The Spiritual Enigma of Southwestern France

It would seem that an indelible impression was made on southwestern France when the Visigoths ruled it as the Kingdom of Toulouse from 419 CE - 507 CE. The Visigoths at that time were no longer pagans but belonged to a stream of Christianity alternative to the Catholic tradition begun by Emperor Constantine. The Visigoths then were Arian Christians, and though their Gallic subjects were Catholics, seeds would seem to have been planted by these temporary Germanic overlords for this future region of France to entertain other views on the Christian faith. When the Franks conquered the Visigothic region of Gaul, the area became known in its broadest political sense as "the Aquitaine". The Aquitaine would later officially become a duchy consisting of smaller provinces whose barons owed allegiance to the reigning duke before they showed any obedience to the king of France. Aquitaine was part of a larger cultural/linguistic region known as the Languedoc, which spoke the now nearly extinct Occitan form of French and also included the southeastern region of France known as Provence. Though there were flare-ups of heterodox attitudes in episcopal courts a century earlier in the region, Aquitaine's religious difference from the rest of France emerged more fully around the middle of the 12th century (the mid-1100s), where even orthodox Christians had developed a cult of mother worship through an intense veneration of Mary Mother of Jesus as an interceding saint and mystic fount of spiritual elevation. The duchy would long espouse the troubadour tradition of poetry, including that of religious love poetry for Saint Mary. Troubadour poetry soon found secular manifestations in which mortal women could also be spiritually admired as avatars of archetypal divine mother, and this came at a time when, cross-currently, Catholicism in general had grown especially vehement in its principles of misogyny, viewing women as inherently corrupt "vessels" in terms of spiritual matters. The views of the troubadour poets on women as spiritual and social equals of men were part and parcel of broader mystical leanings in the Aquitaine, which by the last decades of the 12th century had crystallized into a separatist church with reformist ideas within the geographic boundaries of Catholic Christendom. These were the Cathars, and they had their own clergy (both men and women), and its membership came from all classes, including nobles, knight, merchants, artisans and peasants. In some places entire cities, towns and villages became Catharist, and Catholic Church property was confiscated and redistributed. Catharism was primarily anti-materialistic in its institutional and moral values, and it had a social hierarchy of moral commitment, whose highest members practiced celibacy and certain other forms of asceticism. As the hotbed of the movement was in the Albi region of the Aquitaine, the Pope's call for crusade against these heretics came to be called "the Albigensian Crusade" which lasted from 1208 CE -1226 CE. For the first time in Western Europe, Christians slaughtered other Christians (and fellow Frenchmen to boot) in the name of religion. At least tens of thousands of Cathars were killed in battle, starved in prolonged sieges, or put to death under Inquisitorial sentencing. Nevertheless, religious contrariness was not stamped out in southwestern France. From the ashes of this prolonged crusade arose the avian fire of a millenarian prophetic movement known as Joachitism, which found strong adherence in the Aquitaine beginning in the mid-1200s, inspired by the prophetic writings of the northwestern Italian monk (admired by Dante, no less), Joachim of Fiore, who wrote that a Third Age of Spirit would ensue by 1260 CE. This Third Age would be dominated by the Holy Spirit, who would be incarnated in the body of a woman, and that women would be the chief spiritual teachers to usher in this age. The Third Age would see an end to poverty, inequality, political difference, war and disease. The Female Messiah would be the embodiment of the philosophical manifestation of the Holy Spirit, known as "Sophia" ("she of wisdom"). In Joachim's scheme, the First Age was the Age of the Father-Creator (who presided over Old Testament Times), the Second Age was the Age of the Son-Redeemer (Jesus, who provided over the intervening era). The chief leaders of the movement were a heterodox clerical order of women known as the Beguines, with a loose auxiliary mendicant order of men, known as the Beghards. The movement also became popular in Northern France, the Low Countries, and the High German fiefdoms. Unlike Catharism, which sought to create a living society here and now through settled communities of mutual belief coexistent with the world around them, the Joachite movement was just that: on the move and wholly rejected the institutions of the present age for bringing about the higher state of life of Third Age Christianity. In short, unlike the openly visible Cathars, they were truly an "underground" movement. They were thus less susceptible to a military campaign like a crusade, and required that the Inquisition become more refined and ruthless in its investigative techniques. Despite harrowing judicial persecution through ecclesiastic torture and theocratically-mandated forms of agonizing execution, various forms of Joachitism survived through the Fifteenth Century (1400s), until the stronger intellectual current of Protestantism took over in the Sixteenth Century (1500s). By that point, the epicenter for protestant theological thought in southwestern France was the University of Toulouse, and the popular movement its scholars begot was that of the Huguenots. Though in true-blue Catholic France as a whole they formed a seemingly freakish religious minority, the Huguenots were Protestants in the true sense of the word, as much as the Calvinists in Switzerland and Scotland, or the Lutherans in Germany and Scandinavia. However, in southwestern France, they formed a quite large minority, comparable to the numbers that the Cathars had claimed centuries before, and like the Cathars, they had adherents among all classes, including the peasantry, the artisans, the merchants, the gentry, and the nobility. As their numbers became too great to ignore, the Papacy called upon French Catholics to wage war against the Protestant infestation. Between 1562 and 1598, no less than nine wars were waged against the Huguenots, with brief truces for recuperation called between them. The stubbornness of the Huguenots, the exhaustion of the Catholics, and the sympathy of the French King, Henry IV (who since even before his crowning was sometimes openly, sometimes covertly a Huguenot himself), resulted in the Edict of Nantes, a true peace that brought legal recognition and political equality to French Huguenots. Unfortunately it was not to last. Theocratic subversion of secular control of the kingdom caused mounting harassment and abuse toward Huguenots. Those in southwestern France found the resources to organize themselves back into a military force and they rebelled. Between 1619 and 1628, two wars were fought between French Catholics and French Protestants, with the principle seat of Huguenot power emanating from La Rochelle. Despite help from Protestant England, the Huguenots collapsed as a military and political entity, and a brittle peace ensued. In a few decades, the death knell of Protestantism in France was sounded. The royal regime became ardently Catholic, associated Catholicism with French nationalism, and revoked religious freedom in 1685. Though it was illegal for Huguenots to leave France, those that had the connections and means (some 50,000 of them) immediately fled France, finding religious asylum principally in the Netherlands and the Protestant regions of British-controlled Ireland (though some found welcome refuge in the New World of North America). So what can one draw from this thirteen-hundred-year saga in the Aquitaine? At the very least, one must respect the persistence and courage of the people of that region to hold on to their evolving contrariant religious convictions in the face of very dire punishments and serious punitive military campaigns. Why has there been this monopolistic urge in Christianity when other faiths (such as Buddhism, Hinduism and Judaism) tolerate internal sectarian differences? The tragedy of the Aquitaine is also cultural, because the distinctive language of that region has also withered away -- and with the loss of a language so goes so many other things that create the distinctive color, beauty and identity of a people. Is it foolish to assume that the destruction of the Aquitaine's own brand of spiritual life had nothing to do with the ultimate death of their dialect and their resulting homogenization with the now dominant culture of Northern France? Why have so many Christians over time exacted such a price? Why do Protestants in America now desire to do the same thing to others that their own forebears suffered at the hands of the Catholics, by supporting a theocratic interpretation of the United States Constitution? Surely Jesus would never have wanted people to invoke his holy name to justify the persecution of fellow human beings.