In this way, at a stroke, the Cathars not only abolished all fear of death in their initiates but also sundered bonds of superstition and demonology that had stalled the progress of Western civilisation throughout the Dark Ages. Seeking to sweep the cobwebs away from all aspects of habitual religious behaviour they said that chanting in church ‘deceived simple people’, and ridiculed as an irrational waste of money the Catholic practice of paying alms for souls in purgatory.56
By giving exposure and prominence to such ideas – albeit for just a brief period of history – the Cathars encouraged a new freedom of thought and a new spirit of flexibility and openness to change. The psychologist Arthur Guirdham believes that this was ‘perhaps their most significant contribution to the emancipation of the common man’57: Not to understand this is to fail to realise that Catharism was not only an enlightened but an optimistic creed. Some of the contemporary defenders of Catharism regard it as a dour, Calvinistic and basically pessimistic religion. Sir Steven Runciman who is, on the whole, very fair in his assessment of the Cathars, regards the religion as foredoomed because of its built-in pessimism. Those holding such views are at a loss to explain how such a repressive and pessimistic creed could have spread like wildfire through the most sophisticated and sceptical region of Europe …58
A Renaissance ahead of its time?
Catharism's sudden flowering took place at a time when Europe, stimulated by the contact with the East that the Crusades had brought, was shaking off the slumber of the Dark Ages and rediscovering ancient wisdom in the classical texts. Often described by historians as the ‘Renaissance of the 12th century’, this period of ‘change, experimentation and broadened horizons’59 ended hundreds of years of intellectual stagnation. It saw the birth of many new philosophical and scientific ideas, witnessed the rise of the first towering Gothic cathedrals, and experienced far-reaching social and economic changes.
Together with the neighbouring parts of eastern Spain and northern Italy where the Cathar religion was also strong, the 12th century civilisation of Occitania – urbanised, sophisticated, cosmopolitan – was ‘indisputably ahead of anywhere else in Europe’.60 It lay at the epicentre of what promised to become a great upheaval in Western values marked by a spirit of inquiry and the introduction of a gentler, more cosmopolitan and more tolerant world view. Moreover, had Catharism succeeded in all its aims, we can be certain that there would have been no place, in this new age, for the Catholic Church – which, as the church of Satan, had for so long led so many souls astray. Far from succeeding, however, the Cathar heresy was crushed by a series of violent and genocidal ‘crusades’, unleashed by the Catholic Church in the first half of the 13th century. The last of the resistance was then slowly and methodically finished off by the papal Inquisition which was officially established in 1233 specifically for the repression and extirpation of Catharism.61 Had it not been for the destruction and dislocation wrought by these so-called Albigensian Crusades some believe that the culture of the Languedoc could have anticipated the Renaissance in Italy by more than two centuries.62
Such speculations are frowned on by mainstream historians.63 As a result questions like – ‘what would have happened to the West if Catharism had won its struggle against the Catholic Church?’ – are rarely given any serious scholarly consideration. An exception was the French social philosopher and activist Simone Weil. She died in 1943 as a result of voluntary starvation in sympathy with her compatriots then under German occupation. Aged only 34 at the time of her fatal endura Weil had spent the last few years of her life cultivating a deep interest in the unique culture of 12th century Occitania. She believed Catharism to have been the source of all its inspiration. By crushing the Greeks more than 2,000 years ago, she argued, the Roman Empire had ‘brought sterility to the Mediterranean basin’. Only once since then had another civilisation raised its head in the same region which might have had the capacity to attain ‘a degree of freedom and spiritual creativity as high as that of ancient Greece.’ Snuffed out in the 13th century by the Church of Rome, this was the lost Occitanian civilisation of the Cathars – which, in Weil's analysis, had somehow plugged itself into much older currents of thought: Little as we know about the Cathars, it seems clear that they were in some way the heirs of Platonic thought, of the esoteric teachings and mysteries of that pre-Roman civilisation which embraced the Mediterranean and the Near East …64
Weil was one of those for whom Occitanian civilisation in the 12th and 13th centuries had conceived the true Renaissance. Its potential had been greater even than that of the Italian Renaissance in the 15th century. Because Languedoc was the heartland of this precocious civilisation, the brutal engine of the Albigensian Crusades smashed not just the Cathars but Europe's last living link with the ancient wisdom traditions of India, Persia, Egypt and Greece. By contrast the centuries that followed the destruction of Languedoc ‘were an essay in totalitarian spirituality.’65
Cosmopolitan cities
Occitanian society under the influence of the Cathars was anything but totalitarian. It was far ahead of the rest of Europe in the process of urbanisation. Its rapidly-expanding cities like Narbonne, Avignon, Toulouse, Montpellier, Béziers, and Carcassonne proudly guaranteed the freedom of thought and the economic and political independence of their citizens. Even in his own city, for example, the Count of Toulouse lacked any executive legal authority over the citizens and was only obeyed so long as he respected local common law.66 Narbonne, Avignon, Montpellier and Béziers were hives of intellectual activity – in every sense university cities even before their universities had officially been founded. The most advanced course on Aristotle in Europe, which took account of the latest work by Arab scholars, was taught at Toulouse.67
Arab merchants and doctors had long found their way to Occitania across the Pyrenees from those parts of Spain then under Muslim control, or by sea from the East. They had been welcomed by the Cathars – who were inclined to see the Roman Catholic Church, not the ‘infidel’, as the natural enemy. Besides, for the Cathars, all human bodies, whether Muslim, Christian or Jew, were the prisons of entrapped souls. Since all suffered the trials and rigours of the material world equally, and since only Catharism offered a way out of it, the oppression of one man by another on grounds of race or creed was absurd.
