Asher Sisneros

The Albigensians were a medieval religious sect that broke away from Catholicism. Their beliefs were an awkward merger between Satanic Manichaeism and Catholic Christianity. While they worshiped Jehovah and Christ on paper, they were also dualists like the Manicheans. In that regard, they believed in two gods. One was the incarnation of good, while the other was the incarnation of evil. Already, the dualistic heresy qualified them as heretics with a religion incompatible with Christianity. A fundamental Christian belief is that Jehovah God is the only god, and there are no other gods besides Him. To say that another evil god exists with equal power and authority is a blatant perversion of the Bible. 

To make matters worse, they also believed the good god was purely spiritual and the evil god was fleshly. That error had serious ramifications regarding Christ’s incarnation. They acknowledged Jesus as the good god’s Son but rejected His humanity. To the Albigensians, the good god is spiritual and forsakes all worldly pleasures and fleshly bodies. As a result, they lived very modest lives, trying to forsake all luxury. But Christianity does not believe creation is of itself wicked. It became tainted through sin, but it is good in itself. God declared all creation good in Genesis after He made it. However, that was not what the Albigensians believed. To them, the creation was evil in and of itself. Not only is that contrary to what God Himself stated in Genesis, but it affected their perception of Jesus. Christ needed to take on a human body to act as a proper mediator between God and man. Salvation depended on a man keeping God’s law perfectly, dying unjustly, and paying the price for all sins. But the Albigensians had a misconstrued understanding of all men being “born into sin.” As already stated, to them, that made all creation sinful, not because of their actions, but sinful in essence. Human bodies are sinful in nature in that they inherently lean towards sinning, but they are not sinful in essence. With the misunderstanding that creation has a sinful essence, the Albigensians subscribed to the heretical belief that Jesus did not incarnate into a man because He was a perfect deity. Since the body itself was sinful, Jesus would have sinned by taking on a human body. But He could not have interceded to pay for the remission of sins if He had not become a man. The entire Albigensian philosophy is full of hypocritical inconsistencies. 

The final ramification of accepting the inherent wickedness of material creation was that they rejected the sacraments, which were material signs and seals of God’s invisible grace. For example, the Eucharist had physical wine and bread. Since the wine and bread were themselves evil, it was wrong for the Albigensians, who longed to separate themselves from the material world, to eat it. The same was true of every other sacrament. Properly signifying an invisible and immaterial grace was impossible with the inherently wicked, material, and worldly elements, according to the Albigensians. 

In conclusion, the Albigensians were a dualistic religion that broke away from the Catholic Church during the Middle Ages. They avoided everything material, calling it inherently sinful. The entire religion was heretical and not Christian, but they grew in popularity because of their pious lives. They appeared to live more biblically contrasted with the bishops who basked in luxury. Saint Dominic attempted to convert the Albigensians. The measure of his success is disputed. Eventually, Pope Innocent Ⅲ called Philip Augustus on a crusade against the Albigensians to convert them through military force. Thus, the Albigensians dissolved following the Albigensian Crusade.