576 FOURTH PERIOD. A.D. 590-1049.
Provoked by these cruelties, the Paulicians raised the stand ard of revolt under the lead of KARBEAS. He fled with five thousand to the Saracens, buili a strong fort, Tephrica,1 on the Arab frontier, and in alliance with the Moslems made success ful military invasions into the Byzantine territory. His sonin-law, Chrysocheres, proceeded as far as Ephesus, and turned the cathedral into a stable (867), but was killed by the Greeks in 871, and the sect had to submit to the Emperor Basil the Macedonian. He sent among them the monk Petrus Siculus, who thus became acquainted with their doctrines and collected the materials for his work.
After this the sect lost its political significance, and gradually disappeared from history. Many were transferred to Philippopolis in Thrace about 970, as guards of the frontier, and enjoyed toleration. Alexius Comnenus (1081-1118) disputed with their leaders, rewarded the converts, and punished the obstinate. The Crusaders found some remains in 1204, when they captured Constantinople.
III. The doctrines and practices of the Paulicians are known to us only from the reports of the orthodox opponents and a few fragments of the epistles of Sergius. They were a strange mixture of dualism, demiurgism, docetism, mysticism and pseudo-Paulinism, and resemble in many respects the Gnostic system of Marcion.
(1) Dualism was their fundamental principle.2 The good God created the spiritual world; the bad God or demiurge cre ated the sensual world. The former is worshipped by the Paulicians, i. e. the true Christians, the latter by the "Romans" or Catholics.
1 Now Divrigni in the mountains between Sirvas and Trebizond, still occu pied by a fierce people.
* Petrus Siculus puts this first (p. 16) : Tlparov ^v y&p Ian TO /car' avrovf •yv6ptofj,a TO fivo apxa-s 6/nn3.oyelv, Ttovrjpbv dew nal ayaddv. He says the Paul icians reject the impious writings of the Manichaeans, but propagate their con tents by tradition from generation to generation.
§ 131. THE PAULICIANS. 577
(2) Contempt of matter. The body is the seat of evil desire, and is itself impure. It holds the divine soul as in a prison.
(3) Docetism. Christ descended from heaven in an ethereal body, passed through the womb of Mary as through a channel, suffered in appearance, but not in reality, and began the process of redemption of the spirit from the chains of matter.
(4) The Virgin Mary was not "the mother of God," and has a purely external connection with Jesus. Peter the Sicilian says, that they did not even allow her a place among the good and virtuous women. The true thcotokos is the heavenly Jeru salem, from which Christ came out and to which he returned.
(5) They rejected the Old Testament as the work of the Demiurge, and the Epistles of Peter. They regarded Peter as a false apostle, because he denied his master, preached Judaism rather than Christianity, was the enemy of Paul (Gal. 2: 11) and the pillar of the Catholic hierarchy. They accepted the four Gospels, the Acts, fourteen Epistles of Paul, and the Epis tles of James, John and Jude. At a later period, however, they seem to have confined themselves, like Marcion, to the writings of Paul and Luke, adding to them probably the Gos pel of John. They claimed also to possess an Epistle to the Laodiceans; but this was probably identical with the Epistle to the Ephesians. Their method of exposition was allegorical.
(6) They rejected the priesthood, the sacraments, the worship of saints and relics, the sign of the cross (except in cases of serious illness), and all externals in religion. Baptism means only the baptism of the Spirit; the communion with the body and blood of Christ is only a communion with his word and doctrine.
In the place of priests (fs/>£?7 and TTpetrfi'jTspot) the Paulicians had teachers and pastors (dcfidnxa/.ot and Tro.y^vec), companions or itinerant missionaries ((juv£xdf][toi\ and scribes (vcurdntot). In the place of churches they had meeting-houses called "ora tories" (xpoffs'jxac); but the founders and leaders were esteemed