Cathar Beliefs 2
Abstract
Albigensian Beliefs
In the west, the word Cathar means the Albigensians. The name Albigenses was given to the Catharist heretics of Languedoc from 1181 when it was used by the chronicler Geoffrey de Vigeois. The Albigensians take their name from Albi, an important town in one of those southern provinces of France which were to that country what southern California is to the United States. In these southern provinces, the brilliant example of the Spanish Moors was known best. Before the end of the eleventh century the heresy of the Bogomils was imported into them by missionaries from Bulgaria or Bosnia. The name of Bulgarians (“Bougres”) was often applied to the Albigenses, who communicated with the Bogomil sectaries of Thrace. They resemble, in their dualism, the Bogomils, and still more the Paulicians. A few Albigensian works are still extant:
- Rituel Cathare de Lyon, Editor, Cunitz (Jena, 1852)
- Nouveau Testament en Provençal, Editor, Cledat (Paris, 1887)
- Debat d’Yzarn et de Sicart de Figueiras, Editor Meyer (1880).
In the Albigeois district, the majority of the population went over to the new religion. St Bernard of Clairvaux, the most famous preacher of the time, campaigned there in 1147 AD. He made no impression. The Papacy was alarmed! These Cathari numbered at least hundreds of thousands in France alone.
Cathars had two castes, the Perfecti or Parfaits and Credentes or Croyants. The Perfecti, women no less than men, were effectively the professionals or priests, and the others the lay brothers and sisters. They were people of high character. They held high moral standards and upheld scripture against the divines of the Churches with their commitment to matters of pleasure and politics. They were adored by the faithful, who were taught to prostrate themselves before them whenever they asked for their prayers, because the Holy Spirit already dwelt in them. None but them had received into their hearts the spirit of God´s Son, which cries “Abba, Father”. They alone were adopted sons, and so able to use the Lord´s Prayer, which begins, “Our Father, which art in heaven”. The Perfect alone knew God and could address him in this prayer, the only one they used in their ceremonies. The believers could invoke a living saint, and ask them to pray for them.
The division of Cathars into Perfecti and Credentes is similar to the Manichæan distinction between Electi and Auditores. But Josephus says the Essenes had two classes, the celibate class and the married class, exactly matching these later sects, especially as the celibate Essenes called themselves the Elect or the Chosen, and also considered themselves the Perfectly Holy ones or Saints. The supposed rejection of marriage of the Cathars is well known only to mean the Parfaits, the Credentes marrying as a contract or bond, but not as a holy sacrament. Moreover, the Parfaits were not allowed to so much as touch a Croyant of the opposite sex. The Essenes, were not allowed to touch anyone of a lesser rank, because of their ideas about cleanliness.
The Cathari claimed that their doctrine was the true Christianity. They were the followers of the early Christian Church. A Cathar Ritual, written in the Provençal language and preserved in a thirteenth century MS in Lyons, writes the Abbé Guiraud, no too favourable a witness:
Recall those of the primitive church with a truth and precision the more striking the nearer we go back to the apostolic age.
The medieval inquisitor saw in them an aping of the rites of the Catholic church, but they were really:
Archaeological vestiges (survivals) of the primitive Christian liturgy. In the bosom of medieval society they were the last witness to a state of things that the regular development of Catholic cult had amplified and modified. They resemble the erratic blocks which lost amid alien soils recall, where we find them, the geological conditions of earlier ages. This being so, it is of the deepest interest to study the Cathar cult, since through its rites we can get a glimpse of those of the primitive church, about which want of documents leaves us too often in the dark.Abbé Guiraud
The central Cathar rite was consolamentum, or baptism with spirit and fire. The spirit received was the Paraclete derived from God and sent by Christ, who said, “The Father is greater than I”. Cathars knew of no Trinity. Redemption flowed from the evangelical teachings not the death on the cross, which was a devilish trick. They had three ranks of Perfects, not that they were better than each other or paid differently (they were not paid at all) but apparently merely on precedence—majorales (bishops), presbyters and deacons.
