The Cathars, the most Successful
Heresy of the Middle Ages
By Sean Martin
5
The Autier Revival
Catharism was, in the years after the fall of Quéribus, a chimerical presence. According to the testimony of Stéphanie de Châteauverdun, a noble and Cathar Perfect from the Sabartès, what top-level Cathars remained were living in the mountains. William Prunel was one such Perfect, whose career stretched from around 1258 until 1283. Despite the tireless efforts of the Inquisition, the one thing that was hardest to eradicate from the Languedoc was the deep roots that Catharism had put down. Even after all the atrocities and hardships that the area had suffered over several decades, people still seemed unwilling to give up completely on the old religion. Evidence to support this comes from the fact that William once spent a month in Toulouse; he was recognised as a Cathar, but no one betrayed him. He continued to spread the faith, and was known to have nobility and clergy amongst his flock. Another Perfect,William Pagès, was also active during the same period, although he had managed to survive by spending time in Lombardy.
Apart from the willingness – or otherwise, as in the case of William Prunel – to betray a known Cathar, the Inquisition faced other problems during this period. Foremost among them was the crucial relationship between Inquisitors, bishops and royal officers. Although the machinery of repression was generally efficient, its effectiveness did vary from area to area. In Narbonne, for instance, hostility towards the Inquisitors had diminished to such an extent by the early 1260s that they were called on to arbitrate on the town’s behalf in a secular dispute with Béziers. In Albi, however, the bishop and the Inquisitors were at loggerheads with royal officials for years over the issue of confiscating the property of convicted Cathars: the bishop favoured leniency to prevent families from being bankrupted, and was, remarkably, supported by the Inquisitors. Royal officials were attacked by crowds of locals; in return, the bishop’s bastides – small fortified new towns – were pillaged by royal forces.
Matters deteriorated during the last two decades of the thirteenth century, with complaints against the Inquisitors rising. The Inquisition hit back, accusing royal officials of complicity with heretics: in the 50 years before 1275, there were only two such complaints, but between 1275 and 1306 there were thirty.82 Things were further complicated by the relationship – not always harmonious – between the French king, Philip IV, and the papacy. Philip took sides against the Inquisitors. As a result of these tensions, arrests for heresy in the period 1297–1300 were largely of a political nature. Once the pope, Boniface VIII, died in 1303, Philip withdrew his support and the Inquisitors got back to work relatively unhampered. As they did so, something quite unexpected happened: there was a Cathar revival.
Peter Autier
Peter Autier was from the small town of Ax-les-Thermes, up-country from Foix. He was born around 1240, and had made a comfortable life for himself as a notary. Notaries drafted legal documents – wills, contracts and the like – and were one of the pillars of mediaeval society. Peter had a wife, a mistress and families with both women, a fact which did not harm his good social standing. During the 1270s, the family firm had done work for Roger Bernard III of Foix, and had gone on to do more state work, which had increased the firm’s status and purse.Then in 1296, all that changed.
One day, Peter was reading a book. He showed it to his younger brother William, and asked him what he thought. William replied, ‘It seems to me that we have lost our souls.’ Peter nodded his assent and said, ‘Let us go therefore, brother, and seek the salvation of our souls.’83 What book they were reading remains unknown, but René Weis conjectures that it ‘would almost certainly have been St John’s gospel.’84 They decided to go to Lombardy – where there were still active Cathar communities – to receive the consolamentum. There had been a history of Catharism in Peter’s family – the father and son Peter and Raymond Autier, who flourished in the 1230s, were probably collateral relatives 85 – but what is remarkable is that Peter knew full well what he was letting himself in for, and that he was prepared to turn his back on a very comfortable existence.
In early October 1296, he and William left for Lombardy.There is still a mystery surrounding their departure. Peter was apparently in a great deal of debt to Simon Barre, the hereditary châtelain of Ax. Simon was not above terrorising his debtors and – on occasion – calling for their deaths. In order to repay this debt, Peter Autier sold all his cattle at the Michaelmas fair in Tarascon. After that, it is sheer conjecture: Peter and William probably left for Lombardy around 4 October. It remains a possibility that the debt was deliberately engineered to make it seem as though Peter was fleeing Ax for financial reasons, rather than spiritual. If rumours of debt – rather than heresy – had spread around Ax, it would have bought the Autier brothers more time to make good their escape into Italy. This is all the more plausible when one considers that Simon Barre had Cathar sympathies.
Peter and William travelled with Bon Guilhem, Peter’s illegitimate son, together with Peter de la Sclana, whom one assumes was a close associate of the Autiers. Later, they were joined en route by one of Peter’s daughters and her husband. Peter and William received the consolamentum from an Italian Perfect in Cuneo, a town in south-west Piedmont, which had been a centre for exiled Languedocian Cathars since the middle of the century. Then, around St Martin’s Day (11 November) 1297, Bon Guilhem reappeared in Ax. He informed the Autiers’ extensive network of family and supporters that Peter and William had become Perfect in Italy, and wanted to return as soon as it was safe for them to do so.
It was Peter who returned first, reaching Toulouse in the autumn of 1299.That the purpose of his visit was to see a money changer suggests that securing the mission’s finances were his priority. For all his careful planning, Peter’s cover was blown almost immediately, when he was recognised by Peter, the son of Raymonde de Luzenac, a rich widow whom Peter Autier had attempted to convert to Catharism three years earlier.The young de Luzenac was studying law at the time, and had run up considerable debts. Peter Autier bought the young man’s silence by paying off the money de Luzenac owed.
Meanwhile, William reappeared in Tarascon, preparing the way for the missionary work to begin.While the brothers had been in Lombardy, they had kept in touch with family back home and, by 1300, a wide network of safe houses had been established for the brothers to utilise on their return. During the winter and through into the spring of 1300, William and Peter Raymond of Saint Papoul, another Perfect, lived in a dovecote that belonged to a family of Cathar Believers. Given the power of the Inquisition, Peter and William would need to mount a commando-style operation if they were to stand even a slim chance of success.
