The Grand Inquisitor's Manual (7 page)

The creation story as told in Genesis, for example, was reimagined in a Cathar text that depicts Adam and Eve as a pair of angels, pure and sexless, who are imprisoned by Satan in bodies fashioned of clay. Satan seduces them into the sin of sexual intercourse by creating a serpent out of his own spittle and then teaching Eve how to use her new and unfamiliar body by inserting the serpent’s tail into her vagina in the primal act of sexual intercourse. Here we find the best evidence that the Cathars were
not
the sexual adventurers that the Church made them out to be. For the Cathars, then, the sexual anatomy of human beings is the work of the Devil in the most literal possible way.

The notion that the human body is the prison cell of a celestial spirit provided the rationale for the fundamental rite of Catharism, the
consolamentum,
an elaborate initiation ceremony based on the laying on of hands rather than water baptism. A copy of the Gospels was held over the initiate’s head, and the person presiding over the ceremony laid his or her hands on the initiate’s body. The first seventeen verses from the Gospel of John were read aloud, and the congregation joined in the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, their fundamental credo. The
consolamentum
ended with a ritual exchange of greetings, variously called the kiss of peace or “the Cathar kiss” (
osculum insabbatati
), and the public confession of sins by the congregants.
²⁸

The soul of a man or woman who received the
consolamentum,
the Cathars believed, would be permitted to cease its restless wandering from body to body and ascend once and for all to heaven. One who had been “consoled” was thereafter known as a
perfectus,
that is, a perfected one. But the liberation and ascension of the soul would take place only upon the death of the human body in which it was imprisoned, and so it was essential for the
perfectus
to refrain from any conduct that would corrupt the body for the rest of his or her mortal life. For that reason, the
perfecti
were called upon to lead lives of heroic asceticism, shunning not only sexual relations but every other occasion for taking pleasure in the things of this world.
²⁹

The heroic self-discipline practiced by the
perfecti
matched or exceeded the rigors of any other Christian ascetics. They were forbidden to indulge in sexual acts of any kind, and newly consoled
perfecti
who were married were expected to separate from their spouses. Even when they engaged in the ritual of laying-on hands during the
consolamentum,
for example, women touched men only by placing an elbow to a shoulder, and the kiss of peace was “given from man to man and woman to woman.”
³⁰

A
perfectus
was forbidden to own property or to take the life of a living creature, human or animal. Three times a week, the
perfectus
was permitted to consume only bread and water, and three times a year, the fast was to last a full forty days. Even when they were permitted to eat, the
perfecti
were expected to shun any food that was the result of procreation, including meat, eggs, milk, cheese, and other animal products. (An exception was made for seafood because of the belief, held by both Catholics and Cathars in medieval times, that fish were “the product, not of coition, but of water itself.”) As a result, one sign that a man or woman among the Cathars had achieved the exalted status of a “perfected one” was the physical appearance that results from near-starvation—pale skin and a gaunt aspect were signs of honor.
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By starving themselves into emaciation, the Cathars were making an unspoken claim to a more authentic Christianity than the kind practiced by the princes of the Church. When they renounced all attachments to the material world, including marriage and property, they sought to honor the pious Christian tradition of
via apostolica
—an aspiration that had eluded so many of the priests and prelates of the Roman Catholic church. The worst offense committed by these supposed heretics was their insistence on shaming the Church by setting a better example of Christian piety.

“They continue to be true imitators of the apostolic life, seeking not those things which are of the world, possessing no house, or lands, even as Christ had no property,” wrote one alarmed German churchman in 1143. “‘You, however,’ they say to us, ‘add house to house, field to field, and seek the things that are of this world.’” And the Cathars, alluding to the words of Jesus as quoted in the Gospel of Matthew, emphasized their ironic predicament: “We, the poor of Christ, who have no fixed abode and flee from city to city like sheep among the wolves, are persecuted as were the apostles and martyrs.”
³²

