The Cathar heresy

[Sephiroth]

You make a strange sounding Scot!

Well, I'm just cooking some fishy fingers, and at the same time I shall add a little more body to the Scottish story, since it was pretty brief the last time. And then I'll be ready to post them both. I was thinking I will post one, and then let you post one, and then post the second one? Because I think one story per post would be best, since it might be too long a post if I put them both together?

Oh, and do you know any Latin verse pertaining to the death of Claudius?

Just a few lines, I mean, for the opening...

 

[Giovanna Clairval]

Here's the English translation of Seneca's Apocolocyntosis
a satyrical oeuvre written by S after Claudius's death.
It means "pumkinfication". The dead emperor goes to heaven. Augustus sends him to hell a-flying and then Vulcanus transforms him into a slave.

I have a passage in Latinus somewhere. Looking for it now.


Apocolocyntosis

 

[Giovanna Clairval]

I think this passage could be what you're looking for. A bit of it, not all, of course.
Here's the thing.

[...] et iratus fuit uxori et suspendit illam: numquid occidit? Tu Messalinam, cuius aeque avunculus maior eram quam tuus, occidisti. 'Nescio' inquis. Di tibi male faciant: adeo istuc turpius est, quod nescisti, quam quod occidisti. C. Caesarem non desiit mortuum persequi. Occiderat ille socerum: hic et generum. Gaius Crassi filium vetuit Magnum vocari: hic nomen illi reddidit, caput tulit. Occidit in una domo Crassum, Magnum, Scriboniam, +Tristionias, Assarionem,+ nobiles tamen, Crassum vero tam fatuum, ut etiam regnare posset. Hunc nunc deum facere vultis? Videte corpus eius dis iratis natum. Ad summam, tria verba cito dicat, et servum me ducat. Hunc deum quis colet? Quis credet? Dum tales deos facitis, nemo vos deos esse credet. Summa rei, p. c., si honeste [me] inter vos gessi, si nulli clarius respondi, vindicate iniurias meas. Ego pro sententia mea hoc censeo:" atque ita ex tabella recitavit: "quandoquidem divus Claudius occidit socerum suum Appium Silanum, generos duos Magnum Pompeium et L. Silanum, socerum filiae suae Crassum Frugi, hominem tam similem sibi quam ovo ovum, Scriboniam socrum filiae suae, uxorem suam Messalinam et ceteros quorum numerus iniri non potuit, placet mihi in eum severe animadverti, nec illi rerum iudicandarum vacationem dari, eumque quam primum exportari, et caelo intra triginta dies excedere, Olympo intra diem tertium." Pedibus in hanc sententiam itum est. Nec mora, Cyllenius illum collo obtorto trahit ad inferos, [a caelo]

Anglish translation here:

[...]and once he fell in a rage with his wife and strung her up: did he do any killing? You killed Messalina, whose great-uncle I was no less than yours. 'I don't know,' did you say? Curse you! that is just it: not to know was worse than to kill. Caligula he went on persecuting even when he was dead. Caligula murdered his father-in-law, Claudius his son-in-law to boot. Caligula would not have Crassus' son called Great; Claudius gave him his name back, and took away his head. In one family he destroyed Crassus, Magnus, Scribonia, the Tristionias, Assario, noble though they were; Crassus indeed such a fool that he might have been emperor. Is this he you want now to make a god? Look at his body, born under the wrath of heaven! In fine, let him say the three words [14] quickly, and he may have me for a slave. God! who will worship this god, who will believe in him? While you make gods of such as he, no one will believe you to be gods. To be brief, my lords: if I have lived honourably among you, if I have never given plain speech to any, avenge my wrongs. This is my motion": then he read out his amendment, which he had committed to writing: "Inasmuch as the blessed Claudius murdered his father-in-law Appius Silanus, his two sons-in-law, Pompeius Magnus and L. Silanus, Crassus Frugi his daughter's father-in-law, as like him as two eggs in a basket, Scribonia his daughter's mother-in-law, his wife Messalina, and others too numerous to mention; I propose that strong measures be taken against him, that he be allowed no delay of process, that immediate sentence of banishment be passed on him, that he be deported from heaven within thirty days, and from Olympus within thirty hours."

 

[Sephiroth]

Ah, yes I know the Apocolocyntosis but couldn't find a translation of the original text. Thanks!

 

[Giovanna Clairval]

I selected the above because here Augustus explains why Claudius handsomely deserves to be banished from heaven.

He killed his wife Messalina, and... and...

Not bad, huh?

 

[Sephiroth]

Excellent, yes. But poor Claudius, posterity has been cruel to him......

Ah, now I have to choose a snippet to use...

