THE PERFECT HERESY

O’Shea’s (Back to the Front, 1997) tendentious study of medieval France.

Don’t expect to learn much about the beliefs of the Cathars (the 12th- and 13th-century heretics who argued that the Church should be more like the early, primitive Christians) here. Centered largely in the south of France, the Cathars, like the Manicheans, believed in a strict duality between good and evil, and they rejected the body and the material world as bad. Christ, in their view, was not really resurrected, and they renounced marriage and the other sacraments, as well as the resurrection of the dead, hell, and purgatory. But O’Shea is not very interested in the nuances of Cathar doctrine, preferring instead to focus on the Crusades (launched under Pope Innocent III), which sought to bring the Cathars to heel in the early 13th century. Although the author rightly traces the Inquisition in part to the Church’s desire to stamp out the Cathar heresy, readers will not find very much here about the development of the Dominican Order—which, no less than the Inquisition, grew out of the Church’s struggle to restore orthodoxy. O’Shea’s approach is oddly provincial in its contemporary obsessions—he seems to find religious intolerance today as interesting as the Church’s response to the Cathar heresy. Even his brief portrait of Cathar women (in which we learn that the Cathars “honored” their women and that women had a say in “the affairs of the hereafter”) may tell us more about the present than the Middle Ages. In addition, the author’s self-conscious attempts at literary flair (“To approach Carcassonne for the first time is to dream with your eyes open”) are irritating, and his epilogue (which ranges from French pop music to the Order of the Solar Temple) is superfluous.

Find a real historian if you want to read about the Cathars, and tune into the nightly news if you want to know about religious persecution today. In trying to tell us something about both, O’Shea winds up telling us nothing about either.