Fantastic Metropolis

It just keeps getting longer: my apologies.

When last we left our Cathar “pure ones,” they had begun to expand throughout France during the 11^th century, in part due to a combination of their own novelty, powerful converts like Roger Trencavel II, Raymond-Roger of Foix and Raymond of Toulouse—descendant of the Raymond of Toulouse who had been the first over the wall during the conquest of Jerusalem in 1099—, and the particular political and social conditions of the time. For example, Languedoc was prized by the Capetian kings of France, the Angevin kings of the Plantagenet dynasty, and even the ambitious Aragonese crown from its role as the County of Barcelona. Languedoc itself was religiously tolerant, a wellspring of the courtly style popularized by Eleanor of Aquitaine herself (and we remember the early charges at the turn of the eleventh century that Manichaeans had infiltrated Aquitaine), and had large colonies of Jews (as the composition of the Sepher Bahir here in 1176 tells us) and Waldensians as well as Catharists. And as Catholicism itself had, Catharism primarily spread through converting the wives and ladies of the nobles: the Count of Foix’s sister and wife converted to Catharism before he did and probably helped convince him to do so as well. However, as we saw, figures like Hildegard of Bingen revised the old Catholic policy (as imagined by Augustine of Hippo and Clement of Alexandria) of accusing some other sect of the offenses they were considered to be propagating and changed it so that the expansion of the Cathars, which depended on pointing out the moribund nature of Catholicism as it had become the status quo, was reversed: the Catharist charge that the evil principle, known variously as Yaldabaoth, Samael, Satan, etc. was the demiurgic lord of this world and one had to escape him through knowledge of the true Good God and the perfection of the spirit over base matter became inverted, and the Cathars were charged with worshipping Satan as God himself, aided in part by laborious metaphorical texts like the Desenzano text that argued for the creation of Christ via Lucifer’s seduction of the celestial wife of God or its rival, the argument that God himself slept with the wife of some evil principle. While it seems relatively clear that these texts were attempts to bring earlier, more Manichæan/gnostic thought into a Christian context, they were a heresy that struck at the very heart of Catholicism itself. The fact that most Cathars did not hold such extreme beliefs availed them almost nothing.

By training, Innocent was a canon lawyer, the first of a number of lawyer-popes, but his approach was never narrow or pedantic. With extraordinary energy, he promoted the pastoral reform of the Catholic Church and the clarification of its teaching that was codified in the decrees of the fourth Lateran Council that met in 1215. He insisted upon orthodoxy: it was a time when, beneath the superficial uniformity of the Catholic faith, there were many undercurrents of religious enthusiasm and varian belief. The affluence and worldliness of many of the clergy provoked challenges to the Church. Innocent was sufficiently open-minded to recognise the value of an idealistic innovator like Francis of Assisi but he condemned and set out to extirpate the heretical teaching of the Cathars in Languedoc.

—Piers Paul Read, The Templars

Innocent III was no fool. Even as he moved to ensure that powerful women like Hildegard would no longer be able to directly influence the Church as the heads of Abbeys, he realized that he could best fight the Cathar message by means of preaching much like hers: perhaps only a woman who saw visions from God could possibly compete with the Perfects of Catharism, a rank open to both men and women alike. Indeed, Catharism was a religion spread by women: both by conversion of women important to the powerful and by raising women in the faith, the Katharoi spread their ranks through Languedoc. The political independence of the land, at this time still free from the Capetian kings, made this more possible than it might have been elsewhere, but Catharism’s greatest strength in this regard was its seductive message to women. Join us, and be equals. A woman could be a Perfect the same as a man. A woman could minister, could testify to her faith, could serve as a missionary if she was a Cathar. This spread throughout Languedoc at approximately the same time as the idea of courtly love, and for much the same reason: it appealed to women because it gave them a power they’d otherwise lacked, and it was in those aspects of daily life that feudal society had already designated to women. How children were raised, how courtship was structured, there were in no means part of the warrior ideal of feudalism, where a man’s worth was measured literally in how much money you could receive for not killing him in battle, but rather capturing and ransoming him, or perhaps in how many men-at-arms and horses he could provide for war. Wealth existed to be turned into fighting strength… it was the era of men like William Marshal, who in his long lifetime of fighting served several kings of England, defeated French and rebel armies, and charged into battle at the age of seventy-five. When he died, he separated from his wife so that he could be said to be shriven like a monk in order that he might enter the Knights Templar upon his death. Why the Templars felt it necessary to have the greatest warrior knight in Europe as a member posthumously, we may discuss. But clearly, in a society so stratified, it was to the benefit of Catharism to appeal to women, since it was women who made decisions as to what faith to bring the household into. And Innocent III saw this threat to his own vision of a Europe ruled by a Papacy set above any temporal power, and took steps to prevent it. But why should Innocent be so opposed to women that he would actively turn them away or marginalize them?