Tea at Trianon: The Decline of Catharism’s Charismatic Appeal

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, May 2, 2012

The Decline of Catharism’s Charismatic Appeal

An article about how Catharism took root but did not catch on due to its inherent inconsistencies. Even at its height, the Cathars were in the minority; most people in the South of France remained Catholic. To quote:

The Cathars believed in a dualist cosmology that posited the existence of two coeternal gods, one good and one evil. The evil god had created everything in the visible world, and as a result the Cathars renounced virtually everything in it, including sex, foods derived from animals, and personal property. The human soul, the creation of the good god, suffered by its imprisonment in the visible world and was trapped by a cycle of reincarnation. Only the Cathar sacrament of the consolamentum had the power to purify the spirit and allow it to return to its heavenly home. Yet the purified state produced by this sacrament was easily corrupted – by the eating of meat, sexual contact, or any sin for that matter – and so most believers waited until their deathbeds to be ‘perfected.’ Only a select few opted to receive the sacrament while of sound mind and body, after which they are expected to live a strict life of asceticism. These spiritual elites became known as Perfects, Good Men or Women, and Good Christians – names indicative of their opposition to the Roman Church as much as their impressive apostolic piety. Few others could rival their devotion to humility, poverty, abstinence, and prayer, a fact that earned them respect even among those who did not adhere to their beliefs. They lived an itinerant existence, relying on the goodwill of others as they traveled from village to village preaching to anyone who would hear them. Believers supported them with gifts and adored them in the hopes of being ‘consoled’ on their deathbeds, for only perfected individuals could confer the consolamentum on others. Supporters thus built relationships with the Perfects in the hopes that their souls too would be made pure enough before death to escape the material world and yet another reincarnation. (Read entire article.)