By any conceivable account, Christianity represents one of the great success stories of history. A sect founded among an oppressed people by a leader who was executed as a criminal, today it counts among its adherents a third of the world’s population.
Despite these triumphs, the story of Christianity can be strangely depressing, often amounting to a tale of unsavory compromises with tyranny combined with vicious suppression of rivals. The writings of many Church Fathers are almost unreadable, not because of their abstruseness, but because of their arrogance and hostility. Much of this polemic concerned obscure doctrinal issues that the evidence of scripture itself left vague. At the same time, Christ’s essential teachings of love and forgiveness were frequently neglected or ignored. In its ceaseless combat over creeds and dogmas—about which you can always find cause for dispute if you’re looking for it—the Christian church has often flouted the central truths stressed by Christ himself.
As a result, a modern reader looks back on many of these controversies with more than a little misgiving. Did the right side really win? And what was the right side anyway? Did the truth of the Holy Spirit prevail within Christ’s church against the onslaught of error and deceit? If so, the Holy Spirit often chose savage methods to achieve his end.
Nowhere in the bleak chronicles of heresy does the modern reader feel this tension so acutely as when encountering the Cathars. They appeared in the south of France and northern Italy around the twelfth century, where their presence coincided with a flowering of art, literature, and culture that the Middle Ages had never before seen. The Cathar preachers displayed such charity and continence that they were nicknamed les bonshommes—the “good men.” Unlike the Catholics, they remained on good terms with one another even when they disagreed on matters of doctrine. And they so threatened the Catholic power structure that the Inquisition itself was founded to deal with them. In the end, they would be eradicated with a meticulous brutality that might arouse envy even among modern practitioners of genocide. To explore their saga is to confront the strange possibility that the Cathars may have been right: by that time the established church no longer had anything to do with Christ or with the “good God,” but had been taken over by the forces of darkness.
Who were the Cathars, and where did they come from? Their Catholic contemporaries had no doubts on this matter: they were offspring of the detestable heresy of Mani that had mutated from its oriental form and made its way to the western Mediterranean. Modern scholars are not quite so sure. The more cautious among them tend to doubt the continuity of the “great heresy,” as it came to be called, and focus instead on the breaks and discontinuities in this much-reviled tradition. Nevertheless, there do seem to be connections between the Religion of Light in Babylonia and the bonshommes of Provence. These threads formed around the edges of the great religious empires of Christianity and Islam, which were marking their territories in the early medieval period.
Armenia, the Balkans, and the Bogomils
The first of these regions was Armenia. Armenia prides itself on being the first Christian nation, having adopted the faith as its sole religion in 301 A.D., over ten years before Christianity was even legalized in the Roman Empire. In the early centuries of the Common Era, Armenia maintained its independence by the sort of astute political balancing act that is frequently necessary for smaller nations living in the shadow of large ones. Finally, however, in 387 A.D., Armenia was partitioned between the Byzantine Empire and Sassanid Persia. But even in succeeding centuries, its place as a borderland between great powers enabled it to offer haven to heretics and schismatics of every type.
Two such groups have interest in the present context.1 The first were the Massalians, “the praying people,” an anticlerical sect about whose teachings little is known. Their dualistic beliefs apparently included the idea that each human being is possessed by a personal devil. This devil could only be cast out by a sacrament called the “baptism by fire,” after which the individual was supposed to be free from evil influences and could do as he or she liked. This led to charges of immorality from the Orthodox clergy.
The second group were the Paulicians, so called because of their special reverence for the apostle Paul. They, too, seem to have held some kind of dualistic teaching that distinguished between the wicked creator god of this world and the hidden God of the world to come. They became renowned as formidable warriors and presented serious military problems for the Byzantine state.
It’s not certain how much either of these sects was directly influenced by Mani’s religion. The Byzantine Orthodox polemicists often referred to the Paulicians and Massalians as Manichaeans, but this may simply have been a handy tag to place on them. Some—probably most—scholars believe there was at least some connection between the Manichaeans and the two Armenian sects. Others prefer to trace the Paulicians’ and Massalians’ heritage to Marcionic and other types of Gnostic Christianity that held on for centuries in Syria and Mesopotamia. In either case, these two Armenian sects represented a continuation of the Gnostic legacy into the early Middle Ages.
In 759 the Byzantine emperor Constantine V resettled some Paulicians in the Balkans in the hope that they could be pacified and converted to Orthodoxy. This move proved disastrous for the Byzantines in the long run. Instead of meekly converting to Orthodoxy, the Paulicians spread their heterodox ideas. This was all the easier to do because the Byzantines soon lost control of the region to the Bulgars, a pagan Turkic people who swept through the Balkans and established an empire of their own.
This uneasy time gave rise to yet another heresy. Its origins are also disputed, but most scholars see it as a descendant of Paulicianism. (Other possible influences include Massalianism, Manichaeism transmitted directly across the steppes from Central Asia, and even remnants of the old Orphic and Dionysian mysteries that were still practiced on the edges of Greece as late as the seventh century A.D.). This new sect was called the Bogomils after its semilegendary founder, Bogomil. Practically nothing is known about him other than his name, which in Slavonic means “beloved of God” or “worthy of God’s mercy.” He is alleged to have lived during the reign of the Bulgarian tsar Peter (927–68). Associated with Bogomil was another heterodox prophet named Jeremiah, whose identity is obscure; in fact he is sometimes thought to have been the same person as Bogomil.
