SC - A vegetarian non-heretic...

[Philip & Susan Troy]

Here comes one of my favorite topics, my friends. Take your
seats...Cathars was not only an "heresy", but a politic movement too,
one of the most powerful movements at the Middle Ages. It was the last
big confrontation with the authority of the Pope in Rome and the
beginning of France as national state. The king of France, in alliance
with the Pope, declared a holy croisade (the first one against
Europeans) and demolished the culture of Occitan, Languedoc. The most
powerful nobles of the region (duke of Tolouse, count of Avignon, count
of Alby, and all the lesser nobility in Ariege and Provence, declared
itselves catahares, not just for a religious faith, but as a political
declaration of independence.
The cathares denied marriage the cathegory of Sacrament and the Church
and the central power couldn`t allow tha abolition of the institution,
the most central to heritages and powerreproduction.
Simon de Montfort was the leader of the Croisade, which was one of the
most cruels and injustified repressions at modern time. Twohundred
castles and manor houses was burned down, the castle of Mont Segur was
the last bastion and in it, was sixhundred people burned alive.
Until today, the south of France and the people who claim to belong to
the culture of Occitan, feel a deep resent against the northerners and
Paris.
Its a lot of interesting historical novels treating the subject.
The cathars had not any priests (one more circunstance the Church hated
them) and they gave all the people wno lived as "perfect", the capacity
of applying the sacraments. They did´nt condemn the homosexuality and
they avoided to eat meat, since they tried to live in harmony with the
nature.
They were an antecedent of the protestantism and Luther had read a lot
of catharic litterature.
I wonder if I am not going to take a cathar person. A combination: a
muslim poet, converted to the cathar faith and working in Stockholm to
try to recruit new members to the new faith.

