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Catharism (/ˈkæθərɪzəm/; from the Greek: καθαροί, katharoi, "the pure (ones)")[1][2] was a Christian dualist movement that thrived in some areas of Southern Europe, particularly northern Italy and southern France, between the 12th and 14th centuries. Cathar beliefs varied between communities because Catharism was initially taught by ascetic priests who had set few guidelines. The Cathars were a direct challenge to the Catholic Church, which denounced its practices and dismissed it outright as the Church of Satan.[3]

Catharism had its roots in the Paulician movement in Armenia and the Bogomils of Bulgaria, which took influences from the Paulicians. Though the term "Cathar" (/ˈkæθɑːr/) has been used for centuries to identify the movement, whether the movement identified itself with this name is debatable.[4] In Cathar texts, the terms "Good Men" (Bons Hommes) or "Good Christians" are the common terms of self-identification.[5] The idea of two Gods or principles, one being good the other evil, was central to Cathar beliefs. The good God was the God of the New Testament and the creator of the spiritual realm, as opposed to the bad God, whom many Cathars identified as Satan, creator of the physical world of the Old Testament. All visible matter, including the human body, was created by Satan; it was therefore tainted with sin. This was the antithesis to the monotheistic Catholic Church, whose fundamental principle was that there was only one God who created all things visible and invisible. Cathars thought human spirits were the genderless spirits of Angels trapped within the physical creation of Satan, cursed to be reincarnated until the Cathar faithful achieved salvation through a ritual called the Consolamentum.[6] From the beginning of his reign, Pope Innocent III attempted to use diplomacy to end Catharism, but in the year 1208 Innocent's papal legate Pierre de Castelnau was murdered while returning to Rome after preaching the Catholic faith in southern France.[7] With the option of sending Catholic missionaries and jurists extinguished, Pope Innocent III declared Pierre of Castelnau a martyr and launched the Albigensian Crusade.[7][8]



The origins of the Cathars' beliefs are unclear but most theories agree they came from the Byzantine Empire mostly by the trade routes and spread from Bulgaria to the Netherlands. The name of Bulgarians (Bougres) was also applied to the Albigenses, and they maintained an association with the similar Christian movement of the Bogomils ("Friends of God") of Thrace. "That there was a substantial transmission of ritual and ideas from Bogomilism to Catharism is beyond reasonable doubt."[9] Their doctrines have numerous resemblances to those of the Bogomils and the earlier Paulicians as well as the Manicheans and the Christian Gnostics of the first few centuries AD, although, as many scholars, most notably Mark Pegg, have pointed out, it would be erroneous to extrapolate direct, historical connections based on theoretical similarities perceived by modern scholars. St John Damascene, writing in the 8th century AD, also notes of an earlier sect called the "Cathari", in his book On Heresies, taken from the epitome provided by Epiphanius of Salamis in his Panarion. He says of them: "They absolutely reject those who marry a second time, and reject the possibility of penance [that is, forgiveness of sins after baptism]".[10] These are probably the same Cathari who are mentioned in Canon 8 of the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea in the year 325, which states "...[I]f those called Cathari come over [to the faith], let them first make profession that they are willing to communicate [share full communion] with the twice-married, and grant pardon to those who have lapsed..."[11]




General beliefs[edit]


G. K. Chesterton, the English Roman Catholic author, claimed: "..the medieval system began to be broken to pieces intellectually, long before it showed the slightest hint of falling to pieces morally. The huge early heresies, like the Albigenses, had not the faintest excuse in moral superiority."[17]






In contrast to the Catholic Church, the Cathars had but one sacrament, the Consolamentum, or Consolation. This involved a brief spiritual ceremony to remove all sin from the believer and to induct him or her into the next higher level as a Perfect.[20] Unlike the Roman Catholic sacrament of Penance, the Consolamentum could be taken only once.


