So, although the dualists professed to hate this world, such strategies show that they did not hesitate to use rather worldly and ‘street-wise’ methods to win converts from the established Christian Churches. After travelling amongst the Italian Cathars in the early 13th century Ivo of Narbonne reported that they routinely: … sent to Paris capable students from nearly all Lombard and some Tuscan cities. There some studied logic, others theology, with the aim of strengthening their own error and overthrowing the Catholic faith.32
Such evidence of calculation and strategy seem less discordant with the Cathars’ ethereal central purpose when we remember that they believed themselves to be locked in an elemental struggle – often literally to the death – for the soul of man. If the Catholic Church were allowed to crush out the light of Catharism forever then the soul of man would likewise be lost forever. With the stakes so high and the enemy so diabolical, any means, fair or foul were reasonable to bring him down.
School of heresy
Further evidence that Cathars and Bogomils were involved not only in social agitation but in a coordinated ‘plot’ to overthrow established Christianity comes from study of the methods they used to win conversions. The field missionaries of both sects appear to have followed the same procedures in the same order so closely that it is obvious they must have shared the same training. In this, once again, we have the sense of confronting people who were not in any way ethereal but, on the contrary, rather downto-earth, calculating and strategic.
They also demonstrated a good basic knowledge of psychology in ensuring that the course of instruction they gave as missionaries began with easily-acceptable generalities and moved on only very slowly to reveal the more deeply heretical – and thus conventionally shocking – aspects of their faith.33 Euthymius Zigabenus, who interrogated the monk Basil in Constantinople while he was awaiting his execution in the Hippodrome, was told that the Bogomils began by instructing their followers in those beliefs and practices which they shared with the Orthodox: … preserving the fouler doctrines for later, and entrusting them to the more initiated in impiety as mysteries.34
The objective, in other words, was to detach potential converts as far as possible from the beliefs they had been raised in before attempting to substitute the alternative dualist system.
Another technique used by both Bogomil and Cathar preachers was to capitalise on the common-sense scepticism of ordinary people to demystify elaborate Church rituals – and therefore, by association, the whole religious edifice that lay behind them. The Mass was a favourite target of the Cathars who asked churchgoers to think very carefully and objectively about each of its details. When they partook of the wafer and the wine of Holy Communion, for instance, how could they possibly imagine – as Catholic priests had taught them – that they were consuming the actual body and blood of Christ? Wasn't this contrary to reason, if not just plain stupid? All the Catholics that had ever existed had been performing the Mass and guzzling the Holy Communion for hundreds and hundreds of years. If what they had been consuming were really the physical body and blood of Christ then he must have been absolutely enormous – at least the size of a mountain, with veins like rivers – which clearly had not been the case. Moreover, coming at the problem from a different direction, Cathar evangelists would frequently add an unpleasant reminder about digestive processes and their end products. Did decent people who loved God really want to pass his body and blood through their intestines?35 What kind of religion was it that would require them to participate in such bizarre and frankly cannibalistic practices? So logic, reason and good taste were all against the Church being right about this basic issue long before the time came to introduce more ‘touchy’ Cathar doctrines like the non-physical nature of Christ.
The next step in the conversion process was often for the missionary to provide concrete examples of how far the Church had strayed from the true path. Favoured object lessons were the notorious sins of the clergy and their extravagant lifestyles. These were then graphically compared to the simple, decent, unostentatious lives advocated in the New Testament for Christians. After contemplating the glaring contradictions thus revealed, most rightthinking citizens in the audience would have needed little further convincing that there was something rotten in the heart of the Church.
In a similar way, further still down the road of conversion, the method for introducing the dualist doctrine of the evil nature of material creation was to illustrate it with numerous practical examples that anyone could easily grasp. Earthquakes might be cited, or volcanic eruptions, or lightning strikes, or snakes, along with many of the other noxious evils that we all know do stalk the material world.36 As before, New Testament texts would be extensively quoted, this time to show that the true teachings of Christ and his apostles endorsed the dualist rejection of material things.37
Malcolm Lambert, a modern scholar with decidedly pro-Catholic sympathies, claims that the heretics usually achieved these effects by dishonest manipulation of the relevant passages which were ‘wrenched out of context’ to reinforce the dualist message.38 The end result, most efficacious in winning conversions, was that the typical unsophisticated audience for a dualist sermon would be convinced that they had received ‘an exhortation by good men based on the words of the founder of Christianity and of his followers.’39
It is little wonder, therefore, that for a long while the Cathars and the Bogomils enjoyed enormous success in their respective spheres of influence. By the end of the 12th century they had together created what Sir Steven Runciman describes as ‘one great confederate Dualist Church … stretching from the Black Sea to Biscay.’40 At its core were sixteen bishoprics positioned in areas of influence and high population all the way from Constantinople in the East to Toulouse in the West.41 Since the heretics had, from the beginning, commanded great influence in the countryside as well as in the cities – and had generally worked from the bottom of society up in their programme of conversions – they entered the 13th century occupying an astonishingly strong position in Europe. Not even 250 years had passed since Bogomil himself had first appeared in Bulgaria to preach the doctrine of the Good and the Evil God. Yet in that short time an international infrastructure had been laid down and enough popular support won for medieval dualism to begin to think of itself as an established religion and to proclaim its own ‘universality and supra-national unity’42 over and against that of the established Church.
