institutions of the orthodox Church and to its most fundamental doctrines. The Incarnation could not but be a mistaken belief, for how could Christ have taken upon Himself a nature which was essentially evil? It followed, therefore, that the doctrine of Redemption was similarly void as were the sacraments since matter--wine, bread, and water, by definition polluted--was made use of in them. Churches and their holy vessels--icons, images, and the cross itself--were irrelevant to the dualists, who practised a simple faith with the Lord's Prayer as their only invocation and a form of confession made to each other.

It is the spread of dualist cosmology coupled with criticism of the institutions of the Church which points the connection between movements such as the Petrobusians, the supporters of Henry the Monk, and, most widespread of all, the Cathars, with the eastern heretical tradition. The challenge to the Roman Church was profound, for unacceptable beliefs were spread by unacceptable means. Wandering preachers spread heresy into regions which were either unserved by the existing parish structure, or where landownership was so fragmented that the basic patronal links between Church and laity were hardly in existence. Men such as the Cathar perfecti who eschewed all food produced by procreation, and lived lives of exemplary rigorousness and poverty, stood as living critics of the worldliness of contemporary clerics and the inability of the Church to reach out to the faithful in its preaching. Wherever it emerged, heresy stood as testimony to the inadequacies of the orthodox Church. In the east, the insistence on Greek as a liturgical language may have alienated the Slavonic-speaking peoples of the Balkans; in Languedoc opposition was more personally directed at absentee prelates (such as the archbishop of Narbonne, away from his see from 1190 to 1212) and thrived in a region where secular learning flourished but education of the clergy was woefully inadequate. But heresy was also a sign of social change. Heretics, like traders and the new urban leaders, were those who were ready to break with tradition and to question the bases of existing authority. They flourished in areas where political authority was weak: Italy, the lands of Toulouse, where the departure of Count Raymond

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