But O’Shea is not very interested in the nuances of Cathar doctrine, preferring instead to focus on the Crusades (launched under Pope Innocent III), which sought to bring the Cathars to heel in the early 13th century. Christ, in their view, was not really resurrected, and they renounced marriage and the other sacraments, as well as the resurrection of the dead, hell, and purgatory.
Centered largely in the south of France, the Cathars, like the Manicheans, believed in a strict duality between good and evil, and they rejected the body and the material world as bad. Full of colorful and passionate personalities, his latest book sheds new light on the thirteenth century and on the timelessness of religious intolerance.O’Shea’s ( Back to the Front, 1997) tendentious study of medieval France.ĭon’t expect to learn much about the beliefs of the Cathars (the 12th- and 13th-century heretics who argued that the Church should be more like the early, primitive Christians) here. As he did in his highly praised Back to the Front, Stephen O’Shea brings long-ago events to life though the energy of his prose and the clarity of his insight. By the time the wars were finally over, the ancient social fabric of the Languedoc had been destroyed, the territory of France reached as far as the Mediterranean, and a terrifying new force-the Inquisition-had been unleashed that would torment Europe for centuries.The Perfect Heresy eloquently chronicles the life and death of the Cathar movement-one of Western civilization’s most mind-boggling tales.
He recruited the forces of France, eager to expand her territory to the south, to undertake a systematic extermination of the Cathars and their supporters through a series of crusades between 12. Innocent resolved to eradicate what is now known as the Great Heresy.
The Cathars held revolutionary beliefs that threatened the authority of the Catholic Church as well as the legitimacy of feudal law: They thought the idea of Hell to be a sham they rejected all sacraments, including marriage they thought private property an absurd notion and that all things worldly were corrupt and they preached religious tolerance and equality of the sexes.Supported by the leaders of Languedoc, Catharism enraged the new and formidable pope, Innocent III, who was determined to flex the Church’s muscle after decades of ineffectual weakness. The Revolutionary Life and Death of the Medieval CatharsAt the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Cathars, a group of heretical Christians, rose to prominence in Languedoc, now a region of southern France, but then a patchwork of city-states and principalities beholden to neither king nor bishop.
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