The Perfect Heresy: The Revolutionary Life and Death of the Medieval Cathars. By Stephen O’Shea. NY: Walker & Company, 2000. 333 pages. $25.

Reviewed by Margaret Black

Of history’s many vicious spectacles, few match in sheer beastliness the 13th -century Albigensian Crusade, in which Pope Innocent III incited a group of impoverished nobles from northern France to extirpate the Cathar heresy that flourished along the Mediterranean coast, especially in the region, now part of France, called Languedoc. With stupefying brutality, this crew of greedy armored thugs, led by Simon de Montfort, annihilated not only the heretics, but the independence and culture of a land once famed for its troubadours and gracious songs of courtly love. “While beyond the Loire and the Rhine noblemen were still stirred by epics about the viscera dripping from Charlemagne’s sword,” says Stephen O’Shea in his immensely readable tale, The Perfect Heresy, “their counterparts in the sunny south were learning to count the ways. The ethos of amorous longing so much at odds with the mix of rapine and piety that passed for normal behavior everywhere else, gave a different cast to Languedoc’s life of the mind.”

Over the century preceding the Crusade, the dreary isolation of the Dark Ages was dispelled in southern France. Trade with Italy and lands further east had revived and the area prospered. Arguments among the myriad landowning magnates prevented any one individual from gathering central political control. Towns gained self-governing powers. Jews and other outsiders were openly tolerated. And with the trade came a ferment of new ideas, including those of the Cathars, a pacifist religious sect that disdained orthodox Christian teachings, rituals, clergy, and laws.

The Cathars said that the material world—that is, all creation—was in fact the dark work of Satan. God, who was wholly good, ruled the domain of spirit and light. As fleshy envelopes, humans were part of Satan’s evil empire, but trapped inside them were good spirits that belonged with God. The Cathars believed that Christ was a lesser emanation of God who had never become human or died on the Cross. He had come simply to teach humans how to live so that their good, nonsexual spirits could eventually, after many rebirths in many different male and female bodies, rejoin God in heaven. To become a fully initiated Cathar—a Perfect—required living a flawlessly chaste, moral, and ascetic existence. Obviously most people couldn’t achieve these heights, but they supported and listened to the few who did. Those with the spiritual stamina were eventually taught the secret knowledge of the sect by other Perfect. They then received the one Cathar sacrament, the consolamentum, which initiated them as Perfect themselves. Women were equally likely to be Perfect as men. If a Perfect failed in any fashion to live ascetically and morally, then he or she was no longer a Perfect and could no longer perform the consolamentum for others. A backslider had to perform penance and be deemed worthy of receiving the consolamentum again. This direct laying-on of hands was a crucial vulnerability, because it meant that one could, ultimately, destroy the sect by killing every Perfect.

The Cathars believed that popes, churches, sacraments, civil authorities, property rights, matrimony—you name it—were equally evil aspects of the world of matter. Hell was not to come, but was the here and now, the material world. Heaven was the inevitable destination of the spirit that freed itself of the material. The sincerity, poverty, and morality of the Perfect stood in such sharp contrast to so many of Catholic clergy that even most practicing Catholics in Languedoc regarded the Cathars as “good Christians.”

When de Montfort and crew finished bludgeoning, beating, blinding, and burning alive whoever opposed him, another institution took over to ferret out anyone sympathetic to the Cathars. Catholic bishops had always had the obligation to search out and suppress heretical thought in their jurisdictions, but Innocent III wanted a permanent, overarching institution which would not be subject to local whims or laziness. He established the Inquisition, whose detailed handbooks on interrogation have provided models for totalitarian terror ever since. Its methods included secret denunciation, where “informing on one’s neighbor became not only a duty but a survival strategy,” because silence was a sure indicator of personal guilt. Trials were secret, the accused could not confront their accusers—they often did not even know the charges against them—torture was frequently employed. Very shortly “only the truly heroic dared to say aloud that the world was evil.” The Cathars were obliterated, and Languedoc was reduced to a poverty-stricken ruin held directly by the king of France.

A tale of violent thought control, the destruction of a kind of multiculturalism, the operations of greed—these alone are enough for gripping read. And O’Shea accomplishes this part of his job with taste, wit, and humor—yes, actual humor. He deftly sets the scene, clarifies doctrine, sorts out the fascinating characters, a larger-than-life cast who wouldn’t pass muster in fiction. De Montfort’s depredations are not minimized, but small clots of gore stand for the whole. The author’s excellent notes and amusingly annotated bibliography nestle discreetly at the back of the book where they don’t interfere with a swift read, but show that he did his homework.

But this book does one thing more, which truly makes it stand out. O’Shea talks about what we do with history and historical ideas, how we twist and turn them to fit our current predilections. He shows us how different people have interpreted the Crusade and the Cathars, and how much of our contemporary understanding of them is greatly flawed or incredibly silly. Nineteenth-century French republicans turned them into liberty-loving democrats. Romantics found tragic heroines. Nazis took them up as secret Aryans. Hippies found them totally cool. Today, road signs direct tourists around a kitschy “Cathar Country.” In Carcassonne multilanguage brochures advertise the Torture and Cartoon Museum. Legends of Cathar treasure have summer visitors digging holes all over the landscape, while nouveaux would-be Cathars set up websites on Internet. It’s a stunning little survey, and worth the price of the book alone.