The center of it all

In Stegner's Crossing to Safety, there is a moment when the narrator describes the writing cabin of the father of one of the protagonists up at their summer lake house in Vermont, and as evidence of his level of abstraction and distance shows him working on the Bogomils and Albigensians. My heart, of course, fairly leaped at this little point.

There was a moment when I was working on my dissertation, call it 1995-96, where the confluence of Bogomils and Albigensians seemed right at the heart of it all. The Bogomils were a sect that, in their day -- 12th-13th century, somewhere in there -- were amongst Slavic lands most popular in what subsequently became Bosnia. It was their relative success that made Orthodoxy weakest amongst the Bosnians, so when the Ottomans came through a couple of centuries later, Bosnians converted to Islam, whereas those who later came to call themselves Serbs and Bulgarians stayed true to Christianity. All of which was a precondition to the wars in Bosnia in the mid-90s, in which Islamic patriots from as far away as Afghanistan came and fought.

The Albigensians were a Western outcropping of the same heresy, centered in Languedoc, over between Provence and the Pyrenees. In his 1939 classic, Love in the Western World, Denis de Rougemont somehow tied the Albigensians into the concept of tragic love that became the norm in Western romance, such as that of Lancelot and Guinevere.

So, at one feverish moment when I was deep in my dissertation on the allegorical nature of love narratives in the Russian and western novel, the Bogomil/Albigensian thing somehow was a big freaking deal, it tied together what I was working on and what I was seeing in the headlines, and made me feel like I had my hand on the pulse of history. I'll be damned if I remember exactly how it all fit together, but it did. In Stegner's novel, nobody wants to talk to the old scholar about the Bogomils, after lunch they send him packing back up to his little scholarly shed, but I would totally have loved to talk to the guy. For 10 minutes or so. Then I too would have fallen prey to the blandishments of the lake.