Part 1: The Cathars, the most Successful Heresy of the Middle Ages...Heresy and Orthodoxy ...The Foxes in the Vineyard of the Lord

The Cathars, the most Successful 

Heresy of the Middle Ages

By Sean Martin

Prologue: Béziers 

It was the Feast Day of St Mary Magdalene, 22 July 1209, and an all-out massacre had not been planned. 

A French army from the north, under the leadership of the Papal legate Arnold Amaury, was camped outside the town of Béziers in the Languedoc. Recently arrived from a month-long march down the valley of the River Rhône, the army’s mission was to demand that the town elders hand over the 222 Cathars – about 10 per cent of the town’s population 1 – that they were known to be harbouring.The elders refused.That they did so says as much for the power of the Cathar faith as it does for the complicated political situation in the south in which the Cathars had been able to flourish. 

The Cathars had come to prominence in the Languedoc some fifty years previously and were, by the beginning of the thirteenth century, virtually the dominant religion in the Languedoc. Unlike the majority of the Catholic clergy of the time, the Cathars were conspicuously virtuous, living lives of apostolic poverty and simplicity. This in itself would have been enough to get the sect branded as heretics, as happened to the Lyons-based group, the Waldensians.2 But what set the Cathars apart from the Waldensians was their belief in not one god, but two. According to Cathar theology, there were two eternal principles, good and evil, with the world being under the sway of the latter.They were also implacably hostile to the Church of Rome, which they denounced vehemently as the Church of Satan. 

The Cathars were not the only ones to oppose Rome: most of the south of what we would today call France was fiercely independent, and regarded both the northern army and the Papal agents as foreign invaders. It was therefore unthinkable that the Cathars, fellow southerners, could be handed over to opposition. The enemy was not heresy, but anyone who challenged the authority and autonomy of the local nobility, the powerful counts and viscounts of Toulouse, Foix and Carcasonne. 

The combination of heresy and politics was a combustible one, however, and Pope Innocent III (1198–1216) saw sufficient grounds to call for a Crusade. The west had been launching Crusades with varying degrees of success ever since 1095, but they had all been directed against the Muslims. Under Innocent’s pontificate, that began to change. The Fourth Crusade, launched in 1202, did not bode well for the heretics and nobles of the Languedoc: although aimed at the Holy Land, the Crusaders veered wildly off target in the spring of 1204 and sacked the fellow Christian city of Constantinople.The campaign called against the Cathars was different: it would be the first Crusade to be conducted within the west, against people who were fellow countrymen and women. 

Arnold Amaury called for a meeting with his generals.  It was clear that the heretics were not going to be given up without a fight. While the meeting was going on, a fracas broke out between a small band of Crusaders and a group on the walls of the town. Insults were exchanged. In a rash move, the defenders opened the gates and a small group of men from Béziers ventured out to teach the Crusaders some manners. They swiftly dealt with the northerners, but the news quickly spread that the gate was open. Crusaders poured into the town.Word got back to Arnold Amaury.What should they do? How would they recognize Cathars from Catholics? The Papal legate, paraphrasing 2 Timothy,3 uttered the notorious command: ‘Kill them all. God will recognise his own.’ 

In the ensuing bloodbath of ‘abattoir Christianity’,4 between 15,000 and 20,000 innocent people were butchered. (A more conservative estimate puts the number of victims at a mere 9,000.) Even women and children taking refuge in the Cathedral of St Nazaire were not spared: the cathedral was torched, and anyone caught fleeing was put to the sword. By the evening, rivers of blood coursed through the streets of Béziers. Churches and houses smouldered. Once they had finished killing, the Crusaders looted what was left. 

The Albigensian Crusade, as it came to be known, had begun. Unlike the Fourth Crusade, however, it had gone out of control at the very beginning. The atrocities of Béziers would have confirmed to Cathars everywhere their belief that they alone were God’s elect, and that the world was indeed evil.

1

Heresy and Orthodoxy 

Catharism was the most popular heresy of the Middle Ages. Indeed, such was its success that the Catholic Church and its apologists referred to it as the Great Heresy. As the twelfth century turned into the thirteenth, it was at its zenith: Cathars could be found from Aragon to Flanders, from Naples to the Languedoc. Its equivalent of priests, the Perfect, lived lives so conspicuously virtuous that even their enemies had to proclaim that they were indeed holy and good people. The Cathars found widespread support from all areas of society, from kings and counts to carpenters and weavers.Women, never welcomed by the Church, became Cathars knowing they could earn respect and actively participate in the faith. Needless to say, this mixture of women, virtue and apostolic poverty – to say nothing of the Cathar church’s popularity – did not sit well with Rome. But nor did Rome sit well with the Cathars, who believed that the Church had, in its pursuit of worldly power, betrayed Christ’s message. 

That Catholicism would move against the Cathars was hardly surprising; indeed, in some areas in the south of France, Cathars were more numerous than Catholics.What shocked contemporaries was not that the Pope ordered a Crusade to put the heresy down, but that the Crusaders committed atrocities of such magnitude that they are still echoing down the centuries. In the Languedoc, these crimes have never really been forgotten. 

Strangely, for all its popularity, the exact origins of Catharism are unknown. It emerged at a time when the Church, and Europe as a whole, were undergoing enormous changes prior to emerging into the so-called Renaissance of the twelfth century. Although it is difficult to imagine the scale of atrocities such as Béziers, we can go some way to understanding the mindset of the Cathars’ persecutors by studying the history of the Church and how heresy emerged from it. Moreover, a study of the history of the dualist heresy – essentially, the belief that the devil is as powerful as God, to which Catharism belongs – will help to set things in perspective. Like Catharism, Dualism has murky beginnings. 

Dualism 

Dualism existed before Christianity, and may even be older than recorded history itself. The term was first coined in 1700 by the English Orientalist,Thomas Hyde, to describe any religious system which held that God and the devil were two opposing, coeternal principles.5 The meaning of the term evolved to include any system that revolved around a central, binary pairing (such as the mind/body split in the philosophy of Descartes, or the immortal soul/mortal body in that of Plato). Dualist strands exist in one form or another in all major religions, whether monotheistic (acknowledging one god, such as Islam, Judaism and Christianity), polytheistic (acknowledging many gods, such as Shintoism, some forms of Wicca or the pantheon of classical Greece), or monistic (acknowledging that everything – the Divine, matter and humanity – is of one and the same essential substance, such as certain schools of Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism and Pantheism). For example, fundamentalist Christianity has a pronounced dualist slant in that it sees many things in the world – rock music, drugs, New Age philosophies, Hollywood blockbusters – as being the work of the devil. Likewise, extremist Islamic groups see non-Muslims as either essentially asleep to the truth, or actively engaged in undermining the religion of the Prophet. In both cases, an ‘us and them’ mentality prevails, from which there is only one escape route (belief in Jesus and Mohammed respectively). 

Despite these varying levels of Dualism in the different faiths of the world, religious Dualism proper stands apart in positing the notion of the two opposing principles of good and evil.Within the dualist tradition itself, there are generally held to be two schools of thought: absolute, or radical, Dualism; and mitigated, or monarchian, Dualism. The Italian historian of religions, Ugo Bianchi, identified three distinct features of Dualism: 

1) Absolute Dualism regards the two principles of good and evil as coeternal and equal, whereas mitigated Dualism regards the evil principle as a secondary, lesser power to the good principle. 

2) Absolute Dualism sees the two principles as locked in combat for all eternity, and, in many schools, regards time as cyclical (many absolute dualists, therefore, tend to believe in reincarnation), whilst mitigated Dualism sees historical time as being finite; at the end of time, the evil principle will be defeated by the good. 

3) Absolute Dualism sees the material world as intrinsically evil, but mitigated Dualism regards creation as essentially good.6 

The Good Religion 

Zoroastrianism is usually held to be the first major world religion to espouse a dualistic view of the world. However, the Dualism present in ancient Egyptian religion predates Zoroastrianism by some centuries, if not a millennium (the exact dates of the founding of Zoroastrianism being unknown). Polarities – such as that of light and dark – are frequently found in ancient Egyptian religious thought, perhaps the best known of them being the opposition of Horus (sometimes Osiris) and Seth. In the various versions of the myth that have survived, the two gods are portrayed as being constantly at war with one another, with Seth never being able to destroy Horus (despite blinding him in one eye), but who himself is never quite annihilated either. They were known variously as ‘the two gods’, ‘the two brothers’ and ‘the two fighters’. Although they weren’t originally seen as good (Horus) versus evil (Seth), Seth developed trickster type attributes and was gradually demonised until his name was virtually anathema in Egyptian religious rituals and was effectively banished from the Egyptian pantheon. 

