The Cathars
Gnosticism takes its name from the Greek for knowledge, ‘Gnosis.’ Gnostic Christianity dates from the early first century AD. Some of the most crucial evidence of its teachings come from the Nag Hammadi Library, which displays Christian faith blended with Jewish mysticism and pagan philosophy. Gnostic Christians believed that they were divine beings trapped inside flesh. The New Testament contained a hidden spiritual message that would help their soul to freedom. The Cathars of the Middle Ages were one of the last open manifestations of this tradition.
The Cathars were active in the 12th and 13th centuries, during a period of growing dissent against the increasingly powerful and worldly Church. Known as the Bogomils in Bulgaria and Albigenses in the Languedoc, region of southern France, the term ‘Cathar’ from the Greek Kathari; ‘the pure ones’ acted as an umbrella term. The Cathars were dualists. They believed that the earth split into two: material and spiritual. The material world was evil, a trap created by a false god depicted in the Old Testament. The real god was a god of spirit. He was assisted by Aeons, divine beings that mediated between him and humanity. The most recent of these was Christ who was sent in human disguise to help humanity escape their fleshly bondage.
To escape the material, it was essential to reject the false world around them. So Cathars tried to live as separately as possible. Although the majority of their number still traded, married and had children, the ideal state to achieve was that of a Parfaite or perfecti. These were Cathars who had taken the final step of commitment in their beliefs, that of consolamentum, a form of spiritual baptism. Because Cathar’s made no distinction between the sexes, both men and women could take Consolamentum-usually after marriage and children or when they were near death. This was because, once they became perfecti, a Cathar lived an entirely ascetic, spiritual life.
In the eyes of the orthodox church, the Cathars had rejected not only Church authority, but God’s as they argued had essentially rebranded the creator of the material world as Satan. After years of unsuccessfully trying to harass the Cathar’s into extinction, the Church finally took drastic and bloody action. In 1209, an army of 10,000 men from across Northern Europe was sent out under the secular command of Simon de Montfort and the spiritual guidance of papal legate Arnaud Amaury. They swept across the Languedoc, wiping out areas around Cathar strongholds. They showed no mercy. When asked, “How shall we tell who are the heretics?” Amaury responded: “Kill them all, Lord will know his own.’
During the first wave of the Albigensian crusade, 140 Cathar perfecti were burned at the stake in one day alone after the fall of Minerve -with some perfecti voluntarily throwing themselves into the flames. On March 16, during the second major Albigensian crusade, what is arguably the last Cathar stronghold at Montsegur surrendered. On that same day, 225 male and female perfecti– 20 who had taken consolumentum only days before, were burnt alive. Pockets of Cathar resistance continued, but the sect as an organized unit was massacred out of existence. The last know Cathar Prefecti in the Languedoc, Guillaume Bélibaste, was executed in 1321.
Other heresies damned themselves by wanting to overthrow not only the ecclesiastical but the social order.