BOOK VI.

FROM THE DEPOSITION OF POPE GREGORY VI. TO THE DEATH
OF POPE CELESTINE III, A.D. 1046-1198.
 

CHAPTER XII.

SECTARIES—VISIONARIES

 

 

ALEXIUS COMNENUS receives from his daughter Anna the title of “thirteenth apostle”, for his zeal against the Paulicians of Thrace, who, in addition to then heterodoxy, had offended him by deserting him in his wars with the Normans of Southern Italy. Under the same emperor another remarkable party attracted for a time the attention of the Byzantine government.

The Euchites or Massalians, who derived their name from their practice of praying, are mentioned among the sects of the fourth century by Epiphanius and Theodoret, and are said to have held that every man has within him from his birth an evil spirit, who is to be kept down only by unceasing prayer. The party had been generally supposed to have been long extinct; but in the eleventh century it either emerged again from obscurity, or a new sect, known by the same name and holding similar opinions, arose independently. These later euchites, being persecuted by the Greeks, sought a vent for their opinions among the Bulgarians and Slaves who bordered on the empire; and they now, perhaps with opinions somewhat affected by contact with the Paulicians, attempted, under the name of Bogomiles, to regain a footing at Constantinople.

The new name of these sectaries has been variously derived—from Bulgarian words which might refer to their frequent prayers for the divine mercy; and as meaning in Slavonic “Friends of God”. In many respects their opinions resembled those of the early Gnostics. God, they said, had two sons, the elder of whom, Satanael, was associated with Him in the government of the world, until for rebellion he was cast down from heaven, with a third part of the angelic host, who had shared his crime. Satanael, like the demiurge of gnosticism, framed the world, and created man, on whom God, at his entreaty, bestowed a living soul. But Satanael became jealous of the privileges granted to his creature, and in the form of a serpent he begat Cain; in consequence of which he was stripped of the divine form which had until then been left to him, and of his creative power. Continuing his enmity against mankind, he gave the law by his servant Moses, and deluded the Jews into the belief that he was the supreme God. But in the 5500th year of the world, God in compassion sent forth his Son or Word, the archangel Michael, as to whose birth and humanity the doctrine of the sect was docetic. Satanael, like the demiurge, instigated the Jews to persecute and slay the Christ; and after the Son's resurrection he was punished by being deprived of the which he had retained as part of his name, and thus was reduced to Satan. It was held that the Son and the Spirit (who was said to be begotten by the Son) would be reabsorbed into the Godhead when their work in relation to man should be completed; but that in the meantime respect should be paid to Satan and his angels, although not out of love, but lest they should do hurt. It was said that God, although immaterial, had the form of an old man with a flowing beard; that the Son appeared as a bearded man, the Spirit as a smooth-faced youth; and under these forms the bogomiles professed to see them in dreams and visions. As in older heretical systems, it was taught that men are by nature of various classes; and it was held that at death the body is to be shaken off as an unclean garment, and is to be annihilated for ever.

In their worship the bogomiles were distinguished by a simplicity which has in later times raised up champions to deny their manifest heterodoxy. They disparaged the sacraments of the church—maintaining that its baptism was but the baptism of John, whom they despised as a teacher of legality; and that the Eucharist was a sacrifice of devils, whom they supposed to dwell in all consecrated buildings. They professed to have a true baptism of their own, which they administered to converts, with other rites of gradual initiation into their mysteries. For the Lord’s supper they substituted the repetition of the supplication for daily bread; and, while they objected to prayers in churches, their own devotions consisted of repeating the Lord’s prayer in stated numbers (as two or fifteen) and at stated times. They denounced images and relics, and paid honour to the memory of the iconoclastic emperors. They disparaged the saints of the church, and, although they admitted the miracles done by the relics of saints, they supposed these to be wrought through the power of evil spirits. They were enemies to all learning, classing “grammarians” with the Jewish scribes. They rejected much of Holy Scripture, and, when pressed with texts from those books which they admitted, they escaped by allegorical explanations of them. They maintained the lawfulness of disguising their tenets, on the ground that our Lord enjoined on us an outward conformity to authorities which we disapprove, and that his own parables are instances of disguise. In their appearance and manners they affected a monastic solemnity and austerity; yet with this it need hardly be said that, as in all similar cases, their enemies accuse them of combining not only abominable rites, but gross licentiousness.

This sect had made great progress among the subjects of Alexius, when his attention was called to it by public rumour. On this, he ordered some suspected persons to be seized; and one of these, Diblatius, was brought by torture to avow himself one of twelve apostles sent out by Basil, the chief teacher of the bogomiles. Basil, who is described as a physician, was a man far advanced in life; it was said that he had spent fifteen years in learning his system, and fifty-two in teaching it. The emperor, having caused him to be arrested, affected to treat him with great reverence, admitted him to his own table, and professed a wish to receive instruction from him; and after some hesitation Basil fell into the snare. In a secret chamber of the palace, he was drawn into unfolding his doctrines to Alexius and his brother; and, when the exposition was complete, the emperor, drawing aside a curtain, showed him a scribe who had noted down his words. The doors of the room were then opened, and the heresiarch found himself confronted with the patriarch, the senators, and the clergy of the city. As it was impossible to deny the truth of the written report, he strongly asserted the truth of his opinions, and declared himself willing to endure innumerable deaths for them. After this scene, all who were suspected of heresy were seized, and were brought before the emperor in a place where two great fires had been made, one of them having a cross beside it. Alexius told them that they were all to be burnt, but desired that those who held the orthodox faith would range themselves under the cross, since it would be better to die in orthodoxy than to live under suspicion of heresy. After this not infallible test, all who had chosen the side of the cross were set free; the others were imprisoned, and were plied from time to time with inducements to recant. Many of them died in prison; but Basil alone, on whom repeated conferences made no impression, was condemned to the flames, and, after having in vain expected an angel to appear for his deliverance, suffered in the hippodrome of Constantinople.

The opinions of the bogomiles did not die out with Basil. In the reign of Manuel similar doctrines were taught by Constantius Chrysomalos, and by a monk named Nephon, whose sway over the patriarch Cosmas was such that for his sake the patriarch submitted to deprivation. Bogomilism was secretly spread by teachers of both sexes; it found adherents among the Greek monks in Egypt, although it does not appear to have made any progress, it excited so much apprehension that the patriarch Eulogius of Alexandria wrote a treatise against it and even after the middle of the thirteenth century, the patriarch Germanus of Constantinople found it necessary to compose discourses in refutation of this obstinate heresy.

 

WESTERN SECTS

 

In the West many circumstances concurred to favour the growth of sectarianism. Foremost among these was the corruption of the clergy; and the very efforts of Gregory VII and others at a reform in the interest of Rome tended, by marking out the defects of the clergy for reprobation, to encourage a spirit of opposition to them. Among other causes which contributed to the same result were the fierce quarrels between the ecclesiastical and the secular powers; the growing pretensions of the hierarchy to authority over the things of this world; the narrowing of the limits of thought allowed within the church; the frequent and scandalous contests of bishops for particular sees; the interdicts and curses which inclined the minds of many to seek from some other quarter the religious ordinances and consolations which the church denied them. Accordingly, we now meet with sectaries in many places, and of various characters.

