In Our Time - Catharism

Episode Date: January 17, 2002

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the Cathars, a medieval European Christian sect accused of heresy. In 1215 Pope Innocent III called the greatest meeting of Catholic minds for a hundred years. He hoped that the Fourth Lateran Council would represent the crowning glory of a Papacy that was more powerful than ever before, and it laid down decrees to standardise Christian belief across the whole of Western Europe and heal the papal schism of a generation before. But despite the wealth and power of the Vatican, all was not as it should have been in the Catholic world; Jerusalem was lost, the Crusades were failing, and in the regions of Europe the spectre of heresy moved over the land. It loomed largest in the wealthy Languedoc region of Southern France, where celibate vegetarians called Cathars were proving more popular than Jesus. The Pope moved against the Cathars but why was Catharism such a threat, what were its beliefs and what was the intellectual and spiritual climate that made the high middle ages the era of the heretic?With Malcolm Barber, Professor of Medieval History at the University of Reading; Miri Rubin, Professor of Medieval History at Queen Mary, University of London; Euan Cameron, Professor of Modern History at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the program. Hello. In 1215, Pope Innocent III called the greatest meeting of Catholic minds for 100 years. He hoped that the Fourth Lateran Council would represent the crowning glory of a papacy that was more powerful than ever before, and it laid down decreased a standardized Christian belief across the whole of Western Europe, and heal the papal schism of a generation before. But despite the wealth and power of the Vatican, all was not as he thought it should have been in the Catholic world.

Jerusalem had been lost, the Crusades were failing, and in the regions of Europe the spectra of heresy moved over the land. It loomed largest in the wealthy Longadoc region of southern France, where celibate vegetarians called Cathars were proving more popular than Jesus. The Pope moved eventually murderously against the Cathars, But why was Cartharism such a threat? What were its beliefs? And what was the intellectual and spiritual climate

that made the high Middle Ages the era of the heretic? With me to discuss the Cathars and the medieval heresy is Malcolm Barber, Professor of medieval history at the University of Reading. Mary, Professor of European History at Queen Mary, University of London. And Ewan Cameron, Professor of Early Modern History at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Mayor Rubin, can we start with you? Can you set this the scene in medieval Europe?

What's the state of Christianity? I know it's a tall order, but there we go. What's the state of Christianity at the start of the 12th century? Sure. It's probably good to think of the first millennium of European history as one in which there's a transformation of the Roman world, the old Roman Empire around the 4th, 5th century, 400, 500, being transformed through contact with new peoples,

Germanic peoples from the north, people moving in from Asia, into something new, something that ultimately by the year 1000 is more or less recognizably Christian, in which there are regions and territories and languages that we might even identify today. And around the year 1000, a period of enormous transformation to do with wars, to do with movement of populations, seems to be just about stabilized. It's around that time that we find a beginning of population growth, that we find more communication, trade, it becomes safer to move from more.

one end of Europe to another. And it's in that climate that anyone in charge of power, anyone trying to rule territories really feels you can do more than we've striven to do up to now, as it were. And the papacy, the various kings, the various dynasts with claims, be it England or France, or indeed the Holy Roman Empire, are trying to do just that. And in around the Pope and in the empire, there begins a vision, a vision that this Christian Europe could be rather more ambitious that actually all Christians could be put under one great umbrella of a recognizable. So to put it simply perhaps that, you know, from Cambridge to Krakow, the same sort of Christianity might be practiced. And what sort of Christianity was? That's a brilliant summary.

