The
History of Protestantism |
Chapter 1 | . . . | PROTESTANTISM Protestantism The Seed of Arts, Letters, Free States, etc. Its History a Grand Drama Its Origin Outside Humanity A Great Creative Power Protestantism Revived Christianity. |
Chapter 2 | . . . | DECLENSION OF THE EARLY CHRISTIAN
CHURCH Early Triumphs of the Truth Causes The Fourth Century Early Simplicity lost The Church remodeled on the Pattern of the Empire Disputes regarding Easter-day Descent of the Gothic Nations Introduction of Pagan Rites into the Church Acceleration of Corruption Inability of the World all at once to receive the Gospel in its greatness. |
Chapter 3 | . . . | DEVELOPMENT OF THE PAPACY FROM THE TIMES OF
CONSTANTINE TO THOSE OF HILDEBRAND. Imperial Edicts Prestige of Rome Fall of the Western Empire The Papacy seeks and finds a New Basis of Power Christ's Vicar Conversion of Gothic Nations Pepin and Charlemagne The Lombards and the Saracens Forgeries and False Decretals Election of the Roman Pontiff. |
Chapter 4 | . . . | DEVELOPMENT OF THE PAPACY FROM GREGORY VII.
TO BONIFACE VIII. The Wax of Investitures Gregory VII. and Henry IV. The Miter Triumphs over the Empire Noon of the Papacy under Innocent III. Continued to Boniface VIII. First and Last Estate of the Roman Pastors Contrasted Seven Centuries of Continuous Success Interpreted by Some as a Proof that the Papacy is Divine Reasons explaining this Marvelous Success Eclipsed by the Gospel's Progress |
Chapter 5 | . . . | MEDIAEVAL PROTESTANT
WITNESSES. Ambrose of Milan His Diocese His Theology Rufinus, Presbyter of Aquileia Laurentius of Milan The Bishops of the Grisons Churches of Lombardy in Seventh and Eighth Centuries Claude in the Ninth Century His Labors Outline of his Theology His Doctrine of the Eucharist His Battle against Images His Views on the Roman Primacy Proof thence arising Councils in France approve his Views Question of the Services of the Roman Church to the Western Nations. |
Chapter 6 | . . . | THE WALDENSES THEIR
VALLEYS Submission of the Churches of Lombardy to Rome The Old Faith maintained in the Mountains The Waldensian Churches Question of their Antiquity Approach to their Mountains Arrangement of their Valleys Picture of blended Beauty and Grandeur. |
Chapter 7 | . . . | THE WALDENSES THEIR MISSIONS AND
MARTYRDOMS Their Synod and College Their Theological Tenets Romaunt Version of the New Testament The Constitution of their Church Their Missionary Labors Wide Diffusion of their Tenets The Stone Smiting the Image. |
Chapter 8 | . . . | THE PAULICIANS The Paulicians the Protesters against the Eastern, as the Waldenses against the Western Apostasy Their Rise in A.D. 653 Constantine of Samosata-Their Tenets Scriptural Constantine Stoned to Death Simeon Succeeds Is put to Death Sergius His Missionary Travels Terrible Persecutions-The Paulicians Rise in Arms Civil War The Government Triumphs Dispersion of the Paulicians over the West They Blend with the Waldenses Movement in the South of Europe The Troubadour, the Barbe, and the Bible, the Three Missionaries Innocent III. The Crusades. |
Chapter 9 | . . . | CRUSADES AGAINST THE ALBIGENSES Rome founded on the Dogma of Persecution Begins to act upon it Territory of the Albigenses Innocent III. Persecuting Edicts of Councils Crusade preached by the Monks of Citeaux First Crusade launched Paradise Simon de Montfort Raymond of Toulouse His Territories Overrun and Devastated Crusade against Raymond Roger of Beziers Burning of his Towns Massacre of their Inhabitants Destruction of the Albigenses. |
Chapter 10 | . . . | ERECTION OF TRIBUNAL OF
INQUISITION The Crusades still continued in the Albigensian Territory Council of Toulouse, 1229 Organizes the Inquisition Condemns the Reading of the Bible in the Vernacular Gregory IX., 1233, further perfects the Organization of the Inquisition, and commits it to the Dominicans The Crusades continued under the form of the Inquisition These Butcheries the deliberate Act of Rome Revived and Sanctioned by her in our own day Protestantism of Thirteenth Century Crushed Not alone Final Ends. |
Chapter 11 | . . . | PROTESTANTS BEFORE
PROTESTANTISM Berengarius The First Opponent of Transubstantiation Numerous Councils Condemn him His Recantation The Martyrs of Orleans Their Confession Their Condemnation and Martyrdom Peter de Bruys and the Petrobrusians Henri Effects of his Eloquence St. Bernard sent to Oppose him Henri Apprehended His Fate unknown Arnold of Brescia Birth and Education His Picture of his Times His Scheme of Reform Inveighs against the Wealth of the Hierarchy His Popularity Condemned by Innocent II. and Banished from Italy Returns on the Pope's Death Labors Ten Years in Rome Demands the Separation of the Temporal and Spiritual Authority Adrian IV. He Suppresses the Movement Arnold is Burned |
Chapter 12 | . . . | ABELARD, AND RISE OF MODERN
SKEPTICISM Number and Variety of Sects One Faith Who gave us the Bible? Abelard of Paris His Fame Father of Modern Skepticism The Parting of the Ways Since Abelard three currents in Christendom The Evangelical, the Ultramontane, the Skeptical. |
BOOK FIRST
PROGRESS FROM THE FIRST TO THE FOURTEENTH
CENTURY
CHAPTER 1 Back to
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PROTESTANTISM
Protestantism
The Seed of Arts, Letters, Free States, etc. Its History a Grand Drama Its
Origin Outside Humanity A Great Creative Power Protestantism Revived
Christianity.
THE History of Protestantism, which we propose to
write, is no mere history of dogmas. The teachings of Christ are the seeds; the
modern Christendom, with its new life, is the goodly tree which has sprung from
them. We shall speak of the seed and then of the tree, so small at its
beginning, but destined one day to cover the earth.