Ana

H B skrev:
> 
> > I don't know what a heretical Cathars was, can someone clue me in?
> > Also, when was it considered dangerous to be a veggie?  I just
> > remember veggie options surfacing like for lent, or because of a
> > clerical vow.  someone wanna fill me in, or give me some reference
> > books?  love to come up with some excuses!
> >
> 
> I ran across a reference to the Cathari in a historical novel, but it
> got returned to the library before I got more than a chapter in, so I
> don't know how well they were portrayed; but it caught my interest
> enough to look them up.  Since I know there are other vegetarians out
> there, I thought this might be of wide enough interest to send it to
> the list; sorry to those of you who are not interested.  I'm sure there
> are other sects too, but I don't know how to look them up until I know
> who they were.  Anyway:
> 
> >From _The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church_, F.L. Cross,
> ed., 2nd edition. Oxford Univ. Press, 1958, 1974.  ISBN 0 19 211545 6.
> 
> CATHARI (Gk. [ ], ‘pure’).  The name has been applied to several
> sects, e.g. to the Novatianists by St. Epiphanius and other Greek
> Fathers, and, acc. to St. Augustine, in the form ‘Catharistae’ to a
> group of Manichaeans.  But it is mostly used for a medieval sect, which
> first came to be so known in Germany in the second half of the 12th
> cent.  It was later applied to this sect also in Italy, whereas its
> adherents in S. France are commonly called ‘Albigenses’ (q.v.).
> 
> In France they first appeared at the beginning of the 11th cent., when
> a
> group of heretics was condemned at a Council of Orleans in 1022.
> >From this time to the 13th cent., Catharist influences spread widely,
> being particularly strong in N. Italy and S. France.  The origin of the
> movement is obscure.  Their doctrines were similar to those of the
> Bogomiles of Bulgaria, and from c. 1160 there is clear E. influence on
> the W. Catharists.  It is, however, difficult to find evidence of this
> during the early history of the movement, and it remains a matter of
> doubt whether W. dualism was an import from the Balkans or an
> independent development.  They posed a major threat to the Catholic
> Church, which reacted both by preaching and, through the Inquisition,
> by persecution.  By 1300 the combined effect of force and persecution
> had greatly weakened the Catharists, and thereafter they did not play a
> major part in the history of the W. Church.   For an account of their
> doctrine, see Albigenses.
> 
> (Here follows an extensive list of primary material and scholarly
> treatments of it; if anyone wants the list, email me privately and I’ll
> send it.)
> 
> ALBIGENSES.  A medieval term for the inhabitants of parts of S.
> France, and hence applied to the heretics who were strong there in the
> late 12th and early 13th cents.  These were a branch of the Cathari.
> Their doctrine in its purest form was strongly dualist, akin to the
> Manichaean beliefs, and they rejected the flesh and material creation
> as
> evil, affirming two eternal principles of good and evil.  There are
> signs in their writings of both an absolute dualism (of equal and
> opposite principles) and a ‘mitigated’ dualism (envisaging the ultimate
> triumph of God over the devil).  It is not clear whether one should
> think of distinct schools of belief within Catharism, or whether these
> were different tendencies inside one system of thought.  The purpose of
> redemption was the liberation of the soul from the flesh and the end of
> the ‘mixed’ state which had been brought about by the devil.  Though
> retaining the NT and the prophetic parts of the OT, the Albigenses
> interpreted them as allegories, teaching that Christ was an angel with
> a
> phantom body who, consequently, did not suffer or rise again, and
> whose redemptive work consisted only in teaching man the true (i.e.
> Albigensian) doctrine.  The Catholic Church, by taking the NT
> allegories literally, had been corrupted and was doing the work of the
> devil.
> 
> Rejecting the sacraments, the doctrine of hell, purgatory, and the
> resurrection of the body, and believing that all matter was bad, their
> moral doctrine was one of extreme rigorism, condemning marriage, the
> use of meat, milk, eggs, and other animal produce.  As, however, these
> ideals were too austere for the majority of men and women, they
> distinguished two classes, the ‘perfect’, who received the
> ‘consolamentum’, i.e. baptism of the Holy Spirit by imposition of
> hands, and kept the precepts in all their rigor, and the ordinary
> ‘believers’ who were allowed to live normal lives but promised to
> receive the ‘consolamentum’ when in danger of death; if they
> recovered, they were obliged to lead the life of the ‘perfect’ or die
> by
> the  ‘endura’.
> 
> The Albigenses were condemned by successive Councils, at Lombers
> in 1165 and at Verona in 1184, and at the Fourth Lateran Council of
> 1215 Catholic doctrine was defined with special reference to their
> errors.  The heresy, however, spread rapidly, since the ‘perfect’
> gained
> a hold on the people by the austerity of their lives which contrasted
> with the laxity of many of the Catholic clergy.  Innocent III sought to
> convert them by several missions, which were all unsuccessful.  At
> last,
> after the assassination of the Papal legate Peter of Castelnau in 1208,
> the Pope decided upon a Crusade against them, the leader of which was
> Simon de Montfort.  The actual Crusade, often conducted with great
> cruelty, ended in 1218, the year of Montfort’s death, the outstanding
> events being the massacre of Beziers in 1209, and the battle of Muret
> in
> 1213, where Simon decisively defeated Peter of Aragon, their leader.
> >From 1219 to the treaty of Paris in 1229 the war was mainly a fight for
> the incorporation of Languedoc into France.  In 1233 Gregory IX
> charged the Dominican Inquisition with the final extirpation of the
> heresy, of which no trace was left at the end of the 14th century.
> 
> (More references.)
> 
> Does anyone else know of specific sects?  This book is great on
> defining things, but you have to know what to look up, and 'vegetarian'
> isn't in there!  I know a lot of the church's justification for eating
> meat came from the 'dominion over the Earth and all its creatures' bit
> (which was still being used as justification for exploitation/
> destruction of any natural resource you can think of into this
> century); since the Catholic Church said meat was a good thing to eat,
> and you only don't eat it on fast days when you give it up BECAUSE it's
> a good thing, I imagine there might have been a bit of tension over
> other vegetarians sects too -- though not necessarily as much as with
> these guys, who not only didn't believe in the divinity of Christ but
> even his humanity!
> 
> In the novel (wish I could remember the title!) a newcomer is looked at
> with suspision because she is not eating meat at a meal, and the priest
> especially asks her what is wrong with her dinner, and the whole tone
> is such that this woman (who IS Cathari, but trying to hide it)
> basically has the choice of choking down some flesh and breaking her
> oath, or being branded a heretic and presumably killed for it.  Fun,
> huh?  Sounds like that much might be plausible based on the above
> reference to crusades and inquisitions.
> 
> -- Harriet
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