CATHARS boni homines bonnes hommes bonnes femmes good Christians: Cathar religion and its myths

The Cathar Religion and its Myths
The Two Creations and the Origin of Evil

English translation : Donna G. Dickerson

What the Cathars believed is well known from sources of an extremely diverse nature:

The anti-Cathar texts of the Middle Ages, several dozen polemic works written at the end of the 12^th century and throughout the 13th, besides some emanating from Cathar dignitaries who returned to the Catholic faith, such as the Italian Rainier Sacconi.
Depositions made before the courts of the Inquisition from 1242 to 1325.
The Cathar texts themselves: three Rituals (one in Latin and two in Occitan) and two theological treatises (in Latin), whose work, or rather the summary of a work by the Italian Cathar theologian Jean de Lugio, the Livre des deux Principes ("Book of the two Principles"), was written a little before 1250, and is preserved at Florence.
Finally the apocryphal texts that the Cathars used, scriptures emanating from Christian milieus, but doubtful or suspect to the orthodoxy, so that they were never integrated into the official canon of the Holy Scriptures. Let us cite primarily:
- The Secret Communion or Interrogatio Johannis ("Questioning of John"), which it is difficult to date: between the 5^th and 6^th century? It is a mythical account of the Creation and the Fall, which makes over to some extent the Book of Genesis with which the Old Testament opens.
- The Ascension of Isaiah, a work written in the 2^nd century: one sees the tormented prophet ascending from the firmament to the seventh heaven, where he has a vision of God, the Holy Spirit, and the mission of Christ.

Dualism

From all the foregoing, one can reconstitute the Cathar doctrines, and see what distinguished its constituent articles of faith from Catholic dogma. This the inquisitors knew perfectly. The formularies of their interrogations presented the heretic articles of faith in descending order of importance.

Do you believe
- that it isn't God but the Devil who created the visible world?
- that baptism by water isn't worth anything and is ineffective?
- that the consecrated host is not the body of Christ?
- that salvation is not possible in the state of marriage?
- that the dead are not resurrected?

The Two Creations

Therefore firstly, the belief that the visible world, the world here below, is the work not of God, but of the Devil, an article of faith which calls for two observations:

It does not mean that all creation is the work of the devil. It clearly specifies "the visible world". What this implies is that besides the visible realities, there are invisible realities, whose creator is not the Devil.
This distinction between the visible and the invisible is at the heart of Catholic dogma itself, as in shown in the oldest wordings of the Catholic Creed, the Symbol of the Apostles, stated at the council of Nicea in 325: "I believe in only one God, the all-powerful Father, creator of all things visible and invisible".
The council of Constantinople in 381 said on its part: "creator of Heaven and Earth". Heaven obviously symbolizing the divine kingdom: "Our Father which art in Heaven". It is not the visible sky, in which the stars move. Heaven, or the Heavens, signifies here a world of purely spiritual nature including all the purely spiritual beings: God, angels, and souls.
Whereas for the Cathars, God is certainly the creator of Heaven, but not of Earth: all that is material and visible is the work of a different creator than God.
To call this creative principle the Devil is a schematization, a simplification. In fact, the exact nature of this creator is not always easy to define.

What is essential to remember about this first article of faith is that it affirms the duality of creations and of the creators.

There is an invisible creation, immaterial, purely spiritual, and naturally eternal, which is the work of God.
There is a material and visible creation, the work of this other creator that by convenience we familiarly call the Devil. And as this creation exists in time, it is naturally corruptible and momentary, and not eternal.

Such is the simplest definition that one can give to the dualism of the Cathars.

It is understood that the inquisitors placed this article of faith at the head of their interrogation form, because it is of major importance, for several reasons:

It is from this that arises all the other articles of faith, the whole body of Cathar doctrines in regard to Christ, Salvation, and Judgment.
Also following from this dualism is the Cathars' concept of the Church, along with their liturgy, their baptismal sacrament by the laying on of hands (consolament) and their ethics, which imposed a very ascetic lifestyle on the members of their Church.

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:

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.

In other words, in both cases, the Evil of sorrow seems to be punishment for the Evil of misdeeds. The Evil that one experiences comes to punish the Evil which one commits. In other words Evil originates in the first misuse that the creatures have made of their freedom.

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 4^th 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.

One immediately sees the change of meaning that was affected concerning original sin. For the Cathars, the first sin was committed by the first couple at the instigation of the Evil Spirit, it was not having eaten the forbidden fruit, it was having committed the act of flesh which multiplies the bodies, i.e. the prisons in which the angels (=souls) are locked up whom Satan had snatched from God. One holds here the key to the anathema with which the Cathars held flesh, and at the same time the key to the ascetic life accepted by those among them who were admitted into the religion, the Perfect men and Perfect women.

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".

Moderate Dualism and Absolute Dualism

The belief that the Prince of this world, creator of the visible world, was a rebellious angel, or more exactly the leader of the rebellious angels - in other words a creature of God, consequently good in the beginning, but gone bad by his own will of rebellion - this belief is however only one stage in the development of the dualism of the Cathars.
There is indeed something, in this mythical account, which, for a pure and constant Cathar is rather awkward, and one will see why. The myth tells us well that there are two distinct creations and even antagonists, but since the bad creator is himself a creature of God who corrupted himself, there ultimately is only one supreme principle of all things, God.
In the second place, the evil creation, that is to say the creation of the fallen angel, of this material world which will be the domain of Evil, this creation was not achieved without the knowledge of God. God knows all; he is omniscient, even that which is created is part of his definition. He saw clearly what Satan did. Then how is it that he, who is all-powerful - that also belonged to his definition - he let it happen?
Therefore, even if it is not he who created this bad world dedicated to Evil, God is the last resort responsible for the existence for Evil - without a doubt indirectly, but responsible nevertheless, and in this has a dual capacity:

He had created the angel who, corrupted by his own pride, decided to destroy divine creation. Argument which one could already oppose, we have seen, in the Catholic design.
He had attended, without reacting, to the creation of this evil world by the fallen angel who became Sathanas or Satan.

