Martin The Cathars

The Rise and Fall of the Great Heresy
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-1-84344-416-9
Verlag: Pocket Essentials
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 192 Seiten

Catharism was the most successful heresy of the Middle Ages. Flourishing principally in the Languedoc and Italy, the Cathars taught that the world is evil and must be transcended through a simple life of prayer, work, fasting and non-violence. They believed themselves to be the heirs of the true heritage of Christianity going back to apostolic times, and completely rejected the Catholic Church and all its trappings, regarding it as the Church of Satan; Cathar services and ceremonies, by contrast, were held in fields, barns and in people's homes. Finding support from the nobility in the fractious political situation in southern France, the Cathars also found widespread popularity among peasants and artisans. And again unlike the Church, the Cathars respected women, and women played a major role in the movement. Alarmed at the success of Catharism, the Church founded the Inquisition and launched the Albigensian Crusade to exterminate the heresy. While previous Crusades had been directed against Muslims in the Middle East, the Albigensian Crusade was the first Crusade to be directed against fellow Christians, and was also the first European genocide. With the fall of the Cathar fortress of Montségur in 1244, Catharism was largely obliterated, although the faith survived into the early fourteenth century. Today, the mystique surrounding the Cathars is as strong as ever, and Sean Martin recounts their story and the myths associated with them in this lively and gripping book.

Sean Martin is a writer, poet and filmmaker. He has written books on The Knights Templar, Alchemy and Alchemists, The Gnostics, The Cathars, Andrei Tarkovsky and New Waves in Cinema.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Martin, Sean

Leseproben

2

The Foxes in the Vineyard of the Lord

The First Western Heretics

At the turn of the first millennium, a peasant called Leutard in the village of Vertus, near Châlons-sur-Marne in the north-east of France, had a dream. In it, a swarm of bees attacked his private parts, and then entered his body – presumably through his urethra. The dream, rather than making Leutard wake up half the village with his screaming, inspired him to go into his local church, break the cross above the altar and desecrate an image of Christ. But he didn’t stop there: he sent his wife away and began to preach openly in the village, urging whoever would listen that they should withhold payment of tithes. The bishop of Châlons got wind of the peasant’s activities, but Leutard threw himself down a well before he could be apprehended. Leutard seems to have belonged to a group, although it is not known for sure whether it was Bogomil in origin. (If it was, we can safely assume that the bees were a unique addition to the original Balkan teachings.) Heresy had, despite these somewhat unusual circumstances, arrived in the west.

Heresy was also a phantom presence at the other end of the social and religious spectrum around the time of Leutard’s singular ministry. Gerbert d’Aurillac, the first Frenchman to become pope – he reigned as Sylvester II between 999 and 1003 – made an unusual disposition at Rheims in 991 on the occasion of his consecration as Archbishop. He stated his belief in both the Old and New Testaments, the legitimacy of marriage, eating meat and the existence of an evil spirit that was lesser than God, one that had chosen to be evil. Since the Bogomils, and later the Cathars, rejected all the things that Gerbert was professing faith in, it has been assumed that he was either denouncing a Bogomil sect in the locality, or had himself been suspected of heretical leanings and was making a show of his orthodoxy.30

An obscure French peasant and a pope were not the only forerunners of Catharism. Vilgard, a scholar from Ravenna, saw demons in the shape of Virgil, Horace and Juvenal, ‘who encouraged his excessive pagan studies.’31 Despite his being burnt at the stake, Vilgard’s teachings spread in Italy, and are alleged to have reached Sardinia and Spain, where his followers were supposedly persecuted. In 1018 ‘Manichaeans’, who rejected the cross and baptism, appeared in Aquitaine, and four years later further ‘Manichaeans’ were sighted in Orléans. The Orléans heretics were in fact ten canons of the Church of the Holy Cross, a number of clerics and a handful of nobles, including Queen Constance’s confessor. They were also accused of worshipping the devil in the form of an Ethiopian (Ethiopia being a byword for blackness and, therefore, ultimate evil),32 rejecting the sacraments of the Church, denying that Christ was born of a virgin and denying the reality of the Passion and Resurrection. Furthermore, they were accused of holding nocturnal orgies, carrying out child sacrifice and performing magical flight – all of which would later recur in the Witch Craze of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance. But in 1022, witches were a threat as yet unperceived by the Church, and the Orléans group was burnt as heretics.

Burning at the stake had been the punishment for Manichaeans and would become the favoured method for dispatching unrepentant heretics. However, as the Church had had little experience of heresy for centuries, official procedure was non-existent and punishment varied greatly from area to area. A group of heretics discovered at Montforte in north-western Italy in 1025 was burnt, but at Arras-Cambrai a group which was unearthed the same year was merely forced to recant and was then given a copy of their renunciation in the vernacular.