Such ideas spilled over into civic life and resident aliens in the cities of Occitania enjoyed full citizens’ rights, regardless of their nationality or creed.68 Moreover while Catharism maintained its resolute antipathy to the Church of Rome it was open-handed and liberal with other faiths that were willing to co-exist peacefully with it. This was a time when possession of land by non-Christians was a criminal offence in northern France. It was a time when mobs of Catholics throughout Europe could frequently be worked up into frenzies of anti-Semitic prejudice. Yet in Occitania large and long-established Jewish communities owned land, worshipped openly in synagogues, and prospered unmolested throughout the 12th century.69 They, too, seem to have been going through a period of creative intellectual and spiritual enquiry, just as the Cathar communities were. Indeed it was in the coastal cities of Languedoc in this same period that Jewish savants elaborated the occult philosophy of the Cabala and began to explore its implications.70 A system of mysticism rooted in ancient Judaic traditions, Cabala laid claim to secret knowledge and divine revelation. It also exhibited strong dualistic tendencies in which the ‘left side’ and ‘right side’ of the cosmos were envisaged in constant opposition and conflict.71
It is notable that acclaimed schools of Talmudic law flourished at Narbonne, Lunel and Beaucaire in the 12th century and that there is a report from 1160 of Jewish students from ‘distant lands’ studying there.72 Intriguingly the same source – Rabbi Benjamin of Tudela – also describes an encounter with a Jew at Lunel who had ‘discarded all worldly business, studied day and night, kept fasts, and never ate meat.’73 This suggests the possibility that Cathar ideas about how we should live in the world and what we are d
oing here had begun to have an impact not only on the large number of former Catholics it had freed from the fear of hell but also on the followers of other faiths as well.
Cathars and troubadours
It was in the 12th and 13th centuries that Catharism briefly lit up people's minds in Occitania. In the same period another extraordinary intellectual phenomenon also appeared and disappeared in precisely the same region now encompassed by southern France, northern Spain and northern Italy. This parallel phenomenon was the lyric poetry of the troubadours – a form that was invented in Occitania and composed in the Occitan language. Judged by literary experts today as ‘one of the most brilliant schools that ever existed’, it is accepted as an influence on all later European lyrical poetry.74 Of much greater consequence however, is the fact that troubadour poetry also had an unprecedented social impact. Indeed it brought about what has been described as ‘a revolution in thought and feeling, the effects of which are still apparent in Western culture.’75
The revolution had to do with attitudes towards women in society. The troubadours themselves were favoured at the many noble courts of Occitania – where they enjoyed high status and exceptional freedom of speech (sometimes even intervening in political matters). Launched from this position of eminence their poetry focussed respect-filled eyes upon women in general (including such lowly figures as shepherdesses), and upon the ladies of the courts in particular, bestowing an exalted, almost saintly, status on the female gender. These poems promulgated the idea of courtly love in which the male protagonist existed to worship his lady and to serve her faithfully. Such love was adulterous, in the sense that the lady was almost always married, but also pure in the sense that it was not to be consummated physically.76 The essence of the whole exercise was self denial and frustration, longing from afar and the ennoblement of chastity. In the process the man who must love and yet not touch, must desire and yet never be fulfilled, was raised above the common herd.77 What was really being celebrated, suggests Zoé Oldenbourg, was ‘nothing else, surely, but the urge to proclaim a triumph of self-will?’78
Is it a coincidence that Cathar per fecti, too, sought to impose their will over every physical need and desire, and believed it necessary for their bodies to pass through suffering, protracted vigils, deprivation of the senses and many deaths before that goal could be achieved? For these and other reasons, Oldenbourg believes that there must have been a considerable degree of overlap between the troubadour movement and Catharism. She goes so far as to argue that on many occasions when: … the troubadours … mention God and Jesus Christ it is very probable that they are speaking as Cathars, and that their deity is the ‘Good God’ of the Manichean faith.79
But Oldenbourg is out of line. It is the concensus of medieval historians and literary scholars that the ideas diffused through Occitania by the troubadours in the 12th and 13th centuries had very little and perhaps even nothing at all to do with Catharism.80 We may only comment, with Arthur Guirdham, that this simply makes no sense: How could two such startling manifestations of culture occur at the same time and in a limited area without their being related to each other? To hold such an opinion is equivalent to saying that the teachings of Freud swept London in the 1920s but had no influence on medicine or literature.81
Women hold up half the sky
In tandem with the poetry of the troubadours, the basic organisation and beliefs of Cathar religion also had the effect – whether by accident or by design – of elevating the status of women in Occitanian society. Catholicism had done nothing to dismantle the gross inequalities of the sexes that prevailed in the European Middle Ages and explicitly forbade woman to become priests. Catharism, on the other hand, regarded the souls of men and women as absolutely equal. It saw no reason why the material envelopes that they were imprisoned in – namely their bodies, which by chance could be either male and female – should be treated with any less equality.
