The Medieval Manichee by Steven Runciman

A few days ago I received a message with the very sad news that one of my most influential teachers at SPS had passed away — the Revd Hugh Mead, back then the chaplain, but from 1990 also the school's biographer.

It seems fitting to me that he attained a position at the Temple church as I imagine that had he been born almost a millennium previously he might well have signed up as a Templar. His eyes used to light up with every mention of William Marshal.

I lastingly associate two (very different) books with him: The Castle by Kafka and this one. Both were plugged regularly. I got my own copy of Steven Runciman's acclaimed 1947 dualist survey at Heffers in '86. I've been re-reading it this week in the Reverend's honour.

Gifted linguist and aesthete, Runciman was old school in that what we tend to venerate as 'western' civilisation was for him little more than the barbarian hinterland of where the real action always was, the eastern Med.

In late antiquity this region played host to a complex theological ecosystem, held up by resilient levels of mass education and bookishness. And back then, the more sophisticated you were, the more likely you were to be bothered by the presence of evil in the cosmos.

Heresy would probably not be the most suitable way to describe the resulting explanations, many of which were more semi-obsolescent than new-fangled.

The Zoroastrianism of ancient Persia, for instance, had been 'in the air' for a long time — two perfect realms of light and darkness had somehow become venn-diagrammed, resulting in reality. The rise of Islam had shunted these notions westwards.

Mainstream Christian belief was then being formulated by a series of officially sanctioned compromises, but out 'in the field' many of the key issues remained up for grabs. Was Jesus God, man or both? Did he arrive with his status fixed or did it change in his lifetime etc. And most importantly, what kind of psychotic idiot had fabricated this flawed world?

In 1717 Lady Mary Wortley Montagu stopped at Philippopolis en route to Constantinople and noted the presence there of a strange sect she called 'Paulines'. Not the sort poor Hugh Mead had to contend with, even though they had originally been called Paulicians, or 'contemptible' Paulines. They were a remnant of an 8th century Armenian group who had maintained their own mini-state in Tephrice and had sometimes aligned with Islam against Byzantium, depending on the balance of unhinged puritanism then current between the civilisations.

They were periodically persecuted by the emperors and in the tenth century one made the fateful decision to re-settle a load of them in Thrace (Bulgaria), from where their dualist fancies would seep into the minds then in the main managed by the Bishop of Rome.

Those that remained back east seem to have forgotten most of their old doctrines by the time Lady Mary passed by.

Like many gnostic sects they had been dividing humanity into named classes of spiritual worth based on their level of initiation. Some referred to the masses as 'materials'. Meat, basically.

Amusingly, some believed that a person could become so fused with the holy spirit that they could return to a life of luxury and license and it would make no difference to their ultimate salvation status.

While some strove to make their Christianity more Judaistic, others wanted to demote Jehova to the status of semi-divine being aligned with the Demiurge. As such, anyone who stood up to this false deity in the Old Testament might be hero-worshipped, like Cain, or indeed the Sodomites.

Anti-social types, like V and me, present as least awkward for everyone else when we stick to our own private spaces. But when we become militant, roaming the world whilst declaring it to be one big waste of time, we can present as a serious social, political and economic pathology to the powers that be.

By declaring the visible word totally toxic, literally the devil's work, gnostics were setting up a self-fulfilling prophecy, particularly during an epoch when our civilisation was generally struggling to keep its head above water.

But Orthodoxy had a solution to hand: monasteries. Just stick all the world-rejecting, constitutionally anti-social types in a kind of walled garden. Therein the people who most despised society could be made to do useful things for it (healthcare, education, regulated thinking etc.) within a contained, if not entirely hermetic environment.

And this ultimately worked pretty well, as the gnostics were just a bit too anti-social for their own good. Not everyone could spend every waking hour worrying about the origins of darkness and malign forces, and the sects often seemed more concerned with protecting the wellbeing of pockets of light in this world than the wellbeing of actual fleshy human beings. And so their support levels never reached the tipping point…