Exploration into God
Kris Misselbrook writes about good, evil and the Cathars
As a student of the Cathars, and a Quaker concerned with the spiritual challenge of our times, the age old question of a battle between the forces of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ is a subject of meditation. It seems that evil coalesces into hierarchies of power and control in the world, forever holding humanity in thrall, denying and decrying any basic good in people.
The Cathars in south west France in the eleventh and twelfth centuries are often described as ‘absolute dualists’, meaning they believed that the world of matter and of our incarnated bodies is completely the Devil’s creation, and the world of spirit is that of God, and they are in eternal opposition. It follows that the Cathar Parfaits led an ascetic life, concentrating on the spiritual connection with the Divine, with a concern to meet ‘a good end’ or transition into the better world. We certainly find this absolute dualism in the accusations of the Inquisition and in some of the stricter dualist teachings, from Bogomil and Manichaean sources, that so influenced the Cathars.
But the truth is never so clear cut. The Parfaits, indeed, renounced possessions and sexual relations, but entered into everyday society as humble healers and preachers, embodying more the Christian principle of bringing redemption into the world than of renouncing it. The missionaries from Bulgaria in the 1170s ministered to an already relatively enlightened, largely ‘heretical’ society. A strong independent tradition of spiritual redemption in earthly life had been handed down in the Languedoc region since the early apostles, outside and usually opposed to the Catholic canon, and there is evidence that some of the proscribed ‘gnostic’ gospels, now rediscovered, were in circulation. The contemporary troubadour praise of the divine feminine and its deeper roots in the Magdalene and Mary traditions of the area also give us insight into their vision of the place of the sacred in earthly life.
So, this ‘mitigated dualism’ sees the Devil not as an all-creator, but as a corrupter of this world, in conflict with God or the ‘good’ but not an eternal principle. Cathars saw the demands of Jehovah for fear and obedience as signs of a darker demi-god holding heaven hostage and earthbound. They preached a personal quest for good, believing the power of spirit to intervene, both by an apostolic initiation and by inner knowing. As in the other contemporary esoteric tradition of the Grail, each man and woman is a ‘cup’ able to be filled with light. Christ is the archetype of man’s reawakening as a wholly divine manifestation, albeit in a fallen world. The twenty-first century has its own examples of these.
There are different forces now demanding orthodoxy and people of faith adhering to authority and text – some are ready to kill apostates. There is also the more insidious ‘dumbing down’ of our spirit nature, commonly deriding the power of love and inspiration, moulding our vision to the limits of the rational, physical and mechanical. Is the Devil an amalgam of our own fears and alienation, or an eternally opposing force? Are we creating our latest version of this dark ruler of the world and our separation from our greater reality in spirit, or is this a superior power feeding on and encouraging our lostness?
A Buddhist sees evil as inevitable eddies and countercurrents in the infinite flow of being, neither inherently separate nor eternal. But it seems that we get stuck for aeons in these countercurrents on the earth plane; and even in spirit after-lives, those grey areas of lost souls that cling around our planet, when not finding the ‘good ending’ always prayed for by the Cathars.
It is a step of faith to declare that the world is not a prison for the soul, to see our intrinsic divine nature and to develop our openness to grace. The Quaker quest, like that of the Cathars before us, is to wake up the world by working in it, bringing light, seeking and seeing the good/God in everyone and in everything. Then will we transcend this duality.
Thank God our time is now when wrong
Comes up to face us everywhere,
Never to leave us till we take
The longest stride of soul men ever took.
Affairs are now soul size.
The enterprise is exploration into God.
– Christopher Fry in ‘A Sleep of Prisoners’
Further information: https://lesbonshommes.com
