|
Such are the heights of wickedness to which men are driven
by religion.
Lucretius (99-55 BC), De Rerum Natura
A thousand years or so after its birth, mainstream Christianity
was still in competition with other religions in Europe and the
Middle East. Often these religions were so intermixed with Christianity,
or Christianity was so intermixed with them, that it was not easy
for the Roman Church to decide whether they should be persecuted
as infidels, heretics or schismatics. The Cathars were a case in
point. They were in some ways spiritual successors to the Manichæans.
The Manichæans had been followers of Mani (c AD 216 - 276)
who claimed to be the Holy Ghost incarnate. His beliefs were based
upon Zoroastrianism and Gnosticism, and had a profound effect upon
the early Christian Church. (St Augustine, remember, had been a
Manichæan for ten years). The religion was declared heretical
when the Christian Church achieved power within the Roman Empire,
but it flourished elsewhere.
Manichæism survived in China up to the eleventh century
and in Turkestan up to the thirteenth. In Europe their ideas also
survived, despite persecution. The Bogomils ("Friends of God")
or Bulgars were a Gnostic Christian sect that flourished in Thrace
and Bulgaria in the 10th Century. Their beliefs spread throughout
Europe: to Italy, Northern Spain, the Languedoc, France, Germany,
and Flanders. Bulgars rejected the Trinity and the sacraments, denied
the Catholic Church's teachings on images, infant baptism, saints,
and the virgin birth, and held that matter is inherently evil. A
derivative sect which came to be known as Cathari flourished in
the Languedoc (now Southern France) and Northern Italy . They followed
a life of severe asceticism and found little difficulty in attracting
the bulk of the population who were, according to Church records,
sated with the corruption of the local clergy.
Little is known about Cathars. Most of the information about them
has been destroyed, and what we do know has mostly been aduced from
Catholic records. This is rather like reconstructing Jewish theology
from Nazi records of the holocaust. Records are biased and incomplete.
What we do know is that the Cathars were ascetics. Their ministers
and teachers, called parfaits or perfected ones, were vegetarians.
They generally adopted a life of extreme devotion and simplicity.
Both men and women could become parfaits. They lived in poverty,
the men travelling and preaching. They earned their livings by cloth
making, shepherding, and other trades. Followers were not expected
to adhere to the same ascetic standards as the parfaits, and were
permitted to eat meat and engage in sex. They had a low opinion
of the institution of marriage and are thought to have practised
birth control and abortion. They disagreed with the Roman Church
on many points. They took the view that if sex was agreeable to
both partners then it could not be disagreeable to God. They declined
to take oathes. They denied the validity of clerical hierarchies
and of ordained intercessors between man and God. They believed
in reincarnation. They had no problems with the practice of charging
interest on loans. They did not build churches. They criticised
the accumulation of land, and the forcible extraction of tithes,
by the Roman clergy. One of the things that most outraged the Catholic
authorities was that they read the bible. Another was that women
could be regarded as men's equals. A third was their sincere conviction
that the Roman Church was inspired by Satan.
Cathars regarded themselves as Christians. They used the New Testament,
especially the John Gospel, and repeated the Lord's Prayer with
the addition of the words "For thine is the kingdom, the power
and the glory, for ever and ever" (which the Roman Church regarded
as evidence of heresy before it also adopted this ending ). Believers
were generally called "Good-men" and "Good-women",
or "Good-Christians". The name Cathar had been adopted
by the Church originally as an insult, but people tended to assume
that the name was derived from the Greek word for "pure",
so it stuck.
When Saint Bernard visited the Languedoc in 1145 his main impression
seems to have been the shameless corruption in his own Church. Of
the Cathars he noted that their morals were pure and that no sermons
were more Christian than theirs . In 1205 the churchman Dominic
Guzmán had planned, with the help of God, to convert Cathars
to the Roman faith by preaching to them. Despite God's help, his
preaching proved a spectacular and embarrassing failure. When this
line failed, the Church tried open debates. These debates were permitted
because the Roman clergy thought that they could humiliate the opposition
intellectually and so facilitate mass defections to the Roman Church.