The known facts about the rise of the Bogomils are so few and their sources are so dubious that in the end most scholars seem content to say that the movement arose in tenth-century Bulgaria and leave it at that. In any event, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the Bogomils had some connection with the Manichaeans. The two sects shared many crucial features, including a dualistic vision of a world divided between good and evil gods, with this world being in the possession of the latter; a two-tier hierarchy of believers, the Auditors and the Elect; an allegorical interpretation of scripture; and a rigorous asceticism, in which the Elect abstained from meat, wine, and marriage.
Another detail that will echo later on in this narrative is that, according to one Byzantine source, the Bogomils reviled the Virgin Mary with “offensive words.” This attitude sprang out of a theological doctrine called Docetism (from the Greek dokein, “to appear”), which said that Christ only appeared to be born in the flesh but was actually a kind of materialization or spirit body. Docetism can be traced back to very early times in Christianity, and it’s generally linked to Gnostic currents. The assertion that Christ was born of the Virgin Mary and suffered under Pontius Pilate was inserted in the Apostles’ and Nicene Creeds to combat Docetism.
To return to the Bogomils, their story from their founding in the tenth century to their disappearance in the fifteenth is marked by hardship and persecution—one of the countless tragic episodes in the grim chronicles of the Balkans. The Byzantine state made a concerted effort to eradicate the heresy in its territories, which during the twelfth century, under the reign of Emperor Manuel Comnenus, briefly included the Balkans again. After Manuel’s death in 1180, the Orthodox Serbs became the dominant force and drove the Bogomils westward to Dalmatia and Bosnia. The Bogomils did not regain power in the region until the mid-fourteenth century, shortly before it was conquered in turn by the Ottoman Turks. At this point many Bogomils converted to Islam, and some of them became more vehement adherents of their new faith than their conquerors were. This helps explain why so many Bosnians are Muslims to this day, and why the religious conflicts in the area are still so grievous. They are the legacy of hatreds a thousand years old.
Bogomilism in another form may have survived into the twentieth century. The Bulgarian mystic Omraam Mikhaël Aïvanhov (1900–86) claimed that both he and his spiritual master, Peter Deunov (1864–1944), were spiritual descendants of the Bogomils. Over 150 books of Deunov’s teachings have been published in Bulgarian, and at the time of his death he had over forty thousand followers.2 Most of Aïvanhov’s pupils live in the south of France, where he settled in 1938 and lived the rest of his life, but there are groups of pupils in other locations, including Canada and the United States.
The teachings of these latter-day sages do not, it is true, superficially resemble those of the Bogomils. Aïvanhov, for example, taught an eclectic mix of Kabbalah, Gnosticism, and Hindu spirituality. One of his chief spiritual practices was what he called Surya Yoga, or “sun yoga,” which involves certain meditative rites designed to imbue the devotee with solar energies (the practices are performed at sunrise). Is this just another example of New Age syncretism? Possibly not. Nita de Pierrefeu, a French scholar of Catharism, notes that the Cathars rose at dawn to greet the sun, the “weaver of light,” a practice they inherited from the Bogomils.3 Hence Aïvanhov and Deunov may represent a more direct continuation of this legacy than it might seem on the surface. In any case, it’s a striking coincidence that their centers of operation were Provence and Bulgaria—precisely the regions where the Bogomils and Cathars thrived so long ago.
The Great Heresy in the West
Although Catharism would eventually come to be centered in Provence, the earliest glimmers of its arrival in western Europe are found farther to the north. In 991, one Gerbert d’Aurillac was consecrated as archbishop of Rheims. During the ceremony he was required to profess belief in the sanctity of both the Old and New Testaments and in an evil spirit that existed by choice rather than by origin. These rather curious professions suggest that Gerbert may have been suspected of some dualist heresy then current in the region. Whatever suspicions may have hung over him did not hinder him in his career: he became Pope Sylvester II in 999 (a post that some said he gained through sorcery).4
Despite isolated instances of heretical preachers and rumblings of Manichaeism throughout the eleventh century, the first certain instance of what would become known as Catharism can be traced back only to 1143–44. It appeared in Cologne, in the Rhineland, and was led by the local archbishop. Their teachings and practices will by now have a familiar ring. A Believer was admitted to the Elect by means of a “baptism by fire” administered by the laying on of hands. The Cologne sectarians abstained from meat and wine and admitted marriage only between virgins. They claimed that their religion had adherents throughout the world, and that they had received their teachings from Greece (that is, Byzantium), where these doctrines of true Christianity had been preserved from the earliest times.
The archbishop of Cologne was burned along with his followers, who refused to recant, but this would not be the last Western Europe would see of these teachings. A similar group of sectarians would meet a similar fate in Cologne in 1163. In 1145, Bernard of Clairvaux, founder of the Cistercian Order, went to Languedoc, in the south of France, to combat heresies there. Around the same time, the clergy of Liège (in present-day Belgium) informed the pope that “a new heresy had arisen in various parts of France, a heresy so varied and manifold that it seems impossible to characterize it under one single name.”5
Despite the opposition of the Catholic clergy, the Cathar heresy spread rapidly in Languedoc, no doubt because the region was open to many different religious currents. Jews were tolerated and even appointed to public office. Indeed the Jews in the area were experiencing a mystical revival of their own. The Kabbalah first made its appearance there. (Although the Jewish esoteric heritage was already ancient at this time, this was when the name Kabbalah, or “tradition,” began to be applied to it.) The Kabbalists of twelfth-century Provence produced a cryptic work called the Sefer ha-Bahir, or “Book of Illumination,” one of the earliest treatises that can be properly called Kabbalistic.
