A HERETICAL PROPOSAL
This piece first appeared in Black Lamb in 2006
Americans, as usual, are facing a religious crisis. Between 75% and 90% of us, depending on which unreliable poll you read, believe there’s a divinity which shapes our ends (thank you, WS). But our various systems for approaching that divinity seem to have their collective knickers in a twist at the moment. The Holy Roman and Apostolic Catholic Church is mired in sex scandals, and the current Pope is trying to force his flock back into the 10th Century, which doesn’t go down very well with American Catholics who got used to a looser attitude after Vatican II. The mainstream Protestant churches are cracking like old pews under the double weight of the gay marriage and ordainment issues. The booming, bullying Evangelicals, Pentecostals and the rest of the fundamentalist Bible-Bangers who make a virtue of hating anyone who doesn’t agree with them, got a nasty setback in their attempt to take over the American government in the by-elections of 2006, when they found out that people of minimal sentience didn’t much care for their attempt to smash the church-state barrier and were appalled by George W. Bush’s bloody, hapless Crusade.
Moderate American Jews are hopelessly deadlocked over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, supporting the State of Israel out of reflex, but privately dismayed at the harsh tactics of the IDF and worried about the Black Hat ultra-Orthodoxy which seems to be taking over Israeli politics. Islam in America suffers the taint of ignorant association with the Taliban and al Qaeda, and has become a defensive and understandably paranoid outfit whose leaders have to spend more time assuring Homeland Security that they aren’t terrorists than they do ministering to their faithful. Sure, there are Buddhists, Kabbalists, Hindus, Jains, Sikhs, Ba’haists, Sufis and Wiccans who all promote their version of the Truth, but they don’t count for much in this country, outside a small coterie of rich celebrity hobbyists like Richard Gere and Madonna.
What this country needs is a new religion everyone can accept, if it really wants get serious about ruling the world. I’m not proposing to make one up, as L. Ron Hubbard did with Scientology because he wasn’t making enough money writing science fiction. He bragged about that early on, in a letter to another sci-fi writer, something Tom Cruise and John Travolta don’t like to talk about.
I don’t want to imitate Joseph Smith either. Mormonism has had a pretty good run for a religion based on even more preposterous bullshit than Hubbard’s, but today’s Latter-Day Saints, no matter how successful they have been in using sharp business practices to eat the State of Utah and a lot of Idaho, can’t fully escape a taint of the ridiculous among rational people: the Golden Tablets no one has ever produced, the silly underwear, the practice of using their genealogical records to convert dead people retroactively to Mormonism. And the Mormons are hardly popular among blacks, Jews, independent-minded women or even “regular” Christians. As I write, it looks as if Mitt Romney’s campaign for the Republican presidential nomination will fail because even the Christian right thinks Mormons are closet Satanists who lied about giving up polygamy.
So I certainly don’t want to invent the Church of the Holy Tobinity, although late at night I think it would be pretty cool to be attended by blank-eyed acolytes doing everything I tell them, instead of living with a woman who knows me better than I know myself, and tells me when I’m acting like an asshole, and is always right, dammit.
I propose, instead, to resurrect Catharism, a radical slant on Christianity which posed a serious threat to the Catholic Church in the middle ages. The term comes from a Greek root meaning “pure,” and the vigorous Pope Innocent III got so worried about it that he preached a Crusade in 1209 CE against its adherents in Languedoc, and prompted an Aragonese priest, Dominic de Gúzman, to establish a new monastic order with the specific mission to persecute, prosecute, and eventually burn the heretics. The Dominicans (“Domini Canes,” the Hounds of God) were the original “Spanish” Inquisition, and they were very good at their job, which lasted for centuries after the eradication of the Cathars. Indeed, the current Pope, Benedict XVI, made his mark at the Vatican as head of what remains of the Inquisition – they don’t torture or burn people any more, but the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith has its little ways of keeping the priesthood toeing the Vatican line.
