The Cathars:  Cathar Beliefs:  Catholic Views of Catharism - the Cathar Heresy

The Cathar heresy - "The Great Heresy" - as the Roman Catholics knew it, was dangerous and pernicious, just like its ancient Dualist antecedents such as Mithraism, Manichaeism and Bogomilism. Modern Roman Catholic theological works still refer to the "Cathar Heresy". This is an idea that some other mainstream Churches have abandoned - many of them recognise Cathar ideas as informing the creation of their own belief systems. Click here for more on this.

A Heresy or not a Heresy? For most Catholics, it was enough to know that Cathars were heretics, but some theologians posed substantial questions.  Between themselves, orthodox authorities debated for many centuries whether the Cathar Religion was a Christian heresy or whether it was not a Christian religion at all. The Catholic Encyclopedia represents the latest authorised view.  Here is its statement on the status of Catharism (=Albigensianism):

Properly speaking, Albigensianism was not a Christian heresy but an extra-Christian religion.

The success of the Cathars was also of intellectual interest. In the past it was attributed to demonic assistance, but alternative explanations are now sought. Here is the Catholic Encyclopedia's statement on the reason for the success of Cathar beliefs in the Languedoc.

The rise and spread of the new doctrine in southern France was favoured by various circumstances, among which may be mentioned: the fascination exercised by the readily-grasped dualistic principle; the remnant of Jewish and Mohammedan doctrinal elements; the wealth, leisure, and imaginative mind of the inhabitants of Languedoc; their contempt for the Catholic clergy, caused by the ignorance and the worldly, too frequently scandalous, lives of the latter; the protection of an overwhelming majority of the nobility, and the intimate local blending of national aspirations and religious sentiment.

Catholic Arguments against the Cathar Heresy. Many arguments were marshalled against the Cathars. Some were closely reasoned, some little more than hostile propaganda. Here are some of the arguments.

Biblical passages clearly state that God, not Satan, created the world.  How then, could Cathars claim that this world was an evil creation?  The Cathar answer was that the world had been created by the bad god, the god of the Old Testament.  (They regarded the God of the Old Testament, Jehovah, as a different deity to the good God, the God of Light. Though it is a slight simplification to put it like this, for them, Jehovah equated to Satan). They found confirmation of their ideas in the New Testament. (2 Corinthians 4:4 refers specifically to Satan as the god of this world).  

But this did not account for passages in the New Testament. For example, the opening verses of the John Gospel - the Cathars' favourite gospel - say that nothing was made without the creator god. 

In the beginning was the Word:
and the Word was with God
and the Word was God.
He was with God in the beginning.
Through him all things came into being,
not one thing came into being except through him.

To answer to this the Cathars favoured a contrived reading of the text which accorded with their beliefs. They taught that the Good God had created all things of any value (light, souls and other immaterial creations) - all these were both real and good. The bad god had created all worthless things - material objects, including this world - and all these were both illusory and evil. According to the Cathar reading of the opening text of John, god - the good god - had caused all good things to come into being, but not the bad things. They supported this by reading "no one thing" (New Jerusalem Bible; "nothing" in most other translations) as "nothingness". As they read it, "nothingness" (ie all that is material) was created not by the good god but by the evil god, Jehovah.  In other words they read the last two lines roughly as follows (my translation into English):

Through him all real [ie immaterial] things were created,
But nothingness was not created by him.

In this way the text was reconciled to their doctrine that the good god had created all immaterial things and the bad god all material ones. Here is an unsympathetic medieval Catholic writer purporting to artculate the Cathar Case: I admit that God created all things. This means all good things, but He did not make the evil, vain, perishable, and visible things; a lesser creator, Lucifer, made them, whence the words of John, "Without Him was made nothing". Moreover, [we must] interpret the phrase "The world was made by Him" as meaning worldly souls, namely, our own. But our bodies and all other visible things were made by a lesser creator, the devil.

The text is from an unidentified Catholic writer in the period 1240-50, known only as George, probably a northern Italian. Disputio inter catholicum et paterinum hereticum in Edmond Martene and Ursin Durand, Thesaurus novum anecdotorum (5 vols, Paris, 1717), Vol V, 1705-11.. English translation from wakefield & Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages, §47, p291.

Another problem was that passages of the New Testament seem to accept marriage as a natural state.  How then could Cathars deny that it was divinely sanctioned?  Their answer was that there is no clear sanction anywhere in the New Testament for marriage, and that the verses that seem to refer to marriage at all are to be interpreted as referring to Christ and the Cathar Church. Though an odd explanation to modern ears, this was far from odd to medieval minds. Indeed, to this day the Roman Catholic Church explains the sex scenes in the Song of Songs in the precisely same way. 