Only the
perfecti,
however, were burdened with the full weight of lifelong sexual abstinence, fasting, poverty, pacifism, and veganism. The rest of the Cathars, known as “believers,” were expected only to refrain as best they could from the worst excesses of their Catholic friends, neighbors, and relations and to cherish the hope that they themselves might find the strength to bear the full burden of the faith. The distinction between the
perfecti
and the believers—and the conviction of the Cathars that they alone were practitioners of authentic Christianity—was embodied in the ritualized greetings exchanged between them. “Pray God for me, a sinner, that he make me a good Christian and lead me to a good end,” a believer would say, and the
perfectus
would answer: “May God be prayed that he may make you a good Christian.”
³³

Indeed, the single most controversial feature of Catharism resulted from the constant and poignant longing of believers to become
perfecti
before they died. Many Cathar believers apparently delayed the
consolamentum
until illness, injury, or old age threatened to end their lives. By undergoing the ritual of initiation at the last possible moment, they would be required to bear the burdens of a
perfectus
only on their deathbeds, when they were no longer capable of succumbing to the temptations of carnal sin. Some Cathars, it appears, spent their final days and hours on a diet of sugared water; some literally fasted themselves to death. According to the accounts preserved by the Inquisition, one fortunate Cathar named Gentille D’Ascou was dead within six days of being “consoled,” but a woman from the town of Coustassa reportedly lingered another three months. For the Cathars, it was the ultimate act of faith, but the critics of Catharism, then and now, have preferred to characterize the last rite of the Cathars, known as the
endura,
as “a form of suicide.”
³⁴

“
Perfectus,
” like so many other terms applied to Catharism by its persecutors, was not used by the Cathars themselves; the title by which they referred to the
perfecti
was the humble phrase “Good Men.” And the Good Men resembled nothing so much as the mendicant friars of the Franciscan and Dominican orders; they wore black robes and sandals of a distinctive style, and they traveled in pairs among the cities, towns, and villages to preach and teach the Catharist beliefs and to perform the ceremony of the
consolamentum.
One reason that Cathars were attracted to the craft of weaving as a livelihood—as Bernard of Clairvaux noticed early on—was that medieval weavers were itinerant workers who could move from place to place without attracting undue attention from the authorities.

The Cathar believers tended to be sober, law-abiding, inoffensive people, if only because one of the principles of Catharism, based on a close and literal reading of the Gospels, was that a Christian should not bear arms or take a life. Indeed, the Cathars were regarded as exemplary citizens throughout southern France, where they were tolerated and even admired by the local nobility and gentry. When a Catholic knight was commanded by a stern bishop to drive out the Cathars from his community, the knight courageously affirmed their admirable qualities: “We cannot,” demurred the knight. “We have been reared in their midst. We have relatives among them, and we see them living lives of perfection.”
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Nor was every Cathar the kind of religious fanatic that their enemies made them out to be. “Ardent believers married and begot children,” writes historian Walter Wakefield, “no less frequently than their Catholic neighbours.” The point is made in a poignant story told about a woman named Sybil whose infant daughter, Jacoba, had fallen ill and appeared to be close to death. The
consolamentum
was administered to the baby, and the
perfectus
cautioned Sybil against feeding her dying daughter now that she had been “consoled.” The mother, however, could not bear to hear the cries of the hungry babe.
³⁶
“[W]hen the Perfect and her husband left,” we are told, “she gave Jacoba the breast, to the anger of her husband.”
³⁷

The spread of Catharism may have owed something to the exalted stature of Cathar women, who were fully entitled to be “consoled” and thereby achieve the status of a
perfectus.
Here, too, was a point of contrast on which Catharism may have seemed far more appealing than Catholicism to the common folk of medieval Europe. Once elevated to the high rank of a perfected one, a woman was entitled to lead the congregation (but only if no male
perfecti
were present to do so) and to receive the ritual greeting afforded by believers to a
perfectus.
“No position in Catholicism, not even that of abbess,” explains historian Malcolm Lambert, “offered the status which accrued to the woman who received the
consolamentum.
”
³⁸

