The Perfect Heresy

by Stephen O'Shea

  The imaginary landscape first outlined by Napoléon Peyrat has become progressively weirder. The Cathars are now a protean bunch, ready to transform into just about anything the soul desires. Religious cults of the 1980s and 1990s used them in murderous delirium: The Order of the Solar Temple, the Franco-Québécois-Swiss suicide cult, based some of their arcane calculations on the nonsense written about the Cathar castles. The Web site of Marshall Applewhite’s Heaven’s Gate teemed with references to the asceticism of the Cathars and the god hidden behind the god. He eventually persuaded his followers to commit suicide, so as to go to the “level beyond human”—a state not unlike the Perfects’—and, in the end, listen to the message of the Hale-Bopp Comet.

  However dubious some of its satellites, Cathar country looks likely to continue expanding. It is promised a bright future on the Internet, a matter-free medium made to be an echo chamber of esoteric thought. There is also a movie in the works, a French film for 2000 or 2001 entitled La Main de Dieu (The hand of God). It will deal with the great unsolved murder mystery of the Cathar drama: Who killed Peter of Castelnau? The only other major film about the Cathars dates from the 1940s. La Fiancée des ténèbres (The bride of darkness) had a troubled and fetching young woman realize that she was the reincarnation of—who else?—Esclarmonde of Foix. Napoléon Peyrat, the man who created the myths of Cathar country, is no doubt resting in peace.

  March 16, 1999, was the last anniversary of the famous bonfire to share the same millennium with the Perfect of Montségur. I left my home near Perpignan and headed toward the Pyrenees, the true legacy of the Cathars uppermost in my mind. That this beautiful corner of France—the national affiliation being a part of that legacy—should have been the theater of such cruel intolerance was still hard to credit, even after two years of travel throughout Languedoc in the imagined company of the Cathars. Yet the villages in the Corbières filed by, their names now familiar from Inquisition registers and chronicles of the crusade. History had happened here; a culture had made a choice. At every bend in the road, it seemed, there was a vista of a ruined castle brooding atop a hill, the site, if not the stones, having witnessed some chapter in the Cathar drama. Languedoc, it occurred to me, teaches a lesson about the dangers of the absolute.

  The day was unseasonably warm. I parked in the small lot at the foot of Montségur and walked over to the commemorative stela. A rangy young man shoved a raft of papers into my hand: poems, in Occitan. He was a troubadour, here with his mother. The ticket taker farther up the slope rolled his eyes and told me that they come to Montségur every March 16th.

  The path was steep, snaking upward through the rock and undergrowth, making dizzying switchbacks over the void. The snow-specked heaths grew smaller in the morning sunlight. At one spot, leaning against a bench, a middle-aged man knelt in prayer. I passed him wordlessly; I don’t think he even heard me.

  Montségur

  (Jean Pierre Pétermann)

  In the remnants of the castle at the summit, what looked like an extended family—grandmother, parents, teenage children—stood off to one side and sang. The effect was lovely. The eldest boy later explained that they were Filipinos and that his father had always wanted to come here. Why? He didn’t know.

  I walked through a gap in the walls to where the village of the Perfect had once stood. A few ropes cordoned off the ledges on which archaeologists would be perched once the fine weather returned. I rounded a corner of a rampart and saw, to the south, Mount St. Bartholomew stretching into the sky. I closed my eyes, felt the wind.

  Silence. The clamor of Cathar country lay far below, in the souvenir shops and the cities. Albi was so far away that even its awful shout had been stilled.

  I opened my eyes. The Cathars had won after all. They no longer existed.

