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Cathar Connections to Gnosticism Part 4

© Michelle Powell-Smith

A great deal is known about the Cathars and their religious practices. Those who had undergone the ritual of consolamentum were "perfected" or "good men." There was a clear division within the faith between those who were "perfected" and those who were not. The consolamentum combined baptism and redemption into a single ritual. Those who followed Cathar beliefs, but had not undergone the consolamentum were called simply "believers" or "Christians." Many of these "believers" opted to take the consolamentum at the time of their deaths, thereby avoiding the strict moral and ethical restrictions of the "perfected." Evidence of this may be found in inquisitorial documents that clearly show the divide between believer and "perfect."

The Cathar churches were under the control of bishops, much like traditional churches. The bishops were assisted by two men, referred to as the "elder" and "younger son." The bishops and their "sons" travelled, preaching and baptizing throughout the countryside, while deacons supervised residences for "perfected" men and women who had undergone the consolamentum. The Cathars based the organization of their churches on the orthodox church, using the terms bishop and deacon in reference to their church officials. The preaching of the Cathars, like that of early Christian gnostics, focused on the New Testament. The Cathar preachers, typically "perfected" men, focused their sermons on the true church, that is to say the Cathar church. They began their sermons by criticizing orthodox Christianity and disputing the purpose and usefulness of traditional sacraments. As their preaching crusades continued, they introduced dualism and intensely ascetic Cathar ethics.

The dualistic beliefs of the Cathars are attested to by their contemporaries, including Pierre des Vaux de Cernay, who wrote, in his Historia Albigensis, First it is to be known that the heretics held that there are two creators: viz. one of invisible things, whom they named the benevolent god and another of visible things, whom they named the malevolent god.

While the dualism of the Cathars, as illustrated in this passage, is absolute, it is not, fundamentally, different from the dualism of the gnostics of the second century. The dualistic beliefs of the gnostics are discussed in the Gospel of Phillip. Light and darkness, life and death, right and left are brothers of one another. They are inseparable. Because of this neither are the good good, nor the evil evil,nor is life life, nor death death.

The Cathars, like the gnostics, believed that creation was produced as the result of evil, be it an evil act by the demiurge or an evil act of an evil god. The early Cathars believed in the demiurge, while later Cathars believed in a separate evil deity. Early Catharism, like many strains of gnosticism, believed in a sort of mitigated dualism, in which there was a single benevolent god. The evil of creation then resulted from the act of an emanation of this god.

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