Other factors were at play in Languedoc. The Catholic clergy were known for their laxity and corruption, making the abstemious Cathar preachers look saintly by comparison. Greek monks, some of whom had been influenced by Bogomilism, came to settle in French monasteries. And the two crusades that had been launched by that point, the first successful, the second disastrous, opened up communications with the eastern Mediterranean, with its vast array of divergent sects.
Interestingly, the heretics in France were first known as “Publicans.” This word is familiar from the New Testament, where it means “tax collector.” But in this case it’s probably a corruption of Paulicians (the Greek equivalent was pronounced Pavlikianoi), indicating that the Paulician heresy, in name at least, had spread this far from its original home in Armenia. Later the sectarians became known as Cathars, from the Greek katharos, or “pure” (a term applied to the Elect), and as Albigenses, because the first Cathar bishopric in southern France was established in the town of Albi.
Catharism spread so rapidly that sometime between 1166 and 1176 the leaders of the sect decided to convene a sort of ecumenical council at the town of St.-Félix-de-Caraman near Toulouse. Presiding over the council was an individual named Nicetas, the bishop of the dualist church in Constantinople, who was known as Papa (“Pope”) Nicetas.
One of the chief goals of this conference was to convert the Cathars from their previously held doctrine, known as “mitigated” or “monarchical dualism.” In this view, the evil god initially derived his power and authority from the good God, as in the classic Gnostic systems. The new view, adopted by most of the Cathars in the West at that time, is called “absolute dualism”: the good and evil principles exist in opposition from eternity, as Mani taught. These conflicting views represented schisms in the Balkan dualist churches at the time. While these interactions are too complex to be treated here, it’s important to note that despite their differences, the two sects of the Cathars remained on good terms with each other.6 Perhaps this was a manifestation of genuine goodwill; perhaps the threat of their enemies encouraged them to stick together. In any event, this concord contrasts sharply with mainstream Christianity, whose history is replete with anathemas hurled over doctrinal disputes that were often far more trivial.
By the end of the twelfth century, the Cathar faith was well established in the south of France. It permeated the aristocratic courts, where the ladies were often administered the consolamentum, the rite that admitted them to ranks of the Cathar parfaits (this term, meaning “perfect,” was the equivalent of the Manichaean “Elect”). The men, like most Cathar Believers, preferred to wait until their death was very near at hand, as this rite committed them to various austerities, among the more inconvenient of which was total abstention from violence.
The Consolamentum
What exactly was the Cathar consolamentum? Above I mentioned a “baptism of fire” allegedly practiced by the Cologne sectarians, and it’s reasonable to suppose that this rite corresponded to the consolamentum. To understand the meaning of this practice, it may be helpful to turn to the Gospel of John, the most important book in the Bible for the Cathars. In John 3:5, Christ tells Nicodemus, “Except a man be born of water and the spirit, he cannot enter into the kingdom of God.” Mainstream Christianity equates this rebirth with the rite of baptism by water, which is believed to confer (or to mark) this dual rebirth.
The Cathars and their Gnostic predecessors didn’t quite see things that way. For them, water baptism merely admitted the aspirant into the outer circle of the faith, that of the “psychics,” or, in Cathar terms, Believers. It was the consolamentum that enabled one to be reborn of the “spirit,” to enter the ranks of pneumatic Christians, or the Elect. Only at this level could a member of the sect be considered truly katharos, or “pure.” Some accounts of this rite survive, so it’s possible to piece together how it proceeded.
The initiate was rarely, if ever, admitted upon first joining the faith. Indeed the evidence suggests that recruits were at first exposed to teachings that were very much like those of orthodox Christianity. Only after a year or two of probation were they initiated “into the whole heresy and madness,” to use the words of one heresiologist.7 Even then they might wait a long time before having the consolamentum administered. The typical Believer would not receive it until he or she was very close to death, since, as with the Manichaeans, admission to the Elect enforced strict austerities upon the initiate.
For the small elite (estimates suggest that there were only a thousand to fifteen hundred Cathar parfaits in Languedoc at the beginning of the thirteenth century, when the movement was at its height), the consolamentum was given earlier on in life. It was generally preceded by the endura, a fast of forty days, in imitation of Christ’s retreat into the desert after his own baptism.
The ritual itself was not secret—Believers were permitted to be present—and was comparatively simple in form.8 The aspirant was brought in silence to the place of initiation. A number of lighted torches were arranged along the length of the room, probably to symbolize the “baptism by fire.” In the midst of the room was a table covered with a cloth, which served as an altar. A copy of the New Testament rested upon it.
The assemblage arranged itself in a circle; the aspirant stood in the middle. The Lord’s Prayer was recited, and the aspirant received addresses and admonitions suitable for the occasion. He was told, “The Church signifies union, and wherever true Christians are, there are the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, as the Holy Scriptures show.” Passages from scripture were read that described how the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit manifested in the human being. One verse that was frequently used was 1 Cor. 3:16–17: “Know ye not that ye are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwelleth in you?” The elder presiding over the rite then admonished the aspirant to repent of all his faults and to forgive those of everyone else, an obligation he was to keep for the rest of his life.