As Seth was gradually becoming depicted in ever darker colours, a dualist system that posited good against evil from its very outset was emerging in Persia. The prophet Zoroaster (also known as Zarathustra) was a great Persian religious reformer who founded what he called the Good Religion, or Zoroastrianism. The dates of his mission are unclear, and Zoroaster has been placed in various epochs, from 1700–1400 BC, to 1400–1000 BC or 1000–600 BC. Current research tends to suggest the middle dates, making Zoroastrianism the world’s oldest revealed religion, a religion that ‘has probably had more influence on mankind, directly and indirectly, than any other single faith.’7 

Zoroaster was ‘the first to teach the doctrines of an individual judgment, heaven and hell, the future resurrection of the body, the general Last Judgment, and life everlasting for the reunited soul and body.’8 All of these ideas were to influence Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Yet where Zoroastrianism differs from these later religions is in its treatment of evil. In its traditional form, the faith holds that there is one good god, Ahura Mazda (the name means Wise Lord), under whom are the two equal twin forces of Spenta Mainyu (the beneficent or holy spirit) and Angra Mainyu (the hostile or destructive spirit). Although Ahura Mazda’s creation is good, the source of all evil within it is caused by Angra Mainyu, who is destined to be overcome at the end of historical time, at which point eternity will begin. 

Classical Zoroastrianism, however, underwent changes as the fortunes of the Persian Empire rose and fell. Over time,Ahura Mazda became identified with Spenta Mainyu, reducing the original trinity to a binary pairing.The names of the Wise Lord and his adversary also underwent transformation, being contracted to Ohrmazd and Ahriman respectively. By the time of the Achaemenid Dynasty (550–330 BC), Ahriman was no longer seen as being created by, and inferior to, Ohrmazd, but was now regarded as his equal.9 

The World, the Flesh and the Devil 

Zoroastrianism, in all its forms, regards the world as a battleground between the forces of good and evil, and each individual is expected to make their own choice as to which side to be on.This, together with the idea of the two principles, would later resurface in Catharism. Several other concepts that developed before the Christian era would also help to shape the heresy, namely the split between the body and the soul, and the figure of the Judaeo-Christian equivalent of Ahriman, Satan. 

The body/soul split, although perhaps today synonymous with Descartes 10 and modern empirical science, seems to have first emerged with the cult of Orpheus in the sixth century BC, which came to play an important part in the religious life of ancient Greece. Orphism contained elements of Dualism within it, as the legendary figure of Orpheus was said to be either the son of Apollo or the Thracian king Oeagrus, who was of the dynasty founded by Dionysus. Apollo, the god of order and reason, traditionally stood opposite Dionysus, the god of intoxication and ecstasy, but in Orphism, as in later Zoroastrianism, neither god prevails over the other. Unlike Zoroastrianism, however, which regards the body as the material vehicle of the soul, Orphism regarded the soul as divine and immortal, while the body was its evil, mortal prison for the duration of its earthly existence. 

The origins of this belief derive from the story of the child Dionysus: as the son of Zeus, the boy incurred the jealousy of the Titans, the race of elder gods that Zeus had overthrown. The Titans tempted the child with a mirror, and while he was studying his own reflection, the Titans killed and dismembered the boy.11 

Although Dionysus is later resurrected, Zeus destroys the Titans with a salvo of thunderbolts, and it is from the remains of the elder gods that humankind is born. The physical body was held to be made of Titanic material, and therefore evil, while the soul was formed of divine Dionysian material. Orphism developed practices whose focus was the fate of the soul in the afterlife, and the Orphic initiate hoped that, by following these practices, their soul would be granted salvation in the next world and released from the bonds of matter and the cycle of death and rebirth. 

Satan was originally an accusing angel in Hebrew thought,12 but had the good fortune, like Ahriman before him, to be promoted. In the Book of Job, the earliest Old Testament book in which he has a prominent role,13 Satan is one of the ‘sons of God’ (Job 1.6) who serve God in heaven. God asks Satan for a progress report on what he has been up to of late. Satan replies ‘I have been walking here and there, roaming around the earth’ (Job 1.7). God asks Satan if he has noticed the devout Job, describing him as His most faithful servant. Satan wonders if Job would still serve God if he, Job, had everything taken away from him. God concedes the point, and lets Satan descend to Earth to begin testing Job. 

In a rapid sequence of calamities that could rightly be called Old Testament in their severity, Job has his donkeys stolen by Sabeans (Job 1.15), his sheep (and attendant shepherds) are suddenly struck by lightning and killed a verse later, while, in verse seventeen, Chaldeans make off with his camels. Before Job has time to react, another breathless servant comes running with news even worse: a storm has destroyed the house that Job’s children were feasting in; all were killed. Job tears his clothes in grief, shaves his head and, from a position face down on the floor, praises the Lord for taking that which He had originally given. 

Satan returns to heaven, and God points out to him that, despite the fact that Satan has done his worst to Job, Job’s faith is unshaken. God feels that He has won the toss, but Satan, not to be outdone by his employer, asks God if Job’s faith will be as strong if his body were to be attacked. Once more, God allows Satan to test Job, on the condition that he doesn’t kill the poor man.This time, Satan causes sores to break out all over Job’s body. Rather than seek sound medical advice, Job decides to scrape at his sores with a piece of broken pottery. Once again, Job rejoices in his suffering, and Satan retires, temporarily, from the narrative. 

Satan plays the role of a trickster in the Book of Job, albeit one of a rather cruel bent.There is no doubt that he is still, essentially, a heavenly servant of some kind: if Satan  is not actually doing God’s bidding, then at least God seems content to let Satan get up to his tricks in the earthly realm. It is not until the Second Book of Chronicles, written sometime towards the close of the Achaemenid period (which ended in 330 BC), that Satan steps out from the shadow of the Almighty to become a force set firmly against God and His creation. He – Satan – does so in a rather interesting way, as he plays the role once taken by God Himself in an earlier telling of the story.14 

The story in question is of the census of the tribes of Israel, first recounted in the Second Book of Samuel, Chapter 24: the Lord, being angry yet again with Israel, forces David to number her peoples. David’s army – who are to do the actual counting – are none too happy, but comply with their king’s command.After nine months and twenty days, in which they have been all over Israel, they return to Jerusalem, the census complete. At this point, David has a crisis of conscience, and tells God that he feels that the census has been a terrible sin. Unfortunately for David and the people of Israel, God agrees. He gives David three choices to punish the sin: three years of famine;15 three months of running away from his enemies; or three days of pestilence throughout the land. David is unable to decide, and casts himself at the mercy of his Lord. His Lord, however, is not at His most merciful, and smites the land with three days’ plague, in which 70,000 Israelites perish.When the story is retold in Second Chronicles, however, it is Satan, not God, who urges David to take the census. It makes no difference: the results are, for the unfortunate Israelites, the same. 

Quite why Satan went from being an accusing angel to emerging – around the end of the Achaemenid period – as the adversary of both God and Man is still something of a mystery. One possible explanation for this change is linked with the situation in Israel after the Babylonish Captivity ended. It has been suggested 16 that when the exiled tribes returned home, friction was generated between them and the tribes who had stayed; the exiles felt that it was they who were the true children of God, for they had remained true to the Torah and had suffered the punishment of exile to prove it. Matters came to a head in 168 BC, when the Seleucid ruler of Israel, King Antiochus Epiphanes, embarked on an anti-Semitic purge. Rebellion quickly spread, and when Antiochus forces were defeated, it was the hardline descendants of the former exiles who gained control of the Temple.To them, the likes of the liberal pro-Hellenic Hasmonean dynasty were as much the enemy as the Seleucids, and it was perhaps these ongoing tensions within Israel that led to Satan, formerly one of God’s angels, becoming anathematised in the same way that the hardliners were excoriating the Hasmoneans for, as they saw it, their treachery and betrayal. 

Essenes, Gnostics and the First Christians 

If Dualism has beginnings that are obscured by the mists of time, then the origins of Christianity itself are likewise semi-obscured by the passage of the centuries. The Cathars claimed descent from early Christianity, before the Roman Church became the religion’s dominant form. Roman rule of Israel – which began in 63 BC – was facing increasing resistance from various groups within Israel. Most notable among them were the Essenes, a radical Jewish group based in the caves of Qumran overlooking the Dead Sea. It has been suggested by various writers that both John the Baptist and Jesus himself were at one time members of the Dead Sea community before beginning their respective ministries. While this is debatable, it is known that the Essenes sought to establish a new covenant with God, as they believed that Israel’s sins had all but invalidated the old covenant (given by God to Abraham). According to Roman historians like Josephus and Philo, the Essenes were divided between those who had taken full vows – which involved living at Qumran and adhering to a strict life of celibacy, prayer and ritual – and those who were associate members who, while Believers, lived in towns, plied ordinary trades and married.The Cathars – like their immediate forebears, the Bogomils – would also structure their church in this way. 

In further foreshadowings of Catharism, the Essenes’ worldview was essentially dualist, in that they saw the world as the battleground between the forces of heaven and hell, and that man himself is the microcosm of this war: ‘the spirits of truth and falsehood struggle within the human heart. … According to his share in truth and right, thus a man hates lies; and according to his share in the lot of deceit, thus he hates the truth.’17 They also insisted that what mattered was not one’s ethnic origin – be it Jewish or Gentile – but one’s morality: only the pure of heart would be saved.

