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Religious Book Store > Religious books beginning with O
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The Other God: Dualist Religions from Antiquity to the Cathar Heresy (Yale Nota Bene) |
Author: Yuri Stoyanov
Published: 2000-08-11 |
List price: $21.00
Our price: $14.78
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As of: January 06th, 2009 12:33:54 AM
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Customer comments on this selection.
 A comprehensive survey of dualistic movements
This book is a sober straight-forward account of many versions of the Other God, that is to say, the ignored, defeated, or avoided divinity in dualist systems. The main concern, however, is not so much the other deities as much as dualistic belief systems and their fate in history. The original title is more accurate: "The Hidden Traditions in Europe: the Secret History of Medieval Christian Heresy." It is for the most part well-written although some surprising typographical errors creep in here and there. It tries to cover most dualist religious systems in history. The book is 476 pages long out of which 125 are endnotes! These are almost exclusively bibliographical info. The chapter titles and section titles are for the most part not particularly helpful in describing the content (e.g."The Bridge of the Separator", "The Father of Light and Darkness").
This book is not written in a difficult way at all. But it does use a lot of terms from the Greek and Latin. It is arranged chronologically, which also means somewhat geographically and travels from ancient Egypt via Greece and Palestine to medieval France making several stops in Persia and the Balkans, where it also concludes. A difficulty is the geography and names of places we don't have anymore. Some unclear maps are provided at the beginning of the book. This difficulty is compounded by political history which invariably affected some of these religions and movements. Typical of the larger religious movements is their spreading, mixing with other religions, then being persecuted by those in power, so aside from names of places we get a wealth of names of clans, dynasties, tribes, ethnies, rulers, writers, etc. As a result, some chapters focus entirely on history and not so much on religion.
The Cathars don't occupy all that much space or interest for the author. In turn, the Balkans is what takes up a good portion of this book, and that story was a revelation to me. Sandwiched between Western and Eastern Christianity and later even Islam, the Balkans were the last and most consistent stronghold of dualism. We are introduced to a dizzying array of varieties of Christian dualism with all their respective varieties of demonology and Christology. One should also note that the author acknowledges that sources for this material are questionable as they come mostly from opponents of dualism who distorted and caricatured and literally demonized dualistic beliefs. To some extent this makes a good companion to Umberto Eco's excellent Baudolino, where heresies are at the center of the story and the significance of fine theological differences are worked out more clearly.
The author did a tremendous among of research and this work could almost be the perfect reference text on heresies, if the index were clearer.
 The Dualist Thread
With all the attention given to alternate manifestations of Christian belief in the patristic period, it is remarkable that few have attempted to point out the strength of Christian (and non-Christian) dualism from the classical to the medieval period. Like the gnosticism with which it sometimes overlapped, dualism predated Christianity and some combined its principles with the new faith of Christ into a syncretistic blend that was a natural byproduct of the melting pot of religious and philosophical ideas swirling around the Roman Empire. Although the dualist form of Christianity tells us little about Jesus or his early followers, it is an important ingredient in understanding certain events in Church history.
Yuri Stoyanov has done much to overcome the ignorance of dualist beliefs in his marvelous history of the movement The Other God. Beginning with the idea of a divine polarity - the concept of struggle between opposing spiritual forces - Stoyanov explores how in Zoroastrianism this led to the belief in two divine powers of good and evil were engaged in battle for dominance. As this influence of this religion of Persia spread west, elements of the dualist system would become integrated in variants of other religions leading to a syncretistic blend of faiths. This blending of beliefs would become especially prevelant after large areas of the Mediterranean were conquered in succession by Persia, then the Macedonians, and finally the Romans.
Stoyanov demonstrates that even as Christianity spread througout the Roman Empire, the prevailing syncretism attempted to absorb the new faith. There were overlaps of the aforementioned divine dualism with the gnostic emphasis on a spiritual/physical dualism as the good became identified with the spriritual and evil with the physical world. Thus Jesus was sent by the "good god" to free us from the bondage of physical existence and the god of the Old Testament who created the physical world is seen as the prevailing force of evil. This is in sharp contrast to the incarnational view of orthodox Christianity where the physical world was made good but has fallen due to man's sin and in Jesus the Word was made flesh for the world's redemption.
For those interested in the history of the patristic period, the book will fill in many gaps and correct numerous misconceptions. For example, Manicheanism is often categorized as a Christian heresy but it is better thought of as another world religion that adopted elements of gnosticism, Judaism, Christianity, Zoroastrianism, and Mahayana Buddhism. Although the religion's founder, Mani of Babylon, taught of Jesus, he insisted that the religion Jesus taught was actually Manicheanism and not the Christian faith as had been passed down. In this remaking the figure of Jesus to support Manicheanism, Mani prefigured Muhammed and Bahá'u'lláh who did the same, respectively, for Islam and Bahá'í.
After these preparatory sections outlining how dualism developed and then battled with Christianity for the hearts of those who had rejected paganism, Stoyanov turns to what might be called the "dualist succession" - the series of various dualist movements that continued to flourish and continue this tradition throughout the medieval period. Some of these movements were a more moderate form of dualism - the evil god was an inferior being to the good god -while others were more absolute in holding the dyadic principles in struggle. Sometimes there were even splits as absolute and moderate dualists would declare each other heretics.