The true world is spiritual, eternal and heavenly. This material world is the antithesis of the world eternal, of the inward person renewed day by day, of Christ’s peace and kingdom which are not of this world. For Cathars, Satan was the God of this world, the visible, temporal and material world, and, as Yehouah, inspired the malevolent parts of the Old Testament. He is the lord of the physical person which is decaying, of the flesh which corrupts and makes people captives to desire and sin, of the body of death. Humanity is made of the two principles, the outcome of a primal war in heaven, when the rebellious angels were driven off and were imprisoned in terrestrial bodies, created for them by the adversary. But their celestial bodies, purely spirit (akin to the fravashis of Zoroastrianism), were left behind in heaven. Humans are the fallen angels themselves imprisoned in their bodies, and the aim of life is to realise it and reverse the fall, uniting the soul in the spirit.
Raynaldus, who told us the Perfects wore a black robe, said the Cathars believed human souls are those of angelic spirits who, being cast down from heaven by the apostacy of pride, left their glorified bodies in the air. After successively inhabiting seven earthly bodies, having at length fulfilled their penance, these souls return to those deserted glorified bodies.
The human soul came from the good principle, but their bodies came from the bad. Imprisoned in the garment of flesh, burdened with its sin, souls long to be clothed with their habits left in heaven. They are “buildings from God, houses not made with hands, tunics eternal”, to which the human soul aspires, and eventually returns. Death is no liberation. So long as they are at home in the body, they are absent from God, but would rather be with God. God’s spiritual world is the antithesis of this material one, so, souls had to free themselves from the material by a spiritual purification, which often required several incarnations. A person has to become a new Adam, like Christ, receive the gift of the spirit and become a Paraclete. If they do not, they are reborn in the flesh until they learn.
They were universalists in that they believed in the ultimate salvation of all humanity. Since this world is the world of the Devil, we actually live in hell! There is only one way to go, and that is into the spirit, which is why everyone must be saved eventually. The myth of the descent of Christ into hell, was the story of his descending from heaven to earth as god’s redeemer of humanity. The Church had imbued the whole of Europe with an unhealthy obsession with hell fire. Many people had become convinced that only through the Church could they avoid an eternal roasting. It gave immense power to those who wielded the magic cups and rituals of Christianity, and, particularly, could withhold them in excommunication and interdict, to put terror into princes and nations respectively. Catharism removed this powerful weapon from Catholicism. Since the Cathar believed they lived in hell and the Catholic Church was one of Satan’s instruments, they knew they had nothing worse to fear. That is why they died so nobly, and why the Church was determined to make them suffer as much as it could while it could.
Interestingly, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) of Florence was disliked by the Italian Catholics, failing in his ambitions in politics through the opposition of the Catholics of pope Boniface VIII. Moreover, the art of the troubadours of the Cathar country of Languedoc was the inspiration for his famous Comedie. The view presented is that the resurrected Christ would have when descending through the levels to get to the Devil in his abode. In it, in the frigid desolation of an ice-palace, Dante’s Devil is a giant weeping uncontrollably, partly frozen in the ice at the center of the world—the lowest level of hell. Dante describes the residence of the sovereign of hell as surrounded by a thick fog, so as to make it necessary for the poet to be led by the hand of his guide. The various levels and categories of sin simply show the material world as it is. The Devil at its center is shown as the god of the material existence, and God is nowhere to be seen in this because he is raised on high, a long way away, in a spiritual level quite different from all this. It is the Cathar cosmogony that is illustrated. Man can rise to God, but weighed down by earthly attractions, he will simply sink lower into the eternal ice. That this ice hell can be traced back to gnosticism would show the direct link of gnosticism with Iranian religion and mythology.
The Catholics were in a sense right in saying that Satan was the Cathar God because he was the God of this world, in their cosmogony, but they did not worship him. That is the Catholic propaganda and calumny which led to the idea of Satanism, and that witches worshipped Satan. Cathars disdained the false and perfidious God of the Catholics who created a thousand men to save a single one, while damning all the rest. For them, this was Satanic!
