Catharism

"Pure": a name given by others

The word comes from the Greek katharos, "pure": the dissidents presented themselves as the "pure", the true Christians washed of every compromise with the world^[8]. But it was their adversaries who fixed the name in books: it is found in Latin sources in the middle of the twelfth century, notably in the Sermons against the Cathars of Eckbert of Schönau, around 1163^[9]. They themselves never called themselves by it: they said "Good Men" and "Good Women", "good Christians", or simply "the Church", the true one, set against the Roman Church which they held to be fallen^[10].

The "Albigenses": a geographical nickname

The council of Tours, in 1163, designates the heretics of the Midi under the name of "Albigenses", because the region of Albi seemed infested with them^[11]. The nickname proved successful, to the point that the crusade of 1209-1229 remains the "Albigensian Crusade", although it struck the whole of Languedoc, from Béziers to Toulouse^[12]. In this article, "Cathars" designates the doctrinal movement as a whole, from the banks of the Rhine to Lombardy; the detailed military account of the crusade belongs to the companion article Albigenses.

Neither Patarenes nor Waldensians: avoiding confusion

Three movements are often mixed together and must be distinguished. The Patarenes of eleventh-century Milan denounced the simony and Nicolaitism of the clergy, but remained within the Catholic faith: they were not dualists^[13]. The Waldensians, disciples of the Lyonnais Valdes (around 1173), preach poverty and read the Gospel in the vernacular, but keep the Creator God, the Incarnation and, for a long time, the hope of remaining in the Church: Rome does not confuse them with the Cathars, even if the two groups rub shoulders and the Inquisition pursues them together^[14]. Only the Cathars profess dualism and reject all flesh.

Abundant Catholic sources, and partial ones

Most of what is known about the Cathars comes from their adversaries: chroniclers of the crusade such as Peter of Les Vaux-de-Cernay, whose History of the Albigenses recounts the holy war from the crusaders' side^[15]; polemicists such as Alan of Lille, whose four books Against the Heretics (around 1200) refute Cathars and Waldensians point by point^[16]; inquisitorial summas such as that of the Dominican Moneta of Cremona, five books Against the Cathars and the Waldensians published at Rome in 1743 from the medieval manuscript^[17]. These texts describe in order to refute: they are precise, but they choose their targets.

The witness turned: Rainier Sacconi

The best informed source is that of a penitent: Rainier Sacconi, an Italian who himself lived as a Cathar Perfect before converting, entering the Dominicans and becoming an inquisitor in Lombardy. Around 1250, he wrote for his brethren a Summa on the Cathars and the Poor of Lyon, an internal survey of the dissident Churches, their divisions and their numbers, published in the twentieth century by Fr. Dondaine with the dualist treatise it accompanied^[18]. An adversary who practiced from the inside: no other medieval heresy is documented so closely.

The rare surviving Cathar writings

By an archival miracle, a few texts of the vanquished have survived. The Cathar Ritual of Lyon, an Occitan manuscript kept at the Palais des Arts in Lyon, gives the very text of the rites: transmission of the Our Father, consolamentum, monthly confession^[19]. The Book of the Two Principles, a learned treatise from the middle of the thirteenth century defending absolute dualism, was edited by Dondaine in 1939 with a fragment of ritual^[20]. The Interrogation of John, the "Secret Supper" which the apostle is said to have entrusted in confidence, recounts the fall of the angels and the creation of the world by Satan, copied by Bogomil then Cathar hands^[21]. These three texts prove that dualism is not an invention of the inquisitors: the dissidents wrote it themselves.

Cologne 1143: the letter of Eberwin of Steinfeld

The first dated appearance occurs at Cologne, in 1143: the provost Eberwin of Steinfeld writes to Bernard of Clairvaux to point out heretics who call themselves "apostolic" and refuse marriage, infant baptism, meat and purgatory^[22]. Once arrested, they are burned by the crowd despite the archbishop, who wanted to keep them to instruct them: the first burning, and already the identikit of Catharism, displayed poverty, contempt for the sacraments, courageous death^[23]. Two years later, Bernard himself preaches in 1145 in the Toulousain and the Albigeois, with little fruit: the heresy already has its houses in the Midi^[24].

