| #### 4. ANTI-CLERICALISM, HERESY AND ANTI-CATHOLICISM: WALDENSES, JOACHIM OF FLORA, ALBIGENSES |

| #### #### Between the accession of St. Leo IX, when the papacy began effectively to lead the reform movement within the Church, and that of Innocent III, lies a period of a hundred and fifty years, a period divided evenly by the Concordat of Worms and the first General Council of the Lateran. The movement which St. Leo inaugurated, and whose greatest figure is St. Gregory VII, had been, essentially, directed to the reform of abuses and to the restoration of Christian life throughout the Church. The leaders were men of holy life, monks for the most part, shocked to see the general neglect of the most elementary precepts of the Gospel, their hearts lacerated at the spiritual peril that endangered souls. Whence the bitterness of the struggle these pastors of souls waged, first against the unworthy clergy, then against the system which made their appointment possible, and finally against that lay control of clerical nominations which underlay the whole gigantic betrayal of the designs of Christ Our Lord. #### It was seventy-five years before the struggle against the emperor ended, and although the fight against simony and clerical immorality, as well as the effort to restore the ancient ascetic habit of clerical celibacy, never slackened, it was inevitable that the major contest should absorb the greater part of the energies of the various popes. Despite the canons of councils, and the efforts of popes as active as they were intelligent and capable, despite the work of innumerable saints as shown in the new religious orders, in preachers like St. Peter Damian in the eleventh century and St. Bernard in the twelfth, political events, only too often, sterilised the best endeavours of all this good will. Much, very much indeed, remained to be done before every bishop was to himself and his people mainly a shepherd of souls, before every priest was competent intellectually and fit, morally, to explain the Gospel to his people and lead them to live in union with Jesus Christ. #### The general condition of religion, as the storms of the ninth and tenth centuries left it, was such that even saints despaired. That even when the usurping lay power had been reduced, many of the evils still persisted is not surprising. Clerical ignorance, lay brutality and superstition were still, in the time of St. Bernard and Alexander III, only too common. Tournaments, private wars, the organised brigandage, and the laxity of the great in matters of sex, usury and new abuses which grew out of the new freedom of the clergy from the lay control, a new clerical arrogance and a new clerical greed, and a new clerical ambition to control even the non-religious aspects of lay life -- there is a wealth of evidence to show the mighty task, which, eighty years after St. Gregory VII, still lay before a reforming papacy. #### Even had the popes of the last half of the twelfth century been the single-minded religious of a hundred years before, much time would have been needed before their efforts could tell. Even the strongest of moral reformers depends naturally on the goodwill of those he would reform; and, in the nature of things, the will to be reformed is not a prominent characteristic of fashionable, and successful, sinners. Under the best of popes there would have been, here and there, a certain amount of anti-clerical complaint at the slowness of the pontifical will to correct and chasten those whose lives were the causes of scandal. As it was, with the new alliance between the papacy and the political needs of the Italian States, and with the beginnings of the papacy's new financial needs, and the means devised to satisfy these, anticlericalism began to show itself on a very large scale. Impatience with the half-reformed and increasingly wealthy clergy; impatience with the opposition of the higher clergy to the movement whence came the communes; disgust with the faults of the lower clergy; lack of instruction; and a craving for the better life to which the clergy should have led them; disappointment at the collapse of the Crusade as a spiritual thing, and disgust with those held responsible for the failure -- such causes as these gradually led, in many places, as the twelfth century drew to its close, to autonomous, lay-inspired movements that aimed at the moral regeneration of their members and the conversion of others to their ideals. #### With this striving for a new, simpler, higher, moral life, conceived very often as that of primitive Catholicism and as the life designed by Christ Our Lord, a religious life independent of clerical direction, there went, too, a curious expectation of coming apocalyptic change. The day was approaching when, once again, God would visit His people and another saving prophet would appear. Throughout Christendom, and especially in the south of France and in Italy, such ideas, from the middle of the twelfth century, began to spread increasingly. #### The earlier part of the