The Grand Inquisitor’s Manual Page 5

  The Bogomils were an outgrowth of Christianity, but they rejected the authority of the church under whose jurisdiction they lived, that is, the Eastern Orthodox church. Like its counterpart in the West, the Orthodox Church in eastern Christendom condemned all religious dissidents as heretics, and the Bogomils were accused of various atrocities and outrages by their persecutors. One Christian monk who had secretly embraced Bogomilism was said to have installed (and used) a latrine behind the altar of a church in order to symbolize his contempt for its corruption and carnality. And, like almost every other persecuted faith, the Bogomils were said to engage in the sex orgies and rituals of infanticide and cannibalism that had once been charged by the Romans against the first Christians.22

  “In the evening, they bring together young girls,” wrote one eleventh-century Orthodox propagandist, “extinguish the candles so the light shall not be witness to their abominable deeds, and throw themselves lasciviously on the girls, each one on whomever first falls into his hands, no matter whether she be his sister, his daughter or his mother.” Nine months later, “when the time has come for the unnatural children of such unnatural seed to be born,” the babies were supposedly seized, drained of their blood, and then burned alive. Finally, the Bogomils were said to mix the blood and ash of the dead babies in basins “and so make an abominable drink.”23

  The Bogomils did no such thing, of course, and their only real offense was their rejection of the official theology of the Orthodox church. Ironically, the Bogomils rejected human sexuality and aspired toward the strictest spiritual purity, and yet they were defamed by their enemies as perverts and predators who indulged in every kind of sexual outrage. Indeed, it reveals something important about the workings of the human imagination that such perversions existed only in the minds of pious prelates obsessed with their own authority. The patriarchs and priests, who regarded themselves as the guardians of Christian morality, were perfectly capable of conjuring up the same sexual fantasies that would later find expression in the writings of the Marquis de Sade.

  We cannot know exactly when, where, or how the strange new ideas of the Bogomils rooted themselves in western Europe, but the Church began to notice them as early as the eleventh century, first in Cologne and Liège and later in southern France. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), a Cistercian monk later canonized as Saint Bernard, was dispatched to admonish the followers of Henry the Monk, but he also came across some even more aberrant Christians. Bernard called them “weavers and Arians,” the latter term borrowed from one of the earliest heresies of fourth-century Christianity, but the men and women who caught his attention may have been among the first practitioners of a new kind of Christianity that had been borrowed from the Bogomils.

  The resort to antique vocabulary to describe the latest expression of the religious imagination in medieval Europe reminds us that the Church had always been quick to condemn every strain of Christianity that was not regarded as strictly orthodox. Thus, for example, the latest Christian dissidents to emerge in western Europe were also dubbed Manichaeans—a dualist faith from Persia that Augustine had first embraced and then condemned in the late fourth century—and Marcionites, an even older gnostic sect of early Christianity. At other times and places, the newest heretics in Christendom were called Bulgars, in recognition of their kinship with the Bogomils from far-off Bulgaria—the French version of the word is boulgres and its English counterpart is the root of the modern word bugger. As we shall soon see, the use of “bugger” as a term for anal intercourse is derived from the imagined sexual practices of the Bogomils and their kindred spirits.

  The latest innovation in Christian belief was reflexively condemned by the Church as heresy. And once the new heretics came to the attention of the Church, they seemed to show up everywhere. They were called Publicans in northern Europe, piphles in Flanders, and texerants in France. They were variously known in Italy as ribaldi, bulgari, insabbatati, paterini, policani, turlupini, speronisti, gassari, pisti, and pangenia. None of these terms were flattering—ribaldi, for example, means “riff-raff.” The town of Albi in southern France was wrongly thought to be the center of the new heresy, and so its practitioners came to be called Albigensians. But the name by which they are known best is Cathari, a Greek word, or its English equivalent, the Cathars.24

  By whatever name we know them, the Cathars were destined to become the very first victims of another new phenomenon that was seen for the first time in the Middle Ages—the machine for the extermination of heretics known as the Inquisition.