The consolamentum included further texts and readings that proved the superiority of this baptism by the spirit, for example Acts 1:5: “For John truly baptized with water: but ye shall be baptized with the Holy Ghost not many days hence.” The ritual went on to say: “This holy baptism, by which the Holy Spirit is given, has been preserved by the Holy Church from the Apostles until now, and it has passed from ‘good men’ to ‘good men’ up to this point, and it will till the end of time.”
After the aspirant made his repentance and was pardoned by the assembly, the consolamentum proper was administered. The elder took the New Testament and placed it upon the candidate’s head, while the other members of the Elect present placed their right hands on him. The elder then said, “Holy Father, accept this thy servant into thy justice, and bestow thy grace and Holy Spirit upon him.” At this point, according to Déodat Roché, one of the twentieth century’s leading scholars of Catharism, “the soul rediscovered the spirit from which it had been separated (or, as we would say, of which it had lost consciousness).”9
The rite concluded in the primitive Christian manner, with the kiss of peace. To safeguard purity, however, the “kiss” was communicated between the sexes only by placing the New Testament upon the recipient’s shoulder.
As we can see, the consolamentum was a simple rite, and there are few details in it that would seem totally out of place in a modern Christian church; indeed one Catholic scholar admitted that it contains no statement that could not have been uttered in perfect faith by an Inquisitor.10 Obviously its meaning and power cannot be reduced to any of its parts, or even to all of them taken together, but were due to the candidate’s intense preparation and the depth of feeling in the community. And this raises a crucial question: can gnosis, which is, after all, a state of inner illumination, be conferred by a mere ritual, no matter how profound?
This issue leads us to the nature of initiation, which in its many forms is a universal phenomenon. Initiation marks an individual’s transition from one phase of life to another. But does it merely mark this transition, or does it somehow make the transition happen? In a puberty ritual, by which primitive tribes admit a young man or woman to full adult responsibility, it is clearly both. The individual must be of the proper age, but the rite is more than a glorified birthday party: he or she is traditionally taken aside and taught the wisdom of the tribe, often after a preparation period that includes seclusion, fasting, and other rigors.
While the consolamentum was no puberty ritual, in broad outlines the process was the same. The aspirant prepared for it by the forty-day fast, or endura, which was so rigorous that it sometimes proved fatal. After this probationary period—which in itself would weed out all but the most serious candidates—the individual was received into the circle of the Elect, and the Word of illumination descended upon him, symbolized by the act of placing the New Testament upon his head.
But did this automatically confer gnosis upon the initiate? To answer this question definitively is impossible, since it would require a knowledge of the inner states of people who have been dead for centuries. But there are a number of traditions in which spiritual power is transferred directly by initiation. The Hindu concept of shaktipat refers to a palpable spiritual force that can be transmitted from master to pupil; the Sufis, the mystics of Islam, have a very similar concept, called baraka (which literally means “blessing”). For the Cathars, whether or not their consolamentum conferred true inner illumination, it’s at least safe to say that the rigors of preparation and the intensity of feeling present must have made it a life-changing event for practically all the Elect.
Some scholars have contended that the consolamentum required the aspirant to renounce the conventional Christian baptism, but Déodat Roché disagrees: “The number of Catholic priests and monks who were won over to Catharism appears to have been significant, and this alleged renunciation of their baptism would have forced them to leave the Roman church, which they did not do.” Roché cites a fragment of a Florentine Cathar ritual: “Do not imagine that in receiving this baptism [of the Spirit], you must despise the other baptism, or anything that you have done or said that is truly Christian and good, but you must understand that it is important to receive this holy ordination of Christ as a supplement to the one that did not suffice for your salvation.”11 This fact is curious in light of the Cathar view that the Roman church was little more than an emissary of darkness. While it could have been a tactical move to stave off persecution, this seems unlikely. As even their enemies admitted, the Cathars were neither impostors nor hypocrites.
This detail suggests that the Cathars’ purpose may have been different than is generally supposed. They did not intend to start a new religion; possibly they did not intend even to start a new church. What they may have wanted to do was to restore an inner level of Christianity that had been stifled in the centuries of struggle against heresies and striving for temporal power. The Cathar division of members into Believers and Elect parallels the inner and outer levels of religious teaching, which I discussed in chapter 2.
Catharism may have been an attempt to reintroduce this inner level of Christianity into a church that had become stuck on the level of the exterior. This is a perennial problem in religion, as we can see from this verse in the Gospels: “Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! for ye shut up the kingdom of heaven against men: for ye neither go in yourselves, neither suffer ye them that are entering to go in” (Matt. 23:13). The “scribes and Pharisees” represent those guardians of doctrine at the outer level who become obsessed with preserving the letter of the doctrine but refuse to experience it inwardly for themselves or to let anyone else do so. It’s ironic, of course, that a church that is based on Christ’s teaching would have fallen into a trap that he warned against so explicitly.
If this is true, it would explain why the Cathars were so successful and why the hierarchy found them so threatening. Strictly speaking, the Cathars were not doing anything that was outside the bounds of Christianity. As one Catholic scholar noted, “The Cathar rites of the thirteenth century remind us of those of the primitive Church to a degree that is more and more striking the closer we come to the apostolic age.”12 But the Cathars were casting doubt on one of the central pillars of Catholic teaching: that its doctrines and practices are both necessary and sufficient for salvation. In the consolamentum, initiates were told that their baptism by water had not been sufficient at all.
