Cathars

Background

The name "Cathari" derives from a Greek word meaning "the pure ones." According to the historical sources, they called themselves "good men" and "good Christians." Their ideas are believed to have originated in a dualism transmitted to Western Europe from the Bogomils, a movement begun in tenth-century Bulgaria by the priest Bogomil.

The Cathars held that a good God created the spiritual world, while the material world and the human body were made by Satan. Because they regarded the body as evil, they rejected the idea that Christ had assumed a real body. This belief that Christ only appeared to have a body is a form of Docetism. Their sole sacrament was the consolamentum ("consolation"), a rite performed by the laying on of hands. This rite served at once as baptism, ordination, absolution of sins, and last rites. Those who had received the consolamentum were called "the Perfect" and practiced strict asceticism, including celibacy. Ordinary believers were not held to such rigorous standards. Their worship was simple in form and centered on the Lord's Prayer.

History

• Eleventh and twelfth centuries: The Cathars first appeared in western Germany, Flanders, and northern Italy. By the late twelfth century they had many adherents in Languedoc (southern France). Nobles such as Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse, protected them.
• From 1198: Pope Innocent III first sent preachers in an effort to win them back peacefully. The preachers, including Dominic, achieved little success.
• 1209: The pope launched the Albigensian Crusade, in which knights mainly from northern France took part. In July Béziers was burned and many of its inhabitants were killed; Britannica puts the number of victims at about 20,000. On this occasion the papal legate Arnaud Amalric, a Cistercian abbot, is reported to have said, "Kill them all; God will know His own." Carcassonne fell the same year, and its inhabitants were expelled. Simon de Montfort subsequently led the crusade.
• 1229: The Treaty of Paris formally ended the crusade. Thereafter the Inquisition began proceedings against the Cathars in earnest.
• 1244: In March the fortress of Montségur, the last Cathar stronghold, fell. More than 200 people who refused to renounce their faith were burned at the stake.
• 1321: Guillaume Bélibaste, known as the last of the Perfect, was executed. After 1330 the Cathars no longer appear in Inquisition records.

Consequences and Influence

The crusade destroyed the power of the southern nobility who had protected the Cathars, bringing southern France under the authority of the French crown. It also served as a catalyst for the establishment of the Inquisition as an institution for examining and punishing heretics. Estimates of the number of deaths vary widely among sources, ranging from 500,000 to 1,000,000, so the precise figure is difficult to determine.

Assessment

The Catholic Church objected to Cathar doctrine on three points: it denied the omnipotence and goodness of God, denied that Christ took on a body (the Incarnation), and regarded the material world as the creation of an evil power. Scholarly opinion is also divided. Some scholars regard the Cathars as a Christian sect that differed from Catholicism in its dualism and Docetism, while others consider them closer to Manichaeism than to orthodox Christianity.

Because the Cathars resisted papal authority and were suppressed by force, some view these events as a harbinger of the decline of papal power and of the Reformation. Modern popular culture often portrays the Cathars favorably. The violence of the crusade drew criticism from an early date; Voltaire remarked that nothing was ever more unjust than the war against the Albigensians.

Most of the surviving records were left by the Cathars' opponents, especially inquisitors. For this reason, scholars continue to debate whether a single, unified "Cathar Church" actually existed.