Catharism

Like many edited volumes, Cathars in Question began as a collection of conference papers, in this case from an April 2013 conference entitled "Catharism: Balkan Heresy or Construct of a Persecuting Society?" at the Warburg Institute.

Like much of this area of southern France it is steeped in history and owes its name to the violent repression meted out in the 13th century by members of the Roman Catholic Church to Albigensians - the followers of Catharism, a religious sect, and hence the phrase the Albigensian Crusade.

As they begin to become physically intimate, Xavier explains that the Cathars reject the "cliche form of sexual intercourse" for one that proceeds "from the other side." Catharism, the "very idealistic" movement that the always-bad Catholic Church had cruelly repressed, was a dualism that viewed the physical world as a sinful product of an evil demiurge and that rejected marriage and procreation for its role in bringing new souls into a sinful and evil world.

The local religion then was Catharism, and its followers were called Cathars; they didn't believe in ornate churches, or paying taxes to religious leaders.

(8) "The progress of Catharism and other heterodox religious movements forced the clergy and the papacy to react promptly, before the entire edifice was undermined" (Vauchez 99).

Alain Boureau identifies four thirteenth-century factors that stimulated the intense scholastic interest in the devil: (1) the proliferation of dualist heresies, notably Catharism; (2) new occult knowledge from Arab and ancient pagan sources; (3) apocalyptic prophecies of the antichrist and reenergized demons, specifically in chapter 12 of Revelation; and (4) the development of what he calls a "Scholastic anthropology," which "brought together ordinary humans, favored humans [essentially the Virgin Mary], the Christ-man, and the angels" (98).

In 590, Pope Gregory the Great decreed that married couples who mixed pleasure with procreation in sexual intercourse "transgressed the law." The first church legislation forbidding contraception appeared in the 600s in a canon that specified a penance of ten years for any woman who took "steps so that she may not conceive." The church's reaction to the distinctly non-procreative ethic of courtly love in medieval Europe and Catharism, a Christian sect that rejected the Catholic sacraments, including marriage, further hardened its insistence on the procreative purpose of sex.

Its colourful past includes being a Roman settlement, a stronghold of Catharism and a wine capital.

The metaphysics of pain in the West is fore-grounded upon the doctrine of dualism as expounded in Platonism, Gnosticism, Manichaism, Catharism and Kantian thought.

This, in a nutshell, is the argument of Kelly's monograph, which dedicates a chapter to each of five heresies and their contexts: Montanism in the early church, Monophysitism in the age of the christological councils, Catharism in the Middle Ages, Modernism in late-19th- and early-20th-century Roman Catholicism, and analogous forms of Modernism in Protestantism.

They believed in the equality of menand women; women who converted to Catharism outnumbered men.

That is why the framework of analysis provided by DeRougemont's Love in the Western World (1939) is quite appropriate, even though the author diagnosed the erotic pathology of the West starting with the twelfth century, when European literature, and French literature in particular were heavily influenced by the dualistic heresies of Early Christianity: gnosis, manicheism, catharism, etc.