 

Cathar Practises

Cathar practices also posed problems for Catholic scholars. Some scholars seem to have been mystified, right up to the twentieth first century, by the way that Cathar practices seemed to mimic the ancient form of Catholic practices. Up until then the only explanation was that the Cathars must have perverted Catholic practices.

Also, they pretend that there are two churches: the beneficent one, they say, is their sect, which they declare to be the Church of Jesus Christ. But the other they call the evil Church; this they hold to be the Roman Church, which they shamelessly refer to as the mother of fornication, the great Babylon, the harlot and cathedral of the devil, and the synagogue of Satan. They despise and distort all its offices, its orders, its ordinations, and its statutes. They call all who hold its faith heretics and sinners, and they declare as dogma that no one can be saved in the faith of the Roman Church. Also, all the sacraments of the Roman Church of our Lord Jesus Christ - the Eucharist or sacrament of the alter, baptism which makes use of actual water, confirmation, ordination, extreme unction, penance, and marriage of man and woman - each and every one they declare empty and vain. And, like monkeys, they devise in imitation certain others which seem almost like them. In place of baptism by water, they concoct another baptism, a spiritual one, which they call the consolamentum of the Holy Spirit…

Bernard Gui, Practica inquisitionis heretice pravitatis, Part V, ch 1 (c 1323) (English translation cited by Wakefield & Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages, p379).

The Cathar Consolamentum could be interpreted as a perverted version of baptism, confirmation, final unction, or ordination. The Lord's prayer or Pater as used by the Cathar heretics differed in two important respects from the version used by the Roman Catholic Church - which again proved that they were using a perverted version of it.

It never occurred to mainstream theologians that Cathar practices might have preserved strands of the same ancient traditions that underlay the Catholic practices. Or at least they never said so publicly. (As a matter of fact there is circumstantial evidence that the Cathar form of the Pater preserves an older tradition than the Catholic one, just as the consolamentum preserves a tradition from before the Roman Church divided a single rite into Confirmation and Ordination)

Other less sophisticated arguments hinged on righteous horror at Cathar teachings, sometimes based on fact, for example views on contraception, reincarnation, eating meat, the status of women, attitudes to wealth and power, representation of the cross, religious icons, and (perhaps) suicide; sometimes on misunderstandings (eg incest, sodomy, bestiality, and other sex crimes).

Probably the least sophisticated arguments were forms of abuse likening Cathar ideas to a sort of spiritual illness. The Cathar heresy was a sicknesses to be wiped out, a wound to be cauterised, an infested canker to be purified by fire. Cathar influences were described as a miasma or poisonous mist. Catharism is still referred to in modern works as a disease, an epidemic, a plague, a pestilence, a cancerous tumour to by cut from the body of Christendom. For a good example of modern Catholic thought on this topic see Hilaire Belloc, The Albigensian Attack, Chapter Five ofThe Great Heresies

 

Public Disputes

In the early years a series of public debates were organised between Catholics and Cathars (and sometimes Waldensians as well). Both sides were prepared to participate as they both thought that they could win the rational argument, and expose the errors of the other side. In some cases a panel of independent assessors was appointed to give a formal verdict on who won the debate. Over time the Catholic Church seems to have lost its enthusiasm for these public debates as it failed to win either arguments or converts. The enthusiasm of the Cathar side never seems to have waned, which is in itself suggestive. So are Peter des Vaux de Cernay's excuses in his Historia Albigensis (He constructs improbable explanations for the failure of the adjudicators to find for the Catholic side - for example that the adjudicators feared to offend the Cathars).

We can see that the best Catholic arguments failed to convince, and it is more than possible that these arguments served to bring the Catholic Church even further into disrepute. The people of the Languedoc often made fun of priests, monks, bishops, abbots and cardinals. Arnaud Amaury for example invited ridicule by preaching povety while living like a prince. Saint Dominic's case could not have been helped by his misogynist assistant trying to deny the most highly respected Parfaite of the age a hearing in what was supposed to be an open debate. Proofs that depended on belief in relics like Saint Bernard of Clairvaux' finger bones, improbable miracles and stories of demonic machinations also invited further ridicule. Most tellingly, Catholic learning was apparently not of the highest standard. The Cathars of the Languedoc spoke Occitan, but were well aware where their faith came from, and that the New Testament had been written in Greek. Catholic churchmen were convinced that the Bible had been written in Latin, and based on this error they baulked at conducting theological discussions in any other language. As a Papal Legate put it after one exchange "everyone knows God wrote the Bible in Latin". The hoots of derision from educated Languedocians to blunders like this must have mystified the Catholic churchmen present, all of whom would have shared the legate's level of ignorance.

