I have explained on several occasions my reasoning with regard to what I perceived to be severe problems with the depiction of the Divine in relation to other forces in Fifth Edition. The most recent declaration by Marko that in this Saga the Cathars are “Damned” for their heresy has pushed my tolerance beyond a critical threshold.
In the interests of making everyone understand why this is such a profound issue, I’ll present a more coherent analysis in this one location.
Why the Cathars matter
This question has been directed at me repeatedly. I’m astonished that I have to explain myself on this point, for reasons which I will now present. For those without the familiarity which I have generally assumed all AM players possess, I must attribute my attitude toward my long experience with the game. I forget that not everyone has the same degree of awareness of pre-5th Ed. Versions of the game and Mythic Earth.
- Politically, the Albigensian Crusade against the Cathars may be the single biggest issue in Provencal and Normany Tribunals affairs in the 13th Century. Only the Reconquesta in Iberia is comparable in terms of scope in Western Europe, and it has been going on a very long time.
The Cathar movement reached its pinnacle at the turn of 13th Century in Provence and the regions around the Pyrennes. It interpenetrated the very fabric of society, finding converts and sympathizers at all levels, from the lowliest peasants to the Counts of Toulouse. The Covenants of Bellaquin and Mistridge were both deeply involved with the Cathars, achieving close, positive relations with them. Other Covenants in the region maintained their own affiliations with the Cathars who, unlike the Church, did not condemn the Magi. Doissetep, the greatest Covenant in the region, was, however, aloof from the Cathars, and quite willing to use the issue as a means of opposing those Covenants which did not yield to its domination.
Within the history of the game, the relationship with the Cathars and the trauma inflicted by the Albigensian Crusade were pivotal, long-term Saga issues from the very first edition through at least 3rd Edition. Nearly every last adventure module and sourcebook dealt with the area, which was described as “the political and cultural heart of the Order”. Whichever side one ultimately chose, it was understood that it would matter. Friendship with the Cathars would test the limits on non-intervention with the mundanes and with the generally hostile or at least deeply suspicious views of the Catholic Church. Association was as good as an admission of guilt. Those who supported the Cathars in any capacity would share their fate.
This is the most important point of all. Prior to the Albigensian Crusade the Langue D’oc region was one of thriving commerce, cultural and intellectual development and one of the wealthiest parts of Western Europe. Philosophically tolerant, it permitted the cultivation of various “heresies” which were at odds with the dogma of the Church. Permissive in other fashions, the Langue D’oc was the most “liberal” of Tribunals. This liberalism manifested in a political independence from the King of France and from other centers of power. Several monasteries in the region were mother-houses of religious orders, with their influence felt far across Europe. The Templars were present as well, though no more so than in the rest of France. Like the Templars, the liberal Langue d’Oc accumulated a tremendous amount of wealth and power. Both of which sparked considerable jealousy.
Without delving into an extremely detailed history of the Albigensian Crusade, the salient points are that once it was unleashed the entire Langue D’oc became the target of rapacious nobles, mercenaries, and soliders all working under the blessing and flag of the “Holy” war against the “Cathar heretics”. The property of those accused of heresy--even posthumously--was forfeit to the Church, with a percentage going to those who named them as heretics. The relentless process of denunciation and seizure, accompanied frequently by the execution of the accused, resulted in the dismantling of that prosperity, the destruction of that tolerance, and the slaughter of upwards of two million people. All with the profound “blessing” of the Catholic Church.
During this period, the Inquisiton was formed expressly to hunt Cathars and then other “heretics”. Torture would be sanctioned and endorsed as a method of extracting confessions. The most extreme practices were promoted by bishops, cardinals, and popes, and often carried out by the Dominicans. Or, more accurately, supervised by them, as they gave themselves the “moral” remove of having temporal authorities do the torture and execution with official blessing or at least absolution. An absolution that applied to the many, many participants in the atrocities commited during the Albigensian Cruasde--as with the Crusades in the Near East.
- With respect to the Covenant of Andorra, these events are happening right next door. I’ve read several books on the issue and this period in history, and it is profoundly evident that Catharism ran throughout the Pyrennes and beyond. Montsegur, site of the most famous “last stand” of the Cathars, is maybe twenty-five to thirty miles from the Covenant of Andorra. Mistridge is only about twenty-one miles. For those who would declare that the mountains prevent any interaction, I invite a closer scrutiny of the history record.