But Catharism was stubborn, with roots at least as deep as those of the official Church, and its complete extirpation took almost exactly 100 years. For an admirable account of its rise and fall, particularly in Languedoc, thoroughly researched but written for the general reader, I recommend Stephen O’Shea’s THE PERFECT HERESY (Walker Publishing Co., 2000). The author lines out the origins of Catharism, deftly sorts out the complex web of feudal alliances and rivalries which influenced both sides during the early 13th century Crusade, and details gruesomely the butchery and mass burnings which attended it and continued through the storming of the Cathars’ last stronghold at Montségur in the 1240s, until the last Cathar preacher was betrayed and burned at the stake early in the 14th century.
O’Shea, an American who has spent many years in Languedoc, adds a wonderful coda to his narrative, bringing it up to the turn of the 21st century, when a marriage of convenience between loopy New Age conspiracy theorists and thoroughly cynical local promoters of tourism has turned Languedoc into a cheesy sort of “Catharland!”
But the Cathar phenomenon has always attracted dark forces that try to use it for their own ends: O’Shea points out that Hitler incorporated elements of the Cathars’ anticlericalism into his own nightmare vision of the Thousand-Year Reich. So Catharism already has popular buzz, not to mention rattle and hum (thank you, U2), with wing-nut conspiracy theorists of every lurid stripe, from Holocaust deniers through the credulous fans of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code (the Cathars are in there right next to the Knights Templar and the Illuminati). The damn thing just won’t die, and for modern Languedociens it’s a cash-cow. So why not revive it officially?
Catharism is just one form of a theological dualism that dates back at least to the Zoroastrianism of the 5th century BCE. The notion is that there are two primordial divinities, evenly matched, which have been vying with each other for the souls of humanity since they co-created the world. One of them, a Lord of Light, sparked the human spirit and gave it not only the knowledge of good and evil, but also imbued it with a desire to reunite with its divine Fire. The other, the Dark Lord, created the material world, mired the human spirit in fallible flesh, and has been striving ever since to seduce human beings with Stuff, to keep them from working out their ultimate disincarnation and assume their original, pure forms as beings of Light.
Plato was influenced by Zoroastrian thought: his cave metaphor, in which a group of people sheltering in a cavern and facing its back wall are deluded into believing that the flickering shadows cast by their fire are the real world, is central to the Neo-Platonism which sprang up later and eventually made its mark on early Christianity with the rise of the Gnostics.
Elaine Pagels has written the book, for non-theologians, on the Gnostic Gospels, which deny that an all-powerful, but insubstantial creative force actually took on a flesh-and-blood “costume” and got itself tortured to death. The crucifixion and bodily resurrection of Jesus made less sense to the Gnostics than the idea that what appeared to be a fleshly man was in fact a spirit in illusory human drag. And given the powerful Neo-Platonist current of thought around the Mediterranean Basin, after Paul began to found Christian congregations among gentiles, it’s not surprising that the Gnostics almost trumped the Pauline doctrine of a single God who impregnated a virgin, like Zeus, and let the son from that union die a literally excruciating death. Christ’s death and resurrection left the problem of evil unresolved. It made more sense to posit a Master Illusionist who confused the disciples about the true nature of Christ.
Eventually another dualist heresy, Manicheanism, which arose in the second century CE, revived Gnosticism and became a career-maker for Augustine of Hippo, whose campaign against it made him what’s now called a Church Father and got him sainted.
After the defeat of the Manicheans, dualism went underground for a long time, but it never died out. It surfaced openly again when a Slav known only as “Bogomil” – roughly, “God-lover” – began to preach a new version of it in the early 11th century. The Bogomils maintained that the world of matter was an illusion created by the Devil, and that the orthodox Roman Catholic priesthood had been in service to the Dark Lord since its inception. The idea made a lot of sense to common people, toward whom the priests had generally acted more like wolves than shepherds, and eventually it spread to the south of France in the early 12th century.
