It never occurred to me when I titled this blog that the obvious pun would pass by unnoticed by most people since it's pretty much only sold in Northern Europe. I suppose that's what comes of breeding next to a Brit research station. You see the Brits have this 'snack bar', chocolate, biscuit and some fatty, creamy gunk filling. About 2,000,000 kcals per bite. It's been around since the '30s and goes by the name of Penguin. Geddit? Bite-sized chunks? Ok, not one of my best but I'm usually pushed for time around here. There used to be this awful joke. "Why don't polar bears like penguins?" To which the smart alec reply is: "because they live at opposite ends of the globe." The actual answer is: "because they can't get the paper wrapper off" Told you it was awful.
I thought it might be fun, after yesterday's brain numbing exercise, to talk about something a little lighter: the Albigensian heresy. If you don't know what that is, you can go and look it up on Wikipedia - it's mostly OK, although being married didn't save you from being burnt.
I was reading some Hilaire Belloc, best known for his 'Cautionary Tales', poems about children who do naughty things and come to a sticky end and some very good 'travelogues' and I came across 'The five great heresies'. Now Belloc was a 'born again' catholic and has more zeal for his faith than I have for shagging my partner every five minutes for a month before she disappears back to the sea. He wrote in the first half of the 20th century.
Now I know a little about this so called heresy because it crops up in another book which I didn't believe a word of, 'The holy blood and the holy grail', and I did some research at the time. The Cathars, as the Catholics called them (they just called themselves 'bons hommes et bonnes femmes' - good men and women) were a gnostic, dualist group who discarded most of the trappings of the established church, the trinity, the transubstantiation, the wealth (!) and had a simpler version of christianity. The primary differences were that God and Satan were essentially equal. God controlled heaven, Satan ruled (and owned) the earth. They also reinterpreted the resurrection of Jesus more as reincarnation. For them, it seems, you had to live a life good enough to get past the devil and thus reach god, even if it meant you had to get reincarnated to do it.
Cathars were all over Europe in the 12/13th centuries but were heavily concentrated in what is now the south of France which was essentially controlled by the King of Aragon NOT the King of France. It was one of the most prosperous and cultured regions of Europe. Read that last sentence again and remember it!
Now to a penguin the differences don't seem all that great. Both worship the same fictitious god, both groups have similar aims and all we're talking about is stuff on the periphery. Anyway, successive popes from Innocent III onwards wiped them out! The Inquisition started here! Really! Bored with losing crusades in the middle east to muslims, the popes waged one against christians!
Now Belloc's little chapter, which reads like retrospective propaganda on behalf of the Catholic church, takes as one of his major themes that the church was the sole bastion of culture, education, enlightenment etc in the middle ages and that the Cathars had to be wiped out before they pulled Europe down into the mire! (Remember that sentence I told you to make note of?) Well after the Church exterminated the Cathars that's pretty much what happened to the occital speaking area of Europe where the Cathars had been predominant. Interesting, no?
Now this would all an historical footnote to the barbarity of the early church except for a number of coincidences. The Cathars could potentially completely undermine the entire Catholic faith, merely by existing - it was so much more attractive to people, hence it's popularity - no pope would have wanted that. They were rich and the Church, as well as the King of France were keen to get their hands on that wealth. So we have a people persecuted less for their beliefs and more for territorial, political and economic reasons.
I find the parallels with the christian fundamentalist lobby in the US rather alarming.
Incidentally Belloc includes Islam as a heresy of the Catholic faith, hmmm.
And even more incidentally, that bit above about being married not saving you from the stake in Wikipedia comes from Belloc and its NOT TRUE!
Here endeth today's lesson. Tomorrow we will look at the transubstantiation and why it always hums as you walk past.
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