(1.) TANCHELM. The name of Tanchelm has already been incidentally mentioned. This man appeared in Flanders early in the twelfth century, and the chief scene of his activity was Antwerp, where the people had been prepared to welcome irregular teaching by the circumstance that their populous town was under the charge of a single priest, whose life is said to have been scandalous. The accounts of Tanchelm, as has been truly remarked, have much in common with those of the anabaptists of the sixteenth century. He affected a royal state, being attended by a bodyguard of 3,000 ruffians, wearing a crown, and having a banner and a sword borne before him when he preached. It is said that he claimed a divine character; that hymns were sung to him, that a church was dedicated in his honour, and that the water in which he had bathed was drunk or treasured up by his followers. He inveighed violently against the priesthood and the sacraments; and it is said that he combined with his lofty pretensions not only the practice but the teaching of the grossest licentiousness. The career of this blasphemous and sanguinary fanatic was cut short by a blow on the head from a priest, about the year 1116; and, although the sect did not immediately come to an end, his followers were reclaimed by Norbert about 1124.

(2.) EON. Another fanatical teacher of this time was Eudo or Eon de Stella, who spread his opinions chiefly in Brittany. Although not sprung from the lowest class of society, he is said to have been almost ignorant of the alphabet, and the accounts of him are incredible unless on the supposition that he was insane. He lived in great splendour, ordained bishops and priests, distinguished his chief followers by the names of apostles and of cardinal virtues, and is said to have kept his party together by means of food prepared by the spirits of the air, of which the effect was such that they who had once tasted it became irrevocably attached to the sect. Eon was brought before Eugenius III at the council of Reims, in 1148, and, on being questioned, avowed his belief that he was He who should come to judge the quick and the dead. At the request of the bishop who had brought him to the council, his life and limbs were spared; and the pope committed him to the care Samson, archbishop of Reims, in whose custody he soon after died.

(3.) PETER OF BRUIS. A sectary of a more respectable kind was a priest named Peter of Bruis, whose followers were known by the name of Petrobrusians. After having, for some unknown cause, been deprived of a pastoral cure which he had held, Peter, about the beginning of the century, appeared as an independent teacher in the Alpine dioceses of Embrun, Gap, Digne, and Arles; and, on being driven from that region, he removed into Gascony. There he found a population prepared by the earlier prevalence of sectarian opinions to receive him; he is described as “no longer whispering in hamlets, but openly preaching to multitudes in towns”; and his success, especially in the important city of Toulouse, was such as to astonish those who had been disposed to attribute his earlier successes to the ignorance of the mountaineers whom he had addressed. He vehemently attacked the system of the church in doctrine and in government; his aim was to restore a nakedly scriptural Christianity, without any allowance for change of circumstances, or any consideration for the historical development of ages. Yet it would seem that, while professing to regard scripture as the only source of religious knowledge, he was inclined to discard the Old Testament, and perhaps to retain no part of the New except the Gospels.

The points on which Peter chiefly insisted were five in number: (1) That infants ought not to be baptized, inasmuch as conscious personal faith is necessary in order to receive the benefits of the sacrament. (2) That there ought to be no churches or other places hallowed for worship, forasmuch as the true Church consists of the congregated faithful, and God hears prayer equally wherever it may be offered. (3) That crosses ought not to be reverenced, but, as being the memorials of the Saviour’s sufferings, ought to be dishonoured, broken, and burnt. (4) He not only denied the change of the eucharistic elements into the Lord's body, but held that the sacrament, having been celebrated by our Lord once for all, ought not to be repeated. (5) He taught that prayers, alms, and masses were unavailing for the dead.

The preaching of these doctrines was attended with great effect. Multitudes who had been baptized in infancy submitted to rebaptism; churches were profaned and destroyed; altars were overthrown, crosses were burnt, priests were beaten by excited mobs, and monks were compelled by torture to marry. Once, on Good Friday, Peter caused all the crosses in the town where he was to be thrown into a bonfire, at which he roasted flesh, and then, in disregard of the solemn fast, invited the spectators to partake of it. But the feeling which usually waited on his preaching was not universal; for, after a career of twenty years, he was seized by the populace of St. Gilles in Provence, and, in vengeance for his outrages against the cross, was himself burnt to death. Peter of Bruis was still alive, when the “venerable” Peter of Cluny, in passing through his original haunts, found his opinions largely prevailing there, and thus was induced to compose a treatise, which is almost our only source of information as to the sect. In this book he defends the whole system of the church, although it need hardly be said that his arguments are often of a questionable kind. The preface, written after the heresiarch's death, is addressed to the four prelates whose dioceses were infected, and in it the abbot expresses a hope that they may find his tract useful in argument, which he declares to be the more Christian manner of dealing with heretics, although he holds that, in case of necessity, the secular power may lawfully be called in to coerce them.

In the meantime, as the abbot of Cluny mentions, the heresiarch had found a successor in one Henry, whom some suppose to have been an Italian, and others to have been a Swiss. Henry was a deacon, and had been a member of the Cluniac order. In his habits he still affected the severity of a monk or a hermit, wearing a long beard, walking barefooted even in the depth of winter, living on alms, and professing to limit himself to such things as were merely necessary. Yet Hildebert and Bernard charge him with licentiousness of life, and especially with a fondness for gaming. His eloquence was said to be such that nothing but a heart of stone could resist it, and it was believed that by his mere look he could read the secrets of the heart. He also enjoyed the reputation of learning; but his right to this is denied by his opponents, who allow him no other accomplishments than those of preaching and dicing. The first place at which Henry is described as having made himself conspicuous was Lausanne; and, as we soon after find that opinions closely resembling his were entertained by some persons at Treves and at Cologne, it is probable that he may have visited those cities on his way from Switzerland to Le Mans, where he appeared in 1116. Having obtained from the bishop, Hildebert, permission to preach during Lent, he made use of it to excite the people against the clergy, who were insulted, attacked, and plundered, and were only saved from yet worse outrages by the interference of the civil power. He also made strange attempts at moral reform by encouraging marriages with prostitutes and women of servile condition; and it is said that all such unions were unfortunate in their consequences. During these proceedings, Hildebert had been absent on an expedition to Rome; but on his return he was able, although not without much difficulty, to drive out Henry, who afterwards preached at Poitiers and Bordeaux—everywhere, according to St. Bernard, leaving such an impression that he could not venture to revisit the place. In the south of France he met with Peter of Bruis, and after Peter's death he became the leader of the sect, to whose errors he is said to have made some additions, although the only further difference from the system of the church that is recorded is a denunciation of the system of chanting.

