The Perfect Heresy (4 page)

*
In the interest of brevity,
The Perfect Heresy
will use such terms as
France
and
England
to describe the twelfth- and thirteenth-century constellations of feudal arrangements that would not evolve into states until much later.

L
ANGUEDOC’S PATCHWORK OF
olive groves and vineyards stretches from the sea to the mountains, an arc of hardwon prosperity reaching from the salty mouth of the Rhône to the lazy flood of the Garonne. The land, scorched by the sun and scoured by the wind, seems created for a tale of sudden change. In the reedy marshes of the Mediterranean coast stand the cities of Nîmes, Montpellier, Béziers, and Narbonne, already lively outposts of empire when the centurions of Rome called the area the
provincia Narbonnensis
. By the time of the Cathars, these centers of rough civility had long since come in out of the night of chaos following the collapse of the classical world. Their dockside warehouses overflowed anew with wine and oil, wool and leather; their richer townspeople, clad in costly silks and brocades, traded with their counterparts in Spain, Italy, and beyond.

The warm littoral plain of the traders quickly gives way to
more rugged surroundings. Close to the shore rise the bleached heights of the Corbières, a range of limestone peaks that stretches inland to the south of the River Aude. The summits of these mountains, now crowned with ruined castles, were ideal for watching the tramp of armies in the river valley below. There, in the Aude’s rumpled geometry of field and village, ranks of cypress trees compete with grapevines in giving order to the landscape. Far away to the north loom the rocky plateau of the Minervois, its parasol pines teetering over steep ravines, and the Montagne Noire (the black mountain), a brooding forested prominence that lies across the countryside like some great beached whale.

Beyond the turrets and ramparts of Carcassonne, some forty miles from the coast, the Corbières and the Montagne Noire disappear, and the earth fans out into a succession of gentle ridges. In the summer, the land bakes and the cicadas sing; irregular swatches of cultivation soften the long hogbacks in the rolling panorama. This fertile area comprised the heartland of Catharism. In such towns as Lavaur, Fanjeaux, and Montréal, dualism won its largest following.

To the west of these sleepy settlements lies the broad rich plain of Toulouse, leaden green in the heat. The great city, surpassed in size only by Rome and Venice in the Latin Christendom of 1200, sits on a bend of the River Garonne as it uncoils slowly on its long journey to the Atlantic. The river rises far in the south, in the rock and snow that separate France from Spain. The bleak black majesty of the Pyrenees marks the limit of Languedoc with a towering finality. It was within sight of their summits that such outposts as Montségur and Montaillou witnessed the ultimate stages of the Cathar story.

Wedged between more celebrated cousins—to the east,
Provence; to the west, Aquitaine; to the south, Aragon and Catalonia—Languedoc has never been redeemed from its original sin of sheltering heresy. Incorporated by force into the kingdom of France as a result of the Albigensian Crusade, the region took generations to rediscover the nascent nationalism that northern knight and Dominican inquisitor first aroused, then crushed, in the thirteenth century. Today, it is still more an imaginary construct than a cohesive entity. It doesn’t exist as a full-fledged nation or province, all of which suits its role as standard-bearer of the Cathar invisible.

Even its name reflects the chimerical. Languedoc is a contraction of
langue d’oc
, that is, the language of yes—or rather, the languages in which the word
yes
is
oc
, not
oui
. The patois of Paris and its surrounding Ile de France eventually evolved into French; the languages of oc, or Occitan and its related dialects—Languedocien, Gascon, Limousin, Auvergnat, Provençal—were far closer to Catalan and Spanish. Over time Occitan was decisively exiled to the outermost fringes of the Romance conversation, and the butter-smooth tongue of the French northerners came to dominate Languedoc. Yet the memory of the displaced idiom abides, if only in the twangy way French is now spoken in the south. Whereas the hubbub of café debate in say, Normandy, sounds like a mellifluous exchange between articulate cows, the tenor of the same discussion in Languedoc is akin to a musician tuning a large, and very loud, guitar. This, the echo of old Occitan, can be heard everywhere.

It was in the Occitan language that troubadour poetry first flowered in the twelfth century. In the fields and groves of Languedoc, love was discovered and the erotic rekindled. Jongleurs—the performers of troubadour works—sang of a coy, courtly game of deferred pleasure, exalted sublimation and, ultimately
, adulterous fulfillment. The idea of
fin’amors
was a fresh, heady breeze of individual transcendence imbued with the spirit of medieval Languedoc. While beyond the Loire and the Rhine noblemen were still stirred by epics about the viscera dripping from Charlemagne’s sword, their counterparts in the sunny south were learning to count the ways. The ethos of amorous longing, so much at odds with the mix of rapine and piety that passed for normal behavior everywhere else, gave a different cast to Languedoc’s life of the mind.

The region’s distinctiveness showed up elsewhere during this period. In the coastal cities, the Jews of Languedoc were inventing and exploring the mystical implications of the Kabbalah, proving that spiritual ferment was by no means confined to the Christian majority. In the more material world, the burghers of Languedoc were wresting power from the feudal families who had ruled the land since the time of the Visigoths. Money, the enemy of the agrarian caste sysem, was circulating again, as were ideas. On the paths and rivers of the Languedoc of 1150, there were not only traders and troubadours but also pairs of itinerant holy men, recognizable by the thin leather thong tied around the waist of their black robes. They entered villages and towns, set up shop, often as weavers, and became known for their honest, hard work. When the time came, they would talk—first, in the moonlight beyond the walls, then out in the open, before the fireplaces of noble and burgher, in the houses of tradespeople, near the stalls of the marketplace. They asked for nothing, no alms, no obeisance; just a hearing. Within a generation, these Cathar missionaries had converted thousands. Languedoc had become host to what would be called the Great Heresy.

