BOGOIIILES. Literally " lovers of God " (from the Slavonic), a sect which appeared in Thrace and Bulgaria in the twelfth century. They are also called Bogarmitae, Massilians, and by orthodox members of the Greek Church Phundaites, " wearers of the girdle." The sect was founded by a monk named Basil, whose system of theology was dualistic like that of the Paulicians and Oathari. His followers had to live a life of poverty and asceticism. They did not accept all the books of the Bible, but only the Psalms, the Prophets, the Gospels, the Acts, the Epistles, and the Apocalypse; and they applied the allegorical key to the interpretation of Scrip ture. The world of matter and human beings was created, they held, by Satanael, who sprang from the Divine Being but rebelled against Him and opposed Him. The Logos, who also sprang from the Divine Being, took a phantom body and came down to earth to undo the work of the wicked Satanael. Alexius Comnenus (104S 111S) undertook to exterminate the heresy. In 111S he invited Basil to a banquet, had him seized, and after wards caused him to be burned at Constantinople. But the sect was not suppressed. In A.D. 1140 we find a Council of Constantinople anathematizing the followers of Basil, and in 1325 Bosnia was overrun with them. In this year Pope John xxii. wrote to the King of Bosnia inveighing against them. In the fifteenth century they appealed to the Turks to protect them against the King of Bosnia and the priests who were persecuting them.
Soon after the invasion of Bosnia by Muhammad II. (1463), they seem to have gone over to Islam in large numbers. This, as Mr. T. W. Arnold says, in view of " the numerous points of likeness between their peculiar beliefs and the tenets of Islam," is quite intelligible. " They rejected the worship of the Virgin Mary, the in stitution of Baptism, and every form of priesthood. They abominated the cross as a religious symbol, and con sidered it idolatry to bow down before religious pictures and the images and relics of the saints. Their houses of prayer were very simple and unadorned, in contrast to the gaudily-decorated Roman Catholic churches, and they shared the Muhammadan dislike of bells, which they styled the devil's trumpets.' They believed that Christ was not himself crucified, but that some phantom was substituted in his place: in this respect agreeing par tially with the teaching of the Qur'an. Their condemna tion of wine and the general austerity of their mode of life and the stern severity of their outward demeanour would serve as further links to bind them to Islam. . . They prayed five times a day and five times a night. repeating the Lord's Prayer with frequent kneelings, and would thus find it very little change to join in the ser vices of the mosque." See J. H. Blunt; T. W. Arnold, The Preaching of Islam, 1896.