The BASIC principle of Cathar beliefs, attitudes, practices, existence and living
The Problem of Evil
There is for the Cathars a very close link between the belief in two creations, and the problem of Evil.
One can formulate this problem in a rather simple way:
If there exists an infinitely good God - and God is by definition infinitely good, God is charity, God is love, the New Testament repeats this many times - why does Evil exist? - Evil, that is to say what St. Thomas Aquinas calls the Evil of Pain, in other words Evil which one experiences: suffering, illness, death, natural disasters - and the Evil of Misdeeds, in other words Evil which one commits: dishonesty, theft, crime, etc, all forms of sin, i.e. of disobedience to the commands of God.
To really grasp the inner meaning of the Cathars' stance on this problem, it can be interesting to place theirs in parallel to the position of the Catholics, in order to see precisely how the two religions differ.
One way to reveal and understand these differences is to compare the mythical accounts, which express in a very picturesque way, and even in a very educational way, the respective positions of the two religions. In fact the accounts of Creation are, with both the Cathars and the Catholics, and thanks to allegories - the snake, the tree, the fruit - an explanation both of the origin of things and the origin of Evil - proof, in passing, that the two questions are intimately linked.
A) For the Great Church (the Roman Catholic Church):
Catholic doctrine, in fact Judeo-Christian doctrine, is staged in an extremely picturesque way by the famous story, which opens the Old Testament, the story of Genesis. God completes the creation of the world with the creation of man and woman, whom he places in Eden, where they will live immortal, and innocent, in every sense of the term: naked, but shameless of their nudity; not knowing Evil, because if they knew what Evil is they would be equal to God. God forbids them, moreover, very explicitly, and under penalty of becoming mortals, to eat the fruit of "the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil". They should thus know only the Good. Unfortunately everyone knows what happened: seduced by a snake, who said that God had lied to them when he assured them that they would die if they ate the forbidden fruit, Eve picks the fruit, eats a piece of it, then hands it to Adam who eats some in his turn.
Abruptly, both realize that they are naked, and are suddenly ashamed of their nudity. God looks down from above, sees that he was disobeyed, and is filled with a terrible wrath. Adam denounces his wife as having gathered the forbidden fruit herself and having encouraged him to eat some. The punishment falls immediately: God condemns the man and the woman to mortality, living from now on, not by gathering fruit from the garden of Eden, but by laborious working of the soil, and with being unceasingly afflicted with the assaults of symbolized Evil, as one well understood, by the snake. The first guilty party, Eve, is seen moreover condemned to the sorrows of pregnancy and labour pains. Then God banished them both from the earthly Paradise.
There is however an omission in the story of Genesis. Adam and Eve sinned only for a second. Adam was prompted to sin by Eve. Eve, herself, was provoked to sin by the lying and malfeasant spirit, which dwelled in the snake. But Genesis does not tell us who this spirit is, nor from whence it comes. It isn't until later that will be worked out, through various texts not all of which are part of the canon of the Old Testament, the myth which will come to fill the gap, namely the story of the fall of the rebellious angels.
But it is here that Lucifer, the first created and highest placed angel in the celestial hierarchy, driven by pride, wants to equal God, rebels, and carries along other celestial creatures in his rebellion. God punishes them by hurling them out of Heaven; they become demons, under the control of their leader Lucifer, who consequently becomes Sathanas or Satan. And here the story of Genesis is rejoined: it is Satan who, in the guise of a snake, drives Eve to sin, which will have as a consequence the mortal condition and suffering of all humanity.
Which is the inner meaning of this story? What does it want to say? It is obviously not a historical account. It is the setting in scene and image of very clear and very precise doctrines on the origin of Evil:
The myth of the Fall of the angels and that of Paradise lost are the picturesque expression of the conviction that the creature freely sinned against his creator, that he is thus fully and directly responsible for the evil of misdeed, and consequently indirectly responsible for the evil of sorrow by which God punished the evil of misdeed.
From here, Saint Augustine worked out in the 4th century the concept of original sin, to explain why and how the punishment inflicted on the first man and the first woman indeed reverberates throughout all of humanity, as though the sin of Adam and Eve were, ever since, structurally inscribed in the human condition, a doctrine which the Council of Carthage will proclaim in 418.
B) For the Cathars:
Anathema on sexuality, but anathema also, and consequently, on consumption, not only of meat, but of all that can originate by the act of generation: eggs, animal fat, milk, therefore butter and cheese. Chastity and food asceticism thus do not at all have, for the Cathars, simply disciplinary value, as with the Catholic monks or nuns. They originate in their belief in a creation that is evil in its essence, because it is the work of the enemy of God. This one, Sathanas, or Satan, of course will reign in this universe that is his work. One recognizes there, obviously the "Prince of this world" of the Gospels, and the phrase of St. John (1, 5, 19; 2, 15) "the entire world is subject to Evil".
There is for the Cathars a very close link between the belief in two creations, and the problem of Evil.
One can formulate this problem in a rather simple way:
If there exists an infinitely good God - and God is by definition infinitely good, God is charity, God is love, the New Testament repeats this many times - why does Evil exist? - Evil, that is to say what St. Thomas Aquinas calls the Evil of Pain, in other words Evil which one experiences: suffering, illness, death, natural disasters - and the Evil of Misdeeds, in other words Evil which one commits: dishonesty, theft, crime, etc, all forms of sin, i.e. of disobedience to the commands of God.
To really grasp the inner meaning of the Cathars' stance on this problem, it can be interesting to place theirs in parallel to the position of the Catholics, in order to see precisely how the two religions differ.