Peter of Cluny's tract against the Petrobrusians was not without effect. At the council of Pisa, in 1135, Henry was brought by the archbishop of Arles before Innocent II, by whom he was condemned as a heretic, compelled to a retractation, and given over for custody to Bernard, who furnished him with an order that he should be received as a monk of Clairvaux. After a short detention he was set at liberty, on condition that he should not return to his former haunts; but he speedily resumed his labours in the south of France, and with such effect that, as Bernard reports, the churches were soon without people, the people without priests, the priests without due respect; that holy places were reckoned unholy, festivals were neglected, sacraments were scorned, children remained unbaptized, and sinners died without penance or the holy communion. In 1147 Eugenius II, who was then in France, desired Alberic, cardinal-bishop of Ostia, to undertake a mission against Henry, and Bernard, then fresh from his triumphs in preaching the crusade, was persuaded by Alberic to accompany him. Nowhere had the abbot's successes been more signal than on this mission. At Albi, where the people were especially infected with error, the cardinal was received with insult; but when Bernard arrived, five days later, his appearance was hailed with enthusiasm. The cathedral was unable to contain the multitudes which pressed to hear him; and when, after having discoursed on the chief points of difference, he desired that all who preferred the catholic faith to heresy would hold up their hands, every hand in the assembly was raised. Miracles were performed in such abundance that the heretics slunk off in dismay, and wherever Bernard appeared, so great was the excitement, that he was even afraid to encounter the crowds of his admirers. On one occasion, when bread was carried to him for his blessing (as was usual), he declared that, for the decision of the question between the church and the heretics, every sick person who should taste of that bread would be made whole. “If they receive with right faith they will be healed”, interposed Geoffrey, bishop of Chartres, who feared that the abbot had been carried too far by his enthusiasm. “That is not what I say”, cried Bernard, “but of a truth those who taste shall be healed, that they may know us to be the true and faithful messengers of God!”. The miracle is said to have followed and the effect of it was decisive. Henry, driven from the city, had found a refuge among the nobles of the neighbourhood, who, although indifferent to his doctrines, were favourable to him as an enemy of the clergy. But at Bernard's instance he was given up in chains to the bishop of Toulouse. His further history appears to be unknown, and the sect, as a distinct body, seems to have become speedily extinct, partly through the effect produced by a young girl of Gascony, who, about the year 1151, used to lie insensible three days in each month, and, on awaking, to testily eloquently and learnedly against the errors of the Henricians.

(4.) CATHARI. The heretical opinions most widely spread during this time were those of a Manichaean character, which are found from England to the south of Italy, from the Hellespont to the Ebro. Appearances of this kind have already come before us in the early part of the eleventh century. But whereas those appearances, however similar to each other, seem to have been isolated, we now find in the heretics a knowledge of their own numbers and of the wide extent of their communion, with a formidable system of organization. The connection with the East becomes more distinct, and the oriental tone of their doctrine is too plain to be mistaken.

Of the names by which these sectaries were known, the commonest was that of Cathari (in Italian, Gazzari, and in German, Ketzer), as to which, although other derivations have been proposed for it, there appears to be no reason for doubting that it is of Greek origin, and relates to their profession of purity. Among their other names were—Publicani or Poplicani,  which seems to point to a connection with the Paulicians; Patarini,  a name which, from having belonged to the opponents of clerical marriage at Milan in the preceding century, was now transferred to parties which disparaged all marriage, or perhaps had come to be used, in forgetfulness of its origin, as a convenient designation for sectaries; Apostolici, from their pretension to an apostolical manner of life; Bonshommes, a name which was affected by themselves and bestowed on them by those who favoured them; Bulgari  or Bougres which connects them with Bulgaria, but came to bear a meaning of the most odious kind. In Flanders they were styled Pyphles, as belonging to the “people” or poorer classes; in the south of France, Tisserands, because many of them were weavers; some of them were called after the names of leaders, as the Arnoldists, who were probably connected with an “arch-catharist” of Cologne named Arnold; while other names were derived from places—such as that of Agenenses, and, at a later time, the more celebrated name of Albigenses.

Sectaries who may be identified with the cathari appear during this time in many quarters — at Cologne and Bonn, at Reims and Toul, at Liege, Arras, and other places in Flanders; at Soissons, at Auxerre (where a bishop named Hugh was styled the “hammer of the heretics”), and at Vezelay; at Besançon, and perhaps at Perigueux (although the Manichaeism of the sectaries there is somewhat doubtful). An English writer of the time describes them as numerous in Anjou, but as swarming in Burgundy and Aquitaine. Spain was also infested by them; and in England itself a party of about thirty “Publicans” was discovered at Oxford about 1160. They were all Germans except a female English convert, who afterwards recanted; and all are described as utterly illiterate, with the exception of their leader, one Gerard. These sectaries were examined by a council held at Oxford, in the presence of Henry II, who was especially desirous at that time to give the exiled primate's party no pretext for representing him as favourable to heresy. By the king’s command they were branded in the face, severely flogged, and driven out of the town, after which, according to some writers, they perished in the fields by cold and hunger, as the people would hold no communication with them, while other authorities tell us that they were sent across the sea.

In the treatment of such persons in general, the king of England is honourably distinguished from most of his contemporaries; for we are told that while the Publicans were burnt in many places throughout France, king Henry would by no means allow this in his dominions, although there were many of them there; and it would seem that even warnings and calamities, which were represented as miraculous, were unable to change his policy in this respect. In most places where heretics were found, they were committed to the flames under the authority of bishops and princes, or by the violence of the multitude, and it is generally related that they bore their fate with a courage, and even with an appearance of exultation, which were traced to demoniacal influence. Yet there were eminent teachers who took a truer view of the manner in which error should be dealt with, and among these Bernard was conspicuous. In 1146 he received from Everwin, provost of Steinfeld, an account of some sectaries at Cologne, who were divided into two parties—the one unquestionably Manichaean, while the other seems to have been nearly akin to the Petrobrusians and Henricians. It was through the dissensions of these parties among themselves that they had been discovered; some of them, after a discussion with the clergy, had been hurried away and burnt by the mob; and Everwin expresses his regret for this violence, and asks Bernard to furnish him with arguments and authorities against the errors which he reports to him. In consequence of this application, Bernard composed two sermons on the text, “Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines”. In these sermons he argues zealously against the sectaries, and strongly denounces their peculiarities. But as to the right manner of dealing with them, his opinion is decidedly against persecution and bloodshed. “They are to be taken”, he says, “not with arms but with arguments; and, if possible, they are to be reconciled to the Catholic church, and recalled to the true faith. And that this is the will of Him who will have all men to be saved, and to come to the knowledge of the truth, appears from its being said, not simply, ‘Take the foxes’ but ‘Take the foxes’ He commands that they be gained for Himself and for his spouse, the church”. The utmost that Bernard would sanction is that obstinate heretics should be driven away or imprisoned, rather than that they should destroy the spiritual vines. In like manner, St. Hildegard, while she everywhere expresses a strong detestation of heretics, and exhorts the secular authorities to drive them away by confiscation and banishment, adds that they ought not to be slain, “forasmuch as they are God’s image”. And Peter the Chanter of Paris, in the end of the century, condemns both capital punishment of heretics and the use of ordeals for their trial.