Catharism in Languedoc, was – I can’t improve on the wonderful punning title Stephen O’Shea gave his book – a “Perfect Heresy”, for both the nobility and the commoners of that stubbornly independent land. It was spread by wandering preachers opposed to any sort of hierarchal organization, who were known as Perfecti, the Perfected Ones. These were men and women who had renounced the illusory world of material things altogether, and had become perfect in their service to the god of light. Many of them had been nobly born, but had given everything up to don rough black robes and take to the roads to lead others to the light of salvation They drank no wine; they were weren’t just celibate, a term whose meaning in the middle ages conveniently referred only to someone who had renounced marriage, but abjured copulation altogether; and in fact their sexual abstinence determined their diet, for they ate nothing that was the product of copulation on any level, from meat and fish right down to eggs, milk and cheese. Good news for vegans! And when the Perfecti weren’t traveling and preaching to small crowds, they passed their time in prayer and meditation.
Their severe ascetic regimen wasn’t much different from that of many Catholic reformers during the middle ages: Dominic de Gúzman himself, the instigator of the brutal Inquisition, began as a wandering mendicant preacher who abstained from meat and wine and certainly eschewed copulation; and later on Francis of Assisi, who referred to his body as “Brother Ass” and apologized to it for the burden of carrying his spirit around, first achieved a following for his spectacular feats of self-denial. Indeed, the entire historical track of Christianity since the canons of its doctrine were laid down in the 4th century CE had been a sine-curve. Troughs of worldly corruption were regularly followed by peaks of reformation, as monastic orders, founded by ascetics claiming to follow Christ’s original teachings, arose to counter the excesses of the princes of the Church.
But the Church always managed to accommodate, and eventually co-opt, its reformers. The Cathars, however, were something else again. They held that since the material world was a seductive illusion created by the Dark Lord, any religious doctrine which encouraged men and women to cling to it was Satanically inspired. They maintained that the ceremony of marriage itself, which gave an imprint of sanctity to a couple bent on condemning more sparks of divine light to imprisonment in flesh, was the Devil’s most insidious invention. They pointed out, in elegant and eloquent arguments, that the leaders of the Church, from the Pope on down, were hypocrites who preached abstinence, submission and self-control to the laity while indulging themselves to the fullest in lust, gluttony, avarice and violence.
But they never exhorted their listeners to emulate them. The life of a Perfectus was far too rigorous for most people. Instead, they assured the Believers (Credentes) that drinking wine, eating meat and eggs, playing and singing secular music, dancing, and even fornicating, was perfectly forgivable, because the Credentes were still imprisoned in Satanic flesh. If you weren’t strong enough to become a Perfectus in your current incarnation, you’d have another one in which to try again.
Becoming one of the Perfecti involved a ceremony, sometimes conducted at death-beds,called the Consolamentum, whose details have been lost due to the Inquisition’s thorough expunging of almost all Cathar records. But from what fragments survive, it seems to have been pretty low-key, a simple pledge of devotion by the convert, some words of blessing from the Perfectus and an absolution.
The nobility of Languedoc not only tolerated the Cathars, but frequently joined them as Credentes and in some cases even became Perfecti. For the middle ages, Languedoc was a remarkably open society. The feudal system, with its rigid division of humanity into the Three Estates, priests, warriors and everyone else, was beginning to fray there, as a new class of townsmen started to amass riches through trade. And at the same time as Catharism filtered into the region, the fad of courtly love was in full spate. Courtly love was essentially a celebration of adultery, albeit highly stylized and governed by an elaborate set of rules. It was invented by noblewomen like Eleanor of Aquitaine and her daughter Marie de Champagne, who supported poets and troubadours at their courts to codify the chivalric regulations by which a knight could court, and eventually bed, a noble lady married to someone else, and compose exquisite music and elaborate prose and poetic narratives celebrating the complex new social convention. The fad reflected an unprecedented empowerment of women (at least highborn ones), and of course the Church hated it.