This leads us to ask whether salvation, as traditionally conceived, and gnosis are the same thing. By this point it should be clear that they are not. Salvation is generally understood to be a promise made by God of aid at the time of one’s death: the soul will be rescued from straying into undesirable dimensions of reality—in a word, from hell. It is freely given for the asking. Gnosis is a state of cognitive awakening that is vouchsafed to a very small number of people (mostly because only a very small number seek it out). Salvation is the goal of external Christianity; gnosis is the goal of the inner circle. In biblical symbolism, salvation is represented by the water baptism of John the Baptist; gnosis is represented by Christ’s baptism of the spirit.13
Stated in this way, the distinction is easy enough to see, but it was not always understood, probably at even a very early stage of Christianity. Perhaps this was the main cause of dissension between the Gnostics and the proto-orthodox Christians in the first and second centuries. The Gnostics were concerned with inner illumination; deliverance at the hour of death may have seemed to them a diversion from the real heart of the spiritual quest. To the proto-Catholics, on the other hand, this preoccupation with gnosis was a dangerous detour from what they regarded as the only issue of importance. A thousand years later, this controversy (or misunderstanding) was still being played out, with the Catholics regarding the Cathars as dangerous heretics with their specious consolamentum—clearly worthless when the sacraments of the Church were necessary and sufficient for salvation—and with the Cathars telling their followers that mere baptism by water was not sufficient for true awakening.
Courtly Love
Another phenomenon associated with the Cathars is l’amour courtois, or courtly love, made famous by the poetry of the troubadours, the medieval Provençal poets of love. The connection may seem strange. It’s not quite obvious what this version of romantic love had to do with Catharism, which was so adamant about its contempt for earthly things. In his classic study Love in the Western World, Denis de Rougemont describes the issue thus:
On the one hand, the Catharist heresy and courtly love developed simultaneously in the twelfth century and also coincided spatially in the south of France. How suppose [sic] that the two movements were entirely unconnected? For them not to have entered into relations would surely be the strangest thing of all! But on the other hand, and weighting the opposite side of the scales, how could there be a con-nexion between those sombre Cathars, whose asceticism compelled them to shun all contact with the opposite sex, and the bright troubadours, joyful and up to any folly, who turned love, the spring, dawn, flowery gardens, and the Lady, all into song?14
The name courtly love would lead us to suppose that it sprang up in the noble courts of the era. But the word “court” (cour in French; the adjective is courtois) may be pointing, not to the court of a king, but to the twelfth-century “courts of love,” which handed down rulings and adjudications on the matters of the heart. They were presided over by women of high birth. Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of King Louis VII of France and later of King Henry II of England, held one. So did the Countess of Champagne, whose court produced a remarkable ruling in 1174:
We declare and affirm…that love cannot extend its rights over two married persons. For indeed lovers grant one another all things mutually and freely, without being impelled by any motive of necessity, whereas husband and wife are held by their duty to submit their wills to each other and to refuse each other nothing.
May this judgement, which we have delivered with extreme caution, and after consulting with a great number of other ladies, be for you a constant and unassailable truth.15
Ermengarde, viscountess of Narbonne, delivered a similar opinion: “The affection between a married couple and the genuine love shared by lovers are shown by nature to be completely opposed and to have their sources in completely different movements [of the soul].”16
So far we know two things about courtly love: women laid down its laws, and it had nothing to do with marriage. Indeed it specifically excluded marriage. A third stipulation is just as important: the lovers were not to have sexual intercourse.
This is not to say that courtly love was always or totally free of carnality. In its classic form, it involved a progressive increase of intimacy that began with a glance, proceeding to conversation with the beloved, then to touching her hand, then to the kiss. In the end it might lead to the assais, or “test,” which was not exactly chaste. The lover could look at his lady naked, hold her, embrace her, and caress her—the contact could well lead to orgasm for both parties. But actual penetration was not allowed. (No doubt this rule was violated on more than one occasion, as rules often are.) 17
These facts, however bewildering, bring this curious phenomenon into sharper focus. Courtly love was the opposite of marriage. The obligations between the partners were those of the heart: they were freely chosen, not the result of a contract that society would enforce. Because intercourse was forbidden, the love would produce no children. Consequently it would not threaten the essential basis for marriage: that the couple provide a stable home for their offspring, where the woman is guaranteed some support from her husband and the husband knows that the children are his own. Finally, unlike marriage, where in medieval times the husband had the upper hand, in courtly love the man was the humble suppliant of la dame de ses pensées—“the lady of his thoughts.” One of the precepts of De arte amandi (On the Art of Love), a fourteenth-century treatise on courtly love, admonishes male lovers, “Be ever mindful of all the commands of the ladies.”18
But how is courtly love connected to de Rougemont’s “sombre Cathars, whose asceticism compelled them to shun all contact with the opposite sex”? In the first place, courtly love is the exact opposite of the sexuality permitted by the Catholic Church, which condoned sex only for procreation (hence its prohibitions of abortion and birth control). As Frederic Spiegelberg observes, “The Catholic tradition that sex is permissible if the chance of procreation exists, but otherwise is not permissible, was turned around by the Manichaean prophets to say that sex is permissible as long as procreation is prevented.”19
The bonshommes may also have had something else in mind. The poetry of the troubadours abounds with praises of the “Lady,” whose frustrating unavailability evokes all manner of longing. Sometimes the homage verges on the sacrilegious. “By her alone shall I be saved!” cries William of Poitiers, the first of the troubadours.20 In other verses, the poet promises to keep the Lady’s secret, as if it were a matter of religious faith. The troubadours’ verses are suffused with a delicious ambiguity about the nature of this Lady—whether she is a flesh-and-blood woman to whom the swain has vowed himself or whether she stands for something higher.
