The High Medieval Era · c. 1143-1321 · Languedoc
Cathars / Albigensians
An open theological question
Historians and Christians themselves are divided on whether this group's core beliefs fall inside the historic Christian creeds.
About This Movement
From the 1140s, church writers in the Rhineland and then in southern France describe communities with their own ministers, their own initiation rite, and a teaching that the visible material world was not the work of the good God. A dualism that placed them outside Christianity as the councils had defined it. In Languedoc they had noble protection and something close to a parallel church, and in 1209 the papacy launched a crusade against them: two decades of war, then inquisition, then the siege of Montségur in 1244, where roughly two hundred of their ministers walked into a fire rather than recant. The last known Languedoc perfect, Guillaume Bélibaste, was burned in 1321. Almost everything known about them comes from the people who destroyed them, and historians now argue seriously about how much of 'Catharism' was a coherent movement at all and how much was a category assembled by inquisitors out of scattered local dissent.
Sources
- The Book of the Two Principles (Liber de duobus principiis, c. 1240s-60s), trans. in Wakefield & Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages (1969), p. 511 (primary) — Radical-dualist theology from the circle of John of Lugio (Italy). Non-Catholic authorship is broadly accepted, but whether it speaks for 'the Cathars' (esp. Languedoc) is exactly what Pegg and Moore deny.
- The Cathar Rituals (Occitan Lyon ritual; Latin Florence ritual), trans. in Wakefield & Evans (1969), p. 465 (primary) — The consolamentum liturgy. Scholars still debate whether this really reflects a coherent Catharism, or a small literate circle later projected back onto Languedoc.
- Biller, Bruschi & Sneddon (ed./trans.), Inquisitors and Heretics in Thirteenth-Century Languedoc (Brill, 2011) - Toulouse depositions 1273-82 (primary) — A hostile source, but the only place ordinary believers' voices survive — filtered through the interrogators' own categories; the words 'Cathar' and 'perfect' are largely the inquisitors', not the deponents'.
- Rainerius Sacconi, Summa de Catharis (1250), in Wakefield & Evans (primary) — A hostile source from a former insider: a 'heretic' of seventeen years who turned Dominican inquisitor — uniquely informed, and uniquely motivated to condemn what he'd left.
- Antonio Sennis (ed.), Cathars in Question (York Medieval Press, 2016) (secondary) — The coherence debate itself: Pegg ('The Paradigm of Catharism; or, the Historians' Illusion'), Moore, Biller, Hamilton, Taylor, Stoyanov face to face - the honest state of the question.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 4, ch. 12 'Christians and heretics' (Biller) (reference) — Biller is a leading voice on one side of the live debate, not a neutral summary of it; read alongside Sennis.