The Perfect Heresy by Stephen O’Shea Read Free Book Online Page B

Europe, his beloved Church, buffeted by the changes of the twelfth century, had been left disorganized, discredited, or, worse still, corrupted. When he looked to the east, he saw Jerusalem still in the hands of the Muslims. On the Italian peninsula, years of turmoil had deprived the papacy of the lands from which it once drew income and temporal prestige. And to the west lay Languedoc, where the wound of heresy had been allowed to fester. A new pope had been chosen for a new century.

3.

The Turn of the Century
     

     
    T O BE ALWAYS WITH A WOMAN and not to have intercourse with her is more difficult than to raise the dead.” So wrote a candid if frustrated Bernard of Clairvaux of the threat posed by the female to his pursuit of holiness. In this, the saint was roundly seconded by his fellow churchmen of the twelfth century. The days of powerful, pastoral abbesses, such as the Rhineland’s Hildegard of Bingen, or even of joint foundations like Robert of Arbrissel’s abbey for men and women at Fontevrault, were a distant memory in the era of Innocent III. Male monasteries that had sister convents began cutting ties of affiliation and withdrawing support. By the year 1200, the Church was turning its back on women. Henceforth they were to be nowhere near altar, school, conclave, or council. In the latter stages of the Middle Ages, the Virgin Mary would be tapped as a body double for all banished women of influence, her stature of semidivinity, arguably, a bone thrown to the metaphysically dispossessed. Formany women, shut out of the sacristy and shut in the cloister, this was hardly enough.
    As in so many other things, Catharism differed radically from the majority creed in its attitude toward women. In the three decades that lay between the meeting at St. Félix and Innocent’s procession in Rome, the dualist faith had spread unchecked throughout Languedoc, its message transmitted by a determined matriarchy of revolt. It was no longer like some heterodox hot potato, to be juggled artfully by a showman before an awestruck crowd. Instead, Catharism had migrated to the home, its beliefs deeply interwoven into the fabric of Languedoc family life. The women Perfect had been hard at work.
    Female Cathars, unlike their male counterparts, rarely traveled to proselytize. Instead they established group homes for the daughters, widows, and dowagers of the local petty nobility and artisan classes. Girls would be raised and educated in these homes and then go out into the world to marry and rear children who would, inevitably, become believers in the faith of their mothers. The number of credentes grew accordingly with each generation, as did the number of females opting for the rigors of life as a Perfect. Many of the latter did so as middle age approached.
    Once they had survived the rigors of serial childbirth and done their dynastic duty, nothing prevented the ladies of Languedoc from receiving the consolamentum and taking up an honored position in the community. The quasi divine status of a Perfect—the Church offered nothing as remotely prestigious to women—came coupled with the commitment of Cathar homes to stay open and welcoming to the world at large. There was no cloister, for there were labors, both manual and spiritual, to be undertaken. Instead of inspiring miracles, visions, pogroms, andall the other trappings of popular Christian enthusiasms, Catharism became devastatingly domestic. When Bishop Fulk of Toulouse, one of the most determined enemies of the Cathars, reproached a Catholic knight for failing to punish heretics, the man replied, “We cannot. We have been reared in their midst. We have relatives among them and we see them living lives of perfection.” It was asking too much of anyone to hunt down his mother.
    The maverick faith could not fail to appeal to beleaguered medieval womanhood. Not since the time of the gnostics had women had such a say in the affairs of the hereafter. Simple credentes could bask