How that seed was
deposited in the soil; how the tree grew up and flourished despite the furious
tempests that warred around it; how, century after century, it lifted its top
higher in heaven, and spread its boughs wider around, sheltering liberty,
nursing letters, fostering art, and gathering a fraternity of prosperous and
powerful nations around it, it will be our business in the following pages to
show. Meanwhile we wish it to be noted that this is what we understand by the
Protestantism on the history of which we are now entering. Viewed thus and any
narrower view would be untrue alike to philosophy and to fact the History of
Protestantism is the record of one of the grandest dramas of all time. It is
true, no doubt, that Protestantism, strictly viewed, is simply a principle. It
is not a policy. It is not an empire, having its fleets and armies, its officers
and tribunals, wherewith to extend its dominion and make its authority be
obeyed. It is not even a Church with its hierarchies, and synods and edicts; it
is simply a principle. But it is the greatest of all principles. It is a
creative power. Its plastic influence is all-embracing. It penetrates into the
heart and renews the individual. It goes down to the depths and, by its
omnipotent but noiseless energy, vivifies and regenerates society. It thus
becomes the creator of all that is true, and lovely, and great; the founder of
free kingdoms, and the mother of pure churches. The globe itself it claims as a
stage not too wide for the manifestation of its beneficent action; and the whole
domain of terrestrial affairs it deems a sphere not too vast to fill with its
spirit, and rule by its law.
Whence came this principle? The name
Protestantism is very recent: the thing itself is very ancient. The term
Protestantism is scarcely older than 350 years. It dates from the protest which
the Lutheran princes gave in to the Diet of Spires in 1529. Restricted to its
historical signification, Protestantism is purely negative. It only defines the
attitude taken up, at a great historical era, by one party in Christendom with
reference to another party. But had this been all, Protestantism would have had
no history. Had it been purely negative, it would have begun and ended with the
men who assembled at the German town in the year already specified. The new
world that has come out of it is the proof that at the bottom of this protest
was a great principle which it has pleased Providence to fertilize, and make the
seed of those grand, beneficent, and enduring achievements which have made the
past three centuries in many respects the most eventful and wonderful in
history. The men who handed in this protest did not wish to create a mere void.
If they disowned the creed and threw off the yoke of Rome, it was that they
might plant a purer faith and restore the government of a higher Law. They
replaced the authority of the Infallibility with the authority of the Word of
God. The long and dismal obscuration of centuries they dispelled, that the twin
stars of liberty and knowledge might shine forth, and that, conscience being
unbound, the intellect might awake from its deep somnolency, and human society,
renewing its youth, might, after its halt of a thousand years, resume its march
towards its high goal.
We repeat the question Whence came this
principle? And we ask our readers to mark well the answer, for it is the
key-note to the whole of our vast subject, and places us, at the very outset, at
the springs of that long narration on which we are now
entering.
Protestantism is not solely the outcome of human progress; it
is no mere principle of perfectibility inherent in humanity, and ranking as one
of its native powers, in virtue of which when society becomes corrupt it can
purify itself, and when it is arrested in its course by some external force, or
stops from exhaustion, it can recruit its energies and set forward anew on its
path. It is neither the product of the individual reason, nor the result of the
joint thought and energies of the species. Protestantism is a principle which
has its origin outside human society: it is a Divine graft on the intellectual
and moral nature of man, whereby new vitalities and forces are introduced into
it, and the human stem yields henceforth a nobler fruit. It is the descent of a
heaven-born influence which allies itself with all the instincts and powers of
the individual, with all the laws and cravings of society, and which, quickening
both the individual and the social being into a new life, and directing their
efforts to nobler objects, permits the highest development of which humanity is
capable, and the fullest possible accomplishment of all its grand ends. In a
word, Protestantism is revived Christianity.
CHAPTER 2
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DECLENSION OF THE
EARLY CHRISTIAN CHURCH
Early Triumphs of the Truth Causes The
Fourth Century Early Simplicity lost The Church remodeled on the Pattern of
the Empire Disputes regarding Easter-day Descent of the Gothic Nations
Introduction of Pagan Rites into the Church Acceleration of Corruption
Inability of the World all at once to receive the Gospel in its
greatness.
ALL through, from the fifth to the fifteenth century,
the Lamp of Truth burned dimly in the sanctuary of Christendom. Its flame often
sank low, and appeared about to expire, yet never did it wholly go out. God
remembered His covenant with the light, and set bounds to the darkness. Not only
had this heaven-kindled lamp its period of waxing and waning, like those
luminaries that God has placed on high, but like them, too, it had its appointed
circuit to accomplish. Now it was on the cities of Northern Italy that its light
was seen to fall; and now its rays illumined the plains of Southern France. Now
it shone along the course of the Danube and the Moldau, or tinted the pale
shores of England, or shed its glory upon the Scottish Hebrides. Now it was on
the summits of the Alps that it was seen to burn, spreading a gracious morning
on the mountain-tops, and giving promise of the sure approach of day. And then,
anon, it would bury itself in the deep valleys of Piedmont, and seek shelter
from the furious tempests of persecution behind the great rocks and the eternal
snows of the everlasting hills. Let us briefly trace the growth of this truth to
the days of Wicliffe.
The spread of Christianity during the first three
centuries was rapid and extensive. The main causes that contributed to this were
the translation of the Scriptures into the languages of the Roman world, the
fidelity and zeal of the preachers of the Gospel, and the heroic deaths of the
martyrs. It was the success of Christianity that first set limits to its
progress. It had received a terrible blow, it is true, under Diocletian. This,
which was the most terrible of all the early persecutions, had, in the belief of
the Pagans, utterly exterminated the "Christian superstition" So far from this,
it had but afforded the Gospel an opportunity of giving to the world a mightier
proof of its divinity. It rose from the stakes and massacres of Diocletian, to
begin a new career, in which it was destined to triumph over the empire which
thought that it had crushed it. Dignities and wealth now flowed in upon its
ministers and disciples, and according to the uniform testimony of all the early
historians, the faith which had maintained its purity and rigor in the humble
sanctuaries and lowly position of the first age, and amid the fires of its pagan
persecutors, became corrupt and waxed feeble amid the gorgeous temples and the
worldly dignities which imperial favor had lavished upon it.