To see what the Lady may have symbolized, let us return to Déodat Roché’s observation that the consolamentum was meant to unite the soul with the spirit. In essence, the rite was a mystical marriage between the psyche and the transcendent Self, or the true “I,” from which the psyche, the ordinary level of consciousness, had previously been cut off. The troubadours, in their laments for this lost Lady, may have been speaking allegorically of a longing for this higher Self.
This idea points to an extremely important fact about the spiritual path. In the previous chapter, I suggested that human beings are creatures who are capable of viewing the body as an other. What is even more peculiar is that we are capable of viewing the self as an other as well. Paradoxically, we experience that which is most essential to ourselves, that which alone has the right to say “I,” as tenuous, remote, even nonexistent. In Christ’s parable, it is the master that is away (Matt. 24:45–51). For the Gnostics, it is the pearl at the bottom of the sea; for the troubadours, it is la dame de ses pensées, beguiling, distant, yet drawing the aspirant ever upward toward his higher nature.
Courtly love, then, involved what modern psychology calls projection. The lover’s imagination mingles or confuses his own higher nature with the distant Lady, whose mere glance sends him into paroxysms of rapture. The distinction may not have been clear even to all of the devotees of this enigmatic form of love. No doubt the Cathar adepts and the greatest of the troubadours understood the symbolic meaning of this Lady, but it’s equally likely that many lovers equated her with their ladies of flesh and blood.
If the troubadours were evasive about the exact nature of the Lady, their poetic heirs, most famously Dante, brought the matter into the open. Indeed we could see Dante’s entire literary career as a movement from his love of Beatrice the actual woman, whom he first espies at the age of nine, to his personification of her as the divine Wisdom who guides him through the spheres of heaven in the Paradiso. But these two aspects of Beatrice are indissolubly linked from the start. In the Vita Nuova, Dante recalls:
The moment I saw her I say in all truth that the vital spirit, which dwells in the inmost depths of the heart, began to tremble so violently that I felt the vibration alarmingly in all my pulses, even the weakest of them. As it trembled, it uttered these words: Ecce deus for-tior me, qui veniens dominabitur mihi [“Behold, a god more powerful than I, who comes to rule over me”].21
Dante and Beatrice never come together. Like a troubadour, Dante contents himself with admiring her from a distance, and she dies at an early age. And yet there is something delectable in the flashes of love he experiences simply from greeting her in the street:
Whenever and wherever she appeared, in the hope of receiving her miraculous salutation I felt I had not an enemy in the world. Indeed, I glowed with a flame of charity which moved me to forgive all who had ever injured me; and if at that moment someone had asked me a question, about anything, my only reply would have been: “Love,” with a countenance clothed with humility.22
Notice that Dante does not complain that he cannot enjoy Beatrice’s favors; instead, the briefest glimpse of her launches him into a joy bordering on religious ecstasy. Something within him has transformed lust into adoration. This, too, was essential to courtly love. While it did not always exclude physical contact, it emphasized transmutation rather than consummation. Nor was this a matter of mere technique. The sublimation of the sexual drive into a higher emotional force was meant to happen spontaneously, through the natural operation of the heart.
If the quest for such transmutation seems odd to us today, we must remember the religious backdrop of the time. The Cathars and the Catholics didn’t agree about much, but their views on sexuality were remarkably similar: they thought it was bad. For the Cathars, with their Manichaean heritage, sex imprisoned the sparks of light in the darkness of matter, while for the Catholics it was a regrettable necessity so that the human race could perpetuate itself in this fallen realm. For their different reasons, both sects were entirely happy to embrace an ideal that sacrificed sexual expression to a higher, purer counterpart.
In Love in the Western World, Denis de Rougemont argues that courtly love was the ancestor of romantic love as we know it today. Courtly love, rooted in the inaccessibility of the beloved, inspired the tragic tales of Tristan and Iseult and of Lancelot and Guinevere in the Arthurian romances. Later on, the same impulse would find expression in the tragedies of Shakespeare, Corneille, and Racine, and would culminate in the Romantic exaltation of doomed passion. “From desire to death via passion—such has been the road taken by European romanticism; and we are all taking this road to the extent that we accept—unconsciously of course—a whole set of manners and customs for which the symbols were devised in courtly mysticism,” de Rougemont writes.23
De Rougemont is undoubtedly overstating his case. Romantic love seems to be universal. Many cultures apart from the West have dwelt upon the melancholy intertwining of love and fatality. Nonetheless, de Rougemont does seem to be right in one respect. The greatest love stories of the West are those of doomed love. Tristan and Iseult do not settle down; neither do Heloïse and Abelard, Romeo and Juliet, Zhivago and Lara, or any of the other great lovers of history and literature. De Rougemont argues that this exultation of the tragic has encouraged discontent with the more humdrum but more stable attachments of domestic life, which, he says, is why marriage stands on such a shaky footing today.
It’s unlikely that the perplexities of modern love can all be laid at the door of the troubadours or their literary heirs. Our modern anguishes, like the ones of old, seem to point to something deeper in the reaches of human nature—a discontent that stirs in us at the most unpredictable times and for the most arbitrary reasons, urging us to despise the familiar and pine after the faraway. It is an old predicament, and it has inspired much of the best and the worst in human life, as it has in love itself.
