The Friar of Carcassonne

by Stephen O'Shea

  Others in Languedoc, though not sharing Autier’s corrosive heterodoxy, would have understood many things the Good Man had to say. When he railed against “the Church that fetters”—that is, fetters itself with material goods—heads nodded, tonsured or not. Among the Franciscans, especially in Languedoc and Italy, the seeds of discord that were Francis’ exemplary life and, especially, his last testament would finally bear fruit. Shortly before his death in 1226, Francis had dictated a radical testament in which he commanded his brothers to respect the dictates of destitution. At the request of the Franciscan leadership, this testament was declared nonbinding on the Order of Friars Minor in 1230 by Pope Gregory IX, but the document still hovered over their spiritual landscape as a reminder and a reproach. The life of apostolic poverty had been embraced by the Cathars and the first mendicants; later generations of friars were never really interested in going about in rags, as many men were attracted to the order by its success and prestige. To these were added brothers of an institutional and organizational bent, who saw mass mendicancy on a continent-wide scale as woefully impractical and, more to the point, downright uncomfortable. They came to be called the Conventuals.

  Opposing them in Brother Bernard’s time were the Spirituals, a movement of many factions that had grown in strength and numbers in the second half of the thirteenth century. A large theoretical framework had been built around the notion of Franciscan poverty, notably by a friar of Narbonne, Pierre Jean Olivi. After his death in 1298, Olivi’s grave in that city had become a shrine and the man an unofficial saint. On a more political level, the struggle between Conventuals and Spirituals afflicted convents throughout Europe, with successive popes growing concerned about the threat to orthodoxy such internecine fighting posed. In the early 1290s, Pope Nicholas IV, himself a Franciscan, severely punished the Spirituals, thereby radicalizing them even more. His successor was the hermit pope, Celestine, whose holiness and poverty inspired the foundation of a new branch of Spiritual friars, the Celestines, who were then declared heterodox by his successor Boniface VIII. Pope Clement, hounded by Guillaume de Nogaret in his campaign of posthumous vilification of Boniface, reluctantly made Celestine a saint—though as a confessor and not, as Nogaret had wanted, as a martyr. This canonization was seen as a boon to the Spirituals, and the compromise-seeking Clement allowed them control over several convents in select provinces, of which Bernard’s Languedoc was foremost.

  The divide in the Franciscan Order over poverty was carried to extremes, many of which brought the fight down from the understandable level of control and disposal of resources to a place that, to the eyes of outsiders seven hundred years later, can seem bewilderingly petty. Disputes arose over how many tunics an individual friar could have, and how the habit was to be worn. Many Spirituals opted for a sole habit made of the coarsest cloth, unwashed and in tatters, worn short to ensure mortification of the flesh—all of which drove Conventual abbots to angry reprisals of expulsion or imprisonment. The Spirituals excoriated the feasting at convents; the Conventuals responded by saying that they were simply obeying Francis’ injunction to eat what was put before them and not question the workings of divine providence. It was not their fault that, as often happened, some grateful benefactor prepared for them meals of suckling pig and roast capon, to be washed down with a demijohn of the finest from the vineyards of the Lord.

  Debating whether a Franciscan could own anything, the rigorists claimed that Jesus had owned nothing, and neither had his disciples. Polemic flew back and forth over whether the apostles had handled money, possessed a purse. This led to an ingenious solution: the operative working fiction held that the Order possessed nothing at all and that the friars just borrowed from the pope, who was the owner of all things Franciscan. The Spirituals countered that by using these things, one made a de facto proprietary claim to them. The wisdom contained in the book-lined study of the scholastic friar raised the issue of whether all those volumes, bought and used exclusively by the scholar, were in fact the property of the pope. Some of the more radical Spirituals asked whether such abstruse learning furthered the goal of poverty and preaching or fostered the sin of intellectual pride. “So it goes, there is no more religion,” lamented a Spiritual in the 1290s. “We see a bad Paris that has destroyed Assisi with its learning.”

