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Abstract
During the mid-twelfth century, the church of Western Europe faced a new and very dangerous heresy--that of the "Cathars" or "pure ones". It had been created by the union of two powerful movements of dissent. First, there were dualists from the Byzantine Empire who began to move into Western Europe by the 1140's from the Byzantine Empire, where they had been active as the "Bogomils" since the middle of the tenth century. They considered themselves the one true and pure church and claimed to have supplanted the Catholic Church as the holders of apostolic authority.
Second, these dualists found an already existing movement aiming at reform of the Church in Western Europe, who called for a return to a simpler, more austere Church, based on that of the New Testament. These two movements met one another in the Rhineland. Dispite conflict, assimilation began to take place and by 1163, dualist and reformist traditions had merged into a single heresy. The danger presented by this union prompted a response from Eckbert, monk and later abbot of the Benedicine monastery at Schonau, in the diocese of Trier. Eckbert composed a set of fourteen sermons against the Cathars in 1163, in which he set out their ancient origins in the form of the Manichaeans and refuted what he considered to be their primary doctrines.
Scholars of medieval heresy have long considered Eckbert's sermons of minor importance in the study of twelfth-century Catharism, based primarily on his supposed dependence on Augustine of Hippo's anti-Manichaean writings for information. Thus, no critical edition of this work has yet appeared. I argue that Eckbert's reliance on Augustine has been exaggerated and that his sermons are a reliable and early exposition of Catharism in the medieval West. I have found no evidence that Eckbert supplemented his account of Cathar doctrine from Augustine; instead, he relied primarily on first-hand information gathered from former Cathars and from his own debates with Cathars. My critical edition is based on the only three extant manuscripts of the Sermones contra Kataros and a printed edition of 1530 from Cologne.