While the Essenes may have been an influence on some of the earliest Christian communities, they did not influence all of them. Before the Church established what was and wasn’t acceptable in the Christian faith at the First Council of Nicaea in the early fourth century, Christianity was a mixed bag of beliefs and practices.When the Cathars claimed that they were descended from the first Christians, they probably had in mind the sort of simple Christianity practised by the Apostles, and were certainly implying that they were part of the chain of true Christianity that thrived before the Council of Nicaea, which not only defined what constituted orthodox Christianity, but also, in doing so, defined what was heresy, and many of the early Christian groups ended up in the latter camp.To understand how this came to be so, we need to consider the fractious political situation in both Israel and the nascent Church in the first century. 

Immediately during and after Jesus’s ministry (which probably occurred between the mid twenties and mid thirties AD), his followers were a minority persecuted by both the Romans and the Pharisees alike. There is continuing controversy as to who was Jesus’s successor in the movement. Peter is traditionally seen as the Rock upon which the Church was built,18 and from whom the Roman Catholic Church claims descent, holding Peter as the first Pope. However, this is where problems set in. It has been argued 19 that Jesus’s brother James, known as James the Greater, was the head of the first post-Crucifixion Christian community in Jerusalem, and it is thought that James’s followers clashed with Christianity’s most fervent missionary, St Paul. 

This becomes all the more important when one recalls that Paul’s ideas played a large part – if not the largest – in forming the theology on which the Christian faith is based. And yet Paul remains a controversial figure: seldom does he actually quote Jesus’s words, and his letters – which form the largest part of the New Testament – are frequently addressed to other Christian communities clarifying points of doctrine or urging them to toe the line. Had early Christianity been a unified whole, there would have been no need for such letters. It would not be going too far to say that ‘Paul, and not Jesus, was … the Founder of Christianity’,20 and therein lie the origins of Christian heresy: ‘Paul is, in effect, the first “Christian” heretic, and his teachings – which became the foundation of later Christianity – are a flagrant deviation from the “original” or “pure” form.’21 He is the ‘first corrupter of the doctrines of Jesus’,22 as he rarely quotes from what Jesus himself actually taught. Jesus preached the Sermon on the Mount, Paul preached Christ Crucified; there is a big difference.[yeah there is! DC] 

The Jewish Revolt of 66 AD effectively ended the Jerusalem church of James, while the Christianity of Paul, who was probably dead or dying in a cell in Rome at the time, would continue to grow. However, Pauline Christianity faced further challenges from the various unorthodox groups that sprang up in the three centuries before the Council of Nicaea sat. Certain of the groups developed the Dualism of the Essenes, and stressed the importance of gnosis, or direct experiential knowledge of the divine, and for that reason they are generally known as the Gnostics. Although there is a bewildering number of Gnostic schools of thought, each with their own, often complicated cosmologies, many of them did share the view that the world was created by an evil demiurge.Thus they are mitigated, or anti-cosmic, dualists. Perhaps the most important Gnostic school was that founded by Marcion in the mid-second century AD. Marcion proposed the existence of two gods: the true god, and the false god, the creator of the material world and the god of the Old Testament. Marcionites rejected the world and were rigorous ascetics.The emerging Roman Church recoiled in horror, and branded Marcion a heretic. 

Aside from the idea of the two gods and the asceticism, another Gnostic idea would later reappear in Catharism, that of Christ as an apparition, not a flesh and blood human being. Many Gnostics saw Jesus’s Passion and Resurrection as essentially ghostly, without any human suffering involved. This idea became known as Docetism, and was pronounced heretical. However, Catharism was to differ from many Gnostic schools of thought in its stress upon the way to salvation being only through the ministrations of the Perfect – rather than by direct gnosis on the part of the Believer. In doing so, Catharism would ironically mirror Catholicism, which claimed that the only way to salvation was through the intervention of its priests. 

The Council of Nicaea 

The course of western civilisation changed forever on 28 October 312, when the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great (306–37) achieved a decisive victory over his brother-in-law Maxentius at the Battle of Milvian Bridge, just outside Rome. The two men had been engaged in a power struggle since Constantine’s accession, and at Milvian Bridge, matters came to a head. The night before the battle, however, things did not look good for Constantine. His men were outnumbered by 4:1, and defeat seemed likely.As evening drew on, Constantine saw the Greek letters X P (‘Chi-Rho’, the first two letters of the word ‘Christ’) suddenly appear on the setting sun together with a cross and the motto In Hoc Signo Vinces – ‘in this sign you will conquer’. Constantine saw it as an omen, and ordered the cross be painted on his soldiers’ shields. When he won an outright victory the next day, Constantine put the success down to the god of the Christians, converted to the faith and issued the Edict of Milan, which ordered an end to religious persecution across the empire.23 

As soon as Christianity began to flourish with its newfound status, there were problems.Arianism, in particular, was proving to be controversial, with its view that God the Father and Christ the Son were two distinct entities, with Christ being seen as inferior to God. To settle the matter, Constantine convened the Council of Nicaea, whose opening session began on 20 May 325. In the two months that the Council sat, the 300 or so Church fathers gathered at Nicaea debated a number of topics, including the fixing of the date of Easter, but by far the most important issue was Arianism. In an attempt to establish an orthodox position on Christ’s divine nature, the Nicene Creed was promulgated on 19 June, which drew the battle lines between the orthodox and everyone else. Belief in the tenets of the Creed were central to orthodoxy. They included belief in ‘God, the Father … maker of heaven and earth’, in Christ ‘the only Son of God … eternally begotten of the Father, true God from true God, begotten, not made, one in Being with the Father’, who ‘was born of the Virgin Mary and became man. For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate; he suffered, died, and was buried. On the third day he rose again in fulfilment of the Scriptures.’ Christ’s flock was to be ministered unto solely by ‘one holy catholic and apostolic Church.’24 The key issue of Christ’s divinity, and his being ‘one in Being with the Father’ was settled by vote. The Arians lost and were declared heretics. The Church was sending out a clear message: they were the only means by which one could achieve salvation. 

Interestingly, one of the lesser matters that the Council of Nicaea dealt with – alongside what to do with zealots who had castrated themselves – was whether to welcome a strongly ascetic group back to the Church who had proclaimed strongly against Christians whose faith had lapsed, sometimes under torture. This group was known as the Cathars, or pure ones, from the Greek katharoi. Although this sect was not dualist and almost certainly had nothing to do with the mediaeval Cathars,25 it is tempting to see their fate as an ominous precursor of what was to come: the Nicaean Cathars were denounced and declared heretics, and the cult died out altogether in the fifth century.

Manichaeism and Other Dualist Heresies 

Although the religious ferment in the early centuries of the common era produced a welter of groups whose positions in relation to orthodoxy were to be defined, whether they liked it or not, by the Council of Nicaea, one new religion emerged during this time which was subsequently to put the Church into veritable palpitations at its very mention: Manichaeism. Manichaeism was founded by the Persian prophet Mani (216–275), who was brought up in Babylon as an Elchasaite, a Jewish-Christian sect which was, interestingly, also known as katharoi. After a series of revelations, Mani attempted to reform the Elchasaites, but was denounced and thrown out. Undeterred, he began a vigorous missionary campaign with three former Elchasaites (one of whom was his father) to proselytise what Mani called the Religion of Light. Mani claimed that he was of the same tradition as Zoroaster, the Buddha and Jesus, but that these earlier masters had not revealed the whole truth, the revelation of which was his mission and his alone. 

Mani’s doctrine was formulated to appeal to as many people as possible; it was, in effect, a cut-and-paste religion – taking ideas from Zoroastrianism, Christianity and Buddhism – whose aim was to unite and save humanity in one overarching faith. There were two distinct classes of Manichaean, the Elect and the Listeners. The Elect were the faith’s priesthood, and practised strict asceticism, abstaining from meat, wine, blasphemy and sex. The Listeners – the rank and file believers of Mani’s church were also expected to observe certain rules, including contributing to the upkeep of the elect, and, while they were allowed to own property and marry, they were forbidden to have children. While Mani’s system is too complicated to go into here at length, it should be noted that Manichaeism is radically dualist, denying the validity of baptism, holding that Christ did not suffer on the cross, rejecting the body as irredeemable and maintaining that the evil principle is the equal of the good. 

To the Church, Manichaeism was the deadliest of heresies, even worse than Marcionism. It enjoyed widespread popularity, and St Augustine of Hippo was a Listener of the sect for nine years.When the preaching of St Ambrose and an epiphany in a garden in Milan turned Augustine toward Christianity in 386, he denounced Manichaeism in De Manichaeis and De Heresibus, which were to become the Church’s standard reference books on all matters heretical, and were frequently used in order to identify suspected heretics when the Great Heresy began to emerge in the west from the end of the tenth century onwards. To Augustine, his former faith was a perversion of the truth of the Gospels, its missionaries and priests deceitful and cunning. 

