The Rise of Popular Heresies 4 of 6

The Albigensians

The Albigensians, so-called after the southern French town of Albi where they were particularly strong, were thought to be a continuation of the Manichaean heresy that flourished in the time of Augustine of Hippo (late 4th-early 5th centuries) and was centered in Persia. It supposedly reappeared in Asia Minor as the Paulicians, spread to the Balkans, where its members were known as the Bogomils, to the towns of northern Italy as the Patini, and finally to France, where they were known as the Cathari. Whether there was such a continuity is doubtful, but all of these sects shared the common feature of being dualist, that is, they believed that there were two basic principles in the universe -- a principle of good and a principle of evil. Although many Christians held a similar belief (God versus Satan), this was not the official doctrine of the Church.

The Cathari added a powerful anti-clerical twist to this basic belief. They held that Jesus had been sent to Earth by the principle of Good, but that he had been tricked and killed by the Jews and the Romans. His murderers then played a terrible trick by establishing a Church designed to lead people astray into the power of the principle of Evil by pretending to be the thing that Jesus had been sent to create. They went so far as to make good men and women worship the Cross, the weapon with which they had killed Jesus.

The Cathari were divided, like the Christian world into laity - called credentes, or "believers" - and clergy -- called perfecti, or "the complete ones." They had no churches or other buildings, and the perfecti wandered among the believers, traveling in pairs, living lives of great austerity, speaking the language of the people, and tending to their spiritual needs in a way that the orthodox Church had not done. Even apart from their doctrine, the perfecti were an example of what many people expected from the orthodox Church and what the orthodox Church had been unable to furnish. The established Church tried to combat this movement by sending spokesmen to engage the perfecti in public debate, but this proved to be a mistake when it became clear that the perfecti were better debaters than the orthodox clerics and that their way of life gave them greater credibility than the Church's spokesmen enjoyed.

Since moral suasion had not succeeded, Innocent III (1198-1216) asked the king of France to mount a crusade against the heretics. Under the leadership of Simon de Montfort, the northern French knights committed such atrocities that many of the nobility of southern France joined the resistance against them. The "crusade" was eventually successful and the few remaining Cathari were driven deep underground, but the brilliant culture of the French Midi was also destroyed, and the land of the South was annexed to the Kingdom of France.

The long-term results of this conflict are difficult to gauge, and should be considered in connection with the fate of The Poor Men of Lyons.