The Cathars

Dualist Heretics in Languedoc in the High Middle Ages

Malcolm Barber

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Topic: History
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351223966
• Subtopic: French History
• Index: History

In the second half of the twelfth century, the Catholic Church became convinced that dualist heresy was taking root within Christian society and that it was particularly strong in southern France. The nature and extent of this heresy and the reaction of the Church to the perceived threat have been the focus of extensive research since the mid-nineteenth century, research which has become especially intense in the last decade.
Malcolm Barber's second edition of The Cathars (which first appeared in 2000) brings readers up-to-date with the challenges to previous conclusions of recent scholarship. At the same time, the wider implications of the subject remain relevant, most importantly the fundamental questions raised by the belief in the existence of evil, the ethical problems presented by the use of coercion to suppress forms of dissent believed to threaten the social and religious fabric, and the distortion of the past to underpin present-day policies and arguments.

chapter 1
The spread of Catharism

Dualism

Of course you all know how this heresy - God send his curse on it! became so strong that it gained control of the whole of the Albigeois, of the Carcassès and most of the Lauragais. All the way from Béziers to Bordeaux many, or indeed, most people believed in or supported it. When the lord pope and the other clergy saw this lunacy spreading so much faster than before and tightening its grip every day, each of them in his own jurisdiction sent out preachers. The Cistercian order led the campaign and time and again it sent out its own men. Next the bishop of Osma arranged a meeting between himself and other legates with these Bulgars at Carcassonne. This was very well attended, and the king of Aragon and his nobles were present. Once the king had heard the speakers and discovered how heretical they were, he withdrew, and sent a letter about this to Rome in Lombardy.

God grant me his blessing, what shall I say? They think more of a rotten apple than of sermons, and went on just the same for about five years. These lost fools refused to repent, so that many were killed, many people perished, and still more will die before the fighting ends. It cannot be otherwise.¹

This is part of the introduction of an extended poem, written in Provencal, the first third of which is by William of Tudela, who describes himself as a 'clerk in holy orders'. He was originally from Tudela in Navarre, and the poem covers the period just before and during the Albigensian Crusade, between 1204 and 1218. He is a generally reliable source, pro-crusader in approach, but with an awareness of the suffering of the victims of the crusade as well.

The cursed heresy is Catharism and the early-thirteenth-century followers in the region to which William refers believed in a version of it known as absolute dualism. According to the De heresi catharorum, written by an anonymous but knowledgeable Lombard, perhaps towards the end of the twelfth century, this party of Cathars 'believe and preach that there are two gods or lords widiout beginning and without end, one good, the other wholly evil. And they say that each created angels: the good God good angels and the evil one evil ones, and that the good God is almighty in the heavenly home, and the evil one rules in all this worldly structure.' Lucifer is the son of this god of darkness and he ascended to heaven, where 'he transfigured himself into an angel of light', and persuaded the angels to intercede with God on his behalf and have him appointed steward of the angels. In this capacity he seduced some of the angels and, in the great batde which followed, they were expelled from Heaven with Lucifer. The angels were made up of body, soul, and spirit and 'the souls were seized by Lucifer and were put into the bodies in this world'. Christ, the Son of God, 'came to save only these souls'. 'They explain that human bodies are in part animated by those evil spirits whom the devil created and in part by those souls that fell. Those souls do penance in these bodies and, if not saved in one body, a soul goes into another body and does penance.'²

The Cathars of Languedoc had followed these doctrines since the assembly of a council at the village of St-Félix-de-Caraman, situated about half-way between Toulouse and Carcassonne, which was held either in 1167 or a few years later, sometime between 1174 and 1177.³ It had been attended by leading Cathars from both 'France', that is the lands north of the Loire, and Languedoc, who had been converted by Nicetas, bishop of the Bogomil Church of Constantinople, from their belief in moderate or mitigated dualism. These moderate dualist Cathars, says the author of De heresi catharorum,

believe in and preach one only good God, almighty, without beginning, who created angels and the four elements. They assert that Lucifer and his accomplices sinned in heaven, but some among them are uncertain as to how their sin arose. Some, indeed, hold - but it is a secret - that there was a certain evil spirit having four faces: one of a man, the second of a bird, the third of a fish, and the fourth of a beast. It had no beginning and remained in this chaos, having no power of creation.