With Augustine its most vocal and authoritative opponent, Manichaeism began to go into decline. As early as 372, Manichaeans were forbidden from congregating, and the Roman emperor Theodosius the Great (379–95) – who made Christianity the state religion in 380 – passed legislation against them.The fifth and sixth centuries saw a concerted effort by Rome to wipe out Mani’s followers, while similar measures were enacted in the Byzantine Empire. Early in his reign, the Byzantine emperor, Justinian the Great (527–65) introduced the death penalty for Manichaeans, the favoured method of despatching adherents of the Religion of Light being by burning. So effective was the persecution under Justinian that, by the time of his death in 565, Manichaeism had been effectively wiped out altogether in the west. The Church was tightening its grip.26 

Manichaeism might have been extinguished from Europe, but the name lived on as a byword for dualist, heretic or merely a political opponent. (Indeed, the word ‘maniac’ derives from a derogatory term for Manichaean.) Heresy moved east and Armenia, despite being the first Christian nation, was fast becoming a hotbed of heresy courtesy of refugees fleeing from persecution in the Byzantine Empire and elsewhere.Two new dualist heresies emerged to take the place of Manichaeism: Massalianism and Paulicianism.

The Massalians, who were also known as the Enthusiasts (from the Greek enthousiasmos, which comes from the word entheos, ‘having the God within’) were originally from north-east Mesopotamia, where they are thought to have originated in the late fourth century.As early as 447, Massalianism was already perceived as the biggest heretical threat in Armenia, and the Armenian church introduced measures against its followers. Their main tenet of faith seems to have been the belief that inside every person dwells a demon, who must be banished through a life of prayer (the name ‘massalian’ means ‘praying people’) and asceticism. Once the demon had been banished, the possibility of further sinning was deemed impossible and the believer could return to secular life. As a consequence, the Massalians were frequently accused of immorality and licentiousness. Their missionaries frequently targeted monasteries; any house suspected of being infected with their heresy risked being burnt to the ground. 

The Paulicians were first noted in sixth-century Armenia. Whether the Manichaeans influenced them is debatable, as the Paulicians did not divide their number into Elect and Listeners, as the Manichaeans had done, and neither were they particularly ascetic. The exact date at which the Paulicians became dualists – they seem originally to have been Adoptionists, who believed that Christ was born human and did not become divine until his baptism – is likewise debatable, and it may not have happened until the ninth century.27 In a further deviation from Manichaeism, the Paulicians were fighters to be reckoned with. As the Cathars were pacifists, the Paulicians’ military prowess was something of an anomaly. Seven Paulician churches were founded in Armenia and Asia Minor, whose mother church at Corinth was supposedly founded by St Paul, after whom the sect was named. 

The Bogomils 

As the long night of the Dark Ages descended over Europe, the Church faced threats from two different sources: the rise of the new religion of Islam, which began to make rapid inroads into Christian kingdoms from the early  eighth century, and the waves of nomadic invasions that began with the Huns in the fourth century. The Church’s position was further weakened by its constant struggles with the eastern Orthodox church, a situation that worsened until the dramatic schism of 1054 rent the eastern and western churches permanently asunder. The Balkans, falling midway between Rome and Constantinople, became a theological battleground, serving as home to numerous heterodox sects as much as Armenia had done a century or two before. 

The decisive development that paved the way for the Cathars’ great predecessors, the Bogomils, was the establishment of the first Bulgarian empire (681–1118). Bulgaria immediately proved to be a thorn in Constantinople’s side, and the fact that it was pagan only exacerbated matters. In order to create a bulwark against Bulgaria, colonists from the Byzantine empire’s eastern edges were forcibly resettled in Thrace – an area roughly comprising north-eastern Greece, southern Bulgaria and European Turkey. Unfortunately, amongst those being repatriated were the Paulicians. Introducing heretics into an area that bordered on a pagan kingdom was simply asking for trouble, and trouble is precisely what Constantinople was to get.28 

No one knows precisely where the Bogomils came from. They were first recorded during the reign of the Bulgarian tsar Peter (927–69), who was forced to write twice during the 940s to the patriarch of Constantinople, Theophylact Lecapenus, asking for help against the new heresy.Theophylact was known to be a man more at home in the stable than the cathedral, but he did have time enough to declare Bogomilism a mixture of Manichaeism and Paulicianism. A serious riding accident prevented him from giving Peter more help, and the new dualist faith continued to grow at an alarming rate, so much so that a Bulgarian priest known as Cosmas was forced to denounce the new sect in his Sermon Against the Heretics, which was written at the very end of Peter’s reign (it was certainly completed by 972). 

Cosmas writes that the sect was founded by a priest named Bogomil, but there is both controversy over what his name means and whether it was his real name at all. Some interpret Bogomil as meaning ‘beloved of God’, while others opt for ‘worthy of God’s mercy’ and ‘one who entreats God’. Cosmas describes the Bogomils as rejecting the Old Testament and Church sacraments; the only prayer they used was the Lord’s Prayer. They did not venerate icons or relics, while the cross was denounced as the instrument of Christ’s torture.The Church itself was seen as being in league with the devil, whom the Bogomils regarded as not only the creator of the visible world, but also as Christ’s brother. 

Their priests were strict ascetics, and they abstained from meat, wine and marriage. The Bogomils were – at least initially – mitigated dualists, regarding the devil as a fallen angel who was inferior to God. They knew the scriptures inside out, but what puzzled Cosmas was the way in which they interpreted them. For instance, in the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15.11–32), they saw the elder, stay-at-home, son as being Christ, while the younger, prodigal, son was Satan. The Bogomil take on the Crucifixion was Docetic. 

The Bogomil church was divided into two main classes, the Perfect and the Believers, similar to the Manichaean Elect and Listeners, although the Bogomils apparently did have a Listener class as well, who were below the Believers. According to the monk Euthymius of Constantinople, who was writing in about 1050, the Bogomil Listener became a Believer by way of a baptism that included placing the gospel on the initiate’s head, while the actual baptism itself was done not by water, but by the laying-on of hands. As far as Euthymius was concerned, this erased the Christian baptism, and put the new Believer firmly under the sway of the Evil One. 

The road from Believer to Perfect was a long and arduous one, with intensive teachings, ascetic practices and study, which took two years or more to complete.The ceremony in which a Believer became a Perfect was similar to that which made a Listener a Believer, and was known as the consolamentum (the consoling), or baptisma. For Euthymius, it was ‘whole heresy and madness’ and ‘unholy service to the devil and his mysteries’,29 yet the Bogomils regarded themselves as being the heirs to true, apostolic Christianity. Modelling themselves on Christ and the Apostles, Bogomil leaders had 12 disciples and lived lives of simplicity and poverty, in reaction to what they saw as the irredeemable corruption and false teachings of the Church. 

What further worried Euthymius was that the Bogomils seemed to be a fully developed counter-church, one whose missionaries were active in spreading the word of the heretical faith. How, when and where the Bogomils organised is still a matter of debate, but it seems that, right from the time when they were noted during Tsar Peter’s reign, they were already a distinct group, with their own teachings. Again, whether they were influenced by the Paulicians, Manichaeism or Zoroastrianism is a matter of conjecture. Amongst the Bogomils whose names have survived are Jeremiah (thought by some to be the pseudonym of Bogomil himself), who wrote the widely circulated tract The Legend of the Cross, and two extremely obscure individuals called Sydor Fryazin and Jacob Tsentsak, who brought heretical books with them into Bulgaria. Interestingly, both men were described as being Franks (the name ‘Fryazin’ means ‘Frank’), which raises the possibility that there were heretical groups active in the west around the time that Bogomilism first became known. In Asia Minor, John Tzurillas and Raheas were active Bogomil proselytisers during the eleventh century who, like the Massalians before them, specialised in infiltrating monasteries. 

Perhaps the most notable Bogomil after the movement’s founder was the heresiarch Basil the Physician, who was active in the latter part of the eleventh century. It is said that his ministry lasted for 52 years before he was unmasked during the anti-heretical campaigns of the Byzantine emperor, Alexius Comnenus (1081–1118). Heresy was much on the emperor’s mind by the late eleventh century: northern Thrace in particular had become an epicentre of Paulicianism, and Alexius resolved to bring its followers back into the fold of orthodoxy by whatever means necessary. This resulted in a number of  armed confrontations with the Paulicians, whose reputation for being fierce warriors preceded them. Sometimes, though, the means by which the heretics were brought back to the fold took the form of protracted debates in which the emperor indulged his enthusiasm for religious disputation. 

Such a dispute duly occurred sometime around the year 1100, with Basil being invited to the palace to explain his faith to Alexius and his brother Isaac. Basil duly outlined the main tenets of Bogomilism, before Alexius drew aside a curtain to reveal a stenographer who had transcribed Basil’s testimony verbatim.The heresiarch was placed under house arrest in order that Alexis could try to win him back to the Church, but Basil refused to recant. During their talks, the house was afflicted with Fortean phenomena: it was subject to a rain of stones and an earthquake.Alexis’s daughter, the historian Anna, took this as a sign that the devil was angry that his secrets were being revealed and that his children – the Bogomils – were being persecuted. Still refusing to recant, Basil was burnt at the stake. 

Despite Alexis efforts, the Bogomils continued to preach and win new converts, and the persecution against them in Byzantium would have almost certainly driven some of them west. In doing do, the Bogomils seemed to be fulfilling an old Persian prophecy, which stated that, on the 1,500th anniversary of Zoroaster’s death – which was interpreted as being the year 928 – Zoroastrianism would be restored.While the matter of the Good Religion’s influence on the Bogomils is conjectural, the two religions did share one thing in common: Dualism, and by 928, Bogomil and his followers were starting their mission. As the twelfth century dawned, the prophecy seemed to have been well and truly fulfilled.

