LIFESTYLE
On the one side, Moore puts the growth of this "heresy" in its religious and social contexts: this was no sudden alien implant, but rather a product of many long-term factors.
The War on Heresy: Faith and Power in Medieval Europe
Author: RI Moore
In 1233 Pope Gregory IX issued a formal letter denouncing a sect of devil-worshippers, whose practices he described in unusually precise terms. Novices who wanted to be initiated into the sect were made to kiss first a giant toad, and then a man of fearful pallor whose flesh was as cold as ice. There followed a banquet, presided over by a huge black cat, whose anus was kissed by all in turn; and the evening was rounded off, predictably enough, by an orgy of promiscuous sex.
Typical, you might think, of the credulous medieval mind, which would believe anything about the world of the supernatural. Yet you would be wrong. Until the last part of the 12th century, most intellectuals and educated clerics had ridiculed such stories, warning, for example, against condemning women as witches on the basis of the fantasies of a few foolish people. But in the half-century or so before 1233, something had changed. Western Europe had become a demonising and a persecuting society.
At the heart of this development was a new obsession with heresy as a threat to both church and society. Heresy had always been known to exist; but it had mostly been seen in terms of errors about some specific bits of Christian doctrine, maintained by wrong-headed individuals here and there. The new obsession was with something much more sinister: a complete counter-system of belief, upheld and propagated by an underground counter-church.
This heresy had various names: to us, it is best known as "Albigensian" or "Cathar". Most of what we know about it - or think we know - comes from documents produced by the ecclesiastical authorities, who were determined to suppress it. And suppressed it was, in the "Albigensian Crusade", with a horrifying sequence of massacres and public burnings. Whether the Pope's special representative on the campaign really did say "Kill them all - the Lord will know his own" is debatable, but the comment sums up the policy quite precisely.
The standard account goes like this: Catharism was a "dualist" heresy, in which the creation of the material world was attributed not to God but to his rival, the Devil. It was transmitted from the Bogomils of Bulgaria in the 12th century. In order to free the spirit from the prison of the flesh, Cathars lived ascetic lives, and they despised the official Catholic church because of its compromises with the material world.
It is only recently that this neat and apparently well-attested account has begun to unravel, as scholars have started picking away at the sources, dismissing some documents as forgeries and analysing the prejudices of the official writers of that period. And it is only now, with R?I Moore's The War on Heresy, that the whole body of modern assumptions about the nature of Catharism has been systematically challenged and denied.
On the one side, Moore puts the growth of this "heresy" in its religious and social contexts: this was no sudden alien implant, but rather a product of many long-term factors. Movements of lay spirituality had often gone hand-in-hand with reforming tendencies within the church; only when laymen went too far in trying to emulate the apostolic life, or in rejecting the official church when it fell below that standard, were they denounced as heretics.
On the other side, Moore shows how learned clerics invented a "dualist" theology on the basis of much earlier texts which they had read; he also suggests that it was their own academic training that made them systematise a notional set of opposing beliefs, regardless of how scrappy and ill-formed their enemies' world-view was.
Moore makes a very powerful case. His critics may say, with good reason, that he tends to play down the counter-evidence: he gives little prominence to the fact that some of these people did indeed express dualist beliefs, and only mentions in passing that some texts from Bulgaria did circulate among them. But if only half of his revolutionary new claims are accepted, every encyclopedia entry on the Cathars (and, I would guess, most of the 1,190,000 websites listed for "Cathar" on Google) will have to be completely rewritten.
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