What sort of Christianity was that to be, as it were standardizing it. Now, what did they want to happen? Well, crucial there is the notion that the church is something that is apart. Their slogan was liberty of the church. Now, if the church is going to be a part and be able to control people's lives and marriages and deaths and sex and so on, and indeed king's lives as well and rulership and morality, then it itself has to be sort of exemplary. And therefore, the priesthood has to really transform itself. It has to be rather special. And they hang it all around the notion that the priest is different, is holy, is celibate, is trained. It's like the construction of a sort of Christian bureaucracy. A priest is someone with

special skills that give him special privileges. He conveys the only thing that can help you be saved of human sin, which is grace, which of course came to the world with Christ's crucifixion. And that gift, that treasure of grace, is parceled out only through priests, who are ordained by bishops, who are led by a pope. That is the vision of the sort of strong pyramid of transmission of grace. And how deep did their standardization wish to penetrate? I mean, we're talking about the penetration not only of the organisation of what one might call social in a licence life,

but personal, private, even the most intimate part of life, is going to be controlled, standardised, and looked after by this new bureaucracy of grace, isn't it? Yes, and it's a brilliant design because the notion is that every person, wherever she or he are born, belongs to a parish, that there should be a network of tens of thousands of parishes, wherever Christians live and wherever they come to live, because it's also a period of expansion eastwards into new territories that are conquered and Christianised. It's a very, very strong vision if you could make it work,

if you have the personnel, if you have the cooperation of local lords and kings who allow you to penetrate their territories, as it were. Malcolm Balmer, can you tell us more about the detail of what they wanted to control? I mean, people would be particularly interested in the private data. One isn't seeking to be salacious for anything, but what are they talking about?

may now take for granted in controlling sex, in controlling marriage. Is this new, and what's the driving force to put it on? Is it a force for power, as it were, which Mir Rubin seem to imply, or are we talking about them feeling that at last the inspiration which led them to their calling can have its full expression in a quieting European world? I think really it's a moral force. It's an attempt initially to reform the clergy. as the leaders of society.

And you see this from the 1050s onwards and becoming more and more powerful in the second half of the 11th century. If that's achieved, the next stage is to extend that to the whole of the Christian population, the whole of the laity. So that stage by stage,

the idea would be that there is a massive moral reformation in Christian Europe. So that, as Mary is saying, It is a great vision that they're trying to put into action. But of course, it's not necessarily so easy just to say, you must do this, you must do the other thing. You've got to have a means to do it. You have to have a structure to do it.

And this is where some of the problems start, because in order to have that structure, you start to create legal systems, taxation systems, means of enforcing the ideas that you want to put into action. and inevitably you come into conflict, particularly with political powers who see their own territory being encroached upon. Can I just stay with Michael Rom?

Just to get back to the private things, are we to understand that before this bureaucratization came into full force, people did or did not get married in various ways, but now the church insisted they got married in church with bans being called, it was a sacred public event. Is that not so much new, but is that standardized and enforced at this time? Just take that as an example.

Yes, I think it is beginning to be. I think that it takes longer. I think this is particularly characteristic of clerical leadership, papal leadership over the 12th and 13th centuries. But it is, I think that it's a process of compromise to a degree if you spread Christianity, because you have to take account of, the customs and the attitudes of the people you're trying to convert.

Therefore, for instance, if you take the issue of force, the church has to compromise on that issue. You cannot, if you have a universal church, I think, have a pacifist church. You have to take account of the fact that Germanic peoples you're converting have a war like credo and take account of that when you absorb them. So I think in the early Middle Ages, this is what is happening. what then happens as the papacy develops this great vision is an attempt to standardise that, as you're implying.

But it isn't complete, and it certainly is in the very early stage in the late part of 11th century. Mark Marba, can I ask you one more question for a move on? What kind of variant beliefs did the papacy see against it? I mean, we're talking about a powerful force, which was beginning to say we are more powerful than kings in some way. But let's talk about the heretical beliefs, what they dubbed as heretical?

Were there many? Were they massive? Were they pressing? Most historians would say that there was a reappearance of heresy. From about the year a thousand, there are isolated incidents, probably not connected between about 1,000 and 1050. And again, most historians would argue that there hadn't been a major heresy threatening the church since the Aryan heresy in the late Roman period, which was particularly attractive to some of the barbarian peoples, in particular, the Visigoths. When that died out, the early Middle Ages doesn't seem to be greatly troubled by heresy. But you begin to get signs of it in the first half of the 11th century. Now, this is quite controversial.