One way to reveal and understand these differences is to compare the mythical accounts, which express in a very picturesque way, and even in a very educational way, the respective positions of the two religions. In fact the accounts of Creation are, with both the Cathars and the Catholics, and thanks to allegories - the snake, the tree, the fruit - an explanation both of the origin of things and the origin of Evil - proof, in passing, that the two questions are intimately linked.
A) For the Great Church (the Roman Catholic Church):
Catholic doctrine, in fact Judeo-Christian doctrine, is staged in an extremely picturesque way by the famous story, which opens the Old Testament, the story of Genesis. God completes the creation of the world with the creation of man and woman, whom he places in Eden, where they will live immortal, and innocent, in every sense of the term: naked, but shameless of their nudity; not knowing Evil, because if they knew what Evil is they would be equal to God. God forbids them, moreover, very explicitly, and under penalty of becoming mortals, to eat the fruit of "the tree of knowledge of Good and Evil". They should thus know only the Good. Unfortunately everyone knows what happened: seduced by a snake, who said that God had lied to them when he assured them that they would die if they ate the forbidden fruit, Eve picks the fruit, eats a piece of it, then hands it to Adam who eats some in his turn.
Abruptly, both realize that they are naked, and are suddenly ashamed of their nudity. God looks down from above, sees that he was disobeyed, and is filled with a terrible wrath. Adam denounces his wife as having gathered the forbidden fruit herself and having encouraged him to eat some. The punishment falls immediately: God condemns the man and the woman to mortality, living from now on, not by gathering fruit from the garden of Eden, but by laborious working of the soil, and with being unceasingly afflicted with the assaults of symbolized Evil, as one well understood, by the snake. The first guilty party, Eve, is seen moreover condemned to the sorrows of pregnancy and labour pains. Then God banished them both from the earthly Paradise.
There is however an omission in the story of Genesis. Adam and Eve sinned only for a second. Adam was prompted to sin by Eve. Eve, herself, was provoked to sin by the lying and malfeasant spirit, which dwelled in the snake. But Genesis does not tell us who this spirit is, nor from whence it comes. It isn't until later that will be worked out, through various texts not all of which are part of the canon of the Old Testament, the myth which will come to fill the gap, namely the story of the fall of the rebellious angels.
But it is here that Lucifer, the first created and highest placed angel in the celestial hierarchy, driven by pride, wants to equal God, rebels, and carries along other celestial creatures in his rebellion. God punishes them by hurling them out of Heaven; they become demons, under the control of their leader Lucifer, who consequently becomes Sathanas or Satan. And here the story of Genesis is rejoined: it is Satan who, in the guise of a snake, drives Eve to sin, which will have as a consequence the mortal condition and suffering of all humanity.
Which is the inner meaning of this story? What does it want to say? It is obviously not a historical account. It is the setting in scene and image of very clear and very precise doctrines on the origin of Evil:
- Angels, driven by pride and jealousy, rebelled against their creator. They were changed into demons and thrown into the abyss.
- The first man and the first woman let themselves be seduced by the chief of the demons and deliberately disobeyed divine orders. Because of which they were driven from the Garden of Eden and condemned to the mortal and sorrowful condition that we know.
The myth of the Fall of the angels and that of Paradise lost are the picturesque expression of the conviction that the creature freely sinned against his creator, that he is thus fully and directly responsible for the evil of misdeed, and consequently indirectly responsible for the evil of sorrow by which God punished the evil of misdeed.
From here, Saint Augustine worked out in the 4th century the concept of original sin, to explain why and how the punishment inflicted on the first man and the first woman indeed reverberates throughout all of humanity, as though the sin of Adam and Eve were, ever since, structurally inscribed in the human condition, a doctrine which the Council of Carthage will proclaim in 418.
B) For the Cathars:
- Starting point, of course, the creation of Heaven, with the creatures that populate it, angels.
- Secondarily, the rebellion and the fall of the angels. The mover of the rebellion was essentially jealousy. Lucifer wishes to place his throne higher than that of God. And he well intends, moreover, to firmly destroy the divine creation. But as in our preceding story, the coup fails; God reacts in time and casts him down into the abyss. He becomes Satan.
- Although Satan did not entirely lose the game, he is lacking a lot: indeed it is he who, once driven out by God, creates in seven days the Earth, the visible world, including the bodies of Adam and Eve. It is not God, it is the fallen angel, it is Satan, who, from the start, fabricates out of clay the bodies of flesh, which are from their origin suffering and mortal. Why? To imprison there the angels which had followed him in his rebellion. He imprisons them so that they no longer have any memory of their celestial origin, and thus that they elude God once and for all.
It is these angels imprisoned in bodies of flesh that we call souls. And so that these mortal bodies reproduce, in order to imprison all the other angels, - i.e. in order to truly destroy the divine creation - Satan invents sexual differentiation and, with the voice of the serpent, encourages Eve to seduce Adam so that they both commit the act which will give birth to a new body, and so on from generation to generation. The myth contains even this amazing detail: it is the snake itself that deflowers Eve, thus initiating her in the lust with which she will entice Adam.
Anathema on sexuality, but anathema also, and consequently, on consumption, not only of meat, but of all that can originate by the act of generation: eggs, animal fat, milk, therefore butter and cheese. Chastity and food asceticism thus do not at all have, for the Cathars, simply disciplinary value, as with the Catholic monks or nuns. They originate in their belief in a creation that is evil in its essence, because it is the work of the enemy of God. This one, Sathanas, or Satan, of course will reign in this universe that is his work. One recognizes there, obviously the "Prince of this world" of the Gospels, and the phrase of St. John (1, 5, 19; 2, 15) "the entire world is subject to Evil".
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