Heresy and Orthodoxy

Catharism was the most popular heresy of the Middle Ages. Indeed, such was its success that the Catholic Church and its apologists referred to it as the Great Heresy. As the twelfth century turned into the thirteenth, it was at its zenith: Cathars could be found from Aragon to Flanders, from Naples to the Languedoc. Its equivalent of priests, the Perfect, lived lives so conspicuously virtuous that even their enemies had to proclaim that they were indeed holy and good people. The Cathars found widespread support from all areas of society, from kings and counts to carpenters and weavers. Women, never welcomed by the Church, became Cathars knowing they could earn respect and actively participate in the faith. Needless to say, this mixture of women, virtue and apostolic poverty — to say nothing of the Cathar church’s popularity — did not sit well with Rome. But nor did Rome sit well with the Cathars, who believed that the Church had, in its pursuit of worldly power, betrayed Christ’s message.

That Catholicism would move against the Cathars was hardly surprising; indeed, in some areas in the south of France, Cathars were more numerous than Catholics. What shocked contemporaries was not that the Pope ordered a

Crusade to put the heresy down, but that the Crusaders committed atrocities of such magnitude that they are still echoing down the centuries. In the Languedoc, these crimes have never really been forgotten.

Strangely, for all its popularity, the exact origins of Catharism are unknown. It emerged at a time when the Church, and Europe as a whole, were undergoing enormous changes prior to emerging into the so-called Renaissance of the twelfth century. Although it is difficult to imagine the scale of atrocities such as Beziers, we can go some way to understanding the mindset of the Cathars’ persecutors by studying the history of the Church and how heresy emerged from it. Moreover, a study of the history of the dualist heresy — essentially, the belief that the devil is as powerful as God, to which Catharism belongs — will help to set things in perspective. Like Catharism, Dualism has murky beginnings.