The Albigensian Crusade
The Cathar impulse in the West reached its high-water mark around the beginning of the thirteenth century. The beginning of its decline can be dated to the accession of Innocent III to the papacy in 1198. More than any pope before or after him, Innocent was obsessed with consolidating temporal as well as the spiritual power: his entire papacy was an attempt to assert his authority over mere earthly monarchs. As part of his effort to create a universal theocracy, he was determined to destroy the dualist heresies that threatened the religious unity of Europe.
In 1199, Innocent sent a mission of Cistercian monks to Languedoc to preach against Catharism; this envoy would be followed in later years by missions led by clerics, including Dominic Guzmán, founder of the Dominican Order. Indeed the origin of the order can be traced to Dominic’s efforts to convert the heretics of Languedoc in those years. Innocent also urged the French nobility to suppress the Cathars, but many nobles of Languedoc, especially Raymond VI, count of Toulouse, refused to oblige. In 1207, Innocent excommunicated Raymond. The next year, when a papal legate was murdered in Languedoc, Innocent launched a crusade against the Cathars, usually called the Albigensian Crusade (since the Cathars were also known as Albigenses).
It would be too lengthy and tedious to go into the intricacies and reversals of this war, in which various monarchs and nobles, including Raymond himself, often found it expedient to switch sides at crucial moments. But in essence two major forces were at play. The Catholic Church was determined to stamp out a religious rival, and the nobles of northern France were eager to use this pretext to gain possession of Languedoc. Naturally, the crusade soon surpassed its initial mandate in savagery and cruelty, and Innocent himself had to remind the crusaders of the true purpose of their warfare. The struggle continued on and off until 1229, when it was concluded by the Peace of Paris between Raymond VII (son of Raymond VI, who had died in 1222) and King Louis IX of France. By this agreement Raymond had to cede much of his territories to Louis and the church. Furthermore, his daughter was obliged to marry one of the king’s brothers; upon their deaths, their territories would become part of the French kingdom. From a political point of view, the chief result of the Albigensian Crusade was the consolidation of the French kingdom under the Capet dynasty.
The crusade did not succeed in destroying the heresy itself. Large numbers of the parfaits were captured and burned, but the persecutions were not systematic enough to eliminate them. In the years between 1227 and 1235, however, Pope Gregory IX issued a number of decrees that established the Inquisition, to be staffed chiefly by two new monastic orders, the Franciscans and the Dominicans. Unlike earlier tribunals, which were haphazardly administered by local bishops, the Inquisition was directed ab apostolica sede, “from the apostolic see,” that is, by the papacy. This move would lead to a tremendous increase in efficiency and centralization for the persecutions.
The climactic moment in the fall of the Cathars was the capture of the stronghold of Montségur in the foothills of the Pyrenees. After the Peace of Paris, the Cathar bishops had found it expedient to withdraw here, farther from Italy and northern France. In May 1242, after two visiting Inquisitors were murdered at Montségur, French forces assaulted the citadel.
Montségur’s almost impregnable position made the siege lengthy and difficult, and the attackers were unable to cut off the castle completely from the rest of the world. But as the months progressed, the position of the Cathars and their protectors continued to worsen, and the nobles defending the castle began to negotiate with their attackers. As part of the terms, the parfaits at Montségur were offered the choice of recanting or being burned at the stake. They chose martyrdom, and in March 1244 over two hundred of the Cathar Elect went to the flames singing. Before the capitulation, however, three or four parfaits made a daring escape. Legend says they took with them a mysterious “Cathar treasure,” which has never been found. It is not even clear whether this treasure consisted of gold and jewels or texts and teachings. Rumors about the Cathar treasure continue to surface in the occult lore of Europe.
The fall of Montségur did not, in and of itself, end the Cathar movement, which then moved its headquarters to Lombardy in northern Italy, where struggles between the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor made it difficult for the church to attack the heretics. But the long decades of persecution had broken the back of Catharism, and the increasing efficiency of the Inquisition further hastened, its demise. Catharism continued to survive into the fourteenth century, but at that point it disappears from the face of history.
The Secret Heresy of Hieronymus Bosch
Did the Cathars leave any heirs in the succeeding centuries? There is not much evidence that they did—but that is to be expected, given that this hunted sect had a dire need to cover its tracks. The most fascinating case for a Cathar survival into the Renaissance appears in a recent book by Lynda Harris entitled The Secret Heresy of Hieronymus Bosch.24
Bosch’s strange, lurid, but compelling paintings are familiar to anyone who has taken a basic art history course. Scholars today usually regard his images as the products of his own imagination and characterize him as a distant ancestor of twentieth-century surrealism. But it is possible that another purpose lay behind his bizarre imagery.
In Bosch’s time—the early Renaissance—the tradition of European painting employed a rich and intricate symbolic vocabulary. A dog symbolized fidelity; a lute with a broken string symbolized mortality. Like any other form of language, this network of images was generally understandable but still allowed for a great deal of individual expression. Harris contends that Bosch’s symbolic language expressed his allegiance to the Cathar heresy.
Bosch was born sometime between 1450 and 1460 in the town of s’Hertogenbosch in the Brabant, a district of the present-day Netherlands near the Belgian border; he would live there for his entire life. He came from a family of artists and outwardly lived a conventional bourgeois existence. He was a respected citizen and was considered to be a Catholic in good standing; in fact he was a member of a pious association called the Brotherhood of Our Lady. His only departure from the ordinary—apart from his paintings themselves—was a visit he made to Venice sometime around 1500, where he may have met such artists as Giorgione and Leonardo da Vinci, both of whose works show some traces of Bosch’s influence (as his do of theirs). He died around 1520.