From the
fourth century the corruptions of the Christian Church continued to make marked
and rapid progress. The Bible began to be hidden from the people. And in
proportion as the light, which is the surest guarantee of liberty, was
withdrawn, the clergy usurped authority over the members of the Church. The
canons of councils were put in the room of the one infallible Rule of Faith; and
thus the first stone was laid in the foundations of "Babylon, that great city,
that made all nations to drink of the wine of the wrath of her fornication." The
ministers of Christ began to affect titles of dignity, and to extend their
authority and jurisdiction to temporal matters, forgetful that an office
bestowed by God, and serviceable to the highest interests of society, can never
fail of respect when filled by men of exemplary character, sincerely devoted to
the discharge of its duties. The beginning of this matter seemed innocent
enough. To obviate pleas before the secular tribunals, ministers were frequently
asked to arbitrate in disputes between members of the Church, and Constantine
made a law confirming all such decisions in the consistories of the clergy, and
shutting out the review of their sentences by the civil judges.[1] Proceeding in this fatal
path, the next step was to form the external polity of the Church upon the model
of the civil government. Four vice-kings or prefects governed the Roman Empire
under Constantine, and why, it was asked, should not a similar arrangement be
introduced into the Church? Accordingly the Christian world was divided into
four great dioceses; over each diocese was set a patriarch, who governed the
whole clergy of his domain, and thus arose four great thrones or princedoms in
the House of God. Where there had been a brotherhood, there was now a hierarchy;
and from the lofty chair of the Patriarch, a gradation of rank, and a
subordination of authority and office, ran down to the lowly state and
contracted sphere of the Presbyter [2] It was splendor of rank,
rather than the fame of learning and the luster of virtue, that henceforward
conferred distinction on the ministers of the Church.
Such an arrangement
was not fitted to nourish spirituality of mind, or humility of disposition, or
peacefulness of temper. The enmity and violence of the persecutor, the clergy
had no longer cause to dread; but the spirit of faction which now took
possession of the dignitaries of the Church awakened vehement disputes and
fierce contentions, which disparaged the authority and sullied the glory of the
sacred office. The emperor himself was witness to these unseemly spectacles. "I
entreat you," we find him pathetically saying to the fathers of the Council of
Nice, "beloved ministers of God, and servants of our Savior Jesus Christ, take
away the cause of our dissension and disagreement, establish peace among
yourselves."[3]
While the, "living
oracles" were neglected, the zeal of the clergy began to spend itself upon rites
and ceremonies borrowed from the pagans. These were multiplied to such a degree,
that Augustine complained that they were "less tolerable than the yoke of the
Jews under the law."[4] At this period the Bishops
of Rome wore costly attire, gave sumptuous banquets, and when they went abroad
were carried in litters[5] They now began to speak
with an authoritative voice, and to demand obedience from all the Churches. Of
this the dispute between the Eastern and Western Churches respecting Easter is
an instance in point. The Eastern Church, following the Jews, kept the feast on
the 14th day of the month Nisan [6] the day of the Jewish
Passover. The Churches of the West, and especially that of Rome, kept Easter on
the Sabbath following the 14th day of Nisan. Victor, Bishop of Rome, resolved to
put an end to the controversy, and accordingly, sustaining himself sole judge in
this weighty point, he commanded all the Churches to observe the feast on the
same day with himself. The Churches of the East, not aware that the Bishop of
Rome had authority to command their obedience in this or in any other matter,
kept Easter as before; and for this flagrant contempt, as Victor accounted it,
of his legitimate authority, he excommunicated them.[7] They refused to obey a
human ordinance, and they were shut out from the kingdom of the Gospel. This was
the first peal of those thunders which were in after times to roll so often and
so terribly from the Seven Hills.
Riches, flattery, deference, continued
to wait upon the Bishop of Rome. The emperor saluted him as Father; foreign
Churches sustained him as judge in their disputes; heresiarchs sometimes fled to
him for sanctuary; those who had favors to beg extolled his piety, or affected
to follow his customs; and it is not surprising that his pride and ambition, fed
by continual incense, continued to grow, till at last the presbyter of Rome,
from being a vigilant pastor of a single congregation, before whom he went in
and out, teaching them from house to house, preaching to them the Word of Life,
serving the Lord with all humility in many tears and temptations that befell
him, raised his seat above his equals, mounted the throne of the patriarch, and
exercised lordship over the heritage of Christ. The gates of the sanctuary once
forced, the stream of corruption continued to flow with ever-deepening volume.
The declensions in doctrine and worship already introduced had changed the
brightness of the Church's morning into twilight; the descent of the Northern
nations, which, beginning in the fifth, continued through several successive
centuries, converted that twilight into night. The new tribes had changed their
country, but not their superstitions; and, unhappily, there was neither zeal nor
vigor in the Christianity of the age to effect their instruction and their
genuine conversion. The Bible had been withdrawn; in the pulpit fable had
usurped the place of truth; holy lives, whose silent eloquence might have won
upon the barbarians, were rarely exemplified; and thus, instead of the Church
dissipating the superstitions that now encompassed her like a cloud, these
superstitions all but quenched her own light. She opened her gates to receive
the new peoples as they were. She sprinkled them with the baptismal water; she
inscribed their names in her registers; she taught them in their invocations to
repeat the titles of the Trinity; but the doctrines of the Gospel, which alone
can enlighten the understanding, purify the heart, and enrich the life with
virtue, she was little careful to inculcate upon them. She folded them within
her pale, but they were scarcely more Christian than before, while she was
greatly less so. From the sixth century down-wards Christianity was a mongrel
system, made up of pagan rites revived from classic times, of superstitions
imported from the forests of Northern Germany, and of Christian beliefs and
observances which continued to linger in the Church from primitive and purer
times. The inward power of religion was lost; and it was in vain that men strove
to supply its place by the outward form. They nourished their piety not at the
living fountains of truth, but with the "beggarly elements" of ceremonies and
relics, of consecrated lights and holy vestments. Nor was it Divine knowledge
only that was contemned; men forbore to cultivate letters, or practice virtue.
Baronius confesses that in the sixth century few in Italy were skilled in both
Greek and Latin. Nay, even Gregory the Great acknowledged that he was ignorant
of Greek. "The main qualifications of the clergy were, that they should be able
to read well, sing their matins, know the Lord's Prayer, psalter, forms of
exorcism, and understand how to compute the times of the sacred festivals. Nor
were they very sufficient for this, if we may believe the account some have
given of them. Musculus says that many of them never saw the Scriptures in all
their lives. It would seem incredible, but it is delivered by no less an
authority than Amama, that an Archbishop of Mainz, lighting upon a Bible and
looking into it, expressed himself thus: 'Of a truth I do not know what book
this is, but I perceive everything in it is against us.'"[8]
Apostasy is like
the descent of heavy bodies, it proceeds with ever-accelerating velocity. First,
lamps were lighted at the tombs of the martyrs; next, the Lord's Supper was
celebrated at their graves; next, prayers were offered for them and to them;[9] next, paintings and images
began to disfigure the walls, and corpses to pollute the floors of the churches.