For this reason membership of the Cathar perfectus class was not restricted by sex and both men and women could and did become perfecti. On the highways and byways of these dangerous times Cathar perfectae preached and travelled less than their male counterparts82 – for understandable reasons of physical security. Nor do we find any women among the relatively few ‘bishops’ and ‘deacons’ at the top of the simple, low-maintenance and minimally hierarchical structure by which Catharism was administered in Occitania. Nevertheless there is no doubt that women were highly esteemed and enjoyed great influence in their communities83 where they often established group homes for ‘the daughters, widows and dowagers of the local petty nobility and artisan classes’.84
In practice it is thought that the cadre of active perfecti present in Occitania at any one time is likely to have included rather more males than females (perhaps on the order of 6:4), but this resulted from individual choices, not policy, and was compensated by a higher ratio of women amongst the credentes.85
In summary, by contrast with anything the Catholic Church had to offer, the status of women within the Cathar faith was high and their role both important and recognised. This liberation, too, must have played its part in the great awakening of ideas and human potential that took place in Occitania in the 12th century.
The revolution and the new world order
The point we wish to make here is that although Catharism was a system of inspired spiritual knowledge and, in every sense a religion, it was also a great deal more than that.
We've seen that it was, at one level, a social programme anticipating by centuries the modern recognition that human potential can never be fully realised without ‘women's liberation’. Likewise we've seen how the Cathar doctrine of the equal predicament of souls – and the basic irrelevance of the sex, race or creed of the bodies in which they happen to be trapped – lent itself naturally to the refreshing liberalism, open-mindedness, cosmopolitanism and democratising tendencies of Occitanian society.
Catharism was also a comprehensive philosophy of anti-materialism that offered all who adhered to it a choice of two very clear ways forward in this life – a ‘high’ road and a ‘low’ road. The high road was the way of solitary meditation and renunciation of the world – the suppression through willpower of all physical needs, attachments and desires – that was followed by the perfecti. The low road was the way of engagement in the world followed by ordinary credentes until they received the consolamentum on their deathbeds. They hoped to make solid progress in this incarnation in the great project of freeing their souls from the trap of matter but understood that they might need to return again and again to the material plane before that objective would finally be achieved.
Had it been allowed to become widespread and to win dominance over the Catholic Church throughout Europe we cannot say what the long-term political and economic consequences of such a philosophy might have been. Simple logic suggests that it would have been most unlikely to have led to either of the two great political and economic systems – capitalism and communism – that were ultimately to dominate human affairs in the 19th and 20th centuries. Both are entirely materialist in their outlook and their disagreement is only over the manner in which the riches of the world are to be extracted and divided up. We can suppose that the very different concerns of Catharism, and its horror of material entrapment, would have led during the course of history to very different arrangements concerning ‘production’, the ownership of its ‘means’, and the uses and exploitation of the masses.
Already in 12th century Occitania there is evidence that the Cathars had begun to meddle with the feudal economic order through programmes of adult education and practical training for the poor and disenfranchised. For example workshops run by skilled perfecti were set up to provide apprenticeships in leather, paper-making and the textile trade.86 One of the objectives of these workshops was undoubtedly to turn out missionaries who could be self-sufficient as they wandered from town to town making conversions (as we noted earlier, surviving records show a particularly st
rong concentration in Cathar areas of weavers and other workers in the textile trade). But the long-term effects of such an education programme, leading as it did to the foundation of an instructed artisan class, might have been literally revolutionary if it had been allowed to continue. Little wonder, therefore, that the French philosopher Voltaire seized on the memory of the suppression of Catharism to rabble rouse against the evils of the Church and of feudal oppression of the masses.87 Initiated as a Freemason in 1778, as we saw in Chapter One, Voltaire's ideas were amongst the cocktail of influences that precipitated the French Revolution in 1789.
Pacifism was another central value in the ethical system of the perfecti and a resolute commitment to nonviolence was part of the regime of self-control over the baser bodily instincts and desires that their initiation required of them. There are cases on record of perfecti who chose to be burned at the stake rather than satisfy the Inquisition that they were innocent of heresy by killing even as lowly a creature as a hen.88 Yet surprisingly for people with such apparent contempt for their own lives – and for the pains of death – it has been observed that the perfecti: … retained an absolute respect for the fact of life itself; they would not allow any violent intervention by the human will (which they regarded as invariably evil and arbitrary) in the fate of a soul pursuing its road to salvation.89
The same reasoning explains why the perfecti were utterly opposed to the use of the death penalty, even for capital offences. They also claimed that common criminals should not be punished but instead educated to become better citizens.90 Such avante garde doctrines were of course denounced by the Church as scandalous.91