Heresy - Cathars and Heresy of the Free Spirit
Created | Updated Jan 28, 2002
Early in the development of Christianity and Islam, gnosticism and Sufism became marginalised and persecuted as heretical beliefs. Gnosticism and Sufism themselves inspired two of the more interesting heresies of the Middle Age.
Cathars - Manicheism - Albignesians
Mani was born in Persian controlled Iraq in the 3rd century AD and saw himself as one in the line of Buddha, Zoroaster and Jesus.
His philosophy was that Evil was not a perversion of Good, but rather an alternative form of matter to Good. The two matters battled for supremecy over Earth.* Knowledge was the path to salvation. Missionary work was encouraged.
By the time Manicheism had travelled from Iran to Turkey and through the Balkan trade routes into Western Europe it had developed the view that Evil had already won on Earth. In southern France the Cathar sect formed around the town Albi *. They posited that all material things - the world, us, our actions were inheritly evil. The only Good matter was Heavenly matter - our souls, God, Heaven, the non-material.
Catharism led to a society forming where eating meat or eggs was considered a mortal sin but where sexual promiscuity was encouraged *. The enemies of the Cathars in northern France termed them the Bulgars or Buggers, and assumed if they werent shagging their wives, then they must be gay *. Faced with such an alternative lifestyle, the French Roman Catholic Church had little option but to send in armies on a crusade to slaughter them all. They started at Beziers on July 22, 1209 - a town with a sizeable Cathar population, the rest of course being typical 13th century God-fearing Catholics.
"How will we know who to kill?," a knight is supposed to have asked Abbot Arnold Aimery.
"Slay them all," was the Abbot's response, "God will recognise his own."
And so it went for nearly twenty years. Thousands of innocents were slaughtered, towns were burned to the ground - their land passing to local nobles who supported the Catholic Church. In fact it became pretty clear to a lot of people that it wasn't so much a difference of faith at the root of this holocaust - the Church was making a grab for land. One land-owner in Toulouse ran through the streets before the Crusaders arrived declaring:
"I am no heretic: I have a wife; and sleep with her...I eat meat, I tell lies and swear, and I am a good Christian. So dont believe it when they say I am an athiest, not a word of it! They'll very likely accuse you too, as they have me: these accused villains want to put down honest folk and take the town from its lawful master."
Heresy of the Free Spirit / Will
The other major heresy of the Middle Ages was the Heresy of the Free Spirit. The root of this heresy lies in Sufi Islam - the mystical, populist off-shoot of Islam. The Sufis thoughts were brought into the mainstream in North Africa (the Maghreb) through peculiar social and political events there. As the North Africans controlled the Iberian peninsula at this time, Sufism entered Europe through Spain.
The Heresy of the Free Spirit is in essence a riddle. If God created everything, then he created Evil. If we are in the image of God (a God who is partly Evil) then its OK to be evil. In fact any behaviour we are capable of, is a reflection of the divinity of God. Sufism emphasises the oneness of all Creation - that us, the Universe and Everything are parts of God and vice versa. Introduced into the Maghreb in the 12th century by Al-Ghazali, scholarly Sufism spread from the Maghreb into Europe via Muslim Andalusia, where Spinoza's works lent the ideology of oneness-with-God increased momentum.
The Sufis of Seville began the Heresy of the Free Spirit movement - with followers undergoing an inititation of blind obedience to their master for several years before enjoying total freedom of action. Their every impulse was a divine command. The Heresy took off with holy beggars who wandered the roads of Western Europe along with widows and spinsters.
The Heresy had three major tenets:
1) all is Divine
2) there is no afterlife - Heaven and Hell are states of the soul during life.
3) to know of God renders one incapable of sin
United with God, the individual was above all laws, churches and rites. Famous proponents of the Heresy (all killed by the Church) included Marguerite Porete, burned at the stake in Paris in 1311 and Heinrich Suso who wrote in Koln, Germany in 1330 that untrammelled freedom was:
"when a man lives according to his caprices without distinguishing between God and himself, and without looking before or after."
This radical, gnostic mystic-Christian sect influenced the Anabaptists, Quakers and by evolution the libertarians and anarchists of modern times. Across Europe of the Middle Age it inspired peasant rebellions and later in the English Civil War, the Ranters and Diggers. There are even strong parallels to the thoughts of Nietzsche and the Counter Culture of the 1960s.
