The Perfect Heresy

by Stephen O'Shea

  19 the outermost fringes of the Romance conversation: Occitan and its cousins were once squarely center stage. Before deciding on composing in his Tuscan vernacular, Dante Alighieri considered writing the Divine Comedy in Provençal.

  20 often as weavers: Tradition holds that dualism was spread along the trade routes of the south by itinerant artisans. Foremost among these tradespeople were weavers, and for a while the Cathars were known as tisserands (weavers). Dissident scholarly opinion questions this occupational proclivity, by claiming that associating the Perfect with the rootless artisans was yet another way Catholic propagandists had found to slander them.

  21 St. Félix en Lauragais: At the time, the village was called St. Félix de Caraman. I have given its modern name.

  21 a Cathar International: The capitalized title for the meeting is my invention. As for the meeting itself, a vocal group of revisionists, led by historian Monique Zerner, claim that the heretical conclave never occurred. The skeptics’ argument rests principally on the fact that the sole source for the St. Félix meeting is a seventeenth-century document, whose author (Guillaume Besse) claimed to have worked from a now vanished manuscript of 1223. A colloquium was held in Nice in January 1999 to give the revisionists a hearing, yet the crushing weight of consensus among Cathar experts—Anne Brenon, Michel Roquebert, Malcolm Lambert, Bernard Hamilton, Jean Duvernoy, et. al.—continues to come down on the side of St. Felix having witnessed “the most imposing international gathering ever recorded in the history of the Cathars” (source: Malcolm Lambert, The Cathars, pp. 45–46). Some, however, argue that the meeting took place in the 1170s, not 1167. For an entertaining summary of many of the arguments pro and con, see Michel Roquebert, Histoire des cathares, pp. 58–62.

  21 the believers overwhelmingly outnumbered … the Perfect: To my chagrin, I felt obliged to opt for the terminology coined by the Cathars’ persecutors. I have done this to avoid confusion, for the Cathars simply referred to themselves as Christians, good Christians, good men or good women, or friends of God. A Perfect is so called not because he or she is flawless; rather, one so labeled is a hereticus perfectus or heretica perfecta—”a completed heretic,” in the sense of one who has passed from the stage of sympathizer to the rank of the ordained. I have elected to capitalize the term so it will not be confused with the ordinary sense of “perfect.” The term for believers, credentes, was also coined by Catharism’s enemies.

  22 a ritual response to the melioramentum: The exchange of greetings in the melioramentum emphasized the gulf between the simple, earth-bound believer and the quasi divine Perfect. Malcolm Lambert, in The Cathars (p. 142), draws on Y. Hagman’s doctoral work, “Catharism: A Medieval Echo of Manichaeism or of Primitive Christianity,” in describing the exchange: “In the most solemn form of the ceremony, three profound inclinations of the head on to the hands, so far as to kiss them, was accompanied by ‘Bless us’ (benedicte), ‘Lord’, or ‘good Christian’ or ‘good lady’, ‘the blessing of God and your own’, ‘Pray God for us’ and on the third inclination, ‘Lord, pray God for this sinner that he deliver him from an evil death and lead him to a good end.’ The perfect responded affirmatively to the first and second prayers and to the third at great length alluding to the consolamentum: ‘God be prayed that God will make you a good Christian and lead you to a good end.’ ”

  22 leader of the Cathar faith in northern France: Not much is known of Catharism north of the Loire, save that it was repressed at an early stage and thus never came close to the success it enjoyed in Languedoc. The greatest concentration of dualist heretics in this region appears to have been in Champagne, an area crisscrossed by trade routes and host to the great medieval fairs where goods—and ideas—were exchanged.

  23 The very last of the Bogomils: This nugget of surprising information is found in Friedrich Heer’s The Medieval World (p. 206). I have seen Bogomil also translated as “Deserving of the Pity of God.”

  24 The Catholic precept of ex opere… : To believe that a corrupt priest cannot celebrate a sacrament is a heresy known as Donatism. Augustine of Hippo (354–430) was merciless in combating the Donatists in his homeland of Roman North Africa.

