The Perfect Heresy (37 page)

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the obscene kiss: Even though the tales of turpitude concerning heretics were borrowed from slanders that abounded in classical times (sometimes spread by pagan alarmists about the fledgling sects of Christianity), they were believed by many who should have known better. In 1233, Pope Gregory IX, the sponsor of the Inquisition, issued a papal bull,
Vox in Rama
, that breathlessly repeated old stories about feline orgies. A much-repeated slander was penned in the 1180s by Walter Map, a
deacon of Oxford, who wrote the following of heretics: “About the first watch of the night… each family sits waiting in silence in each of their synagogues; and there descends by a rope which hangs in their midst a black cat of wondrous size. On sight of it they put out the lights and do not sing or distinctly repeat hymns, but hum them with closed teeth, and draw near to the place where they saw their master, feeling after him and when they have found him they kiss him. The hotter the feelings the lower their aim; some go for his feet, but most for his tail and privy parts. Then as though this noisome contact unleashed their appetites, each lays hold of his neighbor and takes his fill of him or her for all he is worth” (source: Jeffrey Richards,
Sex, Dissidence, and Damnation
, pp. 60-61).

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the heretics believed that no one could sin from the waist down: We have Peter of Vaux de Cernay to thank for this titillating fiction about the Cathars.

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the thirteenth century’s culture of lawmaking and codification: It is a commonplace to compare the curiosity of the twelfth century with the reaction of the thirteenth. In a 1948 study of the Plantagenet kings of England, John Harvey summed up the historical consensus elegantly: “The thirteenth [century] was to witness the first riveting of the bands forged by scholasticism upon the minds of scholars, and the barren substitution of authority for empiricism. On the other hand, in the manual arts, such as architecture, sculpture, and painting, great strides were made by lay craftsmen who were sufficiently beneath the notice of the learned world of the schools to be able to carry on a living empiricism of their own. In certain other fields, notably those of law and administration, advances were made in the direction of unity by a process of codification and the hardening of earlier tentative formulae into settled rules of life” (source: J. Harvey,
The Plantagenets
[London: B. T. Batsford, 1948], p. 50).

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historian R. I. Moore has provocatively seen… : In
The Formation of a Persecuting Society
, Moore argues that the persecuting apparatus was a natural but not inevitable outgrowth of the nascent state. He sees the years 1180–90 as a turning point in the development of oppressive institutions. His book, published in 1987, is still making waves.

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Ironically, it took a twentieth-century Dominican friar, Antoine Dondaine, to dispel the fog: The banner year for understanding Catharism was 1939, when Dondaine discovered several important documents in archives in Florence and Prague: a Cathar catechism in Latin; a thirteenth-century philosophical treatise,
The Book of Two Principles
, written by a John of Lugio; and an exceptionally evenhanded description and rebuttal of Catharism,
Contra Manicheos
, written by Durand of Huesca, a Waldensian thinker who had been converted to orthodoxy during a debate with Dominic in 1207. Prior to these discoveries, Cathar theology had been pieced together solely from what their adversaries had written about the heresy and from two incomplete Occitan manuscripts found in Lyons and Dublin. Naturally, the enemies of Catharism had depicted the faith as a mass of superstition. From these documents it became obvious, especially in the case of John of Lugio (a Cathar scholastic), that the heresy was squarely in the tradition of Aristotelian rationalism. After centuries of being considered a fifth column for a Manichean revival, the Cathars could be studied for what they were: medieval Christians.

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there were four contemporary chroniclers: For identification of these sources, see “Usage and Primary Sources” above.

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the forces of American corporate imperialism: The novel in question is
Le Christi
, by René-Victor Pilhes. The author sees American economic leadership as a reincarnation of the totalitarian medieval Church, a view not uncommon in present-day France.

1. Languedoc and the Great Heresy

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the outermost fringes of the Romance conversation: Occitan and its cousins were once squarely center stage. Before deciding on composing in his Tuscan vernacular, Dante Alighieri considered writing the
Divine Comedy
in Provençal.

