Stephen O'Shea: The Perfect Heresy

By PHILIP CULBERTSON

Kill them all; God will sort out his own" was the medieval Catholic Church's response to the Cathar heresy of south-eastern France and north-eastern Spain.

In the 13th century, the Languedoc, roughly extending from Provence and Toulouse to Aragon, was a disorganised collection of fiefdoms - stroppily nationalistic - and torn among various mutually beneficial political and ecclesiastical alliances.

Catharism - whether identical to or confused with Albigensianism, Waldensianism or Bogomilism - was a gnostic and dualist "alternative" to the normative Catholic doctrine of the time. It was fiercely defended by its proponents, and violently defamed by its opponents.

For example, the name "Cathar" is itself a pejorative, derived from the spurious rumour that the rituals of the Cathar faithful included kissing the nether regions of cats.

Life in medieval Languedoc was unstable, unfair and terrifying, and Catharism offered an explanation: while God was good, the world itself was under the control of Satan.

The "perfect" (the fully initiated) and the rest of the believers were called to celibacy, vegetarianism, communal property, simplicity of life and the full spiritual equality of males and females. Unless one achieved a disciplined saintliness in this life, one was destined to be continually reincarnated into this temporal world of darkness.

In 1209, between the Fourth Crusade and the Children's Crusade, Pope Innocent III organised a special Crusade to wipe out the Cathars. The Cathar victims numbered in the tens of thousands, and even whole towns were extirpated. Yet such was the tenacity of the Cathars that the Crusade did not succeed in destroying them. The Church's "final solution" was to establish, in 1233, the feared Inquisition, whose initial purpose was to track down and execute the remaining heretics.

The last known Cathar victim was burned at the stake in 1321. A century later, when there were no more Cathars to unmask, the Inquisition turned its attention to the Jews.

Catharism is just nebulous enough to be open to contemporary misinterpretation. In the modern Languedoc area, Catharism is now a source of regionalist pride, popularised for tourists and heralded by confused New Age cultists. Ironically, the Cathars also became an inspirational myth for both the Nazis and the French underground during the Second World War. Recently, a group of Protestants in Canada has attempted to revive Catharism as a new denomination.

O'Shea's book makes complicated history relatively accessible, though most readers will also rely on the annotated cast of characters with which the book begins. He is patently a defender of the Cathars, though admittedly anyone would have trouble justifying the Church's choice to murder and torture, or what O'Shea calls "man's inhumanity to God". But the passion of his bias causes the Cathars to come alive in a way that they often don't in parallel histories of this "failed heresy". For some levelling humour, the book's endnotes are a treasure.

Profile Books

$59.95

* Philip Culbertson is the Director of Pastoral Studies at St John's Theological College, Auckland.