The resurrection of the body cannot take place, because flesh is material and so evil. For the Cathars, those who die unreconciled to God through Christ are reincarnated either as an animal or as a human—the wicked soul will seek any refuge it can. Lea states that the early Christians had the idea of transmigration to allow for injustice. So, there is nothing that could not be explained in Catharism as the continuation of primitive Christianity into the middle ages. In that time, the Christianity of the state which the emperors called Catholic, changed a great deal, and it seems unlikely that the primitive form did not itself change to some degree, but it seems closer to the beliefs of the Essenes than Catholicism, and is the reason why the modern Christians do not want to see Christianity in Essenism.
In Catharism, Christ was a life giving spirit and the boni homines (bonhommes) or good men, the Cathar Parfaits, were his ambassadors. They are instituted with the spiritual baptism by fire instituted by Christ. It was utterly different from the baptism by water which belonged only to the fleeting material world. Cathars were those who had been “consoled” by this gift of the Paraclete.
The Cathar scheme of salvation was essentially the same as the Paulician one. For them too, Jesus is Christ and Son of God by grace and faithful obedience. The fully intiated caste, the Parfaits, received the holy ghost becoming Christs just as Christ did at his baptism. Photius and Petrus Siculus confirm this. The Parfaits are presbyters who have been “consoled” and become a Paraclete in the flesh. Catholic critics said they were “self-conferred priests” and “calling themselves Christs”. The Cathar Perfects or Elect were each of them considered as Christs being filled with the holy spirit, and the ordinary Cathar “hearers” were ready to worship them as Christs. The Parfaits were Christs and they presented themselves in the form of a cross. Here is something in common with the Celtic saints who were regarded in the same way, the Christ in them being considered worthy of veneration. Adumnan, in his “Life of S Columba”, describes how “a humble man worshipped Christ in the holy man”.
They would stand in prayer with their arms outstretched in the form of a cross while the audience of “croyants” adored the Christ in them. They supposedly laid flat before them, but it is more likely they bowed with their head to the ground in Islamic style. It was precisely because the Cathars regarded Christ to be physically with them in the form of their holy caste of Perfects that they rejected images of Christ on the cross and symbols like the cross itself. Particularly, they hated the idea that Roman priests had that Christ was somehow confined in the cross, and could be taken around and shaken on to believers like a condiment.
The main rite, the consolamentum, was baptism with the spirit of the Paraclete or Comforter brought from God by Christ. This baptism of the spirit removed original sin, righted the effects of the Fall, prepared the soul for the return to heaven, and restored immortality. To be one of the consoled was already to be an angel, waiting temporarily in the flesh for its return to heaven, and the beatific vision of Christ. It is plain to see why these people faced death as heretics, and witches burnt to death with such composure.
The three year probation called “abstinence” which led up to it is the primitive catechumenate with its scrutinies. The prostrations of the credens before the Perfect were in their manner and import identical with the prostrations of the catechumen before the exorcist. We find the same custom in the Celtic church of S Columba. At the third scrutiny, the early catechumen passed a last examination in the gospels, creed and Lord´s Prayer, so after their year of abstinence the credentes receives creed and prayer. The litany with which the elder “handed on” this prayer is preserved, and the Abbé Guiraud remarks that it could easily be believed to be of Catholic origin, it is so Christian in tone! He remarks also that an inquisitor might have used it quite as well as a heretic.
All of those aspiring to the rank of Perfect are called Peter, as in the corresponding Armenian rite. He explains from scripture the indwelling of the spirit in the Perfect, and his adoption as a son by God—his adoption as the son of God. The Lord’s prayer is repeated by the postulant after the elder, who explains it verse by verse. Then comes the renunciation when the postulant reounces the church of the persecutors, the cross, earthly baptism, and the rest. Spiritual baptism is the laying on of hands while the gospel was pressed against the head of the Peter. Various passages are read and the Perfect is given the right to bind and loose. The Perfect agrees to adhere strictly to the ten commandments and the sermon on the mount. The Perfect replies:
I have this will and determination. Pray God for me that he will give me strength.
The second century Roman confiteor (“I confess”) follows:
Perfect postulant: For all the sins I have committed, in word or thought or deed, I come for pardon to God and to the Church and to you all.
Christian congregation: By God and by us and by the Church may they be pardoned thee and we pray God that He pardon you them.
