One of the claims of the Catholic Church was that Cathars rejected marriage. Since God had enjoined marriage, it must be sinful, and heretical to reject it.
There was some truth to the underlying charge. Cathar teaching was that procreation enslaved more angels in human bodies. It followed that procreation was bad. In Catholic thought one of the three explicit purposes of marriage was procreation (In Cannon Law people who could not procreate. Eunuchs for example were - and still are - disbarred from marrying). If procreation was undesirable for Cathars then marriage must be undesirable too. The reasoning held in some respects, but failed to accommodate nuances and qualifications.
The first is the Cathar concept of marriage, which was very different from our modern idea of marriage. For Cathars the word denoted not a ceremony joining a man and a woman, but a ceremony joining the entrapped human soul with its spiritual body in heaven. This was one of the functions of the Cathar ceremony called the Consolamentum, a ceremony preserved from the earliest days of Christianity, from which the various Orthodox Mysteries and Catholic Sacrament evolved over the centuries. This interpretation enabled Cathars to read and interpret the New Testament without discomfort, since references to marriage could be interpreted as referring to this "Spiritual Marriage."
The
Second qualification is that in Cathar thought the horror
of sex and reproduction applied principally to Parfaits
(men) and Parfaites (women). Ordinary believers or credentes
were not expected to remain chaste, though it would be desirable
if they did so. There appears to have been no stigma associated
with marriage between ordinary believers and it is known
that many believers did marry and raise families. In this,
the practice of the Cathars again represented a preservation
of the earliest Christian practices, where Virginity was
the ideal and marriage was an acceptable second best (As
Paul put it: "It is better to marry than to burn").
Virginity could be combined with a form of spiritual marriage.
In different ways both Cathars and Catholics retained the
idea. Virginity and chastity for Cathars was associated
with their spiritual interpretation of marriage. Virginity
and chastity for Catholics was associated with a different
form of spiritual marriage. Monks were thought to marry
the Church on their induction. Nuns were thought to marry
Christ (In some orders they are known as "Brides of
Christ". They still don wedding dresses, wedding crowns
and even wedding rings on their inception).
Another ancient practice preserved in different ways was that of becoming celibate after having been married. This was extremely common practice - indeed standard practice - in the Early Christian Church, just as it remained standard among Cathars. It was for example very common for noblewomen with Cathar sympathies to marry and raise families and then, with their husband's consent, to begin an ascetic life culminating in taking the Consolamentum and so joining the ranks of the Parfaites. This too had a parallel in the Catholic Church, where it was common for men to abandon their wives in order to become monks or priests (Folque of Toulouse is just one of innumerable examples from the thirteenth century). Similarly, Catholic noblemen often packed their unwanted wives off to nunneries. In both cases the Church regarded the original marriage as dissolved so that the person could remarry either the female Church or the male Christ, according to gender. Related to this practice is the apparent anomaly that although a Catholic priest may not marry, the Church has no ban on married men becoming priests, as many have done and still do today.
From all the evidence, no Cathar seems to have been undully exercised by the fact that believers married and raised families. How else could those awaiting reincarnation ever be freed from their cycle of imprisonment?
Even so, the simplistic interpretation by which Cathars should abhor marriage seems to have some practical implications. For example it seems to have provided a strand of argument for propagandists. According to them all Cathars rejected marriage and were therefore heretics. The propagandists appear to have fudged the distiction between believers and Parfaits, and presented the rejection of marriage as an horrific heresy in itself. The audience were unlikely to know that virginity was such an ideal in the earliest Church, and the propagandists could hardly admit that the real Cathar practice of chastity represented represented exactly the ideal of chastity that monks aspired to or the ideal of celibacy that priests aspired to.
Anyone who believed the propaganda could deduce that Cathars would not marry and that anyone who was married could not therefore be a Cathar. Although the reasoning is flawed on two different counts, it does seem to have been articulated as an argument by people accused of being Cathars by the Inquisition. Here is a revealing appeal by one Jean Teisseire accused of heresy:
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It did not save him. Further enquiries were made. Teisseire was burned alive and his wife condemned to perpetual imprisonment
Sexual
Equality