What evidence do we have for his connection to the Cathars? The artist we know by that name Bosch (from s’Hertogenbosch) did not use the surname until around 1500. Before then, he used his hereditary surname, van Aken, which suggests that the family came from Aachen in Germany. Aachen was near Cologne, which, as we have seen, was the site of the first known Cathar community. Moreover, the earliest reference to an ancestor of Bosch’s dates from 1271, when the records of s’Hertogenbosch show a wool merchant named van Aken doing business with England. Cathars were often members of the cloth trade. It is possible, then, that the van Aken family left Germany in the mid-thirteenth century to avoid the increasing persecution of Cathars, the Netherlands being more tolerant. Here, Harris suggests, the family may have continued to practice Catharism in secret for the next two hundred years.
All this evidence is, of course, circumstantial. The most powerful argument for Bosch’s secret heresy comes from the symbolism of his paintings, which is bizarre and inexplicable from the perspective of Catholic doctrine but quite comprehensible from the Cathar point of view. While Harris goes into great detail about Bosch’s symbolism, here two fairly simple examples will have to suffice.
In the background of the central panel of Bosch’s Adoration of the Magi at the Prado, we see a tiny figure of a man leading a donkey with an ape riding on it. Nearby is a statue of what looks like a Greek god on a column atop a small mound.
Harris argues that this is a subtle but deliberate jeer at the traditional imagery of the Flight into Egypt. Most representations of this episode from Matthew’s Gospel show Joseph leading Mary with the infant Jesus on a donkey. Frequently they are depicted passing by the fallen idols of Egypt, which have toppled in the presence of the true God. Bosch’s imagery shows the opposite. It is an ape, and not the Virgin, that is riding on the donkey, and the idol stands undisturbed on its column.
Such imagery is difficult to explain coming from the hand of a pious Catholic, particularly a member of the Brotherhood of Our Lady. But remember that the Bogomils and their successors, repudiating the doctrine of Christ’s humanity, mocked the Blessed Virgin. Bosch’s tiny detail fits in with these dualist beliefs.
There are other features in this painting that support such a view, and there are other details in other paintings that point still more clearly to a Cathar influence. In one strange work, called The Stone Operation, an oafish peasant is having the top of his head cut open by a man dressed in clerical attire and wearing a funnel on his head. Next to this figure is a monk in a black robe holding a pitcher. Off to the side is a woman with a book on her head, watching the scene with a look of distant melancholy.
By the standard symbolism of the time, this scene would speak of the removal of the stone of folly, but here it is not a stone that is being extracted from the man’s head; it is a flower. By Harris’s interpretation, the two performing the operation are members of the Catholic clergy, and what they are extracting is not folly but the flower of the man’s spiritual potential. Both the funnel and the pitcher held by the two quacks allude to the false Catholic baptism by water. But it’s the book on the woman’s head that is most striking, since, as we’ve seen, the consolamentum was conferred by placing a copy of the New Testament on the initiate’s head. This would make her a Cathar adept watching the folly of two quacks—the Catholic clergy—destroying the spiritual potential of an unsuspecting lout.
Harris’s interpretations of these and other paintings makes a great deal of sense out of what otherwise seem to be whimsical and arbitrary details. But could Bosch’s family have kept the Cathar faith for two centuries without being detected, and could Bosch himself have held beliefs that were diametrically opposed to his outward practice without giving himself away?
In both cases, the answer is yes. Family traditions can hand down heterodox religious beliefs over a long period of time, as we see in the Marranos, the Jews of Renaissance Spain who practiced their religion in secret for generations while pretending outwardly to be Catholics. More controversially, there are forms of paganism and the “Old Religion” that were allegedly kept up in family contexts during long centuries of persecution.
As for Bosch’s ability to live so duplicitous an existence, this becomes more comprehensible if we recollect that he lived in what Paul Johnson, in his History of Christianity, characterized as a “total society.”25 Recent instances of totalitarian societies show that people who live in them often go to extremes of deceit and concealment to protect themselves. And given the range of its influence, the technological limitations of the era, and the political disunion of Europe, the Christendom of Bosch’s time was not only a totalitarian society, but a remarkably successful one. No fascist or communist state in the twentieth century was able to keep such extensive control—and for centuries rather than decades. It is hard for a modern American to imagine what it must have been like to pay lip service for a lifetime to values that were totally opposed to those of one’s heart, but it has often been done. In many parts of the world it still has to be done today.
Even if Bosch and others like him did continue to practice Catharism in secret, they were the last heirs of a dying tradition. The great dualist heresy, begun with Mani over a thousand years before, finally expired at the beginning of the modern era. We know this from the simple fact that when the European nations introduced religious toleration in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, no hidden Cathars came to the surface. By then they had all vanished, most likely absorbed either into Catholicism or into the dozens of Protestant sects that sprang up after the Reformation.
And yet the Cathar legacy has perpetuated itself in memory and legend. The parfaits burned at Montségur, formerly reviled as heretics, are now hailed as martyrs to the cause of religious freedom. The troubadours are honored as revivers of the tradition of the Divine Feminine in an age of male domination. Cathar influences may even have survived in ordinary language. The French often speak of le bon Dieu, “the good God.” Did this phrase, now taken entirely for granted, originate long ago in the idea that there is a “good God” who has to be distinguished from another God, who is evil? Perhaps this commonplace expression is a fossil of Cathar theology preserved in the amber of day-to-day speech.