"everyone knows God wrote the Bible in Latin" The Papal Legate in question was Henry of Marcy, the Bishop of Bath, soon to be raised to Cardinal of Albano. "[Q]uia evangelia et epistolae, quibus tantummodo fidem suam volebant confirmare, Latino eloquio noscuntur esse conscripta", Roger of Hovedon, Gesta Regis Henrici Secundi Benedicti Abbati. Editor William Stubbs. Rolls series, (London, Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1867), 1:203. Cited by Frederic L Cheyette, Ermingarde of Narbonne and the World of the Troubadours, p 318.

In any case as the Roman Church turned to violence to enforce its own brand of Christianity, it became ever less enthusiastic about facing Cathars or even suspected Cathars in front of laymen. There is clear evidence that experienced Inquisitors would take care not to allow laymen to hear conversations between themselves and alleged Cathars. The danger seems to have been that humiliated Inquisitors might feel obliged to acquit accused persons whose arguments were judged by lay onlookers to be superior. As one famous Inquisitor, Bernard Gui, put it:

… the faithful laity see occasion for scandal in the fact that the proceedings of the Inquisition once started against someone are abandoned, as it were, in confusion, and they are to some extent weakened in the faith by observing that learned men are thus mocked by low and uncouth persons. For they believe that we have at our command in support of the faith arguments so clear and obvious that no one may oppose us in these matters without our knowing at once how to overcome him, in such wise that even laymen may clearly perceive just what these reasons are. Hence, in such a situation, it is not expedient to dispute in matters of the faith against such astute heretics in the presence of laymen

Bernard Gui, Practica inquisitionis heretice pravitatis, preface to Part V (c 1323) (English translation by Wakefield & Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages, p377).

 

Catholic Acceptance of Cathar Views

Because the catholic Church exterminated medieval Catharism, through its Crusades and Inquisitions, it is easy to forget that contemporary Catholics of the Languedoc lived side by side with the Cathars without, as far as we know, any problem at all. At Béziers many thousands of Catholics died because they refused to give up their Cathar neighbours to the Crusaders in 1209. We know that Catholic rulers of the region tolerated Cathars. We know that many noble families contained both Catholic bishops or abbots and also Cathar Parfaits. We know that Catholic priests in the Languedoc attended Cathar ceremonies - sometimes apparently just being good neighbours, sometimes because they were themselves Cathar Believers.

Here is an extract from a letter from a monk named Heribert, written around 1147 from an area neighbouring the Languedoc, over half a century before the Crusade against the Cathars of the Languedoc. Herbert is a most hostile witness, yet he does not seek to disguise the appeal of what he regards as pseudoprophets and heretics:

Very many persons have already gone over to this deception, not only only some who abandoned their noble status, but also the clergy - priests, monks and nuns. No one is such a rustic that, if he but ally himself with them, he may not become in the space of eight days so wise a scholar that he can be overcome neither in discussion nor in citation

Herberti monachi epistola de haereticis Petragoricis - Migne, Patrologia latina, CLXXXI, 1721-22. English translation from Wakefield & Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages, p 139.

 

Roman Catholic Source Documents:

Note that most authorities on the Cathars refer to them as Cathars (although they never used this name themselves). Most Roman Catholic sources refer to them as Albigenses or Albigensians.

Canon Three of the Fourth Lateran Council (1215)      Outlining how to proceed against Cathar heretics.

Accusations against the Albigensians      An account from the early thirteenth century chronicle by Raynaldus, a Cistercian monk and Catholic opponent of the Cathar heresy.

Technique of Interrogations      [1307-1323], by an Inquisitor, Bernard Gui (who, incidentally, made a guest appearance in Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.

Inquisitors' Manual       [1307-1323] Bernard GUI

Medieval Heresies      Caesarius of Heisterbach, from Dialogue on Miracles, V. Discussion of Waldensians, Albigenses, and "intellectual heretics" at Paris.

The Inquisition Record, Jacques Fournier, Bishop of Pamiers 1318-1325       [At SJSU] English translation by Nancy P. Stork of selected confessions by Cathar heretics and Jews to Bishop Jacques Fournier and the Inquisition at Pamiers:

• Barthélemy Amilhac (priest and husband of Béatrice de Planissolles)
• Agnes Francou (member of the sect of the Poor of Lyons)
• Arnaud Gélis (drunkard and prognosticator)
• Baruch (Jew baptized under threat of death)
• Béatrice de Planissolles (noblewoman)
• Grazide Lizier (widow and priest's concubine)
• Guillemette Battegay (widow)
• Jacqueline den Carot (scoffer)
• Navarre Bru (widow)

Hilaire Belloc, The Albigensian Attack, Chapter Five of Hilaire Belloc's The Great Heresies

The Catholic Encyclopedia's article on the Albigenses