A lot of historians will say that is simply reformist. It's not really got a detailed set of ideas behind it. It's many ways finds its origin in anti-clericalism or in dislike of the way that the clergy operate. But there is a school of thought that argues that as early as this point, there are beginning to be signs of the subject that we're going to go on to, which is that of dualism or of catharism. And that's not universally agreed by any means.

You and Cameron, what were the heretical groups giving the people of Europe that the mainstream church wasn't? After 1050 years, I understand it, the heretical groups grew in number and grew in intensity. Can you again, can you just take on from Mark and Barber how that growth happened between 1050 and 1150, that hundred years? And why were they so attractive to people compared with what the church was doing? I would suggest that there is a sort of symmetry between what Mary has described in terms of the growth of, the growth of an organized, structured papal church and the beginnings of the protest movements, rather sort of unpacking some of what Malcolm was saying a few minutes ago.

Because although it goes back to Augustine originally in the 4th century, there is a line of thought in the medieval church which is massively amplified in the 12th century, which says, the church is the repository and the channel of grace, and that if you as a member of the church perform the right ritual acts, according to the law of the church, in encounter with a correctly ordained priest who is performing the right ceremonies with the right intention, then the grace of God will infallibly flow from God through the structures of the church into your soul,

and your soul will, as it were, make its way on its progress towards eventual salvation. Now, the key challenge, if you like, I would say, to lay credulity is to say, what matters is the ceremonial correctness, not the visible, palpable holiness of the vehicle, of the channel. That's difficult. The tap doesn't need to be clean as long as the water's clean, if you see what I mean. Now, the reason why a lot of people would trace the beginnings of dissent to anti-clerical. as Malcolm's quite rightly pointed out, is that once you start saying, it doesn't matter if the priest at the altar

was sleeping with his housekeeper last night, so long as he's wearing the right vestments and saying the right words and is correctly ordained, you can be sure that your baby will be genuinely baptized, you can be sure that the communion which you receive at Easter will be a valid communion. Now, there are some people who find that very hard to grasp and who irresistibly tend to feel,

No, hang on, surely an unholy person cannot handle, cannot dispense holy things. And so there is a quest for a more immediately tangible kind of holiness, which finds its expression in anti-clericalism, which is quite lawful within Christianity, to say we don't approve of priests who live badly. But when it slips over into something more than anti-clericalism, it says a bad priest cannot. lawfully cannot genuinely pass on what is holy. A final question in this round before we move on.

Can you tell me, did the heretics at the time think of themselves as heretics? Almost certainly not. The overwhelming evidence suggests that they thought of themselves as good Christians who were trying to undo the sins of the priests or to make up for the deficiencies of the priests. and in the very, very few fragmentary writings that we actually have from them, you get this sort of statement. The clergy are not good enough, they're not doing their job,

so we're going to move in and do it for them. And they would have argued that their ideals and their objectives are ultimately those of the true church. So the heretics would then think of themselves as the true church in that particular context 800 years ago. Yes. Yeah, 800 years ago. Fine, let's talk about the Cathar heresy.

Mir Rubin, the Cathar communities were concentrated it broaded on the northern shore of the Mediterranean. Why were they there, do you think, and why did they come to be such an intelligent and powerful and pervasive influential force? That is indeed the area of most of the effort of inquisition in southern France, northern Italy and so on, was concentrated, but there are sizable communities that are very identifiably

what we'll call here today, Cathar, in northern France as well, in Cologne, in other parts. And I think, again, it connects to the sort of phenomena we spotted already of much greater movement, much greater communication over vast areas of Europe in the 11th and 12th centuries. So you have settlements of sort of Latins in Constantinople in the 12th century, for example, who are meeting Greek blends, Greek modes of thinking, thinking dualistically or in orthodox fashion. So there's a great amount of coming and going between regions that had not met, say, in the 9th century. as easily, and thus a flow of ideas that had indeed coalesced and concentrated in the Balkans

and in the Eastern Greek Byzantine Empire. That is one way in which this is possible. Another route of communication, perhaps to this northern literal of the Mediterranean, is through the fact that a lot of southern Italy was still ruled by the Byzantine Empire in the 11th century. So I suppose the thing to emphasize here, these new or renewed ideas are partly to do with a sort of multicultural Europe that we're finding that is in touch with parts it would not have met, say, in the 8th or 9th century, simply because of the development of crusades, travel, merchant activity and so on.