2

The Foxes in the Vineyard of the Lord 

The First Western Heretics 

At the turn of the first millennium, a peasant called Leutard in the village of Vertus, near Châlons-sur-Marne in the north-east of France, had a dream. In it, a swarm of bees attacked his private parts, and then entered his body – presumably through his urethra.The dream, rather than making Leutard wake up half the village with his screaming, inspired him to go into his local church, break the cross above the altar and desecrate an image of Christ. But he didn’t stop there: he sent his wife away and began to preach openly in the village, urging whoever would listen that they should withhold payment of tithes.The bishop of Châlons got wind of the peasant’s activities, but Leutard threw himself down a well before he could be apprehended. Leutard seems to have belonged to a group, although it is not known for sure whether it was Bogomil in origin. (If it was, we can safely assume that the bees were a unique addition to the original Balkan teachings.) Heresy had, despite these somewhat unusual circumstances, arrived in the west. 

Heresy was also a phantom presence at the other end of the social and religious spectrum around the time of Leutard’s singular ministry. Gerbert d’Aurillac, the first Frenchman to become pope – he reigned as Sylvester II between 999 and 1003 – made an unusual disposition at Rheims in 991 on the occasion of his consecration as Archbishop. He stated his belief in both the Old and New Testaments, the legitimacy of marriage, eating meat and the existence of an evil spirit that was lesser than God, one that had chosen to be evil. Since the Bogomils, and later the Cathars, rejected all the things that Gerbert was professing faith in, it has been assumed that he was either denouncing a Bogomil sect in the locality, or had himself been suspected of heretical leanings and was making a show of his orthodoxy.30 

An obscure French peasant and a pope were not the only forerunners of Catharism. Vilgard, a scholar from Ravenna, saw demons in the shape of Virgil, Horace and Juvenal, ‘who encouraged his excessive pagan studies.’31 Despite his being burnt at the stake, Vilgard’s teachings spread in Italy, and are alleged to have reached Sardinia and Spain, where his followers were supposedly persecuted. In 1018 ‘Manichaeans’, who rejected the cross and baptism, appeared in Aquitaine, and four years later further ‘Manichaeans’ were sighted in Orléans. The Orléans heretics were in fact ten canons of the Church of the Holy Cross, a number of clerics and a handful of nobles, including Queen Constance’s confessor. They were also accused of worshipping the devil in the form of an Ethiopian (Ethiopia being a byword for blackness and, therefore, ultimate evil),32 rejecting the sacraments of the Church, denying that Christ was born of a virgin and denying the reality of the Passion and Resurrection. Furthermore, they were accused of holding nocturnal orgies, carrying out child sacrifice and performing magical flight – all of which would later recur in the Witch Craze of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. But in 1022, witches were a threat as yet unperceived by the Church, and the Orléans group were burnt as heretics. 

Burning at the stake had been the punishment for Manichaeans and would become the favoured method for dispatching unrepentant heretics. However, as the Church had had little experience of heresy for centuries, official procedure was non-existent and punishment varied greatly from area to area. A group of heretics discovered at Montforte in north-western Italy in 1025 were burnt, but at Arras-Cambrai a group who were unearthed the same year were merely forced to recant and were then given a copy of their renunciation in the vernacular. 

As the eleventh century progressed, there were further outbreaks of heresy: during the 1040s, it flared up again at Châlons-sur-Marne; Aquitaine, Périgord, Toulouse and Soissons were also affected. It is impossible to say for certain whether these were all Bogomil-influenced groups: they were usually described by the Church as ‘Manichaean’, which became a blanket term to denote heretics – all clergy knew the term from St Augustine – despite the fact that most or all of them weren’t. (In fact, Manichaeism during this period was at its most active in China.) While the usual arsenal of accusations – orgies, child sacrifice, eating a diabolical viaticum made of the ashes of a dead child – were never far away, in many of these incidents, there were a number of similarities. The groups were frequently ascetic, sometimes in the extreme. Church sacraments and the Cross were despised, as were the clergy themselves, while meat, wine and physical union were abstained from. Most of these groups, however, did not survive the death, imprisonment or recanting of their leaders, and heresy, a sporadic affair in the eleventh century, seemed to die out altogether from about 1050 onwards. 

Church Reforms 

That heresy seems to have died down almost completely in the second half of the eleventh century is possibly related to the fact that the Church was starting a programme of reform that had been initiated by Pope Leo IX (1049–54). The greatest of the reforming pontiffs of this period – and indeed one of the most significant of all mediaeval popes – was Gregory VII (1073–85). His tenure as the Bishop of Rome was an eventful one, which saw Gregory at odds with the senior clergy over issues such as celibacy and simony for most of his reign. However, perhaps Gregory’s most influential act was to announce that the Church was the only means by which one could come to God. Every other church and faith was anathema. 

The Church was supreme, according to Gregory, with the pope himself being naturally the highest possible human authority. Gregory, as Malcolm Lambert notes,‘awakened in the laity a new sense of responsibility for reform and a higher expectation of moral standards from their clergy. A genie was unleashed which could never again be put back into its bottle.’33 

Gregory was not the only one pushing for reform. One of the leading figures in the reform movement, Humbert of Moyenmoutier, the cardinal who placed the order of excommunication on the patriarch of Constantinople in 1054, thereby creating the great schism between the Catholic and Orthodox churches, wrote an influential treatise entitled Three Books Against the Simoniacs, which has, in its revolutionary fervour, been compared to the Communist Manifesto.34 The moral life of the clergy became the rallying point for reformers, dissenters and disaffected churchgoers alike, and such was their stress on the moral stature of the clergy that the reformers resembled the Donatists, the fourth-century heretics who held that the masses of priests with moral shortcomings were deemed invalid. 

In the early years of the twelfth century, this popular reforming zeal became even more strident, with charismatic wandering preachers whipping up parishes and often whole towns into an anticlerical frenzy. Tanchelm of Antwerp (d. c. 1115), who was active in the Netherlands, inspired such fanatical devotion that his followers were said to drink his bathwater, and he did not travel anywhere without an armed guard (a measure which proved ultimately futile, as Tanchelm was fatally stabbed by an enraged priest). A rogue Benedictine monk, Henry of Lausanne, caused complete havoc in Le Mans, and effectively kicked out the bishop. Peter of Bruys was even more radical. In an echo of Leutard, he incited people to break into churches and destroy the crucifixes. He held public burnings of crosses until, on Good Friday 1139, an enraged mob threw him onto one of his own bonfires. Arnold of Brescia was even more extreme than Peter. A former student of Peter Abelard, Arnold launched an attack on Rome in 1146 and declared it a republic. It was not until 1154 that the pope was able to return to the Vatican. Arnold was burnt at the stake and his ashes disposed of in the River Tiber to prevent his disciples from making off with relics. 

By the time Arnold made his stand in Rome, however, the most serious heretical threat faced by the Church up to that time appeared on the banks of another river far to the north: the Rhine. 

The First Cathars 

The Cathars first emerged into history in 1143. Eberwin, prior of a Premonstratensian house at Steinfeld near Cologne, wrote to the great Cistercian reformer St Bernard of Clairvaux that two heretical groups had been discovered, after they had apparently blown their cover by arguing amongst themselves over a point of doctrine. The Cathars were brought before the bishop of Cologne for a hearing. It was discovered that their church was organised into a three-tier system of Elect, Believers and Listeners, much the same as the Manichaeans of Augustine’s era had been, and they did not baptise with water, but through the laying-on of hands. They condemned marriage, but Eberwin could not find out why:‘either because they dared not reveal it or, more probably, they did not know.’35 

More ominously, the archbishop learnt that the heresy ‘had a very  large number of adherents scattered throughout the world’ and that it had ‘lain concealed from the time of the martyrs even to their own day [1143].’36 Most of the heretics were persuaded to recant, although two of their number, apparently a bishop and a deacon, remained unrepentant even after three days’ debate with both clergy and laity. Before sentence could be pronounced, the mob seized the two heretics and threw them onto a fire. 

Another chronicle, The Annals of Braunweiler, notes that in the same year as the troubles at Cologne, heretics were also discovered at Bonn.They too were dragged before the Archbishop of Cologne, where most of the accused either came back into the arms of the Church or managed to escape.The three that did not were burnt on the orders of Otto, count of Rheineck.37 

What was different about this new heresy was that it was not merely anticlericalism of the sort propagated by Henry of Lausanne and all the motley assortment of libertarian preachers who had been such a colourful – if unpredictable – fixture of religious life during the twelfth century up to that point.These new heretics had organised properly; indeed, the two groups discovered at Cologne were not merely dissenters from Catholicism, they were members of an underground church that had had time to build itself up and put itself in direct opposition to Rome and all that it stood for. As Malcolm Lambert puts it, ‘[the Cathars] offered a direct, headlong challenge to the Catholic Church, which is dismissed outright as the Church of Satan.’38 

Nothing like this had ever happened before, and suddenly the new heresy seemed to be everywhere. Its rise concerned no less a churchman than St Bernard himself, who, after receiving Eberwin’s letter about the events in the Rhineland, composed two sermons denouncing the heretics. He interpreted the ‘little foxes’ from Song of Songs 2:15 – ‘catch the foxes, the little foxes, before they ruin our vineyard in bloom’ 39 – as heretics. Bernard’s tracts are full of the standard nay-saying: he warns of the heretics’ cunning and secrecy, and accuses them of sexual misconduct and aberration. As to what could be done about the situation, he sounds as if he is almost condemning the burghers of Cologne who cast their Cathars into the flames: ‘Their zeal [in rooting out heresy] we approve, but we do not advise the imitation of their action, because faith is to be produced by persuasion, not imposed by force.’ 

