A Discourse on the Albigensian Heresy

...it is necessary. For if that name belongs to a corporeal thing—that is, common to our light here—this also occurs in other words, even in those considered the most significant of all: the Latin spiritus spirit, the Greek pneuma original: πνεῦμα, meaning spirit or breath, and the Hebrew ruach original: רוּחַ, meaning spirit, wind, or breath. What Beausobre (1) Book 5, chapter 6. discusses regarding matter original Greek: ὕλη (hyle)—as if the Manichaean matter were not correctly explained by that name, and as if the Church Fathers were not concerned about it—belongs to the same category as his other arguments brought against their authority and the testimonies he produced. So far is it from being the case that this dogma of the Manichaeans opposes Christian doctrine, that it is found to agree with it most closely. This is all the more valid because the Manichaeans truly admitted only one God; thus we determine that they were by no means polytheists. While they admitted two principles referring to the dualist struggle between Light and Darkness, they by no means admitted two Gods; and in this (lest we be called enemies of the man), Beausobre has correctly established the point. Just as we say the Fathers are to be understood in this way when they speak of God and declare Him to be light or fire; so also many of them expressed almost the same thing in their discourse on Angels; although we must admit that not all of them can be explained in this way.

But here too Beausobre (2) Part 2, book 5, chapter 6. uses exaggeration; and although theologians almost seem to agree on this—that it must not be held as a certain and defined point of faith, even after the Lateran CouncilThe Fourth Lateran Council (1215), which defined that God created both spiritual and corporeal creatures., that angels (especially the evil ones) are entirely void and free of all matter and every body, and indeed, to assert that would be rash—nevertheless, we are of the opinion that faith and tradition have always existed in the Church regarding the fact that Angels are incorporeal, immaterial, and finally spirits. This is true even if that tradition was not conceived in these specific names and words, but in entirely different ones, which nevertheless signified at that time the same thing as those words do now.

III.

And so much for the errors of the AlbigensiansA medieval dualist sect in Southern France, often linked by Catholic polemicists to the ancient Manichaeans., in which these more recent heretics are found to agree entirely with the ancient Manichaeans. CaesariusCaesarius of Heisterbach (c. 1180–1240), a Cistercian monk and chronicler. adds: they mock whatever benefit is bestowed upon the dead by the living; they say that going to churches, or praying in them, is of no use. Peter the MonkPeter of Vaux-de-Cernay (d. c. 1218), a chronicler of the Albigensian Crusade. attributes other things to those whom he seems to address precisely by the name of Heretics: Likewise, the Heretics said that the good God had two wives, Collant and Colibant, and from them he procreated sons and daughters. He adds certain things about other heretics; but to all of them he attributes these: All these members of the Antichrist, the firstborn of Satan... infected the province of Narbonne with the poison of their perfidy; they said almost the whole Roman Church was a den of thieves, and that she was that harlot of whom one reads in the Apocalypse. William of PuylaurensGuillaume de Puylaurens (c. 1200–1275), a chronicler of the Albigensian Crusade. [wrote] a famous