Yet success is precisely what they achieved.The brothers recruited about a dozen others, whom they consoled, to help spread the word. Among their number were Peter Raymond of Saint-Papoul, the weaver Prades Tavernier, Amiel de Perles, Peter’s son James, James’s friend Pons of Ax and Aude Bourrel, the last known female Perfect.The group relied on the Autier family network for protection and support. Bernard Marty – possibly a relative of the great Cathar bishop Bertrand Marty, who died at Montségur – was a shepherd who frequently acted as a scout and escort for the Perfect (his father owned the dovecote that William and Peter Raymond stayed in), and his older brother Arnold would become one of the Autier Perfect. Martin Francès from Limoux acted as the group’s treasurer; his wife was a devout Cathar who would receive the consolamentum on her deathbed from Peter Autier. Bertrand of Taix was a minor noble who was also a lifelong Cathar Believer. He frequently supplied the Perfect with gifts, such as the barrel of wine he sent to the Autiers when they returned from Lombardy. He also let them stay on his estates when need arose. Bertrand’s wife was a devout Catholic, a fact he never ceased bemoaning.To her credit, she let him continue to support the Autiers and did not betray him. Sybille Baille had a secret room in her house in Ax for the Perfect to hide in, while the de Area brothers at Quié had the equivalent of a priest hole below their grain chest.
Almost as soon as the group began their work in the spring of 1300, they were in danger.They were approached by one William Dejean, who appeared to be a Cathar Believer.After apparently expressing some interest in joining the Autier group, the next day he visited the Dominican convent in Pamiers, offering to betray the Cathars to the Inquisition. What he did not realise was that the friar he spoke to, Raymond de Rodes, was Peter Autier’s nephew. Raymond immediately told his brother William, who then told Raymond Autier, the one Autier brother who was not a Cathar.William and Raymond realised that Dejean had to be dealt with at once. He was lured up a mountain pass, where four Believers beat him to a pulp.When questioned, he was able to answer that he had been intending to betray the Autiers to the Inquisition.The four then threw Dejean over the cliff into the ravine below. His body was never recovered.
Inquisitors who later questioned a number of the Cathars’ key supporters recalled Peter Autier’s sometimes idiosyncratic brand of teaching. He was a radical dualist who took Docetism a step further.While Docetic doctrine ordinarily denies Christ’s corporeality, Peter also believed that the Virgin Mary was similarly non-physical, being instead a manifestation of the will to do good. He also believed that, for a woman to enter heaven, her soul would first have to become that of a man. Despite this strain of misogyny, Peter was a popular and successful preacher, not without humour. He once remarked that crossing oneself was only good for batting away flies, while on another occasion he advised Believers that, if they had to cross themselves while in the company of Catholics, they should mentally say to themselves ‘Here is the forehead and here is the beard, here is one ear and here is the other.’86 On the Eucharist, he pointed out that Christ’s body would need to be as big as a mountain if it were to feed all the communicants. Furthermore, if Transubstantiation was a reality, priests and Believers would, after digesting, have God in their bowels, a God who would inevitably be expelled from the body on their next visit to the water closet.
The Endura
Autier Catharism was different from that of earlier eras in that it was operating clandestinely.There was no hierarchy: Peter Autier was not a bishop or a deacon, he was simply a Perfect, and that was enough. His Perfect travelled at night, being guided by the likes of Bernard Marty over the mountainous terrain of the Sabartès. If they travelled by day, they did so disguised as merchants or pedlars (Peter and William travelled back from their consoling in Lombardy posing as knife salesmen).They slept and taught in cellars, attics, dovecotes, sheds and grain silos.
The group’s principal activity was in administering the consolamentum to the dying. In a society deeply damaged by the Inquisition, where husbands concealed their Cathar beliefs from their wives and vice versa, the visits of the Perfect had to be discreet and expertly timed. If they arrived too soon, they would not have the time to wait until the consoled Believer died, while obviously if they arrived too late, there was nothing they could do. Some of the consolings were remarkably audacious. A woman by the name of Gentille d’Ascou was dying in the hospital at Ax in September 1301. By the time William Autier arrived late one evening, she was too weak to walk or sit upright unsupported. As the hospital was also an unofficial brothel – prostitutes plied their trade at the town’s nearby thermal spa pool – William had no choice but to risk carrying out the consolamentum in the field at the back of the hospital.
Three years later,William performed perhaps the most celebrated of these derring-do consolamentum for Peter de Gaillac’s mother Gaillarde in Tarascon. Around 50 people came to Gaillarde’s bedside to pay their last respects. As William needed total privacy for the consolamentum, Peter’s aunt Esclarmonde urged him to find some excuse to get the well-wishers out of the house while there was still time to console Gaillarde. Peter announced that the heat (it was August) was proving too much for his mother, and that she would be much more comfortable if everyone left. The ruse worked, and only Esclarmonde and Peter’s grandmother Alissende were left alone in the room with the dying woman.They then locked the door from the inside, and Esclarmonde entered the house next door via a secret passageway where William Autier was waiting. She gave him her cloak and cape to wear, and William entered the house disguised as Esclarmonde and performed the consolamentum.
In the first of these cases, the consolamentum was followed by a practice called the endura. This required the newly consoled Cathar to refrain from taking anything except cold water while they lingered in this world.As fear of betrayal meant that the Perfect could not remain with the consoled to ensure that they did not deviate from the stipulated diet, the endura was the practical answer that ensured the newly Perfected Cathar would remain true to the articles of the faith. Taking nothing but cold water, Gentille d’Ascou lasted for another six days after her consolamentum. Guillemette Faure, a woman from Montaillou, lasted 15 days in endura when she was on her deathbed in December 1299. The longest endura known was that of a woman from Coustaussa, who took 12 weeks to die. (However, this seems to be an extreme case of a woman who wanted to die, and used the endura as a means of starving herself to death.)87
Enduras did not always go according to plan, however. When Bernard Marty fell sick with a fever in early 1300, he was consoled and then put into the endura. After three days he couldn’t stand it any more and demanded to eat something; he recovered to become one of the Perfect’s most loyal allies.88 In 1302, Sybille Autier lay dying in her house in Ax. Her mother was with her, as were William, her Catholic brother-in-law, and Esclarmonde, the wife of Raymond Autier. Sybille’s husband, who was not a Cathar, was not aware of his wife’s intentions to be consoled, and was asleep in his bed. William lingered on at the dying woman’s bedside a trifle too long for comfort, and Esclarmonde became desperate to get rid of him so that William Autier – who was waiting in a house nearby – could come in and perform the consolamentum. She asked the Catholic William to walk her home, which he agreed to do. As soon as they were gone, Sybille’s mother hurriedly went to fetch William Autier. By the time the Perfect got to Sybille’s bedside, she was delirious and was incapable of making the necessary responses that the consolamentum required. William said that he would perform the consolamentum if she regained her faculties, but she didn’t and died unconsoled. It is possible that the Catholic brother-in-law suspected what the women were planning, and deliberately stayed at the dying woman’s bedside long enough to ensure that a consoling would not be possible.
