Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe

III THE CATHARS

III THE CATHARS The widely diverse forms of religious dissent that troubled Christian Europe between 1000 and 1145 are difficult to catalogue and systematize. They appear to have sprung from different sources and to have manifested themselves differently, although most of them can be related to the religious temper of the age and the movement for reform that touched all aspects of religious life from 1050 on. Churchmen who noticed them developed a means of describing them that was more homogeneous than the forms of dissent themselves. Summed up in St. Bernard's sermon on the Song of Songs, churchmen's views linked religious dissent with the heresies described in patristic literature and understood them in terms of a series of historical "temptations" of the Church. From the mid-twelfth century on, however, two movements in particular became especially prominent in terms of dissent. Dualists in the Netherlands, the Rhine Valley, eastern France, and in Languedoc and Italy, professing beliefs roughly similar to those of Guibert of Nogent's "Manichees" at Soissons in 1114, argued for the existence of two gods, one good and the other evil, one the creator and sustainer of the spirit, the other the lord of material creation and darkness. Like Guibert, some historians have called these different manifestations of dualism "medieval Manichaeism." But the problem of the continuity of Manichaeism, whether independently in the West, or via Bogomilism from Bulgaria, has also led scholars to argue that twelfth-century European dualism was a native-and recent-development, independent of ongoing influence from anywhere and a consequence of the religious experience of the eleventh and early twelfth centuries. Bogomilism grew up in Bulgaria, a center of tension between Byzantine and Bulgar powers throughout the late ninth and tenth centuries. By the early [ 103 1 [ 104 J Heresy and Authority in Medieval Europe tenth century, Byzantine churchmen noted a strong presence of dualism among the converted Bulgars, some of them attributing this movement to a revival of "Manichaeism," while others attributed it to the influence of the now-dualist Paulicians. Whatever the origins of Bogomilism among the Bulgars, around the middle of the tenth century a village priest in Bulgaria assumed the name Bogomil (which means "worthy of the pity of God") and began to preach a consistently dualist religion. It attracted large followings throughout southeastern Europe in the tenth and eleventh centuries and may have influenced the Latin West (the problem is still a matter of considerable scholarly debate) before its traditionally assigned appearance around 1140. One of the most important documents in Bogomil history is the treatise of Cosmas the Priest against the sect, written around 970 and printed below (no. 17). Cosmas's treatise is the best early source on most Bogomil beliefs. Although the recent work of Malcolm Lambert has indicated the possibility of a Bogomil influence in western Europe much earlier than most scholars had previously thought, there is still no unanimous agreement on the question. What is clear is that dualist beliefs, too sketchily described in the sources to make their precise identification possible, began to spread widely after the beginning of the twelfth century; one form of dualism or another clearly preoccupied churchmen, and won more converts than any other kind of heresy, until the end of the twelfth century. Under a number of different namesPatarines , Publicans, Manichees-dualist sects sprang up, as the sources below indicate, in the Rhineland, Languedoc, and Italy, and they attracted progressively more attention as the century went on. In Languedoc, the heretics took the name of Cathari, "The Pure Ones," from the Greek term katharos, "pure." As Cathars, they were known to the Church and prosecuted with increasing vigor after the middle of the twelfth century. The letter from Everinus of Steinfeld to St. Bernard in 1143 (above, no. 15) brought to the saint, as we have seen, news of yet another heresy on top of those the Cistercian leader had seen already. The dualist heretics described by Everinus at Cologne are far from being individual eccentrics or small, isolated coteries like those of Orleans a century earlier. They engaged successfully in debate with orthodox churchmen, and when they were seized by the local populace, they met their deaths steadfastly, raising profound questions in Everinus's mind about the source of their courage and consistency. Everinus describes two groups of rival heretics, whose differences are as great as their similarities. A few decades later, Walter Map echoes the commonplace of old heresies revived in...