The colloquy of Lombers and the council of Tours

In 1163, the council of Tours strikes with anathema the heretics of Gascony and the Toulousain, already called "Albigenses"^[25]. Two years later, in 1165, the bishop of Albi organizes at Lombers a public disputation between Catholics and "good men": the dissidents set out their faith there, are refuted then condemned, and leave free, protected by their lords^[26]. The episode sums up twenty years of powerlessness: the Church discusses, condemns, and cannot compel.

The council of Saint-Félix (1167): the parallel Church organizes itself

The turning point is played out in 1167 at Saint-Félix-de-Caraman, in the Lauragais. A bishop come from Constantinople, Nicetas, a Bogomil, thus an Eastern dualist, presides there over the assembly of the "good men" of the West: four Churches are delimited there with their bishops, Toulouse, Carcassonne, Agen and Albi, ordinations are regulated and the consolamentum is received from the hands of the East^[27]. The charter of the assembly is known only through a seventeenth-century copy, but its content matches exactly what the Inquisition registers will confirm a century later: from 1167 onward, Catharism is no longer a nebula of preachers, it is a hierarchized counter-Church, linked to its sisters in the Balkans^[28].

"The Church of Toulouse, the Church of Carcassonne, the Church of Agen and the Church of Albi received their bishops from the hands of Nicetas, bishop of Constantinople." : Charter of the council of Saint-Félix (1167), after the seventeenth-century copy^[29]

Where did they come from? The Bogomil lead

The question of origins still divides historians, but the Eastern lead is solid: a dualist doctrine identical to that of the Bogomils of Bulgaria, twin rites, the visit of Nicetas, the circulation of books such as the Interrogation of John from the Balkans toward the West^[30]. Beyond the Bogomils, one glimpses the Paulicians of Armenia, transplanted to Thrace in the eighth century, whose ideas made their way toward the Bulgaria of the priest Bogomil in the tenth century^[31]. The detail of this filiation, Byzantium, Bulgaria, the road toward Italy then Languedoc, belongs to the companion articles: here the observation suffices that Catharism was not born in 1143, but that it is the Western culmination of an Eastern dualism several centuries old.

Two principles? Absolute dualism and mitigated dualism

All Cathars agree on the essentials: the good God, pure spirit, has nothing to do with this world of flesh and suffering, the work of an evil maker^[32]. But they divide over the origin of that maker. The absolute dualists, strong above all in northern Italy around Desenzano, profess two coeternal principles, Good and Evil, at war since the beginning: this is the thesis of the Book of the Two Principles and of its champion, John of Lugio^[33]. The mitigated dualists, the majority in Languedoc, admit only one creator God, whose eldest son, Satan or Lucifer, rebelled with the angels who became human souls, then fashioned the visible world as their prison^[34]. The two schools condemn each other, Rainier Sacconi lists their rival Churches in Italy, but they share the same contempt for the flesh^[35].

A Christ without true flesh

If matter is evil, God cannot have mingled with it: the Christ of the Cathars therefore did not take true flesh in the womb of Mary^[36]. According to the versions, he passes through her body "like water through a pipe", or wears a celestial appearance that simulates humanity: he does not truly suffer, does not truly die, does not rise again in his body, his Passion is only an instructive spectacle^[37]. And Mary herself, when she is not reduced to a symbol, becomes an angel or a celestial creature, for a woman's womb could not have carried God^[38]. The Church recognizes in this the old docetism of the first centuries, already condemned: a phantom Christ saves no one, for "what is not assumed is not saved", in the words of Saint Gregory of Nazianzus taken up by the whole Tradition^[39].

