CATHAR HERESY

An Explication of the Cathar Heresy From THE GOOD MEN by Charmaine Craig

The Good Men have been known since the Middle Ages as Cathars, a designation likely derived from katharós, the Greek for "pure." Many scholars have convincingly argued that Catharism originated in part from the dualistic heresy of the tenth-century Bogomils of Bulgaria, who conceived of the material world as the creation of Satan and thus inherently evil. The faith of the Bogomils could well have spread to western Europe in the twelfth century, as trade between East and West was increasing. By 1143, an organized sect of Cathars had established itself in Cologne; by the late twelfth century, Catharism was a serious threat to the Church and flourishing predominantly in the regions of Toulouse, Albi, and Gascony.

The Cathars were cosmic dualists. They believed in two co-eternal principles: God, creator of light and spirit, and Satan, creator of darkness and matter. According to their cosmology, Satan had lured many souls away from God's heavenly realm and imprisoned them in corruptible, decaying human bodies into which they were to be eternally reincarnated. When God mercifully sent Christ to the earth, the dominion of Satan over these souls was threatened. Christ - whom the Cathars believed to be a pure spirit and merely the illusion of a man - had delivered a message of salvation, which the Cathars alone had preserved in its pristine form. By the Cathar rite of baptism, prisoners of the flesh were cleansed of sin and promised resurrection of the soul. If baptized during the course of their lives rather than at the moment of death, they became Good Men or Good Women - preachers of the faith who lived in extreme asceticism, not eating meat, or holding property, or engaging in that most devilish of sins, sexual regeneration.

So rampant was Catharism in Languedoc by the dawning of the thirteenth century that in 1208, Pope Innocent III called for a crusade against it. Armies of French nobles marched south and launched the holy war with a blood massacre at Béziers. By the spring of 1229, the war was over; soon thereafter, Pope Gregory IX established the Inquisition that would exterminate any remaining heresy. What flickers of Catharism appeared after 1325 would be apparitions, remembrances, evocations of an earlier age.