Revealing another casualty of the Inquisition

Fecha de publicación: 26-nov-2010 18:41:25

Nov 16, 201

BY JOHN MURAWSKI - Staff writer

A civil war between North and South crushed a proud nation, stamped out a thriving culture and obliterated a religious revival. The chief surviving artifact of the vanquished people: their lyrical Southern language, forever relegated to the status of a quaint provincial dialect.

No, this is not a lament over America's war between the states and the despoiled Confederacy. The military conflict described above spanned nearly a half-century in the Middle Ages, unleashing successive waves of Crusaders to brutally suppress the once-vibrant Cathar heresy in France, flattening the cultural and religious landscape of Europe.

The Albigensian Crusade of the 13th century gave rise to the Inquisition, the apparatus of repression, harnessing terror and torture to enforce ideological conformity. The episode is retold by Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998), a Polish poet and essayist who was a keen student of history and eyewitness to the totalitarianism and dictatorships of the 20th century. Herbert fought in the Polish underground resistance against the Nazi occupation and later was recognized as an intellectual giant needled by Polish censors under Communist rule.

"Albigensians, Inquisitors, and Troubadors," Herbert's story of medieval heretics and religious fanatics, is one of several dozen selections in a new English edition of Herbert's essays, vignettes and reflections. Herbert's intellect gracefully spans mythology, history, art, culture, literature, travel and archeology.

But his examination of the Cathars may well be the keynote of the collection, with its poignant political overtones.

"History - not only in the Middle Ages - teaches that a nation subjected to police measures is demoralized, crumbles from within and loses its ability to resist," Herbert writes. "Even the most ruthless hand-to-hand combat is less disastrous than whispers, surveillance, fear of one's neighbor, and a scent of betrayal in the air."

The Cathars movement took its name from the Greek word for "catharsis," indicating the art of purifying. By the Middle Ages, the faith was thriving in what is now Southern France and poised to spread through Europe.

The Cathars rejected the Old Testament as demonic, considered the human flesh evil and repudiated the Roman Catholic Church as a satanic institution. They had no use for sacraments, including baptism and marriage, and instead administered their own purification rite, known as the consolamentum. Those who became "perfected" in the faith became vegetarians and forswore all carnal relations. The Catholic authorities saw the Cathars as a perverted cult of sodomites and demonists.

"Thus one may say that in the south of what is now France there existed a separate civilization, and that the Albigensian crusade was a clash of two cultures," Herbert writes. "The defeat of the county of Toulouse is one of the catastrophes of humanity, like the destruction of the Cretan or Mayan civilization."

Toulouse, the Rome of the Cathars, was one of many strongholds that was besieged and sacked by the Crusaders over several decades. The fall of Montsegur, vilified by the church as "the synagogue of Satan," culminated with the live roasting of 200 men and women in a pyre.

"The singing of the clergy mingled with the cries of the dying," Herbert writes. "The heavy, nauseating smoke descends into the valleys and spreads across history."

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