He goes on to add, however, that ‘it would, without a doubt, be better that they should be coerced by the sword of him “who beareth not the sword in vain” than that they should be allowed to draw away many other persons into their error.’40 In other words, he doesn’t mind people being quietly heretical at home, but once they start to proselytise, then they are asking for trouble.As for punishment, the worst thing he advises is expulsion from the Church. In light of what was to happen in the Languedoc in the early years of the following century, Bernard’s views are remarkably humane and tolerant. If the Church had listened to him – he was after all the most powerful figure in the Church of his time – then history might have been different. 

Bernard himself visited the Languedoc in 1145, suspicious that the count of Toulouse, Alfonso-Jordan, was not doing enough to check the apparent growth of heresy in his lands. Whether Bernard’s visit happened before or after he composed his brace of anti-heretical sermons, we don’t know. What we do know, however, is that the man famed for his preaching skills met a decidedly mixed reaction. He got off to a good start in Albi. The papal legate there was not the most popular of people, and Bernard knew he had to make his words count. His sermon attacked Henry of Lausanne, who was then in the Albi area and was known to have supporters. It was a rousing performance. Concluding his sermon, Bernard asked all those in the congregation who accepted the Catholic Church to raise their right hand. Everyone put their hands up. It marked the end of Henry’s support in the Languedoc. 

If Henry’s career was at an end, then events in the village of Verfeil to the north-east of Toulouse made Bernard realise other forms of heresy were still very much alive and well. He preached in the church, but when he tried to deliver another sermon outside to those who could not get in, his words were drowned out by local knights clashing their armour. Bernard was laughed out of town. The incident could be ascribed to anticlericalism, which was rife in the south at the time, as much as to heresy, but to Bernard there was only one explanation. He returned fuming to his monastery in Champagne, declaring the whole of the Languedoc ‘a land of many heresies’ that needed ‘a great deal of preaching’.41 

The ‘great deal of preaching’ urged by Bernard was largely unforthcoming. Christendom had more pressing matters on its hands in the shape of the Second Crusade, with Bernard himself taking an active role in its early stages. However, once the Crusade was on its way to the east, the pope, Eugenius III, did try to do something about the growth of heresy by issuing a papal bull in 1148 forbidding anyone from helping heretics in Gascony, Provence and elsewhere. In 1157, the Archbishop of Rheims presided over a meeting of the provincial council, which condemned a group of heretics called Piphles,who rejected marriage.At the Council of Tours in 1163, Pope Alexander III presided over a gathering of cardinals and bishops who reiterated Eugenius directives by passing legislation directed against ‘Albigensians’ – so-called because the Great Heresy was flourishing unchecked in the town of Albi – and those who helped them. The same year, Hildegard of Bingen had an apocalyptic vision in which she saw the emergence of the Cathars as evidence that the devil had been released from the bottomless pit. Only destruction could now come to mankind. 

The year 1163 also saw the first detailed refutation of Catharism by a member of the Church. Eckbert, Abbot of Schönau, wrote a set of 13 sermons with the overall title of Sermones contra Catharos for Rainald of Dassel, who was the imperial chancellor and Archbishop of Cologne. Although the Sermones are peppered with large chunks of St Augustine’s De Manichaeism to back up the argument, Eckbert had had personal experience of debating with Cathars in the 1150s, and it is this that makes us certain that the heretics he is describing are Cathars and not merely anticlerical trouble-makers in the mould of Henry T of Lausanne and his ilk. 

After a short preamble, Eckbert begins to tackle the major tenets of Catharism, refuting each one as he goes along. He goes on to say that they hate the flesh, and avoid all contact with it, both in terms of procreation and dietary habit. Eckbert goes on to say that they are called Cathars, but are known under other names in other places: Piphles in Flanders, Texerant in France. No one knows the origin of the word or precise meaning of Piphles, while Texerant was derived from the term for weaving. Weaving was one of the professions forbidden to the clergy, being associated with heresy and magic, but the Cathars, while professing hatred for the world, realised the need to earn a living while in it and often worked as weavers. 

While Eckbert’s treatment of Catharism has thus far been reasonably reliable, it is when he tries to explain the origins of the word ‘Cathar’ that he starts to enter the realms of conjecture. He says that the first Cathars, whom, he believed, lived in antiquity, took their name from katharos, the Greek word for ‘pure’. In linking the Cathars with the apostolic era, Eckbert is inadvertently supporting the Cathars’ own claims that they were descended from the time of the apostles.And Cathars, it must be remembered, were legislated against at the Council of Nicea. So were the Cathars of the fourth century the same as the Cathars of the twelfth? Probably not.And the name is, again, probably not derived from katharos, but, as Alan of Lille (c.1128–1202) says, ‘from the cat, because, it is said, they kiss the posterior of the cat, in whose form, as they say, Lucifer appears to them.’42

The Living Icons 

The Cathars, or Good Christians as they called themselves, would certainly have been horrified to learn that they were being referred to in derogatory terms that suggested they were participants in fictitious satanic ceremonies that were the product of rumour and the overactive imaginations of Catholic critics. Although the Church was keen to paint heretics of all denominations in the blackest possible colours, in doing so they frequently resorted to cliché and outright fabrication; much the same happened to the Jews, who were said to steal Christian children and sacrifice them in secret. In fact, the Cathars were far from satanic, and were often regarded as being better Christians than their Catholic counterparts, a fact which the Church was later forced to acknowledge. 

If their virtue set them apart, then the Cathars’ beliefs further removed them from the mainstream of Christian life. They inherited much from the Bogomils. Like them, the Cathar faith was dualist, holding that the material world is evil, the creation of the devil himself. The true god existed in a world of eternal light beyond the dark abyss of human existence. Both the Cathars and the Bogomils rejected the Church and all its sacraments completely, regarding it as the Church of Satan.The only sacrament they observed was the consolamentum, which served as baptism or, if administered on the deathbed, extreme unction. The only prayer both churches used was the Lord’s Prayer, with the Cathars substituting ‘supersubstantial bread’ for ‘daily bread’. Both Bogomils and Cathars alike rejected most of the Old Testament – and its belligerent deity – as satanic.43 

Both movements regarded the entity of the Church – Catholic in the west, Orthodox in the east – as the Church of Satan, and rejected it utterly. Church buildings – the churches, chapels and cathedrals themselves – were likewise seen as no more holy than any other building, and neither sect built any, preferring instead to meet in people’s homes, or in barns or fields. Contemporaneous anti-dualist propaganda tells of a Bogomil monk who, feigning orthodoxy, built a church on the banks of the Bosphorus, but put a latrine in behind the altar, thereby desecrating it, while in Toulouse, a Cathar was said to have entered a local church and emptied his bowels on the altar, cleaning himself up with the altar cloth.44 

The Cross was seen as the instrument of Christ’s torture, and Bogomils and Cathars alike refused to venerate it. They interpreted the Eucharist allegorically, and took the Docetic line on Christ’s nature, his miracles, Passion and Resurrection. Cathars and Bogomils alike regarded marriage as fornication, and saw it as a means by which further souls could be entrapped in matter through the thoroughly distasteful business of childbirth.While there is little or no evidence about women in the Bogomil church, the Cathars regarded women as the equal of men, and Catharism offered women the chance to participate fully in the faith at all levels. 

The structure of the Cathar church was again derived from the Bogomil model. Cathars were divided into three classes: Listeners, Believers and Perfect. The Listeners were people who chose not to commit to the faith wholeheartedly; they might hear the occasional sermon, but no more. At this stage, Listeners would hear sermons that were close in spirit to evangelical Christianity. If they chose to become a Believer, they would be asked to participate in a ceremony known as the convenanza, which formally bound them to the Cathar church. Believers formed the majority of the movement. They were ordinary men and women who had ordinary jobs and who lived in towns or villages. They were not cut off in monastic seclusion, did not have to abstain from meat, wine or sex, but were very much involved in the world of matter.They were taught to be in the world, but not of it, to follow the basic teachings of the Gospels, to love one another, to live a life of faith and to seek god. They were generally not exposed to dualist doctrine, which was nearly always reserved for the ears of the Perfect alone. The Perfect were the austere, top-level Cathars who were effectively the movement’s priesthood. Both Cathars and Bogomils held the Perfect in the highest regard: they were seen as embodying the Holy Spirit, being the living church itself.They were seen as nothing less than living icons.45 

The Consolamentum 

Central to Catharism – like Bogomilism before it – was the baptismal rite known as the consolamentum. It was the means by which a Believer could become a Perfect, and thereby attain salvation.Without it, the Believer would be condemned to remain in the world of matter in their next incarnation. The consolamentum survives in two versions,  one in Latin, dating from 1235–50, and one in Occitan, dating from the late 1200s, although both were probably based on one twelfth-century Latin original.The ceremony begins with a blessing: 

ELDER: 

Bless us; have mercy on us. Amen. Let it be done unto us according to Thy word. May the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost forgive all your sins (repeated three times). 

