CATHAR LITERATURE 753
city, a murderer of adults and little children, a liar who breaks oath promises.
Once having understood these proved assertions, "our adversaries" should
abandon the god of darkness, "who is the cause and the principle of all iniq-
uity and malice, of all bitterness and injustice," and turn to the true lord and
god, "who is the light, who is good and saintly, who is the living fountain and
the origin of sweetness, of all tenderness and justice."
In a typical passage of "Instruction of the Unknowing" Lugio takes a pas-
sage from Deuteronomy (3:3-7) to show how the biblical god, principle of
evil, urged his people to murder and plunder. "So when king Sihon came out
against us, he and all his people for battle at Jahaz, the lord our god gave him
over to us; and we struck him down, along with his offspring and all his
people. At that time we captured all his towns, and in each town we utterly de-
stroyed men, women, and children. We left not a single survivor."
The late scholar Rene Nelli, who wrote about Cathars and troubadours,
comments astutely on this passage, finding parallels between biblical slaugh-
ter and the fate of the Cathars before the Catholics:During the Crusade against the Albigensians, the Roman
Catholics might have been able to authorize on the basis of these
passages in the Bible the right to sack cities and castles and to ex-
terminate the inhabitants, as they did many times. The Cathar
morality, by contrast, formally condemned wars and massacres
wherever they took place. Whatever one may say about it,
Catharism represented then an indisputable moral progress.
And even their refusal to attribute to a good god the horrors re-
ported in the Bible is a measure of the change that they infused
at that time in the conscience of the best of them.^2The Cathars stood, then, in utter contrast to the crusading power-and-pillage
portraits of soldiers of Christendom who dominated society during centuries
of failed but devastating rampages to Jerusalem. Their inner light and obses-
sion with goodness, peace, and justice are witnessed in the tragic history of
their massacre and disappearance and in the luminous remnants of their song
and scripture.
- Nelli, Ecritures cathares, 159.