century had already seen the appearance of zealous Levitical preachers. Besides Tanchelin and Arnold of Brescia there had been, for example, Peter of Bruys and Henry of Lausanne. The first of these, an unfrocked priest, had been well known as an itinerant propagandist in the south of France. Organised religion, with its churches, its sacraments and its clergy, he declared to be a mockery. The Mass was a mere show, good works done on behalf of the dead a waste of time, since the living cannot in any way assist the dead. Another subject of his violent denunciation was clerical concubinage. This early pioneer of naturalistic Christianity met with a violent death at the hands of the mob in 1137. Apparently he made no effort to form a body of disciples; his mission was a personal matter, and the same is true of the ex- monk of Cluny, Henry, who followed with a similar gospel a few years later. #### The most celebrated of the anti-clerical movements of the century, however, and the one with which it closed, differed from those inspired by Peter and Henry in two important respects. It definitely aimed at the permanent organisation of those who accepted it, and it made no attack on the traditional faith. This movement derived from a wealthy banker of Lyons, Peter Waldo. About the year 1176 -- whether through reading the story in the gospel of the rich young man to whom Our Lord said, "If thou wilt be perfect sell all thou hast. . ." or from hearing the story of St. Alexis, is uncertain -- he divided his wealth between his wife and the poor, and determined to devote his life to preaching to others the poverty to which he now had vowed himself. To live without owning was the one really good work, the one way of perfection, and therefore Peter Waldo, a man whose determination knew no limits, must preach it. His enthusiasm and sincerity quickly won him a following, and soon there was formed the nucleus of a kind of penitential brotherhood vowed to practise poverty and to preach it. The Archbishop of Lyons forbade them to preach, and when they persisted, expelled them from his territory. In 1179 they appeared in Rome, to appeal to Alexander III against their archbishop. The pope blessed their scheme of living a life of consecrated poverty, but he would not allow them to preach where the bishops were opposed to it. #### This papal prohibition was the turning point of the movement. Against submission they urged the example of the Apostles themselves, and quoting their words to the Sanhedrin, " We must obey God rather than men," set the prohibition at defiance. Whence, in 1184, a stern condemnation of the movement from Lucius III, who, by then, had succeeded Alexander. It was now only a matter of time before these insubordinate apostles of poverty, critics already of evident abuses, would absorb some of the heretical notions in general currency everywhere since the days of Peter of Bruys. At first, however, their orthodoxy remained unspotted. Their disobedience to the prohibition of preaching is the most serious thing alleged against them by their earliest Catholic critic. Then they allowed women to preach, and they began to criticise, as useless and unavailing, good works and masse's offered for the souls of the dead. #### With the beginning of the next century -- about 1202 -- their wanderings brought them into contact with other anti-clerical groups, definitely heretical and hardened by years of conflict with the bishops. Especially important in this respect were the Lombard associations of those who called themselves "The Humble" (Humiliati). This movement, too, had passed through a crisis like to that which had tested the Poor Men of Lyons. Those of the Humiliati who had refused submission had gradually come more and more under the influence of anti-sacramentarian teaching; and through contact with them the followers of Peter Waldo moved still further away from their first position as a kind of religious order within the Church vowed to heroic poverty. They began to oppose the personal merit of the individual to his sacramental status as the source whence he had power to bless or consecrate, to bind or loose in the sacrament of penance. Bad priests have lost all claim to be obeyed, they urged; to obey them is in fact sin. Confession to a layman is as good as, is even better than confession to a priest. The one source of power over souls, power, for example, to forgive sins, is to live as the Apostles lived, in absolute poverty, dependent on alms, and shod with sandals -- this last detail had a great importance. Sacramental acts were null if the priest were in mortal sin, and, since even the smallest lie was in their eyes a mortal sin, this must happen frequently. Prayers for the dead were useless. Oaths were always unlawful and so, too, it was unlawful to take human life. Any layman, in case of necessity, could, without any ordination, say mass, provided he wore sandals, that is led the apostolic life of poverty. #### But although, in the early years of the thirteenth century, Waldenses