While folks have debated just how much the Cathars are a medieval variant of the Gnostics, I do think it’s significant that they arise as a movement that is historically situated. Their identification of the Creator God with Satan is both an extreme reiteration of the Marcionite heresy, and at its core, a renunciation of the Eucharist and belief in the Covenantal love of God. The Jewish understanding was that the good Creation awaited the fullness of the eighth day. The liturgy is the announcement of divine fidelity and the ultimate transformation of the world of dust, sin, and death into the Resurrected Body of Christ.
And so, when I look at modernity and try to discern the imprint of the Cathars, I suppose the expert technocrat is a kind of Perfect, whose gospel is the transhumanist dream of translation into AI, liberated from the constraints of created finitude and the doom of mortality. And then the parallel to the alliance of Puritanism with indulgence of hedonist abandon is the virtual world, both a flight from the incarnate flesh, and equally a realm where every form of the illicit and perverse is celebrated, because the digital promises a false infinite and idolatrous eschatology.
The Puritans of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were very different in many ways from the Albigenses or Cathars of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. As the word itself indicates, they wanted to continue the so-called Reformation and purify the Anglican Church of all the remnants or traces of Catholicism, especially regarding certain liturgical practices. They despised Roman Catholics and the Roman Catholic Church, but they did not despise the created world. The Puritans of the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages enjoyed good food, good drink, good company, good marriage, procreation and almost everything else just as much as any of their contemporaries.
I agree that the early English-Reformation puritans (mid-16th to mid-17th century) were not nearly as extreme, in theology or praxis, as the Cathars. But what I suggested in this article is that the fundamental spiritual-psychological impulses were similar, and that is why (in my view) the puritans gradually became more like the Cathars: some forms of later puritanism more closely resembled Catharism in their intensely minimalistic religious practice, exaggerated austerity, and moral severity. That is also why I find those 16th- and 17th-century quotes so interesting: even during the earlier stages of Reformation puritanism, people recognized that there was an affinity between the underlying religious inclinations of the medieval Cathars and those of the Reformation puritans.
Thanks for your reply. Yes, I take your point about the English Puritans, especially towards the middle of the seventeenth century after they defeated and judicially murdered King Charles I. They did take a sharp turn to the left (so to speak) outlawing Church weddings for instance and even abolishing Christmas!! The seeds of such things had already been planted by the Puritans, however, in the preceding decades as their early opponents clearly intuited.
To be a killjoy is also deep in fallen human nature. Shakespeare ridicules it in Malvolio. Envy must have something to do with it. I suspect extreme cults attract unhappy people.
Some modern writers also romanticise the Cathars as a plucky persecuted minority fighting a bullying Church, which eventually suppressed them with great severity. Simone Weil, the French mystic and writer, was persuaded of this.
I also recall there was a weird Californian cult some years ago whose members committed suicide after castrating themselves?
And didn't serious Manicheans in St Augustine's day believe in an unceasing battle between good and evil? And voluntary celibacy, if possible? Augustine couldn't make that sacrifice then. In the end, only the grace offered by the true Faith could give him the strength he needed.
Just some random thoughts after reading your thought-provoking essay!
Thank you for these reflections! It turns out that Catharism has been not only romanticized by modernity, but also commercialized!
"Until the 1990s, interest in Catharism was largely restricted to the academic world or spheres close to the cultural activism sector. It was from this decade onwards that the first echoes of the intense media campaign of the Pays Cathare trademark in the French department of Aude, the result of an ambitious local development programme that aimed to promote the rich cultural heritage of the region, ... started to be heard."
"Catalonia was one of the priority areas of promotion for the Pays Cathare message. This situation was to have repercussions for the soaring demand for everything that could be described as ‘Cathar’, including innumerable publications that filled the shelves of Catalan bookshops: novels, popular works, guidebooks and even recipe books, which in some cases became best-sellers."
The Albigensian Heresy is not a really a heresy per se, as it "adherents" became complete apostates and infidels. It is rather Talmudism and Kabbalism, and the reason why the desolation of the modern world is so similar, is because it has the same roots. Catharism was promoted by the perfidious Jews, who maintained seats in Pisa, Genoa, and Venice, in particular, and were largely responsible for the shifting alliances and the maintainence of a precarious balance of power among the thrones of Europe, pitting corrupt kings against corrupt popes in a ceaseless series of internicene wars. (The one great advantage of the Medieval Period was that the rules of war were more "civilized" and war crimes were actually punished by the body politic.)
Puritanism was also promoted by the same people, whose dupes always end in the same noxious state, choosing perversion and death over true purity and life.
