In truth, in that far off future in which you live, our faith will not be understood, since only the interpretations of our enemies will have survived and so, I beg your indulgence, for I will sing to you a little of the tenets of our beliefs, and how at Pamiers, in civilised debates, we explained our doctrine to the representatives of the Roman Church.
In those days, sitting beside Esclarmonde de Foix (that great lady perfecta) I listened as Guilhabert told the Catholics how Satan had created the world and all its creatures, including man. I smiled to myself to see their faces as he explained, with unequalled equanimity, that a Son of God could not, therefore, have entered such a world to live in the corruptible body of Jesus. I held my head high as he pointed out to them that this meant three things: that Christ, a God, could not have died on the cross; that Jesus’ body of corruption could not have been resurrected; and that his mother, being only a woman, could not be called the Mother of God.
The Romans were aghast and incensed, for these tenets formed the very foundation of their faith!
As far as I could then see, the entire argument revolved around the difference between two words – similar and same. We Cathars believed Jesus was only similar to Christ – while the Romans believed Jesus was the same as Christ.
That is one reason why the Romans feared the Cathar Church and persecuted it, but there is yet another, a ritual called Consolamentum.
The Romans believe this ritual to be evil because alongside the arguments of similar and same, came the arguments of through and from – which began in the 3rd century, and concerned the origins of the Holy Spirit, whom we call the Consoler. I will not dwell on these arguments for they were many and varied, but I will tell only as much as can help you to understand how they have led to our present troubles.
Some time ago the Roman Church decreed that a man could not have a spirit at all – despite the assertion that the man Jesus had become one with the spirit of Christ! Since then, any man who dares speak of a human spirit is threatened with excommunication and is pronounced to be ‘anathema’ which means, cursed by God. Our faith, on the other hand, argued that the spirit can be conferred on any man by way of the laying on of hands – this, despite our assertion that Christ’s spirit could not have entered into a man’s corruptible body!
Do you see how subtly, imperceptibly, each side has fallen into error? Each forming from out of the small and intricate contradictions of the past an erroneous foundation for new and more confusing contradictions in the present, until no man in the future will know if the ground he stands upon will collapse into an abyss!
Oh my! The foolishness of knowledgeable men! And I should know, for the Lord God has given us each a weakness and the foremost of my many weaknesses is that I have always considered myself a man of learning! Yes…I may have sacrificed the love of a woman, marriage and children, meat and eggs and milk, and a wondrous life singing songs like my friend Matteu, but until recently I had not, God forgive me, sacrificed my thirst for knowledge. In truth, night after night I had dreamt of a great library that expanded to infinity and in which there were not a thousand manuscripts but one great book; a book that held the answers to all questions of religion – a book that could prove to the world the veracity of the one true faith: ours of course!
What a pleasant dream! But I was speaking of the debates and how the years passed. Yes, each side could not convince the other and this eternal round of argument continued until one fateful night, near forty years ago, when a papal legate was murdered. That is how ill begets ill, for such a crime gave Pope Innocent, a cannon lawyer before he took up the keys of Peter, the pretext he needed to convince the French King of the lawfulness of a Crusade against us.
Fight the heretics and rob them of their lands and their goods! Those who take up arms against these plague-ridden un-believers will be granted heaven by God!
Ah but the men of the south are proud! They would not be cowered and took our part and have defended us ever since; paying for their loyalty with the slaughter of their citizens, the sieges of their castles and the burning of their friends and relatives – God bless them. That is why a small part of me cannot blame the vassals of Pierre Roger for killing those inquisitors at Avignonet, even though it has set me upon this path, which you shall soon know, for you see, now that I have an understanding of everything, I realise that it could have been no different, and to illustrate this, I will sing of the night I met Lea.
It was midnight and all was quiet after a day where nothing was heard save the pounding of shots from below and the shouts of the soldiers from the parapets. Seeking solace, I came again to the meeting room situated at the top of a long set of circular stairs in the keep. It was my custom to come here on sleepless nights so as to read from the contents of our sizeable library. Here, I could read not only the precious writings of the fathers of our church, but also a number of ancient texts brought over from Syria and other far off places. This night, mindful of Guilhabert’s request, I was engaged in copying the Apocalypse (that part which speaks of the woman standing on the moon with the sun in her belly and the stars crowning her head) onto some parchments that I had prepared, when I heard a noise, no more than a whisper of a sound.