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T he Cathars represent the last major flourishing of gnosis in western Europe in the early eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries. They are also called Albigensians, a geographical reference, because among their main converts were the people in the Languedoc city of Albi. When the pope declared the crusade against the Cathars in 1209, he called it the Albigensian Crusade. The epithet Cathar was probably derived from the Greek katharoi (clean, pure) and designated the class of the perfect or elect. The name was already applied to the dualist community at Monteforte in Italy as early as 1030.

The Cathars first appeared in northern Italy, and then in western Germany, England, and Flanders, but soon their major concentration was in Provençal-speaking southwestern France. By the end of the tenth century we hear of Gerbert of Aurillac, archbishop elect of Reims, who issued a declaration of faith that included Manichaean dualistic doctrines and a rejection of the Old Testament. 1 There is evidence of a continuity of Manichaean groups in France from the time (c. 370s CE ) when Augustine, in his earlier Manichaean period, was exiled in Champagne and was actively proselytizing. Whatever the size and significance of these interesting relics of classical Manichaeism, however, the reappearance of a radical dualism in the region can be attributed to the Bogomils, a neomanichaean group from Macedonia and Bulgaria who, like the original adherents of Mani, quickly spread the fire of their doctrine from Europe and North Africa to China. This time the Bogomils carried their message through the Balkans and western Europe. Such was their impact that by the twelfth century the Cathars had their own network of bishoprics reaching from southern to northern France, Catalonia, and the whole of northern Italy, with scattered communities from Lombardy down to Rome.

The spread of gnosticism in this area of western Europe also coincided in twelfth-century Languedoc with the emergence of Kabbalism. The Sefer ha-Bahir (Book of Bright Light) is, as Gershom Sholem demonstrates, an example of gnostic Kabbalism as well as the most significant extant document of medieval Jewish mysticism and symbolism. The many dissenting religious movements in this area of southern France made it a new Alexandria, where, as in the ancient hellenistic capital, diverse religions and philosophical movements flourished, including neoplatonism, hermeticism, Judaism, Christianity, and, a child of this diversity, gnosticism.

The legendary founder of Bogomil neomanichaeism was the tenth-century Slavic priest Bogomil, also called Theophilos. The Bogomils, who owed many ideas to the earlier Paulicians 2 in Armenia and the Near East, were the most powerful sectarian movement in the history of the Balkans. Predominantly Slavs with some Greek followers, they were a powerful force in Constantinople, Macedonia, and Bulgaria, and especially in Serbia and Bosnia, where they persisted for five centuries and for a period vied for dominance with orthodoxy. In the capital city of Constantinople the Bogomils were a powerful populist movement that vigorously opposed Byzantine culture and theocracy. They fell into obscurity in the fifteenth century with the Ottoman conquest of Byzantium, but in their active years the Bogomils in the east, together with the Cathars in the west, formed a network of dualist communities from the Black Sea to the Atlantic .

Bogomillian and later Catharist ideas go back to the grand confusion of many earlier heretical sects, including the Marcionites, Borborites, Bardaisans, Messalians, Montanists, Adoptionists, and Monarchians, and the later sect in Dioclea and Bosnia called the Patarenes (who after a migration to the west were eventually the Cathars of northern Italy). Many of these sects shared with the monophysites, and the Nestorians, 3 who still survive in large numbers in Mesopotamia and India, the essential docetic notion of Christ and Jesus as two figures, one divine and one human, and Christ as a phantom on the cross who only seemed to be human.