and Humiliati fraternised to the extent that through the Humiliati many of the old teachings of Arnold of Brescia passed into the Waldensian movement, the two sects never fused. The Congress of Bergamo (1218) that should have united them marks definitely their final division. The Italian group had never made celibacy a condition of perfection. Its members continued to live a family life in their own families. Again, although vowed to poverty, they by no means refused to work. Indeed by making manual work a virtue they became a power in the social life of the time, playing a great part in the early history of the textile industries in Lombardy. The Italians, also, could never bring themselves to that cult of Peter Waldo which for the Poor Men he founded was of the first importance. Nevertheless the failure to amalgamate the two bodies did not result in any lessening of the power of either. Their criticism and propaganda continued to be, as they had already been for forty years, a permanent feature of the problem that every bishop had to face in southern France, in Italy, in Switzerland and even in Germany. #### Contemporary with the Lyonese Peter Waldo, and the pioneer of doctrines destined also to be an embarrassment for official Catholicism was the Calabrian abbot Joachim. Not indeed that Joachim failed to accept the traditional discipline, or made a frontal attack on any of the traditional doctrines. But the sanctity of his life gave a wholly unmerited importance to the apocalyptic fantasies which ran riot through all he wrote, fantasies destined in later years to bring to nought the heroic lives of thousands, and seriously to weaken in its first years the greatest organised movement of popular spirituality the Church had yet known -- the order of the Friars Minor. #### Unlike Peter Waldo and the leaders of the Humiliati, Joachim was a man of education, who had spent much of his time at the most cultured courts of Europe -- Naples and Constantinople-and had travelled extensively. He entered the order of Citeaux and in 1177 was elected Abbot of Corazzo in Sicily. In 1184 he sought, and received, permission from Lucius III to write a commentary on the Bible, and then, at fifty years of age, he began his real momentous career. For the remainder of his life, seventeen years, the commentary was to be his main occupation, and the successive popes were, all of them, interested in it. In 1191 Joachim left Corazzo for Flora, where he founded the first house of a new order of solitaries. The new departure took place without any consultation of Citeaux, and four years of trouble between Joachim and the order followed, until, in 1196, the pope authorised the change and the new order. #### Joachim was not a missionary, not a popular preacher, but essentially a contemplative, a solitary, and, above all, a seer. Nor, despite his strong denunciation of the corruption of the clergy, and criticisms which did not spare the Roman curia itself, was he ever rewarded with anything but veneration during his life. He made a formal submission of all he had written -- one work only was published in his lifetime -- and long after discredit had fallen on his books owing to the part they had played in later heretical movements, the prestige of his sanctity was sufficient for the pope to authorise the traditional cultus given him in the houses of the order he had founded. #### The two chief features of Joachim's own teaching are a theory of the Trinity and, related to it, a theory of human history which not only explained the present and the past but also foretold the future. #### The Trinitarian doctrine, directed against Peter Lombard, derived partly from that of Gilbert of la Porree. It treated as distinct realities the divine essence and the three Persons in whom it was manifested. The unity of the Trinity was no more than the collective unity which every group possesses. #### For Joachim, as for all preceding Catholic students of the Scriptures, the Old Testament was the figure of the New. His new revolutionary contribution to biblical science was that he saw in the New Testament the figure of a third age yet to come. The Old Testament had been the age of the Father; the New Testament that of the Son; in the coming age the Holy Ghost would rule. Of this new age Joachim was the herald and prophet, fitted for the work by a special divine gift which enabled him to read beneath the known meaning of the Bible its final meaning, hitherto undiscovered. As the age of law and fear, in which men obeyed God as His slaves, had given place to that of grace, of faith and the obedience of sons, so in the new age faith would give place to charity, filial obedience to liberty. Again, each age had its characteristic social type in which the ideal of Christian life was realised. In the first age it was the married; in the second age the clerics; in the age to come it would be contemplative religious, and here Joachim made the prophecy of the rise of a new order, vowed to poverty and work, which, to many of his