Baptism, which apostles required water only to dispense, could not be celebrated
without white robes and chrism, milk, honey, and salt.[10] Then came a crowd of
church officers whose names and numbers are in striking contrast to the few and
simple orders of men who were employed in the first propagation of Christianity.
There were sub-deacons, acolytes, exorcists, readers, choristers, and porters;
and as work must be found for this motley host of laborers, there came to be
fasts and exorcisms; there were lamps to be lighted, altars to be arranged, and
churches to be consecrated; there was the Eucharist to be carried to the dying;
and there were the dead to be buried, for which a special order of men was set
apart. When one looked back to the simplicity of early times, it could not but
amaze one to think what a cumbrous array of curious machinery and costly
furniture was now needed for the service of Christianity. Not more stinging than
true was the remark that "when the Church had golden chalices she had wooden
priests."
So far, and through these various stages, had the declension of
the Church proceeded. The point she had now reached may be termed an epochal
one. From the line on which she stood there was no going back; she must advance
into the new and unknown regions before her, though every step would carry her
farther from the simple form and vigorous life of her early days. She had
received a new impregnation from an alien principle, the same, in fact, from
which had sprung the great systems that covered the earth before Christianity
arose. This principle could not be summarily extirpated; it must run its course,
it must develop itself logically; and having, in the course of centuries,
brought its fruits to maturity, it would then, but not till then, perish and
pass away.
Looking back at this stage to the change which had come over
the Church, we cannot fail to see that its deepest originating cause must be
sought, in the inability of the world to receive the Gospel in all its
greatness. It was a boon too mighty and too free to be easily understood or
credited by man. The angels in their midnight song in the vale of Bethlehem had
defined it briefly as sublimely, "goodwill to man." Its greatest preacher, the
Apostle Paul, had no other definition to give of it. It was not even a rule of
life but "grace," the "grace of God," and therefore sovereign, and boundless. To
man fallen and undone the Gospel offered a full forgiveness, and a complete
spiritual renovation, issuing at length in the inconceivable and infinite
felicity of the Life Eternal. But man's narrow heart could not enlarge itself to
God's vast beneficence. A good so immense, so complete in its nature, and so
boundless in its extent, he could not believe that God would bestow without
money and without price; there must be conditions or qualifications. So he
reasoned. And hence it is that the moment inspired men cease to address us, and
that their disciples and scholars take their place men of apostolic spirit and
doctrine, no doubt, but without the direct knowledge of their predecessors we
become sensible of a change; an eclipse has passed upon the exceeding glory of
the Gospel. As we pass from Paul to Clement, and from Clement to the Fathers
that succeeded him, we find the Gospel becoming less of grace and more of merit.
The light wanes as we travel down the Patristic road, and remove ourselves
farther from the Apostolic dawn. It continues for some time at least to be the
same Gospel, but its glory is shorn, its mighty force is abated; and we are
reminded of the change that seems to pass upon the sun, when after contemplating
him in a tropical hemisphere, we see him in a northern sky, where his slanting
beams, forcing their way through mists and vapors, are robbed of half their
splendor. Seen through the fogs of the Patristic age, the Gospel scarcely looks
the same which had burst upon the world without a cloud but a few centuries
before.
This disposition that of making God less free in His gift, and
man less dependent in the reception of it: the desire to introduce the element
of merit on the side of man, and the element of condition on the side of God
operated at last in opening the door for the pagan principle to creep back into
the Church. A. change of a deadly and subtle kind passed upon the worship.
Instead of being the spontaneous thanksgiving and joy of the soul, that no more
evoked or repaid the blessings which awakened that joy than the odors which the
flowers exhale are the cause of their growth, or the joy that kindles in the
heart of man when the sun rises is the cause of his rising worship, we say,
from being the expression of the soul's emotions, was changed into a rite, a
rite akin to those of the Jewish temples, and still more akin to those of the
Greek mythology, a rite in which lay couched a certain amount of human merit and
inherent efficacy, that partly created, partly applied the blessings with which
it stood connected. This was the moment when the pagan virus inoculated the
Christian institution.
This change brought a multitude of others in its
train. Worship being transformed into sacrifice sacrifice in which was the
element of expiation and purification the "teaching ministry" was of course
converted into a "sacrificing priesthood." When this had been done, there was no
retreating; a boundary had been reached which could not be recrossed till
centuries had rolled away, and transformations of a more portentous kind than
any which had yet taken place had passed upon the Church.
CHAPTER 3
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DEVELOPMENT OF THE
PAPACY FROM THE TIMES OF CONSTANTINE TO THOSE OF HILDEBRAND.
Imperial
Edicts Prestige of Rome Fall of the Western Empire The Papacy seeks and
finds a New Basis of Power Christ's Vicar Conversion of Gothic Nations
Pepin and Charlemagne The Lombards and the Saracens Forgeries and False
Decretals Election of the Roman Pontiff.
BEFORE opening our great theme it may be needful to
sketch the rise and development of the Papacy as a politico-ecclesiastical
power. The history on which we are entering, and which we must rapidly traverse,
is one of the most wonderful in the world. It is scarcely possible to imagine
humbler beginnings than those from which the Papacy arose, and certainly it is
not possible to imagine a loftier height than that to which it eventually
climbed. He who was seen in the first century presiding as the humble pastor
over a single congregation, and claiming no rank above his brethren, is beheld
in the twelfth century occupying a seat from which he looks down on all the
thrones temporal and spiritual of Christendom. How, we ask with amazement, was
the Papacy able to traverse the mighty space that divided the humble pastor from
the mitered king?