In Italy the cathari were to be found even as far south as Calabria. But they were especially numerous m Lombardy, where the heretics of Monteforte had appeared at an earlier time, and from the days of Ariald and Herlembald there had been a strong feeling against the clergy; and there they are described as abounding in cities and in suburbs, in villages and in castles, and as teaching publicly without fear or hindrance. The sectaries of Lombardy were divided into parties—those of Concorrezzo and of Albano mutually excommunicating each other; but with this exception it is said that their congregations were everywhere in communion. Of these churches sixteen are enumerated—in Italy and France, in Slavonia, at Constantinople (where there were one of Latins and one of Greeks), and elsewhere in the east; and it is said that all the rest were derived from those of Bulgaria and Dugunthia. The writer who gives this information reckons the whole number of the sect, including both sexes, at less than four thousand; but it would seem that this estimate was meant to exclude all but the “perfect” or highest grade of them.

But the chief stronghold of these sectaries was in the south of France, where circumstances were very favourable to the spreading of their opinions. The population of this territory were widely different from the northern French, to whom their dialect, the langue d'oc, was even unintelligible. Toulouse, the capital, was the ancient seat of the Arian Gothic monarchy, and heresy is said to have always lingered in the region. The nobles were remarkable for their gay and luxurious manner of life, and among them was cultivated a vernacular poetry of love and chivalry, strongly tinged with licentiousness, and unsparing in its satire against the clergy, who had fallen into tastes and habits too strongly resembling their own. The citizens had been enriched by commerce, and had achieved for themselves a degree of political freedom which was elsewhere unknown. The tone of thought and feeling was independent; Peter of Bruis and Henry had found an eager reception among the people, and had paved the way for other teaching hostile to the church. To the more serious, the heresy was commended by its professions of austerity; to those of opposite character, by its enmity to the clergy, and by the indulgence which it allowed to such of its converts as had not yet taken on themselves the obligations of its highest grade. We have already seen that in the beginning of the eleventh century some Manicheans were discovered and put to death at Toulouse. The renewed progress of heresy in the same region had been noticed and denounced as early as the year 1119, when Calixtus II held a council at that city; and the denunciation had been repeated by the Lateran council of 1139, by the council of Reims in 1148, and by that of Tours in 1163—all held under the presidency of popes. In 1165 a conference took place between some bishops and some of the "good men" (as they styled themselves) at Lombers, a little town near Albi; where the sectaries behaved with all the consciousness of strength, defied the sentence which was passed against their opinions, and were allowed to depart without any attempt to extend it to their persons. Some years later, we read of a council held by the heretics themselves at St. Felix de Caraman, near Toulouse, under the presidency of a personage styled “Pope Niquinta”—a name which has been identified with that of one Nicetas, who is said by a writer of the time to have come from Constantinople into Lombardy. A vast multitude of both sexes flocked to receive from this chief the mystical rite which was styled consolamentum. Representatives of several catharist churches appeared; bishops were chosen and ordained for these communities; and, with a view to the preservation of harmony among the sectaries, Niquinta told them that all churches were, like the seven churches of Asia, originally independent of each other; that such was still the case with their brethren of Bulgaria, Dalmatia, and the east; and he charged them to do in like manner.

In 1177 Raymond V, count of Toulouse, addressed a letter to the abbot of Citeaux and his chapter, requesting the assistance of the order against the heretics by whom his dominions were infested. About the same time the kings of France and England —probably at the count's instance— concerted measures for the suppression of the heresy; and at their request Peter, cardinal of St. Chrysogonus, Henry, abbot of Clairvaux, Guarin, archbishop of Bourges, Reginald, bishop of Bath, John, bishop of Poitiers, and others undertook a mission into the affected country. These commissioners describe the heresy as triumphant, not only among the people but among the clergy. On entering Toulouse they were hooted, and were reviled as hypocrites and heretics. They disputed with two leaders of the cathari, who disavowed the chief errors which were laid to their charge, and denied that they had ever taught so. But count Raymond and others deposed that they had often heard them vent those doctrines, and, as they refused to abjure, on the ground that oaths were unlawful, they were solemnly excommunicated. The chief supporter of the heresy at Toulouse, an old man of great wealth and powerful connexions, named Peter Moran, who is said to have been styled John the Evangelist, abjured his errors, and was punished by being repeatedly flogged, amerced in all his property, and sent on pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Roger, viscount of Beziers, on being summoned to expel the heretics, and to procure the release of the bishop of Albi, who was in their hands, withdrew into an inaccessible part of his territories. He was therefore denounced excommunicate in the name of the pope, and was defied in feudal form on the part of the two kings. Many of the sectaries were brought to an abjuration; but this was in some cases only evasive and insincere, and the mission is described by a contemporary as having had little success.

In 1179 the council of Lateran passed a canon against the “Cathari, Patarini, or Publicani”, denouncing all who should favour them, and promising the indulgences and privileges of crusaders to those who should take arms against them. In 1181 Henry of Clairvaux, who at the council had been created cardinal-bishop of Albano, again proceeded into the south of France, as papal legate. His preaching was seconded, not only by miracles in refutation of the heretical opinions as to the Eucharist, but by an army which caused much devastation and bloodshed. Roger of Beziers was compelled to profess that he would show no favour to heretics, and after his death, in 1194, an oath to the same effect was taken by the guardians of his son, Raymond Rogers. Lucius III, in conjunction with the emperor Frederick, sent forth from Verona in 1184 a decree against all heretics, and prescribed measures for the suppression of their errors. But we shall see hereafter that, notwithstanding all the measures both of persuasion and of force which had been employed, the heresy continued to retain its hold on the population of Languedoc.

The leading principle of these sectaries was dualism; but, while some held this in the full Manichaean sense of supposing two gods, independent of and opposed to each other, others held a modified opinion, nearly resembling that of the bogomiles—that the creator of evil was himself created by the good god, and had fallen from his first estate by rebellion. The creation of the elements was by some ascribed to the good god, and by others to the bad; but all agreed in referring the division of the elements, and the formation of the world from out of them, to the bad god; and from the imperfection of the world—from the fire which burns and the water which drowns—it was argued that it could not be the work of Him who is all-perfect. The Son of God was said to be the highest angel, and was held to be inferior to the Father, as the Holy Ghost to the Son.

It was said that Adam and Eve were formed by the devil, and had souls of light imprisoned within their fleshly bodies; that the forbidden fruit was carnal intercourse; and that Cain was begotten by the devil. The god of the Old Testament was declared to be cruel, false, and changeable. The angel who foretold the birth of St. John the Baptist was said to have been sent by the devil, as was also John himself; the baptism of John was of the devil, and whatever was well spoken by him as to Christ, was spoken without his will or understanding. The reality of the Saviour’s incarnation was denied by the sectaries in general; by some the blessed Virgin was supposed to be an angel, while some regarded her as an allegorical representative of the church, and others supposed her to have been born of a woman alone, without any human father.

The bodily form of the Saviour, his actions and sufferings, were explained on the docetic principle; the gospel miracles were said to have been wrought in no other than a spiritual sense—such as feeding spiritual hunger, healing the diseases of the soul, or raising from the death of sin; and in this sense the sectaries claimed for themselves a continuance of miraculous power, by virtue of the Saviour’s promise.