This did not happen, and the Roman Church seems to have succeeded
only in confirming the extent of the gulf between themselves and
the general population. When a great noblewoman, the Lady Esclarmonde
of Foix, a parfaite, tried to speak at a formal debate between Roman
clergy and Cathar representatives, she was admonished by a representative
of the Roman Church: "go to your spinning madam. It is not
proper for you to speak in a debate of this sort". The churchman's
treatment of such a prestigious figure as Esclarmonde could only
have had the opposite effect to that intended. In any case, even
with God's personal help, the Roman Church once again failed to
secure mass conversions, or indeed any conversions at all. More
vigorous action was called for. Speaking on behalf of Christ a little
later, Guzmán promised the Cathars slavery and death .
Partly because of the attraction of Cathar teaching, and partially
because of the widespread corruption of the Catholic Church, more
and more people in Southern France defected to the Cathars. The
Roman Church hierarchy became increasingly worried. Pope Innocent
III found a convenient excuse in 1208, and ordered a crusade against
them. Crusaders enjoyed the same privileges as those who fought
the Moslems. Killing Cathars, like killing Moslems, assured the
killer of the highest place in Heaven. An army was mustered under
the command of the Cistercian Abbot of Cîteaux. Tens of thousands
of Crusaders were enlisted. They were mainly Northern French, keen
for plunder, the remission of their sins, and an assured place in
Heaven. They were crusaders in every sense, wearing the crusaders
cross and enjoying all of their privileges (protection of goods,
suspension of debts, and so on).
On 22 July 1209 they arrived at Béziers, on the periphery
of the area in the Languedoc where Cathars flourished. There were
believed to be around 200 Cathars amongst a much greater population
of sympathetic Catholics. The crusading army sacked and looted the
town indiscriminately, while townspeople retreated to the sanctuary
of the churches. The Cistercian abbot-commander is said to have
been asked how to tell Cathar from Catholic. His reply, recorded
later by a fellow Cistercian, demonstrated his faith: "Kill
them all - the Lord will recognise His own" . The doors of
the church of St Mary Magdalene were broken down and the occupants
slaughtered. 7,000 people died in the church including women, children,
clerics and old men. Elsewhere many more thousands were mutilated
and killed. Prisoners were blinded, dragged behind horses, and used
for target practice. The town was razed. Arnaud, the abbot-commander,
wrote to his master, the Pope: "Today your Holiness, twenty
thousand citizens were put to the sword, regardless of rank, age,
or sex." .
Other towns followed. The Crusaders refined their methods. At
Carcassone they expelled the inhabitants with a day's safe conduct,
so that they could loot at leisure. Arnaud wrote to the pope to
explain why on this occasion no-one had been killed. Simon de Montfort,
the new military leader, had another technique. When the castle
at Bram fell in 1210 he had the noses of 100 prisoners cropped,
their lips cut off and their eyes gauged out. One man was left with
one eye so that he could guide the others away. With a hand on the
shoulder of the one in front, and the one-eyed man at their head,
a file of blind prisoners wound its way to the next town to demonstrate
the ineffable mercy of God's Army. At other towns Simon favoured
mass burnings. The Pope, who was kept informed, gave thanks to God.
For their part, the Cathar perfecti behaved like the early martyrs
of Christian legend. At Minerve the Cistercian Vaux de Cernay noted
that it was not necessary to throw them to the flames, for they
went voluntarily. They claimed that "neither death nor life
can separate us from the faith to which we are joined". Their
behaviour seems to have impressed some of their persecutors, but
not enough to raise qualms about killing them. At Lavaur, 400 were
burned by the crusaders, "with great joy" as de Cernay
noted. (The crusaders generally burned people alive with great joy
- cum ingenti gaudio). One perfecti allegedly renounced his faith.
The rest died in silence.