  Significantly, none of the names used by the Church to identify the new sect were actually used by the sectarians to describe themselves. Although they were denounced as enemies of Christianity by the medieval clergy—and a modern scholar like Norman Cohn still dismisses them as “exotic and non-Christian”—they insisted on calling themselves “Christians” or even “Good Christians.” For convenience, however, and in deference to conventional usage, we will continue to call them by the name that their persecutors coined and used—the Cathars.25

  The Cathars regarded themselves as “the only true Christians” and the guardians of “a stream of pure underground Christianity, often persecuted, but always surviving and reaching back to the days of the apostles.” If they placed themselves in opposition to the Roman Catholic church, it was only because they came to believe that Catholicism was a corrupted version of Christianity whose clergy were “servants of Satan’s Church.” They read and revered the New Testament, although they preferred some scriptures above others: the book of Revelation, with its account of a “war in heaven” between God and Satan, was wholly consistent with their core theology; and the Gospel of John, a text in which the fingerprints of gnosticism have been detected by some modern readers, figured prominently in their ceremonies.26

  Yet it is also true that the Cathars were apparently influenced by a fantastic variety of sources, ranging from ancient and obscure writings to the sermons of their own charismatic teachers and leaders. A direct linkage between the Cathars and the Bogomils can be seen in the fact that their readings included the Interrogation of John (also known as Secret Supper), a Bogomil text carried from Bulgaria to western Europe in about 1190. But they also seemed to know the Jewish apocalyptic writings, the mystical speculation and storytelling traditions that had attached themselves to the Bible among both Jews and Christians, and perhaps even more exotic texts that reflected the gnostic and Manichaean elements of their belief system.27

  The dualist theology of the Cathars was almost surely borrowed from the Bogomils. They imagined the existence of two divinities, a benign one who reigns in heaven and a malign one who reigns on earth. They condemned the carnal world as a place of pure evil, and they longed only to be set free from their bodies so that their souls could return to the celestial paradise. They expressed their theology in the kind of folktales and fairy tales that every religion invents for itself, borrowing freely from Jewish and Christian texts and traditions, and adding a few twists and tweaks of their own. Indeed, we can glimpse a rich and playful religious imagination in the shards of Catharism that remain available to us despite the best efforts of the inquisitors to eradicate them.

  The creation story as told in Genesis, for example, was reimagined in a Cathar text that depicts Adam and Eve as a pair of angels, pure and sexless, who are imprisoned by Satan in bodies fashioned of clay. Satan seduces them into the sin of sexual intercourse by creating a serpent out of his own spittle and then teaching Eve how to use her new and unfamiliar body by inserting the serpent’s tail into her vagina in the primal act of sexual intercourse. Here we find the best evidence that the Cathars were not the sexual adventurers that the Church made them out to be. For the Cathars, then, the sexual anatomy of human beings is the work of the Devil in the most literal possible way.

  The notion that the human body is the prison cell of a celestial spirit provided the rationale for the fundamental rite of Catharism, the consolamentum, an elaborate initiati
on ceremony based on the laying on of hands rather than water baptism. A copy of the Gospels was held over the initiate’s head, and the person presiding over the ceremony laid his or her hands on the initiate’s body. The first seventeen verses from the Gospel of John were read aloud, and the congregation joined in the recitation of the Lord’s Prayer, their fundamental credo. The consolamentum ended with a ritual exchange of greetings, variously called the kiss of peace or “the Cathar kiss” (osculum insabbatati ), and the public confession of sins by the congregants.28

  The soul of a man or woman who received the consolamentum, the Cathars believed, would be permitted to cease its restless wandering from body to body and ascend once and for all to heaven. One who had been “consoled” was thereafter known as a perfectus, that is, a perfected one. But the liberation and ascension of the soul would take place only upon the death of the human body in which it was imprisoned, and so it was essential for the perfectus to refrain from any conduct that would corrupt the body for the rest of his or her mortal life. For that reason, the perfecti were called upon to lead lives of heroic asceticism, shunning not only sexual relations but every other occasion for taking pleasure in the things of this world.29

