The Cathars

Arriving in the Languedoc region of southern France as early as the 11th century, Cathars (deriving from the Greek Katharoi, meaning ‘pure ones’) were dualist, gnostic Christians. Their doctrine, which stated that two opposing deities existed, was antithetical to the doctrine of the medieval Catholic Church, which held that God alone created the physical and spiritual worlds. It was during the 13th century that organized persecution of the Cathar faith reached a climax: in 1209 Pope Innocent III abandoned efforts to peacefully convert the Cathars in southern France, and instead launched the Albigensian Crusade to wipe out the heretics through military might. Over the next century and a half, the Cathars were systematically eradicated through forced conversion, inquisitions and massacres.

The Cathar religion was entirely unique due to its mixing of several previously disavowed heresies. Gnosticism was at the core of Catharism because of the main belief that the world was influenced by a struggle between a good and an evil deity. This cosmology was influenced by the idea that the tone and themes of the Old Testament are different from that of the New Testament. Gnostics argued that the God mentioned in each section was not the same. Specifically, Gnostics argued that the Old Testament God who created the world was evil while the God of Jesus was good. This doctrine guided most of the Cathars' other beliefs, including the understanding that everything in the material world was evil.

The Cathars were a unique religious group in medieval Europe because their beliefs were unlike any other faith popular at the time.

Some of these included:

The material world is evil
The God of the Old Testament is evil
The God of the New Testament is good
There was a cycle of reincarnation until one renounced the material world
A belief in Sabellianism rather than the trinity
A mostly pescatarian diet

Cathars clearly regarded themselves as good Christians, since that is exactly what they called themselves. On the surface, their basic beliefs seem unremarkable. Most people would have difficulty in distinguishing the principle Cathar beliefs from what are now regarded as conventional orthodox Christian beliefs. However, pursuing their fundamental beliefs to their logical conclusion revealed surprising implications (for example that Roman Catholics were mistakenly following a Satanic god rather than the beneficent god worshipped by the Cathars.)

Like the earliest Christians, Cathars recognised no priesthood. They did however distinguish between ordinary believers (Credentes) and a smaller, inner circle of leaders initiated in secret knowledge, known at the time as boni homines, Bonneshommes or "Goodmen" , now generally referred to as the Elect or as Parfaits.

Cathars had a Church hierarchy and a number of rites and ceremonies. They believed in reincarnation, and in heaven, but not in hell as it is now normally conceived by mainstream Christians.

The Cathar view was that their theology was older than that of the Roman Church and that the Roman Church had corrupted its own scripture, invented new doctrine and abandoned the beliefs and practices of the Early Church. The Catholic view, of course was exactly the opposite, they imagined Catharism to be a badly distorted version of Catholicism. In addition to accusing the Cathars of faulty theology, they imagined a range abominable practices which would have been amusing except that, converted into propaganda, they led to the death of countless thousands through the Cathar Crusades and the Inquisition.

The Roman Church seemed to have successfully extirpated Cathars and Cathar beliefs by the early fourteenth century, but the truth is more complicated. For one thing, modern historians have shown that many Catholic claims were false, while they have vindicated many Cathar claims; and there is a case that the Cathar legacy is more influential today than has been at any time over the last seven hundred years.