Lucifer came down and was led astray by this evil spirit and when he returned to heaven seduced others.

They were cast out of heaven but did not lose the natural abilities which they possessed. These heretics assert that Lucifer and the other evil spirit wished to separate the elements, but could not. Thereupon, they begged from God a good angel as an assistant, and thus with God's acquiescence, with the aid of this good angel, and by his strength and wisdom, they separated the elements. And, they say, Lucifer is the God who, in Genesis, is said to have created heaven and earth and to have accomplished this work in six days.⁴

Ultimately this change was very significant for Languedoc, for moderate dualism has recognisable similarities to the Catholic version of the Fall, but absolute dualism has no common ground with the Catholics at all. By 1209, having failed to make any inroads against the absolute dualists of the region, Pope Innocent III saw no feasible alternative to the use of force. For him, drawing on the ideology of the just war worked out by St Augustine in the early fifth century, this was a legitimate weapon in the face of unbending obstinacy.⁵

William of Tudela claims that this heresy was rife all the way from Beziers to Bordeaux, but he only hints at how it might have arrived there in the first place when he refers to a meeting at Carcassonne between the bishop of Osma and those he calls 'Bulgars', The name Bulgar derives from the Bogomil heretics of the Balkans, in particular those of Thrace, Macedonia, and Bosnia, but by William's time it was extensively used to describe Western heretics, reflecting a widespread perception that their beliefs and organisation had originally derived from these regions. However, the process by which it occurred is by no means self-evident. The Bogomils did share some characteristics with two earlier eastern heresies Paulicianism and Messalianism - both of which were present in the Balkans as a result of Byzantine policy which aimed to break up opposition in the imperial heartland of Asia Minor by the physical removal of disaffected populations to other regions. The Paulicians were strengthened in the eighth century when the Isaurian dynasty - the so-called 'iconoclast emperors' attempted to suppress the use of icons, an attitude which, from the 730s, persuaded them to tolerate those equally unsympathetic towards the externals of Christian worship. Moreover, when the Emperor Constantine V reconquered Armenia from the Muslims in the 750s, Paulicians from the region were among those resettled in Thrace, depopulated by plague a few years before. With the ending of the Iconoclast regime in the mid-ninth century, Paulicians were persecuted once again, suffering serious military defeat when their fortress at Tefrice in the theme of Armeniakon in eastern Anatolia fell to Basil I in 878; even so, they were not eliminated, for some were recruited into imperial armies, where their presence was regularly reported down to the twelfth century, while the removal by the Emperor John Tzimisces of further communities from the eastern frontier to Philippopolis in Thrace during the 970s added to their presence in the Balkans.⁶

Both sects found their origins in the East: the Messalians in fourth-century Edessa and the Paulicians in Mesopotamia in the mid-seventh century. Both gained adherents throughout the Byzantine Empire, for during the fifth century Messalians could be found in Syria, Cappadocia and Asia Minor, while by the early ninth century the Paulicians claimed to have seven churches extending from the Euphrates in the east to Corinth in the west.⁷ Neither accepted the Judeo-Christian belief in the creation of the world by God; both sought an explanation for evil in the existence of matter, a key component of which was the human body. However, while the Messalians thought that a demon inside each body needed to be expelled by intense prayer, the Paulicians were part of the dualistic tradition, in that they believed in the eternal separation of God and Matter. These are the 'Two Principles' which ultimately came to characterise the absolute dualists of Languedoc and northern Italy from the 1170s onwards.

