Cathars

Cathars (Gk., ‘pure’). The name was applied to several sects in patristic times, but is used mainly for a large group of dissenters who posed a serious challenge to the Church in the 12th and 13th cents. They were known to their contemporaries under various names: Cathars, Manichaeans, Bulgari, Albigenses (in France), and Patarines (in Italy). Affirming two principles of good and evil, they rejected the flesh and material creation as evil; the purpose of redemption was the liberation of the soul from the flesh. They held that Christ was an angel with a phantom body who consequently neither suffered nor rose again, and whose redemptive work consisted only in teaching man the true doctrine. Rejecting the sacraments, the doctrines of hell, purgatory, and the resurrection of the body, and believing that all matter was bad, they condemned marriage and the use of meat, milk, eggs, and other animal produce. As these ideals were too austere for most people, they distinguished two classes: the ‘perfect’, who received the ‘consolamentum’, i.e. baptism of the Holy Spirit by the imposition of hands, and kept the precepts in all their rigour, and ordinary ‘believers’, who were allowed to lead normal lives but promised to receive the ‘consolamentum’ when death approached.

Traces of this way of thinking can be found in W. Europe in the early 11th cent. From c.1140 there is clear evidence of their distinctive ideas and organization, and by 1200 they were strong in S. France and Lombardy. The reforms of the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 and the emergence of the Dominican Order were both in part reactions to the threat of heresy, as was the development of the Inquisition.