Gafney on Pegg, A
Most Holy War
As I read Pegg’s account of the beginning of the Albigensian
Crusade, I was struck by his characterization of the murdered Peire de
Castelnau as a second Christ figure:
Peire de Castelnau was transformed
(by torturous papal prose) into Jesus Christ; his damp death on the Rhone (by a
lance, not a sword) became the redemptive crucifixion on Golgotha; his
sacrifice a sign to a corrupt generation (Pegg, 6).
Of course, any medieval martyrdom bore a comparison with
Jesus’ self-sacrifice. But here, the association has significant implications
for the way that Christians in the 11th century saw themselves as
social, political, and spiritual members of a particular and sanctified
community.
Much of the medieval Christian’s
sense of himself or herself as a member of the Christian community (which, of
course, intersected with and stood in for a variety of other communities) was
predicated on the New Testament and the teachings of the early Church fathers.
Paul’s letters were particularly instrumental in this process of identification
of the self with a greater Christian community; Paul was instructing various
prospective or newly converted peoples in what kind of life a Christian was
expected to lead. Paul’s letters, however, imagine a community of Christian
citizens that was to exist on earth for a very short time. Indeed, in his
second letter to Timothy, Paul describes the end times, which he imagined would
come within the first century following Jesus’ death. Moreover, Paul’s letters
and the gospels in general cast Christians as a chosen people, but as a people
who must endure persecution, torment, and suffering. And, the position of the
early Christians was often a perilous
one; in fact, when the Thessalonian converts endured Roman persecution, they
believed that the end of the world had come. So, a community of Christians, for Paul, was a community of
the brave who defied worldly, political, and social norms, and instead cleaved
together to form another group that would endure torment until they were
redeemed by the second coming of Jesus.
Though Paul’s teachings remained
important to medieval Christians, the position of those Christians was entirely
different from the position of those Paul addressed in his letters. Instead of
being a marginalized group, the Christians had become overwhelmingly powerful
in every aspect of life in Western Europe. I believe that this prominence and
power, when coupled with the still-relevant teachings of the early Christians,
produced a kind of collective guilt in Christian communities, and produced in
them the desire to reenact the early days of the Church, in order to imagine
themselves to be a persecuted minority standing up for their beliefs. The move
to transform Peire de Castelnau into not only a martyr, but rather a Christ
figure, fits neatly into this paradigm. The victim is not only a “sign to a
corrupt generation,” but also allows those who presume to fight in his cause a
standing analogous to that of the early Christians. This move also recasts the
enemy as not only non-Christian, but anti-Christian, heretical.
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