contemporaries, seemed, in the Friars Minor, fulfilled to the letter on the very morrow of his death. #### The three ages grew each from the other, and yet the end of each would be marked by immense catastrophes. The rites and sacraments of each age pass away with the age; they are but types of the better things to come. The Mass then will disappear as the Paschal Lamb had done. Even the redemption of mankind has not yet been perfectly accomplished; the Christ who appeared and lived in Palestine was Himself no more than a figure of the Christ who would appear. Nor, in the coming new dispensation, would the Church exist in its present state. The visible Church would be absorbed in the invisible, the new contemplatives would be everything and the clergy, necessarily, would lose their importance, lose their very reason for existence. #### This new age was at hand. Joachim was precise, even to the year in which it would begin, 1260. Persecutions, a general religious catastrophe, would precede the final period of peace in which Jews and Greeks would return to religious unity and the revelation be made of the Gospel that was to endure for ever. This " Eternal Gospel " would not be a new gospel, but the spiritual interpretation of the existing written gospel. #### Abbot Joachim, for all his pessimistic criticism of every aspect of Christian life, was no friend to either of the great movements with which he was contemporary, the anti-clerical Waldenses and the anti-Christian Cathari. His own theories were, however, no less mischievous. And yet, for long enough -- with the exception of his exposition on the Trinity -- they escaped condemnation. Partly because of his saintly life Joachim was generally, though by no means universally, accepted at his own valuation. Again, it is often the fortune of visionaries of his kind that while one type of mind mocks at their revelations as manifest lunacy, pious, or rather superstitious, fear, with another type, sterilises the power of criticism. The fact remains that from now on a new and powerful influence is discernible in Catholic life, to persist as a source of trouble for another hundred and fifty years. Vague, obscure, full of contradictions, still more involved and anarchical as interested forgers began to interpolate the authentic Joachim, and to put into circulation under his name apocrypha that he would himself assuredly never have owned, it provided the critical and dissentient elements of the Church of the later Middle Ages with an inexhaustible fount of ideas and arguments, and with material for successful popular propaganda. #### When the student turns from the idealism of Peter Waldo, or the reveries of Abbot Joachim, to the history of the Catharists who were their contemporaries he has the sensation of entering a new world altogether. Here are no Catholics whom disgust with the present condition of the Church drives into opposition, but the passionately enthusiastic pioneers of a new anti-Christian social order. They were the heirs to those Manichee doctrines which had provoked the repression of Diocletian, and enslaved St. Augustine centuries before, doctrines which had troubled the Rome of St. Leo and which, in later centuries, found a continuity of disciples in Asia Minor and the Balkans. Manicheans, Paulicians, Bogomiles, Catharists and Albigenses, [ ] whatever be the truth that all are corporally related, these various sects were, at different times, all of them inspired by a common body of doctrine, and a similarity of moral practice. #### In place of the one supreme God whom the Church believed to be the creator and ruler of all, the Albigenses set two gods, one supremely good, one supremely evil. God and the devil shared responsibility for the universe and power over it. #### The material element in the universe, and of course in man, is the work of the devil and it is wholly evil. Man, creation partly of God and partly of the devil, stands in need of salvation. The source of this is not, however, the Incarnation and redeeming death of Christ Our Lord. Christ, for the Albigenses, is not God nor is He truly man. He is an angel who found a temporary lodging in an apparent human body; His humanity was an appearance merely; His passion and death were illusions. His mission is to teach the truth that God exists and that in every man, by reason of his soul, there is something of the divine through which he can ultimately escape the power. of the supreme evil. The Catholic Church is the enemy of Christ's Church, for it is the continuation in time of the synagogue. Hence on the part of the Albigenses an active hatred for the Catholic Church, and a never-ceasing effort to destroy its influence. #### Salvation comes through the soul’s emancipation from the body. So long as the soul is united to the body it is in danger of being lost to the devil, unless the person concerned has broken this power of the devil by receiving the Consolamentum -- a simple rite of sacramental character administered by the leaders of the sect. But whoever received