I mean, Messalina, she.....wasn't very nice.....

 

[Mary Hoffman]

Dear Giovanna, Patrician and Sephiroth - may I make a plea not to wander off the Cathar topic?

This thread has been SO useful to me - particularly Giovanna's 4-part history and Patrician's addenda - that I'd be sad if it got diluted by other things.

Many thanks

Mary

 

[Giovanna Clairval]

Mary, forgive us Spammers....

I'm posting something serious in a few minutes (not that Spamming is not serious, but... well...)

 

[Giovanna Clairval]

The Cathar Heresy​

# 1
A Nail in the Catholics’ Coffee​

The Various Appellations of the Cathars

The Cathares called themselves Bons Hommes, Bonnes Femmes or Bons Chrétiens (Good Men, Good Women or Good Christians). The Inquisitions called them “Parfaits”, Perfects (an adjective used as a noun). This last term stands for “Perfect Heretics”, meaning “those who have received the sacrament called consolamentum, the imposition of hands”. The Parfaits preached, which distinguished them from their congregation.

Two Eternal, Battling Principles: God is All Good; Evil is Evil and That’s All
The Cathares’ religion was dualistic in essence, albeit they never explicitly referred to Mani (Manichaeism). Their heresy—as Rome called it—had its roots in the search for the original sense of the Scriptures. The main source of inspiration was John’s gospel.

The principles of Good (God) and Evil are eternal. Good is the creator of everything that is perfect. Evil hijacks the spirits that were good in the beginning, and is the creator of material, physical things. All that is visible is corruptible.

Ideas and Phenomena in Plato’s Philosophy: Unity Against Duality
Here I will make a little digression about the correspondence of the Cathares’ visible world with the world of phenomena as opposed to the intelligible word in Plato’s philosophy. This duality of the world is only apparent because, according to Plato, the visible world is an emanation of the world of the Ideas—hence the word “intelligible”. The Ideas are perfect and eternal, while the objects and beings that exist in the world of phenomena (meaning “that which happens”) are pale copies of the Ideas. According to Plato, everything is Good, and the supreme being can only be perfect and good. Then—and this is different from Manichaeism—all beings are fundamentally good, and evil does not exist as a separate entity. Evil is the product of human choices.


And... the Catholics Agreed with Plato
Plato’s philosophy of non-dualism (cf. Buddhism) is very important because it inspired the highest vision of Christian thinkers. When I say “highest”, I am not emitting a judgment on the value of this doctrine. What I am saying is that all the Doctors of the Church shared Plato’s vision, through the influence of Neo-Platonicists (Plotinus, a non-Christian philosopher of the 3 th century, was the father of Neo-Platonicism). Amongst the Christian thinkers, we must count Augustine and Pseudo-Dennis the Areopagite, an author who influenced the Christian thought up to the 16th century.


The Devil and the Catholics
But, a second, more popular, belief is the existence of an adversary to God, named Satan or the Devil, who eternally struggles to steal souls from salvation. Another Doctor of the Church, Thomas da Aquinas (called “the Doctor of the Angels”) went to great length to explain how the demons were good in the beginning, although, possessing free will, they made evil choices, corrupting thus their originally perfect soul. This was a learned (and neo-Platonicist) attempt to justify the existence of Satan and his legions as eternal opponents to God, whom the Pseudo-Dennis called “the Good”, in the Platonicist tradition.


Well, that was a lengthy digression. I wrote it because I would like to underline the fact that the Catholic vision, in its learned version, excluded the existence of Evil per se, whilst the Catholic beliefs held by the masses tended to be much more dualistic.

Let’s say that, besides other considerations that we will see in the next instalment of The Cathar Heresy, this problem of Good and Evil was a nail in the Catholics' coffee. Well, coffee came to Europe in the 17th century… A nail in their wine, then.



In the next post, we will examine the Cathar heresy with regard to its interpretation of the Scriptures—John first of all.

Cathar Fortresses and The Sacking of Béziers (1209)

 

[Mary Hoffman]

That's wonderful, Giovanna!

And of course members of Chronicles are not capable of spam, since you are all legitimately here and entitled to write what you wish. Maybe, since it was a sort of relish to the main dish, it should be called Chutney instead of Spam?

Mary

 

[JDP]

The guy at the back of the crowd in that picture seems to be wearing Calvin Klein underpants. I'm quite happy to take this picture as conclusive evidence of time travel.

 

[Giovanna Clairval]

Jdp, I admit to thinking the same.


Mary, what would we be called then, Chutners?

 

[Sephiroth]

*is definitely a Chutner*





And regarding the Calvins, I won't say I didn't have a chuckle.......