  26 heretical, by every definition except their own: Heresy is a slippery little devil. To label an idea heretical is to know exactly what it is you believe, and precisely what it is that you consider an unacceptable interloper into your patch of the divine. For the great majority of medieval believers, the line between heterodoxy and orthodoxy snaked all over the map. Christianity, like other faiths, was an ongoing argument, and the teachings and practices of the Church wandered in and out of deadend debates, picking up thoughts that would later be deemed repugnant, dismissing others that might subsequently constitute dogma. To the average Languedoc peasant, no doubt the Cathar holy men and women seemed to be completely orthodox in their piety, more orthodox than the village priest living with his concubine. Scholar Leonard George has nicely defined heresy as “a crime of perception—an act of seeing something that, according to some custodian of reality, is not truly there.” The word originates in the Greek hairesis, the noun formed from the verb haireomai (to choose). At base, heresy means consciously opting for a set of beliefs, and thus a heretic is—the anachronism is irresistible—pro-choice. It then came to mean choosing an incorrect belief system. Given the shifting sands of doctrine, finding the officially approved path to salvation frequently took deft spiritual footwork. Paul admonished his followers about heretics in an oft-quoted passage from the New Testament’s Titus 3:9–11: “But avoid foolish controversies and genealogies and arguments and quarrels about the law, because these are unprofitable and useless. Warn a divisive person once, and then warn him a second time. After that you may have nothing to do with him. You may be sure that such a man is warped and sinful; he is self-condemned.” In another influential remark about heresy, the thirteenth-century English churchman Robert Grosseteste, one of the rare specimens of medieval humanity to have survived into his eighties, leaves implicit the notion of a single, approved truth. According to him, heresy is “an opinion chosen by human perception, contrary to holy scripture, publicly avowed and obstinately defended.” Again, choice and perception were paramount in this definition, with the added proviso of publicity. The wise old Grosseteste was saying that you wouldn’t be called a heretic if you just kept your mouth shut. The Cathars, famously, did not. Their creed embraced so many officially proscribed errors—Donatism, Docetism, dualism, Monophysitism, etc.—that to call them heretics seems an understatement. True, the Cathars thought the Catholics were heretics, but the Church, just as famously, won the argument. If the Cathars can’t be called heretics, we should just delete the word from our dictionaries. In the text I use the term in the sense of dissent, not depravity.

  27 Ephemeral messiahs and cranky reformers: My quick review of colorful charismatics of the twelfth century should be supplemented by reading, in order of palatability, Norman Cohn’s The Pursuit of the Millennium, R. I. Moore’s The Origins of European Dissent, and Malcolm Lambert’s Medieval Heresy. The jungle of dissent is lush.

  27 revered him so much that they drank his bathwater: The charge against Tanchelm’s followers, complete with details of how they adored his toenail clippings, may or may not be true, given the partisan nature of the pro-Catholic medieval sources. What is more certain is that the tale, even if it is a canard, continues to intoxicate with its perverseness. In the New Yorker of November 29, 1999, John Updike writes about Shoko Asahara, the head of the cult that released nerve gas in Tokyo subways: “His followers were also privileged, when he was at liberty, to kiss his big toe and to pay upward of two hundred dollars for a drink of his used bathwater.”

  29 Mystical, anorexic, brilliant, eloquent and polemical: The mention of anorexia may surprise, but the great Bernard was voluble about his ills, imagined or real. An entertaining depiction of the man—and of his nemesis, Peter Abelard—can be found in Christopher Frayling’s Strange Landscape, in which he de
votes a chapter titled “The Saint and the Scholar” to their famous twelfth-century feud. Frayling writes (p. 123) of Bernard’s gastric troubles: “Bernard was permanently ill—which was hardly surprising given the way he punished his body and the damp surroundings he lived in. He seems to have suffered from a form of extreme anorexia nervosa—rejecting food so regularly that he was sometimes paralysed through lack of nourishment; and he stank continually of stale vomit. ‘I have a bad stomach,’ he wrote, ‘but how much more must I be hurt by the stomach of my memory where such rottenness collects.’ ”

  29 The great man was laughed out of town: The story is alluded to in Geoffrey of Auxerre’s medieval Life of Saint Bernard and expanded upon in the first chapter of William of Puylaurens’s chronicle.