Like earlier gnostics, the Bogomils held a dualistic view of soul and body, and of good and evil deities as evinced in the struggle between the good god of light and the demonic biblical god of darkness and error who created and trapped our souls in material, perishable bodies. Christ was an angel messenger of god. On earth, following the docetic interpretation of Jesus Christ, the Christ was not real flesh but a phantasm, his sufferings an illusion. The man Jesus was a prophet, the earthly counterpart of Christ the angel spirit. The Bogomils replaced biblical myth, as did the earlier gnostics, with an elaborate cosmogony and theogony of their own, and rejected much of the Old Testament, whose deity they considered to be Satan. They utterly opposed most of the church structure, symbology, and doctrine—hierarchy, saints, sacraments, relics, the cross, the trinity, and the divinity of Mary. They detested the cross as the instrument of Christ’s murder. They aimed early Christian iconoclasm at Orthodox icons, which they called idols. As for their comportment, they drank no wine, ate no meat, and were essentially pacifists practicing passive resistance. And they took a politically populist view, denouncing the wealth and opulence of the Byzantine Church and seeking to liberate the Slavic serfs from serfdom.

In the eleventh century the Bogomils sent missionaries to spread their reform—or heresy, in the eyes of the established church—into northern Italy and France, where the new orders retained the essential Bogomil theology and personal practice. The Cathars, however, extended the more restrictive reading of the Bogomils to include Paul, the gospels, and the Hebrew Bible, to which, in the manner of the earlier Alexandrian exegetes, they gave their own distinctive interpretation. In 1167 the Bogomils sent to Toulouse a major bishop, Nicetas, who instructed and gave prestige to the developing Cathar movement. And Bogomil scriptures appeared in Latin, one of which survives today: the Gospel of the Secret Supper, or John’s Interrogation. This key and influential book came into hands of the French and Italian Cathars in Latin translation, probably from Byzantine Greek (the original was lost). It exists in two slightly different versions, one preserved in the archives of the Office of the Inquisition at Carcassonne and the second in the National Library of Vienna.

The Cathars of France and Italy are normally divided into two sects: absolute dualism and mitigated dualism. 4 Absolute dualism is more purely Manichaean, varying less from its Bogomil roots and using the traditional terms of Manichaean cosmogony. Mitigated dualism was dominant among the Cathars, however. Even the present form of the Gospel of the Secret Supper, or John’s Interrogation, the major Bogomil text imported into France and used by the Cathars, the dualism is decisively mitigated, and the usual terms and personages of Manichaean dualism—aeons, archons, Sophia—are not used. Not even the name of Mani appears in it. Instead, the text is based on the gospels and a gnostic interpretation of them, and especially of the Gospel of John, which throughout has been favored among the canonical gospels by gnostics as one of their own. As a rule the gnostics have vigorously interpreted the Gospel of John, through elaborate exegesis, as gnostic scripture. The Cathars saw the Gospel of the Secret Supper, or John’s Interrogation, as a purely Johannine gnostic text. It is a conversation between the evangelist John and god (le Seigneur ) in which John interrogates le Seigneur about Satan before the fall, the creation, Adam and Eve, the descent of Jesus Christ, baptism by water and by spirit, and Satan’s lake of fire and the invisible god’s heaven. It is a Cathar variation of Christian myth.

In contrast, the major extant Cathar text, known as the Book of the Two Principles, is a perfect example of absolute dualism, showing the relentless struggle between the god of goodness and the god of evil for dominion and belief among the unknowing. The god of goodness will be conquered in time but will be victorious in eternity when captive souls escape evil and return to light. Only then will evil be annihilated. As in classical Manichaean texts, a Cathar primordial human will also fight against evil and fail, as will the good angels. But their victory is not in defeating and punishing evil now—which they say is the way of the romains (the Catholics)—but in waiting until matter annihilates itself, when nonbeing is truly nonexistent and light lives in eternity.

In the absolute dualism of the Albanenses (an epithet for the absolute dualists), the principle of good is entirely opposite to the principle of evil, as being is to nonbeing. The absolutists’ god is limited ontologically to the good, without free will, because his power (la puissance ) and his will (la voluntée ) are one and the same. He cannot and does not want to do evil. Nor can the good god create anyone with free will, such as a human who might do evil or a favored angel Lucifer, who has the free will to become the evil devil. That task of creating evil, free will, and the demon god is left to the entirely separate entity of the principle of evil. It must be remembered that the principle of evil is the eternal principle, preceding the demon god of evil.