"The Word became flesh and dwelt among us.", Saint John, Gospel, 1:14^[40]

"Every spirit that confesses Jesus Christ come in the flesh is from God; every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God.", Saint John, First Epistle, 4:2-3^[41]

The evil world: marriage, oaths, war and meat

The whole morality follows from the dualist thesis. Since flesh is the prison of the fallen angels, to propagate flesh is a crime: marriage is refused, "fornication", say the Perfects, and procreation, which imprisons one more soul, is the worst of evils^[42]. Oaths are forbidden, for to swear is to involve God in the affairs of the evil world; shedding blood is forbidden, even the blood of animals, hence the vegetarianism of the Perfects, who refuse all flesh born of coitus, fish remaining permitted^[43]. Needless to say, these prohibitions fully bind only the Perfects: simple believers live, marry and wage war like everyone else, while awaiting the consolamentum of the final hour^[44].

The consolamentum, the unique sacrament

The whole edifice rests on a single rite, the consolamentum, the "baptism of the Spirit" by laying on of hands: the candidate, kneeling, receives the book of the Gospels on his head while the Perfects present lay their hands on him and pass on to him the Our Father, the only authorized prayer^[48]. The Lyon ritual details the ceremony word for word, and the Inquisition registers confirm that, from Languedoc to Lombardy, it was practiced everywhere in the same way^[49]. The rite can be given only by a Perfect who is himself "consoled" and in a state of purity: if the minister later falls into carnal sin, all the consolamentum rites he has conferred since then are null and must be redone, a permanent anguish for the dying, who demand the surest minister^[50].

Melioramentum, apparelhamentum, endura

A whole ritual surrounds the sacrament. The melioramentum, the triple genuflection of the believer before the Perfect accompanied by the word "Bless me" (Benedicite), marks at each meeting the boundary between the two orders^[51]. The apparelhamentum is the monthly public confession of the Perfects among themselves, where each admits his faults, eating meat by accident, touching a woman, and receives penance^[52]. The endura, finally, is the fast unto death that some persons consoled at the point of death impose on themselves in order to depart in a state of purity: attested by Inquisition depositions, its real extent remains debated among historians, some seeing in it a common practice, others an exception dramatized by the judges^[53].

The life of the Perfects: poverty, itinerancy, preaching

Once become a Perfect, the adept enters a regulated life of impressive harshness: absolute chastity, frequent fasts on bread and water, prohibition against killing and swearing, manual labor, weaving above all, hence the nickname of "weavers" given to the heretics of the North, and itinerant preaching from house to house^[54]. The Perfects travel in pairs, like the apostles, lodge with the believers who feed them fish and oil, and hold nocturnal meetings where they sing, pray and comment on the Gospel in the vernacular^[55]. Women can become Perfects, the "Good Women" keep houses that are at once workshops, schools and refuges, but they do not preach in public and do not transmit the consolamentum to men without a male witness^[56]. This austerity accounts for their success: confronted with a clergy often rich and absentee, the contrast preaches louder than sermons^[57].

Believers and last-hour heretication

The mass of sympathizers, the believers (credentes), live an ordinary life: they marry, bear arms, take oaths, eat meat^[58]. Their religion rests on three gestures: sheltering the Perfects, greeting them with the melioramentum, and themselves receiving the consolamentum on their deathbed, "heretication", as the registers call it^[59]. This two-tier system explains both the massive spread of Catharism and its fragility: tens of thousands of sympathizers, but only a few thousand Perfects, and everything collapses when the Perfects disappear^[60].

Why Languedoc? Indulgent lords and a weakened clergy

The Toulouse South brings together in the twelfth century all the conditions: a distant and tolerant count of Toulouse, a lesser nobility, the future "faidits", who protect the preachers out of hostility toward the bishop and the clergy, rich and lettered towns eager for novelties, and a parish clergy often ignorant or scandalous, whom the legates themselves denounce^[61]. The "good men" do not take castles: they take houses, workshops and consciences, and the lords, up to Count Raymond VI, shield them because they embody a Church of the country against the Church of the prelates^[62].