Can you give us an overview of what the beliefs of Kathars were? Ah, that's a very tall order because the fundamental problem, I'm sure everyone here would like to acknowledge, is that so much of what we know about them is from terrifically rich archives, but archives that are left by the people who persecuted them, wanted to uproot them, wanted to vilify their beliefs, or indeed those, let's say, who were not part of the Inquisition, but were part of the intellectual effort to write polemical tracts and writings against them. That is such a fundamental problem.

And the problem is twofold. First of all, there's, in a lot of them, there's an enormous lack of sympathy, and they're vilified as what you already said, heretics. But there's another thing, and that's a problem there. that in a way their beliefs are perhaps made to seem more systematic, more coherent, more theology-like by those who are trying to contend with them point by point. So if a cathar is investigated and there's a list of questions that the Inquisitor will put to that cathar

one by one about all areas of belief, then and that cathar gives an answer or that suspect gives an answer, it seems as if that person holds systematically every one of those beliefs. There's a basic method about learning about them. Nevertheless, we have to generalise. I would like you or somebody else to give me an overview. The listeners are with bated breath. They want to know what the Cathars, which is the centre of this program, what the Cathar heresy came from, what these people,

this great number of people believed in why they had a Cold Crusade had to be launched against them. We must be able to get something even from the annals of the defeated. So what did they stand for? We call it dualism. That is the belief that the world is not true. just made by one good God who spreads his goodness by various means. Jews believe in one way, Christians through grace that we've mentioned already. But rather, the world is fundamentally in a sort of state of struggle between good forces and bad forces.

Good God, a bad God. And that you as an individual have to choose on whose side you will be. How will your life contribute to that ongoing struggle? by living the material life associated with the bad principle and which the Catholic Church represents and forces and all its sacraments and all its rituals that you and already mentioned present to you? Or will you identify with the rule, with the possible rule and a possible victory of the spiritual element of the good God, which is harder to see, harder to encounter,

but which you may through the mediation of charismatic people who have chosen to show you the way, which Cathar is called perfect, their sort of charismatic leadership, and thus you will try in your life in a little way as much as you can to distance yourself from the material passing, failing, and associate yourself with the good. The problem is how to explain the palpable evils of the world, babies dying, horrible, horrible calamities.

Can that be made by a good God? So if you have the other principle there, It relieves your God. It relieves you from the need to associate God with all sorts of appalling, suffering, putrefaction and disaster. Did that lead, Malcolm Barber, did that lead to the, as I understand it? Are we talking about people who were vegetarians? We're talking about people who wouldn't eat anything that came out of sexual congruence.

We're talking about people who were supposed to have magnetic preachers and so on and so forth. We talk about people who wanted to be celibate. I think all those things that I've read should be brought into the equation. If I'm wrong, you will tell me. What do you think that the nub of the philosophy was, which Mirri has explained very well in its sort of background, and it's an approving nature. Why was it so abhorrent to the papacy?