the Consolamentum took upon himself thereby lifelong obligations of a most serious character, the momentary neglect of which annulled the rite received and involved him once again in the danger he had escaped. He was bound, for example, by accepting the rite to perpetual continency, to fasts which lasted the best part of the year, and in which little more than bread and water was allowed. He must never eat meat nor eggs nor milk nor butter nor cheese. He must never take an oath, nor take any part in a lawsuit which involved punishment. And with the rest of the Perfect -- for such he became when he received the Consolamentum -- he must live a common life. To receive the Consolamentum was then to enter an extremely severe kind of religious order. #### From such an obligation the vast majority shrank. They accepted the Albigensian doctrine, they accomplished their duty of reverencing the Perfect, and they pledged themselves to receive the Consolamentum. But of those who received the Consolamentum many preferred to die, rather than face the horror that life was for the Perfect. This they achieved by a slow starvation, consecrated by the name of Endura. Suicide was the perfect act of the true Albigensian, and in the case of those whose ability to lead the life of the Perfect was doubtful, and who had yet accepted the Consolamentum under the fear of dying suddenly without it, the Endura was forced upon them. The Perfect surrounded the bed in which they lay and saw that no food came to them, and so in agonies that sometimes lasted for weeks they passed from life. #### The Albigenses met for worship regularly. The service consisted of readings from the Bible -- especially from the New Testament, which they venerated highly, of which they prepared a translation into the vernacular -- and from commentaries of a militantly anti-Catholic kind. #### The body, they held, was wholly evil. This pessimistic principle was the basis of all the asceticism of the Perfect. It was the foundation of all their moral teaching. Life, since it involved the imprisonment of a soul within a body, was the greatest of evils. To communicate life the greatest of crimes. And the unnatural theory nowhere showed itself so unpleasantly as in the Albigensian condemnation of marriage. Nothing was to be so shunned as pregnancy. A woman with child they regarded, and treated, as possessed by the devil. Yet while they condemned marriage so strongly the Perfect -- for all that their own lives were ordered strictly according to their vows -- looked with tolerance on the extra-matrimonial sex-relations of the Believers. So long as the man and his companion were not married there was always the hope of their ultimate separation. An affection for fornication was a less serious obstacle than marriage to the transition from Believer to Perfect. #### How did such a religion of despair and self-destruction ever come to take real hold of a people? To begin with, the devotion of the Perfect to their life must be realised. They preached their doctrine everywhere, and at the root of it all was a clear and simple explanation of the problem of evil. On the other hand the average Catholic priest never preached at all. The heresy was heard by thousands who never knew why they were Catholics, nor, in very many cases, what Catholicism was, beyond a system of religious duties. Again, the Perfect lived in great poverty and austerity, while she Catholic clergy took only too readily whatever chance of wealth and luxurious living came their way. The Perfect moreover had at their disposition a great deal of money, and they used it in generous almsgiving -- often perhaps with a view to proselytes -- and used it also to subsidise industries for the employment of the Believers. The heresy thus became rooted in the country's economic prosperity, and the very name Catharist became a synonym for weaver. The Perfect were also, very often, physicians, and in their convents they organised free schools for the Believers and their children. Finally, although the system liberated the convert from the difficult struggle between himself and his own desires which is the lot of fallen humanity, even in the dispensation of grace, it did not impose on him any new set of commandments. Until he received the Consolamentum the Believer was bound by nothing but his own tastes, or the limits of his opportunity. And should he die without the saving rite he was not "lost" in the Catholic sense. There was no hell, no purgatory in the Albigensian scheme of things; but the crimes and shortcomings of life were expiated in a future life, or in a state of future trial. It was from the prospect of an endless series of possibly difficult lives -- St. Paul, they taught, had had to endure thirty-two in all -- that the Consolamentum delivered the Perfect. Nor, at the end of all, was there any resurrection of the body, for the body was essentially evil. #### The distinction between the obligations of Believer and Perfect was, it may be believed, the decisive factor in the development