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often as weavers: Tradition holds that dualism was spread along the trade routes of the south by itinerant artisans. Foremost among these tradespeople were weavers, and for a while the Cathars were known as
tisserands
(weavers). Dissident scholarly opinion questions this occupational proclivity, by claiming that associating the Perfect with the rootless
artisans was yet another way Catholic propagandists had found to slander them.

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St. Félix en Lauragais: At the time, the village was called St. Félix de Caraman. I have given its modern name.

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a Cathar International: The capitalized title for the meeting is my invention. As for the meeting itself, a vocal group of revisionists, led by historian Monique Zerner, claim that the heretical conclave never occurred. The skeptics’ argument rests principally on the fact that the sole source for the St. Félix meeting is a seventeenth-century document, whose author (Guillaume Besse) claimed to have worked from a now vanished manuscript of 1223. A colloquium was held in Nice in January 1999 to give the revisionists a hearing, yet the crushing weight of consensus among Cathar experts—Anne Brenon, Michel Roquebert, Malcolm Lambert, Bernard Hamilton, Jean Duvernoy, et. al.—continues to come down on the side of St. Felix having witnessed “the most imposing international gathering ever recorded in the history of the Cathars” (source: Malcolm Lambert,
The Cathars
, pp. 45–46). Some, however, argue that the meeting took place in the 1170s, not 1167. For an entertaining summary of many of the arguments pro and con, see Michel Roquebert,
Histoire des cathares
, pp. 58–62.

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the believers overwhelmingly outnumbered … the Perfect: To my chagrin, I felt obliged to opt for the terminology coined by the Cathars’ persecutors. I have done this to avoid confusion, for the Cathars simply referred to themselves as Christians, good Christians, good men or good women, or friends of God. A Perfect is so called not because he or she is flawless; rather, one so labeled is a
hereticus perfectus
or
heretica perfecta
—”a completed heretic,” in the sense of one who has passed from the stage of sympathizer to the rank of the ordained. I have elected to capitalize the term so it will not be confused with the ordinary sense of “perfect.” The term for believers,
credentes
, was also coined by Catharism’s enemies.

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a ritual response to the melioramentum: The exchange of greetings in the melioramentum emphasized the gulf between the simple, earth-bound believer and the quasi divine Perfect. Malcolm Lambert, in
The Cathars
(p. 142), draws on Y. Hagman’s doctoral work, “Catharism: A
Medieval Echo of Manichaeism or of Primitive Christianity,” in describing the exchange: “In the most solemn form of the ceremony, three profound inclinations of the head on to the hands, so far as to kiss them, was accompanied by ‘Bless us’ (
benedicte
), ‘Lord’, or ‘good Christian’ or ‘good lady’, ‘the blessing of God and your own’, ‘Pray God for us’ and on the third inclination, ‘Lord, pray God for this sinner that he deliver him from an evil death and lead him to a good end.’ The perfect responded affirmatively to the first and second prayers and to the third at great length alluding to the
consolamentum
: ‘God be prayed that God will make you a good Christian and lead you to a good end.’ ”

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leader of the Cathar faith in northern France: Not much is known of Catharism north of the Loire, save that it was repressed at an early stage and thus never came close to the success it enjoyed in Languedoc. The greatest concentration of dualist heretics in this region appears to have been in Champagne, an area crisscrossed by trade routes and host to the great medieval fairs where goods—and ideas—were exchanged.

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The very last of the Bogomils: This nugget of surprising information is found in Friedrich Heer’s
The Medieval World
(p. 206). I have seen
Bogomil
also translated as “Deserving of the Pity of God.”

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The Catholic precept of
ex opere
… : To believe that a corrupt priest cannot celebrate a sacrament is a heresy known as Donatism. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) was merciless in combating the Donatists in his homeland of Roman North Africa.

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heretical, by every definition except their own: Heresy is a slippery little devil. To label an idea heretical is to know exactly what it is you believe, and precisely what it is that you consider an unacceptable interloper into your patch of the divine. For the great majority of medieval believers, the line between heterodoxy and orthodoxy snaked all over the map. Christianity, like other faiths, was an ongoing argument, and the teachings and practices of the Church wandered in and out of deadend debates, picking up thoughts that would later be deemed repugnant, dismissing others that might subsequently constitute dogma. To the average Languedoc peasant, no doubt the Cathar holy men and women seemed to be completely orthodox in their piety, more orthodox than the
village priest living with his concubine. Scholar Leonard George has nicely defined
heresy
as “a crime of perception—an act of seeing something that, according to some custodian of reality, is not truly there.” The word originates in the Greek
hairesis
, the noun formed from the verb
haireomai
(to choose). At base,
heresy
means consciously opting for a set of beliefs, and thus a heretic is—the anachronism is irresistible—pro-choice. It then came to mean choosing an
incorrect
belief system. Given the shifting sands of doctrine, finding the officially approved path to salvation frequently took deft spiritual footwork. Paul admonished his followers about heretics in an oft-quoted passage from the New Testament’s Titus 3:9–11: “But avoid foolish controversies and genealogies and arguments and quarrels about the law, because these are unprofitable and useless. Warn a divisive person once, and then warn him a second time. After that you may have nothing to do with him. You may be sure that such a man is warped and sinful; he is self-condemned.” In another influential remark about heresy, the thirteenth-century English churchman Robert Grosseteste, one of the rare specimens of medieval humanity to have survived into his eighties, leaves implicit the notion of a single, approved truth. According to him, heresy is “an opinion chosen by human perception, contrary to holy scripture, publicly avowed and obstinately defended.” Again, choice and perception were paramount in this definition, with the added proviso of publicity. The wise old Grosseteste was saying that you wouldn’t be called a heretic if you just kept your mouth shut. The Cathars, famously, did not. Their creed embraced so many officially proscribed errors—Donatism, Docetism, dualism, Monophysitism, etc.—that to call them heretics seems an understatement. True, the Cathars thought the Catholics were heretics, but the Church, just as famously, won the argument. If the Cathars can’t be called heretics, we should just delete the word from our dictionaries. In the text I use the term in the sense of dissent, not depravity.

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Ephemeral messiahs and cranky reformers: My quick review of colorful charismatics of the twelfth century should be supplemented by reading, in order of palatability, Norman Cohn’s
The Pursuit of the Millennium
, R. I. Moore’s
The Origins of European Dissent
, and Malcolm Lambert’s
Medieval Heresy
. The jungle of dissent is lush.

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revered him so much that they drank his bathwater: The charge against Tanchelm’s followers, complete with details of how they adored his toenail clippings, may or may not be true, given the partisan nature of the pro-Catholic medieval sources. What is more certain is that the tale, even if it is a canard, continues to intoxicate with its perverseness. In the
New Yorker
of November 29, 1999, John Updike writes about Shoko Asahara, the head of the cult that released nerve gas in Tokyo subways: “His followers were also privileged, when he was at liberty, to kiss his big toe and to pay upward of two hundred dollars for a drink of his used bathwater.”

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Mystical, anorexic, brilliant, eloquent and polemical: The mention of anorexia may surprise, but the great Bernard was voluble about his ills, imagined or real. An entertaining depiction of the man—and of his nemesis, Peter Abelard—can be found in Christopher Frayling’s
Strange Landscape
, in which he devotes a chapter titled “The Saint and the Scholar” to their famous twelfth-century feud. Frayling writes (p. 123) of Bernard’s gastric troubles: “Bernard was permanently ill—which was hardly surprising given the way he punished his body and the damp surroundings he lived in. He seems to have suffered from a form of extreme anorexia nervosa—rejecting food so regularly that he was sometimes paralysed through lack of nourishment; and he stank continually of stale vomit. ‘I have a bad stomach,’ he wrote, ‘but how much more must I be hurt by the stomach of my memory where such rottenness collects.’ ”