The Cathars: dogma and way of life

 In my final paper, I bring to light some connections that critics drew between the troubadours and the Cathars. In order to do so, in the first part of my paper I present some elements of the Cathar doctrine. The gallery of pictures illustrates some of their dogmatic characteristics.   Catharism was a dogma that essentially expressed the dualism between good and evil, light and dark powers. In Languedoc, two different versions of the dogma developed in time. In a first stage, the Cathars practiced a mitigated form of dogma that could be compatible with the Roman Church ideology, because it has similarities to the Catholic version of the Fall Indeed, the Cathars believed in the existence of a single God, good in essence, and rejected the principle of Evil on God’s son, Lucifer, an angel who had sinned in Heaven and therefore was excluded and “fell” into the world of matter (P7 image illustrates the “fall” of and the distinct separation between Heaven and Earth). In a second stage, another form of dogma qualified as absolute dualism spread and was largely adopted. That dogma expressly adopted a belief in the existence of two Gods, one good, the other evil (in P3, the Cathar community seems to have in mind “two equal armies”, which could represent real armies, or, on the dogmatic side, the equal forces of evil and good). It is because of that particular form of dogma that the Roman Church condemned the Cathars as heretics and burned them (see P1 and P6). The absolute dualism presented the world divided into the world of the Spirit, created by the good God, and the word of the Matter, created by the God of evil. The representation of the world creation was basically as follows: angels that were in the heaven of the good God had been seduced by Lucifer, son of the Evil God. They fell into the world of evil (as illustrated in P7), and they had to wander through successive reincarnations of the soul in the physical world, until, through the consolamentum (a form of spiritual baptism consisting in the imposition of the hands), the soul was purified, saved from the domination of the matter and brought again in the Heaven. On the moral side, the Cathars had a rather austere lifestyle, a pure one. The word “Cathar” is derived from the Greek “katharos” that means “pure” and has the same linguistic root as the word “catharsis”, esthetical purification. The Cathars lived in poverty and even in rigorous conditions, practicing a form of simplicity that related them with the first periods of Christianity (P1, P2  and P5 illustrate the poverty by representing the Cathars totally naked, in a strong contrast with the armed soldiers; it is surprising to see that, because of their colorful dimension, pictures P1 and P6 are in a very strong contrast with the atrocities committed during the Albigensian crusade). The Cathar style of life contrasted with the way of life of the Roman Church, that practiced the institutional accumulation of goods. Often they traveled by two (see P 4). They had to be “baptized” not when they were children, but at the end of their lives, through the technique of the consolamentum, that consisted in the imposition of hands. After that ceremony, they become “Perfects” and, purified from the matter, they had to live in a very austere way until death. In order to be “purified” some Cathars starved to death (a technique called endura): P1, P2 and  P5 perfectly show their skinny bodies.