752 CATHAR LITERATURE
The good god's sole wish to do good—the principle of good—and the evil
god's desire to inflict wickedness—the principle of evil—are elaborated
throughout "Instruction of the Unknowing." We have chosen this seminal and
longest treatise in the Book of the Two Principles, with its focus on the two
principles of the title, to represent the Cathar branch of absolute dualism.
The author of these seven treatises, composed around 1250, is likely to have
been Jean de Lugio (Giovanni de Lugio) of Bergamo, an absolute dualist, who
was a vicaire of the Cathar church and major assistant to the bishop of Desen-
zano in Italy. Our scant information about the author and even the attribution
to Jean de Lugio comes from Rainier Sacconi, an Inquisitor and former Cathar
priest, whose denunciations of the Cathars are contained in his Summa de
Catharis. Sacconi discusses the rigorously philosophical basis of the writings.
His summary and response actually refers to a larger, more inclusive volume.
Preserved, however, is only this highly systematized metaphysical and polem-
ical part—the rest is lost.
Unlike the Gospel of the Secret Supper, which contains some pages of a
cosmology and myth, the Book of the Two Principles is a scholastic argument,
repeatedly documenting its message in biblical evidence. Proven by biblical
example, Lugio's elaborate and logical argument will, he believes, inexorably
lead all adversaries to reject the ways of the unknowing and to accept the
Cathar truth. The reader is so instructed at the end of each segment. The trea-
tise's gods mirror the deities of gnostic scriptures in which the invisible father
is good and nameless while the biblical creator god, who takes on many noto-
riously evil-sounding names, is evil. In brief, since god wants to do good and
cannot do evil, he is not omnipotent but all powerful with regard to the good.
Since there exists evil in the world, in the temporal and material world if not
in his own eternal world, and since he the god of goodness cannot do evil or
even create a being with free will to do evil, it follows that the evil, as well as
the temporal world itself, has been created by a principle of evil. This princi-
ple precedes the god of evil, Satan, and is unredeemable. But in the day of
reckoning, even Satan the god of evil has a soul, and when free of the body, it
may be elevated to spirit and find redemption.
To prove that the biblical god is not the god of goodness, Lugio cites holy
scriptures, seeking to demonstrate that the creator of the temporal universe is
actually the demon, the principle of evil and creator of the infernal earth and
its bodily inhabitants, in which our souls are imprisoned. The biblical god, he
claims, is all iniquity: a fornicator, a destroyer and plunderer of village and