  30 dualists were sighted everywhere: Perhaps the strangest incident of heresy detection in the twelfth century occurred near Rheims, when a cleric named Gervase of Tilbury, out riding with the archbishop and some senior prelates, spotted a pretty girl working alone in a vineyard. A chronicler, Ralph of Coggeshall, relates: “Moved by the lewd curiosity of a young man, as I heard from him myself after he had become a canon, he went over to her. He greeted her, and asked politely where she came from, and who her parents were, and what she was doing there alone, and then, when he had eyed her beauty for a while, spoke gallantly to her of the delights of love-making.” She turned him down, saying that she would always remain a virgin. His suspicions now aroused as well, Gervase learned that the peasant girl believed, on heretical religious grounds, that her body must not be corrupted. He tried to get her to change her mind, in the timeless manner of one who will not take no for an answer. Their arguing finally attracted the attention of the archbishop, who rode over and soon became scandalized. Not by Gervase’s conduct, but by the girl’s faith. He had her arrested and brought back to Rheims for questioning. The farm girl refused to recant, and she was burned. (Source: R. I. Moore, The Birth of Popular Heresy, pp. 86–88.)

  30 labeled the unfortunates Cathars: The name originated in Eckbert of Schönau’s Thirteen Sermons against the Cathars, written in 1163. Eckbert also called the Cathars “wretched half-wits.”

  30 the question of oath taking: The refusal to swear oaths was frequent among heretics, and not just of the Cathar variety. One justification is found in Matthew 5:33–37: “Again, you have heard that it was said to the people long ago: ‘Do not break your oath, but keep the oaths you have made to the Lord.’ But I tell you, Do not swear at all: either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; or by the earth, for it is his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King. And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white or black. Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’‘No;’ anything beyond this comes from the evil one.”

  31 Cathar dioceses were drawn up: Among those who concede that the St. Félix meeting took place, there is further argument about what happened there. Some believe that Nicetas (often styled Niquinta) laid down the dualist law, convincing the Languedoc Cathars to move from “mitigated dualism” to “absolute dualism”—the latter being a more hard-core belief positing an almost co-equal evil divinity. Others hold that the tale of Nicetas’s dogmatic authority is baseless, caused by a misreading in the 1890s (by historian Ignaz von Döllinger) and repeated unwittingly by generations of historians throughout the twentieth century. What is certain is that Nicetas warned the Languedoc Cathars against divisiveness and approved their diocesan organization.

  2. Rome

  33 the pontiff’s superiority over all the crowned heads of Christendom: The chutzpah of Gregory VII can still take one’s breath away. In a volume of his correspondence, historians found a list that contains the following statements: “The pope can be judged by no one; the Roman church has never erred and never will err till the end of time; the Roman church was founded by Christ alone; the pope alone can depose and restore bishops; he alone can make new laws, set up new bishoprics, and divide old ones; he alone can translate bishops; he alone can call general councils and authorize canon law; he alone can revise his own judgements; he alone can use the imperial insignia; he can depose emperors; he can absolve subjects from their allegiance; all princes should kiss his feet” (source: R. W. Southern, Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages, p. 102).

  37–38 the church of SS. Sergio and Bacco: The church of Lotario’s cardinalate no longer exists. Neither does the tower that was erected on top of the arch of Septimius Severus.

  37 The church was a treasure house of relics: There may be a six-or seven-year anachronism in the list of some of the relics to be found at the Lateran in 1198. A lot of relics came on the market following the crusader sack of Constantinople in 1204; thus some of the objects listed may not have found their way to Rome until after that event. For example, Enrico Dandolo, the wily old doge of Venice, brought back from Constantinople the lions that stand in front of St. Mark’s, as well as a piece of the True Cross, the arm of St. George, a vial of Christ’s blood, and a chunk of John the Baptist’s head (source: Marc Kaplan, “Le sac de Constantinople,” in Les Croisades, ed. R. Delort).

  38 it was he who definitively nudged the papal court to … the Vatican: Innocent would eventually wind up back at St. John Lateran, however, when a disgruntled nineteenth-century papacy moved his body to the church as a symbolic riposte to constitutional liberalism. He now lies in the transept, his recumbent stone effigy a study in lordly calm, guarded by a pair of statues depicting women. One holds the light of wisdom; the other, the banner of crusade. It is rumored that his remains were transferred from Perugia to Rome in the suitcase of a seminarian traveling in the second-class compartment of a train.