Then comes the act of consolation. The presiding Perfect takes the gospel from a white cloth where it has been during the ceremony, and places it against the postulants’s head, while the other Good Men present place their hands on his head. Simple prayers are repeated several times, then they say:
Holy Father, welcome thy servant in thy justice, and send upon him thy grace and thy Holy Spirit.
Then they repeat the earlier prayers again ending with the Lord’s prayer and a quotation from the beginning of John. This Believer is now Perfect. The Perfect Ones present give the new one the kiss of peace and the rite ends.
The rite had been started by Christ and had been passed on by the bonhommes. It was the equivalent of the apostolic succession in Catholicism. The consolamentum could only be given by somebody who had received from another “good Christian” or a “Parfait”. It contrasted with the Catholic interpretation which was that the magical succession could be passed even through the hands of someone wicked. The Perfects were the Elect, the only ones properly able to use the Lord’s prayer which begins, “Our Father”, as adopted “sons” through the consolamentum. The Cathar church was organised into dioceses, whose bishops presided over the elder and younger sons, deacons, male perfecti and female perfectae, their priesthood. The believers prayed through the Perfects who were considered as saints—they were perfectly holy. Bernard of Clairvaux said that they lived basically good, even if heretical, lives.
Parfaits always travelled in pairs just as Jesus instructed the apostles to do, probably following Essene practice. The reasons were that a younger “son” would travel with an experienced one as an apprentice, and learn at the feet of the master, but also the two could preach more effectively together, and they could help each other to overcome any temptations that came their way. The Waldenses also travelled in pairs.
Like the Essenes a thousand years before, they were successful healers and doctors, with herbs and stones. The Cathars did not believe in a Last Judgement, believing instead that this material world would end only when the last of the angelic souls had been released from it, a marked difference from Zoroastrianism and conventional Christianity.
The life of a Perfect was so hard and so fraught with danger, once the persecution started by the Catholics, that most people left the consolamentum until their deathbed act. The Catholic deathbed sacrament of “extreme unction” was introduced to compete with the death-bed consolamentum of the Catharists.
The Parfaits were strictly chaste once they had received the consolamentum, so they had to leave their wife and family. A male Perfect could not lay his hand on a woman without incurring penance of a three day fast. They rejected all sexual concourse because it pandered to the physical pleasure of the material body and that was under the law of Satan. The sin of Adam and Eve had been coitus. Angels had no need of sexuality because they were immortal. In the kingdom of God, there is no marrying or giving in marriage. Parfaits were notional angels already, and could not compromise their provisional angelic status for worldly enjoyment.
The Perfect must also leave his father and mother, and his children. The family must be sacrificed to the divine kinship. He that loveth father or mother more than Christ is not worthy of him, nor he that loveth more his son or daughter. The teaching of Jesus was that those who had repented should take the most secure precautions against transgressing afterwards and losing their saved status, even going so far as to say that the repentant person should pluck out an eye rather than allow it to induce sinful thoughts.
Like Catholic priests and nuns they considered themselves married to their Church. Anything in the Gospel and the Apostle that seemed to approve of marriage was considered a reference to Christ and the Church, which makes sense as a Christian adaptation of the marriage of God to Israel, that it had been for the Essenes. The Christian Church had become the new Israel, and God had acted through Christ.
Paulicians did not have a rite of marriage and Cathars also repudiated it. Marriage and procreation were forbidden to the Parfaits because one must not collaborate in the work of Satan, who sought to imprison souls in their bodies. But, the Cathar religion placed no rules for ordinary Croyants to live by. Ordinary Cathar souls had to find their own path to purity, and rules did not help—experience did. The Catholic hierarchy aimed to control every Catholic’s salvation, to control them, and it was largely done by setting rules which could invite penances, guilt and fear. Living a blameless life was no good to the priests, who wanted a handle on the believer through the confession. Indeed, those who lived blameless lives were leaving themselves open to an accusation of heresy. Catholics brought before the inquisitors defended themselves by showing the turpitude of their lives.