The later miracles of the church were denied, and members of the sect sometimes threw ridicule on them by applying to some famous worker of miracles for the cure of a pretended ailment, and afterwards exposing the imposture.

The cathari professed an especial knowledge of Scripture, and a reverence for it which excluded all deference to tradition, and to the authority of the doctors of the church. Yet, like many other sectaries whom we have met with, they regarded Moses as an organ of the devil, and disparaged the Old Testament in general, although they made exceptions in favour of such parts of it as are quoted in the New Testament, and some of them seem to have admitted the poetical and prophetical books. They had vernacular versions of the Scriptures, and it is a significant fact as to the origin of the sect that these were based on the Greek. With these, they received some apocryphal books, which were also of eastern origin—among them, an apocryphal Gospel of St. John.

The cathari are said to have held the doctrine of absolute predestination, and to have been traducianists in their opinion as to the soul. By their Manichaean view as to the origin of all visible things they were led to deny the efficacy of Baptism administered with water, and the possibility of any change in the Eucharist. Christ, they said, did not baptize with water, but with the word and the Holy Spirit. They also derided the rite of confirmation, and the whole ecclesiastical system of confession, penance, and excommunication. Yet they had sacraments of their own, which, with a rigour far exceeding the most rigid system of the church, they declared to be absolutely necessary to salvation; so that, from their manner of insisting on rites and works, their adversaries took occasion to charge them with denying the power of faith. Of these sacraments, the chief was the consolamentum, which they supposed to be the true baptism of fire—the rite which at once restored to each man for his guide the original heavenly soul which had been lost by the fall, and conveyed the gift of the consoling Spirit or Paraclete. The form of administering this began with the novice's publicly confessing his sins, and professing a desire to give himself to God and the gospel; after which the minister, holding the Gospel of St. John (or, according to some authorities, the whole New Testament) before his breast, pronounced absolution, laid the book on the novice’s head, repeating the Lord’s prayer seven times, and welcomed him by taking his right hand and kissing him. The administration of this rite was not limited to the clergy of the sect, but might, in case of need, be performed by any one who had received it—even by women. But if it were given by a sinner, it was null; and, in order to guard in some degree against the danger of its invalidity, it was commonly received twice, or oftener. For any grievous sin committed afterwards—such as eating flesh, cheese, or eggs—it was necessary to do penance and to be reconsoled but as to the more venial sins, a sincere confession was regarded as sufficient, and for this purpose there was a solemn monthly confession, styled apparcilamentum.

The other sacraments of the sect were—Blessing of Bread (which was performed over their daily food, and by which they supposed themselves to receive the spiritual nourishment of the Saviour’s body), Penance, and Ordination. The whole ritual system of the church was condemned; churches were said to be dens of thieves, church bells to be trumpets of devils, the cross to be the mark of the beast, the abomination of desolation standing in the holy place. Images were denounced, and it is said that, by way of bringing them into contempt, the sectaries painted the saints under an uncomely form, and departed from the traditional type in representing the Saviour’s cross. Lights and incense, vestments, altars, chanting, the ceremonies of the mass and of ordination, holy water, relics, pilgrimages, unction of the sick, the doctrine of purgatory, the intercession of saints, the use of aims, prayers and masses for the dead, the festivals of the saints and all other holy days of the church, were utterly disallowed. But the cathari are said to have kept in honour of their founder a festival called Malilosa, which is iden­tified by Eckbert of Schonau with the Manichaean Bema, although that was celebrated in March, and the Melilosa in autumn.

Their opinion as to the origin of matter involved the denial of the resurrection of the body; and they are said—(although this seems irreconcilable with other opinions imputed to them)—to have held that all sins are equal, and will be equally punished—that “the traitor Judas will fare no worse than the child of one day old”. They denied that the true priesthood was in the Roman church, which they supposed to have been apostate from the time of pope Sylvester, whom they regarded as the Antichrist. The church was the harlot of the Apocalypse; all its ministrations were vain, and the true priesthood was confined to their own communion. But, unless many ancient writers are mistaken, they had a pope of their own in Bulgaria, with whom the western sectaries kept up an intercourse. They had also an order of bishops, under each of whom were two chief assistants, known as his elder and his younger son, and an order of deacons.

The members of the sect were divided into two classes —the imperfect or foederati (who, according to some writers, were subdivided into hearers and believers) and the elect or perfect. The perfect were those who had received the and by the form of admission to it were pledged to great severity of life. They no longer belonged to themselves, but were bound to travel and to labour for the service of the sect; they were to avoid and to renounce marriage, which was declared to be so fatal that no married persons could hope for salvation unless they separated before death; and, as a consequence of the opinion as to the unlawfulness of all sexual intercourse, they were to abstain from eating animals or their productions—fish alone, as coming out of the water, being excepted. And as it was held that penance for sins would be wrought out in this world by means of a transmigration of the soul, it was forbidden to kill all animals, except creeping things, in which it was believed that souls capable of salvation could not be contained.

The cathari reproached the church for assuming that there were various states of life in which men might be saved, and taught that their own sect and state only were lawful. As, in order to salvation, it was absolutely necessary to die in the sect, the foederati were required to receive the consolamentum on their sick-beds, if not before; many entered into an agreement known as “la Convenenza”, that it should be administered to them in their last moments; and some, after having received it, starved themselves to death lest they should be again defiled by a relapse into sin. Besides this, which was styled endura, suicide was allowed in various cases, such as that of extreme persecution; and it is said that, in order to obtain for the receivers of clinical consolation a higher place in glory, it was usual for their friends to starve or to strangle them.

Reinerius Sacchoni tells us that many of those who had been admitted into the perfect grade, regretted that they had not taken advantage of their former immunity to indulge more fully in sin; that, in consequence of the belief in the all-purifying virtue of the consolamentum, the lives of the foederati were very lax; and that he himself, during a connection of seventeen years with the sect, had never seen any member of it pray by himself, or show any token of sorrow for sin. Other writers bring against the cathari accusations of magic, incest, and other abominations such as are usually laid to the charge of heretical parties. Oaths, and even affirmations, such as “truly” and “certainly”, were strictly forbidden; it is said that the “perfect” would rather die than swear, although the “believers” swore as freely as they lied. The use of equivocation was sanctioned, especially in answer to questions as to the sect, so that the opponents of the cathari compare them to eels, “which, the more tightly they are squeezed, the more easily they slip away”. They considered all war and all capital punishment to be murder, and declared the pope and his bishops to be murderers for countenancing wars; and they denounced with especial severity all wars and persecutions for the sake of religion. The “perfect” renounced all property, professing to follow the Saviour and his apostles in poverty, and they were constant in declaiming against the wealth and secularity of the clergy. It is, however, said that they themselves were fond of money, that they practised usury and other unscrupulous means of getting it, and that—partly from avarice, and partly from a disbelief in the efficacy of alms towards salvation—they were uncharitable to the poor. The graver invectives against the clergy were relieved by the performance of ludicrous parodies on the services of the church.

