Very few Cathar tracts have come down to us. Most of the surviving works come from Italy, where literacy levels were generally higher than in the Languedoc, and where the controversy between various Cathar factions encouraged polemicism. Moreover, Italy’s geographical closeness to the Balkans meant that books arriving from the east, such as the Bogomil Secret Supper and The Vision of Isaiah, would generally first appear in the west on the Italian peninsula. These two works were known in the west by the end of the twelfth century. The Secret Supper elucidates the Bogomil/Cathar creation myth, in which Satan is cast out of heaven for wishing to be greater than God. Satan pretended to repent, at which God forgave him and let him do what he wanted. With his new-found freedom, Satan created the world of matter, and formed human beings from the primordial clay. Each soul was a trapped angel from heaven. Satan then convinced humanity that he was the one true god, an action which caused the real god to send Christ — a spirit who entered Mary through her ear — in order to alert humanity to the ways of the devil and to announce the existence of the true god. TheVision of Isaiah was accepted by both the moderate and absolute schools, as it ‘showed a material world and a firmament riven by the battle between Satanic and Godly forces.’94
The most important surviving Cathar tract is The Book of the Two Principles, which was written in the 1240s, probably by John of Lugio, a Cathar from the Albanensian95 school, which was part of the absolutist church of Desenzano. It is ‘the most decisive evidence that the Cathars were evolving their own ideas about the nature of Dualism’,96 and were not content simply to recycle Bogomil material. The Book of the Two Principles is a sustained polemic against the moderate school, whom the author regards as almost no better than Catholics (who also come in for attack during the course of the argument). The work makes a case for there being two coeternal principles of good and evil, each of which created their own spheres — heaven and the material world respectively. The true god cannot be the author of evil. The verse in the Gospel of John which states ‘All things were made by it [the Word of God], and without it, was made nothing’97 was interpreted as meaning that ‘nothing’ — i. e., the material world — was made by Satan. The true world was the domain of the real creator god, which was not a world of matter, but a higher world that obeyed its own laws.
Also extant is a very late tract — possibly from the third quarter of the fourteenth century — called TheVindication of the Church of God. It presents the Cathars ‘as a persecuted and martyred church, suffering before the appearance of the Antichrist and the Last Judgment.’98 It states that ‘this Church of God has received such power from our Lord Jesus Christ that sins are pardoned by its prayer’, that ‘this Church refrains from adultery’, that ‘this Church refrains from theft’, concluding that ‘this Church keeps and observes all the commandments of the law of life’, in sharp contrast to ‘the wicked Roman Church’.99
World History