To the then-papacy. Well, I think we can sort of amplify what Miri is saying by pointing to the fact that there are two really important strands here. One is called mitigated or moderate dualism. And this is essentially derivative. The argument is that the evil principle, the figure that comes to be called Satan, is actually part of the heavenly kingdom, rebels, takes with him after the rebellion various souls who have been involved with that rebellion, and created the material world from the four elements that the good God had actually established.

established. That's one view, and you can see that has some similarities to the Christian version of the fall, and is not perhaps such a problem for the church as the second strand, which is called absolute dualism, which postulates two quite separate co-eternal deities without beginning, without end, one of which is good, is lord of the invisible and the timeless, one of which is bad, is lord of things that corruptible and transitory. So if you are a pope and you're looking at this and you're trying to protect the possibilities of salvation for the Christian populace, you're bound to be horrified by an idea that suggests that the material world

is entirely evil and entirely created by this evil being. Because as I understand it, that would include the notion that Christ, Jesus Christ, could not have been incarnate as a man, because being a man who would be material, he would be material, he would become out of the creation of the devil, and therefore be evil. Some Cathars certainly would argue that the story of Christ become man, living a life in a proper human body, being crucified and resurrected, could not possibly have happened.

They say it's an appalling thought that he was in a womb, a woman's body, most abhorrent of all. It's just absolutely appalling. And they've just worked so hard on developing the theology of marriage for Christians, as we said earlier, all of a sudden, marriage, marriage is just a plot to justify sex and in fornication. So, I mean, the church is working hard on these mediations through visible signs, and the cathars reject that totally. I still haven't got, I don't think we've got quite the picture of the cathars we want before we launch the crusade against them.

You and Cameron, I'm just going to. on what they dress in white, they're magnetic preachers, they have a certain pastoral responsibilities, rather like the cults really, but they don't, that's not, and so on. Just, let's find a bit more about the Cathars before we turn against them. Yes, excuse me, the key to the Cathar lifestyle was a small elite class,

which, according to one writer in 1250, although that was possibly in a period of gradual decadence, he estimated there were no more than 4,000 cathars across the whole of Christendom from the Black Sea to the Atlantic. And these people, whom Mary has referred to as the perfect, who are in the Longadoc are called the Good Men or Good Women, these people were those who had voluntarily taken upon themselves to rise above the world of matter as far as possible.

So they would not marry or engage in sexual intercourse. They would not eat food, as you mentioned, which was, as they saw it, born of sexual activity. So interestingly, that left fish as okay because they lived in water, and so they weren't part of this airborne world. And they would practice regular ritual prayer, regular self-examination and discipline. And they were thereby, as they saw it, raising themselves. above the level of the world of matter. Now, for the majority of people

whom the good men and good women lived amongst, these were the, if you like, the mediators of the holy. And the ordinary population of the areas would show respect to the good men by certain forms of ritual obeisance. They would genuflect to them, ask to be blessed by them, and most ordinary people would expect, or hope, if they adhered to Cathar beliefs,

that just before their death, they would be received into the class of the elite and thereby be able to be saved. The principle of Cathar belief, which is radically opposed to the pastoral principle of the Catholic Church, is that only those who have risen above the level of the material world by the ritual called consoling, consolamentum,

can actually attain salvation, as opposed, of course, to the church, which says that only those who receive the physical sacraments of grace, embodied horror of horrors in material things like water, bread, wine, can be saved. There is an attraction here, because if the imprisoned souls

receive the consulamentum, they can return to their guiding spirits in the heavenly realm. And therefore, there is no point in doing, the sort of things that Catholics would have done, which is to say prayers for the dead, for instance, because that was irrelevant. If, on the other hand, the person dies without having received a consulamentum, the soul transmigrates into another body, another material being until such

time as that being receives a consulamentum. Right. Now, the Pope, in this and the third, tries to persuade them and he's unsuccessful, persuade them not to come, as it were, over to his side. But in 12.09, he launches a crusade, a massive crusade, Albujancian crusade. How does that start, Mirroo? The thing to remember is that really the efforts against them really begin about 30 years earlier already, various popes recommending the bishops,

whose job it is in any case to persecute heretics. But that didn't work, so they launched a crusade. That doesn't work, yes. Well, I mean, this is. something extraordinary, really. It's the bringing together of ecclesiastical power with physical power, and where can you turn to the Pope famously does not have tanks or cohorts. You have to turn to some sort of political entity that would be interested in supporting this effort. I mean, it begins by very, very concentrated efforts in the Lange Dock of absolute, you know, intensive preaching and literally sending in... I know that. We haven't time for that. Let's go for a crusade.