Every single year the herders of the Pyrennes would take their flocks down through the passes into Iberia, going as far south as Valencia. Going with them were merchants and pilgrims--and not just Catholic pilgrims. Catharism extended well into Iberia, with sympathizers and major leaders present there as well. Extended families had relations sweeping for more than a hundred miles, and their friends could extend even farther. News, songs, stories, and beliefs traveled with the herds and the commerce. People in Andorra know those in the zone of the Crusade, and may well have relatives who are suffering from the calamity being inflicted. They know that the Crusade is expanding, and may reach Andorra within a few years. The cycle of vendettas and feuds which are prominent in the region are already being exploited to the fullest, with various parties denouncing one another as “heretics”. Whether or not one IS a Cathar or a sympathizer is as irrelevant as it is in France, where hundreds of thousands have been butchered and their communities destroyed merely because they lived alongside Cathars or suspected or denounced Cathars.
It is acknowledged tha the Inquisition and the Church may turn its attention toward the Magi. Relations with the Church have always been extremely tense, at least in those versions of Mythic Europe where the existence of the Magi is known to the Church outside of a select few. Any connection to the Cathars by any Magi--and Bellaquin, THE most open and famous among mundanes of all Covenants, was and may still be intimately connected with the Cathars, hosting them as guests and allies--would be a perfect excuse to declare the Order as “heretical”, as if its pursuit of Magic was not cause enough.
Wherever one stands on the issue, the Cathar question and that of the Albigensian Crusade against them matters a very great deal to Magi and to mundanes in the Langue d’Oc and the Pyrennes, including Andorra.
- On a personal level, Vares is from Provence. He grew up there, has traveled extensively across the Langue d’Oc, and knows what it was like before the Crusade. He has also crisscrossed the war zone in recent years and witnessed the devastation, learned of the gross travesties committed under the banner of the “Holy Crusade”, and observed the aftermath of its campaigns. Countless innocents have been slaughtered with Church blessing, entire communities obliterated, and the wealth of the region ransacked. The Crown of France is among the most explicit perpetrators, seizing that wealth to enrich itself while others from as far away as Germany and England if not farther participate in the murder, destruction, and a scale of looting that is almost without precedent in Western Europe since the fall of the Roman Empire.
Why the metaphysical status of the Cathars matters
This issue runs much wider and deeper than the previous section. One can argue the above on a political and historical basis in terms of wealth, power, culture, authority, and the nature of war. Without any actual supernatural imprimature, there is a degree of subjectivity that can lead to multiple interpetations. Once a “Divine” sanction exists, however, everything changes radically.
- One must understand the nature of the Cathar heresy. If requested, I will attempt to convey it in depth, however, for the purposes of this immediate debate I will summarise. The Cathars are Manicheanist heretics who posit that there are two “Gods”: one is the Old Testament Biblical “God”, full of wrath, envy, and other perilous qualities who has trapped humanity in the material world where it is subjected to repeated torment; the other is a quasi-New Testament “God” who is embodied in Christ as a Savior intent on freeing humanity from the trap of the material world.
Cathars are philosophically pacificist and preferentially vegetarian. They oppose the shedding of blood, the consuming of meat, and, in the more “advanced” stages of belief, any type of procreative congress. This is not entirely dissimilar from the Church’s imposition of oaths of chastity, though the goal has an added dimension. Not only does it free the soul from the appetites of the flesh, enabling it to attain a “Pure” state which will allow it to exit the material world upon death instead of being forced into another incarnation over and over (the Cathars believed in reincarnation, only as part of the punishment of mortality), it can, theoretically, lead to the ultimate end of mortal existence with conscious if peaceful extinction of the vessels being used to trap souls. Personally, I view this last part of their theology to be insane, however, they never forced anyone to accept it, acknowledged that it could be many, many centuries before everyone was “Purified”, and were, intriguingly, actually known for an appreciation of beauty and romantic as well as Platonic love.
The Cathars opposed the corruption of the Church and the nobility. They believed in the very Christian ideals of compassion, altruism, aiding the sick and the poor, and had their own rites meant to reaffirm these values. They had only a very loose religious hierarchy, unlike the Church, because they saw it as yet another method by which humans became ensnared in the world and corrupted to serve it. Cathar philosophers and orators were renowned as being extremely knowledgeable and eloquent, beating Church representatives at nearly every single debate, swaying audiences with their logic and their honesty. Many of their virtues were New Testament Christian virtues--and those of the Gnostics, with whom they shared a common origin.