which ultimately gave the whole of southern France and much of northern Italy to the new religion, the prospect of a life free from all external control, where "self-expression" had no sanctions to fear. #### The earliest recorded appearance in western Europe of this heresy is the trial of thirteen of the clergy, charged with it at the Council of Orleans in 1022. About the same time there is evidence of it in Germany, and in northern Italy, and in the south of France too. Wherever it appeared it was universally execrated; and the mob showed no mercy to those suspected of sharing in it. Then, for years, there is little mention of it, until the second quarter of the twelfth century, when it is revealed as strongly established with Champagne, Languedoc and Milan as its chief centres. From Champagne it spread into Burgundy, Picardy, Flanders and the centre of France. From Milan the rest of Lombardy was infected, Tuscany too -- especially Florence, where by 1265 a third of the best families were Catharists -- and the March of Ancona. Rome itself did not escape, and Catharists were to be found throughout southern Italy, in Sicily and in Sardinia too. By a confusion with the groups who, at Milan, in the time of St. Gregory VII had fought clerical marriage, these opponents of all marriage were called in Italy Patarini. #### The chief centre of all was Languedoc, the most cultured province of Christendom, the land where something still remained of the traditions of the Moors who once had conquered so much of it, an outpost of Saracen culture close to the very heart of Catholic Europe. It was in this wealthy, refined, orientalised civilisation, where Moors still abounded, and for which the "aggressive prosperity" of the Jews had won the name of Judaea Secunda, that heresy first began to find influential patrons. This was in the early years of the twelfth century, and from that time on, the Albigenses, under one name or another, are condemned and denounced in a whole series of councils, at Toulouse in 1119, the Second Lateran in 1139, at Rheims in 1148 and Tours in 1163 and in the Third Lateran of 1179. St. Bernard had been sent to preach against the movement but neither his sanctity nor his eloquence had availed much. From about 1160 the heretics began to have the upper hand, and from Languedoc the movement spread into Spain, to Navarre and Leon and especially into Aragon and Catalonia. #### Everywhere in the south of France, St. Bernard testifies, churches were deserted, feasts no longer kept, the sacraments neglected. Thirty years later the Count of Toulouse, the chief ruler in the affected provinces, bears a like witness. Catholicism by now is quite definitely in the background. The heretics have won over many of the leading nobles, and the count declares that he dare not, and cannot, check the evil. At Toulouse itself the heresy was become the official religion of the town and the legates sent by Alexander III in 1178 were driven out with ignominy. Nor did the solemn condemnation of 1179 produce any greater effect. A mission was organised under the Abbot of Clairvaux, but though it deposed the Archbishop of Narbonne it effected little else. By the time of accession of Innocent III (1198) almost the whole population had, in greater degree or less, drifted from the Church and while the heretics preached unhindered in the streets of every city the Catholic clergy, when they did not openly go over to the sect -- as even bishops and abbots are known to have done - - sometimes secretly sympathised, and far from making any effort to organise resistance, made friends often enough with the now dominant party as the obvious means of securing favour and privilege. The Cistercians still kept to the severity of their rule, so far as their personal way of living was concerned, but the order was already collectively wealthy. Other monasteries were relaxed, abuses of luxurious living, of worldliness in dress, of simony and concubinage were rampant among the clergy. Money, it began to seem, was all-powerful in the matter of dispensations, and could even secure for the Catharists toleration, and the non-execution of the new laws enacted against them. Finally, the new count, Raymond VI, the son of the count who in 1177 had lamented his powerlessness to improve matters, himself secretly went over to the sect. The Church, he declared in 1196, had no right to own. The man who despoiled it was thereby eminently pleasing to God. #### A whole important province of Christendom was drifting into aggressive anti-Catholicism, while octogenarian popes could only look on and lament -- a key province which, by its geographical situation, lay between the capital of the new centralised papal leadership and the capital of the new Catholic scholarship, between the Roman Church and its traditional protector the King of France. As with the relations between pope and emperor, so in this other urgent problem of the new Manicheeism, the election of Innocent III was to mean a revolutionary change in the papal policy. |