Lombardy: the second homeland

The second centre is northern Italy: Milan, Concorezzo near Monza, Desenzano on Lake Garda, Florence, Verona shelter rival Churches, absolute dualist Albanenses, mitigated Concorezzenses, which Rainier Sacconi describes from the inside with their bishops and their numbers^[63]. It is in Italy that Catharism produces its learned theology, the Book of the Two Principles, and it is in Italy that it survives the latest after the fall of Languedoc, until the capture of Sirmione on Lake Garda in 1278^[64].

In the north: the failure in Champagne and the Rhineland

Everywhere else, implantation fails. In the Rhineland, the early burnings, Cologne in 1143, then the repression by the archbishops, prevent any Church from becoming structured^[65]. In Champagne, the heretics discovered are burned and the movement does not take root; in Burgundy and in the North, conciliar condemnations and the absence of seigneurial protectors overcome the nascent cells^[66]. Catharism is a phenomenon of protected margins: where the prince strikes swiftly, it does not take hold.

Anathema is not enough: from Verona to Lateran III

Faced with this entrenchment, Rome hardened the law. After the council of Tours (1163), the constitution Ad abolendam of Lucius III at the council of Verona (1184) organized the episcopal repression of heresy, with the support of Emperor Frederick Barbarossa^[67]. The Third Lateran Council (1179) struck the Cathars with anathema in canon 27 and granted a crusade indulgence to the lords who would take up arms against them^[68]. In 1199, Innocent III went further with Vergentis in senium: heresy was equated there with the crime of lese-majesty, and the goods of heretics were confiscated^[69]. But texts do not convert: preachers were needed.

The Cistercian mission and the legate's blood

In 1203, Innocent III sent two Cistercian legates to the South, Peter of Castelnau and Ralph, soon joined by Arnold Amalric, abbot of Citeaux: they preached, disputed, excommunicated, with little result, so firmly did the "good men" hold the ground of consciences^[70]. On 14 January 1208, Peter of Castelnau was murdered near Saint-Gilles by a squire of the count of Toulouse: the shock decided Innocent III to proclaim the crusade, offering the combatants a plenary indulgence^[71]. The detailed account of the twenty years of war that followed, Béziers, Muret, Toulouse, the treaty of Meaux-Paris, belongs to the article Albigenses: only what concerns the fate of the dissidence is retained here.

Saint Dominic and the disputations (1206-1207)

Between the legates and the crusaders stands a decisive figure: the Castilian canon Dominic de Guzman, the future Saint Dominic. In 1206-1207, with the bishop of Osma and then a few companions, he disputed publicly with the Perfects at Montreal and then at Pamiers, in the evangelical poverty he set against their austerity: the same mendicant dress, the same itinerancy, but for Christ in his true flesh^[72]. According to Jordan of Saxony's Libellus, at Montreal, when the books of both sides were thrown into the fire, that of the Catholics leapt intact out of the flames, before the eyes of the judges^[73]. From these controversies was born the Dominican intuition: a false poverty can only be refuted by the true one, and the Order of Preachers, founded in 1216, kept from this origin its vocation for learned controversy^[74].

Lateran IV (1215): canon 3 against heretics

The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) systematized doctrine and repression: its canon 3 excommunicated heretics, ordered bishops to seek them out in their dioceses, and enjoined secular princes to punish them, on pain of themselves being struck^[75]. The same council solemnly defined the Catholic faith under attack: one single God creator of all visible and invisible things, and Christ true God and true man^[76]. Henceforth the Church had said what she believes and what she refuses: the rest belonged to the judges.

1209-1229: twenty years of war (summary)

The crusade preached in 1208 was no ordinary war of religion: it was an army of armed pilgrims, renewed each summer, sweeping down upon the South under the banner of Simon de Montfort^[77]. Béziers fell on 22 July 1209 and its population was massacred, and the words attributed to the legate Arnold Amalric, "kill them all, God will know his own," are reported only by Caesarius of Heisterbach, a generation later, and their authenticity remains doubtful^[78]. Carcassonne surrendered, Muret (1213) saw the death of King Peter II of Aragon, Minerve (1210) and Lavaur (1211) saw hundreds of Perfects mount the pyres rather than abjure^[79]. Simon died before Toulouse in 1218, his son Amaury ceded his rights to King Louis VIII, and the treaty of Meaux-Paris (12 April 1229) subdued Raymond VII: Languedoc passed under Capetian tutelage, and seigneurial protection of the Cathars collapsed^[80]. The full military account can be read in the article Albigenses.