The zeal of the cathari in attempting to gain proselytes was indefatigable. They distributed little tracts in favour of their opinions—sometimes leaving them on the mountains, in the hope that shepherds might find them and might carry them to the clergy to read. The missionaries of the sect disguised themselves, changed their names, and assumed the character of catholics, that they might enter into disputation with avowed catharists, and might allow these to gain the appearance of victory. In order that they might have the arts of disputation at their command, young men of promising abilities were commonly sent from Lombardy and Tuscany to acquire dialectical and theological knowledge in the schools of Paris. The members of the sect were made known to their brethren by letters of recommendation and by secret signs; even their houses were distinguished by marks which enabled the initiated to recognize them. Their hospitality to members of their own community was unbounded, as we learn especially from a letter written by a person who, affecting the character of a brother, had lived on them for some years—being recommended by one congregation to another, from Lombardy to the Danube, and partaking of the luxuries which they enjoyed in secret. The rigid lives (in appearance, at least) of the perfect produced a strong impression on those who saw them, so that many of them even gained a high reputation for sanctity. Thus, after the death of one Armanno Pungilupo, at Ferrara, in 1269, the Ferrarese demanded canonization for him on the strength of his holy life and of miracles which he was said to have done, and the claim was supported not only by the canons of the cathedral, but apparently by the bishop. The investigation of the case lasted for no less than thirty years; but at length it was clearly proved that Pungilupo, while professing to forswear the patarine errors with which he had at one time been charged, had continued to be in reality an active official of the sect; and, although the canons had almost to the last adhered to his cause, Boniface VIII, decreed in 1301 that his body should be taken up and burnt as that of a heretic, and that an altar which had been erected to him, with all pictures and sculptures in honour of him, should be destroyed.

(5.) PASAGINI. Among the minor sects of the time, the Pasagini, of northern Italy, may be mentioned on account of the opposite nature of their errors in some respects to those of the cathari. By some, the name of these sectaries has been deduced from their unsettled manner of life; by others, from pasagium, a common term for the crusades, by means of which expeditions it is supposed that their opinions were brought into the west. Like the Manichaean heretics, the pasagini denied the unity and the equality of the Divine Persons, and condemned the Roman church; but, in marked opposition to the catharist doctrines as to the Old Testament, they maintained the abiding obligation of the Mosaic law —of circumcision, the sabbath, and the distinction of clean and unclean meats.

(6.) WALDENSES. The early history of the Waldenses has been obscured by two opposite parties who identify them with the Albigenses—the one party with a view of involving Waldenses as well as Albigenses in a common charge of Manichaeism, while the other party regards the Albigenses, no less than the Waldenses properly so called, as free from Manichaean error, and as the inheritors and maintainers of a pure and scriptural Christianity. By the supporters of this latter view, the name of the sect is derived from the valleys of Piedmont, where its faith is supposed to have been preserved and transmitted from the time of the apostles by a chain of witnesses, among whom Vigilantius, in the fourth century, and Claudius of Turin, in the ninth, are conspicuous. The Waldenses themselves, in the thirteenth century, professed to have existed as a distinct body from the time of pope Sylvester I—when they supposed that the poison of secularity had been poured into the church by the imaginary donation of Constantine—or even from the days of the apostles. But such pretensions are contradicted by the unanimous testimony of writers who lived soon after the origin of the sect—that it was founded by one Waldo or Waldensis, about the year 1170. And the only connection of their name with valleys in the early writers is of a figurative kind; as where one tells us that they styled themselves Vallenses from sojourning in the vale of tears, or where another derives the name of Valdenses from their dwelling in the deep and dense valleys of darkness and error.

Peter Waldo, a rich merchant of Lyons, is said to have been deeply impressed by the death of one of his fellow-citizens, which took place at a meeting of the chief inhabitants of the place. His mind being thus turned to spiritual things, he became desirous to understand the Gospels which he had been accustomed to hear in church; and he employed two ecclesiastics, Stephen of Evisa (or Ansa), and Bernard Ydros, to translate them into the vernacular tongue, with other portions of scripture and some passages of the fathers, which were regularly arranged under heads. Struck with the idea of imitating our Lord and His apostles in voluntary poverty, Peter threw all his wealth to the poor, and, in company with some associates of both sexes whom he had gained, he began to preach in the streets of the city, and in the neighbouring villages. But the archbishop of Lyons, on hearing of these proceedings, forbade Peter and his friends to teach; and on receiving the answer that they must “obey God rather than man”—that the Saviour had commanded them to “preach the gospel to every creature”—he excommunicated them, and expelled them from his diocese. On this, Peter, who had no intention of separating from the church, but aimed at the revival of what he supposed to be apostolical purity within it, sent two of his party to Rome, with orders to exhibit to Alexander III some specimens of their translations from the Scriptures, and to request his sanction for their labours. The subject was referred by the pope to a commission, and Walter Map, archdeacon of Oxford, who has left an account of the proceedings, was appointed to examine the Waldenses. Their simplicity and their ignorance of theological language excited the laughter of the examiners, and their application to the pope was ineffectual, although the Lateran council, which was sitting at the time, did not include them in its condemnation of heretical parties. In 1184, however, those who falsely style themselves humilliati,  or “poor men of Lyons”, were, with other sectaries, put under perpetual anathema by Lucius III; and it would seem that to them the pope intended especially to point in his denunciation of some who, under an appearance of piety, presume to preach without being duly sent, so that the condemnation was not for heterodoxy, but for irregularity.

From this time the “poor men of Lyons” (as they were called from their claim to evangelical poverty of spirit) became more decidedly separate from the church, and their opinions were more distinctly developed in opposition to it. They spread into the south of France, into Lombardy, and into Aragon, wherein 1194 Alfonso II issued a decree for their expulsion as enemies of the cross and of the kingdom. The earliest real evidence which connects them with Piedmont is of the year 1198, when James, bishop of Turin, obtained from the emperor Otho IV authority to use forcible measures against them. The progress of the sect was rapid. In Lombardy and Provence the Waldenses had more schools than the Catholics; their preachers disputed and taught publicly, while the number and importance of the patrons whom they had gained rendered it dangerous to interfere with them. In Germany we are told that they had forty-one schools in the diocese of Passau, and they were numerous in the dioceses of Metz and Toul. In most of these quarters the ground had been prepared for them by the labours of earlier sectaries, and by the faults and unpopularity of the clergy; and their zeal in endeavouring to gain converts was unremitting. Female agency was largely employed, and through it the men were won “as the serpent deceived Adam by means of Eve”. The missionaries of the sect are said to have used underhand arts for the purpose of spreading their doctrines; thus they would disguise themselves as pedlars, and having in that character obtained access to the houses of nobles, they took occasion from the nature of their wares to exhort to the purchase of heavenly jewels. With the simpler people, they began by promising to disclose great things to them; and, after having tried their secrecy by imparting to them some plain lessons of morality with a confidential and mysterious air, they went on to teach the more peculiar doctrines of the sect. Their eagerness to study and to learn, and their remarkable acquaintance with the vernacular Scriptures, are acknowledged by their adversaries. Labourers and artisans, after the work of the day, devoted their evening hours to study; and it is stated, in reproof of the indolence of the clergy, that a poor Waldensian used to swim across a river in wintry nights to reach a catholic whom he wished to convert. They taught and learned everywhere—even in lazar-houses. If any ignorant person met their exhortations to learn by pleading inability, they told him that, by learning a single word daily, he would in a year master more than three hundred. But the knowledge of the sectaries was not of any wide or scholarly kind, so that they are often derided for their illiteracy, through which it is said that they fell into ludicrous misinterpretations of Scripture and as they were themselves illiterate, they made their ignorance a ground for condemning all “privileged” or liberal studies. It is said, too, that in consequence of their occupation in the study of Scripture, they allowed but little time for devotion, and that they admitted no other form of prayer but the Paternoster.

