The Perfect Heresy: The Life and Death of the Cathars

by Stephen O'Shea

The Cathedral of Ste-Cécile, Albi

There is no transept; thus the church does not even have the redemptive shape of the cross.

For centuries, it had just one small door. Unlike the other great French cathedrals in Paris, Chartres, Rheims, Bourges,

Rouen, and Amiens, there were no messy markets under Ste-Cécile’s soaring vault, no snoring wayfarers on its floor, no livestock droppings to slop out in the mornings, no grand portals to let in the air breathed by ordinary men. The church’s exterior was—and still is—a monument to...

“Kill them all, God will know his own.” The sole catchphrase of the Cathar conflict to be handed down to posterity is attributed to Arnold Amaury, the monk who led the Albigensian Crusade.

The Albigensian Crusade, which lasted from 1209 to 1229, was launched by the most powerful pope of the Middle Ages, Innocent III, and initially prosecuted by a gifted warrior, Simon de Montfort, under the approving eye of Arnold Amaury.

The crusade’s two decades of salutary slaughter then gave way to fifteen years of fitful revolt and repression, which culminated in the siege of Montségur in 1244.

After 1095, the year Pope Urban II had urged Christendom to retake Jerusalem, tens of thousands had gone charging off to Palestine in search of adventure

The Cathars were joined by other heretical groups—notably the Waldensians, or the “Poor Men of Lyons”—in lashing out at the mainstream religion.

by other heretical groups—notably the Waldensians, or the “Poor Men of Lyons”—in lashing out at the mainstream religion.

Arguably, Languedoc “belonged” with Aragon, not with the Frankish northerners who would someday create the entity known as France.

For the Cathars, the world was not the handiwork of a good god. It was wholly the creation of a force of darkness, immanent in all things. Matter was corrupt, therefore irrelevant to salvation. Little if any attention had to be paid to the elaborate systems set up to bully people into obeying the man with the sharpest sword, the fattest wallet,

irrelevant to salvation. Little if any attention had to be paid to the elaborate systems set up to bully people into obeying the man with the sharpest sword, the fattest wallet, or the biggest stick of incense. Worldly authority was a fraud, and worldly authority based on some divine sanction, such as the Church claimed, was outright hypocrisy.

or the biggest stick of incense. Worldly authority was a fraud, and worldly authority based on some divine sanction, such as the Ch...

The god deserving of Cathar worship was a god of light, who ruled the invisible, the ethereal, the spiritual domain; this god, unconcerned with the material, simply didn’t care if you got into bed before getting married, had a Jew or Muslim for a friend, treated men and women as equals, or did anything else contrary to the teachings of the medieval Church. It was up to the individual (man or woman) to decide whether he or she was willing to reno...

unconcerned with the material, simply didn’t care if you got into bed before getting married, had a Jew or Muslim for a friend, treated men and women as equals, or did anything else contrary to the teachings of the medieval Church. It was up to the individual (man or woman) to decide whether he or she was willing to renounce the material for a l...

Hell was here, not in some horrific afterlife dreamed up by Rome to scare people out of their wits. To believe in what is called the Two Principles of creation (Evil in the visible, Good in the invisible) is to

be a dualist, an adherent to a notion that has been shared by other creeds in the long course of humanity’s grappling with the unknowable. Christian Cathar dualism, however, posited a meeting place between Good and Evil: within the breast of every human being. There, our wavering divine spark, the remnant of our earlier, angelic state, waited patiently to be freed from the cycle of reincarnations.

The medieval sexual status quo would have been undermined if everybody had believed, as the Cathars did, that a nobleman in one life might be a milkmaid in the next, or that women were fit to be spiritual leaders.

Cathar repugnance to the practice of swearing oaths. Minor though this may seem to us now, medieval man thought otherwise, for the swearing of an oath was the contractual underpinning of early feudal society.

Their name, once thought to mean “the pure,” is not their own invention; Cathar is now taken as a twelfth-century German play on words implying a cat worshiper.

It was long bruited about that Cathars performed the so-called obscene kiss on the rear end of a cat. They

were said to consume the ashes of dead babies and indulge in incestuous orgies. Also common was the epithet bougre, a corruption of Bulgar—a reference to a sister church of heretical dualists in e...

was the invention of a companion of the crusade who related that the heretics believed that no one could sin from the waist down.

One need only refer to Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s classic work on one of the last redoubts of Catharism, to see the value of Inquisition registers in reconstructing the past.

The heart of the story, however, takes place between the Cathars’ rise and fall, in the momentous time of open conflict that began with the sack of Béziers in 1209 and ended at the fall of Montségur in 1244.

disciple of David Hume: “The past has no existence except as a succession of present mental states.”

Close to the shore rise the bleached heights of the Corbières, a range of limestone peaks that stretches inland to the south of the River Aude.

broad rich plain of Toulouse, leaden green in the heat. The great city, surpassed in size only by Rome and Venice in the Latin Christendom of 1200, sits on a bend of the River Garonne as it uncoils slowly on its long journey to the Atlantic. The river rises far in the south, in the rock and snow that separate France from Spain.

Languedoc is a contraction of langue d’oc, that is, the language of yes—or rather, the languages in which the word yes is oc, not oui.

It was in the Occitan language that troubadour poetry first flowered in the twelfth century.

The small town of St. Félix en Lauragais, huddled on its prow of granite in a sea of waving

green,

heresiarchs

reciting a prayer that asked for

assurance of a good end to their lives. This ritual, known as the melioramentum, marked the supplicants as believers in the Cathar message. These believers, or credentes, were not, properly speaking, Cathars but rather sympathizers who bore witness and showed deference to the faith. The cred...

Throughout Languedoc the believers overwhelmingly outnumbered the holy few, whom the Church would later label the Perfect—as in perfected, or fully initiated, heretics. It was the Perfect, the black-robed visitors to St. Félix, who were the true, seditious Cathars. An austere class of monks-in-the-world, the Perfect showed by example alon...

sa...

sere

Through Nicetas’s fingers passed the power of the consolamentum, the sole dualist sacrament. It transformed the ordinary believer into one of the Perfect, who then, in turn, could “console” others ready to live their final, holy life.

The Perfect had to abstain from any form of sexual intimacy, pray constantly, and fast frequently. When allowed to eat, they had to avoid all meat and any byproduct of reproduction, such as cheese, eggs, milk, or butter. They could, however, drink wine and eat fish, as the latter was believed by medieval man to be the product of spontaneous generation in water.

The Cathars believed that Jesus of Nazareth, an apparition rather than a gross material being, had come to Earth as a messenger carrying the dualist truth and as the initiator of the chain of the consolamentum.

Tanchelm of Antwerp rode roughshod over wealthy prelates, attracting an army of followers who, it is said, revered him so much that they drank his bathwater.

As for Jesus of Nazareth, they avoided saying that he was a mere apparition, a hallucination who could not possibly have been a being of flesh and blood. That—a heretical opinion known as Docetism—