  The bickering over detail might have remained just lively material for a footnote in Franciscan annals, full of colorful charges about gluttonous Conventuals and holier-than-thou Spirituals, were it not for the growing involvement of the laity in the matter. The Franciscans had originally been an order of laymen; under the Spirituals the tradition was strengthened. Two of their greatest defenders, Arnaud de Vilanova and Ramon Llull, were laymen. On a far humbler but more important level, thousands of ordinary people joined auxiliary Franciscan groups, called the Third Order, its members known in Languedoc as Beguins. These latter, whose numbers included a large share of women, embraced some of the strictures of poverty and much of the fervent piety of their tonsured guides. Alarm bells went off in the papal curia, which was always leery of unauthorized associations in which the unordained might approach the Scripture and its interpretation. Sacerdotal professionalism was as important to the medieval Church as the immunity of the clergy to secular prosecution.

  In practice, the Spirituals and the Beguins seem surprisingly close to the Good Men and their believers. Simple, austere meals were shared, the blessing and breaking of bread performed, the cup of wine passed around, followed by injunctions to lead a simple, pious life in imitation of the apostles. The Cathar believers of the mountains sat at the feet of Peire Autier; the Beguins of the coast gathered round the table of Bernard Délicieux—for Brother Bernard, according to a horrified Dominican contemporary in Béziers, had by 1314 become the undisputed leader of the Spirituals there. The Dominican wrote that Bernard and other prominent Spirituals were viewed by the common people and the local clergy as “saints of God and the foundation of His church.” What Délicieux offered, as did Autier, was access to a humane spirituality denied by an authoritarian, sometimes terrifying Church hierarchy.

  In fact, the result of Brother Bernard’s actions may be seen as justification of what he had been saying all along, even during the heady days of the rage carcassonnaise. Catharism was nonexistent in the lands where the Beguins were thick on the ground. The most effective antidote to doctrinal heresy may have been not, as the inquisitor believed, campaigns of prosecution and punishment, but, as Bernard had long insisted, the offering of an alternative gentler Christianity for those impatient with the imperfections of the Church. Heresy—the root of the word comes from the Greek for “choice”—could be defeated by choosing another pastoral mode.

  Fatally for Bernard, some in the Spiritual movements strayed dangerously out on a limb. Smarting from severe disciplinary measures, radical Spirituals echoed the Cathar Autier almost to the letter by holding up their victimhood as a proof of the justice of their cause. That position, of course, was diametrically opposed to the radical Dominican one, which viewed persecution in the service of the Church as a divine command, and thus it was the persecutor, not the persecuted, whose cause was automatically just. Where the inquisitors, especially Conventual Franciscan inquisitors, became truly interested in the Spirituals as targets of persecution occurred when some of the more ecstatic of the brethren left the bounds of orthodoxy. The struggle no longer took place in the convent, between two factions within the Order; rather, it moved to the larger ontological stage where the suppression of the Cathars also unfolded.

  The heterodoxy of the later Spirituals arose from a lush forest of apocalyptic and mystical thought. Baldly stated, some Spirituals, by the second decade of the fourteenth century, believed themselves freed of their vow of obedience to the pope. They arrived at this remarkable view through an intellectual journey that reflected the persistent uncertainties and terrors of their time.

  Although a definitive beginning to any movement of thought is difficult to pinpoint
, the foundation for the more heterodox of Spiritual assertions was laid prior even to the emergence of St. Francis. At the close of the twelfth century a Calabrian abbot, Joachim of Fiore, produced texts concerning the three ages of mankind, the nature of the Trinity, and various prophetic declarations drawn from the Book of Daniel and the Book of Revelations, among others. His complex, riddle-filled schema of speculative eschatology influenced thinkers throughout the thirteenth century, leading some to identify the Antichrist as Emperor Frederick II and prophesy an end time beginning, or concluding, in the year 1260. Even after that year came and went with neither bang nor whimper, Joachite thinking, as it is called, remained a constant underground source of speculation and prophecy.