Yes. They tried a lot of preaching. 30 years didn't work. They launched a crusade. How did it start? Well, he is already. He has a crusading rhetoric ready because he's already been involved in crusades and he will be involved in future crusades. And the thing is to mobilize who is willing to go and do this and in the name of what.

And he puts together an extraordinary coalition. There are local enthusiasts that is local lords who see themselves locally as Catholics who want to join the fight in order to purify their own region. course, to gain politically. There are enthusiasts who come from France, as it were, from the North, which speaks to different languages, is really a different country. And ultimately, he's going to mobilize the King of France himself to give support. And Malcolm has written wonderfully about all of this. This is a coming together of a holy new coalition. But there is already the sort of precedent of allowed papal violent, papal-led violence, as you said earlier, there are crusades already, three, four crusades already that have taken place.

It's fair to argue, of course, that the outbreak of the Albigensian Crusade is sometimes credited to an accident, which was the murder by personal persons unknown, of one of the Pope's legates. And it's striking how suddenly the whole thing rolls into action after the murder of Pia de Castellé. Well, like the First World War, ready to happen, and murder triggered it. You can compare it almost, really, with the Beckett murder, but it never got to be so popular, as you might say,

Beckett there develops a cult. An attempt is made to develop a cult around Pierre de Castellan, who is murdered by a vassal of the Count of Toulouse, but not on the count of Toulouse's order. So there's a sort of similarity between Henry II and Beckett and this, but it never catches on in that way. It certainly stimulates the forces of the North. So the Crusades, they sail south, or they don't sail, they might south, obviously. I'm in a few bit excuse me. And it begins and continues in a quite brutal way, doesn't it? it. They besiege Bezié, as I understand it, and take it. And when they move into the city, somebody is reported to have said, you're all going to correct me. How do I tell a Kathar? And their answer is, kill them all, God will know his own. Yeah, this is a very interesting little story. It isn't contemporary. It comes from a man called Caesarius of Heistaback, who is a Cistercian, who is using this. as an exemplum in teaching novices. And in the original source, it says that Arnold Amory, the papal negative, supposed to have said this.

The phrase he uses, is said to have said. But you never see that in the books because that waters it down too much. It sounds too much like hearsay. Most historians wouldn't accept that that had actually happened, though some do. But most historians would accept that the taking embezzarion, was particularly, it was brutal.

Was brutal, yes. Absolutely. I've just like to go into, because we're talking, as you have given us an idea of the Cathars as being, on the whole, comparatively for the time, harmless, practicing a form of Christianity, which, though it was had theological, could, to which one could bring theological objection, wasn't kind of hurting anybody, it was still such Christianity. and yet this brutality, can we just give the listener some idea of the strength of that brutality? Well, the massacre at Bezier, which we've already discussed, is startling because of the fact that a town with a population of roughly 15,000 has within it, I think in your book it says Malcolm, there's an estimate of perhaps 200 heads of household who were actually associated in heresy. 700 people, yes. So one in 20 of the population roughly had any of the population roughly had any of the,

to do with heresy, and yet there is this enormous savagery applied to it. The use of force against heresy is always an incredibly blunt instrument, unless you're dealing with a movement which is incredibly nucleated in very small areas, which catharism wasn't. The problem was that there was a much, much larger, outer ring of people in the Longadoc, some of the nobility, some of the particularly what you might call the gentry, the lords of small towns, who sympathised with or who saw the cathar good men as being holy people, who had a sort of moral sympathy, even though they might not agree with or might not even know

the theological errors that were attributed to the cathars. So at local level it was very difficult for the church to deal with these people because the local nobility just saw them as devout ascetics, very much as you described as harmless, pious, very morally disciplined people, perhaps even more disciplined than the clergy. And so the church, by calling in people from the north, invokes a sort of cultural alien hostility, and the crusade spirals, it could be argued,

into a sort of longaday versus longadoc cultural warfare, of which the cathars are the occasion, but they're not the exclusive targets. Could you take that on, Mary Roman? and I know you feel rather squeamish about this, but I think we owe it to people to say what the ferocity of this particular European crusade was at that time. Oh, absolutely.