Giovanna, your knowledge is formidable.

 

[Mary Hoffman]

Chutners let it be and that Calvin Klein idea was certainly a spoonful of relish!

Mary

 

[Patrician]

I said I would write something about Montsegur and the last Cathar, Belibaste, but that will have to wait because I'm going to Greece this evening.

But Gio is doing all the work I see, and doing it good. But you have not mentioned the obscene kiss

For the Cathars, if I remember correctly, the world was not the work of the good god, but of the evil one. All things material were corrupt, therefore irrelevant to salvation. The God Cathars worshiped waas a god of light, of the invisible, ethereal, the spiritual domain. They belived that they had to renounce the material and lead a life of self-denial, less they will be constantly reincarnating on this world, the evil god's handiwork. So naturally they found the Curch to be a false one, proving with it's riches that it belongs to the material world.
This is a great quote of Arnold Hot, a Cathar Perfect who lost his temper on a debate with clergy:

Roman Church is the devil's church and her doctrines are those of demons, she is the Babylon whom St. John* called the mother of fornication and abomination, drunk with the blood of saints and martyrs...neither Christ nor the apostles has established the exsisting order of the mass"

*not the evangelist but John of Patmos the mystic who authored Relevations

They also allowed women to become Perfect. A nobleman in one life could be milkmaid in the next so why should sex matter?
The word cathar is some German play on words regarding the obscene kiss. The obscene kiss is some prank that the church made up saying that the cathars had some ritual where they kissed a cat's...rear end. Along with eating ashes of dead babies...

And now I got to go

 

[Giovanna Clairval]

Good journey, Patrician!

And you are right about John of Patmos.

There were three John: the apostle, the evangelist, and the man who wrote the Apocalypse (which means "Revelation", and not "Catastrophe" as many think). This statement is based on the study of the style and the choice of words. As for the Evangelist, we know that John's gospel was written later on. Off the top of my head, about 70 years after Jesus.

I'll post the second instalment tonight.

 

[Giovanna Clairval]

The Cathar Heresy​

Or​

Good versus Evil (a nail in the Catholics’ coffee)​

EPISODE 2​

Return to the Scriptures

The Cathars seek the original message of the Scriptures, especially John’s gospel and the book of Revelation, which was written by another John, by the way.


The principle of Good pre-exists.
Good does not know Evil because the latter emanates from Nothingness (nihil) and Good cannot fight against Evil without changing its own primordial nature. The Evil principle is victorious in our time, the seculum—time as humans beings experience it, as opposed to the eternal Time. But, through victory, Evil loses, and loses for eternity.


The two principles do not share the same nature, nor do they possess equal strength.


A Fundamental difference between Catharism and Catholicism.


The Cathars believe that God endures Evil, but never punish anyone for it. For the Catholics, God is the cause of the Evil, with which he punishes sinners.

The Cathars think that Good/God cannot strike and end the cosmic battle once and for all. G. has to wait for Evil to exhaust itself, until the end of mundane time, through the continuous effort Evil gives in effecting its Evilness.

Evil’s batteries aren’t rechargeable. Good’s are.

It is thanks to its eternal nature that Good is superior to Evil.


Illustration: Apocalypse from Nuremberg Chronicles, one of the first printed books

 

[Ursa major]

Sorry to break the historic spell you're weaving, Gio, but it caught my eye that you said Evil came from Nothingness; just as those supporting the Big Bang would suggest all matter and energy did (in some of the theories, at least).

Is this idea of Evil (by which, I thought, the Cathars meant the physical world) emerging from Nothingness one of the tenets of Cathar belief?

(In my ignorance, I had assumed that these people had believed that Good and Evil had appeared simultaneously; but obviously not.)

Of course with quantum fluctuations, Evil (their view of Evil) can appear spontaneously; perhaps it's just as well they're not around to find this out.

 

[Sephiroth]

This is off-topic, Ursa, but...quantum nothingness is not 'nothingness'...far from it!

The fluctuations.....the fluctuations...........

There is no zero!

 

[Giovanna Clairval]

Interesting question, Ursa.

Yes, the Cathars weren't dualistic to the core. The existence of Bad unravels out of the Nihil, as a by-product of Materia. It is, in this sense, a product of creation, but not as the Catholics think, a punishment thrown upon us bad people by a vengeful god.

In the light of the above, Evil is not, like in Mani's heresy, a principle that exists on the same level as Good (Ariman vs. Ahura Mazda, Darkness against Light as two components of the Universe).

God beeing infinite Good, he can't--by definition--"decide" to create Evil.

It was embarrassing for the Catholics. How to scare the masses with a Devil on limited batteries?