On the whole, the Cathars represented a reformist “heresy” that sought to embrace Christian virtues free of the Church and the established temporal power structure wedded to it. For these reasons, they were deemed to be an extreme threat to the existing order, and after repeated attempts to convince the inhabitants of the Langue d’Oc to abandon Catharism or turn on the Cathars failed, a few minor incidents served as the pretext to launch the Albigensian Crusade.
- Consider the above. If the Albigensian Crusade is “Holy”, if the participants receive absolution for all their sins in exchange for annihilating the Cathars, then the Divine must be sanctioning the mass murder of millions of people. This type of genocidal conduct was found in the Old Testament, and the resort to it by the contemporary Church “proves” the true nature of the Catholic God in the eyes of the Cathars. If the Cathars are “Damned” because they do not Believe as the Church would have them Believe and their Faith--which holds to so many of the core New Testament Virtues--is responsible for that, then the Divine is guilty of repeatedly overweighing “good” with any variance from a set dogma. This goes beyond “good intentions”. The Cathars had extreme levels of “good conduct” frequently exceeding those within the Church in their age. Whereas the followers of the Church, regardless of their atrocities, may be granted “Salvation” even as they commit those acts, any opposing the Church is consigned to “Hell”.
It isn’t hard to extend this to all the other “heretics”--including the Greek Orthodox Church. Remember that the Fourth Crusade against Byzantium, although originally opposed by the Pope, subsequently received Vatican blessing as “The Will of God”. The destruction of the the heart of the Eastern Church was deemed to be a glorious thing. Those who had followed it must have been “heretics” or at least “schismatists” whose souls were, at a minimum, imperiled by their refusal to adhere to Roman Church dogma.
Separately, the Cathars are Manichean. Much as I have severe issues with Fifth Edition and its wholesale revision of Mythic Earth cosmology, it DOES recognise Zoroastrianism as a “Divine” religion. Manicheanism IS a form of Zoroastrianism. The Cathars, therefore, are a “Divine” religion. If the Crusades are valid--or the Jihads--then it is within the power of one “Divine” religion to effectively condemn and “Damn” another. Faith doesn’t really matter. The “Divine” is on the side of whomever figures out how to invoke it successfully.
That is not the expression of a genuinely “Good” force. Something else, perhaps, that defies mortal comprehension, but NOT one that is uniformly “Good” nor remotely “just” nor consistent. There can be no “One Truth”, and the religions of Man are all false in some degree.
If the “Cathars” are “Damned” then “good” doesn’t really matter--only dogma. Dogma that requires adherence to murderous, jealous “Faiths”. The Divine is implicitly, inherently hypocritical. It demands absolute devotion to it and it alone, yet even that is not enough. The Divine is fickle and capricious. It is also, if it is, indeed, the Creator of All, responsible for every piece of misery, every single iota of cruelty, every misdeed, every misunderstanding, every failure, and every injustice in existence because it had perfect knowledge of what form its Creation would take and what would become of those within it. The Cathars rationalised this with their dichotomy: the author of the world did all of these terrible things, and continues to inflict them. Another Divinity seeks to free them from it, ending the tormet, and it is this Salvation that they seek. “Suffering” is not “Holy”--it is only suffering. Hatred and violence are not “Holy”, either. Not to any Power that claims to be genuinely “Good”.
- An "Absolute" Divine is something which goes against "Ars Magica's" history. In prior editions, the Divine was a far-reaching and influential force, but it was not "the" Word on anything and everything. Subjectivism was an underlying theme throughout. In some permutations of Mythic Earth different views and interpretations were valid. What the "Medieval Paradigm" held was true--to a point, and within a certain scope. There were things outside of it, agencies which did not match and did not conform. The Magic Realm and regions of Faerie could and did exist separate from the Dominion and the Infernal. They embodied alternative paths for those willing to risk them.
If the Absolutist Divine is the ONLY "reality", and it is as hypocritical and destructive as the above suggests, then there is ultimately no choice at all. Free Will exists only in that it enables one to be "Damned"--though the Divine KNEW that from the start because it knows everything. The system was set up, rigged, and the only "choices" are slavery to the Divine and its Absolute Will or else the inevitably doomed course of rebellion, be it in seeking a more benevolet version of the "Divine", seeking to exist apart from the "Divine" scheme, or in active opposition as either a would-be independent rebel or a willing recruit of the Infernal (which is itself the realm of the already-defeated).
I see no point in pursuing any course in such a universe. The only possible outcomes are "Damnation" or slavery to a "Divine" which is unbearable and hypocritical in the extreme.