  The heroic self-discipline practiced by the perfecti matched or exceeded the rigors of any other Christian ascetics. They were forbidden to indulge in sexual acts of any kind, and newly consoled perfecti who were married were expected to separate from their spouses. Even when they engaged in the ritual of laying-on hands during the consolamentum, for example, women touched men only by placing an elbow to a shoulder, and the kiss of peace was “given from man to man and woman to woman.”30

  A perfectus was forbidden to own property or to take the life of a living creature, human or animal. Three times a week, the perfectus was permitted to consume only bread and water, and three times a year, the fast was to last a full forty days. Even when they were permitted to eat, the perfecti were expected to shun any food that was the result of procreation, including meat, eggs, milk, cheese, and other animal products. (An exception was made for seafood because of the belief, held by both Catholics and Cathars in medieval times, that fish were “the product, not of coition, but of water itself.”) As a result, one sign that a man or woman among the Cathars had achieved the exalted status of a “perfected one” was the physical appearance that results from near-starvation—pale skin and a gaunt aspect were signs of honor.31

  By starving themselves into emaciation, the Cathars were making an unspoken claim to a more authentic Christianity than the kind practiced by the princes of the Church. When they renounced all attachments to the material world, including marriage and property, they sought to honor the pious Christian tradition of via apostolica—an aspiration that had eluded so many of the priests and prelates of the Roman Catholic church. The worst offense committed by these supposed heretics was their insistence on shaming the Church by setting a better example of Christian piety.

  “They continue to be true imitators of the apostolic life, seeking not those things which are of the world, possessing no house, or lands, even as Christ had no property,” wrote one alarmed German churchman in 1143. “‘You, however,’ they say to us, ‘add house to house, field to field, and seek the things that are of this world.’” And the Cathars, alluding to the words of Jesus as quoted in the Gospel of Matthew, emphasized their ironic predicament: “We, the poor of Christ, who have no fixed abode and flee from city to city like sheep among the wolves, are persecuted as were the apostles and martyrs.”32

  Only the perfecti, however, were burdened with the full weight of lifelong sexual abstinence, fasting, poverty, pacifism, and veganism. The rest of the Cathars, known as “believers,” were expected only to refrain as best they could from the worst excesses of their Catholic friends, neighbors, and relations and to cherish the hope that they themselves might find the strength to bear the full burden of the faith. The distinction between the perfecti and the believers—and the conviction of the Cathars that they alone were practitioners of authentic Christianity—was embodied in the ritualized greetings exchanged between them. “Pray God for me, a sinner, that he make me a good Christian and lead me to a good end,” a believer would say, and the perfectus would answer: “May God be prayed that he may make you a good Christian.”33

  Indeed, the single most controversial feature of Catharism resulted from the constant and poignant longing of believers to become perfecti before they died. Many Cathar believers apparently delayed the consolamentum until illness, injury, or old age threatened to end their lives. By undergoing the ritual of initiation at the last possible moment, they would be required to bear the burdens of a perfectus only on their deathbeds, when they were no longer capable of succumbing to the temptations of carnal sin. Some Cathars, it appears, spent their final days and hours on a diet of sugared water; some literally fasted themselves to death. According to the accounts preserved by the Inquisition, one fortunate Cathar named Gentille D’Ascou was dead within six days of being “consoled,” but a woman from the town of Coustassa reportedly lingered another three months. For the Cathars, it was the ultimate act of faith, but the critics of Catharism, then and now, have preferred to characterize the last rite of the Cathars, known as the endura, as “a form of suicide.”34

  “Perfectus,” like so many other terms applied to Catharism by its persecutors, was not used by the Cathars themselves; the title by which they referred to the perfecti was the humble phrase “Good Men.” And the Good Men resembled nothing so much as the mendicant friars of the Franciscan and Dominican orders; they wore black robes and sandals of a distinctive style, and they traveled in pairs among the cities, towns, and villages to preach and teach the Catharist beliefs and to perform the ceremony of the consolamentum. One reason that Cathars were attracted to the craft of weaving as a livelihood—as Bernard of Clairvaux noticed early on—was that medieval weavers were itinerant workers who could move from place to place without attracting undue attention from the authorities.

  The Cathar believers tended to be sober, law-abiding, inoffensive people, if only because one of the principles of Catharism, based on a close and literal reading of the Gospels, was that a Christian should not bear arms or take a life. Indeed, the Cathars were regarded as exemplary citizens throughout southern France, where they were tolerated and even admired by the local nobility and gentry. When a Catholic knight was commanded by a stern bishop to drive out the Cathars from his community, the knight courageously affirmed their admirable qualities: “We cannot,” demurred the knight. “We have been reared in their midst. We have relatives among them, and we see them living lives of perfection.”35

  Nor was every Cathar the kind of religious fanatic that their enemies made them out to be. “Ardent believers married and begot children,” writes historian Walter Wakefield, “no less frequently than their Catholic neighbours.” The point is made in a poignant story told about a woman named Sybil whose infant daughter, Jacoba, had fallen ill and appeared to be close to death. The consolamentum was administered to the baby, and the perfectus cautioned Sybil against feeding her dying daughter now that she had been “consoled.” The mother, however, could not bear to hear the cries of the hungry babe.36 “[W]hen the Perfect and her husband left,” we are told, “she gave Jacoba the breast, to the anger of her husband.”37

  The spread of Catharism may have owed something to the exalted stature of Cathar women, who were fully entitled to be “consoled” and thereby achieve the status of a perfectus. Here, too, was a point of contrast on which Catharism may have seemed far more appealing than Catholicism to the common folk of medieval Europe. Once elevated to the high rank of a perfected one, a woman was entitled to lead the congregation (but only if no male perfecti were present to do so) and to receive the ritual greeting afforded by believers to a perfectus. “No position in Catholicism, not even that of abbess,” explains historian Malcolm Lambert, “offered the status which accrued to the woman who received the consolamentum.”38


  The Cathars may be seen as successful competitors for the hearts and minds of the Christian laity in medieval Europe rather than as polluters of Christianity. By the twelfth century, Catharism amounted to a rival church with its own hierarchy of bishops and priests and its own system of dioceses in southern France and elsewhere around western Europe. A certain high-water mark was reached sometime after 1167, when a mysterious figure from far-off Constantinople called Papa Nicetas—papa is a Latin term for a pope—convened a gathering of Catharist clergy from all over Europe at the French town of Saint-Félix-de-Caraman, where he persuaded them to accept the more rigorous form of dualism that was practiced in the birthplace of Bogomilism and rebaptized them into their newly invigorated faith.

  Politics rather than theology is surely the best explanation for the fear and loathing with which the Church regarded the phenomenon of Catharism. The Supreme Pontiff in Rome was no more comfortable in coexisting with a Cathar pope than with the patriarch of Constantinople, and he resolved to bring the full weight of his authority down on the competitors who had appeared within his own realm and dared to call themselves Good Christians. The first weapon to be deployed, however, was a purely rhetorical one. The Cathars would be denounced and defamed before they would be destroyed, a strategy that represents our first glimpse of the brave new world of the Inquisition.

  “Cathar” is most likely derived from the Greek word for cleansing or purification—as used, for example, in the English word catharsis—and the term grudgingly acknowledges that a man or woman who had been fully admitted into Catharism was regarded as having been purged of the inevitable corruption of a mortal life. It is also true, however, that the same root word, rendered as katharoi or “purified ones,” had been used to identify at least two other heresies that afflicted the Church in its first centuries of existence, neither of which is plausibly linked with the Cathars of the twelfth century. Thus, the decision to label the Cathars with a word whose root refers to purity was darkly ironic, and the Church intended to bury rather than praise the Cathars.