The absolute and mitigated dualists also differed in their myths, though these differences are less significant than the conceptual differences of absolute versus relative separation of the good and evil principles. As an example of the mythic differences, the absolutist Albanenses believed that the demon of evil never managed to invade any of the seven levels of heaven and their corresponding angels. The mitigated dualists believed that only the higher levels of heaven resisted the temptations of the fallen angel Lucifer, but that Lucifer could ever have been at any level of god’s heaven was an idea abhorrent to the absolute dualists. The good god could never have been the creator of a Lucifer who has the free will to become wicked.

More prominent in mitigated dualism than in absolute dualism is the essential theory of emanation. For the mitigated dualists, there is only one original principle: the good god, from whom both Christ and Lucifer emanate. Lucifer, carrier of light, was originally good and sat next to god, but he became corrupted and corrupted his angels and they all became demons. For the absolute dualists, there are two principles: the principle of good and the principle of evil, which is nothingness. Lucifer is Satan, the creature of nonbeing, of earth, which is the inferno where souls must wait for the possibility of redemption and return to the light. Satan has always been evil, and of his own free will has imprisoned the good spirits (who lack free will) into earthly matter. The good spirits on earth have not willingly sinned but have been forced into human bodies.

Some modern scholars attempt to reconcile the two systems, saying that these two theses do not reflect fundamentally different worldviews but are simply different ways of explaining how Satan was tempted and absorbed by matter, how evil entered heaven, and how being was contaminated by nonbeing, all of which was inevitable when god chose to create. Such an argument is wrong, however, and reflects only the mitigated branch of Catharism. It must be remembered that the good god of absolute dualism is absolutely separate from any creation that could have led to evil. This separation from evil, however, has interesting consequences in limiting the true god’s power. God cannot create evil, and to that extent is not omnipotent like the good god of mitigated dualism. The absolute god seems to be “all powerful” yet remains limited because of his inability to concoct an evil universe. His purity and goodness limit him. Yet he still has contact with evil: the good god will spend eternity struggling with evil, and ultimately, as Jean de Lugio, the probable author of the Book of the Two Principles, assures us, this good principle will overcome the wicked principle, being will vanquish nonbeing, and every soul infected with evil, except the principle of evil itself, will be redeemable, including Satan.

Among the firm dualists, the devil’s domain was this world of evil matter. This is why the good spirit will ascend to the spiritual domain while the material body must remain in this world. The Old Testament was the domain of the creator god and his patriarchs Abraham and Moses, who were villainous, although the other Old Testament prophets as well as the Songs (the Psalms) and the Song of Songs were accepted. Other gnostic sects (such as the Mandaeans) made John the baptizer a true rival of Jesus, but while some Cathars saw John as a false prophet because he baptized with water rather than spirit, others held him to be an angel, as we note in the Book of the Two Principles. As for creating more evil bodies, the perfect (or elect) chose abstinence. Some of the perfect even chose endura , meaning they committed suicide through starvation. The believers, however, were freer than their Catholic counterparts. They could have sex outside of marriage, particularly if it did not lead to the conception of children and more trapped sparks of light. So marriage contained a dubious expression of sexuality, where conception was accepted as inevitable but regrettable. These reversals of Catholic principles were deeply repugnant to the established church.

In general the Cathar mythology of god and creation is, as in diverse gnostic texts, poetic, fantastic, and contradictory. With so much of our knowledge still dependent on summaries in archival documents of the Inquisition in France and Italy, the nature of Cathar thought is difficult to classify neatly. Christ, for example, is seen in sundry ways. All Cathar texts agree that he is not the son of god, nor is he god by another name. He is god’s first angel. Some declare that because he fought the demon and was not contaminated, he earned the title—but just the title, not the fact—of son of god. Others among the mitigated dualists claim that Christ’s soul is god. All agree that to save souls he had to come to earth and suffer—either by giving the appearance of suffering and sacrificing himself in the phantasm of a Christ figure, or, as some believed, by becoming a man and truly suffering the passion. Another reason Christ was sent below by the father was to instruct people that the god they worshiped in the churches, the god of the Bible, was none other than the devil.

