Free The Grand Inquisitor's Manual by Jonathan Kirsch Page A

Moreover, like the gnostics of Orléans who declared that they regarded the scriptures as nothing more than “the fictions of carnal men, scribbled on animal skins,” Bernard was willing to entertain the subversive notion that words written on parchment were not the only or even the best resource for achieving spiritual enlightenment. “You will find something much greater in the woods than in books,” he wrote. “The woods and stones will teach you what you cannot learn from other masters.” 44
    The roots of the Inquisition, in fact, can be traced back to the otherwise benign missionary work of friar-preachers who, with nothing more than their own ardent words, sought to persuade their fellow Christians to correct their errors and return to the Church. Like Bernard himself, other cloistered monks of the Cistercian order were released from their cells and sent into the world to preach against the heretics. By the opening decade of the thirteenth century, the newly chartered Franciscans and Dominicans, too, were charged by the pope to “go humbly in search of heretics and lead them out of error,” according to a papal bull of 1206. By way of shining example, Domingo (Dominic) Guzmán himself, founder of the Dominican order, once argued with an errant innkeeper in Toulouse from sundown to sunrise before finally winning him back to the Church, and he later established a safe house for the women and children whom he succeeded in spiriting away from the Cathars. 45
    The willingness of the Church to fight a war of words led to a few scenes that are strange indeed when viewed in the light of what we know now about the Inquisition. Catholic monks engaged in public disputations with the perfecti of the Catharist church, including one well-advertised debate at which the audience included such luminaries as the archbishop of Narbonne, the viscount of Béziers, and the countess of Toulouse, who happened to be the sister of the king of France. Remarkably, the defenders of the Roman Catholic church were willing to fight according to rules set by the Catharists; since the Cathars rejected the authority of the Hebrew Bible and regarded only the Gospels (and especially the Gospel of John) as holy writ, the Catholic debaters agreed to confine themselves to the New Testament.
    The Catharists were not so deferential, or so we are told by the Catholic chroniclers, and they appeared to be utterly fearless in confronting their adversaries. The Catholic clergy “were not bishops and priests,” the Catharists are shown to say in the medieval transcripts of these great debates, “but ravening wolves, hypocrites and seducers, lovers of salutations in the market place, desirous of being called rabbis and masters contrary to the command of Christ, wearers of albs and gleaming raiment, displaying bejeweled gold rings on their fingers, which their Master Jesus did not command.” Crossing oneself, according to one Cathar preacher, “was only good for batting away flies.” And the notion that bread and wine were changed into the body and blood of Jesus Christ in the rite of Communion—the cherished Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation—struck the Cathars as both impious and ludicrous, since the communicants would “have God in their bowels, a God who would inevitably be expelled from the body on their next visit to the water closet.” 46
    The debaters, Catholic and Catharist alike, discovered that words alone are rarely enough to change the mind of a true believer. The Church, in any case, was not willing to suffer such taunts and insults for long. Preachers and propagandists began to escalate their rhetoric against the Catharists, and Pope Innocent III eventually declared open war on the dissident Christians whom he condemned as “filth”—a term of abuse previously reserved only for the Muslims who faced the crusaders on the fighting fronts in the Holy Land. Ominously, the dissidents whom Saint Bernard proposed to take “by force of