even incest, was not one whit more iniquitous than marriage. On the whole they were rather less evil. For adultery was only temporary and produced a feeling of shame; whereas marriage was permanent, a lasting living in sin, contemplated without shame. The bearing of children was regarded with horror. Every birth was a new triumph for the evil one; a pregnant woman was possessed of the Devil, and if she died pregnant, could not at once be saved.37
Catharan beliefs inevitably involved the denunciation of Catholicism.38 It was the Catholic that was the heretic; the wearer of the pontifical tiara could not possibly be even a disciple of Him who wore a crown of thorns, was indeed antichrist. The clergy from the highest to the lowest were pharisees; the sacraments—infant baptism, the sacrificial mass—were declared to have no warrant in Scripture, to be mere figments of the imagination.39
The Cathari, it has to be remembered, were a church. They had an organization, held services with a certain very simple ritual, for example substituting for the mass a simple blessing of bread at table, the Catharan meal bearing a close resemblance to the early Christian ἀγάπη. Confessions were made to elders of the church once a month. But the most distinctive ceremony of the sect was the Consolamentum, an imposition of hands whereby the ordinary believer was admitted into the select ranks of the Perfected. The number of the latter was always small, and consisted principally of the avowed ministers of the faith. The Consolamentum, which meant re-entrance into communion with the spiritual world, was the desire of all true Cathari, but was apt to be postponed until late in life, often until the death-bed. The actual ritual of the Consolamentum—or hæretication, as Catholics termed it—was very brief. The candidate, after a series of genuflections and blessings, asked the minister to pray God that he might be made a good Christian.40 Such prayer having been offered, the candidate was then asked if he was willing to abjure prohibited foods and unchastity, and to endure persecution if necessary. When the Consolamentum was given to a man on his death-bed, it was frequently followed by the Endura, which commonly took the form of suffocation or self-starvation.
The Perfected consisted of four orders—bishop, filius major, filius minor, deacon—their duties being to preside at services and missionary work, in which the Cathari were zealous. Outside their ranks were the simple adherents, the Believers or, as they were sometimes called, Christians. These bound themselves eventually to receive the Consolamentum; but, generally speaking, they were under no obligations save to venerate the Perfected who, in the strictest sense, composed the true Catharan Church, and to live the pure life their faith enjoined. But they were under no coercive authority, and were even permitted to marry.
Wherein lay the attraction of the Catharan doctrine and system? For evidently they were attractive, as their great and rapid spread over Europe shows. It is at first difficult to discern anything attractive in teaching so austere; and if the Catharan promised a reward in heaven, so also did the Catholic. In his case purgatory had first to be faced, but then the ordeal on earth was less exacting. There would appear to be two explanations, the one high-minded, the other the reverse. In its early days the gospel of Catharism probably made to some a lofty appeal. It denounced palpable clerical abuses, repugnant to the moral consciousness. The austerity of its ethical principles seemed to point to a higher standard of living in days when any outstanding examples of asceticism, whether in the Church or outside it, evoked admiration. In its hatred for the evil spirit of materialism, in its detestation particularly of that worst of human passions, cruelty, there was an element of nobility which finds a response in the instinct which we to-day call humanitarian.41 In so far as its appeal was of this nature, it was sincere and fine. Unhappily, however, Catharism unquestionably developed another appeal of a wholly different character, which resulted almost inevitably from the complete impracticableness of its ideal. A creed that approved of suicide and denounced marriage stands self-condemned. It was at war with the very principles of life itself. The ascetic rule it enjoined was one ‘more honoured in the breach than the observance.’ There was taint of unhealthiness and corruption in a rule so hopelessly at variance with nature; while a creed which, if it meant anything, held as its highest hope the speediest possible destruction of all human life, was devoid of the balance and sanity which is essential in any doctrine that is to be of any practical service in the world. Such a religion as Catharism could not harmonize with the most elementary facts of life and human nature. The consequence was—and herein lies the greatest condemnation of the sect—that it went on proclaiming an impracticable ideal while admitting that it was impracticable, sanctioning a compromise, itself antithetical to its essential dogma, whereby alone the heresy was able to continue at all. The compromise is seen in two practices—the distinction made between the Perfected and the Believers and the postponement of the Consolamentum, or complete initiation, until the end of life. The Believers—the great bulk of the adherents of the creed—might do pretty well as they liked, in fact ignore all the Catharan precepts of conduct, might marry, have riches, make war, eat what they chose, provided only they were prepared to receive the Consolamentum before they died. Such an arrangement is merely the apotheosis of the system of the death-bed repentance, it is an encouragement to insincerity and hypocrisy. This does not mean that most, or necessarily even many, Cathari were hypocrites. Most of them, probably, were originally simple-minded labourers and artisans, attracted by a novel gospel, which discerned the evils of the times, gave hopes of heaven and was marked by the ascetic and missionary enthusiasms which were then regarded as the hall-mark of a spiritual origin and divine inspiration.
Nevertheless, the temptation to insincerity was clearly present. ‘Believe in the Catharan creed, venerate the Perfected, receive the Consolamentum before death,’ made a simple and an attractive faith for one who wished to enjoy the pleasures of life to the full, yet to whom the tortures of a material hell were painfully vivid. ‘We are the only true Christians, the Catholic church is but an usurpation, utterly corrupt,’ made a convenient excuse for the feudal lord, by whom only the excuse was wanted, to harry the clergy and make inroads on their property. Nor need we wonder that these holders of a doctrine of ultra-asceticism, of a complete celibacy, were credited with even the foulest of sexual orgies. The distinction between Perfected and Believers was an antinomian arrangement. Intense asceticism among the very select number of the former was made compatible with excesses among the latter. Was not the very rigour of existence among the completely initiated an invitation positively to extreme indulgence prior to such initiation? It would be highly uncritical to place a great deal of credence in the many stories told of immoral practices among Cathari. Such stories were bound to be told. We find them in connection with practically every mediæval heresy; it was such an obvious device for the discrediting of unholy beliefs to demonstrate that they involved unholy lives. But it would also be uncritical to reject the stories altogether. There is an inherent probability that a certain percentage—it may be only a small percentage—of those told of the Cathari were true. The critic’s objection, ‘what abomination may one not expect of those who hold incest no worse a crime than marriage?’ is pertinent and sound.42 What results are likely, once given the impossibility of complete continence, from such a perverted teaching?
Indeed, notwithstanding its better qualities, its still better possibilities, Catharism was essentially perverted: and the antagonism it aroused and the efforts made to suppress it are in no way surprising. It has been termed ‘a hodge-podge of pagan dualism and gospel teaching, given to the world as a sort of reformed Christianity.’43 A hodge-podge it undoubtedly was, an amalgam of ancient Manichæism and elements of eastern origin, which were not Christian at all but Mazdeist, together with certain features of pure Christianity. It is no wonder that the Catholic Church viewed with alarm the challenge made by a faith so compounded when it claimed to be the only true Christianity. Catharism was not an antagonist to be despised. Its missionary enterprise, its anti-social tendencies and the evident popularity of its anti-sacerdotal features made it undeniably dangerous. Moreover, it did not stand alone. Taken together, the different anti-sacerdotal heresies, of which Waldensianism and Catharism were the chief, which were abroad in Europe before the end of the twelfth century, presented a serious problem and indeed a menace. Was not the widespread phenomenon of organized heresy a challenge to the whole conception of the Civitas Dei alike on its spiritual and its secular side? If only in self-defence must not the Church—society on its spiritual side—take special measures to counteract the influence of rebels, who had deliberately made war upon it by declaring themselves alone to be the true repositories of the