The small town of St. Félix en Lauragais, huddled on its prow of granite in a sea of waving green, teemed with visitors in early May of 1167. From the windows of their hostelries, the newcomers could look out over fields of spring wheat and be thankful for the felicity of a time without famine. Not that they thought the good god had had a hand in such material good fortune, for the guests of St. Félix were dualist grandees—heresiarchs—from distant lands. They had gathered here to talk, openly, without fear of persecution or contradiction, at a great conclave in the castle of a local noble. It was the first and only meeting of its kind, a Cathar International of spiritual dissent. The Catholic bishop in his palace in Toulouse, a day’s ride to the west, would not have received an invitation.

The townspeople no doubt greeted the robed heresiarchs by bowing deeply and reciting a prayer that asked for assurance of a good end to their lives. This ritual, known as the
melioramentum
, marked the supplicants as believers in the Cathar message. These believers, or
credentes
, were not, properly speaking, Cathars but rather sympathizers who bore witness and showed deference to the faith. The credentes had to await a future life to accede to the status of the Cathar elect.

Throughout Languedoc the believers overwhelmingly outnumbered the holy few, whom the Church would later label the
Perfect
—as in perfected, or fully initiated, heretics. It was the Perfect, the black-robed visitors to St. Félix, who were the true, seditious Cathars. An austere class of monks-in-the-world, the Perfect showed by example alone that there was a way out of the cycle of reincarnation. Their holiness made them living saints, equal in stature, in the view of the credentes, to Jesus’ apostles. Having arrived at the last phase of worldly existence, the Perfect prepared for a final journey; their lives of self-denial
ensured that at their death they would not return. Rather, their imprisoned spirit would at last be freed to join the eternal, invisible Goodness. Eventually, all people would be among the Perfect, in the sere and spartan waiting room of bliss. In the meantime, the simple Cathar believers could conduct themselves as they saw fit, but it was best to follow the teachings of the gospels: Love your neighbor and the peace that goodness and honesty bring.

The Perfect in St. Félix acknowledged the homage of the credentes with a ritual response to the melioramentum. Normally, the utterances would have been exclusively in Occitan, the lingua franca of the rolling farmland in which St. Félix was just one of many small settlements. But, given the uniqueness of the occasion, some of the Perfect answered in the
langue d’oïl
, the ancestor of French. A certain Robert d’Epernon, leader of the Cathar faith in northern France, had come to the meeting along with several of his fellow Perfect. The melioramentum response was also given in the tongue that would mature as Italian. This was spoken by a Milanese gravedigger named Mark, one of the pioneers of Catharism in Lombardy, where the growing towns were wracked by strife between the pope and the Germanic emperor. In this year of 1167, the towns and the papacy founded the defensive Lombard League to thwart the designs of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. In the cracks caused by this power struggle, the heretical faith of Mark and his fellows was allowed to flower.

Mark had come to St. Félix as an escort. Nicetas, his traveling companion, spoke Greek, a language not heard in these peasant surroundings since the local Latin gentry recited it in their literary academies some 800 years previously. Nicetas, whose identity has never been fully established, was most probably the
bishop of Constantinople for the Bogomil faith, a dualist creed that had arisen in eastern Europe when a tenth-century Macedonian monk known as “Beloved of God”
(Bogomil
, in Slavonic) started spreading the good-and-evil news. Dualism, a metaphysic known to Christianity since the gnostics of antiquity, had a following in several lands controlled by the Byzantine Empire. Although mystery surrounds the genesis of the Cathars, it is reasonable to assume that the Bogomils
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may have initially acted as mentors to the Western heresy, especially as the contacts between Greek East and Latin West increased after the turn of the first millennium.

As a heresiarch from the East, Nicetas brought an impressive pedigree of dissent to the meeting in St. Félix. One of his predecessors, a certain Basil, had openly tried to convert the Byzantine emperor to the ways of dualism in the year 1100. The emperor was not amused, and Basil the Bogomil was burned for his temerity just outside the hippodrome of Constantinople. For the Cathar Perfect, however, the martyrdom suffered by the Bogomils, no matter how glorious, mattered less than the conduit of legitimacy they represented.

Through Nicetas’s fingers passed the power of the
consolamentum
, the sole dualist sacrament. It transformed the ordinary believer into one of the Perfect, who then, in turn, could “console” others ready to live their final, holy life. Baptism, confirmation, ordination, and, if received at death’s door, extreme unction all rolled into one, the consolamentum entailed the laying-on of hands and repeated injunctions to live a flawlessly chaste and ascetic existence. The Perfect had to abstain from any form of sexual intimacy, pray constantly, and fast frequently.
When allowed to eat, they had to avoid all meat and any byproduct of reproduction, such as cheese, eggs, milk, or butter. They could, however, drink wine and eat fish, as the latter was believed by medieval man to be the product of spontaneous generation in water. One slip in this strictly enforced regimen—be it as minor as a nibble of veal or a stolen kiss—and the status of Perfect vanished. The backslider had to receive the consolamentum again, as would all others whom the imperfect Perfect had “consoled” in his or her career. The Catholic precept of
ex opere operato, non ex opere operantis
([grace] results from what is performed, not who performs it), through which a sacrament remains valid no matter how corrupt its celebrant, was rejected out of hand by the Cathars. The consolamentum had to be immaculate.