I nodded my head demurely.
‘Now, if I may continue,’ he cleared his throat. ‘Plato tells us that a man cannot be good, for that is a privilege of the gods, and that he cannot be evil for those same reasons. He can become evil or good, but he therefore cannot be evil or good.’
‘Well, if man can be neither good nor evil, what is left to him?’
‘The middle state which, Plato says, is preferable to either. Perhaps it is the natural function of man to seek the middle way and this is the cause of heresy.’
‘But tell me, master, for I become more and more confused, what makes the Cathars different from the Waldensians, and the Waldensians from the Spiritualists who seem to be so similar to the Franciscans?’
‘It is all a matter of how far they have wandered from the middle way. Cathars, my boy, believe in a Manichean ideal of evil which rests on the belief that everything created in the material world – including man himself – is the work of the evil God. They deny the cross, for they do not believe Christ died upon it and they do not believe in the sacrament as it is given in the Roman church. St Augustine confesses to having been a Manichean before he was converted.’
‘And what of the others like the Waldensians?’ I pressed.
‘The Waldensians do not seek doctrine outside the church, but their downfall rests in that they abhor wealth, believing it to be sinful, condemning rich bishops and priests of being corrupt and so not worthy to give the sacrament. A pious ideal when applied with temperance, but a terrible weapon in the hands of the poor and hungry, or those of extreme propensity whose violence leads to murder and plunder. These sects then become, after a time, like old encumbered trees whose branches are laden with fruit, whose seeds cause new trees to grow . . . perhaps birds carry the seeds a very long way from their place of origin . . . and thus, when they are carried to many diverse places, the trees they generate are different, because they are influenced by this or that; climate, soil, etc so that they become almost unrecognisable. This makes it exceedingly difficult for the church, as you can imagine, for her captains are constantly facing new strains of the old heresies.’
‘So what can be done?’
‘Not too much. Here in Languedoc we see that even when the rivers are awash with blood it is impossible to stem the tide of dissent because it is characteristic of the human spirit that it is infinitely resilient. You may quash a movement here and before too long new movements linked with the old can be seen springing up there. Like those seeds we spoke of earlier, having become estranged from the mother tree, they develop independently, and often in confusion, for they consist of members that had perhaps belonged to the Cathars or the Waldensians, or Bogomils from the ordo Bulgariae elsewhere. Often these men bring with them no subtlety of doctrine, only simple moralistic ideals. The accidents of one then are attributed to the other, and they are seen as one and the same, though initially in principle they were very different. It is a being that comes to life through a mixture of elements.’
‘So you are saying that it makes no difference what heresy it is because they eventually intertwine, and so all must be equally punished?’
‘No, that is not it.’
‘But ...’
‘No, because what a man confesses when persuaded with a hot iron, my boy, may far exceed the extent of his sin. One can never be certain that one hears the truth under torture.’
‘But why lie? How could one confess to terrible crimes if they are not true?’ I asked because I did not know, at that tender age, that the flesh is weaker than the spirit.
My master shook his head in dismay, and at that moment he looked more like a Saracen than a Christian. ‘Firstly, we are not all born to endure a martyred end, my boy, otherwise we would all be saints! When one is tortured – and we must remember with what zeal an inquisitor pursues his victim – one will often confess to anything in order to die and in order to escape pain and humiliation. A person will often confess to the most remarkable things. Theres is also a strange phenomenon, something not explained by medicine or science that occurs between an inquisitor and his captive. An unnatural, unholy bond that sees the accused confessing to greater and greater sins in order to please the inquisitor. After a time even the accused believes his lies. It is a terrible thing.’
‘And yet,’ I retorted, ‘if a person confesses to having committed a sin that he did not in truth commit he is then compounding that sin with an even greater one!’
‘You say these things, Christian, because when one is young, one believes very simply, as you have said before, in black and white, right and wrong, good and evil, but just as nature adorns herself in manifold colours, so, too, are there various shades of virtue, as there are various shades of depravity.’