Faith & RitualGreek → English
Cathar
/ˈkæθɑːr/noun
A member of the dualist Christian movement of medieval Languedoc, destroyed by the Albigensian Crusade.
The Greek roots
καθαρός
katharós
clean, pure
Literally: “pure one”
Follow a root:καθαρός3 words
The story of the word
Their enemies supplied the name. Latin churchmen called them Cathari from Greek katharoí, the pure, a label already in use in the third century for the rigorist Novatianists who refused communion to anyone who had cracked under persecution. The same adjective gives catharsis, which for Aristotle was the purging a tragedy performs on an audience.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Medieval Latin → English
- First recorded
- 17th century
The same roots elsewhere
Other languages reached for exactly the same Greek pieces.
Same family
catharsiscathartic
In a sentence
The last Cathar stronghold at Montségur fell in 1244.
He wrote a doctoral thesis on Cathar preaching in the Toulouse countryside.