Which leads me to the Cathars--who called themselves the Bonnes Hommes--the particular heresy which brought Peire Maurand so low. Catharism emerged in southwestern France in the early 12th century, perhaps brought by merchants or missionaries from Byzantium or Bulgaria who had embraced the Christian movement of the Bogomils ("Friends of God") of Thrace. The term Cathar comes from the Greek word for "pure."
No one knows precisely what the Cathars believed. Only a few of their
sacred writings have survived, and most of what we know was written by their persecutors. They seem to have been dualists (like
the Gnostics) who believed that the earth, the material world, was created by an corrupted evil god, Lucifer and Good God was unknowable and inaccessible. In this cosmology, humans were angels trapped by Lucifer in our corruptible bodies. The spiritual goal for each believer was to remember the divine soul imprisoned in our bodies. The Cathars held some Arian beliefs as well,
rejecting the Trinity and embarrassed by the crude fleshy materialism of the crucifix. To them, Christ
was never incarnated as human (that is, corrupted flesh) but was always a divine spirit, a messenger sent by Good God to reveal our divine origins and to show the way back to heaven.
They objected to the moral, spiritual and political corruption of the
institutional Catholic church, the Devil's
playground. They may have regarded as immoral the material wealth
squandered on church structures and clerics. In their worship, they sought to restore the hierarchical structure and asceticism of the early Christian communities. Bishops, deacons and priests led worship in private homes, but Salvation was not mediated through the church hierarchy. Spiritual authority resided ultimately in the believers themselves. Their liturgy was written in their native language, Occitan, not Latin. Their sacred
scripture was the New Testament which they supplemented with books of
apocrypha; they rejected Genesis.
They rejected most Roman Catholic sacraments as corruptions of original Christiam practices dating to Constantine: baptism of infants, marriage (why sanctify two corrupted bodies made one?), the eucharist (why would they celebrate transubstantiation when they considered the body & blood to be the works of the devil?), mediation of saints and veneration of relicts. Their sole prayer was the Lord's Prayer, and they observed Christ's last supper by blessing bread at daily meals, "The bread of the Lord's Prayer." They practiced Adult Baptism by laying on hands (during which the Holy Spirt would free the mind from the physical world), and had a single, one time only sacrament, Consolation, a ceremony that was partly ordination, party last rites, which removed all sin from the credente, the believer. The individual who underwent Consolation to become a Prefect, one of the spiritual elite, vowed to lead lives without sin, to do the will of God by doing good. Prefects were required to do manual labor, preach to others and live in quasi-religious communities (for example, Maurand's large mansion with its workshops and gathering spaces.) They travelled in twos (which lead inquisitors to accuse them of homosexuality) to prevent backsliding.
Because flesh is evil, "born of corruption", leading a life without sin meant avoiding all worldly desires and uncleanliness. They ate a vegan diet (they didn't call it that, of course), and fasted so much that their enemies accused them of trying to starve
themselves to death. They vowed not to lie, not to kill, not to swear oaths and sought to speak soberly and without malice.
They prayed for mercy: "Have no pity on the flesh, born of corruption,
but show mercy to the spirit which is imprisoned therein." As a result,
they were hard-working, kind, charitable, honest, abstemious, chaste,
gentle, peaceable. Males and females were equals, and they married only once, if
they married at all. They were exemplary citizens.
When the nobility of Languedoc were criticized for not attacking heretics more aggressively, they responded, 'We cannot. We have been reared in their midst. We have relatives among them and we see them living lives of perfection.'"
St Bernard of Clairvaux, as orthodox a churchman as one can find, wrote:
"If you question the heretic about his faith, nothing is more Christian; if about his daily converse, nothing more blameless; and what he says he proves by his actions ... As regards his life and conduct, he cheats no one, pushes ahead of no one, does violence to no one. Moreover, his cheeks are pale with fasting; he does not eat the bread of idleness; he labours with his hands and thus makes his living."
It's easy imagine that these fragments of Cathar belief and practices are modern interpretations of the evidence. As described in my sources, many of the Cathar's criticisms of the Catholic orthodoxy prefigure the complaints made by Protestants during the Reformation 300 years later--the wealth, corruption and hierarchy of the church, the mediation of the church between God and faithful, the veneration of relicts, the use of the common language and rejection of transubstantiation. This makes me wonder again--despite all I've written above--about how much we really know about the Cathars. How much is speculation, biased on complaints made later in history?
From a variety of illuminated manuscripts, mostly found on the British Library website
Image 1: Lucifer being cast from heaven
Image 2: The soul in all its purity
Image 3: Infant baptism in the Roman Catholic church.
Image 4: Another repellent sacrament, marriage
Image 5: Cathars being expelled from Carcassonne.
Image 6: An illumination from the Lyon Ritual, the Carthar book of liturgy
Unquestionably the best description of the Cathars I've ever read. You paint a very human picture, and a far cry from the cultish mysticism that seems to surround the Cathars in the popular imagination (which seems to mash up the Cathars, the Templars, and the Freemasons).
Posted by: neverted | March 19, 2013 at 06:38 AM