The Cathars: Cathar Beliefs: Vindication
Both Catholics and Cathars believed that they alone represented
the one true version of Christianity. Consequently,
both sects needed to explain the existence of the other,
its beliefs, practices and doctrine. Catholics and
Cathars were fond of pointing out each others' misreading
of scripture, their failure to follow orthodoxy (as evidenced
by early Christian tradition) and what each saw as the other's
perverse fabrications.
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Cathar charges against the Roman Church have been
largely vindicated, while Catholic charges against
the Cathars look increasing unsustainable. In many
respects the Cathar position is now accepted by historians
and objective observers as correct, or at least more
correct than the corresponding position of the Roman
Church. Catholics and Cathars disagreed about the
Identity
and Nature of God. For example, Cathars rejected
the Catholic concept, which is now generally acknowledged
to date from the fourth century.
Cathars claimed (and footnotes in modern Catholic
bibles confirm it) that the earliest Christians knew
no Priesthood
in the Roman Catholic sense of the word. Cathars also
correct in claiming that the Roman Church had adopted
the doctrine of Apostolic
Succession, if not from the Cathars directly then
at least from other early Gnostics. Cathar teachings
reflect Apostolic
Practices in other ways - ascetic lifestyles,
an equal sharing of authority among the teachers,
everyone working for their living, women teachers
as well as men.
No historian doubts that Cathar practices followed
Biblical
Injunctions more closely than Roman Catholic ones.
Cathars rejected graven images; practised poverty
as well as preaching it; practised pacifism and refused
to kill; declined to lie, swear oaths or to sit in
judgement over others. On the question of Baptism
the Cathars adopted the earliest Christian practice,
while the Roman Church adapted existing Jewish practice.
(According to the bible Jesus replaced the Jewish
practice of baptising in water with baptism by the
Holy Sprit.) In other areas Cathar theology is now
accepted as predating the innovations of the Orthodox
and Roman Churches. In place of the medieval Sacraments
(we find early Christian ceremonies, early Christian
Prayers
notably the Pater,
early Christian public confession (Apareilementum),
the early Christian Agape, with a communal meal involving
the blessing of bread without any idea of transubstantiation.
Scholars agree with the Cathars in noting that the
Catholic Church forged key texts, falsified documents
and mistranslated important passages to match their
own ideas. Catholic forgeries
and mistranslations omitted or disguised passages
in the scriptures, and wrote women out of the story.
Examples of other areas where the Cathar position
has been vindicated include the existence of distinctive
Gnostic
passages in the New Testament, recognition that
the concept of Purgatory was unknown before the Middle
Ages, and assorted Other
Teachings. Those sympathetic to Catharism, are
also fond of pointing out that in the whole of history
of Christianity no sect has a better verifiable claim
to the ideals of Martyrdom
than the Cathars.
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Here is an extract from one of the most authoritative
historians of the twentieth century, Sir Steven
Runciman, an expert on the Middle Ages. He is
addressing the question of Catholics trying
to explain why the Cathar Consolamentum seemed
so familiar:
"... the resemblance of the whole wording
of the ceremony tempted certain orthodox writers
to see in it a travesty of Catholic Church ceremonies.
In this they entirely misunderstood the position.
Any similarity between the ceremonies of the
Cathars and those of the Catholic Church was
due not to conscious mockery on the part of
the former sect but to their common origin.
The services of the Early Christian Church up
to the fifth century show almost all the characteristics
to be found in Cathar services. The ritual feast
of the Cathars is, if we equate the Perfect
with the early Christian priest, exactly the
same as the Early Christian Communion Feast.
The Kiss of Peace terminated Early Christian
services as it did those of the Cathars. The
Apparelliamentum of the Cathars was couched
in almost the same terms as the General Confession
of the Early Christians, indeed the Confiteor
that still survives in the Catholic Church.
The Consolamentum itself in its two aspects
was closely akin to the adult baptism administered
by the Early Church to the dying and to the
ordination or initiation into its ministry.
The very details of the service are similar.
In the Early Church the catechumen was tested
by a long and stern probationary period. His
initiation ceremony began with his reception
of the Symbol and the Pater Noster. They were
recited to him with a homily by the Presbyter
who conducted the service and he had to repeat
them. The Melioramentum that followed was not
unlike the Confessional ceremony held by Early
Christians on Holy Thursday or Good Friday.
Finally, the actual ordination was identical,
consisting of the laying on of hands and of
the Gospel upon the catechumen's head.
Such similarity cannot be fortuitous. Obviously
the Cathar Church had preserved, only slightly
amended to suit its doctrines of the time, the
services extant in the Christian Church during
the first four centuries of its life."
Sir Steven Runciman, The Medieval Manichee
( Cambridge University Press, 1999), p 164.
A little later (p 173) He says:
"... it was the Gnostics that kept these
ceremonies in their pure form; for the orthodox,
with growing wealth and power, and, at last,
with the patronage of Imperial Rome, began to
enrich their services with pomp and splendour,
till they lost their old simplicity. In the
course of the centuries this led to a strange
anomaly.
To the Early Christians baptism, the reception
into the Church, was a species of initiation
ceremony. There were many sympathisers who might
be called Christians but who had not been received
into the Church and were not received into the
Church till their death beds - for example,
the Emperor Constantine It was only when the
practice arose of giving baptism sooner in the
Christian's life, in order that even dying infants
should have the advantage of membership of the
Church, that every Christian sympathiser became
by his baptism as an infant an initiate; and
gradually, with this cheapening of initiation,
the ceremony of Confirmation rose in importance.
By the end of the fifth century there was no
spiritual aristocracy in Christendom, other
than the official hierarchy of the Church. The
Gnostic sects, however, by the stress they laid
on their gnosis, retained the older practice.
Thus when polemical churchmen in the Middle
Ages denounced the heretics for maintaining
a class of the Elect or Perfect they were denouncing
an Early Christian practice, and the heretic
initiation service that they viewed with so
much horror was almost word for word the ceremony
with which Early Christians were admitted to
the Church."
Runciman's terminology is in some cases slightly
different from that used on this website. Corresponding
terms, with links are:
Consolamentum
(the same)
Perfect - Parfait
/ Parfaite
Pater
Noster (the same = "Our Father")
Apparelliamentum - Apareilementum
Melioramentum - Melhoramentum
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Without doubt, the Cathars had a stronger claim than the
Roman Church to represent the teachings and practises of
the Early Christian Church. Its tradition represented ancient
practices abandoned or amended by the Orthodox Church and
then further by the Roman Church. The truth seems to that,
in the bosom of medieval society, Cathars represented the
last witness to the earliest Christian Church. Cathars
themselves were aware of this, and told their persecutors
so. They even seem to have known the route by which their
tradition came to western Europe. Here is an extract from
a letter of 1143 or 1144 from Eberwin, Prior of the Premonstratensian
Abbey of Steinfeld, writing to Bernard
of Clairvaux (Saint Bernard):
Indeed, those who were burned told us during their
defence that this heresy has lain concealed from
the time of the martyrs even to our own day, and
has persisted thus in Greece and certain other lands.
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| Sancti Bernardi....epistolae,
ep 472 (Everwini Steinfeldensis praeposti ad S.
Bernardum) - Migne Patrologia latina, CLXXXII,
676-80. English translation from Wakefield &
Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages
(Columbia University Press, 1991), p 132. |
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