While folks have debated just how much the Cathars are a medieval variant of the Gnostics, I do think it’s significant that they arise as a movement that is historically situated. Their identification of the Creator God with Satan is both an extreme reiteration of the Marcionite heresy, and at its core, a renunciation of the Eucharist and belief in the Covenantal love of God. The Jewish understanding was that the good Creation awaited the fullness of the eighth day. The liturgy is the announcement of divine fidelity and the ultimate transformation of the world of dust, sin, and death into the Resurrected Body of Christ.
And so, when I look at modernity and try to discern the imprint of the Cathars, I suppose the expert technocrat is a kind of Perfect, whose gospel is the transhumanist dream of translation into AI, liberated from the constraints of created finitude and the doom of mortality. And then the parallel to the alliance of Puritanism with indulgence of hedonist abandon is the virtual world, both a flight from the incarnate flesh, and equally a realm where every form of the illicit and perverse is celebrated, because the digital promises a false infinite and idolatrous eschatology.
The Puritans of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries were very different in many ways from the Albigenses or Cathars of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries. As the word itself indicates, they wanted to continue the so-called Reformation and purify the Anglican Church of all the remnants or traces of Catholicism, especially regarding certain liturgical practices. They despised Roman Catholics and the Roman Catholic Church, but they did not despise the created world. The Puritans of the Elizabethan and Jacobean ages enjoyed good food, good drink, good company, good marriage, procreation and almost everything else just as much as any of their contemporaries.
I agree that the early English-Reformation puritans (mid-16th to mid-17th century) were not nearly as extreme, in theology or praxis, as the Cathars. But what I suggested in this article is that the fundamental spiritual-psychological impulses were similar, and that is why (in my view) the puritans gradually became more like the Cathars: some forms of later puritanism more closely resembled Catharism in their intensely minimalistic religious practice, exaggerated austerity, and moral severity. That is also why I find those 16th- and 17th-century quotes so interesting: even during the earlier stages of Reformation puritanism, people recognized that there was an affinity between the underlying religious inclinations of the medieval Cathars and those of the Reformation puritans.
Thanks for your reply. Yes, I take your point about the English Puritans, especially towards the middle of the seventeenth century after they defeated and judicially murdered King Charles I. They did take a sharp turn to the left (so to speak) outlawing Church weddings for instance and even abolishing Christmas!! The seeds of such things had already been planted by the Puritans, however, in the preceding decades as their early opponents clearly intuited.
To be a killjoy is also deep in fallen human nature. Shakespeare ridicules it in Malvolio. Envy must have something to do with it. I suspect extreme cults attract unhappy people.
Some modern writers also romanticise the Cathars as a plucky persecuted minority fighting a bullying Church, which eventually suppressed them with great severity. Simone Weil, the French mystic and writer, was persuaded of this.
I also recall there was a weird Californian cult some years ago whose members committed suicide after castrating themselves?
And didn't serious Manicheans in St Augustine's day believe in an unceasing battle between good and evil? And voluntary celibacy, if possible? Augustine couldn't make that sacrifice then. In the end, only the grace offered by the true Faith could give him the strength he needed.
Just some random thoughts after reading your thought-provoking essay!
Thank you for these reflections! It turns out that Catharism has been not only romanticized by modernity, but also commercialized!
"Until the 1990s, interest in Catharism was largely restricted to the academic world or spheres close to the cultural activism sector. It was from this decade onwards that the first echoes of the intense media campaign of the Pays Cathare trademark in the French department of Aude, the result of an ambitious local development programme that aimed to promote the rich cultural heritage of the region, ... started to be heard."
"Catalonia was one of the priority areas of promotion for the Pays Cathare message. This situation was to have repercussions for the soaring demand for everything that could be described as ‘Cathar’, including innumerable publications that filled the shelves of Catalan bookshops: novels, popular works, guidebooks and even recipe books, which in some cases became best-sellers."
https://repositori.udl.cat/server/api/core/bitstreams/6a61df75-d7b1-4a0a-9da6-70bd6e77c4be/content
It didn't end well, that we know
The Albigensian Heresy is not a really a heresy per se, as it "adherents" became complete apostates and infidels. It is rather Talmudism and Kabbalism, and the reason why the desolation of the modern world is so similar, is because it has the same roots. Catharism was promoted by the perfidious Jews, who maintained seats in Pisa, Genoa, and Venice, in particular, and were largely responsible for the shifting alliances and the maintainence of a precarious balance of power among the thrones of Europe, pitting corrupt kings against corrupt popes in a ceaseless series of internicene wars. (The one great advantage of the Medieval Period was that the rules of war were more "civilized" and war crimes were actually punished by the body politic.)
Puritanism was also promoted by the same people, whose dupes always end in the same noxious state, choosing perversion and death over true purity and life.
In the Holy Hearts of Jesus and Mary.