The Cathars

by Sean Martin

  Manichaeism might have been extinguished from Europe, but the name lived on as a byword for dualist, heretic or merely a political opponent. (Indeed, the word ‘maniac’ derives from a derogatory term for Manichaean.) Heresy moved east and Armenia, despite being the first Christian nation, was fast becoming a hotbed of heresy courtesy of refugees fleeing from persecution in the Byzantine Empire and elsewhere. Two new dualist heresies emerged to take the place of Manichaeism: Massalianism and Paulicianism. The Massalians, who were also known as the Enthusiasts (from the Greek enthousiasmos, which comes from the word entheos, ‘having the God within’) were originally from north-east Mesopotamia, where they are thought to have originated in the late fourth century. As early as 447, Massalianism was already perceived as the biggest heretical threat in Armenia, and the Armenian church introduced measures against its followers. Their main tenet of faith seems to have been the belief that inside every person dwells a demon, who must be banished through a life of prayer (the name ‘massalian’ means ‘praying people’) and asceticism. Once the demon had been banished, the possibility of further sinning was deemed impossible and the believer could return to secular life. As a consequence, the Massalians were frequently accused of immorality and licentiousness. Their missionaries frequently targeted monasteries; any house suspected of being infected with their heresy risked being burnt to the ground.

  The Paulicians were first noted in sixth-century Armenia. Whether the Manichaeans influenced them is debatable, as the Paulicians did not divide their number into Elect and Listeners, as the Manichaeans had done, and neither were they particularly ascetic. The exact date at which the Paulicians became dualists – they seem originally to have been Adoptionists, who believed that Christ was born human and did not become divine until his baptism – is likewise debatable, and it may not have happened until the ninth century.27 In a further deviation from Manichaeism, the Paulicians were fighters to be reckoned with. As the Cathars were pacifists, the Paulicians’ military prowess was something of an anomaly. Seven Paulician churches were founded in Armenia and Asia Minor, whose mother church at Corinth was supposedly founded by St Paul, after whom the sect was named.

  The Bogomils

  As the long night of the Dark Ages descended over Europe, the Church faced threats from two different sources: the rise of the new religion of Islam, which began to make rapid inroads into Christian kingdoms from the early eighth century, and the waves of nomadic invasions that began with the Huns in the fourth century. The Church’s position was further weakened by its constant struggles with the eastern Orthodox church, a situation that worsened until the dramatic schism of 1054 rent the eastern and western churches permanently asunder. The Balkans, falling midway between Rome and Constantinople, became a theological battleground, serving as home to numerous heterodox sects as much as Armenia had done a century or two before.

  The decisive development that paved the way for the Cathars’ great predecessors, the Bogomils, was the establishment of the first Bulgarian empire (681–1018). Bulgaria immediately proved to be a thorn in Constantinople’s side, and the fact that it was pagan only exacerbated matters. In order to create a bulwark against Bulgaria, colonists from the Byzantine empire’s eastern edges were forcibly resettled in Thrace – an area roughly comprising north-eastern Greece, southern Bulgaria and European Turkey. Unfortunately, amongst those being repatriated were the Paulicians. Introducing heretics into an area that bordered on a pagan kingdom was simply asking for trouble, and trouble is precisely what Constantinople was to get.28

  No one knows precisely where the Bogomils came from. They were first recorded during the reign of the Bulgarian tsar Peter (927–69), who was forced to write twice during the 940s to the patriarch of Constantinople, Theophylact Lecapenus, asking for help against the new heresy. Theophylact was known to be a man more at home in the stable than the cathedral, but he did have time enough to declare Bogomilism a mixture of Manichaeism and Paulicianism. A serious riding accident prevented him from giving Peter more help, and the new dualist faith continued to grow at an alarming rate, so much so that a Bulgarian priest known as Cosmas was forced to denounce the new sect in his Sermon Against the Heretics, which was written at the very end of Peter’s reign (it was certainly completed by 972).

  Cosmas writes that the sect was founded by a priest named Bogomil, but there is both controversy over what his name means and whether it was his real name at all. Some interpret Bogomil as meaning ‘beloved of God’, while others opt for ‘worthy of God’s mercy’ and ‘one who entreats God’. Cosmas describes the Bogomils as rejecting the Old Testament and Church sacraments; the only prayer they used was the Lord’s Prayer. They did not venerate icons or relics, while the cross was denounced as the instrument of Christ’s torture. The Church itself was seen as being in league with the devil, whom the Bogomils regarded as not only the creator of the visible world, but also as Christ’s brother. Their priests were strict ascetics, and they abstained from meat, wine and marriage. The Bogomils were – at least initially – mitigated dualists, regarding the devil as a fallen angel who was inferior to God. They knew the scriptures inside out, but what puzzled Cosmas was the way in which they interpreted them. For instance, in the parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15.11–32), they saw the elder, stay-at-home, son as being Christ, while the younger, prodigal, son was Satan. The Bogomil take on the Crucifixion was Docetic.