  In the Franciscan context, the Joachite notion of the ages of mankind, along with theories about different epochs of Church history, took the order down several winding roads. If Jesus had introduced the First Age of the Church, then Francis inaugurated the Second. A third and final stage, after the age of Father and Son, would involve the Holy Spirit.* Alternatively, Francis might have been an angel, breaking the sixth seal of apocalyptic tradition and ushering in the arrival of a seventh and concluding seal breaker. Perhaps this would be the Antichrist, once thought to be the Stupor Mundi—who was christened in the same baptismal font in Assisi that had served to christen Francis—or perhaps the personage to usher in the end times was an angelic pope, such as Celestine, or a bad pope, Boniface, whose pontificate saw the persecution of the Spirituals, a persecution not only welcomed but foreseen by prophecy.

  Whichever the variant—and there were many—on these rich speculative themes, the figure of Francis of Assisi invariably stood at the center of them all. Over time the charismatic visionary of the early thirteenth century, the figure who had seized and shaped his moment of history, came himself to be shaped by later generations who poured their fears and hopes into him. Like his contemporary Dominic, hapless before a posterity that had transformed him into an inquisitor, Francis was changed into something he would not have recognized. The self-proclaimed holy fool was championed as a prophet who had transcended the institutional Church, a figure of revolutionary piety standing outside the flow of normal time. In the most radical iteration put forth by the Spirituals, the testament of Francis carried as much authority as the Gospels, and the man of Assisi became the equal of the man of Nazareth. If the pope ordered the Franciscans to make compromises with the world that were at odds with Francis’ sacred testament, then in the eyes of these Spirituals the pope was wrong.

  Heresy was the logical climax of the process. The papacy was swept away, the first thousand years of sanctioned Christianity, so recently celebrated in Jubilee, definitively closed, as the Joachite prophecies had foretold. Jesus and Peter had founded a church to supersede Judaism; Francis had come to supersede that church and usher in a new era. Whereas the Cathars saw themselves as continuators of the Church of the apostles, the more radical Spirituals knew themselves to be trailblazers into a mystical future. And while the Judeo-Christian thread in this speculative enterprise has often been underlined, to observers of other traditions another comparison springs to mind—these Spirituals were to Christianity what the Shia are to Islam. Just as the murdered Ali (and his murdered son Huseyn) came to assume as much sanctity as the founder of Islam in the eyes of some Shia, with their cause destined to be vindicated by the arrival of a hidden imam, or providential figure, to bring on a new dispensation, so too had Francis, in the eyes of the radicalized Spirituals, achieved parity with Jesus, Christianity’s avatar, with the friar’s followers scouring their prophecies to predict the as yet undisclosed arrival of a world-shaking figure to further the Franciscan revolution.

  Bernard may have been one of their number, awaiting the Franciscan imam. Certainly, the soothsaying straws at which he grasped in predicting the early demise of two popes most certainly came from the prophetic literature produced in Spiritual circles at the time.* And, more speculatively, the astonishing trope used in his great sermon of 1303, during which a weeping Bernard claimed to be Jesus Christ, may have been less an eccentric stroke of rhetoric than an indication of familiarity with the more radical Spiritual claims about the status of St. Francis.

  Whatever Bernard’s implication in this conjecture, a swirl of conflicting influences washed over his rich and inventive homeland.† A deadly tug-of-war took place between two sets of opposing parties in Languedoc, with the majority of the populace, pious or impious, looking on in consternation. Inland, the inquisitors fought the Cathars, their sympathizers, and anyone who impeded the inquisition. On the coast, in such places as Béziers and Narbonne, the Spirituals faced off against the Franciscan hierarchy, its Conventual leadership whispering in the pope’s ear at Avignon. In both arenas, a muffled hatred was animated on all sides by a shared love of Jesus Christ. It was a singular moment, not destined to last. And alone among the dissident parties in the second decade of the fourteenth century, one man had made enemies of both the inquisitors and the Conventuals. That man was Bernard Délicieux.

