Month: December 2024

Patience is the companion of wisdom.

St. Augustine

Going solo

So here I am alone in the wilderness of the Karoo, and the song in my mind is by Cat Stevens and goes “Miles from nowhere, guess I’ll take my time, oh yeah, to reach there. Look up at the mountain I have to climb, oh yeah, to reach there”.

Strange thing this affliction that some of us have, almost an aversion to excessive comfort or compromise. Maybe driven by a longing for something undefined. God. Love. Beauty. I know I’m not the first…

I stumbled across the story of the Cathars a while back – they were a Christian sect in centred around southern France in the late Middle Ages. They called themselves the Good Christians and believed that we human souls were actually angels that had been separated from God were and trapped on earth in physical form, destined to suffer until the separation was finally over. They refused to kill or consume meat, regarded men and women as spiritual equals, and shunned procreation because they believed that only when humans were no more, would the the trap be broken and the angels be liberated. Central to their belief was that suffering is inseparable from being human, and that our suffering is an inevitable result of our separation from God and our longing to return to Him.

It’s a common theme. In Plato’s Symposium, Aristophanes recounts the delightful myth of the androgynous people that preceded modern humans, when we had four legs, four arms, two heads, and there were three genders: male-male, male-female, and female-female. They were immensely more powerful beings than we are today today and when they challenged the gods and lost, Zeus decided to cleave them all as punishment and to ensure it would never happen again. According to the myth, we are all half-beings and our destiny is to feel incomplete and spend our lives searching and longing for our missing half. In the same book, Socrates talks about the journey from longing for beautiful things to beautiful bodies to beautiful thoughts and finally to the contemplation of the essence of beauty itself.

We may ridicule the Cathars or the Greeks, but I think their myths and beliefs were just manifestations of the same underlying human condition that we, while blessed, are somehow broken and incomplete beings. I think this human feeling lies at the heart of so many beautiful poems and works of art, even great works of science. As Einstein himself said, feeling and longing are the motive forces behind all human endeavour and human creations.

Had the Cathars been a small sect, they would in all likelihood have been left alone, but they were not. They were branded as heretics by the Catholic Church, who naturally saw them as a threat, and they were subjected to a series of inquisitions aimed at their persecution and eradication. In 1209, the Pope Innocent III finally instituted the Albigensian Crusade against them, although the crusade was not just against the Cathars; the Catholics of southern France had lived happily alongside their Cathar neighbours and supported them in their defence against the crusaders. But their fate had been sealed and when the remaining Cathars, along with thousands of their Catholic defenders from the surrounding region took refuge in the city of Beziers, it was besieged. The siege was broken later that year and Arnaud-Armoury, the crusader abbot-commander gave the order to kill the Cathars as the city was sacked. When reminded that there were many more Catholics than Cathars in the city and asked how to tell them apart, he replied with the immortal line “Caedite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius“—”Kill them all, the Lord will know His own”. The Cathars finally got their wish, just by genocide and not by the means of their own choosing.

I read somewhere once an idea that rang true along the lines that there is no dogma, however absurd, that some people won’t be prepared to die for, or others prepared to kill for. I’ve had an aversion to all forms of dogma for as long as I can remember. A natural sceptic, I need to seek knowledge and distill my own truth rather than have it prescribed to me. In some ways I guess that where I now find myself in my life journey reflects this – never willing to accept all the elements of the hand I’ve been dealt, and continually questioning whether my direction is true.

So here I am, at 62, on my own path again. At least I didn’t wait until real old age, like Tolstoy. He left home at 82.

Miles from nowhere,
Not a soul in sight,
Oh yeah, but it’s alright.
I have my freedom,
I can make my own rules,
Oh yeah, the ones that I choose.