The Cathars also refused the Catholic Sacrament of the eucharist saying that it could not possibly be the body of Christ. They also refused to partake in the practice of Baptism by water. The following two quotes are taken from the Catholic Inquisitor Bernard Gui’s experiences with the Cathar practices and beliefs:




Some believe that the Catharist conception of Jesus resembled nontrinitarian modalistic monarchianism (Sabellianism) in the West and adoptionism in the East.[24][25]

Bernard of Clairvaux's biographer and other sources accuse some Cathars of Arianism,[26][27] and some scholars see Cathar Christology as having traces of earlier Arian roots.[28][29] According to some of their contemporary enemies Cathars did not accept the Trinitarian understanding of Jesus, but considered him the human form of an angel similar to Docetic Christology.[30] Zoé Oldenbourg (2000) compared the Cathars to "Western Buddhists" because she considered that their view of the doctrine of "resurrection" taught by Jesus was, in fact, similar to the Buddhist doctrine of reincarnation.[31] The Cathars taught that to regain angelic status one had to renounce the material self completely. Until one was prepared to do so, he/she would be stuck in a cycle of reincarnation, condemned to live on the corrupt Earth.[32]


Social relationships[edit]

Killing was abhorrent to the Cathars. Consequently, abstention from all animal food (sometimes exempting fish) was enjoined of the Perfecti. The Perfecti avoided eating anything considered to be a by-product of sexual reproduction.[20] War and capital punishment were also condemned - an abnormality in Medieval Europe. In a world where few could read, their rejection of oath-taking marked them as social revolutionaries.

Cathars also rejected marriage. Their theology was based principally on the belief that the physical world, including the flesh, was irredeemably evil - as it stemmed from the evil principle or "demiurge".[34] Therefore, reproduction was viewed by them as a moral evil to be avoided - as it continued the chain of reincarnation and suffering in the material world. It was claimed by their opponents that, given this loathing for procreation, they generally reverted to sodomy. Such was the situation that a charge of heresy leveled against a suspected Cathar was usually dismissed if the accused could show he was legally married.



It has been alleged that the Cathar Church of the Languedoc had a relatively flat structure, distinguishing between perfecti (a term they did not use, instead bonhommes) and credentes.[20] By about 1140 liturgy and a system of doctrine had been established.[35] It created a number of bishoprics, first at Albi around 1165 [36] and after the 1167 Council at Saint-Félix-Lauragais sites at Toulouse, Carcassonne, and Agen, so that four bishoprics were in existence by 1200.[20][35][37][38]

In about 1225, during a lull in the Albigensian Crusade, the bishopric of Razes was added. Bishops were supported by their two assistants: a filius maior (typically the successor) and a filius minor, who were further assisted by deacons.[39] The perfecti were the spiritual elite, highly respected by many of the local people, leading a life of austerity and charity.[20] In the apostolic fashion they ministered to the people and travelled in pairs.[20]

Role of women in Catharism[edit]

Cathars being expelled from Carcassonne in 1209. In this group, women appear to be nearly as numerous as men and the Crusaders seem to give women equally harsh treatment for their beliefs.

Catharism has been seen as giving women the greatest opportunities for independent action since women were found as being believers as well as Perfecti, who were able to administer the sacrament of the consolamentum.[40] The Cathars believed that one would be repeatedly reincarnated until one commits to the self-denial of the material world, which meant that a man could be reincarnated as a woman and vice versa, thereby rendering gender completely meaningless.[41] The spirit was of utmost importance to the Cathars and was described as being immaterial and sexless.[41] Because of this belief, the Cathars saw women equally capable of being spiritual leaders, which undermined the very concept of gender held by the Catholic Church and did not go unnoticed.[42]

The women that were accused of being heretics in early medieval Christianity included those labeled Gnostics, Cathars, Beguines as well as several other groups that were sometimes "tortured and executed".[43] The Cathars, like the Gnostics who preceded them, assigned more importance to the role of Mary Magdalene in the spread of early Christianity than the Church previously did. Her vital role as a teacher contributed to the Cathar belief that women could serve as spiritual leaders. Women were found to be included in the Perfecti in significant numbers, with numerous receiving the consolamentum after being widowed.[40] Having reverence for the Gospel of John, the Cathars saw Mary as perhaps even more important than Saint Peter, the founder of the Church.[44]