The especial peculiarity of the Waldenses was that, while they avoided the Manichaeism by which the sectaries of their time were for the most part infected, they endeavoured more thoroughly than the Petrobrusians or the Henricians to form a system of belief and practice derived from the Scriptures only. At first their distinctive tenet had been the right of the laity to preach; and this they gradually carried out to the extent of maintaining, not only that lay persons might teach in subordination to the authorities of the church, but that they might preach and might administer all Christian rites in opposition to the clergy; that the right to minister was not conferred by ordination, but depended on personal piety. In the early days of the sect this claim was not limited to the male sex; but it would seem that the ministrations of women were afterwards forbidden. From this principle the Waldenses proceeded to a general enmity against the clergy, whom they charged with having cast them out of the church from envy of their virtue and popularity, and decried in all possible ways. After their excommunication, they declared the pope to be the source of all error, the church to be the apocalyptic beast and the whore of Babylon; that it had been apostate, and had lost its spiritual power, from the time of Sylvester, whom they identified with the “little horn” of Daniel’s prophecy, although they held that in all ages there had been some who maintained the true faith, and were inheritors of salvation. They limited salvation to their own sect, as being the only body which lived like the Saviour and his apostles. They declared monks and clergy to be the scribes and pharisees, children of the devil, disallowed all distinctions of order and rank among them, and wished to confiscate all their endowments and privileges, so as to reduce them to the condition of diggers, earning their bread by the labour of their hands. Yet, while they themselves professed rigid evangelical poverty, and avoided the pursuits by which wealth might be gained, it was held that the teachers were entitled to be maintained by the “imperfect” members of the sect and some of their opponents represent them as notorious for idleness, and for a love of basking lazily in the sunshine.

Like the cathari, the Waldenses opposed the whole ritual system of the church, with everything that pretended to a symbolical character, and denied the claims of the clergy to the powers of excommunication, absolution, and exorcism. They also disallowed the right of the church to make laws or constitutions, alleging that the Saviour’s teaching was enough. They attended the public services, confessed and communicated, but it is said that in their hearts they mocked at such observances. They denied the efficacy of baptism, especially in the case of infants, whom they believed to be saved without it. As to the Eucharist, some represent them as supposing it to be merely figurative; but according to other authorities they held that the elements really underwent a change—not, however, in the hands of the priest, but in the mouth of the faithful receiver. In the consecration, as in the rest of their services, they made use of the vernacular tongue. They denounced the penitential system of the church, as alike burdensome and unavailing, and contrasted with it the full and free forgiveness which their own sect offered, after the example of the Saviour’s words, “Go, and sin no more”. They denied the doctrine of purgatory, and the lawfulness of the practices connected with it—some of them believing in an intermediate state of rest or of punishment, while others held that souls on leaving the body go at once to their final abode. They denied the miracles of the church, and pretended to none of their own, although in later times some of them professed to see visions.

The Waldenses are described as quiet, modest, and formal in their manners. They regarded a lie as a mortal sin, which no circumstances could excuse; but it is said that they avoided answering directly, and had “feigned consciences” which suggested ingenious evasions to them. They eschewed commerce on account of the falsehoods which were supposed to be involved in the practice of it, and restricted themselves to manual labour. As to oaths, war, and capital punishment, their views agreed with those of the cathari. At the outset they affected poverty of dress, and one of their names —or —was derived from the sandals which they wore in imitation of the apostles but such peculiarities were afterwards abandoned, and they are described as grave but not sordid in their attire. They avoided and sternly denounced the ordinary amusements of the world; “every step that one takes at a dance”, it was said, “is a leap towards hell”. They were scrupulous in the use of blessings before and after meals. Unlike the cathari, they held it lawful to eat meat, even on days when it was forbidden by the church and they held marriage to be lawful, although they regarded celibacy as higher.

Much as the Waldenses differed from the church, it is admitted by their ecclesiastical opponents that they were “far less perverse than other heretic”, that they were sound in their faith as to the doctrines which relate to God, and received all the articles of the creed so that, in the south of France, they were sometimes allied with the clergy in defence of these truths against Manichaean and other sectaries. While they highly exalted the gospel above the law, it was in no spirit of Manichaean disparagement of the older scriptures. And, although they did not escape the popular charges of secret and abominable rites, or the imputation of hypocrisy, the general purity of their morals is allowed by their opponents.

From the sectaries of this age the transition is easy to the visionaries who were among its remarkable features; for, however devoted to the papacy these might be, they agreed with the sectaries in denouncing the secularity of the clergy, in crying out for a reform, and often in prophesying their downfall. Among the most noted of these visionaries were two German abbesses—Hildegard, of St. Rupert’s near Bingen, whose name as already come before us, and Elizabeth of Schonau. Elizabeth appears to have been of a very nervous temperament, and was frequently visited with illness. It is said that, from the age of twenty-three, she was in the habit of falling into trances on Sundays and holidays, at the hours when the church was engaged in its most fervent devotions. In these trances she uttered oracles in Latin, although unacquainted with that language; and, after having long refrained from telling the visions with which she was favoured, she was at last constrained by the threats of an angel, and by the authority of her ecclesiastical superior, to dictate a report of them to her brother Eckbert—the same who has already been mentioned as a controversialist against the cathari. In her visions she was admitted to behold the saints, the angelic hierarchy, and the blessed Virgin—whom she speaks of by the title of “Queen of Heaven”—and from them she received revelations on difficult and doubtful points. Among other things, she is said to have learned, after much inquiry, that the mother of our Lord was "assumed" both in body and in soul; she contributed to the legend of St. Ursula, by giving names to many of the newly-found relics of the 11,000 virgins; and in connection with that fabulous company were revealed to her the existence and the history of a fabulous pope Cyriac, who was said to have resigned his dignity that he might share in their travels and their martyrdom. In a letter to Hildegard, Elizabeth complains that forged prophecies were circulated under her name; among them, that she was reported to have foretold the day of judgments. Both Hildegard and Elizabeth, although they were devoted to the Roman church, and have, without any formal canonization, attained the honour of saintship, were strong in their denunciations of the faults of the clergy and Hildegard foretold that these would be punished by heavy chastisements, of which the heretics were to be the instrument. Such prophetesses as these nervous and enthusiastic women had a powerful influence on their age but it is probable that the writings which bear their names have been largely tampered with, or in great part composed, by those through whose hands they have passed.