  Geoffroy d’Ablis had reason to be pleased with himself since receiving Guilhem Peyre-Cavaillé five years earlier. In Toulouse in 1310 for a sermo generalis that lasted for days, on April 10 of that year he stood alongside his esteemed colleague, Bernard Gui, as the body of Peire Autier was consumed by flames before the Cathedral of St. Stephen. Autier had been finally tracked down and captured near Toulouse in August 1309. Over the next nine months, he was tortured, tried, and convicted. His Cathar revival was dead, or at least its leadership destroyed. One Good Man had committed suicide to elude capture; another had tried to undertake the endura, or hunger strike, earlier in the year, but Brother Bernard Gui burned the impudent fellow before peaceful death snatched him from his deserved fate. All the others had been caught and burned, save one, who had disappeared over the mountains into Aragon.

  The inquisition in the two decades to follow was unstoppable. Succeeding and surpassing the work of Gui and d’Ablis, Bishop Jacques Fournier brought a methodical, almost sociological approach to interrogation out of what was obviously a passion for prosecution. The bishop, a corpulent man of the south with boundless energy, seems to have been more interested in getting convictions than in handing down sentences, given his occasional leniency toward those found guilty. Nonetheless, his see, Pamiers, once notorious for sedition under Bernard Saisset, became even more notorious as the center of a rapacious dragnet that no one could escape. The inhabitants of the mountain village of Montaillou had successfully pulled the wool over D’Ablis’ eyes about the extent of their heretical leanings; not so with Fournier, who revived the investigation to reveal that the entire town was Cathar, even the curé. That proceeding has come down to us because the transcripts of Fournier’s activities survived in the archives of the Vatican—the brilliant, ruthless bishop eventually became an Avignon pope, Benedict XII.

  Thanks to Fournier’s remarkable industry, the remaining network of Cathar sympathizers was painstakingly dismantled, as informants and spies thrived under the bishop’s generous stewardship. Even those who were orthodox yet refused to turn in their heretical neighbors fell afoul of his tribunal. “I did nothing to denounce them,” one Catholic protested to Fournier, “because they did no harm to me.” The man was jailed. And the last Good Man of Languedoc was lured across the Pyrenees from his safe house far to the south, beyond Tarragona, by a sleeper Fournier operative who had lived among the émigré Cathar faithful there for more than a year. The Good Man was burned in 1321.* After Fournier shut down his machine five years later, there were no further convictions for heresy in the diocese of Pamiers. This can be ascribed either to the complete extermination of Cathar belief or to his successors’ willingness to leave well enough alone. If the experience of Albi is any indication, where Bishop de Castanet’s last frenetic inquisition of 1300 was succeeded by a judicial flatline toward heresy, we can assume that the blessings of peace to descend on Pamiers had less to do with the disappearance of r
esidual spiritual disagreement than with the departure of a driven prosecutor.

  On the coast, events moved inexorably to a conclusion through the departures of the great, rather than by the burning conviction of a few gifted inquisitors. The pivotal moment came on April 20, 1314, when Pope Clement V passed away. As if to explain how the disease-ridden old man had managed to hang on for so long, a debunked but still tantalizing historical legend attributes his death to a curse that Jacques de Molay, the last Templar Grand Master, had shouted out six weeks earlier as the fire roared beneath his feet on an island in the Seine—within the year, the expiring Knight howled, those responsible for this murder most foul would themselves be dead. Clement promptly obliged, as did Philip the Fair, on November 29, 1314, following a stroke while out hunting in Picardy. The last great Capetian monarch left a country soon to be visited by war, disease, and famine as the disastrous fourteenth century progressed. Jacques de Molay’s greatest nemesis, Guillaume de Nogaret, had died in the year preceding the apocryphal curse, carried off by some revolting illness that resulted in a death rictus unusual for the way the tongue of the deceased was found sticking far out of his mouth. Whether supernatural in character or not, the disappearance of these three figures ushered in a time of great peril for the Spirituals, and in particular for Bernard Délicieux, who had lost support in court and curia.