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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.
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