Talk:Cathar Perfect

Expansion

I've added a little extra detail. I will add some references soon. ThePeg 18:05, 15 April 2007 (UTC)

Merging

There's not much in the Perfecti article which isn't in this one. Would a redirect be appropriate? I'll add the detail about the demi-angelic status of the Perfecti to this one. ThePeg 10:44, 1 May 2007 (UTC)

Prefecture

Merging sounds like a good idea. I believe that this article twice introduces a mistake. I don't believe that there was anything such as a "spritual prefecture", they were priests full stop. I doubt that the roots of perfecti and prefecture are the same. Merging or not, I propose to delete:

or member of the spiritual prefecture

into the prefecture of his or her fellow Perfecti

Or can someone point me to a reference to the "prefecture"?--Joel Mc 10:14, 29 August 2007 (UTC)

Where does this article mention 'prefecture'? And the Cathar 'Parfaits' or 'Good Christians' were never Priests as well as never Prefects. ThePeg (talk) 15:59, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

It was in this draft: [1] I deleted it as I mentioned above.--Joel Mc (talk) 16:50, 17 November 2007 (UTC)

Ah yes I see. I didn't write that draft. What exists now is pretty much my overhauling of that version. Thanks for the clarification. ThePeg (talk) 12:52, 6 June 2010 (UTC)

Elite is a problem

There seems to be an irrational insistence upon referring to the "Parfaits" in this entry as "elite". That is an oxymoron, and I think the Cathar community would be aghast at the use of that term. Why not replace it with the correct term, monks?

To be monks they would have had to live in monasteries, which they didn't. They would have been closer to Friars, but they weren't those either, as Friars emerged in the wake of the Cathars. Parfaits were not contemplatives only, as monks are, but also actives, following the instructions of the Gospels to go among the people and heal them. I don't see how 'monks' can be regarded as 'the correct term'. It was not used by them and has never been used in this context in any historical source I have ever encountered.

In the end, all attempts to define the Cathars in terms of conventional Christianity are doomed to failure as they simpler were not like that, the parallels are not there. People have a tendency to refer to Cathar Bishops, for instance, which is also completely misleading and has quite the wrong connotations. They Parfaits were 'elite' in the sense of having acheived a form of spiritual perfection, but this does not mean that they regarded themselves as 'superior' to the Credentes. Far from it. They followed the Christian teachings of John's Last Supper and placed themselves at the foot of the table, as it were, regarding all humanity as equal. They never demanded the privileges we usually associate with elites.

We know that, like the Manicheans and the Valentinian Gnostics that the Cathar movement was differentiated between its Inner Circle and the majority of followers who were not expected to follow the austerest tenets of the faith. Those were arrived at after years of spiritual work and initiations, whether one was a Pneumatics (Valentinian Gnostic) a Speaker (Manicheanism) or a Parfait (Catharism). I don't see what is wrong with calling these 'elites', unless one only thinks of the term as referring to something contemptuous of anything that is not at the same level as itself, which is not true of the Parfaits." ThePeg (talk) 12:39, 6 June 2010 (UTC)***

Worthless

With a total lack of sources after 8 years for its claims this article has little more worth than piece of Cathar fanfiction. It deserves almost wholesale deleting and whatever can be salvaged by citation can be merged into the article on Catharism. Xophe84 (talk) 22:12, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

It doesn't have total lack of sources. It has general references. I think it should stay as stand alone article because stubs can be more useful than merges.--Thinker78 (talk) 03:44, 11 October 2019 (UTC)

Odd sentence

The article includes this line, but I don't understand how it fits into the rest of the paragraph: "This was aimed at enabling the Perfect to bestow the sacrament to those whose illness meant they could not ask for it." Indeed it seems in tension with the rest of the paragraph, if not outright contradiction. Maybe the problem is in the immediately preceding sentence, which may require more information: "One of the conditions of being a Credente was the uttering of the Convanenza, or Covenant, when encountering a Perfect, which involved the request for the Consolamentum should they be dying." JKeck (talk) 16:59, 22 September 2021 (UTC)