  Notes

  USAGE AND PRIMARY SOURCES

  I opted to anglicize most proper names. Some language groups have no problem with such blanket transformations (the French, for example, can call Michelangelo Michel-Ange without a twinge of embarrassment), yet making the switch for The Perfect Heresy meant defying present-day Occitan political correctness. May my friends in Languedoc forgive me, but the vagaries of spelling—I’ve seen the Occitan for Peter rendered as Peire, Peyre, and Pere—proved daunting. While it is true that the many Raymonds of the story might have styled themselves Raimon or Raimond or some other cognate, to my eye such unfamiliar spellings put up obstacles to understanding. (The names of the two troubadours I mention, however, have been left as found.) A few other exceptions to my linguistic imperialism occur, for reasons of euphony, nationality, or avoidance of the ridiculous. King Peire/Peyre II of Aragon became Pedro, not Peter or Pierre; the Italian Lotario resisted becoming Lothar; and Guilhabert of Castres simply refused to be called Wilbert. As for the numerous French figures in the text, there too I have anglicized names in the interests of easier comprehension. In this I am not alone: The thirteen-volume Dictionary of the Middle Ages, edited by Joseph R. Strayer (New York: Scribners, 1989), has comforted me in many of my decisions. The French particule (i.e., de or des) is retained only when a long-standing convention has been established (e.g., Simon de Montfort) or when I have determined the name is a patronymic. Thus the murderers of Avignonet include a William of Lahille, a man from the village of Lahille near Fanjeaux, and a Bernard de St. Martin, whose last name appears to be just that—a last name. If my desire to make the text more accessible is an insufficient argument in the face of debatable judgment calls, I will gladly fall back on the excuse made famous by French Communists: “Ce sont mes contradictions!” (Such are my contradictions).

  In the same arbitrary mood, I have embraced anachronism in geography. For our period, as mentioned in the introduction, it is premature to speak of France or England as established national states or governments, yet it would be tiresome to continue repeating “that patchwork of feudal arrangements that would one day coalesce into what we now call x.” A recent book on the Cathars adopts the following nomenclature: Carolingian France is referred to as Gaul; the area under the suzerainty of the early Capets is then termed Francia; and the confines of the state after King Philip Augustus is called France. Masterly distinctions; muddy waters. As long as it’s recognized as such, a little anachronism is better than a lot of confusion.

  Readers should know of the principal primary sources for the Cathar drama before consulting the notes. First among equals is the thirteenth-century Canso, or, as it is now translated, The Song of the Cathar Wars. A 10,000-line Occitan-language chanson de geste—that is, a rhymed narrative song—the Canso has the peculiarity of being the work of two authors, both of whom witnessed many of the events of the crusade. The first third of the poem was written by the pro-crusade William of Tudela, a cleric assumed to have received the patronage of Baldwin, Count Raymond VI’s brother. When the traitorous Baldwin, a partisan of Simon de Montfort, was captured and hanged by his kinsmen shortly after the battle of Muret, William’s inkwell ran dry. The story from 1213 on was taken up by an anonymous continuator, who was ferociously pro-Toulouse in his leanings. The Canso thus switches sides. The last two-thirds of the poem brings the action up to 1219, as Toulouse is about to repel its third siege in eight years. The continuator, usually referred to as Anonymous, appears to have been a devout Catholic and, most probably, a companion of the young Count Raymond VII. Janet Shirley, in the introduction to her welcome English prose translation of the Canso (Aldershot, England: Scolar Press, 1996), distinguishes between the two writers: “Another and considerable difference between these two authors, one that is all but lost in translation, is that William was a good competent writer but his successor was a man of genius. William can tell a good story and is careful to leave us in no doubt that he was a well educated literary man… . The Anonymous, however, can toss showers of words into the air and catch them again.”

  Another primary source of importance is the Hystoria albigensis, a Latin chronicle written by the pro-crusader Peter of Vaux de Cerna
y, a Cistercian monk. The nephew of a prelate who was a faithful friend of Simon de Montfort, Peter took part in many of the crusade’s actions and is a valuable, if unswervingly partial, eyewitness. At this writing, the definitive translation was to the French: Pascal Guébin and Henri Maisonneuve, Histoire albigeoise (Paris: Vrin, 1951). An English version of Vaux de Cernay’s chronicle, translated by W. A. and M. D. Sibly was published in 1998 (Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell).

