Cathar Overview

The Cathars were a medieval Gnostic movement that flourished for a time in the Languedoc region of Southern France. They are thought to be an offshoot of the Bogomils, a Bulgarian gnostic sect, in turn most likely influenced by ideas from Manichean and other eastern gnostic sects,* brought West through trade routes from the Middle East.

The Cathars believed themselves to be the only "true" church, and dismissed the Roman Church as corrupt, greedy, hypocritical, and power-hungry Roman paganism. They eschewed materialism and hierarchy, and attempted to emulate the earliest Christians, living simply and ascetically.Very little is known about the intricacies of Cathar doctrines, but it is known that they had a dualistic view similar to that of the Zoroastrians and the Manichean gnostics- that good and evil were eternal powers that existed in almost balanced measure, in constant opposition. They believed the material world to be a prison- that Satan was the personification of chaos, and the earth a construct that allowed the dark forces to imprison and partake of the nature of the light. The taught that it it was a Cathar's spiritual duty to liberate the spirit from its material prison.

Cathar views of Jesus were also gnostic in character. They taught that Christ was not a physical man, but a being of pure spirit who visited the earth only long enough to teach his apostles the doctrine of salvation from the Old Testament God, the Demiurge who was synonymous with Satan as the creator of the material world. The realm of Light was the abode of the good and of freed souls, but the forces of the earthly god worked to keep the souls of men imprisoned. Some believed that the spirits of men were those of fallen angels, lost to matter after the fall from heaven.

The Cathars considered the rituals of the Catholic Church to be inventions, and decried the veneration of saints, relics, and especially the crucifixion, to be works of the devil. They rejected the crucifixion and those that upheld it as a symbol, and they denied the virgin birth. They found the eucharist to be abhorrent, and decried the possibility that something that "met such a bad end" in the sewers could in fact be the body of God.

Cathars did not believe in hell, but in reincarnation into the created world. The ascetic life of the Parfait was intended to aid in overcoming the cycle of rebirth, as one who became pure would have the strength to fight the evil spirits who would continually hound human souls into new bodies. Those who received the consolamentum late in life or while dying were thought to have the opportunity to return to a more spiritual life- this death-bed baptism was referred to as "making a good end."

Taken from 'The Cathars'