I'm with you in acknowledging how appalling it was, only, I suppose, just to add that there was also just the grinding routine cruelty, also of an inquisition at work after the crusade and before the crusade, well, interrogations before the crusade. But during the crusades, what's also very striking is that it's the very structure or non-structure, of catharism that in a way could also give a rationale and justification to these ferocious knights from the north because so few were perfects but so many other people supported and

sympathized with them and all these people who are believers or adherence of catharism there was a truth to be said that in a city like baizee there were perhaps only a few hundreds of identified full-time cathars but probably a lot of sympathizers so if you think of heresy as something contagious and that anyone supporting or harboring, it's not a bit like with criminals, anyone harboring a criminal is punished like a criminal, and that is what has done in the day, then anyone vaguely sympathising,

if this city has not produced them, denounced them up to now, it is clearly a sympathising city. And in that sense, it gives you the sort of justification of going for a whole community rather than very, very carefully rooting out households. Well, like the Simon de Montfort, the father of, as it were, as Simon de Montfort, they continued, of course, very brutally from city to city to city,

and then brought in, or the Dominicans instigated the Inquisition there. Can we talk about those two things? You and you were coming in. What was occurring to me while Mary was speaking was that one of the reasons for the crudity and blunt nature of crusade was the fact that between 129 and 1229, when the bulk of the fighting in the Alphagency and Crusade took place. It's a long time, isn't it, 20 years?

It is a very long time, yes, punctuated by the fact that it ebbs and flows, depending upon... The Crusader's only served for 40 days, and the attitude of the Counts of Toulouse kept changing. Sometimes they're taking the cross, sometimes they're opposing it, and so it, as I say, it ebbs and flows. The structured procedures for investigating people as individuals and ascertaining their beliefs and dealing with them systematically did not really exist in a legally complete full. form until the 1230s. By that point, with discipline created, with friars in large numbers around in the area who could examine people from a position of literacy in heresy and having a book of techniques and a book of rules as to how they could interrogate, from that point you could start to deal with people individually, sift out the ones who were really

committed from the ones who were just casual fellow travellers. But before that point, just don't have these techniques. You can see that what's, what the implication of this is, that despite the 20 years of warfare, catharism still existed afterwards. Otherwise, it wouldn't have been necessary to develop these inquisitors to investigate. What the crusade does do is change the general environment.

No longer is it so easy for the perfectity to find sympathetic lords who will give them protection, places where they can travel in safety. they're now being pushed into a situation where it's more difficult to sustain belief, more difficult to develop their ideas in a coherent way and so on. So I think the Inquisition or the Inquisitors, I think Inquisition is probably the wrong word. Inquisitors is probably better. The Inquisitors are faced with an existing catharism,

but one in which they're operating in a better environment because the environment is more favourable to Orthodoxy than it had been before. Almost as a digress, why was an unordained charismatic preacher like Francis, who became St Francis, whose views were very like the Cathars? Why was he not only tolerated but embraced, whereas they were burnt at stake and blinded and the things that we're touching on very likely? That's a terrifically good question. A wonderful example as to where church thinking is at the time.

