The Grand Inquisitor's Manual (6 page)

Valdes was living a privileged life in the town of Lyons in southern France when, like Francis and Dominic, he experienced a life-changing revelation. One day he passed a street minstrel who was singing about Saint Alexius, the son of a rich man who refused the marriage that had been arranged for him and chose instead a life of pious destitution. Thus inspired, Valdes settled a portion of his fortune on his baffled wife, installed his daughters in a convent, took a vow of poverty, and embarked on his own self-appointed ministry. During the famine of 1176, for example, he fed the poor at his own expense while, at the same time, eating only what was offered to him by others. His followers called themselves the Poor Men of Lyons and later, after the death of their founder about 1205, they came to be known as the Waldensians.

“They go about two by two, barefoot, clad in woolen garments, owning nothing, holding all things in common like the apostles,” wrote Walter Map (ca. 1140–ca. 1209), an English delegate to the Third Lateran Council in 1179, “naked, following a naked Christ.”
¹⁹
By yet another irony, the vivid but also unsettling phrase that Map used—“naked, following a naked Christ”—is borrowed from Jerome, the fifth-century church father who translated the Bible from its original Hebrew and Greek into Latin. Jerome himself was canonized for his efforts, but the translation of Holy Writ into vernacular languages soon came to be condemned by the Church as a threat to its monopoly on interpretation and instruction. The Waldensians, who imitated Jerome by preparing and using their own translations of various biblical texts, and who insisted on the right to preach even though they were not ordained as members of the clergy, were defying two of the prerogatives that the Church valued and protected with fierce determination. “If we admit them,” concluded Walter Map, “we shall be driven out.”
²⁰

Here we see the tripwire between the kind of Christian rigorism that the Church was willing to sanction and the kind that it insisted on punishing. The Franciscans and the Dominicans were chartered orders of the Roman Catholic church who lived and worked under the authority of the pope, but the Waldensians and others like them were outsiders whose true belief did not permit them to bend to the will of the Church. They all aspired to a reformed and purified Christianity, but Francis and Dominic were raised to sainthood while Peter Valdes and his followers were condemned as heretics.

By the year 1000, the so-called Dark Ages—a term coined by Petrarch to describe the isolation and ignorance of feudal Europe—were already coming to an end. Adventurers, merchants, pilgrims, and crusaders were beginning to explore the eastern reaches of Christendom and even more far-flung places in Africa and Asia. And when they returned to the cities of western Europe, they brought back a treasure trove of new ideas—arts and crafts, food and drink, texts and teachings. The emblematic example, which turns out to be wholly fanciful, is the tale of how a Venetian merchant-adventurer named Marco Polo reached the court of Kublai Khan in China in the thirteenth century and returned to Italy with the recipe for pasta. In fact, the phenomenon began a couple of centuries before Marco Polo, and the things that the travelers brought home were far more explosive than spaghetti.

Perhaps the single most exotic import into western Europe during the High Middle Ages was a variant of Christianity that appears to have originated in the tenth century in Bulgaria, a kind of theological no-man’s-land that lay on the frontier between eastern and western Christendom. A Bulgarian village priest, whose adopted name was Bogomil (“worthy of the pity of God”), introduced his congregants, “newly and shakily converted from paganism,” to his own peculiar version of Christian belief and practice. According to the medieval chroniclers whose writings have come down to us from the era of the Crusades, a few knights from France and Italy on crusade in the Holy Land encountered the followers of Bogomil in Constantinople or Macedonia and carried their strange new ideas back to western Europe like tainted fruit in their baggage.
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At the core of the so-called Bogomils’ theology was a simple answer to the perennial question of why evil exists in a world supposedly created by a benign deity. The founder of Bogomilism taught that there were, in fact, two sources of divine power in the cosmos, one good and one evil. It’s an idea that historians of religion call dualism, and it can be traced back through the gnostics of the early Christian era to the even older apocalyptic texts of Judaism and Christianity, such as the book of Daniel and the book of Revelation, and from these ancient texts all the way back to the earliest traditions of Zoroastrianism in far-off Persia. But, as often as the idea of dualism had been reworked over the millennia, it found a new and remarkable expression among the Bogomils.

