The Cathars—or Albigensians, as their southern French adherents were called—were dualists, believing that the world is dominated by the opposing principles of Good and Evil. They owed their theology to the Bogomils of the Byzantine empire, who had long preserved Manichean traditions and whose disciples spread the word in the second half of the 12th c. in Flanders, the Rhineland, France, and Lombardy, wherever anticlericalism had created fertile soil. Two schools of theologians, the mitigated and the absolute dualists, contended for supremacy among believers.
But the appeal of Catharism in southern France lay less in its theology than in the ethical values it taught, and in the way of life of the perfecti, the élite of the sect. These men abandoned family and home, embraced the life of apostolic poverty, foreswore sexual relations and meat-eating, rejected oath-taking (that necessary element in medieval social life), and concentrated on ministering in the vernacular to their adherents and on developing a ritual for their Church. They exercised so strong a hold on their followers' imaginations that Catholics were forced into imitating them; the Dominican order of friars was designed to promote a similar life-style combined with rigid orthodoxy. The credentes, those who accepted the authority of the perfecti but did not aspire to their standards, undertook to accept the consolamentum, the sacrament of heretication, on their deathbeds. Otherwise few rules were imposed upon them. Many castellans and lesser aristocrats of southern Languedoc in the 12th and early 13th c. united resentment of the Catholic clergy's moral claims with affection for a heretical ministry that required no tithes for its maintenance. Their female relations were attracted by the Cathar nunneries, and perhaps also by the less blatantly sexist character of the heretics' ecclesiology.
Pope Innocent III saw in these supporters the primary danger to Christianity. In 1208 he launched the Albigensian Crusade [see Canso de la Crotzada] against them, which embittered all southerners, whether heretic or not, against the predominantly northern crusaders. Though Catharism survived the crusade, it then suffered from the Inquisition, instituted by Pope Gregory IX in 1231. The usual penalty for support of the perfecti, forfeiture of land, slowly forced the southern aristocracy back into the clutches of the Catholic Church, and Catharism became an underground movement, increasingly found only in the Pyrennean villages beyond the Inquisitors' reach. After Jacques Fournier's inquest (1318-25) into the heretics of Montaillou [see Le Roy Ladurie] and its surroundings, no more was heard of it.
[Jean Dunbabin]
Bibliography
- C. Thousellier, Catharisme et valdéisme en Languedoc, 2nd edn. (1969)
- R. Lafont et al., Les Cathares en Occitanie (1982)
