Tea at Trianon: The Body Is Not a Prison: Franciscan Spirituality and Modern Neo-Catharism

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

Monday, November 9, 2026

The Body Is Not a Prison: Franciscan Spirituality and Modern Neo-Catharism

From Hilary White at The Sacred Images Project:

I was thinking about it all again today while looking at some of the Franciscan artworks from the 13th century. These are in a form that is thought by some art historians to have been popularised by the Church as an answer to the Catharist1 heresy, that was gaining ground in some parts of Italy at the time. Once you learn something about Catharism, you start to see similarities happening all around us, and you start to wonder what part of that Franciscan spirituality might be useful to us now.
It’s a popular pastime of revisionist modern historians to cast the Cathars and other medieval heretical movements as innocent, hobbitish hippies who just wanted to do their thing and be left alone by the wicked patriarchal oppressors in the Catholic Church. It can be eye-opening to learn what they were up to, the extreme consequences of Bad Ideas.
How could a good God have made a world containing suffering, decay and cruelty? The Cathars answered this ancient problem by reviving Dualism, separating God from creation and attributing the material world to an evil power. Some Cathar groups taught there were two eternal principles, two equal and opposed “gods”. Others said the evil creator of material reality was subordinate to the good, spiritual God. Either way, the main point is that material creation, including our bodies, are evil, stopping us having union with God.
This created the idea of a radical separation within man, between the material, bodily self and the spiritual self or soul. The spiritual element in the human person, they said, belonged to the higher, spiritual realm and salvation meant liberation from the captivity of material physicality. All sorts of things follow logically from this starting point. (Read more.)

My novel on the Cathars, HERE. How it was stolen and made into a film, HERE.