The Hidden Tradition in Europe

Description

Christianity has always defined itself through fierce opposition to powerful ‘heresies’; yet it is only recently that we have begun to retrieve these remarkable, underground traditions, buried beneath the contempt of the Church. Of these ‘heresies’ the greatest challenge to the medieval Church was posed by the ‘Great Heresy’ of the Cathars, who saw themselves as inheritors of a true and long-concealed Christian tradition, but who were also heirs to the age-long teachings of Dualism — the doctrine that cosmos and man are constant battlegrounds between the two principal and irreconcilably opposed forces of good and evil. The Cathars, who were savagely suppressed in the thirteenth century, are the best-known medieval adherents and martyrs of Dualism, but yet behind them we can still glimpse ‘one of the most elusive and tenacious.heretical sects of the Middle Ages — the Balkan Bogomils. In this superb piece of scholarly detective work Yuri Stoyanov charts the descent and evolution of Dualism, from the revelations of Zoroaster and the Orphics, via the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Mithraic Mysteries and the great Gnostic teachers, to reconstruct its medieval revival in Europe. His book casts fresh light on some of the most obscure aspects of the history and the teachings of the Bogomils and the Cathars and illuminates unsuspected religious and political undercurrents that lie beneath the surface of official history. Yuri Stoyanov was born in 1961 and graduated from the University of Sofia, where he obtained his BA in 1987 and his MA in 1989. He has subsequently done research at Oxford and the University of London, where he is currently a Frances A. Yates Fellow at the Warburg Institute. He has written and lectured extensively on Jewish and Christian mysticism, medieval Balkan history, and heretical and mystical movements in the Middle Ages.