CATHAR LITERATURE 733
John, which throughout has been favored among the canonical gospels by
gnostics as one of their own. As a rule the gnostics have vigorously interpreted
the Gospel of John, through elaborate exegesis, as gnostic scripture. The
Cathars saw the Gospel of the Secret Supper, or John's Interrogation, as a
purely Johannine gnostic text. It is a conversation between the evangelist John
and god {le Seigneur) in which John interrogates le Seigneur about Satan before
the fall, the creation, Adam and Eve, the descent of Jesus Christ, baptism by
water and by spirit, and Satan's lake of fire and the invisible god's heaven. It is a
Cathar variation of Christian myth.
In contrast, the major extant Cathar text, known as the Book of the Two
Principles, is a perfect example of absolute dualism, showing the relentless
struggle between the god of goodness and the god of evil for dominion and
belief among the unknowing. The god of goodness will be conquered in time
but will be victorious in eternity when captive souls escape evil and return to
light. Only then will evil be annihilated. As in classical Manichaean texts, a
Cathar primordial human will also fight against evil and fail, as will the good
angels. But their victory is not in defeating and punishing evil now—which
they say is the way of the romains (the Catholics)—but in waiting until mat-
ter annihilates itself, when nonbeing is truly nonexistent and light lives in
eternity.
In the absolute dualism of the Albanenses (an epithet for the absolute du-
alists), the principle of good is entirely opposite to the principle of evil, as
being is to nonbeing. The absolutists' god is limited ontologically to the good,
without free will, because his power {lapuissance) and his will {la voluntee) are
one and the same. He cannot and does not want to do evil. Nor can the good
god create anyone with free will, such as a human who might do evil or a fa-
vored angel Lucifer, who has the free will to become the evil devil. That task of
creating evil, free will, and the demon god is left to the entirely separate entity
of the principle of evil. It must be remembered that the principle of evil is the
eternal principle, preceding the demon god of evil.
The absolute and mitigated dualists also differed in their myths, though
these differences are less significant than the conceptual differences of absolute
versus relative separation of the good and evil principles. As an example of
the mythic differences, the absolutist Albanenses believed that the demon of
evil never managed to invade any of the seven levels of heaven and their cor-
responding angels. The mitigated dualists believed that only the higher levels
of heaven resisted the temptations of the fallen angel Lucifer, but that Lucifer
could ever have been at any level of god's heaven was an idea abhorrent to the