We traced in the foregoing chapter the decay of
doctrine and manners within the Church. Among the causes which contributed to
the exaltation of the Papacy this declension may be ranked as fundamental,
seeing it opened the door for other deteriorating influences, and mightily
favored their operation. Instead of "reaching forth to what was before," the
Christian Church permitted herself to be overtaken by the spirit of the ages
that lay behind her. There came an after-growth of Jewish ritualism, of Greek
philosophy, and of Pagan ceremonialism and idolatry; and, as the consequence of
this threefold action, the clergy began to be gradually changed, as already
mentioned, from a "teaching ministry" to a "sacrificing priesthood." This made
them no longer ministers or servants of their fellow-Christians; they took the
position of a caste, claiming to be superior to the laity, invested with
mysterious powers, the channels of grace, and the mediators with God. Thus there
arose a hierarchy, assuming to mediate between God and men.
The
hierarchical polity was the natural concomitant of the hierarchical doctrine.
That polity was so consolidated by the time that the empire became Christian,
and Constantine ascended the throne (311), that the Church now stood out as a
body distinct from the State; and her new organization, subsequently received,
in imitation of that of the empire, as stated in the previous chapter, helped
still further to define and strengthen her hierarchical government. Still, the
primacy of Rome was then a thing unheard of. Manifestly the 300 Fathers who
assembled (A.D. 325) at Nicaea knew nothing of it, for in their sixth and
seventh canons they expressly recognize the authority of the Churches of
Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, and others, each within its own boundaries, even
as Rome had jurisdiction within its limits; and enact that the jurisdiction and
privileges of these Churches shall be retained.[1] Under Leo the Great (440
461) a forward step was taken. The Church of Rome assumed the form and exercised
the sway of an ecclesiastical principality, while her head, in virtue of an
imperial manifesto (445) of Valentinian III., which recognized the Bishop of
Rome as supreme over the Western Church, affected, the authority and pomp of a
spiritual sovereign.
Still further, the ascent of the Bishop of Rome to
the supremacy was silently yet Powerfully aided by that mysterious and subtle
influence which appeared to be indigenous to the soil on which his chair was
placed. In an age when the rank of the city determined the rank of its pastor,
it was natural that the Bishop of Rome should hold something of that
pre-eminence among the clergy which Rome held among cities. Gradually the
reverence and awe with which men had regarded the old mistress of the world,
began to gather round the person and the chair of her bishop. It was an age of
factions and strifes, and the eyes of the contending parties naturally turned to
the pastor of the Tiber. They craved his advice, or they submitted their
differences to his judgment. These applications the Roman Bishop was careful to
register as acknowledgments of his superiority, and on fitting occasions he was
not forgetful to make them the basis of new and higher claims. The Latin race,
moreover, retained the practical habits for which it had so long been renowned;
and while the Easterns, giving way to their speculative genius, were expending
their energies in controversy, the Western Church was steadily pursuing her
onward path, and skillfully availing herself of everything that could tend to
enhance her influence and extend her jurisdiction.
The removal of the
seat of empire from Rome to the splendid city on the Bosphorus, Constantinople,
which the emperor had built with becoming magnificence for his residence, also
tended to enhance the power of the Papal chair. It removed from the side of the
Pope a functionary by whom he was eclipsed, and left him the first person in the
old capital of the world. The emperor had departed, but the prestige of the old
city the fruit of countless victories, and of ages of dominion had not
departed. The contest which had been going on for some time among the five great
patriarchates Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Constantinople, and Rome the
question at issue being the same as that which provoked the contention among the
disciples of old, "which was the greatest," was now restricted to the last two.
The city on the Bosphorus was the seat of government, and the abode of the
emperor; this gave her patriarch Powerful claims. But the city on the banks of
the Tiber wielded a mysterious and potent charm over the imagination, as the
heir of her who had been the possessor of all the power, of all the glory, and
of all the dominion of the past; and this vast prestige enabled her patriarch to
carry the day. As Rome was the one city in the earth, so her bishop was the one
bishop in the Church. A century and a half later (606), this pre-eminence was
decreed to the Roman Bishop in an imperial edict of Phocas. Thus, before the
Empire of the West fell, the Bishop of Rome had established substantially his
spiritual supremacy. An influence of a manifold kind, of which not the least
part was the prestige of the city and the empire, had lifted him to this fatal
pre-eminence. But now the time has come when the empire must fall, and we expect
to see that supremacy which it had so largely helped to build up fall with it.
But no! The wave of barbarism which rolled in from the North, overwhelming
society and sweeping away the empire, broke harmlessly at the feet of the Bishop
of Rome. The shocks that overturned dynasties and blotted out nationalities,
left his power untouched, his seat unshaken. Nay, it was at that very hour, when
society was perishing around him, that the Bishop of Rome laid anew the
foundations of his power, and placed them where they might remain immovable for
all time. He now cast himself on a far stronger element than any the revolution
had swept away. He now claimed to be the successor of Peter, the Prince of the
Apostles, and the Vicar of Christ. The canons of Councils, as recorded in
Hardouin, show a stream of decisions from Pope Celestine, in the middle of the
fifth century, to Pope Boniface II. in the middle of the sixth, claiming,
directly or indirectly, this august prerogative.[2] When the Bishop of Rome
placed his chair, with all the prerogatives and dignities vested in it, upon
this ground, he stood no longer upon a merely imperial foundation. Henceforward
he held neither of Caesar nor of Rome; he held immediately of Heaven. What one
emperor had given, another emperor might take away. It did not suit the Pope to
hold his office by so uncertain a tenure. He made haste, therefore, to place his
supremacy where no future decree of emperor, no lapse of years, and no coming
revolution could overturn it. He claimed to rest it upon a Divine foundation; he
claimed to be not merely the chief of bishops and the first of patriarchs, but
the vicar Of the Most High God.
With the assertion of this dogma the
system of the Papacy was completed essentially and doctrinally, but not as yet
practically. It had to wait the full development of the idea of vicarship, which
was not till the days of Gregory VII. But here have we the embryotic seed the
vicarship, namely out of which the vast structure of the Papacy has sprung.
This it is that plants at the center of the system a pseudo-divine jurisdiction,
and places the Pope above all bishops with their flocks, above all king with
their subjects. This it is that gives the Pope two swords. This it is that gives
him three crowns. The day when this dogma was proclaimed was the true birthday
of the Popedom. The Bishop of Rome had till now sat in the seat of Caesar;
henceforward he was to sit in the seat of God. From this time the growth of the
Popedom was rapid indeed. The state of society favored its development. Night
had descended upon the world from the North; and in the universal barbarism, the
more prodigious any pretensions were, the more likely were they to find both
belief and submission. The Goths, on arriving in their new settlements, beheld a
religion which was served by magnificent cathedrals, imposing rites, and wealthy
and powerful prelates, presided over by a chief priest, in whose reputed
sanctity and ghostly authority they found again their own chief Druid. These
rude warriors, who had overturned the throne of the Caesars, bowed down before
the chair of the Popes. The evangelization of these tribes was a task of easy
accomplishment. The "Catholic faith," which they began to exchange for their
Paganism or Arianism, consisted chiefly in their being able to recite the names
of the objects of their worship, which they were left to adore with much the
same rites as they had practiced in their native forests. They did not much
concern themselves with the study of Christian doctrine, or the practice of
Christian virtue. The age furnished but few manuals of the one, and still fewer
models of the other.