Cathar Croyants were taught about the battle between good and evil, and were expected to join on the side of good, following the example of the Bonhommes, the living Christs on earth. The reincarnation of imperfect souls meant that the Cathars knew and accepted that procreation was necessary. Creatures had to be born into the world to provide residences for the imperfect souls to find their salvation from wickedness. Therefore Credentes had no vow of chastity, and could marry, though it was not encouraged. Cathars named their children on the eighth day, the day of circumcision of a Jewish boy.
Charles Molinier, an early twentieth century French historian, says Catholic and Catharist teaching on marriage are identical, but N A Weber, in the CE denies it. For the Cathari, no salvation was possible without previous renunciation of marriage, but, he argues, although the Catholic priest is forbidden to marry, married couples can enjoy eternal happiness in the married state. This might be the Catholic interpretation, but no one who can read Mark’s gospel can accept it. Answering Sadducees, Jesus plainly says that marriage does not exist in heaven. People go individually to heaven and there become sexless angels.
The Cathar Eucharist was a benediction of bread. The bread was blessed, but no one thought it was the body of Christ. Men and women approach a table and standing are conducted in “Our father”. The one who is ranked first among them takes the bread and says:
Thanks be to the God of our Jesus Christ. May the Spirit be with us all.
The bread was broken and distributed among them. They kept three Lents in the year, and fasted Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays when they only took bread and water. The novitiate, like the Essene novitiate was for three years, and they were on a permanent fast of bread and water. They included wine in the humble repast at easter, and on some other occasions fish. Only fish was allowed of flesh because fish were not considered to indulge in sexual procreation. Cheese, eggs and milk all have plain sexual connotations and were absolutely forbidden. Besides that, they had the same idea as the Pythagoreans, since they accepted metempsychosis—any animal might be the home of a human soul. The Perfects were not allowed to kill anything. They followed the gospel of John, and the chief Perfect had a foot washing ceremony matching that which occurs only in that gospel.
A curious practice they had was to starve themselves to death when they felt the end of their life had come, after they had taken the consolamentum. This world was wicked, and once they had taken the consolamentum, elderly Cathars could see no point in prolonging life in it. The world of the spirit was assured, if they were sincere, and so then was immortality. They went into a final fast called the endura. Catholic propagandists made a great deal of this.
The Parfaits were forbidden to kill any animal and so would not fight or resist capture. If ill or tired of life through age they would fast to death in the endura, but they never did this to escape being burnt alive or tortured. They were determined to laugh at the Devil through whatever pain he could inflict, because they were certain that in death they had salvation. They were already angels. One inquisitor, in the thirteenth century, had estimated that there were originally 4000 Parfaits among the Cathars, a curious echo of the number quoted for the numbers of Essenes and Pharisees in Judaea at the time of Christ, and the number fed by the eucharistic mass feeding in the gospels. Most of these were burned at the stake rather that deny their faith. Only 14 Parfaits lived a century later.
Peter de Bruys founded a sect called the Petrobrusians who rejected infant baptism, the need for consecrated churches, ceremonies, transubstantiation, crosses and masses for the dead. He was an ascetic who overthrew altars and burnt crosses, and rebaptised his followers. The cross was the instrument of Christ’s death and so he destroyed them whenever he found them. It all identifies him as a Cathar. An angry crowd burnt him at the stake, setting a precedent adopted by the Church and the secular authorities for half a millennium. The incident suggests that there were many people who were not Cathars in the early twelfth century, or were upset by Cathar militancy.
Tanchelmus preached Cathar beliefs as far away as Utrecht in Holland. He denied the authority of the Roman Church, declared its sacraments were useless, and invalid when applied by immoral people. Whatever affected the body did not affect the soul, so that sexual pecadilloes were unimportant to salvation. He was killed in 1115.
Another was Henri de Lausanne whose followers were called Henricians. He too disapproved of the administration of the sacraments by the corrupt priesthood of the Church. Only poor honest priests could offer them validly. The priesthood had the opposite inclinations—wealth and graft. S Bernard of Clairvaux had him arrested.