The Inquisition: hunting down the networks (1229-1245)

The council of Toulouse, in November 1229, created the decisive instrument: in each parish, suspects would be sought out, the houses of the Perfects razed, concealers punished, this was the episcopal inquisition^[81]. From 1233 onward, Gregory IX entrusted the task to the Preaching and Minorite friars, professional judges who proceeded by inquiries, depositions and registers: the great inquiry of 1245-1246 in the Lauragais alone gathered several thousand testimonies, mapping each house, each meal shared with a Perfect^[82]. The reader will find the Catholic reading of this repression, neither black legend nor wishful thinking, in the articles How to answer the objection of the Inquisition and Heretics and the black legend of the Inquisition.

Montségur (1244), Quéribus (1255): the last castles

Deprived of protectors, the Perfects took refuge in the Pyrenean citadels. Montségur, rebuilt by the local lords to shelter the Cathar Church, withstood a nine-month siege, from May 1243 to 16 March 1244: about two hundred and ten unrepentant Perfects and believers then went down to the pyre erected at the foot of the pog rather than abjure^[83]. Quéribus, the last fortress, surrendered in August 1255^[84]. In Italy, the fall of Sirmione on Lake Garda (1278) finished off the Lombard Churches^[85].

Montaillou and the last Perfect (1318-1321)

The epilogue played out in a village of the Ariège. From 1318 to 1325, Jacques Fournier, bishop of Pamiers, the future Pope Benedict XII, hunted down the last Cathar networks of the Sabarthes: his register of interrogations, preserved and edited in the 20th century by Jean Duvernoy, brings back to life, house by house, the life of the last believers, and would provide the material for Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie's Montaillou^[86]. The last Perfect of Languedoc, Guillaume Bélibaste, a shepherd exiled in Catalonia, was lured into a trap by a spy of the Inquisition and burned at Villerouge-Termenès in 1321^[87]. In that same year the last organized traces disappeared in Italy: after nearly two centuries, there was no longer a Cathar Church.

The world is good, because God made it

Against the dualist contempt for matter, the Church holds first to Genesis: God saw all that he had made, "and behold, it was very good" (Gn 1, 31)^[88]. The Fourth Lateran Council defined it solemnly in 1215, in the midst of the Cathar crisis, by the constitution Firmiter: one single true God, "creator of all visible and invisible, spiritual and corporeal things"^[89].

"We firmly believe and simply confess that there is only one true God, eternal and immense [...], creator of all visible and invisible, spiritual and corporeal things.", Fourth Lateran Council (1215), constitution Firmiter^[90]

Saint Augustine had already refuted Manichaeism, to which he himself had belonged for nine years before his conversion, by showing that evil is not a substance rival to God, but the privation of good, as darkness is privation of light^[91]. A world evil by nature would accuse its author; a world good but wounded by sin calls for a Savior: the whole Christian faith rests on this difference^[92].

True God and true man: the Christ of Nicaea and Chalcedon

Against the phantom Christ, the Church holds to the definitions of the councils: Nicaea (325) confesses the Son "consubstantial with the Father," Chalcedon (451) confesses him "in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation"^[93]. The apostle John, whom the Cathars claimed as their own, condemns them in advance: "every spirit that does not confess Jesus [come in the flesh] is not of God" (1 Jn 4, 3)^[94]. And if Christ neither suffered nor rose in his body, then the cross is empty and the Eucharist, where the Church receives that body given up for us, is but a sham, which indeed is what the Perfects affirmed, refusing to kneel before the host^[95].

