Original scientific paper
The Notion of 'Creation' in the Bosnian-Hum Christian Chruch
Franjo Šanjek
; Katolički Bogoslovni fakultet, Zagreb, Hrvatska
Abstract
The Church of the Bosnian-Hum Christians was organized approximately in the same manner as the medieval evange1ical confraternities and the moderate Catharists who advocated a dualistic view of the world.
The Christians of the heterodox Bosnian Church had their »perfect« representatives, »true Christian men and true Christian women ( ... ) that follow the true creed of the Apostles«, ordinary believers or »Christian men and women who hate sin« and adherents who support them in hope they would eventually join the Christian community.
The creation of the world and man is one of the fundamental issues in the philosophical and theological thought of the Bosnian-Hum Christians. The Bosnian Church followers' faith is described as belief in two principles in the Latin and Croatian sources of catholic provenance. Creations of the spiritual world and the invisible things are attributed to the first principle, which is - according to the Christian teaching - the only and true God. Soil does not come of this good God but from the devil, Satan or Satanael, who is the principle of all the visible things in this perishable world.
The Bosnian-Hum Christians could not reconcile the notion of a good God with the creation of the perishable material world where evil and poverty reign. According to Christian views, human souls are actually angels, creations of the good God, that Lucifer had seduced and forced to dwell in human bodies. As human souls, the angels can only be redeemed through »spiritual« christening in the Bosnian Church. It is, however, hard to confirm these and similar theses of Catholic heresiologists and polemicists by consulting the preserved documents of Christian provenance.
There are two groups of sources that interpret the Bosnian-Hum Christians' notion of creation. Describing the religious teachings of Italian Catharists of the »Slavonic order«, the Latin authors write about it indirectly: the anonymous De haeresi catharorum in Lombardia, Salvo Burce (Liber supra stella), Moneta of Cremona (Adversus catharos et valdenses), Rajner Sacconi (Summa de catharis et leonistis), Anselm of Alexandria (Tractatus de haereticis), and also the statements of the accused by the inquisition. The Christian cosmogony is directly discussed by the author of Rasprava između rimskog kršćanina i bosanskog patarena (around 1250), in the treatises Interrogatio Iohannis (13th century) and Početie svieta (13th century), in the list of false beliefs of Bosnian heretics from the 14th century, as well as in the lost Dialogus contra manichaeos in Bosnia by the Franciscan monk Jakov Markijski (1432-1437) and the Symbolum pro informatione manichaeorum regni Bosnae by Juan Torquemada (1461).
Keywords
Hrčak ID:
81986
URI
Publication date:
4.12.1995.
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