There was a wide-spread feeling, analogous to later puritanism, in favour of personal holiness;
this was associated with a cult of poverty. The Church was rich and largely worldly; very many
priests were grossly immoral. The friars brought accusations against the older orders and the
parish priests, asserting abuse of the confessional for purposes of seduction; and the enemies of
the friars retorted the accusation. There can be no doubt that such charges were largely justified.
The more the Church claimed supremacy on religious grounds, the more plain people were
shocked by the contrast between profession and performance. The same motives which ultimately
led to the Reformation were operative in the thirteenth century. The main difference was that
secular rulers were not ready to throw in their lot with the heretics; and this was largely because
no existing philosophy could reconcile heresy with the claims of kings to dominion.
The tenets of the Cathari cannot be known with certainty, as we are entirely dependent on the
testimony of their enemies. Moreover ecclesiastics, being well versed in the history of heresy,
tended to apply some familiar label, and to attribute to existing sects all the tenets of former ones,
often on the basis of some not very close resemblance. Nevertheless, there is a good deal that is
almost beyond question. It seems that the Cathari were dualists, and that, like the Gnostics, they
considered the Old Testament Jehovah a wicked demiurge, the true God being only revealed in the
New Testament. They regarded matter as essentially evil, and believed that for the virtuous there
is no resurrection of the body. The wicked, however, will suffer transmigration into the bodies of
animals. On this ground they were vegetarians, abstaining even from eggs, cheese, and milk. They
ate fish, however, because they believed that fishes are not sexually generated. All sex was
abhorrent to them; marriage, some said, is even worse than adultery, because it is continuous and
complacent. On the other hand, they saw no objection to suicide. They accepted the New
Testament more literally than did the orthodox; they abstained from oaths, and turned the other
cheek. The persecutors record a case of a man accused of heresy, who defended himself by saying
that he ate meat, lied, swore, and was a good Catholic.
The stricter precepts of the sect were only to be observed by certain exceptionally holy people
called the "perfected"; the others might eat meat and even marry.