Fantastic Metropolis

To be a Cathar was difficult. A true member of the Perfect, a combination of Priest and Missionary, had to be chaste and celibate: while those who believed the message of the faith but were not of the Perfect could marry and have children, the Perfect could not, for in their perfection they represented what Mani would call freedom from the cage of fleshly existence and the end of the iron prison house of material existence. (Comparisons to Buddhism are apt: both a Buddhist and a Perfect would look forward to ending their time on the cycle of death and rebirth.) Also, Cathar could not eat meat of any kind, nor its products. Plants and fish were their diet, and sexual contact of any kind would end the Perfect state and worse, end it for anyone whom the Perfect in question had granted the consolamentum, so if you succumbed to temptation and embraced the great lie of the material world over the truth of the spirit, you would condemn any who had received that truth from you as well. One can understand that Cathar lass going to the flames willingly rather than submit to Gervase’s touch, when the consequences to her were ultimately that she would ascend forth into the true Godhead of all creation if she burned, and further imprisonment in the hell of matter—not only for herself but for any she had helped achieve perfection—if she fornicated. Perfects’ lives served as examples to all of their freedom from temporal concerns and their ultimate embrace of their faith, a powerful countermeasure at a time when Popes were very concerned with worldly power. However, they were as limited by this as they were freed by it: their total disregard for oaths meant that they were in essential disagreement with the very bedrock of feudal society. Their disdain for any form of sexual congress (which, ironically, put them into agreement with St. Paul and St. Augustine of Hippo, those notorious attackers of Manichæanism) meant that while they could spread through women they were limited, since no Perfect could have a family to raise or a husband or wife, a form of aesceticism that left them isolated. Furthermore, while the faith’s appeal to women lay in great part in its acceptance of them as equals, this also led to dissention: not only did mainstream Catholics like Bernard use their acceptance of women as “proof” of their essential fornications (even while the Church burned them at the stake for not fornicating) but even some Cathars argued that a Perfect’s last incarnation on Earth had to be a man. Even powerful men like Raymond-Roger of Foix were less likely to become Cathar themselves than to simply tolerate it and allow Cathar Perfects into their entourage to perform the consolamentum in case of serious injury in a manner similar to the old deathbed conversion of Constantine. But the conflict between the Cathars and the Papacy, while rooted in their vast discordances, also has similarities in that both Innocent and the Cathars believed that the physical world was corrupt and impure. Innocent merely believed that obliged the Papacy to take control, much as in years to come the Yezidi would believe that Malek Taus, the Peacock Lord, was the master of this world and one had to come to an accommodation with him: the Cathars, on the other hand, believed that you couldn’t do that and retain your purity, and the gnosis which leads one to ultimate union with God requires total abstinence from all the pleasures and traps of this world, which is a lie.

But then, why did the Cathars seem so determined to infiltrate the nobility of Languedoc, which they did with great success, and not just the nobles, but the minor lords, and even the common folk? If the temporal world is so corrupt, why bring so many of its princes into your ranks? In part, this might have been due to the example of the Bogomils, who were extant in Byzantium at the time, and who openly attempted to convert the Patriarch and the Emperor to their faith and were burned for it. The Bogomil heresy predated that of the Cathars, and indeed was contemporary with the rise of Gerbert of Aurillac. But another possibility presents itself, and this one is a more unusual one. What if Gerbert was a Manichæan of sorts? After all, the young Cathar who died rather than be defiled was from Reims, his bishopric and the home of the Cathedral School he reformed after his years of study in Spain, including possible trips to al-Andalus itself. It’s possible that while Gerbert was in Muslim Spain, he became acquainted with the Isma’ili sect of Islam, and possibly even its Druze subcurrent, which preserved many Neo-Platonic elements and a marked dislike for materialism. (The Druze still exist today, and take part in the fighting in Lebanon.) Was Gerbert introduced to the Druze belief in reincarnation and an eventual freedom from same in union with God? Isma’ili, Bogomil, gnostic or Manichæan, they all seem to preserve a fragment of that ancient teaching called variously Zoroastrian and Zurvanite, the teaching of dual opposition between forces in the maintenance of the world. But unlike the Manichæanism of Catharism, held also by the Bogomils and the Druze (who are not dualists) the Zoroastrian faith did not hold matter in contempt or as corrupt: it was part of the good creation of Ahura Mazda, and thus too would be redeemed at the final battle between good and evil.

Assuming for a moment that Gerbert was exposed to Isma’ili thought, perhaps even Zoroastrian doctrine preserved in Islamic sources, it does not seem to have dampened his faith: he willingly signed the oath that rejected Manichæan doctrines to become Archbishop in 991. He clearly did not reject Catholicism. But did he bring back the idea of rationalism applied to faith preserved in Neo-Platonism and gnosticism? It’s interesting that among his achievements, none was more famous in all of Europe than his Book of the Astrolabe. And that book clearly had a salutory effect on Abelard himself, because the man named the child he and Heloise conceived after it. Abelard never reached the Neo-Platonic idea that matter is corrupt and the source of evil, but it’s likely he might have. His near-contemporary Moses ben Maimon, also known as Maimonides, writer of The Guide for the Perplexed was more fortunate than Abelard, and had access to translations of Aristotle and Plato that Abelard did not. Like the Neo-Platonists, he came to view matter as the source of all evil and imperfection.