The Cathar movement proved to be extremely successful in gaining female followers because of its proto-feminist teachings along with the general feeling of exclusion from the Catholic church. Catharism attracted numerous women with the promise of a sacerdotal role that the Catholic Church did not allow.[6] Catharism let women become a Perfect of the faith, a position of far more prestige than anything the Church offered.[45] These female Perfects were required to adhere to a strict and ascetic lifestyle, but were still able to have their own houses.[46] Although many women found something attractive in Catharism not all found its teachings convincing. A notable example is Hildegard of Bingen, who in 1163, gave a widely renowned sermon against the Cathars in Cologne. During this speech, Hildegard announced a state of eternal punishment and damnation to all those who accepted the Cathars beliefs.[47]

While women Perfects rarely traveled to preach the faith, they still played a vital role in the spreading of the Catharism by establishing group homes for women.[48] Though it was extremely uncommon, there were isolated cases of female Cathars departing from their homes to spread the faith.[49] In the Cathar group homes, women were educated in the faith and these women would go on to bear children who would then also become believers. Through this pattern the faith grew exponentially through the efforts of women as each generation passed.[48] Among some groups of Cathars there were even more women than there were men.[50]

Despite women having an instrumental role in the growing of the faith, misogyny was not completely absent from the Cathar movement. Some seemingly misogynistic Cathar beliefs include that one's last incarnation had to be experienced as a man to break the cycle.[19] This belief was inspired by later French Cathars, which taught that women must be reborn as men in order to achieve salvation.[6] Another one is that the sexual allure of women impedes man's ability to reject the material world.[19] Toward the end of the Cathar movement, French Catharism became more misogynistic and started the practice of excluding women Perfects.[6] However, the influence of these type of misogynistic beliefs and practices remained rather limited on the whole of Catharism as later Italian Perfects still included women.[6]






Albigensian Crusade[edit]

In January 1208 the papal legate, Pierre de Castelnau - a Cistercian monk, theologian and canon lawyer - was sent to meet the ruler of the area, Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse.[52] Known for excommunicating noblemen who protected the Cathars, Castelnau excommunicated Raymond for abetting heresy following an allegedly fierce argument during which Raymond supposedly threatened Castelnau with violence.[53] Shortly thereafter, Castelnau was murdered as he returned to Rome, allegedly by a knight in the service of Count Raymond. His body was returned and laid to rest in the Abbey at Saint Gilles. As soon as he heard of the murder, the Pope ordered the legates to preach a crusade against the Cathars and wrote a letter to Philip Augustus, King of France, appealing for his intervention—or an intervention led by his son, Louis. This was not the first appeal but some see the murder of the legate as a turning point in papal policy. Others claim it as a fortuitous event in allowing the Pope to excite popular opinion and to renew his pleas for intervention in the south. The chronicler of the crusade which followed, Peter of Vaux de Cernay, portrays the sequence of events in such a way that, having failed in his effort to peaceably demonstrate the errors of Catharism, the Pope then called a formal crusade, appointing a series of leaders to head the assault. The French King refused to lead the crusade himself, and could not spare his son to do so either—despite his victory against John, King of England, there were still pressing issues with Flanders and the empire and the threat of an Angevin revival. Phillip did however sanction the participation of some of his more bellicose and ambitious—some might say dangerous—barons, notably Simon de Montfort and Bouchard de Marly. There followed twenty years of war against the Cathars and their allies in the Languedoc: the Albigensian Crusade.

This war pitted the nobles of the north of France against those of the south. The widespread northern enthusiasm for the Crusade was partially inspired by a papal decree permitting the confiscation of lands owned by Cathars and their supporters. This not only angered the lords of the south but also the French King, who was at least nominally the suzerain of the lords whose lands were now open to despoliation and seizure. Phillip Augustus wrote to Pope Innocent in strong terms to point this out—but the Pope did not change his policy—and many of those who went to the Midi were aware that the Pope had been equivocal over the Siege of Zara in 1202 and the Sack of Constantinople in 1204. As the Languedoc was supposedly teeming with Cathars and Cathar sympathisers, this made the region a target for northern French noblemen looking to acquire new fiefs. The barons of the north headed south to do battle.