The world as we know it, according to the Bogomils, was created not by God but by the fallen angel called Satan and, as a result, everything on earth is purely and irretrievably evil. Only upon the death of the human body does the soul locked within its fleshly prison rise to the spiritual realm and reunite with God. In the meantime, the Bogomils aspired to distance themselves as much as possible from the things of the world that Satan had made, including the making of babies and the consumption of food derived from animals that engage in sexual procreation. For that reason, not only sex itself but also the consumption of meat, eggs, cheese, and milk were declared taboo.

The Bogomils also understood that only a few devoted men and women were capable of such self-discipline while waiting to be liberated from earthly existence by their own deaths. So they expected the purest asceticism from only a small number of devotees who submitted to a ritual of initiation and then dedicated themselves to lives of rigorous self-denial. The rest of the rank-and-file of the Bogomils were free to live ordinary lives in the carnal world while supporting the initiates in their renunciations and devotions.

Fasting and celibacy, of course, were familiar to the Christian world, and the principal prayer of the Bogomils was the Pater Noster (“Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name…”), a commonplace of Christian practice. Other aspects of Bogomilism, however, pushed them outside the bounds of Christian orthodoxy. For example, they rejected the cross as a religious symbol precisely because it suggested that Jesus of Nazareth was a creature of flesh and blood who had been crucified by the Romans. The Bogomils, by contrast, refused to imagine that God had descended to a world created by Satan, inhabited a human body, and suffered the indignities of torture and death.

The Bogomils were an outgrowth of Christianity, but they rejected the authority of the church under whose jurisdiction they lived, that is, the Eastern Orthodox church. Like its counterpart in the West, the Orthodox Church in eastern Christendom condemned all religious dissidents as heretics, and the Bogomils were accused of various atrocities and outrages by their persecutors. One Christian monk who had secretly embraced Bogomilism was said to have installed (and used) a latrine behind the altar of a church in order to symbolize his contempt for its corruption and carnality. And, like almost every other persecuted faith, the Bogomils were said to engage in the sex orgies and rituals of infanticide and cannibalism that had once been charged by the Romans against the first Christians.
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“In the evening, they bring together young girls,” wrote one eleventh-century Orthodox propagandist, “extinguish the candles so the light shall not be witness to their abominable deeds, and throw themselves lasciviously on the girls, each one on whomever first falls into his hands, no matter whether she be his sister, his daughter or his mother.” Nine months later, “when the time has come for the unnatural children of such unnatural seed to be born,” the babies were supposedly seized, drained of their blood, and then burned alive. Finally, the Bogomils were said to mix the blood and ash of the dead babies in basins “and so make an abominable drink.”
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The Bogomils did no such thing, of course, and their only real offense was their rejection of the official theology of the Orthodox church. Ironically, the Bogomils rejected human sexuality and aspired toward the strictest spiritual purity, and yet they were defamed by their enemies as perverts and predators who indulged in every kind of sexual outrage. Indeed, it reveals something important about the workings of the human imagination that such perversions existed only in the minds of pious prelates obsessed with their own authority. The patriarchs and priests, who regarded themselves as the guardians of Christian morality, were perfectly capable of conjuring up the same sexual fantasies that would later find expression in the writings of the Marquis de Sade.

We cannot know exactly when, where, or how the strange new ideas of the Bogomils rooted themselves in western Europe, but the Church began to notice them as early as the eleventh century, first in Cologne and Liège and later in southern France. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), a Cistercian monk later canonized as Saint Bernard, was dispatched to admonish the followers of Henry the Monk, but he also came across some even more aberrant Christians. Bernard called them “weavers and Arians,” the latter term borrowed from one of the earliest heresies of fourth-century Christianity, but the men and women who caught his attention may have been among the first practitioners of a new kind of Christianity that had been borrowed from the Bogomils.