The most famous and the most remarkable of all the visionaries was Joachim, a Calabrian, who was born in 1145 (or, according to some, as early as 1130) and died in 1202. In his youth he was introduced by his father to the court of Roger II of Sicily; but in disgust at the courtly life he broke away, and went on a pilgrimage to Egypt and the Holy Land, where he distinguished himself by the severest ascetic exercises. On his return he became an inmate, and afterwards abbot, of Corace, a Cistercian monastery near Squillace; and, after a time of solitary retirement and study, he founded the abbey of Fiore, near the confluence of the Albula and the Neto, which became the head of a new and very rigid order. Although Joachim's opinions did not pass without question among his contemporaries, he exercised a powerful influence over important persons both ecclesiastical and secular. His labours on the obscurer parts of Scripture were encouraged and approved by three successive popes—Lucius, Urban, and Clement. Richard of England and Philip of France, on their way to the Holy Land, held conferences with him at Messina, when it is said that Richard was greatly impressed by the prophecies which he professed to have derived from the Apocalypse, and in 1191 he threw himself in the way of Henry VI with such effect that the emperor was persuaded to desist from his ravages and cruelties, and requested him to expound the prophecy of Jeremiah.

Joachim is described as remarkable not only for piety, but for modesty. The gift which he claimed was not that of prophecy, but of understanding. This gift, however, was supposed to have rendered him independent of the ordinary means of learning, for it is said that, until supernaturally enlightened, he was wholly illiterate, and hence it was natural that he should denounce the method of the schoolmen, whose attempts to attain to spiritual knowledge by means of their own reason he likened to the efforts of the men of Sodom to break in the door of Lot's house—the house of contemplation. Thus he was led to make a violent attack on Peter Lombard's doctrine as to the Trinity, and to draw on himself in consequence the censure of the fourth Lateran council, as having vented a heresy which savoured of tritheism. With his doctrine of the Trinity, however, was connected one of the chief parts of his prophetical system—the doctrine of the Three States, in which the government of the world was conducted by the three Persons of the Godhead respectively. These states were not wholly distinct in time; for one was said to begin when another was at its height, and as the earlier state ended, the next attained to its height of “fructification” or “clarity”. Thus, the first state, in which men lived according to the flesh, began with Adam, reached its clarity in Abraham, and ended with Zacharias, the father of St. John the Baptist. The second state, which is divided between the flesh and the Spirit, began with Elijah, and reached clarity in Zacharias; the third began with St Benedict, and its clarity—the outpouring of the Spirit upon flesh—was to be at the end of the forty-second generation from the Nativity—in the year 1260. The character and mutual relation of these states were illustrated by a variety of comparisons. In the first, the mystery of the kingdom of God was shown as by stars in the darkness of night; the second was as the dawn, and the third as the perfect day. The three answered to the respective attributes of the Divine Persons—power, wisdom, and love. The letter of the Old Testament was of the Father; the letter of the New Testament, of the Son; and, as the Holy Ghost proceedeth from both the Father and the Son, so under His dispensation the spirit of both Testaments would be manifested. The first was the state of slavery; the second, of filial service; the third, of friendship and freedom. There was first the state of married persons; next, that of clerks; lastly, that of monks, hermits, and contemplatives. The three were respectively typified in St. Peter, who represents the power of faith; in St. Paul, the representative of knowledge; and in St. John, the representative of love and contemplation, who was to tarry till his Lord should come. According to this system, the world was on the eve of a great change; the first sixty years of the thirteenth century—the last years of the forty-two generations between the Incarnation and the consummation of all things—were to be a middle period; and in the last three years and a half of this time Antichrist would come. It is said that Joachim told Richard of England that Antichrist was already born at Rome; and that the king replied that in that case he must be no other than the reigning pope, Clement. But Joachim looked for Antichrist to arise from among the patarines, and expected him to be supported by an antipope, who would stir him up against the faithful, as Simon Magus stirred up Nero.

Against the existing clergy Joachim inveighed in the strongest terms; and he especially denounced the corruptions of the Roman cardinals, legates, and court, while he spoke with peculiar reverence of the papacy itself. He regarded Rome as being at once Jerusalem and Babylon—Jerusalem, as the seat of the papacy; Babylon, as the seat of the empire, committing fornication with the kings of the earth. For he regarded the German empire with especial abhorrence, and denounced all reliance of the church on secular help; the bondage of the church under the empire was the Babylonian captivity; the popes, in relying on the king of France, were leaning on a broken reed which would surely pierce their hands.

On account of the connexion with the Byzantine empire, as well as of its errors as to the Holy Ghost, he very strongly censures the Greek church, which he compares to Israel, while the Roman church is typified by Judah; yet, in accordance with that comparison, he supposes the eastern church to contain a remnant of faithful ones, like those seven thousand who had not bowed the knee to Baal. The only merit which he acknowledges in the Greeks is, that among them the order of monks and hermits originated. These he considers to be figured in Jacob, while the secular clergy are as Esau. The seculars were to perish as martyrs in the final contest with Antichrist; and after his fall the monks would shine forth in glory. Thus the papacy was to triumph, but its triumph was to be shared by the monks only; and Joachim’s view of the final state of liberty and enlightenment, through the immediate agency of the Holy Spirit, excluded the need of any human teachers.

That Joachim’s works have been largely tampered with appears to be unquestioned; and this was the case with a passage in which he was supposed to have foretold the rise of the Dominican and the Franciscan orders. In its original shape the prophecy contained nothing beyond what might have been conjectured by his natural sagacity; he speaks of two men who are to begin the contest with Antichrist, and he seems to expect that these will arise from among the Cistercians. But in its later form the two individuals become two new orders, which are to preach the “everlasting gospel”, to convert Jews and Mahometans, and to gather out the faithful remnant of the Greek church, that it may be united to the Roman; and the characteristics of the Dominicans and Franciscans are marked with a precision which proves the spuriousness of the passage. And as, of the two new orders, the Franciscans are preferred, it would seem that the forgery is rather to be traced to them than to the Dominicans.

That there was much danger in Joachim's speculations is evident, although he protested that his belief was entirely in accordance with that of the church; yet it would be a mistake (however natural) to suppose that he meant to represent Christianity itself as something temporary and transitory. For he speaks only of two Testaments, which, according to him, were to be followed, not by a third, but by an enlightenment as to the meaning of the two. And his reputation, supported on one side by papal approbation of his works and of his order, while on the other side it was disparaged by the general council's condemnation of his doctrine as to the Trinity—continued to be of a mixed and doubtful kind. Notwithstanding that the gift of miracles, as well as that of prophecy, was claimed for him, an attempt to procure his canonization at Rome in 1346 was unsuccessful but he has obtained at the hands of the great Florentine poet a place among the beatified spirits in Paradise.

 

 

CHAPTER XIII.

SUPPLEMENTARY.