The first of the Gothic princes to enter the Roman
communion was Clovis, King of the Franks. In fulfillment of a vow which he had
made on the field of Tolbiac, where he vanquished the Allemanni, Clovis was
baptized in the Cathedral of Rheims (496), with every circumstance of solemnity
which could impress a sense of the awfulness of the rife on the minds of its
rude proselytes. Three thousand of his warlike subjects were baptized along with
him.[3] The Pope styled him "the
eldest son of the Church," a title which was regularly adopted by all the
subsequent Kings of France. When Clovis ascended from the baptismal font he was
the only as well as the eldest son of the Church, for he alone, of all the new
chiefs that now governed the West, had as yet submitted to the baptismal
rite.
The threshold once crossed, others were not slow to follow. In the
next century, the sixth, the Burgundians of Southern Gaul, the Visigoths of
Spain, the Suevi of Portugal, and the Anglo-Saxons of Britain entered the pale
of Rome. In the seventh century the disposition was still growing among the
princes of Western Europe to submit themselves and refer their disputes to the
Pontiff as their spiritual father. National assemblies were held twice a year,
under the sanction of the bishops. The prelates made use of these gatherings to
procure enactments favorable to the propagation of the faith as held by Rome.
These assemblies were first encouraged, then enjoined by the Pope, who came in
this way to be regarded as a sort of Father or protector of the states of the
West. Accordingly we find Sigismund, King of Burgundy, ordering (554) that all
assembly should be held for the future on the 6th of September every year, "at
which time the ecclesiastics are not so much engrossed with the worldly cares of
husbandry."[4] The ecclesiastical
conquest of Germany was in this century completed, and thus the spiritual
dominions of the Pope were still farther extended.
In the eighth century
there came a moment of supreme peril to Rome. At almost one and the same time
she was menaced by two dangers, which threatened to sweep her out of existence,
but which, in their issue, contributed to strengthen her dominion. On the west
the victorious Saracens, having crossed the Pyrenees and overrun the south of
France, were watering their steeds at the Loire, and threatening to descend upon
Italy and plant the Crescent in the room of the Cross. On the north, the
Lombards who, under Alboin, had established themselves in Central Italy two
centuries before had burst the barrier of the Apennines, and were brandishing
their swords at the gates of Rome. They were on the point of replacing Catholic
orthodoxy with the creed of Arianism. Having taken advantage of the iconoclast
disputes to throw off the imperial yoke, the Pope could expect no aid from the
Emperor of Constantinople. He turned his eyes to France. The prompt and powerful
interposition of the Frankish arms saved the Papal chair, now in extreme
jeopardy. The intrepid Charles Martel drove back the Saracens (732), and Pepin,
the Mayor of the palace, son of Charles Martel, who had just seized the throne,
and needed the Papal sanction to color his usurpation, with equal promptitude
hastened to the Pope's help (Stephen II.) against the Lombards (754). Having
vanquished them, he placed the keys of their towns upon the altar of St. Peter,
and so laid the first foundation of the Pope's temporal sovereignty. The yet
more illustrious son of Pepin, Charlemagne, had to repeat this service in the
Pope's behalf. The Lombards becoming again troublesome, Charlemagne subdued them
a second time. After his campaign he visited Rome (774). The youth of the city,
bearing olive and palm branches, met him at the gates, the Pope and the clergy
received him in the vestibule of St. Peter's, and entering "into the sepulcher
where the bones of the apostles lie," he finally ceded to the pontiff the
territories of the conquered tribes.[5] It was in this way that
Peter obtained his "patrimony," the Church her dowry, and the Pope his triple
crown.
The Pope had now attained two of the three grades of power that
constitute his stupendous dignity. He had made himself a bishop of bishops, head
of the Church, and he had become a crowned monarch. Did this content him? No! He
said, "I will ascend the sides of the mount; I will plant my throne above the
stars; I will be as God." Not content with being a bishop of bishops, and so
governing the whole spiritual affairs of Christendom, he aimed at becoming a
king of kings, and so of governing the whole temporal affairs of the world. He
aspired to supremacy, sole, absolute, and unlimited. This alone was wanting to
complete that colossal fabric of power, the Popedom, and towards this the
pontiff now began to strive.
Some of the arts had recourse to in order to
grasp the coveted dignity were of an extraordinary kind. An astounding document,
purporting to have been written in the fourth century, although unheard of till
now, was in the year 776 brought out of the darkness in which it had been so
long suffered to remain. It was the "Donation" or Testament of the Emperor
Constantine. Constantine, says the legend, found Sylvester in one of the
monasteries on Mount Soracte, and having mounted him on a mule, he took hold of
his bridle rein, and walking all the way on foot, the emperor conducted
Sylvester to Rome, and placed him upon the Papal throne. But this was as nothing
compared with the vast and splendid inheritance which Constantine conferred on
him, as the following quotation from the deed of gift to which we have referred
will show: "We attribute to the See of Peter all the dignity, all the glory,
all the authority of the imperial power. Furthermore, we give to Sylvester and
to his successors our palace of the Lateran, which is incontestably the finest
palace on the earth; we give him our crown, our miter, our diadem, and all our
imperial vestments; we transfer to him the imperial dignity. We bestow on the
holy Pontiff in free gift the city of Rome, and all the western cities of Italy.