ALL PRESENT: 

(The Lord’s Prayer) O our father which art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Let thy kingdom come. Thy will be fulfilled, as well as in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our supersubstantial bread.And forgive us our trespasses, even as we forgive our trespassers. And lead us not into temptation: but deliver us from evil. For thine is the kingdom and the power, and the glory for ever. Amen. 

ELDER: (John 1.1–17) 

In the beginning was the word, and the word was with God: and the word was God. The same was in the beginning with God. All things were made by it, and without it, was made nothing, that was made. In it was life, and the life was the light of men, and the light shineth in the darkness, but the darkness comprehended it not. 

There was a man sent from God, whose name was John. The same came as a witness to bear witness of the light, that all men through him might believe. He was not the light: but to bear witness of the light. That was the true light, which lighteth all men that come into the world. He was in the world, and the world was made by him: and yet the world knew him not. 

He came among his own and his own received him not. But as many as received him, to them he gave power to be the sons of God in that they believed on his name: which were born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh, nor yet of the will of man: but of God. 

And the word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we saw the glory of it, as the glory of the only begotten son of the father, which word was full of grace and verity. 

John bore witness of him and cried, saying:This was he of whom I spake, he that cometh after me, was before me, because he was ere than I. And of his fullness have all we received, even grace for grace. For the law was given by Moses, but grace and truth came by Jesus Christ. No man hath seen God at any time.The only begotten son, which is in the bosom of the father, he hath declared him. 

There then followed a series of requests for forgiveness, similar to the beginning of the ritual (in the Occitan version only). 

The most senior Cathar present then placed the Book – either the New Testament or St John’s Gospel – on a table covered with a cloth. The elder then explains in detail to the Believer the import of what he or she is about to do, and takes the would-be Perfect through a line-by-line exegesis of the Lord’s Prayer.When this is over, the ceremony continues: 

ELDER: 

Now you must understand if you would receive this prayer, that it is needful for you to repent of all your sins and to forgive all men, for in the Gospel Christ says, ‘But and ye will not forgive men their trespasses, no more shall your father forgive your trespasses.’ (Matthew 6.15) 

Sometimes there was a break in the ceremony at this point, but it was not mandatory. What followed next was the actual consolamentum itself. 

ELDER: 

[Name of Believer], you wish to receive the spiritual baptism by which the Holy Spirit is given in the Church of God, together with the Holy Prayer and the imposition of hands by Good Men.This holy baptism, by which the Holy Spirit is given, the Church of God has preserved from the time of the apostles until this time and it has passed from Good Men to Good Men until the present moment, and it will continue to do so until the end of the world. [Name of Believer] keep the commandments of Christ to the utmost of your ability. Do not commit adultery, kill, lie, nor swear an oath nor steal. You should turn the other cheek in the face of those that persecute you. You must hate this world and its works and the things that are of this world.

BELIEVER: 

I will. 

The Believer gives the elder the melioramentum, or ritual greeting, by which Believers honored the Perfect. 

The elder then takes the Book from the table and places it on the Believer’s head, and all the Perfect present place their right hand on the Believer. 

The ceremony ends with further requests for forgiveness, and the ritual known as the Act of Peace, in which all present kiss each other on the cheek, and also kiss the Book. The Believer is consoled. He or she is now a Perfect.46 

As a Perfect, they would now be expected to keep their vows for the rest of their lives. The slightest slip would necessitate reconsoling, and also invalidate the consolamentums of any Believers they may have made Perfect.This was known euphemistically as ‘making a bad end’. They were expected to pray fifteen times a day, and to fast on Mondays,Wednesdays and Fridays. Prayers were to be said on horseback, when crossing rivers and when entering the homes of Believers. When out travelling, if the Perfect – who usually travelled in pairs – came across goods belonging to someone, they were only to return them if they were sure the goods could be reunited with their rightful owner. If not, then the Perfect were instructed to leave them where they found them. 

If they happened upon a bird or animal caught in a trap, they were to release the bird or animal on condition that they were able to recompense the hunter with money or a gift.When visiting Believers, they were expected to bless them and their food if they were dining together, and would leave a gift for the Believers’ trouble. Many Believers took the consolamentum when they were close to death, in which case, the cloth and Book would be laid out on the Believer’s bed. If the Believer subsequently recovered, they were usually advised to seek reconsoling at a later date. Once a month, the Perfect in a given area would gather to meet their deacon and confess their sins, a ceremony known as the apparellamentum.Three times a year, the Perfect were expected to undertake 40- day fasts, mirroring Christ’s experiences in the wilderness: from 13 November to Christmas Eve; from Quinquagesima Sunday (the Sunday before Ash Wednesday) to Easter; and from Pentecost to the feast of the apostles Peter and Paul (29 June). Aside from their rigorous observances, the Perfect were notable for their dress: they wore black, or sometimes dark blue or dark green, robes with a cord tied round the waist. 

The Spread of Catharism 

Once the Church had become aware of the Cathars, they also noted two things: that Catharism was already a fully fledged church that had suddenly emerged, as if from nowhere, and that the Cathars – along with fellow-travellers such as the Publicans and the Waldensians – seemed to be everywhere at once, undermining the foundations of Church and society. In Cologne, more Cathars were  unearthed the same year as Eckbert denounced the faith in his Sermones. Like their predecessors of 20 years earlier, they went to the stake. In England, a group of Publicans – who may have been Cathars under another name 47 – preached at Canterbury and Oxford, hoping to win new converts to Dualism.They were denounced, branded, and thrown out into the winter snow, which no doubt did something to ease the pain of their burning skin. People were forbidden from helping them and were not allowed to give them shelter for the night.All of the Publicans died of exposure. 

Another group of Cathars came to light in 1165 in Lombers, a town ten miles to the south of Albi.With their sensitivities heightened by the Council of Tours and Eckbert’s pronouncements, the Church took the Cathars very seriously indeed. The heretics were arraigned before no fewer than six bishops, eight abbots, the local viscount and Constance, one of the king of France’s sisters. The Cathars themselves knew that they had to be careful, as word would have no doubt reached them that their brethren in Germany had been burnt for their beliefs. Led by a Perfect called Olivier, the Cathars at Lombers engaged in debate with the clergy. They answered questions astutely, referring frequently to the New Testament. 

They came unstuck, however, over the issue of oath-taking: this was something they simply would not do under any circumstances. They claimed Biblical authority, citing Matthew 5.33–37: ‘But I say unto you, swear not at all: neither by heaven, for it is God’s seat: nor yet by the earth, for it is his footstool: neither by Jerusalem, for it is the city of that great king … your communication shall be yea, yea: nay, nay. For whatsoever is more than that, cometh of evil.’ In mediaeval society, oaths were the glue that held things together: between lord and vassal, between Church and state. They were the middle ages’ equivalent of modern legally binding contracts, and to refuse to swear an oath was an act of the greatest subversion.

At this point, Olivier and his fellow Cathars went into a scathing tirade of abuse, denouncing the Church as hypocritical and accusing the assembled bishops of being little better than ravening wolves. However, unlike their unfortunate brethren in the Rhineland, the Lombers Cathars were allowed to remain at large. With anticlericalism running at an all-time high in the Languedoc, there were no doubt many people at Lombers that day who, while not necessarily supporting the Cathars in their beliefs, were unwilling to see them burnt. Such apparent toleration of heresy did not go unnoticed, and would not bode well for the future. 

The Council of St Félix 

The theological showdown at Lombers was nothing compared to what happened two years later 48 in the village of St Félix de Caraman in the Lauragais, south of Toulouse. The gathering of Cathars there in 1167 was ‘the most imposing gathering ever recorded in the history of the Cathars.’49 It was nothing less than an international symposium of Cathars from all over Europe, including – crucially – a delegation from eastern Europe.The purpose of the meeting seems initially to have been to reorganise the Cathar church, and to decide on important issues such as the creation of new bishoprics, the demarcation of diocesan boundaries and the appointment of new bishops. 

Presiding over the council was the still enigmatic figure of Papa Nicetas. He had travelled to the Languedoc from Lombardy in the company of Italian Cathars (more of whom later), and was evidently treated with the utmost respect.The word papa is Latin for pope, but it is not certain whether he was one of the fabled heretical Balkan antipopes so feared by the Church. In all probability, he was a bishop of the Bogomil church in Constantinople, although it has been suggested 50 that he was merely a charismatic preacher exploiting western hunger for eastern wisdom. He may even have been both.We shall probably never know. What is known, however, is that Nicetas effected a profound shift in Languedocian Catharism, which would change the nature of the movement forever. 