Like the Abbot of Cîteaux, other churchmen were keen participants
in the extirpation of a rival faith. A major participant was Folquet
of Marseilles, bishop of Toulouse, who is now numbered among the
saints. Dominic Guzmán was another. Still smarting from his
conspicuous failure to convert by persuasion, he made good his promise
to bring slavery and death. He is now venerated as St Dominic, and
is regarded by many Christians as one of the most holy men ever
to have lived.
The Crusade was intensified under the next pope, Honorius III.
Here is a contemporary account of a masacre carried out by Crusaders
in 1219 at Marmonde, a town of some 7000 people. It shocked even
the crusaders own allies:
…terror and massacre began. Noblemen, ladies and their
little children, men and women stripped naked, all were slashed
and cut to ribbons by keen edged swords. Flesh, blood, brains,
torsos, limbs and faces hacked in two; lungs, livers and guts
torn out and thrown away - laying on the open ground as if they
had rained down from the heavens. Marshland and firm ground, all
was red with blood. Not a man or woman was left alive, neither
young nor old, no living creature, except perhaps some well-hidden
infant. Marmond was razed and set alight…
Ordinances were passed which imposed new penalties for heresy.
Honorius sanctioned Dominic Guzmán's new religious order,
popularly called Dominicans after him. The Dominicans in turn spawned
the Inquisition. In 1233 the next pope, Gregory IX, charged the
Dominican Inquisition with the final solution: the absolute extirpation
of the Cathars.
Soon the Franciscans would join in too. By the end of the fourteenth
century Catharism had been virtually extirpated. Before the crusade
the Languedoc had been the most civilised land in Europe. Learning
had been highly valued. Literacy had been widespread, and a vernacular
literature had developed earlier than anywhere else in Europe. Religious
tolerance had been widely practised. Jews enjoyed ordinary civil
rights. This was the home of courtly love, poetry, romance, chivalry
and the troubadours. With the notable exception of most of the Catholic
priesthood, people had preferred simple asceticism to venality and
corruption. Even some Roman priests are known to have been Cathars
.
All in all some 500,000 men women and children were massacred
in the Church's campaign . The holocaust was so severe that, apparently
by accident, it extinguished the high culture of the Troubadours.
Educated and tolerant rulers were killed, and replaced by relative
barbarians from Northern France, who were prepared to toe the Church's
line. At the end of the extirpation of the Cathars, the Church had
convincing proof that a sustained campaign of genocide can work.
It also had the precedent of an internal Crusade within Christendom,
the machinery of an inquisition, and two bodies of dedicated men,
Dominican and Franciscans, prepared to man it.
Cathars were exterminated elsewhere. There were mass burnings
at Montwimer in Champagne in 1239, at Plaisance in Lombardy in 1268
(28 cart-loads), and at Verona in 1278 . From a secular point of
view there was no harm in the Cathars. Their fate is still mourned
in the Languedoc to this day. Yet it is not difficult to find Roman
Catholic authorities who seek to justify the Church's genocide and
make out that it acted for the best. A Handbook of Heresies, approved
by a Roman Catholic Censor and bearing the Imprimatur of the Vicar
General at Westminster, refers to Guzmán's "heroic exercise
of fraternal charity" . His failure as a preacher is not mentioned,
nor the fact that even using trickery and torture almost no parfaits
(if any at all) could be induced to abandon their faith. The thousands
of Cathar deaths are not referred to - except in the most oblique
terms: "The long and arduous task was at length successful,
and by the end of the fourteenth century Albigensianism, with all
other forms of Catharism, was practically extinct." And the
opportunity is taken to condemn Cathar beliefs once again: "This
anti-human heresy, by destroying the sanctity of the family, would
reduce mankind to a horde of unclean beasts..." . There is
not a hint of remorse or regret for the holocaust, and one can only
assume that, if it could, the Church would act in the same way again
if similar circumstances arose in the future.
Click on the following link for more about the
Cathars of the Languedoc
|