To cede precedence to him, we divest ourselves of our authority over all those
provinces, and we withdraw from Rome, transferring the seat of our empire to
Byzantium; inasmuch as it is not proper that an earthly emperor should preserve
the least authority, where God hath established the head of his religion."[6]
A rare piece of
modesty this on the part of the Popes, to keep this invaluable document beside
them for 400 years, and never say a word about it; and equally admirable the
policy of selecting the darkness of the eighth century as the fittest time for
its publication. To quote it is to refute it. It was probably forged a little
before A.D. 754. It was composed to repel the Longobards on the one side, and
the Greeks on the other, and to influence the mind of Pepin. In it, Constantine
is made to speak in the Latin of the eighth century, and to address Bishop
Sylvester as Prince of the Apostles, Vicar of Christ, and as having authority
over the four great thrones, not yet set up, of Antioch, Alexandria, Jerusalem,
and Constantinople. It was probably written by a priest of the Lateran Church,
and it gained its object that is, it led Pepin to bestow on the Pope the
Exarchate of Ravenna, with twenty towns to furnish oil for the lamps in the
Roman churches.
During more than 600 years Rome impressively cited this
deed of gift, inserted it in her codes, permitted none to question its
genuineness, and burned those who refused to believe in it. The first dawn of
light in the sixteenth century sufficed to discover the cheat.
In the
following century another document of a like extraordinary character was given
to the world. We refer to the "Decretals of Isidore." These were concocted about
the year 845. They professed to be a collection of the letters, rescripts, and
bulls of the early pastors of the Church of Rome Anacletus, Clement, and
others, down to Sylvester the very men to whom the terms "rescript" and "bull"
were unknown. The burden of this compilation was the pontifical supremacy, which
it affirmed had existed from the first age. It was the clumsiest, but the most
successful, of all the forgeries which have emanated from what the Greeks have
reproachfully termed "the native home of inventions and falsifications of
documents." The writer, who professed to be living in the first century, painted
the Church of Rome in the magnificence which she attained only in the ninth; and
made the pastors of the first age speak in the pompous words of the Popes of the
Middle Ages. Abounding in absurdities, contradictions, and anachronisms, it
affords a measure of the intelligence of the age that accepted it as authentic.
It was eagerly laid hold of by Nicholas I. to prop up and extend the fabric of
his power. His successors made it the arsenal from which they drew their weapons
of attack against both bishops and kings. It became the foundation of the canon
law, and continues to be so, although there is not now a Popish writer who does
not acknowledge it to be a piece of imposture. "Never," says Father de Rignon,
"was there seen a forgery so audacious, so extensive, so solemn, so
persevering."[7] Yet the discovery of the
fraud has not shaken the system. The learned Dupin supposes that these decretals
were fabricated by Benedict, a deacon of Mainz, who was the first to publish
them, and that, to give them greater currency, he prefixed to them the name of
Isidore, a bishop who flourished in Seville in the seventh century. "Without the
pseudo-Isidore," says Janus, "there could have been no Gregory VII. The
Isidorian forgeries were the broad foundation which the Gregorians built
upon."[8]
All the while the
Papacy was working on another line for the emancipation of its chief from
interference and control, whether on the side of the people or on the side of
the kings. In early times the bishops were elected by the people.[9] By-and-by they came to be
elected by the clergy, with consent of the people; but gradually the people were
excluded from all share in the matter, first in the Eastern Church, and then in
the Western, although traces of popular election are found at Milan so late as
the eleventh century. The election of the Bishop of Rome in early times was in
no way different from that of other bishops that is, he was chosen by the
people. Next, the consent of the emperor came to be necessary to the validity of
the popular choice. Then, the emperor alone elected the Pope. Next, the
cardinals claimed a voice in the matter; they elected and presented the object
of their choice to the emperor for confirmation. Last of all, the cardinals took
the business entirely into their own hands. Thus gradually was the way paved for
the full emancipation and absolute supremacy of the Popedom.
CHAPTER 4
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DEVELOPMENT OF THE
PAPACY FROM GREGORY VII. TO BONIFACE VIII.
The Wax of Investitures
Gregory VII. and Henry IV. The Miter Triumphs over the Empire Noon of the
Papacy under Innocent III. Continued to Boniface VIII. First and Last Estate
of the Roman Pastors Contrasted Seven Centuries of Continuous Success
Interpreted by Some as a Proof that the Papacy is Divine Reasons explaining
this Marvelous Success Eclipsed by the Gospel's Progress
WE come now to the last great struggle. There lacked
one grade of power to complete and crown this stupendous fabric of dominion. The
spiritual Supremacy was achieved in the seventh century, the temporal
sovereignty was attained in the eighth; it wanted only the pontifical supremacy
sometimes, although improperly, styled the temporal supremacy to make the Pope
supreme over kings, as he had already become over peoples and bishops, and to
vest in him a jurisdiction that has not its like on earth a jurisdiction that
is unique, inasmuch as it arrogates all powers, absorbs all rights, and spurns
all limits. Destined, before terminating its career, to crush beneath its iron
foot thrones and nations, and masking an ambition as astute as Lucifer's with a
dissimulation as profound, this power advanced at first with noiseless steps,
and stole upon the world as night steals upon it; but as it neared the goal its
strides grew longer and swifter, till at last it vaulted over the throne of
monarchs into the seat of God.
This great war we shall now proceed to
consider. When the Popes, at an early stage, claimed to be the vicars of Christ,
they virtually challenged that boundless jurisdiction of which their proudest
era beheld them in actual possession. But they knew that it would be imprudent,
indeed impossible, as yet to assert it in actual fact. Their motto was Spes
messis in semine. Discerning "the harvest in the seed," they were content
meanwhile to lodge the principle of supremacy in their creed, and in the general
mind of Europe, knowing that future ages would fructify and ripen it. Towards
this they began to work quietly, yet skillfully and perseveringly. At length
came overt and open measures. It was now the year 1073. The Papal chair was
filled by perhaps the greatest of all the Popes, Gregory VII., the noted
Hildebrand. Daring and ambitious beyond all who had preceded, and beyond most of
those who have followed him on the Papal throne, Gregory fully grasped the great
idea of Theocracy. He held that the reign of the Pope was but another name for
the reign of God, and he resolved never to rest till that idea had been realized
in the subjection of all authority and power, spiritual and temporal, to the
chair of Peter. "When he drew out," says Janus, "the whole system of Papal
omnipotence in twenty-seven theses in his 'Dictatus,' these theses were partly
mere repetitions or corollaries of the Isidorian decretals; partly he and his
friends sought to give them the appearance of tradition and antiquity by new
fictions."[1] We may take the following
as samples. The eleventh maxim says, "the Pope's name is the chief name in the
world;" the twelfth teaches that "it is lawful for him to depose emperors;" the
eighteenth affirms that "his decision is to be withstood by none, but he alone
may annul those of all men." The nineteenth declares that "he can be judged by
no one." The twenty-fifth vests in him the absolute power of deposing and
restoring bishops, and the twenty-seventh the power of annulling the allegiance
of subjects.[2] Such was the gage that
Gregory flung down to the kings and nations of the world we say of the world,
for the pontifical supremacy embraces all who dwell upon the earth.