  The last of the trinity of contemporary accounts was written at mid-century by William of Puylaurens, a notary for the Inquisition once in the employ of Count Raymond VII. Telegraphic in style, yet covering a greater chronological span, the Chronica magistri Guillelmi de Podio Lau-rentii backs up the detail found in the Canso and the Hystoria. Puylaurens appears to have spoken to the survivors of the crusade in their old age. The most commonly used translation from the original Latin was effected by the dean of French-language Cathar studies, Jean Duvernoy (Paris: C.N.R.S., 1976). The Chronica is not sympathetic to the Cathar cause, but neither does it spare the crusaders abuse for their often underhanded tactics.

  The primary sources used for later periods of the Cathar story are discussed in the chapter notes that follow. Full publishing information on most of the books mentioned in the notes can be found in the bibliography.

  The Perfect Heresy was written to be accessible to all readers curious about the past. For points of well-established fact and excerpts of medieval documents to be found in most studies of the Cathars, I did not think it necessary to credit the sources. Serious points of disagreement among them, however, are outlined in the notes, as well as any information that I deemed subsidiary, or distracting, to the flow of the narrative. Some of this “off-topic” information, I like to think, is interesting in its own right.

  Introduction

  4 There was nothing subtle about the appearance of Ste-Cécile: Lest any admirer of this peculiar church criticize me for neglecting the interior of Ste-Cécile, it should be mentioned that the side chapels and ceiling of the cathedral are a riot of colorful portraiture. Around the choir, occupying fully half of the nave, a pale lattice of carved limestone houses dozens of statues in its niches. This flamboyant Gothic rood screen is among France’s finest ecclesiastical treasures—a testament to the wealth of the see of Albi. At the back of the church, however, is an enormous fresco of the Last Judgment, four stories tall and as wide as the building itself. Commissioned by Louis d’Amboise, a late medieval bishop, it is a masterwork of the macabre, teeming with scores of figures in various stages of agony as reptilian demons and slimy toads torture them for eternity. Although the Cathars had long since vanished when Bishop d’Amboise had Florentine artists execute the work between 1474 and 1480, the fresco’s grotesque depiction of the consequences of sin seems less than innocent in this red-brick menace of a cathedral. Further queasiness is caused by another accident of art history. A bishop of the baroque era, Charles Le Goux de la Berchère, punched a huge hole in the center of the fresco to build a chapel in the base of the bell tower. In the top half of the painting—that part dedicated to the souls heading heavenward—the modification had the unfortunate effect of obliterating God, the judge of the Last Judgment. The solace of the divine is thus nowhere to be seen in this horror show, as if the painting sought solely to scare rather than to uplift. Again, given the history of the area, the result is almost too fitting to be a coincidence.

  6 Whether Arnold Amaury actually uttered that pitiless order is still a matter for debate: “Kill them all, God will know his own” first appeared in the Dialogus miraculorum of the Cistercian monk Caesarius of Heisterbach, who wrote his admiring account of the crusade some thirty years after the fact. It had long been a historian’s reflex to shrug off the order as apocryphal and absolve Arnold Amaury of any such brutal eloquence. Recent scholarship, however, has pointed out that the wording echoes passages to be found in 2 Timothy (2:19) and Numbers (16:5). As the scrupulous Malcolm Lambert states in The Cathars (p.103): “This makes it a little more likely that these words from the mouth of an educated member of the hierarchy [i.e., Arnold Amaury] were authentic.” Whatever the truth of its birth, the expression continues to live on. Culture critic Greil Marcus, in his Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the 20th Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1990), claims that the expression “Kill ‘em all, God will sort ‘em out!” was a T-shirt slogan favored by fans of punker Johnny Rotten and, in a Spanish version, by members of Guatemalan death squads. The New York Times reported that Karla Faye Tucker, the ax-murderer executed in 1998 in Texas, used to wear a “Kill ‘em all” T-shirt in her bad girl days.

  6 “a thousand years without a bath”: The mot is attributed to Jules Michelet.

