Free The Grand Inquisitor's Manual by Jonathan Kirsch

ritual of initiation, or at least to refrain from sexual contact with the spouse. And, because marriage was likely to result in procreation, the Cathars did not regard a wedding as a sacred rite to be celebrated within their church. But the enemies of Catharism convinced themselves that the Cathars actually favored extramarital sex, and they were accused of keeping women as concubines rather than sanctified wives and engaging in the sexual free-for-alls that were supposed to take place at the end of the consolamentum ceremony.
    So, too, was the end-of-life ritual called the endura given strange and dire interpretations by the Cathars’ enemies. A dying man or woman might be too sick or too weak to eat or drink, of course, and the ravages of a final illness surely made it easier for the religious true believer to fast until death. But the spiritual self-discipline of a dying Cathar was characterized by Catholic critics as an act of suicide, and it was later suggested that the perfecti who gathered around the bed of a dying Cathar would routinely speed the ritual to its desired end by choking or smothering the helpless man or woman, thus turning the endura into an act of sanctified murder.
    Once set into flight, the imaginations of the inquisitors and the propagandists in their service reached ever greater altitudes of speculation and invention. Although the Cathars claimed to renounce the ownership of property, they were said to possess vast hoards of gold, silver, gemstones, and other treasures. They were even thought to have purloined the most sacred object in Christian tradition; the legendary Holy Grail was supposedly locked away in the secret treasury at the fortress of Montségur, a remote Cathar sanctuary high in the Pyrenees on the frontier between France and Spain. Here is yet another lie that reflects a certain obsession of persecutors across the ages—the notion that one’s enemy has succeeded in amassing a secret fortune by means of deceit and devilry. Indeed, the looting of victims was a favorite technique of the Inquisition and its successors. 42
    All these accusations and speculations are dismissed by modern historians. Principled theologians might even find themselves forced to concede that the Cathars had committed no crime except the one that every person commits in failing to embrace fully every jot and tittle of the dogma prescribed by the religious authorities. But the popes and princes who made war on Catharism were less interested in the fine points of theology than in getting and keeping wealth and power, and they were perfectly willing to make use of a willful lie as a lubricant for the consciences of the crusaders who were called upon to exterminate men, women, and children. Then as now, demonization of the victim is the necessary precondition for genocide.
     
     
    Bernard of Clairvaux, as we have already seen, was sent to save the souls of Christians who had fallen under the influence of the charismatic preacher known as Henry the Monk, and Bernard’s mission was expanded to include the newly detected heresy of Catharism, then only vaguely known as a sect of “weavers and Arians.” When he arrived in Languedoc in 1145, ready to do battle with the minions of the Catharist church, his arsenal consisted only of his own earnest words of persuasion—Bernard’s aim was to win the hearts and minds of errant Christians through preaching and public debate rather than by arrest, torture, and execution. “Heretics are to be caught,” he reasoned, “not by force of arms but by arguments through which their errors may be refuted.” 43
    Bernard himself was a mystic and an ascetic, and he was as unhappy about the excesses of the Church as any of the heretics who were his declared enemies. Like the perfecti of Catharism, Bernard’s physical appearance—his spare diet rendered him pallid and emaciated, and he wore only the simplest of clothing—was the best evidence that he practiced what he preached.