The Cathars also adopted from the Bogomils a populist mode that esteemed beggars, itinerant monks, and the common good people, which is to say, the peasants. Indeed, while the Cathar theologians and ascetics also had their inevitable hierarchy, they held on to modest titles, even for the perfects, as in la bona gen (Provençal) and le bon homme (French), both meaning “a good person.” The notion of the good everywhere in the celestial realm was at the core of Catharism and has led scholars to speak of a pantheistic good. In the words of Steven Runciman, “The Cathars were essentially believers in pantheism throughout the celestial realm. That is to say, good to them was God.” 5 And on earth that good should be fairly shared, including a knowledge by the people of the scriptures, which speak the good, meaning that holy text is not the sole province of clergy. Hence the abundant translation of texts into the vernacular tongue (Provençal). It is fair to say that this anticlerical, populist strain in the middle ages was not restricted to the Cathars.

The Lollards in England and the Carmelite descalzos (the unshod) in Spain were other attempts to return to the truth or legend of the early Jewish-Christian peasant movement, derived from the communal poor, for whom spirit was stronger than gold or power. All were swiftly denounced and persecuted as heresy. 6

Among the ordinary people of Toulouse and other cities in Languedoc, there were two groups of the faithful Cathars: the perfect (also known as the parfait , bon-homme , elect, or purists) and the much larger ranks of believers (also known as the credentes or hearers). The perfect were ascetic clergy, devoting themselves to contemplation and following strict moral rules, who forswore meat, cheese, sex, and other worldly pleasures. To pass into the ranks of the perfect, one received the sacrament of consolamentum , a laying on of hands. The believers were the lay people, who were peasants, a mobile merchant class, and even a majority of the southern lower nobility as well as greater nobles such as Count Raymond VI of Toulouse, Count Raymond-Roger of Foix, and Roger II, Viscount of Béziers and Carcassonne. The movement also included an unusually large number of very active women, both at the perfect and believer levels. There was a clear division of acceptable behavior for the two divisions of Catharists, and the believer caste was exceptionally free from ascetic restraints.

The devotion by Cathar credentes to diverse regional arts was not only tolerated but encouraged. Consequently, the arts flourished in Toulouse and other Cathar cities when northern France lived under a darker light. Southern France had the song of the aristocratic troubadour composer and the joglar (jongleur) performer and singer—albas , cansos, sirventes, plancs, pastorals (morning songs, songs, political lyrics, dirges, pastorals); the north had grave epic and the trouvères, who imitated the troubadours. Out of this mélange of Cathar and Catholic and poetry, the troubadours gave us an age of cosmopolitan, witty, and wildly satiric song. In short lyric or ballad, they recounted adventures and misadventures of carnal and spiritual love. Their cult of courtly love commingled with a fully secular expression in an accessible vernacular tongue, and they opened worlds of courtly love from which we have, fortunately perhaps, never recovered. Indeed, it is a commonplace to say that the first lights of the renaissance, even before the radiant sonneteers of the royal courts of Sicily, shone in the free-spirited Midi of southern France.

From the point of view of church orthodoxy in France and Italy, however, this popular religion was increasing at an alarming rate. Its dualistic, anticlerical, and worldly stance was a diabolic heresy and its suppression inevitable. When it came, the punishment was catastrophic. The fall of the Cathars had levels of political complexity, with diverse Spanish, northern French, Italian, and even English interests vying for a piece of the destruction. Pope Innocent III made the first decisive move, proclaiming the Albigensian Crusade in 1209 against the gnostic heresy, calling in secular forces against the dualists, whom he offered the same indulgences as given to crusaders: spiritual salvation and material riches. The papal troops ravaged Toulouse, and in southern France thousands were slaughtered or burned at the stake. Churches and monasteries were razed, and scriptures burned. Many of the nobility lost their lands and were also burned. Later the northern barons, under the French king Saint Louis IX, invaded, and in 1244 they captured the last Cathar fortress, the famous mountaintop Montségur in the Pyrenees, bringing the independent region of the south into a larger France. For the French king his invasion was not a crusade against Cathar heresy but a war of annexation.

