God's War: A New History of the Crusades (92 page)

THE CATHARS

Near the heart of the Christian religion sits the problem of suffering, traditionally interpreted as a consequence of sin, of the fall of man as described in the Book of Genesis and, therefore, of the existence of evil. Both the Creation stories and experience of the material world suggested to Christians that evil existed in terrestrial matter, the city of Man, in contrast to paradise, the city of God. Much of the reform initiated within the western Catholic church from the eleventh century had been directed precisely at mitigating some of the implications of this by developing explanations, mechanisms, sacraments and devotional practices through which the consequences of inevitable sin could be alleviated, its penalties satisfied or purged and heaven attained. The penitential strand in crusade ideology and its plenary indulgence formed part of this process, as did the Fourth Lateran Council’s acceptance of individual oral confession and transubstantiation in 1215 and the thirteenth-century elaboration of a coherent doctrine of purgatory and a Treasury of Merits endowed by God to save souls.

While going some way to assuage the anxieties of the faithful, this concentration on the redemptive sufferings of Christ exposed a central conundrum of belief. Christ the Son could save from sin the world created by God the Father. If the material world was sinful, it was still by definition the creation of an eternal, omnipotent and presumably loving God. Some devout and godly people found (and find) the orthodox Christian explanations for this problem of evil opaque, evasive and unconvincing. This was not a new phenomenon in the twelfth century, but the added concentration by orthodox Christians on the corruption of the world and the implications of sin and evil may have lent added encouragement to those who sought alternative and more satisfying doctrines. The
vita apostolica
trumpeted by reformers, not least Innocent III’s own teams of licensed preachers, explicitly condemned many of the church’s temporal accretions. More fundamentally, the sharp distinction between the spiritual and temporal spheres that lay at the heart of the Gregorian reformist critique highlighted the eternal paradox of God and Matter, the presence of evil in a world created by a beneficent Deity. Incentive to question belief and practice followed perennial orthodox interest in the nature and immanence of God,
expressed by theologians such as Anselm of Canterbury, preachers such as Bernard of Clairvaux and generations of academics at the university of Paris. This was matched by official concern with the state of the church and its ministers, constantly lashed by the criticisms of Gregorian papal reformers. By challenging traditional assumptions and structures and by posing fundamental questions about the nature of the church and the place of religion in society, Catholic reformers, while engineering a transformation in their church, indicated paths that led away from disciplined uniformity. Heresy, defined as systems of belief unacceptable to prevailing ecclesiastical authority, flourished as the church’s leadership proclaimed first principles; as Gregory VII commented, ‘Christ did not say I am Tradition but I am the Truth.’ Radicalism rarely flows along neat channels. Heresy became reform’s inescapable companion in the search for solutions to these central issues of faith and observance. The western medieval church’s age of reformation
c.
1050–1300 was therefore also its great age of heresy.
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Some heresies sprang from academic debate and hardly left the lecture room; others from evanescent personality cults; others from wider social dissent and alienation. Many shared an element of biblical fundamentalism; all a rejection of church authority in favour of direct personal or communal appreciation of scripture and faith outside official norms, mediation and control. Often flourishing in areas of weak or disputed secular and ecclesiastical authority, few regions of western Christendom escaped entirely as church leaders strove to maintain control lest reform turned to licence and destroyed the institution it was intended to improve. Even traditional, conservative and closely governed England attracted its small crop of heretics in the 1160s.
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Boundaries between orthodoxy and heresy could be narrow and shifting; passage between the two was frequent, despite the apocalyptic rhetoric of mutual hate and demonization. Most heretical groups succumbed rapidly after the removal of a charismatic leader or through the customary factious divisiveness of the righteous. However, some established lasting identity in distinct theologies, liturgies, literature and organization. The most successful such group to challenge the institution as well as the theology of the Catholic church in this period were the Cathars, whose success in promoting their solution to the problem of evil in the area nominally under the rule of the counts of Toulouse provoked the Albigensian crusades.

The word Cathar derives from the Greek
katharos
meaning clean or pure. The central insight of the Cathars explained the existence of evil as the result of creation being determined by two principles of Good and Evil. The Cathars were thus dualists, but, in common with the seventh-century eastern Christian dualist sect of Paulicians, Christians, unlike non-Christian dualists such as the Manichees and Gnostics of the late classical world. For Cathars, the material world was logically the creation of an evil creator, not the Good God, whose realm was of the spirit. Two identifications of this evil creator were proposed by different Cathar traditions. The so-called mitigated dualists saw the evil creator as a fallen angel, Satan, who had seduced numbers of the eternal angelic souls in heaven and imprisoned them in material bodies. Alternatively, according to the more extreme or absolute dualists who dominated western Catharism from the later twelfth century, the material world had been created by an co-eternal power of evil, in some texts Lucifer’s or Satan’s father, into whose material human bodies of fallen angels the Good God had breathed divine life. In both versions, the goal of man was escape from the material body though the ceremony of
consolamentum
(from the Latin for comforting). Ultimately, when all the angelic souls of humans had been released to rejoin their guardian spirits in heaven, the two worlds of Spirit and Matter would be restored to their entirely separate spheres. Given the burden of sin in the world, the journey of some souls to the
consolamentum
could involve periods locked in other material objects and animals.

Cathar theology accepted parts of the New Testament and a few passages of the Old while radically reinterpreting them. The Catholic doctrine of the Trinity was rejected as, inevitably, was the Incarnation, although a reordered trinitarian hierarchy seems to have been accepted. By definition, God could not become material, and therefore the Crucifixion and Resurrection could not have occurred, except perhaps in some metaphorical or symbolic show in the spiritual world. The rejection of Catholic sacramental teaching was, consequentially, absolute. One appeal of Catharism may have lain precisely in this challenge to the increasingly prescriptive penitential and sacramental systems imposed by the church and the consequent perception of its growing intrusion and financial profiteering in social and private life. Cathars followed the Donatist heretics of the early church in arguing that the spiritual power of priests and the efficacy of their ministry depended on their own moral
state, which made their own priestly hierarchy vulnerable to the slightest charges of hypocrisy, backsliding or corruption. Once again, this addressed current orthodox concerns. Gregory VII himself had flirted with similar ideas. Given the paucity of surviving Cathar texts, unmediated by hostile interpreters or the judicial formulae of the Inquisition, aspects of their theology and mysticism remain obscure, but its themes ran parallel to the concerns of orthodox theologians with sin, the means of salvation and the sacraments. In many respects the asceticism of the Cathars, the flight from the secular, the awareness of the snares of materialism and the sense of the reality of evil mirrored Catholic spirituality. The segregated Cathar communities of men and women found echoes in monasticism. Like Catholicism, Catharism was ‘a written church’, literate, founded on liturgical as well as theological and mystical texts.
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Unlike another tenacious contemporary heresy, the scriptural fundamentalist Waldensians, Catharism was not a discarded offshoot of the Catholic church but an independent Christian denomination whose theological antecedents and continuing intellectual affinities lay with similar churches in the Byzantine Balkans rather than in the west. Nonetheless, the flourishing of Catharism, even if in an apparently remote orbit, occupied part of the universe of western religious, intellectual and cultural revival and expansion known to historians as the Twelfth-century Renaissance.

The structure of the Cathar church reflected the rigorous austerity of its theology. Most adherents were unprepared or unable to comply with the denial of materialism and human comforts prescribed for the full initiates. The church was organized into dioceses, each led by a bishop and two assistants, called elder and younger ‘sons’, who constituted the order of episcopal succession, supported by deacons.
Perfecti
or
perfectae
, men and women who had taken the
consolamentum
, acted as the church’s priests, also known as
Boni Homines
, Good Men, sometimes itinerant, sometimes living communally in segregated houses, sometimes distinguished by the dark cloaks they wore as a sign of their status of purity. Major decisions affecting the church were discussed at diocesan or provincial councils. Before the beginning of the crusades in 1209, when such encounters began to court arrest, imprisonment or death, formal disputations were often conducted with Catholic preachers, another sign that the Cathar church was far from a nest of bucolic sectaries ministered to by an obscurantist order of hedge
priests. There were numerous halls of residence for
perfecti
, and extensive networks of formal and informal study groups of believers, involving men and women of all social classes. There were even special Cathar cemeteries. Of central importance to the spread of informed belief, and to the impression of a genuinely popular as well as sophisticated religion, were the vernacular Cathar translations from Latin of religious texts, especially of the Vulgate version of the Bible and the Cathar liturgies.