As the eleventh century progressed, there were further outbreaks of heresy: during the 1040s, it flared up again at Châlons-sur-Marne; Aquitaine, Périgord, Toulouse and Soissons were also affected. It is impossible to say for certain whether these were all Bogomil-influenced groups: they were usually described by the Church as ‘Manichaean’, which became a blanket term to denote heretics – all clergy knew the term from St Augustine – despite the fact that most or all of them weren’t. (In fact, Manichaeism during this period was at its most active in China.) While the usual arsenal of accusations – orgies, child sacrifice, eating a diabolical viaticum made of the ashes of a dead child – were never far away, in many of these incidents, there were a number of similarities. The groups were frequently ascetic, sometimes in the extreme. Church sacraments and the Cross were despised, as were the clergy themselves, while meat, wine and physical union were abstained from. Most of these groups, however, did not survive the death, imprisonment or recanting of their leaders, and heresy, a sporadic affair in the eleventh century, seemed to die out altogether from about 1050 onwards.

Church Reforms

That heresy seems to have died down almost completely in the second half of the eleventh century is possibly related to the fact that the Church was starting a programme of reform that had been initiated by Pope Leo IX (1049–54). The greatest of the reforming pontiffs of this period – and indeed one of the most significant of all mediaeval popes – was Gregory VII (1073–85). His tenure as the Bishop of Rome was an eventful one, which saw Gregory at odds with the senior clergy over issues such as celibacy and simony for most of his reign. However, perhaps Gregory’s most influential act was to announce that the Church was the only means by which one could come to God. Every other church and faith was anathema. The Church was supreme, according to Gregory, with the pope himself being naturally the highest possible human authority. Gregory, as Malcolm Lambert notes, ‘awakened in the laity a new sense of responsibility for reform and a higher expectation of moral standards from their clergy. A genie was unleashed which could never again be put back into its bottle.’33

Gregory was not the only one pushing for reform. One of the leading figures in the reform movement, Humbert of Moyenmoutier, the cardinal who placed the order of excommunication on the patriarch of Constantinople in 1054, thereby creating the great schism between the Catholic and Orthodox churches, wrote an influential treatise entitled Three Books Against the Simoniacs, which has, in its revolutionary fervour, been compared to the Communist Manifesto.34 The moral life of the clergy became the rallying point for reformers, dissenters and disaffected churchgoers alike, and such was their stress on the moral stature of the clergy that the reformers resembled the Donatists, the fourth-century heretics who held that the masses of priests with moral shortcomings were deemed invalid.

In the early years of the twelfth century, this popular reforming zeal became even more strident, with charismatic wandering preachers whipping up parishes and often whole towns into an anticlerical frenzy. Tanchelm of Antwerp (d. c. 1115), who was active in the Netherlands, inspired such fanatical devotion that his followers were said to drink his bathwater, and he did not travel anywhere without an armed guard (a measure which proved ultimately futile, as Tanchelm was fatally stabbed by an enraged priest). A rogue Benedictine monk, Henry of Lausanne, caused complete havoc in Le Mans, and effectively kicked out the bishop. Peter of Bruys was even more radical. In an echo of Leutard, he incited people to break into churches and destroy the crucifixes. He held public burnings of crosses until, one Good Friday in the early 1130s, an enraged mob threw him onto one of his own bonfires. Arnold of Brescia was even more extreme than Peter. A former student of Peter Abelard, Arnold launched an attack on Rome in 1146 and declared it a republic. It was not until 1154 that the pope was able to return to the Vatican. Arnold was burnt at the stake and his ashes disposed of in the River Tiber to prevent his disciples from making off with relics.

By the time Arnold made his stand in Rome, however, the most serious heretical threat faced by the Church up to that time appeared on the banks of another river far to the north: the Rhine.

The First Cathars

The Cathars first emerged into history in 1143. Eberwin, prior of a Premonstratensian house at Steinfeld near Cologne, wrote to the great Cistercian reformer St Bernard of Clairvaux that two heretical groups had been discovered, after they had apparently blown their cover by arguing amongst themselves over a point of doctrine. The Cathars were brought before the bishop of Cologne for a hearing. It was discovered that their church was organised into a three-tier system of Elect, Believers and Listeners, much the same as the Manichaeans of Augustine’s era had been, and they did not baptise with water, but through the laying-on of hands. They condemned marriage, but Eberwin could not find out why: ‘either because they dared not reveal it or, more probably, they did not know.’35 More ominously, the archbishop learnt that the heresy ‘had a very large number of adherents scattered throughout the world’ and that it had ‘lain concealed from the time of the martyrs even to their own day [1143].’36 Most of the heretics were persuaded to recant, although two of their number, apparently a bishop and a deacon, remained unrepentant even after three days’ debate with both clergy and laity. Before sentence could be pronounced, the mob seized the two heretics and threw them onto a fire.

Another chronicle, The...