736 CATHAR LITERATURE
of Steven Runciman, "The Cathars were essentially believers in pantheism
throughout the celestial realm. That is to say, good to them was God."^5 And on
earth that good should be fairly shared, including a knowledge by the people
of the scriptures, which speak the good, meaning that holy text is not the sole
province of clergy. Hence the abundant translation of texts into the vernacu-
lar tongue (Provencal). It is fair to say that this anticlerical, populist strain in
the middle ages was not restricted to the Cathars.
The Lollards in England and the Carmelite descalzos (the unshod) in Spain
were other attempts to return to the truth or legend of the early Jewish-Chris-
tian peasant movement, derived from the communal poor, for whom spirit
was stronger than gold or power. All were swiftly denounced and persecuted
as heresy.^6THE PERFECT AND THE BELIEVERS
Among the ordinary people of Toulouse and other cities in Languedoc, there
were two groups of the faithful Cathars: the perfect (also known as the par-
fait, bon-homme, elect, or purists) and the much larger ranks of believers
(also known as the credentes or hearers). The perfect were ascetic clergy, de-
voting themselves to contemplation and following strict moral rules, who
forswore meat, cheese, sex, and other worldly pleasures. To pass into the
ranks of the perfect, one received the sacrament of consolamentum, a laying
on of hands. The believers were the lay people, who were peasants, a mobile
merchant class, and even a majority of the southern lower nobility as well as
greater nobles such as Count Raymond VI of Toulouse, Count Raymond-
Roger of Foix, and Roger II, Viscount of Beziers and Carcassonne. The move-
ment also included an unusually large number of very active women, both at
the perfect and believer levels. There was a clear division of acceptable behav-
ior for the two divisions of Catharists, and the believer caste was exception-
ally free from ascetic restraints.
The devotion by Cathar credentes to diverse regional arts was not only tol-
erated but encouraged. Consequently, the arts flourished in Toulouse and
other Cathar cities when northern France lived under a darker light. Southern
France had the song of the aristocratic troubadour composer and the joglar
- Runciman, The Medieval Manichee, 149.
- There were even French crusade leaders from the poor, leading armies of the poor, Peter the
Hermit (c. 1050-95) and his disciple Walter the Penniless (Gautier Sans-Avoir, d. 1096). But
like the titled leaders, they brought hell and havoc wherever they could plunder, from Belgrade
to Jerusalem.