So it’s easy to see why a sophisticated culture chafing under its nominal allegiance to Rome, which openly embraced illicit love-affairs and indeed made them part of a social code that required aspirant knights to pledge themselves to women married to other men, perform prodigious feats of arms in their honor, and ultimately enjoy their physical favors, would take to a version of Christianity which rejected matrimony as a devil’s bargain and told its followers that a child born of adultery was likelier to achieve Perfection than offspring produced through legal bargains between magnates sanctioned by satanic priests. The Cathars and the courtly lovers were in perfect synchronicity.
And the Perfecti assured the Occitan nobility that their adventures in adultery, their delight in wine and song, their feasts and elaborate tournaments, were not sinful, but simply aspects of the fleshly prison in which the Devil had bound them, and hence, blameless. At any time a man or woman might accept the Consolamentum and leave all that behind to finish out what remained of life as an ascetic. And for those who couldn’t quite bear giving up the lush life while they were still healthy, the Consolamentum was equally effective in freeing the soul from the wheel of incarnation when administered during a person’s final moments.
Whoopie-doo! Now this is a religion anyone can get behind! You get to lay up all the riches you can grab on this Earth, drink and drug yourself stupid, fuck other people’s spouses freely without a hint of guilt, and when you get tired of the sheer strain of wallowing in fleshly delights, all you have to do is take the quiet vow and be assured of instant reunion with the pure light of god. No sweaty “Born-Again” ceremonies, no confessions to priests prompted by a fear of hell (the Cathars maintained, after all, that Hell was here), not a trace of magical mumbo-jumbo, tithing, or fundraising drives. Accept the Consolamentum, even on your death-bed, and you’re bound for glory.
It should go without saying that the Perfecti were pacifists – although when the Occitan nobles and knights who supported the Perfecti were trying to drive the northern Catholic Crusaders off their lands, they could be just as brutal as the invaders. And the Perfecti provided even those violent warriors with the Consolamentum whenever they asked for it. So Catharism embraces even war-criminals, which ought to extend its appeal even further. The most horrible crimes this busy monster manunkind (thank you, e. e. cummings) can nightmare up are all the Devil’s fault. Good news for serial killers, ethnic cleansers, multinational corporate executives, bankers, lawyers, real-estate developers, arms dealers, druglords and politicians! No need to plunge yourself in guilt because you self-medicate after a hard day’s work of doing awful things. Revel in what you’ve done, because it isn’t real, and knock back the booze or snort the coke not out of guilt, but because it makes you feel good, at least temporarily. And the Cathar message is that everything in this unclean, illusory world is temporary. You don’t even have to worry about your weight, because the Devil makes you eat too much. Kill, lie, cheat, rob and deal to your tainted heart’s content, in the certain knowledge that when that overburdened organ finally begins to fail, the Perfectus who shows up as you’re choking on your last breath won’t ask you cough up your filthy secrets before granting absolution.
Of course reviving Catharism depends on finding people willing to accept the rigors of becoming Perfecti while they are still strong and healthy. But in America’s health-crazed subculture, there are already thousands of folks practicing forms of grotesque asceticism: vegans, marathon runners, people who climb mountains using their bare fingertips and toes, and so on. So far they haven’t had a religious excuse for tormenting their bodies almost to destruction, and I suspect that occasionally they wake up in pain at three ayem and wonder, “Why the fuck am I doing this?”
Catharism answers, “Because you are pure and holy, obviously, so here’s the black robe. Go out and preach by example, bringing the slobs you despise to the Light. You can go on punishing yourself, but try to stay in the physical vehicle long enough to give the Consolamentum to a few miserable ignorant assholes who aren’t as strong as you are.”
Spiritual vanity will bring plenty of recruits, and in time all other religions which come with too many hooks and obligations, material baggage and built-in lethal bigotry, will simply dry up and blow away, leaving humanity as nasty as it ever was, but at least free of guilt. Global warming, nuclear war, asteroid impacts, giant volcanic spews, tsunamis, famine, pandemics – don’t worry, be happy, because the world is an evil illusion that deserves to be destroyed. Catharism is the ultimate death wish, and right now it’s in perfect sync with the times. And as the fashion industry knows, everybody looks thinner in black.