Arnold of Brescia in Italy, a friend of Abelard, was also sentenced for heresy at Sens—in 1140, after being pursued by S Bernard of Clairvaux. Arnold believed in the spiritual virtue of poverty and living a pure life, and thought no priests should own property or have power in this fleeting world. The pope, Eugene III, granted him absolution. In 1145, he entered Rome which had been seized by the Romans who rejected the temporal power of the pope, had expelled him, and proclaimed a republic. Arnold denounced the Roman clergy, particularly the Curia. Otto of Freising wrote that the essence of Arnold’s preaching was:
Clerks who have estates, bishops who hold fiefs, monks who possess property, cannot be saved.
The “Patarins” remained in power for ten years before Hadrian IV, the only English pope, put the city under interdict, and the senate came to heel forcing Arnold to flee. This again shows how effective a weapon the interdict and excommunication was against princes and rulers. The German emperor, Frederick Barbarossa, had Arnold arrested and delivered to Rome where Hadrian IV hanged him as a rebel, and burnt his body, in 1155. His followers joined the Waldenses.
Abelard also sounded Cathar in declaring that God had forgiven sin, out of his grace even before he sent Christ. God gave His forgiveness freely, and because of it, those who came to realise it automatically came to love God. Christ was sent as the example of what men should be. They respond to his perfect example by becoming conscious of their sin, and respond in love to be new people. Bernard of Clairvaux, considered a model Catholic, and sent to convert the Cathars, thought Abelard was heterodox and subversive. Bernard had him convicted of heresy at Sens. Abelard was excommunicated, and sought refuge in the famous monastery at Cluny where he was eventually reconciled with Bernard before he died in 1142. Even as late as this, the Church was not too neurotic about heresy.
Malcolm Lambert believes (Medieval Heresy: Popular Movements from the Gregorian Reform to the Reformation) heresy is short-lived, and smaller movements such as Petrobrusians and Speronists were successfully strangled almost at birth, but, though the Cathars, Paulicians, Beguines, and the Spiritual Franciscans were also suppressed into extinction, several larger sects like the Waldensians, Hussites, Lollards, Unitas Fratrum, and the Utraquists survived until the Reformation. Lambert thinks that once the Church had set its policy against them, it was remiss not to have extinguished them, although it would have been better to have responded. Extinction could not be success, one might imagine, but Lambert counts heretics as successful when they succeed in changing the Church or getting “toleration for their opinions and practices”. One could say, on one or other of these criteria, the heresies have today succeeded.
The question remains what caused them to keep re-emerging, in essence the same, even though many did not last. These minor heresies are artificially classified as different sub-species by their small differences, rather than classifying them into a species or even a genus, as they actually were. Lambert gives his own clue to this in that he discerns a “submerged reasoning piety, the beliefs of laymen who had their own devotional life” and had their “doubts about individual points of doctrine”. It was one of the most “underestimated forces in medieval Church history”. He is correct! Here is the genus of heresy—nothing less than the subterranean Primitive Christian Gnostic tradition that constantly sprouted new offshoots, even as the Church was burning away the root.
Lambert adds more in that “the intellectual appeal of the heretical leaders in the twelfth century is very limited” and that Wyclif wrote to stress “the guidance of the Holy Spirit on those of good life, but not necessarily of much learning, who seek to understand”. The plain implication here is that there was indeed a grass roots, non-intellectual piety that was different from the teachings of the established Church, and necessitated the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. When he states that “instruction was not adequate to guard the faithful against deviations of belief”, he admits that the vicars of Christ had neglected their duties to the grass roots, and that had they been educated in the changes that the established Church had wrought since the Donation of Constantine, they would not have “slipped into” or become “tainted” by heresy.
An educated piety could never be heretical because the heresies would have been educated out of the pious. Lambert thought it tragic that the Church was incapable of welcoming and cultivating these “unlearned” demands of lay piety, showing that he has no idea of the gravity of the Church’s neglect, and the source of the lay piety, he admires. He thinks it is an innate piety given by God’s grace, when it was the true (or a truer) religion of the original Christians.
The tragedy had been that so much enthusiasm had already slipped away, condemned to the twilight world of the sects.
No Christians ever stop to wonder whether the true Church of God might be that which is closer to the principles expounded by His son. If that is so, the heretics were true, and the established Church was grossly perverted. That is what the Cathar heretics thought, and that is also what their descendents, the Puritans, thought.
