Cathars and the Perfect
Explanation
The Cathars (from Greek katharoi, the pure) were a dualist Christian movement that flourished in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in southern France (especially Languedoc, with centres in Albi, Toulouse, Carcassonne), northern Italy, Catalonia and other regions. Also called Albigensians. Their remote origin lies in the Bulgarian Bogomils (tenth century) and, further back, in the Paulicians, Manichaeans and Gnostics, all dualist traditions that conceived the universe as a stage for the struggle between the principle of good and the principle of evil.
The Cathar worldview was radically dualist: a good God, creator of the spiritual world, and an evil God (identified with the Yahweh of the Old Testament), creator of the material world, which is intrinsically evil. Human souls are fallen spirits trapped in material bodies, who must liberate themselves through asceticism and renunciation to return to the realm of Light. They therefore rejected the incarnation (Christ was apparent, not really embodied), material sacraments, and the authority of the Catholic Church (which they considered the synagogue of Satan).
Cathar social structure distinguished between the believers (sympathisers, the majority, who lived normally with families and trades, and could receive the consolamentum at the moment of death), and the perfect (perfecti, perfectae, a minority of spiritual elite who had received the consolamentum in life and lived in strict chastity, poverty, vegetarianism, fasting and itinerant preaching). The consolamentum was the only Cathar sacrament: a laying on of hands that transmitted the Holy Spirit and purified the recipient.
Catharism spread rapidly in Occitania during the twelfth century, with support from local nobles and popular sympathy. The Catholic Church considered it a threatening heresy and, after failed attempts at peaceful conversion (Dominic of Guzmán initially founded the Dominican Order for that), Pope Innocent III proclaimed in 1209 the Albigensian Crusade, led by Simon de Montfort. The crusade was a bloodbath: massacres such as that of Béziers (kill them all, God will know his own), the fall of Toulouse, the destruction of Occitan civilisation.
After the crusade, the Papal Inquisition (created in 1231 by Gregory IX, partly precisely to persecute surviving Cathars) systematically hunted down the remaining perfecti. The last bastion was the fortress of Montségur, besieged and taken in 1244: more than 200 perfecti were burned at the stake for refusing to recant. By the end of the thirteenth and early fourteenth century, Catharism had been practically exterminated as an organised movement, although it survived clandestinely for some time longer in Italy.
For the theory of consciousness, the Cathars offer a Christianised Gnostic perspective: ordinary, embodied consciousness is captivity; liberation requires recognising our original spiritual nature and following a rigorous path of detachment. Their historical tragedy has given rise to much literature (Raymond de Peñafort; historical studies by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie in Montaillou; works by Simone Weil, an admirer of Catharism), to tourism in the Cathar castles of Languedoc, and to esoteric speculation (alleged links with the Grail, theories that the perfecti left with the Cathar treasure before the fall of Montségur, etc.). As an example of a demanding and pure spirituality that was violently annihilated by the established power, Catharism continues to exert a melancholy fascination on many readers.
Strengths
- Rigorous ethical coherence between doctrine and practice.
- Powerful articulation of the human condition as exile.
- Spiritual resistance against dominant powers.
- Kinship with other dualist traditions.
Main critiques
- Philosophically problematic metaphysical dualism.
- Devaluation of the material world.
- Limited documentation due to persecution.
- Possible contemporary romanticisation.