With the fall of the citadel at Montségur and the capitulation of the nobility, the Catharist communities went underground. There was a large immigration to Catalonia and Lombardy, and also to Bosnia, where the Bogomils offered them sanctuary. As for the Cathar church in France, it was not yet completely crushed, but the great cities of the south—Toulouse, Béziers, Carcassone, and Narbonne—lay in ruins. After a hundred years of war and executions, there was almost everywhere in southern France a drop in population of more than half .

As a legal instrument to complete the job of rooting out Catharism in Albigensian centers, Pope Gregory IX in 1233 established the Inquisition. He gave the task to the Dominicans friars. So was born the medieval Inquisition, which later spread to northern Italy and Germany. (The Spanish Inquisition established by Ferdinand and Isabella in Spain in 1478, with its notorious autos-da-fé, was independent of the medieval Inquisition elsewhere in western Europe and was finally abolished in 1834.) The Dominican inquisitors labored through southern France in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to extinguish virtually all discoverable remnants of the heretical religion. The Inquisition kept records of their activities and preserved the documents of heresy in their archives. We owe our detailed historical knowledge of these events and of Cathar scripture to these documents.

The Inquisition and the Vatican found not only Catharism subversive, but also the troubadours, the great symbol of Occitanian and general Provençal culture. Many of the troubadours were Cathars, and of these, some of the best known, such as Peire Cardenal, were strongly anticlerical, that is, anti-romains (anti-Catholic). The troubadour composers—and the jongleurs who performed the troubadour songs—vanished as their noble patrons had vanished in the massacres of the great families. With the destruction of the two dissenting movements, the Cathars of inner light and the troubadours of outer light, along with the supporting peasants, nobility, and their political protectors, power and culture in France moved from the prevailing langue d’oc (in Provençal, lenga d’oc ) in the south to the bleak langue d’oïl north, and the brilliant Provençal civilization faded forever. 7

The literature of the Cathars awaits the discovery of its own Nag Hammadi library of original gnostic scripture. We rely principally on five treatises, including the Gospel of the Secret Supper (La Cène secrète ), the Anonymous Cathar Treatise (Le Traité cathare anonyme ), the Cathar Ritual (Le Rituel cathare ), the Ritual of Dublin (Le Rituel de Dublin ), and the extensive Book of the Two Principles (Le Livre des deux principes ), as well as writings of the heresiologists deposited in the offices of the Inquisition, which were written to record the central doctrines, practices, and heresies of the Cathars. The Anonymous Cathar Treatise, for example, is a scholastic interpretation of absolute dualism, probably the work of Barthélemy of Carcassone, an antipapist Cathar who employed reason to prove his heretical faith. The treatise is included in the Book against the Manichaeans (Liber contra Manicheos ), written in 1222 or 1224 and attributed to Durand de Huesca, in which the author cites Cathar texts and then point by point refutes them, converting the book into a Catholic essay in itself. The most important heresiological work by far is the work of a former Cathar priest, Rainier Sacconi, who became a romain , a church Catholic, and an articulate inquisitor, whose seminal work against the Cathars is the Summa de Cataris . We also possess twelfth- and thirteenth-century works with Catharist influence.

From the rituals of the Cathars, the pivotal work is the Consolamentum in the Book of Ritual, which contains the sacramental words an initiate must recite in order to become a perfect. The core of the ritual is a reading from parts of the canonical Gospel of John. As we have seen throughout this volume, John was the favorite gospel among the gnostics: from the Alexandrian gnostics, who explained and allegorized John as a gnostic gospel, to the Cathars, for whom John was at the heart of their ceremony and scriptures. The book of John persisted as a key source in the last centuries for all those major groups who speculated on the alien god, and who looked for the light of knowledge in its verse: