The Perfect Heresy

by Stephen O'Shea

  Those suspect of heresy are those who are present at the preaching of heretics and participate, however little, in their ceremonies.

  Those simply suspected have done such things only once.

  Those vehemently suspected have done this often.

  Those most vehemently suspected have done this frequently.

  Concealers are those who know heretics but do not denounce them.

  Hiders are those who have agreed to prevent heretics being discovered.

  Receivers are those who have twice received heretics on their property.

  Defenders are those who knowingly defend heretics so as to prevent the Church from extirpating heretical depravity.

  Favorers are all of the above to a greater or lesser degree.

  Relapsed are those who return to their former heretical errors after having formally renounced them.

  The inquisitors had cast their net wide. In the heyday of open Catharism, everyone but the blind and the cloistered in a city like Toulouse or Carcassonne would have qualified as a “concealer,” for known heretics had abounded as accepted members of the community. Armed with such catchall lists of offenses, the Inquisition of the 1240s proceeded to intimidate indiscriminately, conducting a head count on a scale that had not been seen since a census of antiquity. The sheer number of people called, and re-called, to testify or confess went far beyond the bounds of previous medieval practice. Historical irony had singled out the Cathars—who believed the material world was an evil irrelevancy—to inspire the forerunner of the police state.

  Brother Ferrer, a Catalan Dominican from near Perpignan, took over from the assassinated friars at Avignonet. Aside from showing exemplary ruthlessness, he improved the process by systematizing interrogations and limiting arduous and dangerous travel. Villages came to him, rather than vice versa. Ferrer also went back to old registers to ferret out falsehoods in the testimony collected by William Arnald and Stephen of St. Thibéry. He was, in many respects, the most prolific pioneer of mass prosecution and police work, establishing the habit of double- and triple-checking every sworn statement.

  Page from an Inquisition register

  (Institut de recherche et d’histoire des textes, Paris)

  In his turn, Ferrer was superseded by two who would gain even greater notoriety: Jean de St. Pierre and Bernard de Caux, the latter earning orthodoxy’s fondest compliment, malleus hereticorum (the hammer of heretics). In the closing half of the 1240s, Brothers Jean and Bernard compiled a cross-referenced compendium of confessions extracted from tens of thousands of people. They were, in effect, cartographers of Languedoc’s mental landscape. The 5,065 transcripts of their interrogations that have survived represent but a fraction of their work, which mostly took place near the church of St. Sernin in Toulouse and within the walled city of Carcassonne. They filled both dungeons there with hundreds of unfortunates, to be fed, in the words of an admirer, paraphrasing the Hebrew Bible, “the bread of pain and the water of tribulation.”

  The friars’ accomplishment would have remained an anecdote in the larger history of organized terror, like Conrad of Marburg’s reign of rough justice in the Rhineland, had Brother Bernard not put his investigative expertise in the service of creating a new literary genre: the inquisitor’s manual. Designed as guides for the burgeoning number of papal courts throughout Europe, these manuals enlightened the fledgling inquisitor on the pitfalls of the interrogation procedure and recommended a graduated scale of sentences that ranged from burning at one extreme to a mild public penance at the other. Most manuals reminded inquisitors that they were in the business not of punishment but of salvation, a distinction lost on the thousands whose lives were ruined by the friars’ judgments.

  Bernard de Caux’s treatise, known as the Manual of the Inquisitors of Carcassonne, stood as the unrivaled authority in the field for a half century and added luster to Languedoc’s reputation among churchmen as a laboratory of repression. In the early fourteenth century, the reputation was enhanced even more when a talented inquisitor of Toulouse, Bernard Gui, wrote a hefty manual that would influence the Aragonese and Spanish Inquisitions. Gui, later made a literary villain in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, spoke highly of the work of Bernard de Caux and Jean de St. Pierre and acknowledged their contribution to the crushing of Catharism.

  Such sterling coercion was made easier by an improved quality of turncoat. The inquisitors managed to persuade a handful of captured Perfect to convert to Catholicism and, in some instances, to sell their services to the court. Outstanding in this work of delation was one Sicard of Lunel, who had been a prominent Perfect in the Cathar diocese of Albi. In the 1240s, Sicard gave the friars an exhaustive list of Cathar sympathizers—he even fingered his own parents. All those who had helped him in any way during his years of secretive missionary work, whether they had offered him a bed for the night or given him a jar of honey, were hauled up for punishment on the strength of his encyclopedic testimony. He and others of his ilk were lodged thereafter in a castle outside of Toulouse, in a type of witness-protection program, where they visited dungeons to coax confidences from prisoners and exhort the obstinate to follow them in the paths of righteous betrayal. Handsomely rewarded by the Inquisition, Sicard apparently lived into a peaceful old age, his activities recorded well into the 1270s.

  As a final fillip to inquisitorial power, Pope Innocent IV issued a decree in May 1252 that gave the friars permission to use torture in their search for the truth. The procedure, primly called “putting the question,” could be employed at the discretion of the inquisitor, but on no account should the victim, the pope thought prudent to add, have a limb severed, lose too much blood, or expire. The bull, Ad extirpanda, also reinforced the Inquisition in Italy, to which many in Languedoc had fled to elude the traps set by the Dominicans. Italian Catharism, which had subsisted in parts of Lombardy, Venezia, and Tuscany, had not yet felt the full force of papal repression. From the time of Mark, the Lombard who went in 1167 to the meeting at St. Félix, to the mid-thirteenth century, the constant struggle between pope and emperor in many Italian towns had created a civic space in which the heresy could survive, even flourish. Although Catharism in Italy would never reach Languedocian proportions in its following or near the “national” allegiance felt by the Occitans, the faith was firmly established there and possessed enough doctrinal sophistication to split into several different “churches” of dualist thought. Innocent IV’s bull, in part triggered by the murder of a respected inquisitor in 1252, spelled the beginning of the end for Italian Cathars; in 1278, more than 200 Perfect were burned in Verona.

  Despite the presence of their coreligionists, the fleeing Occitan Perfect who took refuge in the isolated Cathar strongholds in Italy found too few of their compatriots to revive the spiritual community that had once thrived under the counts of Toulouse. Worse yet, their numbers dwindled with each successive generation. In Languedoc, the homeland of the heresy, successive waves of highly trained inquisitors, aided by informers and torturers, fired by a totalitarian creed, and instructed by detailed manuals and ever-expanding registers, slowly ground Catharism into oblivion. Thousands of private dramas ended in the darkness of a dungeon. By century’s end, only the truly heroic dared to say aloud that the world was evil.

  The year 1300 saw the papacy institute the jubilee, the greatest occasion for raising funds and consciousness ever devised in the Middle Ages.*Pope Benedict VIII, the most ambitious and abrasive pontiff since Innocent III, declared that pilgrims to Rome that year would receive a raft of spiritual indulgence so ample as to render future damnation an utter fluke. Somewhere between one and two million people accepted his offer, an army of the anxious faithful from all over Europe, crossing the Alps on foot and horseback, docking at ports on the Adriatic and the Tyrrhenian, ready to open wide their hearts and purses once in sight of the holy city on the Tiber. The clergy and merchants of Rome exulted. An eyewitness, William Ventura, described the scene in one church: “Day and night two
priests stood at the altar of St. Paul’s holding rakes in their hands, raking in infinite money.” The crowds were so large that papal soldiers had to double as crossing guards by enforcing a keep-right system on the bridge leading to the Vatican.

  The hordes of the first jubilee meandered the length and breadth of Italy, on their way to and from the Eternal City, attracting fellow travelers who sought safety in numbers. Homebound Occitans made their way along the rocky shore of the Mediterranean past Genoa, Nice, and Marseilles. At some point during these seasons of spiritual migration, two brothers, Peter and William Autier, slipped into the crowd of pilgrims, their bags laden with knives from Parma which they said they were going to sell in their native Languedoc. Until 1296, the two men had lived a comfortable, sedentary existence in Ax-les-Thermes, a mountain town near Foix where the literate Peter had been a successful notary. In that year, the brothers had sold everything and vanished from Ax. Riding the tide of jubilee pilgrims, the Autiers resurfaced, seemingly content to make their living as itinerant peddlers. The least credulous of their companions may have found it odd that such educated, wealthy men, well into their fifties, should embrace such a lowly station in life.

  The Autier brothers no doubt kept to themselves on their journey home. At the many shrines on the well-trodden pilgrimage route, the company stopped to hear mass and pray. Peter must have repeatedly bitten his tongue at these pious moments, for he would later say that making the sign of the cross was useful only for batting away flies. He even suggested alternate wording for the gesture: “Here is the forehead and here is the beard and here is one ear and here is the other.” Had such sarcasm defined the outer bounds of his skepticism, Peter Autier’s name would be unremembered, like those of the millions whose sacrilegious wit formed a rich part of folk culture. But the notary-turned-knife-salesman was more than a mere wiseacre; Peter Autier was the last great Perfect in Cathar history. After three years of study, fasting, and prayer—and a solemn consolamentum conferred by Italian dualists—Peter and his Perfect brother returned to Languedoc as missionaries. It was a jubilee year for the Cathars, too.

  For once, the inquisitors were caught unawares. Or rather, they had their attention turned elsewhere, in a nasty sink of secular politics and ecclesiastical intrigue. In the years surrounding the turn of the fourteenth century, the Dominicans and their episcopal allies had at last run into resistance, as urban leaders reconciled themselves to the French conquest and royal officials began seeing the all-powerful clergy as inimical to the prosperity of the province and the prestige of their monarch. In Albi, Bishop Bernard de Castanet threw many of his secular adversaries into prison, on what were often flimsy charges of latent Cathar sympathies, and insisted that any opposition to him was tantamount to sin. To drive home his point, Castanet began the erection of the red-brick behemoth of Ste-Cécile, the fortress cathedral which still reminds the town of the bishop’s might. In Carcassonne, plots were hatched to destroy Inquisition registers; in the hands of unscrupulous bishops and friars, these bound volumes of confession and betrayal had become tools of blackmail and extortion.

  While Peter Autier quietly made his way back from Italy to the highlands of Languedoc, civic strife kept the inquisitors on the defensive. Their most eloquent critic was Bernard Délicieux, a Franciscan friar who claimed that the prosecution of a moribund faith had degenerated into an abuse of power. The darling of merchants and magistrates, Délicieux was a gifted rabble-rouser who, at the height of his power in 1303, convinced a royal official to lead a mob in storming the Inquisition’s dungeon in Carcassonne and freeing all of its prisoners. The incendiary friar, who went so far as to claim that inquisitors simply made up confessions of fictitious people in order to blackmail the innocent, stood squarely in a purist tradition that despised the Dominicans for their gradual slide into worldliness. Indeed, the brand of apocalyptic piety common to Délicieux and many others, who were known as “Spiritual Franciscans,” would be declared a heresy in 1317. They made the mistake of taking up where the Cathars had left off—in decrying too loudly the wealth of the Church. Their less radical brethren, however, weakened the appeal of heresy. Throughout the thirteenth century, the preaching and example of the friars had done much to bring spontaneous, popular piety back into the fold of orthodoxy.

  Before the uproar caused by Délicieux died down, the Autier brothers had benefited from five long years of neglect. In the hills of the Sabartès, the up-country near Foix, Catharism once again took root. Although nearly three generations had passed since the time of tolerance, there were still vivid memories of the “good Christians” who had once freely walked the mountain meadows and preached in village squares. In the first decade of the new century, Peter Autier recruited about a dozen people to join him in his austere mission, among them the last recorded female Perfect, Aude Bourrel. There were to be no Cathar “homes” or bishops or mountaintops this time around. The acolytes of Autier led a harsh life of perpetual stealth and moonlight travel, always on the move lest they be detected.

  Bernard Délicieux as depicted by Jean-Paul Laurens

  (Musée des Augustins, Toulouse/Art Resource, New York)

  The 1,000 or so households won back to the illicit faith stood in constant peril of betrayal; if but one of their family turned traitor and went to the authorities in Toulouse, Carcassonne, or Foix, misery and ruin would have ensued. There were instances of husbands and wives concealing their heretical beliefs from each other, of village gossips ignorant of the dualist missionaries hidden in their neighbors’ back rooms, of suspected double agents for the Inquisition found murdered in remote ravines. The credentes spoke guardedly of their faith in coded language: The “scandal” referred to the decades of persecution; the “understanding of the Good” (entendement de Be), to their acceptance of the Perfects’ message. Unlike their predecessors of a century before, conversant with troubadour, tradesman, and merchant, the Cathars of 1300 lived in a lonely landscape of fear.

  The nature of the revival reflected the sadly reduced circumstances of Catharism. Autier’s Perfect were metaphysical highwaymen, dimly glimpsed creatures of the night who acted less as pastors of a flock than as visiting angels of death. Administering the consolamentum to the dying became the raison d’être of the Perfect. Credentes had always wanted to “make a good end” so that their next “tunic,” or earthly incarnation, would lead them closer to God. Among Autier and his followers, however, the consolamentum at death’s door took precedence over other aspects of the faith.

  The risks taken to attend to the expiring were immense. Time was short, making subterfuge all the more difficult. Panting messengers sought out the Perfect, or people who knew where they were hiding, then led them back, often over great distances, to the grieving family. Since medieval death, like medieval life, entailed a promiscuous lack of privacy, the Perfect had few occasions to be alone with the dying and perform the sacrament. They frequently spent hours, if not days, concealed in a household, hoping that the stricken believer would not lose consciousness before they had a chance to promote him to a better future life. In one instance, having advised a relative to find a pretext for clearing the sickroom of its milling guests, Peter Autier donned the clothes of the future widow and took care to keep his back to the window as he administered the consolamentum. Those who might linger on for several days were ordered to undertake the endura, a hunger strike that ended in death. Nothing could be allowed to corrupt—and thus cancel—the otherworldly grace bestowed by the consolamentum, and the Perfect, for safety’s sake, could not risk staying around to keep a vigil over the ill. The endura was a cruel surrogate for the hospice work performed by Cathar Perfect in happier times.

  Peter Autier’s men must have realized that their obsession with the final consolamentum might give simple credentes a skewed vision of what was a philosophy that embraced all of life. Errors about the faith could flourish. Grazida Lizier, a woman believer from the village of Montaillou, gave the following strange version of dualism t
o the Inquisition: “I believe God made those things that are helpful to man, and useful too for the created world—such as human beings, the animals men eat or are carried about on—for instance oxen, sheep, goats, horses, mules—and the edible fruits of the earth and of trees. But I don’t think God made wolves, flies, mosquitoes, and such things as are harmful to man.” Other credentes strayed from Cathar precepts by squirreling away scraps of bread touched by the Perfect, a practice similar to orthodoxy’s reverence for relics. Earlier Cathar leaders might have denounced such material magic, but Autier and his fellows blessed the bread crumbs as a souvenir of their passage.

  Discovery was inevitable, for thousands of people—especially a grudge-bearing, garrulous peasantry—could not be expected to keep a secret indefinitely. Also, after the middle of the first decade of the fourteenth century, men of exceptional ability were appointed to head the Inquisition. Geoffrey d’Ablis, an incorruptible Dominican, got Carcassonne; Bernard Gui, a brilliant investigator, Toulouse. In the county of Foix, Jacques Fournier, the bishop of the see of Pamiers, undertook an Inquisition that was a model of painstaking thoroughness. Fournier, an intelligent and sensitive Cistercian who would later be elected Pope Benedict XII, brought what can only be termed an anthropological curiosity to bear on the practices and prejudices of the remaining Cathars—to the delight of future historians. He and Gui were not vindictive hacks; both men allowed Christian ideals to inform their work. Many of their hundreds of victims appealed for, and received, clemency. To the Perfect and the unrepentant credentes, of course, the inquisitors showed no mercy.