The Portrait of Dorian Gray
Accepting as all scholars do that Bogomilism was simply ‘Bulgarian Catharism’,43 or, more accurately, that ‘Catharism was in origin a Western form of Bogomilism’,44 what were the most important beliefs at the core of this heretical, pan-European religion?
We've seen that a belief in duality was fundamental – that is to say, a belief in two Gods, one Good, one Evil, with the latter depicted as the creator of the earth, of mankind, and of all material things. This in turn led the dualists to the conclusion that Christ, as an emanation of the Good God, could not have existed ‘in the flesh’ – which was by definition evil. Likewise he could neither have been born nor crucified (both of which call for a physical body) – and therefore could not have redeemed our sins by dying on the cross.
The reader is also familiar with the notion, again shared in full by the Bogomils and the Cathars, that the Holy Spirit had been brought to earth by the non-physical Christ and transmitted ever since – ‘from Good Man to Good Man’ – through the ritual of the consolamentum and the laying-on of hands. In both branches of the religion the ritual was the same and in both it served as an instrument of initiation at which a sacred gnosis was acquired that raised the candidate from the class of the neophytes to the class of adepts.45
Such beliefs and behaviour, on their own, clearly delineate key differences between mainstream Christianity on the one hand and the Bogomil/Cathar religion on the other. But there are many more – as might be expected given the genuinely Gnostic and essentially non-authoritarian character of the heres
y. Like all earlier forms and expressions of Gnosticism it honoured the power of individual revelation over and above established doctrine. The result, part of the life of the religion, was a luxuriant jungle of speculation by both Cathars and Bogomils around their key concerns. These were the origins of evil, the essential goodness and immortality of souls, and the cause of their repeated incarnations in human bodies here on wicked planet Earth. It was the encouragement given to such individual creativity and freedom of expression that led to the principal schism in the heretical Church – that between so-called absolute and moderate dualists, which in turn proliferated into numerous smaller subdivisions. These seem to have competed for conversions – ‘although they may have differing and contrary opinions’46 – but they also apparently recognised one another and co-existed in a spirit of mutual tolerance.47
Despite the state of intellectual anarchy that prevailed amongst the heretics we thought it was possible to make out certain fundamentals of their religion on which all or most seem to have agreed. When we compared these with the fundamentals of established Christianity it was difficult to avoid the eerie feeling that each was a weirdly distorted reflection of the other. Like Dorian Gray and his portrait in the attic they were the same but opposites, near but very far apart.
The journey of the soul
One matter of great common interest and wildly dissimilar treatment was the origin and ultimate fate of the soul and its relationship to the human body.
Established Christian teaching is extremely clear: Each individual soul is a new creation of God, infused into the body destined for it.48
At death the soul is separated from the body, though not permanently as the two will be reunited at the Second Coming of Christ and the resurrection of the dead. Then: … departed souls will be restored to a bodily life and the saved will enter in this renewed form upon the life of heaven.49
Said to be a ‘fundamental element’ of Christian doctrine it was a dominant view amongst medieval theologians that: … the resurrection will involve a collection and revivifying of the particles of the dead body.50
Naturally the Cathars and Bogomils did not believe in the resurrection of the body. They regarded it as a truly impractical and actually rather hideous idea. Their interest was exclusively in the soul which they saw as an immortal non-physical intelligence that entered the human body at conception and thereafter wore it like a ‘tunic’51 until the body died. They pictured the soul as a time traveller on an immense journey towards perfection. Rather than the one-off ‘resurrection’ of billions of mouldering corpses on Judgement Day, their view was that each soul would be reborn many times on earth, in many different bodies – both human and animal52 – before attaining its goal. Very much as in Buddhism, the objective was to progress to the advanced state of detachment, purity and self-control, obtainable only in human form,53 that was believed necessary to release the soul forever from its imprisonment in the world of matter. The price was a life, perhaps many lifetimes, of severe asceticism and meditation. Moreover, though austerities were regarded as absolutely necessary, the reader will recall that they were not on their own held to be sufficient to obtain the soul's release. For that was also required the power of the Holy Spirit transmitted through the laying on of hands in the consolamentum.
So, in the dualist scheme of things, the destiny of the soul after death depended on what it had done with its period of physical incarnation just completed: • If, through efforts made in this and previous lives, it had been born in the body of a man or a woman who would become a Cathar or Bogomil perfectus, and if the perfectus concerned died in a fully-consoled state without having lapsed, then the soul's term of imprisonment on earth would end. Released from the snares of matter it could rise back at last to its true home in the furthest and highest heaven – the realm of pure spirit ruled by the God of Good.