The origins of Paulician belief are therefore a matter of importance to historians seeking the inspiration of medieval heresy in the West. Byzantine writers almost invariably called them 'Manichaeans'. Manichaeism was the work of a Persian called Mani, put to death by the Zoroastrian establishment in 276 ad. Systematic dualism originated with the Gnostics of the first century for whom matter was intrinsically evil, but Mani himself seems to have been subject to a variety of ideas drawn from Zoroastrianism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Babylonian Mandaeism (in which he had been brought up). Among the identifiable elements is the influence of Marcion, the son of the bishop of Sinope, who died in 160 ad. Marcion's dualism took the form of rejecting the God of the Old Testament, since he was responsible for the evil in the world, so that this God therefore had no connection with the New Testament at all. In Mani's cosmology, Darkness and Light were quite separate in origin, but the capture of some particles of Light by the aggressive forces of Darkness (which took the form of a composite creature with a lion's head, dragon's body, bird's wings, fish's tail, and beast's feet) meant that God had been obliged to undertake a series of actions to undo this catastrophe. The consequence was a long and, as yet, unresolved conflict, in which God sent a series of 'evocations' to create a material world in which to imprison the forces of Darkness. In reaction to this the power of Darkness invented man, self-propagating like the demons, in order to ensure that the particles of Light remained imprisoned, in this case in the human body. Jesus Christ was one of these divine 'evocations', sent to bring the message of dualism. Mani himself was the last of these, possessed of the final revelation which was intended to make these beliefs universally accepted. The ultimate goal was a return to the complete separation of Light and Darkness.⁸ Like their counterparts in the Orthodox Church, for many Latin clerics these ideas were not lost in the obscurity which the passing of ten centuries might have brought. St Augustine had, for about nine years, been an 'auditor' among the Manichaeans, which meant that the word was deeply embedded in the vocabulary of all literate men in the medieval West.⁹ Many ecclesiastical writers were therefore ever ready to see 'Manichees' at the root of all 'heretical depravity' without feeling the need for further investigation.

Not surprisingly modern historians have neither been so easily convinced nor have they found such ready unanimity. It is notoriously difficult to trace the path of ideas over centuries, especially when those ideas run counter to prevailing orthodoxy and are therefore subject to vilification, distortion, and suppression. Some historians - among them Dmitri Obolensky, Steven Runciman, and Hans Söderberg and, more recently and tentatively, Yuri Stoyanov - while fully aware of the propaganda value of the Manichaean label to the orthodox, have been prepared to accept the essential continuity of dualism, tracing it from Gnosticism and Manichaeism to the Paulicians and thence to the Bogomils and the Cathars.¹⁰ Söderberg's view is especially clear-cut: absolute dualists derived from Persian Manichaeism, and mitigated dualists were influenced by Egyptian and Syrian Gnosticism. For him the Cathars gave 'a Christian clothing to the myth of the combat between the two powers'; between them and Gnosticism there existed 'an uninterrupted, traditional chain'. Arno Borst sees this more in terms of context than continuity, pointing to the fundamental nature of the problem of the existence of evil. Thus there is a common element in the religions of the first millennium before Christ seen in both Persian Zoroastrianism and the cults of ancient Greece, which was the inherence of evil in matter which imprisoned the soul. Thereafter Pauline Christianity, heavily influenced by the Greek perspective, emphasised the duality between God and the world, while a range of Christian heretics, including Marcion in the second century and the Spaniard Priscillian in the fourth century, threatened the orthodox with their dualistic beliefs. Two heresies - the Messalians and the Paulicians - proved more durable, stamping their presence on the minds of the Byzantine theologians of the early middle ages.¹¹ It is entirely understandable that medieval churchmen should see contemporary dualists as Manichaeans, but Manichaeism as such disappeared in the Byzantine Empire after the persecution of the Empero...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Illustrations, tables, maps
• Series editor's preface to the first edition
• Preface to the first edition
• Author's preface to the second edition
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The spread of Catharism
• 2 The Cathars and Languedocian society
• 3 The Cathar Church
• 4 The Catholic reaction
• 5 The decline of Catharism
• 6 The last Cathars
• 7 Cathars after Catharism
• Further reading
• References
• Tables
• Maps
• Index