Because when he starts, this Italian guy from a really well-offer, family well-educated, decides to give it all up, walk around barefoot, you know, charitimately, preaching the conversion of souls and so on, and in abject poverty and literally owning absolutely nothing. And lots of other guys are giving up what they have and joining him and so on. This could be an absolute pain. But the main thing is he never rejected the clergy. You may say that by his example of poverty, he rather showed up well-off clergy or bishops or popes who lived well. But Innocent III, and that's where his brilliance is,

he saw this guy is so charismatic. Let's have him on our side. Let's have people like that doing the work of converting souls and showing how to live a good Christian life. There are other examples of the same phenomenon in Innocent the Third's technique. Slightly before Francis comes on the scene, Innocent manages, through his representatives in Longadoc

to buy over someone who had been an anti-cloth heretic, a man called Durand de Vosca, who was a Waldensian heretic. He had gone as far as you could in anti-clericalism, saying very much, as I said at the beginning of the program, the priests aren't doing their job, the priests are illiterate, they're not preaching against heresy. So I'm going to write a treatise against the Cathars. And he produces a very substantial piece of writing, explaining why catharism is wrong and giving point-by-point advice on how you preach against it. time he is not within the Catholic communion, but round

about 127, 128, innocent buys him over and actually brings him and a lot of his followers into the church and then defends them against the great hostility of the Archbishop of Naban and all the other people in the region who are deeply suspicious of this man who's still going around wearing sandals

which have cut little holes in to pretend to be like the apostles and he is kept within the fold and his energies and his intellectual ability are deployed, and he writes more anti-Cathar works in the 20s. The first time I've ever connected Sandals with the apostles, it's quite interesting.

No, seriously, it's quite interesting. Can we just go back to St Francis, because there's something absolutely key here. It's not just that he lives this life that looks rather similar to the Cathar, perfecting. He is profoundly anti-Cathar. He believes in the wonder of God's creation. And these little stories, semi-legendary stories,

about in preaching to the birds, for instance, are meant to underline that point. So this is an absolutely fundamental difference, which we do need to stress. It's not just a matter of living an ascetic life. Given that there's about 4,000 of that, and we've got massive more questions here, but you've been so intriguing.

I am really, it's been fascinating, but we've got a few. Given that there were only 4,000 of them, given that, you know, the Pope with all his powers, he didn't have, you know, battalions in the Vatican, but he could call them up through everything down, a big crusade, they're hammering away. It takes us 20 years of crusades

and inquisitors who then became the Inquisition, started up to hammer away at them. Their influence went on. The Lutherans claimed them as ancestors. They still remain, if you go down the Longadoc today, they're the Cathar. What was so, I'm afraid you'd have to be brief here, Malcolm. What was so tenacious about Catholicism

that made it so hard to crack? I think it tries to. to face a fundamental problem. Even as small children, one asks, one asks one's parents, why, if you come from a family which you brought up in a religious way, you might ask, well, why, if there's a good God, why does he allow these terrible things to happen? Why are the disasters in the world and so on?

You never get a satisfactory answer to this. And so I think it is a fundamental issue, and that's why Catholicism is in some sense as a reappearance of different forms of dualism that you see right throughout the ages. So I think it's a fundamental issue, that's why.

So you're talking actually... It's so persistent. Tenacity is because it's a war of ideas. You and Cameron, would you agree with that? I would partly agree with it in the sense that the question of why is the reval in the world is perennial and the instinct

that spirit is pure and good and holy and matter is corruptible and base and bad. That's a very long-standing thing within Christian thought, though it is prone to lead into unorthodox ways of thinking. But there's a sort of impulsion in human nature that says that which is above and beyond the material that we can see and feel is somehow more holy, more eternal. However, one could also argue that the tendency to disbelieve in the ceremonial ritual, holiness of the medieval church was always there. As long as Christianity continued to talk about a God-made man and a body, it'll be difficult for people to accept.

And that a clergy can save you would always be a difficult concept to accept. And throughout the Middle Ages, there are people resisting this idea that the ceremonially pure clergy must always be right. Well, thank you all very much indeed. I really enjoyed that. Thanks for me, Rubin, you and Cameron, Malcolm Barth. Next week we're going to be talking about happiness with the philosophers Anjee Hobbes, Simon Blackburn and Anthony Grayley. Thanks for listening.

We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.uk forward slash radio 4.