The resort to antique vocabulary to describe the latest expression of the religious imagination in medieval Europe reminds us that the Church had always been quick to condemn every strain of Christianity that was not regarded as strictly orthodox. Thus, for example, the latest Christian dissidents to emerge in western Europe were also dubbed Manichaeans—a dualist faith from Persia that Augustine had first embraced and then condemned in the late fourth century—and Marcionites, an even older gnostic sect of early Christianity. At other times and places, the newest heretics in Christendom were called Bulgars, in recognition of their kinship with the Bogomils from far-off Bulgaria—the French version of the word is
boulgres
and its English counterpart is the root of the modern word
bugger.
As we shall soon see, the use of “bugger” as a term for anal intercourse is derived from the imagined sexual practices of the Bogomils and their kindred spirits.

The latest innovation in Christian belief was reflexively condemned by the Church as heresy. And once the new heretics came to the attention of the Church, they seemed to show up everywhere. They were called Publicans in northern Europe,
piphles
in Flanders, and
texerants
in France. They were variously known in Italy as
ribaldi, bulgari, insabbatati, paterini, policani, turlupini, speronisti, gassari, pisti,
and
pangenia.
None of these terms were flattering—
ribaldi,
for example, means “riff-raff.” The town of Albi in southern France was wrongly thought to be the center of the new heresy, and so its practitioners came to be called Albigensians. But the name by which they are known best is
Cathari,
a Greek word, or its English equivalent, the Cathars.
²⁴

By whatever name we know them, the Cathars were destined to become the very first victims of another new phenomenon that was seen for the first time in the Middle Ages—the machine for the extermination of heretics known as the Inquisition.

Significantly, none of the names used by the Church to identify the new sect were actually used by the sectarians to describe themselves. Although they were denounced as enemies of Christianity by the medieval clergy—and a modern scholar like Norman Cohn still dismisses them as “exotic and non-Christian”—they insisted on calling themselves “Christians” or even “Good Christians.” For convenience, however, and in deference to conventional usage, we will continue to call them by the name that their persecutors coined and used—the Cathars.
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The Cathars regarded themselves as “the
only
true Christians” and the guardians of “a stream of pure underground Christianity, often persecuted, but always surviving and reaching back to the days of the apostles.” If they placed themselves in opposition to the Roman Catholic church, it was only because they came to believe that Catholicism was a corrupted version of Christianity whose clergy were “servants of Satan’s Church.” They read and revered the New Testament, although they preferred some scriptures above others: the book of Revelation, with its account of a “war in heaven” between God and Satan, was wholly consistent with their core theology; and the Gospel of John, a text in which the fingerprints of gnosticism have been detected by some modern readers, figured prominently in their ceremonies.
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Yet it is also true that the Cathars were apparently influenced by a fantastic variety of sources, ranging from ancient and obscure writings to the sermons of their own charismatic teachers and leaders. A direct linkage between the Cathars and the Bogomils can be seen in the fact that their readings included the
Interrogation of John
(also known as
Secret Supper
), a Bogomil text carried from Bulgaria to western Europe in about 1190. But they also seemed to know the Jewish apocalyptic writings, the mystical speculation and storytelling traditions that had attached themselves to the Bible among both Jews and Christians, and perhaps even more exotic texts that reflected the gnostic and Manichaean elements of their belief system.
²⁷

The dualist theology of the Cathars was almost surely borrowed from the Bogomils. They imagined the existence of two divinities, a benign one who reigns in heaven and a malign one who reigns on earth. They condemned the carnal world as a place of pure evil, and they longed only to be set free from their bodies so that their souls could return to the celestial paradise. They expressed their theology in the kind of folktales and fairy tales that every religion invents for itself, borrowing freely from Jewish and Christian texts and traditions, and adding a few twists and tweaks of their own. Indeed, we can glimpse a rich and playful religious imagination in the shards of Catharism that remain available to us despite the best efforts of the inquisitors to eradicate them.