  38 Lotario must have absorbed the lesson behind that beatification: There is no documentary evidence proving that the young Lotario was impressed by the canonization of Thomas Becket in neighboring Segni. It is, however, a fairly reasonable assumption and one that is repeated by several of Innocent’s biographers. Jane Sayers, in her Innocent III, states that Lotario toured the saint’s shrine in Canterbury on a student visit to Britain (p. 19). Historian Edward Peters, in “Lotario dei Conti di Segni becomes Pope Innocent III” (from Pope Innocent III and his World, ed. J. C. Moore) dates the visit at 1185 or 1186 (p. 10).

  38 5,000 ounces of gold: In Paul Johnson’s A History of Christianity (p. 267), the visit in 1511 of the Dutch scholar Erasmus to the shrine of St. Thomas in Canterbury is evoked: “Erasmus’s account makes it clear they were deeply shocked by what they saw. The riches which adorned the shrine were staggering. Erasmus found them incongruous, disproportionate, treasures ‘before which Midas or Croesus would have seemed beggars;’ thirty years later, Henry VIII’s agents were to garner from it 4,994 ounces of gold, 4,425 of silver-gilt, 5,286 of plain silver and twenty-six cartloads of other treasure.”

  3. The Turn of the Century

  40 “To be always with a woman …”: This nugget of misogyny is quoted in R. W. Southern’s classic Western Society and the Church in the Middle Ages (p. 315). Southern makes his point about the Church turning its back on women with other selected quotations. One of the most remarkable was penned by a Premonstratensian abbot: “We and our whole community of canons, recognizing that the wickedness of women is greater than all the other wickedness of the world, and that there is no anger like that of women, and that the poison of asps and dragons is more curable and less dangerous to men than the familiarity of women, have unanimously decreed for the safety of our souls, no less than that of our bodies and goods, that we will on no account receive any more sisters to the increase of our perdition, but will avoid them like poisonous animals.”

  42 “… We cannot. We have been reared in their midst.”: The Catholic knight who made this oft-cited admission to Bishop Fulk was Pons-Adhemar of Roudeille. The anecdote is related by William of Puylaurens.

  42 entirely free of the prejudices of its time: Peter Autier, the leader of the Cathar revival in the early 1300s, taught that one had to
be a male in one’s last incarnation if one was to join the good god. The idea that women were sinks of corruption and carnality, an oft-repeated theme in medieval Catholicism, appears to have cropped up in Catharism during the time of its persecution. For a levelheaded and exhaustive examination of Cathar beliefs, see Anne Brenon’s excellent Le Vrai Visage du cathar-isme.

  43 Noblewomen, especially, founded, managed, and led Cathar homes: Again, the work of historian Anne Brenon should be consulted, especially her Les Femmes cathares. The role of women in Catharism, long neglected by Catholic and Protestant historians feuding over the doctrinal implications of dualism, is now seen as one of the most remarkable sociological aspects of the heresy. Of the great Cathar matriarchs, Blanche of Laurac was undoubtedly the most notorious. On becoming a widow, Blanche and her youngest daughter, Mabilia, received the consolamentum and ran a Cathar home in Laurac, the town that gave its name to the Lauragais region. Another daughter, Navarra, left her husband, Stephen of Servian, when he repented of his heresy to Dominic. Navarra moved to Montségur. Another of Blanche’s daughters, Esclarmonde, married into the Niort clan and became the mother of the most dangerous family in Cathar history. The last of Blanche’s daughters was Geralda of Lavaur, a Cathar believer murdered by the crusaders in 1211. Blanche’s only son was Aimery of Montréal.

  44 the elder man invited a bevy of prelates to sniff out Catharism in his capital of Toulouse: The unsuccessful mission of 1178 included the head of the Cistercians, Henry of Marsiac, a powerful cardinal, Peter of Pavia, as well as the bishops of Bourges and Bath. Marsiac returned in 1181, at the head of an armed force and captured the town of Lavaur, a settlement between Albi and Toulouse that had a reputation for heresy. Although Marsiac’s occupation of Lavaur was fleeting, an ominous precedent had been set.

  45 a troubadour named Peire Vidal: Vidal was by no means the only troubadour in Raymond’s court. Indeed, the count’s secretary for many years was Peire Cardenal, a troubadour who was an accomplished composer of sirventes—rhymed songs that usually skewered the enemies of the man who commissioned them.