  6 “I’m gonna get medieval …”: Tarantino’s zinger about the Middle Ages is rivaled by the memorable couplet concocted in the 1960s by satirist Tom Lehrer about segregationist Dixie: “In the land of the boll weevil/Where the laws are medieval.”

  13 the obscene kiss: Even though the tales of turpitude concerning heretics were borrowed from slanders that abounded in classical times (sometimes spread by pagan alarmists about the fledgling sects of Christianity), they were believed by many who should have known better. In 1233, Pope Gregory IX, the sponsor of the Inquisition, issued a papal bull, Vox in Rama, that breathlessly repeated old stories about feline orgies. A much-repeated slander was penned in the 1180s by Walter Map, a deacon of Oxford, who wrote the following of heretics: “About the first watch of the night… each family sits waiting in silence in each of their synagogues; and there descends by a rope which hangs in their midst a black cat of wondrous size. On sight of it they put out the lights and do not sing or distinctly repeat hymns, but hum them with closed teeth, and draw near to the place where they saw their master, feeling after him and when they have found him they kiss him. The hotter the feelings the lower their aim; some go for his feet, but most for his tail and privy parts. Then as though this noisome contact unleashed their appetites, each lays hold of his neighbor and takes his fill of him or her for all he is worth” (source: Jeffrey Richards, Sex, Dissidence, and Damnation, pp. 60-61).

  13 the heretics believed that no one could sin from the waist down: We have Peter of Vaux de Cernay to thank for this titillating fiction about the Cathars.

  13 the thirteenth century’s culture of lawmaking and codification: It is a commonplace to compare the curiosity of the twelfth century with the reaction of the thirteenth. In a 1948 study of the Plantagenet kings of England, John Harvey summed up the historical consensus elegantly: “The thirteenth [century] was to witness the first riveting of the bands forged by scholasticism upon the minds of scholars, and the barren substitution of authority for empiricism. On the other hand, in the manual arts, such as architecture, sculpture, and painting, great strides were made by lay craftsmen who were sufficiently beneath the notice of the learned world of the schools to be able to carry on a living empiricism of their own. In certain other fields, notably those of law and administration, advances were made in the direction of unity by a process of codification and the hardening of earlier tentative formulae into settled rules of life” (source: J. Harvey, The Plantagenets [London: B. T. Batsford, 1948], p. 50).

  13 historian R. I. Moore has provocatively seen… : In The Formation of a Persecuting Society, Moore argues that the persecuting apparatus was a natural but not inevitable outgrowth of the nascent state. He sees the years 1180–90 as a turning point in the development of oppressive institutions. His book, published in 1987, is still making waves.

  14 Ironically, it took a twentieth-century Dominican friar, Antoine Dondaine, to dispel the fog: The banner year for understanding Catharism was 1939, when Dondaine discovered several important documents in archives in Florence and Prague: a Cathar catechism in Latin; a thirteenth-century philosophical treatise, The Book of Two Principles, written by a John of Lugio; and an exceptionally evenhanded description and rebuttal of Catharism, Contra Manicheos, written by Durand of Huesca, a
Waldensian thinker who had been converted to orthodoxy during a debate with Dominic in 1207. Prior to these discoveries, Cathar theology had been pieced together solely from what their adversaries had written about the heresy and from two incomplete Occitan manuscripts found in Lyons and Dublin. Naturally, the enemies of Catharism had depicted the faith as a mass of superstition. From these documents it became obvious, especially in the case of John of Lugio (a Cathar scholastic), that the heresy was squarely in the tradition of Aristotelian rationalism. After centuries of being considered a fifth column for a Manichean revival, the Cathars could be studied for what they were: medieval Christians.

  14 there were four contemporary chroniclers: For identification of these sources, see “Usage and Primary Sources” above.

  16 the forces of American corporate imperialism: The novel in question is Le Christi, by René-Victor Pilhes. The author sees American economic leadership as a reincarnation of the totalitarian medieval Church, a view not uncommon in present-day France.

  1. Languedoc and the Great Heresy