The Cathars spent much of 1209 fending off the crusaders. The Béziers army attempted a sortie but was quickly defeated, then pursued by the crusaders back through the gates and into the city. Arnaud-Amaury, the Cistercian abbot-commander, is supposed to have been asked how to tell Cathars from Catholics. His reply, recalled by Caesar of Heisterbach, a fellow Cistercian, thirty years later was "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius."—"Kill them all, the Lord will recognise His own."[54][55] The doors of the church of St Mary Magdalene were broken down and the refugees dragged out and slaughtered. Reportedly, 7,000 people died there. Elsewhere in the town many more thousands were mutilated and killed. Prisoners were blinded, dragged behind horses, and used for target practice.[56] What remained of the city was razed by fire. Arnaud-Amaury wrote to Pope Innocent III, "Today your Holiness, twenty thousand heretics were put to the sword, regardless of rank, age, or sex."[57][58] The permanent population of Béziers at that time was then probably no more than 5,000, but local refugees seeking shelter within the city walls could conceivably have increased the number to 20,000.


Treaty and persecution[edit]



The Inquisition was established in 1234 to uproot the remaining Cathars.[61] Operating in the south at Toulouse, Albi, Carcassonne and other towns during the whole of the 13th century, and a great part of the 14th, it succeeded in crushing Catharism as a popular movement and driving its remaining adherents underground.[61] Cathars who refused to recant were hanged, or burnt at the stake.[62]

From May 1243 to March 1244, the Cathar fortress of Montségur was besieged by the troops of the seneschal of Carcassonne and the archbishop of Narbonne.[63] On 16 March 1244, a large and symbolically important massacre took place, where over 200 Cathar Perfects were burnt in an enormous pyre at the prat dels cremats ("field of the burned") near the foot of the castle.[63] Moreover, the Church decreed lesser chastisements against laymen suspected of sympathy with Cathars, at the 1235 Council of Narbonne.[64]

Inquisitors required heretical sympathisers – repentant first offenders – to sew a yellow cross onto their clothes.[65]




After several decades of harassment and re-proselytising, and perhaps even more importantly, the systematic destruction of their religious texts, the sect was exhausted and could find no more adepts. The leader of a Cathar revival in the Pyrenean foothills, Peire Autier was captured and executed in April 1310 in Toulouse.[66][67] After 1330, the records of the Inquisition contain very few proceedings against Cathars. The last known Cathar perfectus in the Languedoc, Guillaume Bélibaste, was executed in the autumn of 1321.[68][67]


Later history[edit]



Pays Cathare[edit]


The term Pays Cathare, French meaning "Cathar Country" is used to highlight the Cathar heritage and history of the region where Catharism was traditionally strongest. This area is centred around fortresses such as Montségur and Carcassonne; also the French département of the Aude uses the title Pays Cathare in tourist brochures.[70] These areas have ruins from the wars against the Cathars which are still visible today.



In an effort to find the few remaining heretics in and around the village of Montaillou, Jacques Fournier, Bishop of Pamiers, future Pope Benedict XII, had those suspected of heresy interrogated in the presence of scribes who recorded their conversations. The late 13th- to early 14th-century document, discovered in the Vatican archives in the 1960s, is the oldest known account of the daily lives of ordinary people told in their own words. It was translated by Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie as Montaillou: The Promised Land of Error.[16] In the original, the book was entitled Montaillou, Occitan Village.

Historical scholarship[edit]


In the 20th century, Deodat Roche (1877-1978) was a key historian, and the founder of the scholarly French-language journal Cahiers d'Etudes Cathares.

Major academic books in English - for example, Malcolm Lambert's The Cathars[71] and Malcolm Barber's The Cathars[72] - only starting appearing at the turn of the millennium.