  The Bogomil Church was divided into two main classes, the Perfect and the Believers, similar to the Manichaean Elect and Listeners, although the Bogomils apparently did have a Listener class as well, who were below the Believers. According to the monk Euthymius of Constantinople, who was writing in about 1050, the Bogomil Listener became a Believer by way of a baptism that included placing the gospel on the initiate’s head, while the actual baptism itself was done not by water, but by the laying-on of hands. As far as Euthymius was concerned, this erased the Christian baptism, and put the new Believer firmly under the sway of the Evil One.

  The road from Believer to Perfect was a long and arduous one, with intensive teachings, ascetic practices and study, which took two years or more to complete. The ceremony in which a Believer became a Perfect was similar to that which made a Listener a Believer, and was known as the consolamentum (the consoling), or baptisma. For Euthymius, it was ‘whole heresy and madness’ and ‘unholy service to the devil and his mysteries’,29 yet the Bogomils regarded themselves as being the heirs to true, apostolic Christianity. Modelling themselves on Christ and the Apostles, Bogomil leaders had 12 disciples and lived lives of simplicity and poverty, in reaction to what they saw as the irredeemable corruption and false teachings of the Church.

  What further worried Euthymius was that the Bogomils seemed to be a fully developed counter-church, one whose missionaries were active in spreading the word of the heretical faith. How, when and where the Bogomils organised is still a matter of debate, but it seems that, right from the time when they were noted during Tsar Peter’s reign, they were already a distinct group, with their own teachings. Again, whether they were influenced by the Paulicians, Manichaeism or Zoroastrianism is a matter of conjecture. Amongst the Bogomils whose names have survived are Jeremiah (thought by some to be the pseudonym of Bogomil himself), who wrote the widely circulated tract The Legend of the Cross, and two extremely obscure individuals called Sydor Fryazin and Jacob Tsentsal, who brought heretical books with them into Bulgaria. Interestingly, both men were described as being Franks (the name ‘Fryazin’ means ‘Frank’), which raises the possibility that there were heretical groups active in the west around the time that Bogomilism first became known. In Asia Minor, John Tzurillas and Raheas were active Bogomil proselytisers during the eleventh century who, like the Massalians before them, specialised in infiltrating monasteries.

  Perhaps the most notable Bogomil after the movement’s founder was the heresiarch Basil the Physician, who was active in the latter part of the eleventh century. It is said that his ministry lasted fo
r 52 years before he was unmasked during the anti-heretical campaigns of the Byzantine emperor, Alexius Comnenus (1081–1118). Heresy was much on the emperor’s mind by the late eleventh century: northern Thrace in particular had become an epicentre of Paulicianism, and Alexius resolved to bring its followers back into the fold of orthodoxy by whatever means necessary. This resulted in a number of armed confrontations with the Paulicians, whose reputation for being fierce warriors preceded them. Sometimes, though, the means by which the heretics were brought back to the fold took the form of protracted debates in which the emperor indulged his enthusiasm for religious disputation. Such a dispute duly occurred sometime around the year 1100, with Basil being invited to the palace to explain his faith to Alexius and his brother Isaac. Basil duly outlined the main tenets of Bogomilism, before Alexius drew aside a curtain to reveal a stenographer who had transcribed Basil’s testimony verbatim. The heresiarch was placed under house arrest in order that Alexius could try to win him back to the Church, but Basil refused to recant. During their talks, the house was afflicted with Fortean phenomena: it was subject to a rain of stones and an earthquake. Alexius’s daughter, the historian Anna, took this as a sign that the devil was angry that his secrets were being revealed and that his children – the Bogomils – were being persecuted. Still refusing to recant, Basil was burnt at the stake.

  Despite Alexius’s efforts, the Bogomils continued to preach and win new converts, and the persecution against them in Byzantium would have almost certainly driven some of them west. In doing so, the Bogomils seemed to be fulfilling an old Persian prophecy, which stated that, on the 1,500th anniversary of Zoroaster’s death – which was interpreted as being the year 928 – Zoroastrianism would be restored. While the matter of the Good Religion’s influence on the Bogomils is conjectural, the two religions did share one thing in common: Dualism, and by 928, Bogomil and his followers were starting their mission. As the twelfth century dawned, the prophecy seemed to have been well and truly fulfilled.

  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.