The Church, her sacraments and her priests

Against the invisible Church of the "pure," the Church holds to the promise made to Peter, "you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church" (Mt 16, 18)^[96], and to the mission given to the apostles, with the power to forgive sins and to baptize in water and the Spirit^[97]. The water baptism that the Cathars despised as a useless bath was commanded by Christ himself: "no one, unless born of water and the Spirit, can enter the Kingdom" (Jn 3, 5)^[98]. As for unworthy priests, from whom the Cathars drew their best argument, the Church answers with Saint Augustine against the Donatists: the validity of the sacrament does not depend on the holiness of the minister^[99], an answer that at the same time ruins the Cathar dread of a fallen Perfect invalidating all his consolamentum.

Marriage and the flesh restored

Against the refusal of marriage, the Church holds to the word of Christ: "what God has joined, let man not separate" (Mt 19, 6)^[100]. Saint Paul had prophesied the objection to the letter, eleven centuries before the Perfects:

"The Spirit expressly says that, in the last times, some will abandon the faith [...]. They will forbid marriage, they will prohibit the use of foods that God created to be received with thanksgiving [...]. For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected when it is received with thanksgiving.", Saint Paul, First Epistle to Timothy, 4, 1-5^[101]

Forbidding marriage, proscribing foods: the portrait is so exact that the medieval controversialists, Alain of Lille foremost, had only to open their New Testament to refute the "good men"^[102].

Historiography: from Runciman to the debate of the 2000s

Scholarly study began with Steven Runciman and his Medieval Manicheism (1947), which established the continuity between Paulicians, Bogomils and Cathars^[103]. Jean Duvernoy then edited the decisive sources: the Inquisition register of Jacques Fournier, the Occitan ritual, the chronicle of William of Puylaurens, giving historians the very texts of the vanquished and of their judges^[104]. Anne Brenon and the Centre for Cathar Studies at Carcassonne renewed the synthesis in the 1980s-1990s, with an avowed sympathy that takes nothing from its documentary solidity^[105].

Since the 2000s, a revisionist school, Robert I. Moore, Mark Pegg and his Corruption of Angels (2001), has maintained that "Catharism" as a unified Church would be essentially a construction of the inquisitors imposed upon disparate local dissidences^[106]. The thesis shook certainties, but it leaves unanswered the most awkward pieces of evidence: the rituals written by the dissidents themselves, the charter of Saint-Félix confirmed by the registers, and the spontaneous vocabulary of the believers of Montaillou, earlier than the judges' frameworks^[107]. Denying the Cathar Church requires explaining away too many papers.

Myths and appropriations: treasure, Grail, sun of Montségur

The tragic end fed a tenacious folklore: the Cathar treasure smuggled out of Montségur on the night of the fall, the Grail hidden in the land of Oc, the solar orientation of the fortress, so many legends without documentary foundation, some of which, such as Otto Rahn's "crusade against the Grail" in the 1930s, were appropriated by Nazi esotericism^[108]. The "Cathar country" is today a tourist brand of the Aude and Ariège, between vertiginous castles and festivals: the emotion there is sincere, the history often simplified^[109]. As for the small "Cathar" Churches reconstituted in the 20th century, they belong to contemporary invention, with no continuity with the Perfects of the Middle Ages^[110].

• The Balkan roots: Bogomilism (10th-15th century), the priest Bogomil, Satanael, and the road to the West
• The Armenian ancestors: Paulicianism, Constantine of Mananalis, Sergius, Tephrike and Thrace
• The holy war 1209-1229: Albigenses, Béziers, Muret, Toulouse and the treaty of Meaux-Paris
• The poor cousins of Lyon: Waldensians, Valdes, evangelical poverty and the rupture
• The preacher of controversy: Saint Dominic, Montreal, Pamiers and the founding of the Preachers
• The canons that decide: Third Lateran Council (1179) and Fourth Lateran Council (1215)
• Understanding the repression: How to answer the objection of the Inquisition and Heretics and the black legend of the Inquisition