Catharism and Vedanta April 1, 2008
Posted by Colin in Comparative.trackback
This is such an amazing similarity that it must have been noticed before, but it is new to me so I thought I would share. I just read about an interesting sect of Christianity which was persecuted by the Catholics and literally run out of existence by way of a military crusade. This sect was called Catharism and it thrived for a brief period around the 12th century. The Cathers share an interesting doctrine with the Vedic philosophy of the Upanishads. They were gnostic Christians who believed that the human soul is a spark of the divine which was created by God, but the soul has been trapped in a body, in a material world, which itself was created by Satan. The only way to break the grip of Satan on the soul is to seek spiritual enlightenment, which consists in a realization of one’s true divine nature. They even believed in reincarnation. Of course, Catharism is still quite distinct from the Vedic doctrines of Atman, Brahman, and moksha (spiritual liberation) as any Christian doctrine must be, but the similarities between Catharism and the Vedanata are compelling.
Much of the early gnostic Christian philosophy is also very similar to Vedantic philosophy (and Indian metaphysical thought on these issues in general). The Cathars were surely influenced by the gnostic movements, which, like the Manichaeans, tended to hold that the physical world, including the body, was either illusory or evil–this is why the Manichaeans, for example, were so dead set against sexual activity (which is where the Catholics got it, through Augustine who was at first a Manichaean, even though they don’t like to admit it). Some of the gnostic groups held that Jesus’ human existence and suffering were illusory, because they were antagonistic to the notion that something divine would have any physical nature at all. Gnosticism flourished in Eastern Christianity, in Egypt, Syria, etc., and there are lots of texts written in Syriac. No doubt this gnosticism itself was influenced by Indian modes of thought, as Indian philosophy (particularly Buddhist philosophy) was big in the region at the time (we’re talking from around 2nd century CE to around the 4th or so when the catholic/orthodox unification movement of Ambrose and those guys gained ascendancy and the gnostics were basically run out of town). Thus, if the Cathars were influenced by gnosticism (which they probably were), and gnostisicm was influenced by Indian philosophy (which is almost certainly true), then Catharism was influenced by Indian philosophy, though distantly (like the dub of a dub…)