Today marks a sad aniversary, one of the least-known but most tragic chapters in Church history, when the last of the European gnostics ended a long siege and walked willingly into the bonfires prepared for them by the inquisitors of the Catholic Church. Their only crime was believing differently than other Christians.

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.

Cathar Dualism

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. These beliefs led to a lot of supertistious misinterpretation by enemies of the sect, who have claimed that the Cathars utterly rejected the physical body, that they were favorable to or encouraged suicide, abortion, etc. The Cathars themselves seemed to interpret this "liberation of spirit" to be at least partially metaphorical, carried out by their rejection of material wealth and social rank and their emulation of Jesus.

Continue: The Cathars and the Massacre at Montsegur