• If on the other hand the soul had incarnated in a body that did not have the opportunity to encounter Cathar or Bogomil teachings – and thus to be consoled – then it would born again in yet another body, and another, and another, until it did, finally, come to ‘the understanding of God.’54
A doctrine of karma is not explicitly spelled out in the fragments of the dualist teachings that have come down to us. Still it is clear that goodness and personal austerity were thought to be beneficial to the progress of the soul while a lifetime of wickedness and self-indulgence would have profoundly negative consequences. Punishments of a ‘karmic’ nature could take the form of rebirth in particularly ghastly circumstances, or as an idiot, or even as a dumb animal – which, since it could not speak or reason, would only further frustrate the progress of the soul caged within it.55
Jehovah (aka the Devil) and the Old Testament
For Cathars and Bogomils the earth, and all material things in the perceptible universe, were the work of the Evil God. And while they worshipped the God of Good they acknowledged that he existed in an entirely separate dimension and had no direct influence in the Devil's playground.
By way of stark contrast, Christians believe in only one God, depicted as omnipotent and universally good, who created the material world and with it the human body and soul. He also established a spiritual heaven somewhere ‘above’ and outside the material dimension. There the souls of his elect, restored to their bodies, are to be sent on the Day of Judgement while for the remainder of mankind – sinners all – it is well known that God has prepared a suitable hell.
For mainstream Christians the books of the Old Testament, just like those of the New Testament, are regarded as inspired texts that form an integral part of their canonical scriptures.56 Much is made of the continuity between the old ‘Law’, shared with the synagogue, and the new Law brought by Jesus. Likewise when Roman Catholics or Orthodox Christians speak of God as the ‘Father’ and Jesus as the ‘Son’ they clearly understand the ‘Father’ to be none other than Yahweh (Jehovah), the God of the Old Testament. Nothing compels us to believe that he has become some completely different or even radically transformed deity. Jesus brings a ‘New Covenant’, certainly, but you don't have to read the small print to realise that the God Christians go to church to worship today is still Jehovah.
The heretics adopted the same general scenario but their take on it was radically different. Far from being the object of their worship, Jehovah for them was synonymous with the ‘Devil’, or ‘Satan’, or ‘Lucifer’ – just another of the many names by which the Evil God who had made the material world was known. They judged him by his deeds which were well known and had always been arbitrary, vengeful, violent and cruel. The Old Testament, in describing these deeds, was simply an extended paean to Jehovah's unmitigated wickedness and was seen by the Cathars and the Bogomils as an irredeemably evil text – evil through and through – that had been written to flatter this evil deity. To adopt it as scripture, as the established Christians had done, was to capitulate entirely to the Devil. They therefore exorcised the Old Testament from their lives and would accept no argument based on its authority.57 They relied instead upon the New Testament, and in some extreme cases on just a few specific books within the New Testament.
To this extent, though they were not Christians, theirs was a new Testament religion. However they also reverenced several other texts, as we shall see later, that were neither known nor accepted by the mainstream Church.
The creature of mud and the Hole in Heaven
If the basic dualist perception is of the separation and complete incompatibility of the realms of spirit and matter then how is it possible that souls – though wholly spiritual and the creation of the Good God – could have ended up imprisoned in human bodies created by the Evil God?
Cathar and Bogomil missionaries had a varied collection of myths at their disposal to help confront such paradoxes and answer questions arising from them in graphic and engaging ways.58 The myths weren't ‘dogmas’ or even ‘doctrines’ and it would be foolish to think that they were taken literally. Rather they were s
toryboards used as teaching devices – the point being for different teachers to bring different listeners in different circumstances to their own independent understanding of the mystery.
In brief, what the dualist myths tell us is that the paradoxical mixing of good and evil in the heart of the human creature came about after the Evil God/Jehovah/Satan had created the material earth as described in the Old Testament. Some of the myths state that he was not satisfied with this achievement so he attempted to create a man, moulding the body out of mud or clay, like a potter.59 But try as he might he was unable to breathe the spirit of life into the body he had made – for the spirit of life is in the gift of the Good God alone. In desperation therefore: He sent an embassy to the Good Father, and asked Him to send His breath, saying that the man would be shared if he were to be endowed with life … Because God is good, He agreed and breathed into what [Jehovah/Satan] had moulded the breath of life; immediately man became a living soul, splendid in his body and bright with many graces.60
A quaint sidelight comes from a vernacular form of the myth, repeated to the Inquisition in Toulouse in 1247. A witness reported having been told by a Cathar how the Devil made the body of the first man, Adam, and God gave it a soul. But then: The man leaped up and said to the Devil, ‘I do not belong to you’.61
So we are to envisage an independent-minded creature here, one who is aware of the good within himself and capable of subduing the evil material inclinations of his body. The natural impulse of this ‘Living Soul’ is to return to the realm of the Good God yet it cannot do so without purification because it has now been thoroughly contaminated by matter. Worse, far from sharing Adam, as he had promised, it is the intention of the Evil God to monopolise the man, drawing him ever deeper into the realm of this world and causing him to forget his spiritual origins. Eve is suddenly (sometimes confusingly) on the scene, also a ‘Living Soul’, and she and Adam are impelled by the Devil: … towards that carnal union that finally consummated their position as creatures of matter.62