In short, he who is, by his own definition, all-powerful and infinitely good, he did not prevent Evil resulting in existence, he did not prevent that which created the conditions which make it possible for Evil to appear, i.e. this material world dedicated to suffering.
Didn't he want to prevent it? Then is he as good as he is said to be?
If he wanted it, but did not prevent it, it is that he was unable to. Then is he, as he is said to be, all-powerful? The mythical account of Creation such as is found in the Secret Communion emerges, one can see, as an extremely serious question.

The Cathars were completely conscious of this. Many of them and in particular apparently the majority of Occitan Cathars - went much further than the myth told by the Secret Communion. Within one of the Italian Cathar Churches, a current emerged in which the rebel angels had been manipulated, had been driven to rebel and destroy the divine creation, by an uncreated being, an obscure spirit, an occult power crouching at the bottom of the abyss and which made him his instrument. It is already lessened to a large extent the responsibility of God, insofar as one is led to admit that if God did not prevent Evil, it is perhaps because he could not: there was opposite him an antagonistic power against which he could do nothing. That saves to some extent his infinite kindness. But it is at the price of refusing to consider him all-powerful. Indeed, if his own power opposes an evil power against which he can do nothing, it is because he is not all-powerful.

But there remains still a point to be crossed. At the point where are we, God could not prevent Satan from creating the evil world. He remains nevertheless responsible for having created the angelic being whom he allowed to be corrupted by the evil power, become Satan, and create the world. To completely clear God of the existence of the world, therefore of Evil, it is enough now to do some sort of saving of the fallen angel, or at least to believe that the creator of the world is not a creature of God who would have allowed him to be corrupted, but that he is a direct emanation of the evil power.

We lead this time to a total, radical, absolute dualism, which does not pose simply the duality of creations, but also the duality of the powers which are behind the creations: on the one hand the Power of Good which is God, on the other hand the Power of Evil which caused and directly provoked the creation of the World where Evil is manifest, and for which it is solely responsible. In short, a radicalized dualism which poses what in philosophical or theological terms we will call the duality of principles.

And this time we are at the extreme opposite of the Catholic dogma. For the Cathars, who is responsible, in the last resort, for the creation of the world, therefore the appearance of the Evil? An uncreated power with which God himself clashes, on which he has no hold, a kind of God of Evil, - but of which the Cathars were careful to constantly specify that, if it happens that one calls him thus for convenience, he is not a True God, he is an "untrue God", he is a "foreign God", a lying God, he is the Father of deception. He is even called the "Father of the Devil".
For this extreme form of dualism, Satan is no longer a corrupted divine creature, but the same creature as the Evil Principle, its instrument, to which he is dedicated in the mission of destroying the good divine creation, invisible and eternal, by creating its opposite, a material world, perishable and malicious.

What does this mean, in the final analysis, this slipping of the dualism of creations to the dualism of the creative principles? It means the desire to completely exonerate God from the existence of Evil.
Why? Why this kind of eagerness, as is seen when one reads the two treatises of Cathar theology, this eagerness to not implicate God, to any degree, in the existence of Evil, therefore the existence of the world where Evil appears?

A resident of the county of Foix whom the inquisitors asked, in May 1320, if he had had a Master who had inculcated the heretic articles of faith to him, answered: "Not, it is me who invented them, while reflecting on the world. According to what one sees there, I did not think that it was God who had created it ". The answer is less naive than it appears to be. Translated into terms of theology, it means that God is necessarily innocent of the existence of Evil. All of Catharism rests indeed, finally, on this particular idea of God.

For the Catholics, God is at the same time infinitely good and all-powerful. If Evil exists, it is due to the misuse that the creatures made of their free will. This was the inner meaning of the mythology conveyed by the story about the Fall of the angels and of Paradise lost.
The Cathars refused this explanation.

With them, we are confronted by the quasi visceral refusal of imagining that Evil can originate in the free choice of a creature of God, or that it can have its place in the secret designs of Providence, or that it can be a punishment inflicted by God whose essence itself is to forgive; we are confronted by the absolute refusal to believe that an infinitely good God could create the conditions which make it possible for Evil to appear, which is to say, matter and time, in other words the World.
About all this, no reasoning is able to grasp. It is an existential attitude, which is rooted in the absolute pre-eminence given spontaneously, by the Cathars, of the infinite kindness of God, to the detriment of his absolute power. It is well in any case that their own mythology expresses this. It expresses the idea that, in their eyes, only the existence of another creative principle opposed to God, an essentially bad principle, and by vocation destructive, can satisfactorily explain the origin of Evil, and of the World.

Whereas a Catholic states "I believe in God, the all-powerful, creative Father of Heaven and Earth", the Cathar will say for his part: "I believe in God, the infinitely good, creative Father of Heaven, but not of the Earth"

Michel Roquebert^®, 2001

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