The attraction of Catharism to women is well attested, if equivocal. Although child bearing was considered evil, the Good God made no discrimination between the souls of men and women. Nature was diabolic, so women were no more so than men. Cathar women could, like their Catholic equivalents, preside over religious communities, except that they were able to attain the ranks of the perfects/priests that were denied Catholic nuns and abbesses. However, the undisguised Cathar hatred of female bodies spoke of entrenched misogyny.
Perfectae
were not permitted to act as deacons, ‘sons’ or bishops, nor were they customarily engaged in hearing confessions or giving the
consolamentum
without a
perfectus
present. Nor, it seems, were Cathar women, even
perfectae
, much engaged in transmitting or even reading texts, an activity which seemed, accidentally or not, a masculine preserve. The Cathar hostility to procreation, specifically pregnancy, may well have dissuaded lay women from believing: pregnant women were denied the right to receive the
consolamentum
, in theory even if
in extremis
during labour. Modern feminists see Catharism as actually off-putting for most non-aristocratic women because of the desexualized existence of
perfectae
, the ubiquitous condemnation of all carnality, the inequalities in hierarchical opportunities and the belief that salvation abolished sexual difference.
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Lay Cathars, the large majority, were known as
credentes
, believers, who supported the
perfecti
financially and materially, and expected to receive the
consolamentum
when nearing death, a procedure reminiscent of Catholic extreme unction and the popular practice of deathbed admission into a religious order. On one occasion, a donor to the abbey of St Sernin in Toulouse was received into the order on his deathbed only for it to be discovered after his burial that he had also received the
consolamentum
, a neat double indemnity that revealed the Cathar habit of outward or occasional conformity, a trait that greatly worried the
Catholic hierarchy. In this case the corpse was quickly dug up and burnt.
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While dual allegiance may have been prudent or simply sociable, it indicated how Cathars could coexist with a Catholic society, as did evidence of genuine conversions of the devout on both sides of the religious divide. Heresy and orthodoxy shared interests, anxieties and learning. In the 1170s, two
perfecti
were converted to Catholicism and promptly preferred to canonries in Toulouse. Two other thirteenth-century
perfecti
became prominent Dominican inquisitors into former associates, Rainier Sacconi in Lombardy, who composed an important description of his previous faith, and the brutal Robert le Bougre, i.e. the Bugger or Bulgar, a reference to where it was thought Catharism originated. Traffic also passed in the opposite direction. Theodoric, a leading Cathar theologian who disputed with Catholic preachers in 1207, had once been a canon of Nevers.
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THE CATHARS IN LANGUEDOC

Dualist Christianity in western Europe almost certainly derived from Byzantium, specifically the dualist Bogomil church (named after its founder) established from the early tenth century in Bulgaria, Macedonia and Thrace. Although the evidence is patchy, uncertain and much contested, while some Bogomil evangelists probably visited the west in the early years of the eleventh century, their greatest impact only began a century later, borne on the newly vitalized trade routes linking eastern and western Europe. One source of this proselytizing may have been the dualist church set up by western settlers in Constantinople in the years following the First Crusade. This distinct ‘Latin’ dualist community probably provided western converts with Latin translations of the Greek Bogomil texts including the
consolamentum
ritual and the New Testament, collated with the Vulgate.
¹¹
The first unequivocal signs of recognizably Bogomil/Cathar beliefs in the west date from the mid-twelfth century. Their geographical spread, including the Rhineland, Champagne, Lombardy and western Languedoc; institutional organization as early as the 1140s in Cologne, Champagne, and later Languedoc; as well as subsequent rapid expansion to Lombardy and Italy indicate the presence of well-grounded networks of evangelism. The initial Cathar conversion of Lombardy may have come from northern France and the
Rhineland rather than directly from Bulgaria, Thrace or Constantinople, but the early leadership in the west seem to have remained in close touch with the mother churches to the east. By the 1170s at the latest, Cathar bishops had been established in ‘France’ (i.e. northern France), Albi and, probably, Lombardy. In common with elements of the Bogomil church, which was also in the process of evolving its doctrines, these western Cathars espoused mitigated, not absolute, dualism. With the conversion of the western Cathars to absolute dualism, the heretical church, especially in Languedoc, came more clearly into historical focus – and into the line of concerted orthodox Catholic fire.