The author does a remarkable job of explaining how the myriad dualist groups throughout Asia and parts of Europe were interconnected. In some cases there was a direct institutional link while in other cases the migration of members of a dualist community due to economic or political factors would result in the dualist view finding fertile new ground. One item that is of particular interest to those knowledgable of Christian history is how the Bogomil movement - a Christiian dualist movement centered in the Balkans - may have organized a dualist mission to Western Europe that resulted in the Catharist (or Albighensian) heresy that shook the medieval Catholic Church to its foundations.
Stoyanov then details how the combination of crusades by the Eastern and Western Churches against dualist churches and then Muslim conquests of Asia and parts of Eastern Europe eliminated the dualist threat to monotheism. Bosnia, a longtime stronghold of dualism, would be the only area in Europe to permanentlly convert to Islam. Persia (now Iran), which may be considered the birthplace of dualism would also end up ruled by the Muslim religion. Although it did influence monotheism with some of its mystical practices, it's overt adherents have been reduced to small and often isolated communities. Thus dualism eventually lost its struggle with its monotheistic rivals.
The book closes with a description of how certain dualist ideas became incorporated into popular folklore. In areas where dualism was strong, certain myths would naturally have arisen and been passed down. Such informal tradition is generally freer from the scrutiny of the Church as it is likely ignored by theologians or ascribed to mere ignorance. However, it does reinforce the ideas into the popular consciousness.
Although not mentioned in the book, one area where dualism be said to survive in a very moderate form is within the confines of American Evangelicalism. With an entrenched anti-sacramentalism and pockets of fascination with Satan as a power in his own right - often ignoring the sovereignty of God - we can hear echoes of earlier dualist claims. This is most prevalent in the "Word-Faith" movement where Satan seemingly calls the shots and God is reduced to pulling a Jacob to trick Satan out of his inheritance.
The irony increases when certain Evangelicals claim past dualist movements as "proto-Protestants" in a "trail of blood" who kept the true faith. While those who make such claims are generally ignorant of Church history and have no idea what these groups actually taught, their claim of them as spiritual ancestors does have a validity in one sense - although it is not something they would find flattering.
The history of dualism is a story that needed to be told. With its influence often downplayed except for sensationalistic and mostly erroneous accounts, an accurate historic treatment is vital to understand how the forces the Church struggled against in the devlopment of her doctrine. With The Other God, Yuri Stoyanov has written the most through source on this subject in a style accessible to the average lay reader. For an understanding of the challenge of dualism, there is simply nothing better
Superb Scholarship
Not a light read by any stretch of the imagination, but I can't think of any better book to cover this subject matter.
 Perhaps this book was just over my head
Although I find the subject riveting, I was slightly misguided by the books description. This is an academically aimed and sophisticated discussion of dualist religion and is not appropriate for someone who is not relatively versed in the subject to begin with. I found myself going to my exterior references often to follow the author's train of thought (tracking down academic references and unknown vocabulary) - although when I gleamed what the author was trying to say, I found his thoughts insightful. This is a very heavy read - and will require some muscling though to get to the end.
Rising Above Academic Suppression
"The Other God" is a Rig Veda net of gems, not a single gem. I discovered it when I was researching the same questions as Stoyanov addresses so masterfully. I suggested it as reading in my Philosophy of Religion course, and I referenced it heavily in my book, "The Order of the Dragon," which extends Stoyanov's history of The Great Heresy (I prefer The Great Heterodoxy as a name) both backward and forward in time. The discovery of an ivory statuette of a lion-headed man in Ulm, Germany, dating to about 40,000 BC indicates how far back this Heterodoxy can go. Its inclusion in Freemasonry and in cutting-edge science indicates how far forward it has come. But it has been suppressed ruthlessly along the way. The one review of Stoyanov's "The Hidden Tradition" can't fault him on facts or reason, so it faults him for Judaeo-Christian heterodoxy. Apparently Joseph Campbell even had trouble getting his books published in his later years, as he too was walking the path of the heterodoxy. After teaching 20 years at an academic institution to complement my main area of bioethics at a medical school, I had my adjunct professor appointment terminated for using that heterodox text as a supplementary reading to expand the parochial texts of philosophy of religion, and for daring to use it in my Nietzsche course to give students the Zarathustrian background one needs to understand Nietzsche.
I'm relieved that Stoyanov has experienced only minor suppression of his work, though I think the last chapter of his book reflects his trying to accomodate that suppression. After carefully showing the ongoing thread of The Great Heresy, he recants in that last chapter and denies there is such an ongoing thread because this tradition is not monolithic. But then, neither is the Jewish or Christian tradition, yet we still group those religious views under unifying categories. I don't think the suppressive cultural tendencies deserve such obeisance, and I hope Stoyanov continues to light the hidden recesses of The Great Heterodoxy. When that Heterodoxy successfully defends itself against suppression by monotheisms, we have Renaissances. When it doesn't, we have Dark Ages.
Dr. Colleen D. Clements
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