ABSTRACT
The Cathars are the most famous heretics of the Middle Ages, relentlessly celebrated in histories (silly and scholarly), novels (enjoyable nonsense), memoires (a year or two in Provincia), poems (all bad), wine (rough and ready) – the list is endless. The story of the Cathars traditionally opens in the eleventh century, their presence faint and uncertain, then, halfway through the twelfth, there they are, loud and visible, from the Mediterranean to the North Sea, until, at the threshold of the thirteenth, a “Cathar Church” exists with systematic dualist doctrines and an elaborate episcopate. Sometime, during this hundred or so years, Bogomil missionaries covertly travel from the Balkans and influence the dualist theology of the Cathars. A cosmic chasm splits the Cathar universe: an active Devil manipulates the earth, a passive God dwells in heaven. Body and soul are irreconcilable. Existence is an unrequited yearning for an indifferent God; and, if such longing is to be endured, equanimity in mind and manner is practised. Thousands of Cathars live in spiritual and social tranquillity (tinged with holy melancholia). The region where the Cathars thrive are the lands of the counts of Toulouse between the Garonne and the Rhône Rivers. This grand narrative reaches its tragic crescendo in the bloody violence of the Albigensian Crusade from 1209 to 1229 and, thereafter, the unremitting persecutions of inquisitors until the Cathars disappear, for all intents and purposes, sometime in the fourteenth century. An epic tale of spiritual freedom and religious intolerance, a warning and a lesson from the past, always worth telling – except, of course, that none of it is true.1