As not all the Perfect agreed with Peter Autier on doctrinal matters, so the same held true with the consolamentum. Unlike William Autier, Prades Tavernier performed a number of consolings for Believers who were not capable of the response, either due to the fact that they were too ill, or, in one case, because the person to be consoled was a baby only several months old. Once Prades, who was evidently a bit of a soft touch and could often be persuaded to console people who were in no fit state to receive the sacrament, had left the house, the baby’s mother almost immediately invalidated the consoling by giving her baby the breast.The little girl, Jacqueline, lived for another year, but died without being reconsoled.
Geoffrey d’Ablis and Bernard Gui
Things began to go wrong for the Autier group in 1305. Upon his release from prison, William Peyre, a trusted confidant and Believer, wanted money to pay off a debt he had run up while incarcerated. For reasons unknown, the Autiers refused him the money, and Peyre lured James Autier and Prades Tavernier to Limoux on the pretext of performing a consolamentum. It was a trap, and the two Perfect were arrested. It could have spelt the immediate end for the Autier network, but James and Prades managed to escape almost immediately. Nevertheless, the damage was done. Peyre told the Inquisition everything he knew about the group’s operations, and how widespread it had by then become – at least 1,000 Believers were part of the Autier flock, scattered over 125 locations.89 But the Autiers still had a great deal of support; Peyre’s brother was murdered in Carcassonne in retaliation for his treachery, and Peyre was still living under the equivalent of a witness protection programme as late as 1321.
A much greater challenge was to come from the Inquisition. Either side of the arrests, two men were appointed to run the Inquisition in the Languedoc who would go down in history as two of the most able churchmen ever to hold down the job: Geoffrey d’Ablis and Bernard Gui, presiding over Carcassonne and Toulouse respectively.The confessions they extracted from suspects – and those extracted by James Fournier, bishop of Pamiers from 1317 – are so detailed that they are the best record we have of any period of Catharism. Despite their fearsome reputation, d’Ablis and Gui received appeals for clemency, and often granted it. Of Gui’s 930 convictions, only 42 were death sentences.90 Perhaps the most notable example of the efficiency of the new Inquisitors occurred at Montaillou. On 8 September 1308, the whole village was arrested on suspicion of heresy.
The Last Perfect
With the renewed vigour inspired by Geoffrey d’Ablis and Bernard Gui, the Inquisition eventually caught up with nearly all of the Autier Perfect.They were arrested, interrogated and burnt during 1309–10.91 Sans Mercadier, a young weaver who had only been consoled in 1309, was not caught but committed suicide in despair. Peter Autier spent eight months in prison before being burnt on 9 April 1310 in Toulouse. Now in his late sixties, he remained defiant to the very end. As he was being tied to the stake, he asked to be allowed to preach to the crowd who had come to watch him die; Peter announced that he would convert all those present to Catharism. His request was denied, and, with his passing, there remained only one Perfect still at large in the Languedoc.
William Bélibaste was from the Corbières who, sometime before Easter 1305, had killed a fellow shepherd. Later that year, shortly before James Autier and Prades Tavernier were arrested in Limoux, he had met the Perfect Philip d’Aylarac while the latter was travelling by night and wanted to take refuge in William’s sheepfold.The meeting was to change William’s life. He joined the Autier network, and was consoled. In 1307, he and Philip d’Aylarac were imprisoned in Carcassonne on suspicion of being heretics, but managed to escape in September of that year; they evaded their gaolers by hiding all day in a stream. Bélibaste seems to have then crossed over the border into Catalonia. After the Autier movement was effectively destroyed in the arrests and burnings of 1309–10, he remained in exile, where he tended to a group of Believers who had fled from the Languedoc.
Bélibaste’s ministry was an unusual one. He kept a mistress in the shape of Raymonde Piquier, but outwardly kept up the pretence of the celibacy required by the consolamentum. In 1319, he arranged for Raymonde to marry Peter Maury, a shepherd and Cathar Believer, in an attempt to fool people into thinking that Peter was the father of the child that Raymonde was carrying. Several days after the marriage, Raymonde and Peter were divorced and she moved back in with Bélibaste. Despite his shortcomings, however, Bélibaste was an inspired preacher who conscientiously guided his diminished flock as best he could. He urged his followers never to give in to despair, stressed the need to love one another and praised the good God who waited for them all in the true world, the immaterial world of light. As Stephen O’Shea notes, ‘Bélibaste’s sermons were remembered for years’ 92 by his followers.
The group was troubled by the arrival of a newcomer, Arnold Sicre, in 1317. His credentials seemed respectable enough. He had come from Ax-les-Thermes, where his mother Sybille and his brother – Pons of Ax, one of the Autier Perfect – had been burnt by the Inquisition. He asked for instruction in the faith, but not all of Bélibaste’s group were convinced he was genuine; his father was not a Cathar and had helped organise the raid on Montaillou. Nevertheless, despite these reservations, Sicre became part of the group and found work locally as a cobbler.After a year with the group, Arnold informed Bélibaste that he wanted to search for his rich aunt and younger sister, who lived, so he said, somewhere in the Pallars valley, a part of Aragon that bordered on the county of Foix. He made two trips north in search of his family, each time returning with money that he said his aunt wanted Bélibaste to have to fund his teaching. Finally, he announced that his sister, Raymonde, wanted to marry. Bélibaste decided that she would make a fine wife for one of the group,Arnold, Peter Maury’s brother; the prospect of having a rich benefactress also appealed.
Bélibaste set off with Sicre to meet the aunt and the sister sometime around the middle of March 1321. It was a sting. Once they reached Tírvia, which was within Fuxian jurisdiction, Bélibaste was arrested.Arnold Sicre explained that he had done it because he wanted to reclaim his mother’s house, which had been forfeited when she had been burnt. The aunt and nubile sister had never existed: during his absences, Sicre had instead been visiting James Fournier, who was spearheading a fresh wave of Inquisitorial proceedings. Sicre’s treachery did not stop there. Once Bélibaste had been put into custody, he immediately put himself into the endura, hoping to starve himself to death before he could be burnt. Sicre convinced the Perfect that he was sorry for his actions, and told Bélibaste that he had devised an escape plan, which could only be carried out if Bélibaste were fit. He abandoned his fast. Sicre had been lying again – there was no plan, no escape. Had Dante been a Cathar,93 one could easily imagine Sicre being placed in one of the lower circles of hell for his treachery. Sicre had his mother’s house restored to him, and continued to betray other Cathars to the Inquisition. No record of Bélibaste’s trial survives, and he was burnt in the small town of Villerouge-Termenès.
Montaillou
James Fournier, meanwhile, was continuing to interrogate afresh people who had been questioned ten years earlier by Geoffrey d’Ablis (who had died in 1316). Fournier was a much more thorough inquisitor, and managed to extract a wealth of new information. In particular, he found that the situation in Montaillou was much graver than had originally been thought. Almost everyone there had been, or still was, a Cathar, which instigated a fresh wave of arrests. A number of factors had allowed Catharism almost to take over the entire village.There was no lord to keep an eye on things, as he had died in 1299, and his widow, Béatrice de Planissoles, seems to have been converted – at least for a time – to Catharism by Peter Clergue, the village’s rector. Although a Cathar, Clergue was still outwardly a Catholic priest, saying mass, hearing confessions, performing baptisms and funerals. He was also notoriously promiscuous, bedding many of the women in the village, including Béatrice, with whom he once had sex in the church. Peter’s brother Bernard was the village’s bayle – effectively an agent for the local count of Foix – and was also a Cathar. Together the two men effectively controlled the village, and had the power to keep unwelcome visitors out.
The early 1320s were a legalistic marathon, with Fournier sentencing hundreds of people. Béatrice de Planissoles was sent to prison, but her sentence was later commuted to the wearing of yellow crosses.Various members of Bélibaste’s group were jailed, including Peter Maury and his brother John, who were sentenced to ‘perpetual prison’ on 12 August 1324. Peter Clergue, the randy rector of Montaillou, died before he could be sentenced. On 16 January 1329, he was pronounced a heretic, and his remains were dug up and burnt.
It was the end of Catharism in the Languedoc. What Believers there were left had all been forced to confess and recant.There were to be no more consolings, or ‘holy baptisms’, as the ritual of the consolamentum phrased it, a tradition which, the Cathars believed, had come down to them ‘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.’ Now that there were no more Good Men left, it seemed that the end of the world had truly come.
6
Italy and Bosnia
Thirteenth-Century Italian Catharism
Italian Catharism entered the thirteenth century as a fractured church, with Concorezzo and Desenzano being respectively the bastions of the moderate and absolute schools. The ordo of other churches, such as those at Florence and the Val del Spoleto, remains unknown. Like the Languedoc, the political situation helped nurture the growth of Catharism, but, unlike the south of France, opposition did not generally come from Crusaders but from reforming movements that originated both within and without the Church. From within, the way was led by St Francis of Assisi who, while not mentioning the Cathars – or Patarenes as they were frequently known in Italy – by name, stressed the importance of closely examining the beliefs of potential new recruits to the Franciscan order. He wrote of the importance of regular attendance at both church and confession, and of the need to respect priests. He also stressed the physical reality of Christ’s birth, which went against the Docetism of the Cathars.
There were also popular preachers such as John of Vicenza, who commanded the attention of huge crowds every time they gave a sermon. In John’s case, it led to the rise of the Alleluia movement, a popular, if short-lived, phenomenon in the tradition of the pro-reform Pataria of Gregory VII’s day, and John presided over the mass burning of 200 heretics – mainly Cathars and Waldensians – in Verona in August 1233. John’s success led to the founding of a number of lay confraternities, such as that of St Maria of Misericord in Bergamo, which were intended for people who wanted to further their spiritual practice without having to become a monk or nun. Its members swore to adhere to certain rules, such as the refusal to shed blood, to bear weapons and to refrain from an unethical way of life. They also actively worked towards the repression of heresy.
While the various movements acted as outlets for people who were dissatisfied with traditional forms of religiosity, conflict between the papacy and the empire created space in which Catharism could flourish. The reign of Emperor Frederick II (1220–50) saw these confrontations reach their zenith, and Italian politics came to be dominated by two factions, the pro-papal Guelphs, and the pro-imperial Ghibellines. Frederick did little to encourage the persecution of heretics, and the papacy, keen to gain allies in the key cities of Lombardy, did not press the heresy issue. Also, many cities, wishing to maintain their independence, did not enforce anti-heresy legislation, not because they were especially sympathetic to groups such as the Cathars or the Waldensians, but because any attempt to persecute heretics would have necessarily led to a greater role for the Church, thereby decreasing the cities’ autonomy. Cathars were relatively free to go about their business under the protection of the Ghibelline nobility, and in Lombardy, a Languedocian Cathar church in exile flourished.
Cathar Writings
Very few Cathar tracts have come down to us. Most of the surviving works come from Italy, where literacy levels were generally higher than in the Languedoc, and where the controversy between various Cathar factions encouraged polemicism. Moreover, Italy’s geographical closeness to the Balkans meant that books arriving from the east, such as the Bogomil Secret Supper and The Vision of Isaiah, would generally first appear in the west on the Italian peninsula.These two works were known in the west by the end of the twelfth century. The Secret Supper elucidates the Bogomil/Cathar creation myth, in which Satan is cast out of heaven for wishing to be greater than God. Satan pretended to repent, at which God forgave him and let him do what he wanted. With his new-found freedom, Satan created the world of matter, and formed human beings from the primordial clay. Each soul was a trapped angel from heaven. Satan then convinced humanity that he was the one true god, an action which caused the real god to send Christ – a spirit who entered Mary through her ear – in order to alert humanity to the ways of the devil and to announce the existence of the true god. The Vision of Isaiah was accepted by both the moderate and absolute schools, as it ‘showed a material world and a firmament riven by the battle between Satanic and Godly forces.’94
The most important surviving Cathar tract is The Book of the Two Principles, which was written in the 1240s, probably by John of Lugio, a Cathar from the Albanensian95 school, which was part of the absolutist church of Desenzano. It is ‘the most decisive evidence that the Cathars were evolving their own ideas about the nature of Dualism’,96 and were not content simply to recycle Bogomil material. The Book of the Two Principles is a sustained polemic against the moderate school, whom the author regards as almost no better than Catholics (who also come in for attack during the course of the argument).The work makes a case for there being two coeternal principles of good and evil, each of which created their own spheres – heaven and the material world respectively. The true god cannot be the author of evil. The verse in the Gospel of John which states ‘All things were made by it [the Word of God], and without it, was made nothing’97 was interpreted as meaning that ‘nothing’ – i.e., the material world – was made by Satan. The true world was the domain of the real creator god, which was not a world of matter, but a higher world that obeyed its own laws.
Also extant is a very late tract – possibly from the third quarter of the fourteenth century – called The Vindication of the Church of God. It presents the Cathars ‘as a persecuted and martyred church, suffering before the appearance of the Antichrist and the Last Judgment.’98 It states that ‘this Church of God has received such power from our Lord Jesus Christ that sins are pardoned by its prayer’, that ‘this Church refrains from adultery’, that ‘this Church refrains from theft’, concluding that ‘this Church keeps and observes all the commandments of the law of life’, in sharp contrast to ‘the wicked Roman Church’.99
The Decline of Italian Catharism
The pro-imperial Ghibelline party received a major setback with the death of Emperor Frederick II on 13 December 1250. His son Conrad IV continued the struggle, but the papacy emerged victorious with the capture and execution of Frederick’s grandson Conradin in 1268, who was the last of the Hohenstaufen rulers.With the loss of their main ally, the Ghibellines went into decline, and the Cathars they were protecting found themselves vulnerable to the attentions of the Inquisition. After the murder of the Inquisitor and former Cathar Peter of Verona by Cathar-hired assassins in 1252, pope Innocent IV wasted no time using it to the Church’s advantage: Peter was canonised as St Peter Martyr, and Innocent authorised the use of torture during inquisitorial procedure.
The intensification of the Inquisition’s efforts drove many Cathars underground, or into living double lives. Perhaps the most extraordinary case of this is that of Armanno Pungilupo of Ferrara. He was thought of as a pious Catholic who was famed for his good works and, after his death on 10 January 1268, was buried in the cathedral. His saintly reputation persisted, and miracles were reported around his tomb. After much rooting around by the Inquisition, it emerged that Armanno had been not just a Cathar Believer, but had been a Perfect for the last 20 years of his life. He even survived a brush with the Inquisition in 1254, who tortured him, made him swear loyalty to the Catholic Church and threatened to impose a heavy fine on him if he was caught engaging in heretical practices in the future. Armanno agreed, and promptly carried on as before. Even one of the so-called miracles at his tomb, that of a mute who suddenly regained the power of speech, was found to have been faked by a Cathar intent on lampooning the Church’s cult of miracles. Eventually, the Inquisition prevailed, and Armanno’s remains were dug up and burnt in 1301, and his ashes thrown into the River Po.
By far the most serious loss the Italian Cathars sustained was the fall in 1276 of the castle at Sirmione, which stood on a peninsula extending into Lake Garda. Sirmione was the Italian Montségur, and had been home to various exiled Cathars, including the last known bishop of the Northern French Cathar church, and also the last Cathar bishop of Toulouse, Bernard Oliba. In February 1278, all 200 Sirmione Perfect were burnt in the amphitheatre at Verona.
Brute force and mass murder, however, were not the sole reasons for Catharism’s decline in Italy. As Malcolm Lambert notes, ‘alternative paths to salvation had opened up’,100 and people were able to express their dissatisfaction with the Church in other ways, not just by becoming Cathars. Groups such as the lay confraternities certainly played a large part in this, as did the enormous success of the Franciscans. Unlike the Languedoc, where Catharism was extinguished in a Church-sponsored holocaust that ended with the Inquisition of James Fournier and the burning of William Bélibaste, Catharism in Italy faded away slowly.The last active Cathar bishop was arrested in 1321, and the last known Cathar in Florence was hauled up before the Inquisition in 1342. By this date, the only remaining Cathars existed in secretive mountain communities in the Alps, where, for several more decades, they managed to elude the long arm of the Inquisition.
The Last Cathars
The last Cathars haunted the remote valleys of the Piedmont. An almost invisible presence, they co-existed with groups of fugitive Waldensians, only occasionally breaking their cover to murder a priest who tipped off the Inquisition about their location in 1332, and two Inquisitors, who met the same fate in 1365 and 1374. Once enemies, the Waldensians and the Cathars were now forced together by circumstance, and ‘came to see persecution as a special mark of the true church.’101The persecution continued in the form of sporadic military action: the French mounted an expedition against the Waldensians in the Dauphiné in 1375, but on the Lombard side of the Alps, the use of force remained a logistical and political impossibility. Slowly but surely, the Inquisition closed in on the last remaining communities. Cathar sentiments were discovered in 1373 in the Val di Lanzo, while Antonio di Settimo di Savigliano’s Inquisition of 1387–9 uncovered the last two major Cathars: Antonio di Galosna and Jacob Bech.
Antonio di Galosna had been a Franciscan in Chieri, near Turin, but in 1362 had been introduced to the heresy in a house in Andezeno, a small town to the north-east of Chieri. The ceremony he participated in seems to have been part Waldensian and part Cathar, which indicates that, by this very late date, the Piedmont Cathars were practising a hybrid form of the faith. Galosna related to the Inquisition that he had renounced his belief in the incarnation of Christ and the sacraments of the Catholic Church. That a syncretistic or degenerate form of Catharism was being preached at Andezeno is evident in that, after visiting his teacher several times, Antonio was ritually struck on the head with a sword in order to induct him into the heresy.102 He was then given dualist instruction, in which God was extolled as the creator of heaven, but not of earth; the latter was apparently created by a fearsome dragon, which exercised more power in the earthly realm than the true god.103
A further teacher, Martin de Presbitero, had appointed Antonio to hear confessions, and was apparently present at two degenerate consolamentum, in which the consoled, rather than being put into the endura, were suffocated with pillows. Under torture, Antonio related stories of orgies presided over by a woman called Bilia la Castagna, who made a magic potion out of toad droppings and pubic hair to ensure that the novice would never leave the sect. This was undoubtedly untrue, as belief in sexual deviation had been a standard part of heresy accusations ever since Orléans in 1022, and it is fairly certain that Antonio was merely telling the Inquisitors what they wanted to hear.
Jacob Bech’s confession, however, makes it clear that not all of the Piedmont Cathars entertained notions about dragons – he was taught the more orthodox Cathar view that material creation was under the sway of Satan, and he also told the Inquisition of links between the Piedmont Cathars and Ecclesia Sclavoniae, which was apparently still active at that time. Indeed, Bech claimed to have been converted by two Italian Cathars and a third individual from ‘Sclavonia’, and that the Balkan heretics had their own pope.104 Before that, Bech had been a member of various heretical groups, including the Apostolics, and his travels had taken him as far as Rome and Avignon. At one point, he had even been given money by a well-wisher to cross the Adriatic to seek further instruction from Balkan heretics, but was unable to make the crossing due to inclement weather.
In time, Bech himself began to gather disciples, and at Castagnole he was honoured with a feast. When he was asked about the consolamentum, Bech corroborated Galosna with reference to the euthanasia by suffocation, but added that the consoled had another option, that of a complete three-day fast, in which they could not even take that staple of the endura, cold water. If they survived, they would become Perfect, but would have to give all their worldly goods to the one who had consoled them. Bech told the Inquisition that he had settled in Chieri, where moderate Catharism was rife, and that a number of other Cathars had gone from there to Bosnia for further instruction.105 Both Galosna and Bech were burnt, and Catharism in the west effectively died with them.
In 1412, the Inquisition returned to Chieri and dug up 15 dead Cathars – some of whom had been named by Bech as having journeyed to Bosnia – and burnt their remains. There were apparently no Cathars left alive, although the Inquisition acknowledged that the heresy was still rife across the Adriatic.
The Enigma of the Bosnian Church
Bosnia had always had a reputation for heresy. As early as 1203, Innocent III had urged the king of Hungary – the Church’s only real ally in eastern Europe and the Balkans – to mount a campaign against the heretics there.The Ban – or ruler – of Bosnia, Kulin, was thought to be a heretic, as were 10,000 of his subjects.At length, Innocent’s chaplain, John de Casamaris, was sent to investigate. Ban Kulin rejected all accusations of heresy, and pointed out to John that he had just built a church that celebrated a recent military victory. However, Christianity in Bosnia was underdeveloped, and it is possible that Ban Kulin was not aware of where orthodoxy ended and heresy began. As a precaution, seven senior leaders from various monastic communities submitted to Roman rule at Bilino Polje on 8 April 1203 before Ban Kulin and the papal legate. On 30 April, the ceremony was repeated on an island off Csepel in the Danube south of Budapest, only this time the seven priors made their submission in front of Ban Kulin, Emeric, king of Hungary, and senior Hungarian churchmen. In addition to submitting to the rule of the Church, the Bosnians were made to agree not to receive anyone they suspected of being a ‘Manichaean’.
Despite this, the heresy situation in Bosnia continued to worry successive popes. In 1232, it was discovered that the Catholic bishop of Bosnia was an uneducated simoniac who not only did not know how to baptise, but also lived in the same village as heretics.106 He was removed from office and replaced by a Dominican. It became clear to Gregory IX that a military solution was necessary. He appointed the king of Hungary to lead Crusades against the Bosnian heretics, and campaigns were mounted between 1234 and 1246, which saw a number of heretics being burnt. Following the death of Ban Ninoslav around 1250, Bosnia was forced to accept Hungarian rule.
This seems to have been a major turning point in Bosnian religious affairs. While the Crusades were attempts to extirpate heresy, they ultimately backfired, as it was under Hungarian suzerainty that the Bosnian Church was probably founded; it is still a matter for debate, as records are scarce for the period. Little seems to have been done to check heresy; the Dominicans were driven out and their convents burnt down. Elisabeth, the mother of the boy king of Hungary, Ladislas (1272–90), promised Pope Nicholas III in 1280 that she would take measures against the heretics, but it is not known if these measures achieved anything. It is unlikely they did, as, by the time the Bosnian Church emerged again into the historical record, around 1322, it was condemned by both Rome and the Serbian Orthodox Church as heretical.
The precise nature of the Bosnian Church’s heresy remains a matter for speculation. That its members were known as Patarenes – the name for Cathars in Italy – suggests a Catharist orientation. Furthermore, the Church used a ritual that was very similar to the consolamentum and included the giveaway phrase ‘supersubstantial bread’ in the Lord’s Prayer, a further strong suggestion that the Bosnian Church was either Cathar, semi-Cathar or at least tolerated Cathar practices within it.
In 1325, Pope John XXII (1316–34) exhorted a number of leaders to take action against the Bosnian Church, as ‘many heretics’ were flooding into Bosnia. His successor knew all about heresy, as he was none other than the bishop of Pamiers, James Fournier, who ruled as Benedict II (1334–42), but even he was unable to get a Crusade in motion. The most headway that the Catholic Church was able to make was in the sending of a Franciscan mission to Bosnia, but Stephen Kotromanic´, Ban 1318–53, remained tolerant of the Bosnian Church, and there were no persecutions. He remained on good terms with the Franciscans, and converted to Catholicism. Heretics remained un-persecuted under Stephen’s successor, his nephew, Tvrtko I (1353–91), so much so that the Franciscans complained that ‘Patarenes’ were allowed into church when they said mass, and the support for the heretics was so great that the Franciscans almost had to practise their religion in secret.
Heretics long remained in positions of prominence in Bosnia, and were even sent on diplomatic missions, such as those to Dubrovnik – then an independent republic – in the first half of the fifteenth century. (Indeed, a merchant from Dubrovnik noted in 1458 that the Bosnians ‘follow Manichee customs’.107) The last great gosti – or elder – of the Bosnian Church, Radin, enjoyed a long and successful parallel career as a diplomat, serving both the Bosnian monarchy and Dubrovnik. When he drew up his will in 1466, he drew sharp distinction between members of the Bosnian Church and Catholics, although that did not stop him bequeathing money to the latter.
The increasing threat from the Ottoman Turks led the Bosnian king, Stephen Thomas (1443–61), to appeal to the west for help.To increase his chances of receiving support, he converted to Catholicism and began to persecute the Bosnian Church, a move that made him extremely unpopular with his subjects. Members of the Church were offered the choice of conversion or exile. Some of Radin’s community were given asylum in Dubrovnik and Venice, while others chose to defy their king and collaborate with the Ottomans. Bosnia fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1463, but the fate of those members of the Bosnian Church who did not go into exile remains obscure. They are traditionally thought to have converted to Islam, although there are reports of Bogomils, Patarenes and Manichaeans in Bosnia well into the eighteenth century; the last known report dates from 1867.108 It is perhaps fitting that the Great Heresy, which emerged seemingly from nowhere during the tenth century, should have an equally obscure and mysterious end.
7
The Cathar Treasure
Since their demise, many legends have circulated about the Cathars, usually centring around the so-called Cathar Treasure, which was said to have disappeared during the siege of Montségur, and their relationship with the Troubadours and the Knights Templar.While much of this seems to be the result of the romanticisation of the faith by writers such as Napoléon Peyrat (1809–81) and Déodat Roché (1877–1978), such legends have actually been circulating since at least the 1320s,109 and deserve to be outlined below as they have played a crucial role in shaping the mystique surrounding the Cathars, which in turn has gone a long way in helping to retain the interest and imagination of the public, speculative historians, mystics and the not so-reliable for generations.
The Cathars and the Holy Grail
Perhaps the most enduring myth about the Cathars is that they possessed the Holy Grail. Although, as will be noted below, nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers managed to get a great deal of mileage out of the Grail and are commonly assumed to have invented the Cathar/Grail myth, it in fact originated in the thirteenth century, while Catharism was still very much alive.
The Grail myths as we know them today originated in the city of Troyes, courtesy of the quill of Chrétien de Troyes; his Conte del Graal, written around 1180, is the first Grail narrative.110 It concerns the attempts of King Arthur’s knights to attain the Grail, but, due to Chrétien’s death, it breaks off before the Grail is attained. The story was picked up by Robert de Boron and then by the writer about whom most Grail myths circulate, Wolfram von Eschenbach. Wolfram’s greatest work is Parzival, which is most frequently read as an allegory of spiritual development, and betrays the influence of the east (Wolfram was thought to have gone on Crusade) and also of alchemy. However, he continued to write about the Grail in Titurel, and identifies the Grail castle as being in the Pyrenees. Moreover, he describes the lord of the grail castle as being called ‘Perilla’.When one recalls that not only was Montségur in the Pyrenees, but its lord, Raymond Pereille, often signed his name in Latin, Perilla, do the alarm bells of speculation start ringing. Such a strange coincidence does not, of course, mean that Wolfram knew something that later writers did not, but his account complicates any attempt to repudiate the Grail/Cathar myth entirely. It at least suggests that the Grail myth has been a part of the Cathar story since the time of the Good Christians, and is not just the invention of later writers.
Wolfram’s grail, in Parzival, was said to be a stone, which recalls the Philosopher’s Stone in alchemy. However, there have been alternative interpretations of the grail, from the chalice of tradition to, more controversially, the womb of Mary Magdalene, which was seen as the cup that caught Christ’s blood not on Calvary but after the wedding at Cana. One hypothesis holds that the Cathar treasure, which was smuggled out of Montségur shortly before the surrender, was in fact the Grail, which was then either hidden in a nearby cave, or entrusted to the Knights Templar. (Montségur’s sergeant, Imbert of Salles, however, told the Inquisition that the Cathar treasure was merely money and precious stones.111)
The Magdalene hypothesis suggests that the Holy Grail, which is san graal in French, is, in fact, a misspelling of sang real, the holy blood, meaning the bloodline of Jesus and the Magdalene. This theory has most famously been explored in Michael Baigent, Richard Leigh and Henry Lincoln’s classic The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail. More recently, it has been the subject of Dan Brown’s global bestseller The Da Vinci Code. However, the idea that Jesus married Mary Magdalene does not originate with Baigent, Leigh and Lincoln: one of the Cathars’ inner teachings, which was only passed on to the Perfect, was that the Magdalene was Jesus’s wife.112 This is puzzling, to say the least, as the Cathars despised marriage. Furthermore, it was not a belief inherited from the Bogomils. It is possible, in believing that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married, that the Cathars were reflecting a popular Languedocian tradition, but we cannot be certain.
The Troubadours and the Knights Templar
The two groups with whom the Cathars are most often associated are the Troubadours and the Knights Templar, both of whom had a very strong presence in the Languedoc during the thirteenth century.The Troubadours were itinerant poets writing in Occitan who flourished between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. In Germany, they had fellow travellers in the shape of the Minnesingers, of whom Wolfram von Eschenbach was one.The Troubadours’ main themes were chivalry and courtly love, in which the virtues of a particular lady would be extolled by the poet. Sometimes these were literal love songs, often addressed to a woman who was unattainable, while other Troubadour poems and songs were in fact allegories of spiritual development, and betray an awareness of the Divine Feminine. Among the most celebrated Troubadours were Peter Vidal, William Figueira and Jaufré Rudel. In the Languedoc, they enjoyed the protection of the same families who protected the Cathars. At least one Troubadour,William de Durfort, was known to be a Cathar; no doubt there were others.The concept of the Divine Feminine suggests another link between the two movements: the Perfect, upon being consoled, were given the title of Theotokos, which means God Bearer, an assignation usually associated with the Virgin Mary.
The Knights Templar were the most powerful military religious order of their day, and were major landowners in the Languedoc. While theories suggesting that the Cathar treasure – whatever its nature – was entrusted to the Templars remain fanciful, there are a number of more definite links between the heretics and the soldier-monks. One of the Templars’ great Grand Masters, Bertrand de Blancfort, came from a Cathar family, and during the Albigensian Crusade, they welcomed fugitive Cathars into the order. In some Templar preceptories in the Languedoc, Cathars outnumbered Catholics. Furthermore, the Templars refused to participate in the Albigensian Crusade. There could have been a number of reasons for this.They had a great deal of support in the Languedoc, so any military intervention there would have been politically disastrous for the Order, and, towards the end of the de Montfort years, they were actively involved in the Fifth Crusade (1217–21), in which they played a decisive role. However, one cannot help but wonder if certain elements within the Temple remained sympathetic to the Cathars, a sympathy rendered all the more plausible by the fact that the Templars were themselves viciously suppressed between 1307 and 1312, on charges of heresy, blasphemy and sodomy – charges that had been formerly levelled against the Good Christians.113
Modern Cathars
The romanticisation of the Cathars began with the Languedocian writer Napoléon Peyrat. Despite being a priest himself, he was also a member of an anticlerical group known as the Priest Eaters, and launched numerous attacks on what he saw as the reactionary nature of the Catholic Church.To bolster his arguments, he invoked the name of the Cathars, whom he regarded as southern martyrs. His mammoth History of the Albigensians, published in the 1870s, took frequent liberties with the known facts in the name of mythologising the Cathars and denigrating the Church. Montségur became a kind of Camelot, full of wonders that were still awaiting discovery, and Peyrat was convinced that the Cathar Treasure was a cache of sacred texts that was hidden in a cave at nearby Lombrives. Not only that, but a community of Cathars took shelter in the caves, and lived there until they were discovered by northern troops, who walled them up alive in the cave. In their anti-papal stance, the Cathars were forerunners of not just Protestantism but also foreshadowed the French Republic.
Peyrat’s mythologised, semi-fictional Cathars had a big impact on the likes of the Félibrige, a group of scholars who were keen to preserve works written in Occitan. Underneath this goal lay a separatist movement, who wanted to restore Languedocian independence and identity. Peyrat was regarded as something of a guru, and the group began to produce its own Cathar theories, which tended to view the Cathars as occult initiates who had inherited age-old wisdom from the east. The Cathar Treasure thus became a repository of ancient wisdom.
Déodat Roché, another southern self-styled Cathar expert, published a number of pro-Cathar works, including L’Église romane et les Cathares albigeois (1937) and Le Catharisme (1938). In 1948, he began publishing a magazine, Cahiers d’Études Cathares, and two years later, founded a group, the Société du Souvenir et des Études Cathares. During the 1930s, he headed a loose-knit group that included the philosopher Simone Weil (1909–43) and the novelist Maurice Magre (1877–1941), both of whom wrote proCathar polemics. Magre famously referred to the Perfect as ‘the Buddhists of the West’. A third figure who came into Roché’s orbit was the young German writer Otto Rahn (1904–39). In his first book, The Crusade Against the Grail (1933), Rahn interprets Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival as a thinly disguised account of the Albigensian Crusade.
In this version of events, the Cathar Treasure is nothing less than the Holy Grail itself. In his next book, The Court of Lucifer (1937), Rahn compared the struggles of the Cathars against the Crusaders with the struggles of Hitler to establish the Thousand Year Reich, seeing the Cathars as good Aryans who opposed not just Rome but also Judaism. It comes as no surprise to learn that, by this time, Rahn was working for Himmler. Subsequently, myths have grown up around Rahn, who was seen as a Nazi Indiana Jones who actually found the Grail and took it back to Germany, where it was hidden in the Bavarian Alps shortly before the end of the war.
The psychiatrist Arthur Guirdham (1905–92) is probably the most prominent English neo-Cathar. In the 1960s, a certain Mrs Smith, one of his patients, began telling him about her previous life as a Cathar in thirteenth-century Languedoc. Initially sceptical, Guirdham began to investigate her claims, and wrote to Jean Duvernoy, one of Catharism’s leading historians. Much to Guirdham’s surprise, Duvernoy corroborated the details of Mrs Smith’s story. The resultant book, The Cathars and Reincarnation (1970), details Guirdham’s further discoveries, including the possibility that he himself was a reincarnated Cathar. The story was continued in We Are One Another (1974) and The Lake and the Castle (1976). Guirdham’s The Great Heresy (1977) is a brief history of the movement, and included in its later chapters revelations dictated to him by disembodied Cathars, covering such topics as the healing power of crystals, the aura, the emanatory powers of touch and the true nature of alchemy. The Perfect, according to Guirdham, were well-versed in such things during their earthly existence.
The Persecuting Society
The Cathars emerged at a time of profound change in Europe.The historian R.I. Moore has argued that western society formed its institutions through the persecution of heretics and others in the thirteenth century.114 Furthermore, definitions of heresy played a large part in shaping the concept of witchcraft, which greatly aided the persecution and execution of thousands of innocent people – predominantly women – during the Witch Craze of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
It is perhaps the Cathars’ quest for an authentic spirituality that makes their story still relevant. Their belief that they – and not the Church – were the real Christians calls to mind Dostoyevsky’s parable of the Grand Inquisitor, in which Christ returns to earth, specifically Seville, during the height of the Spanish Inquisition. He is immediately arrested as a heretic, and questioned by the aged Grand Inquisitor. The old man prefers the safety and power that the Church offers him to Christ’s simple message. He tells Christ,‘If anyone has ever deserved our fires, it is Thou.Tomorrow I shall burn Thee.’ He waits for Christ to respond: ‘ “He saw that the Prisoner had listened intently all the time, looking gently in his face and evidently not wishing to reply. The old man longed for him to say something, however bitter and terrible. But He suddenly approached the old man in silence and softly kissed him on his bloodless aged lips. That was all his answer. The old man shuddered. His lips moved. He went to the door, opened it, and said to Him: ‘Go, and come no more ... come not at all, never, never!’ And he let Him out into the dark alleys of the town.The Prisoner went away.” ’115
The Cathars’ claim to be part of an authentic apostolic tradition dating back to the time of Christ cannot be proved, it can only be inferred. The Catholic Church’s claim to descend from Peter is also historically unverifiable. Something that perhaps finds in the Cathars’ favour is one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, only made public for the first time in 1991. The end of the Damascus Document – The Foundations of Righteousness: An Excommunication Text – appears to show the excommunication of Paul from the Christian community.116 If this were indeed the case, then it would automatically invalidate the Catholic Church’s claim to be God’s vicars on earth, as most of the major forms of organised Christianity are based on the teachings of Paul, not Christ.
The Church obviously feels that publication of the text has not damaged its position, and in March 2000, Pope John Paul II issued an apology for the Crusades. Many felt that the statement did not go far enough in offering rapprochement to the Arab world. Needless to say, no mention was made of the Albigensian Crusade. It remains unlikely that the papacy will ever apologise.
It may be that the real Cathar treasure is to be found in their stress on simplicity, equality, non-violence, work and love. By not building churches, they necessarily brought divinity into the domestic sphere, suggesting that, for the Cathars, every moment of every day could be used to deepen one’s spiritual life. Maurice Magre belief that they were the Buddhists of Europe is not too far wide of the mark. Given that the Church – both the Catholic Church and the religious right in America – seems to be as conservative and exclusive as it ever was, the Cathars’ message is perhaps as relevant now as it was in the Languedoc of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
The great American science-fiction writer Philip K. Dick summed up the need for – and difficulties of practising – the Cathars’ kind of spirituality in his novel VALIS. The hero, tormented by the trivialities of the modern world, becomes a convert to Gnosticism (as was Dick himself). He is mocked by his friends for his attempts to live as a first-century Christian, but points out that the persecuting society – the Roman Empire in the novel – ‘never ended’. He feels that life as a Gnostic is the only solution, and near the end of the novel, concludes: ‘Since the universe is actually composed of information, then it can be said that information will save us. This is the saving gnosis which the Gnostics sought.There is no other road to salvation … Thus it is said that we are saved by the grace of God and not by good works, that all salvation belongs to Christ, who, I say, is a physician … The physician has come to us a number of times under a number of names. But we are not yet healed.’117
footnotes and source
https://www.bibliotecapleyades.net/archivos_pdf/cathars-successful-heresy.pdf
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