That a Bogomil bishop should be invited to chair an important Cathar gathering is the first real evidence we have of the kinship between the two heresies. While they shared numerous beliefs and practices, as we have already noted, strangely no evidence has come to light linking Bogomilism and Catharism prior to the meeting at St Félix. ‘As far as extant records are concerned,’ writes Malcolm Lambert,‘no Bogomil was ever caught preaching [in the west], leading a group of neophytes or disseminating literature.’51 

Quite how the Bogomils spread their dualist creed in the west therefore remains a mystery. Bernard Hamilton has suggested 52 that heretical Byzantine monks could have spread Bogomilism while on pilgrimages to shrines in the west, although where in the west they could have made their first landfall is open to conjecture. Palermo in Sicily seems to have had a Bogomil presence by about 1082, possibly due to Bogomils escaping Alexius persecution back home. Bogomilism may have had another route into Europe via returning Crusaders, some of whom could have become infected with the heresy while campaigning in the east.53 In short, we don’t know for sure. The Bogomils remain amongst the most elusive of all mediaeval sects, and the lack of firm evidence about their activities in the west gives them the air of phantoms. 

Catharism had almost certainly been developing quietly for some decades before the events of 1143 brought it to the notice of the authorities, and, despite its Bogomil ancestry, was ‘never subservient to the East: as soon as we have records of its existence, it is unmistakably and thoroughly westernised and develops a life of its own.’54 The Cathar faith as Nicetas encountered it in 1167 was rapidly expanding, and used the occasion of St Félix to put its house in order.The rambling diocese of Toulouse was split up: Toulouse, Carcasonne, and either Agen or Val d’Aran became bishoprics, and the border between Toulouse and Carcasonne was settled. 

One aspect of the Cathar church that remained intact, however, was the process by which bishops were elected. Each Cathar bishop would have two bishops-in-waiting beneath him, known as the filius major (elder son) and filius minor (younger son).When the bishop died, retired or resigned, the filius major automatically became the next bishop, and the filius minor became the filius major. A new younger son was then chosen.This helped maintain the unity of the Cathar church, and, in the case of the Languedocian church, helped to unify and strengthen it. Unlike the Catholic Church, there were no protracted rows about succession and election. 

At some point in the proceedings at St Félix, however, Nicetas delivered a bombshell. He spoke of the unity of the eastern dualist churches, naming them as Ecclesia Bulgariae (situated probably in eastern Bulgaria or Macedonia), Ecclesia Dalmatiae (Dalmatia), Ecclesia Drugunthia (also known as Ecclesia Dragometiae, which was probably in Thrace or Macedonia), Ecclesia Romanae (Nicetas’s own church in Constantinople), Ecclesia Melenguiae (location unknown, possibly somewhere in the Peloponnese) and Ecclesia Sclavoniae (also Dalmatia, possibly another name for Ecclesia Dalmatiae). While Nicetas claimed that these churches enjoyed cordial relations with one another, they did not in fact see eye to eye on matters of doctrine. The Cathars of the Languedoc were derived from the ordo – or rule – of Ecclesia Bulgariae, which meant that they were moderate dualists. Nicetas informed his captive audience, however, that the ordo of Bulgaria was invalid, as the person or persons from whom the Cathars of the Languedoc had first been consoled had ‘made a bad end’.This was potentially disastrous news, as it meant that all the Perfect in St Félix that day were no longer Perfect.

The issue was a crucial one, as the moral life of the clergy in the Catholic Church had been one of the main rallying points in calls for reform from eleventh- and twelfth-century critics, and the Cathars took some pride in the fact that the Perfect were wholly unlike the average Catholic priest in that they were actually holy; they practised what they preached, literally. To have the Perfect who had consoled you be exposed as sinful – even if it were only through a minor indiscretion – meant having to be reconsoled. Nicetas had a solution to the problem. His church in Constantinople lived by the ordo of Ecclesia Drugunthia, and he proposed that everyone accept the new ordo. There was one crucial difference between the churches of Bulgaria and Drugunthia: the latter were absolute dualists who were, in the eyes of Rome, even more dangerously heretical than the moderates.After some debate amongst themselves, the delegates at St Félix chose to accept the ordo of Drugunthia. 

Catharism in Italy 

As has been noted, Nicetas travelled to St Félix in the company of Italian Cathars. In Italy, as elsewhere in Europe, anticlericalism was rife. Arnold of Brescia’s campaigns against the pope only ended with Arnold’s execution in 1155, but stability did not return to the Italian peninsula. The papacy remained locked in conflict with the Holy Roman Emperor, the formidable Frederick Barbarossa, and a series of imperially sponsored antipopes. The situation was exacerbated by the influence of the Pataria, a group of pro-reform clergy who opposed the abuses of a mainly aristocratic clergy during the pontificate of Gregory VII. 

Like their brethren north of the Alps, the Pataria called for a morally pure clergy and remained deeply suspicious of conspicuous wealth and privilege amongst churchmen. The Pataria remained popular even after the movement’s dissolution, and the time seemed ripe for someone to step into Arnold of Brescia’s shoes. 

According to Anselm of Alessandria, a thirteenth-century Inquisitor and chronicler, Catharism came to Italy from Northern France. Sometime in the 1160s, a ‘certain notary’ from that area encountered a gravedigger by the name of Mark in Concorezzo, to the north-east of Milan. Mark, evidently enthused by what the French notary had told him of the new faith, spread the word to his friends John Judeus, who was a weaver, and Joseph, who worked as a smith. Soon there was a small group of would-be Cathars in Milan, and they asked the notary from France for further instruction in the faith.They were told to go to Roccavione, a village on the road that led over the Alpes Maritimes to Nice, where a group of Cathars from northern France who followed the ordo of Bulgaria had established a small community. 

Mark received the consolamentum and returned to Concorezzo, where he founded a Cathar church and began to preach. Gathering followers, Mark spread the word in both the March of Treviso and Tuscany. It is probable that John Judeus and Joseph the smith also received the consolamentum, and began preaching careers. Further Cathar churches were established at Desenzano, in the March of Treviso (also known as Vicenza), Florence,Val del Spoleto and Bagnolo (sometimes known as the church of Mantua, which was nearby). 

Nicetas’s appearance, sometime prior to the gathering at St Félix, changed things in Italy. But unlike the situation in the Languedoc, where his mission had a unifying effect, in Italy he was to sow the seeds of discord.As he was to do at St Félix, Nicetas told Mark and his group that the consolamentum they had received was invalid, presumably as the Perfect who had administered it had also come to a bad end. Nicetas duly reconsoled Mark and his colleagues, and the group then accompanied Nicetas on his historic trip to the Languedoc. The situation, however, got dramatically worse after St Félix. Nicetas disappeared, presumably returning to Constantinople, never to be heard of again. In his place another eastern bishop appeared, Petracius from the church of Bulgaria. He informed Mark that Simon, the Drugunthian bishop who had consoled Nicetas, had been caught with a woman in addition to other, unspecified, immoralities. (Others believe that it was Nicetas himself who had made a bad end, thereby lending weight to the theory that he was something of a charlatan.) This left Mark and his group with no choice: they had to be reconsoled for the second time. 

Mark set off, determined to seek a valid reconsoling, but was thrown into prison – presumably after receiving the consolamentum in the east, but before he could return to Concorezzo. John Judeus managed to speak with Mark in prison, and was reconsoled by him. However, John did not have the support of all the Italian Cathars, and some formed a breakaway group under Peter of Florence. At length, an attempt to broker peace between the two factions was made. Delegates from both sides went to the bishop of the northern French Cathars, from whom all the Italians had originated, to seek arbitration. The bishop declared that the matter should be settled by the drawing of lots, a precedent established in the Acts of the Apostles,  where the disciples drew lots to elect Judas’s successor.The winning candidate should go to the east, be reconsoled, then return to Italy and proceed to reunify the Cathar church.The plan was scuppered by Peter of Florence, who, in a fit of pique, declared that he would not submit to the drawing of lots. Peter then found himself out of the running, with John Judeus seemingly the winning candidate for the journey to the east. However, some of Peter’s party were not happy with this arrangement, and protested. John Judeus, less of a primadonna than Peter, resigned, not wishing to cause further trouble. 

In an attempt to sort out the mess, a council was convened at Mosio, which lay between Mantua and Cremona. The new plan was that each side would propose a candidate from their rivals. The chosen candidates were Garattus, from John Judeus’s party, and John de Judice from Peter’s. Again deferring to apostolic precedent, lots were drawn and Garattus was elected. Preparations were set in motion for his journey to the east: he started to choose travelling companions, and money was collected for the trip. Just as Garattus and his party were about to depart, however, two informers claimed that he had been with a woman. This proved to be the last straw and Italian Catharism splintered permanently. 

Desenzano remained faithful to the ordo of Drugunthia – and therefore Nicetas – and became a stronghold of absolute Dualism, while Concorezzo, Mark the gravedigger’s church, reverted to the ordo of Bulgaria and moderate Dualism. The church in the Trevisan march took the middle line, and sent their candidate to Ecclesia Sclavoniae, which was impartial in the dispute between  Bulgaria and Drugunthia. Unlike their counterparts in the Languedoc, the Italian churches would continue to bicker for the rest of the movement’s existence.

NEXT

The Albigensian Crusade

SOURCE and footnotes here

https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/archivos_pdf/cathars-successful-heresy.pdf