CATHARI, the name given to themselves by the adherents of numerous heretical sects, undoubtedly of Gnostic and Manichean origin, which swarmed in western Europe, and partic ularly in northern Italy and southern France in the 12th century. At that period society had much advanced in wealth and power, which brought their concomitant vices. There were many abuses prevalent in the Church, and some of the clergy led scandalous lives. The mimer ous heretical sects won adherents by violently and indiscriminately denouncing the entire hier archy, from the Pope down to the monastic orders; but their tirades were not more em phatic than the philippics launched against the same scandals by sincere Catholics, their con temporaries, such as Saint Bernard, Saint Hil degarde, Saint Malachi, archbishop of Armagh, and others. But while these sought to pro cure the eradication of the current abuses by a reformation from within the Church, the Cathari (Gr. katharos, Lat. mundus, gurus, and puritanus, pure, clean) aimed at nothing short of the total destruction of the dominant re ligion, of its whole system of belief and even of its moral teaching. For not only were the sects styled Cathari (including a host of off shoots of eastern Manicheism), heretics and reformers, but in their inner circles, dualists, i believers in the existence of two 'supreme prin ciples, the one a good principle, God, and the other an evil principle, the creator of the material world. But open profession was not made of this tenet; it was communicated only to the inner circle in the several Manichean sects, to the elect ones, the perfecti, but with held from the mass of their followers, the credentes, the faithful vulgar. To these latter
and to outsiders the adepts of the arcana of catharism made profession of being strictly reformers of a corrupt ecclesiastical system, and of profound regard for the letter and spirit of the moral law as taught in the apostolic writ ings. As already said, they enthroned the evil principle as creator of the physical universe; they believed in the divine mission of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, that is, of the good principle; but with the Docetx they denied that the Son of God had assumed human nature really, and held that his humanity was phan tasmal only. In conformity with their tenet of a supreme principle of good and a supreme principle of evil, the initiates condemned as works of the flesh the sacraments of the Church as a whole, and looked on the contract of marriage as sinful. They held absolute pre destination: that all men belong to one or other of two classes, those who will infallibly be saved, and those who cannot possibly attain holiness: hence their doctrine that an infant dying immediately after birth, if it belongs to the class of those predestined to be lost, is punished as is Judas in hell. They dared not confess that on their principles the elect cannot lose the divine favor by sin; but they did teach that repentance is of no account, and that the sins of the people are forgiven by the rite (consolamentum) of laying on hands. This honor was only a concession to the prejudices of the ignorant vulgar: the perfecti, the initi ates of the arcana of Catharism held themselves to be superior to the moral law.