The Cathars may be seen as successful competitors for the hearts and minds of the Christian laity in medieval Europe rather than as polluters of Christianity. By the twelfth century, Catharism amounted to a rival church with its own hierarchy of bishops and priests and its own system of dioceses in southern France and elsewhere around western Europe. A certain high-water mark was reached sometime after 1167, when a mysterious figure from far-off Constantinople called
Papa
Nicetas—
papa
is a Latin term for a pope—convened a gathering of Catharist clergy from all over Europe at the French town of Saint-Félix-de-Caraman, where he persuaded them to accept the more rigorous form of dualism that was practiced in the birthplace of Bogomilism and rebaptized them into their newly invigorated faith.

Politics rather than theology is surely the best explanation for the fear and loathing with which the Church regarded the phenomenon of Catharism. The Supreme Pontiff in Rome was no more comfortable in coexisting with a Cathar pope than with the patriarch of Constantinople, and he resolved to bring the full weight of his authority down on the competitors who had appeared within his own realm and dared to call themselves Good Christians. The first weapon to be deployed, however, was a purely rhetorical one. The Cathars would be denounced and defamed before they would be destroyed, a strategy that represents our first glimpse of the brave new world of the Inquisition.

“Cathar” is most likely derived from the Greek word for cleansing or purification—as used, for example, in the English word
catharsis
—and the term grudgingly acknowledges that a man or woman who had been fully admitted into Catharism was regarded as having been purged of the inevitable corruption of a mortal life. It is also true, however, that the same root word, rendered as
katharoi
or “purified ones,” had been used to identify at least two other heresies that afflicted the Church in its first centuries of existence, neither of which is plausibly linked with the Cathars of the twelfth century. Thus, the decision to label the Cathars with a word whose root refers to purity was darkly ironic, and the Church intended to bury rather than praise the Cathars.

So hateful was the Catholic reaction to Catharism, in fact, that one medieval propagandist came up with an even more damning explanation for the root meaning of the word. Perhaps, he proposed, it was derived from
cattus,
a Low Latin term for cat, because the Cathars were falsely accused of offering worship to a black cat, supposedly the incarnation of Satan, by kissing the satanic creature “abominably, under the tail.” Thus did “the Cathar kiss” come to be characterized as the imagined practice of kissing the bare bottoms of the
perfecti
who presided over their worship services. And the same slander, as we shall see, was carried forward and applied to every other imaginary heresy that came to the attention of the Inquisition.
³⁹

Such free-associative sexual libel, as it turns out, is typical of the impulse of religious authoritarians to demonize all heretics by attributing to them every manner of outrage that a perverse human mind could imagine. Indeed, the impulse to equate theological error with sexual adventure starts in the Bible—“I will not punish your daughters when they play the harlot, nor your brides when they commit adultery,” complains the cranky Hebrew prophet Hosea, “for the men themselves go aside with harlots, and sacrifice with cult prostitutes”—and has never really ended. But it was raised to a fine art by the persecutors of heresy in medieval Europe, and the manuals and handbooks that guided the work of the Inquisition are spiced with perversities that existed only in the dirty minds of the priests and friars who were their authors.
⁴⁰

We have already seen that those burned as heretics at Orléans were condemned not only for practicing a kind of harmless amateur gnosticism but also for engaging in child murder, cannibalism, and orgiastic sex. Ironically, but also tellingly, the same charges had been laid against the first Christians by their adversaries in ancient Rome, where Christianity was similarly regarded as a secret cult whose members killed and ate babies in the course of the demoniacal sex orgies that served as their worship service. In fact, the sordid accusations appear to have been borrowed directly from the writings of Justin Martyr, a Christian apologist of the second century who recorded and then repudiated the libels of Christianity in pagan Rome. Historian Walter Lambert dismisses the lurid tales told about the Orléans sectarians by a medieval chronicler as nothing more than a “literary digression,” but they can also be seen as something far worse—a willful lie and a habit of the persecutorial mind.
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