Digital Continent Digital Continent Easter 2017 | Page 15

things, including the world and all that is in it, particularly man except for his soul.” 18 The
Cathars did not believe in the holy Trinity, they separated God the Father from the Son, and the
Spirit who they taught were created angels. Jesus only had the “appearance of a body, a
mirage.” 19 The Cathars taught that the mission of Jesus Christ was to show man how to free his
soul from the matter of the body through a process called, consolamentum. A baptism of sorts,
water not being used as it was “merely a material symbol from the world and of no
significance.” 20 The perfected or good men those who had gone through the ritual of
consolamentum, laid their hands on the initiate who had been known as a “credentes or
believer.” 21
Believers were the populace who had not yet received consolamentum. Believers
followed for the most part the tenets of the heresy often times choosing the least rigorous of the
teachings to live by. Many believers waited until their death bed to be ‘baptized’ as the rigidity
of living the strict moral code of the perfected was not for the faint hearted. Once perfected or
consoled the person lived an extreme ascetic life without sin, avoiding all matter, in mind and
body. Among the precepts to be kept by the perfected were strict dietary restrictions that
included abstaining from meat, eggs and dairy products. They were to keep the fast for three
days each week as well as keeping the three forty day fasts of taking only bread and water into
the body each year. 22 “Sexual acts which produced new bodies to inhabit the temporal realm had
no divine sanction; thus legal matrimony was no better than prostitution.” 23 The perfected
abstained from all manner of matter which it disdained as they were convinced that matter was
18
Albert Shannon, OSA, The Medieval Inquisition, (MN: Liturgical Press, 1984), 4.
Albert Shannon, OSA, The Medieval Inquisition, (MN: Liturgical Press, 1984), 5.
20
Michael Costen, The Cathars and the Albigensian Crusade, (NY: Manchester University Press, 1997), 65.
21
Albert Shannon, OSA, The Medieval Inquisition, (MN: Liturgical Press, 1984), 7.
22
Ibid., 11.
23
Walter Wakefield, Heresy, Crusade and Inquisition in Southern France, 1100-1250, (CA: University of California
Press, 1974),33.
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