Legacy in art and music[edit]


Legacy in modern popular culture[edit]

The Cathars have been depicted or re-interpreted in popular books and films such as The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, Labyrinth, and Bernard Cornwell's The Grail Quest series, and Cathar concepts and tenets permeate Cloud Atlas. A number of semi-fictional conspiracy theories have been published that integrate the Cathars into their ideas, especially in France and Germany.

See also[edit]


  1. ^ OED (1989), "Cathar".
  3. ^ Lambert (1998), p. 21.
  4. ^ Pegg (2001a), pp. 181 ff..
  5. ^ Théry (2002), pp. 75-117.
  6. ^ a b c d e Schaus (2006), p. 114.
  7. ^ a b Sumption (1999), pp. 15-16.
  8. ^ Madaule (1967), pp. 56-63.
  9. ^ Lambert (1998), p. 31.
  10. ^ John of Damascus (2012), p. 125.
  11. ^ Schaff & Wace (1994), p. 20.
  12. ^ Murphy (2012), pp. 26-27.
  13. ^ Dondaine (1939).
  14. ^ Wakefield & Evans (1991), pp. 511-515.
  17. ^ Chesterton (1910), p. 30.
  18. ^ Wakefield & Evans (1991), p. 136.
  19. ^ a b c O'Shea (2000), p. 42.
  22. ^ Barber (2000), pp. 103–104.
  23. ^ a b Burr (1996).
  24. ^ "Cathari", Columbia Encyclopedia, Columbia University Press, 2007 .
  25. ^ "Albigensians", Encyclopaedia 2, The Free dictionary 
  32. ^ O'Shea (2000), p. 11.
  33. ^ The Gnostic Bible, Google Books.
  34. ^ Weber (1908b).
  35. ^ a b Sumption (1999), pp. 49-50.
  36. ^ O'Shea & 2000 (pp2-4).
  37. ^ Lambert (1998), p. 70.
  38. ^ Lambert (2002), p. 140.
  39. ^ Moore (1995), p. 137.
  40. ^ a b Ward (2002), pp. 241-42.
  41. ^ a b O'Shea (2000), pp. 10-12.
  42. ^ O'Shea (2000), pp. 25-26.
  43. ^ Clark (2001), p. 412.
  44. ^ O'Shea (2000), pp. 80-81.
  45. ^ O'Shea (2000), pp. 40-43.
  46. ^ Kaelber (1997), p. 120.
  47. ^ Newman (1998), pp. 753-755.
  48. ^ a b O'Shea (2000), p. 41.
  49. ^ Weis (2001), p. 122.
  50. ^ Walther (1965), p. 167.
  51. ^ Johnson 1976, p. 251.
  52. ^ Sumption (1999), pp. 68-69.
  53. ^ Sumption & 1999 (72-73).
  54. ^ of Heisterbach, Caesarius (1851), Strange, J, ed., Caesarius Heiserbacencis monachi ordinis Cisterciensis, Dialogus miraculorum 2, Cologne: JM Heberle, pp. 296–8, "Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eis" . Caesarius (c) was a Cistercian Master of Novices.
  56. ^ Johnson (1976), p. 252.
  57. ^ Innocent III (1855), Vol. 216.
  58. ^ Sibly & Sibly (2003), p. 128.
  59. ^ Chanson de la Croisade Albigeoise laisse 205.
  60. ^ Sumption (1999), pp. 179-81.
  61. ^ a b Sumption (1999), pp. 230-232.
  62. ^ Martin (2005), pp. 105-121.
  63. ^ a b Sumption (1999), pp. 238-40.
  64. ^ Innocent IV (1252), Ad extirpanda (Bull) .
  65. ^ Weis (2001), pp. 11–12.
  66. ^ O'Shea (2000), pp. 237-38.
  67. ^ a b Sumption (1999), pp. 242-43.
  68. ^ O'Shea (2000), pp. 239-46.
  69. ^ O'Shea (2000), p. 230.
  70. ^ Pays Cathare
  71. ^ Lambert (1998).
  72. ^ Barber (2000).
  74. ^ La Nef. Montségur: La tragédie cathare. Dorian Recordings.DOR-90243


External links[edit]