Now
began the war between the miter and the empire; Gregory's object in this war
being to wrest from the emperors the power of appointing the bishops and the
clergy generally, and to assume into his own sole and irresponsible hands the
whole of that intellectual and spiritual machinery by which Christendom was
governed. The strife was a bloody one. The miter, though sustaining occasional
reverses, continued nevertheless to gain steadily upon the empire. The spirit of
the times helped the priesthood in their struggle with the civil power. The age
was superstitious to the core, and though in no wise spiritual, it was very
thoroughly ecclesiastical. The crusades, too, broke the spirit and drained the
wealth of the princes, while the growing power and augmenting riches of the
clergy cast the balance ever more and more against the State.
For a brief
space Gregory VII. tasted in his own case the luxury of wielding this more than
mortal power. There came a gleam through the awful darkness of the tempest he
had raised not final victory, which was yet a century distant, but its
presage. He had the satisfaction of seeing the emperor, Henry IV. of Germany
whom he had smitten with excommunication barefooted, and in raiment of
sackcloth, waiting three days and nights at the castle-gates of Canossa, amid
the winter drifts, suing for forgiveness. But it was for a moment only that
Hildebrand stood on this dazzling pinnacle. The fortune of war very quickly
turned. Henry, the man whom the Pope had so sorely humiliated, became victor in
his turn. Gregory died, an exile, on the promontory of Salerno; but his
successors espoused his project, and strove by wiles, by arms, and by anathemas,
to reduce the world under the scepter of the Papal Theocracy. For well-nigh two
dismal centuries the conflict was maintained. How truly melancholy the record of
these times! It exhibits to our sorrowing gaze many a stricken field, many an
empty throne, many a city sacked, many a spot deluged with blood!
But
through all this confusion and misery the idea of Gregory was perseveringly
pursued, till at last it was realized, and the miter was beheld triumphant over
the empire. It was the fortune or the calamity of Innocent III. (1198-1216) to
celebrate this great victory. Now it was that the pontifical supremacy reached
its full development. One man, one will again governed the world. It is with a
sort of stupefied awe that we look back to the thirteenth century, and see in
the foreground of the receding storm this Colossus, uprearing itself in the
person of Innocent III., on its head all the miters of the Church, and in its
hand all the scepters of the State. "In each of the three leading objects which
Rome has pursued," says Hallam "independent sovereignty, supremacy over the
Christian Church, control over the princes of the earth it was the fortune of
this pontiff to conquer."[3] "Rome," he says again,
"inspired during this age all the terror of her ancient name; she was once more
mistress of the world, and kings were her vassals."[4] She had fought a great
fight, and now she celebrated an unequaled triumph. Innocent appointed all
bishops; he summoned to his tribunal all causes, from the gravest affairs of
mighty kingdoms to the private concerns of the humble citizen. He claimed all
kingdoms as his fiefs, all monarchs as his vassals; and launched with unsparing
hand the bolts of excommunication against all who withstood his pontifical will.
Hildebrand's idea was now fully realized. The pontifical supremacy was beheld in
its plenitude the plenitude of spiritual power, and that of temporal power. It
was the noon of the Papacy; but the noon of the Papacy was the midnight of the
world.
The grandeur which the Papacy now enjoyed, and the jurisdiction it
wielded, have received dogmatic expression, and one or two selections will
enable it to paint itself as it was seen in its noon. Pope Innocent III.
affirmed "that the pontifical authority so much exceeded the royal power as the
sun doth the moon."[5] Nor could he find words
fitly to describe his own formidable functions, save those of Jehovah to his
prophet Jeremiah: "See, I have set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms,
to root out, and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw down." "The Church
my spouse," we find the same Pope saying, "is not married to me without bringing
me something. She hath given me a dowry of a price beyond all price, the
plenitude of spiritual things, and the extent of things temporal;[6] the greatness and
abundance of both. She hath given me the miter in token of things spiritual, the
crown in token of the temporal; the miter for the priesthood, and the crown for
the kingdom; making me the lieutenant of him who hath written upon his vesture,
and on his thigh, 'the King of kings and the Lord of lords.' I enjoy alone the
plenitude of power, that others may say of me, next to God, 'and out of his
fullness have we received.'"[7] "We declare," ,says
Boniface VIII. (1294-1303), in his bull Unam Sanetam, "define, pronounce it to
be necessary to salvation for every human creature to be subject to the Roman
Pontiff." This subjection is declared in the bull to extend to all affairs. "One
sword," says the Pope, "must be under another, and the temporal authority must
be subject to the spiritual power; whence, if the earthly power go astray, it
must be judged by the spiritual."[8] Such are a few of the
"great words" which were heard to issue from the Vatican Mount, that new Sinai,
which, like the old, encompassed by fiery terrors, had upreared itself in the
midst of the astonished and affrighted nations of Christendom.
What a
contrast between the first and the last estate of the pastors of the Roman
Church! between the humility and poverty of the first century, and the
splendor and power in which the thirteenth saw them enthroned! This contrast has
not escaped the notice of the greatest of Italian poets. Dante, in one of his
lightning flashes, has brought it before us. He describes the first pastors of
the Church as coming
And addressing Peter, he says:
Petrarch dwells repeatedly and with more amplification on the same theme. We quote only the first and last stanzas of his sonnet on the Church of Rome:
There is something here out of the ordinary course.
We have no desire to detract from the worldly wisdom of the Popes; they were, in
that respect, the ablest race of rulers the world ever saw. Their enterprise
soared as high above the vastest scheme of other potentates and conquerors, as
their ostensible means of achieving it fell below theirs. To build such a fabric
of dominion upon the Gospel, every line of which repudiates and condemns it! to
impose it upon the world without an army and without a fleet! to bow the necks
not of ignorant peoples only, but of mighty potentates to it! nay, to persuade
the latter to assist in establishing a power which they could hardly but foresee
would clash themselves! to pursue this scheme through a succession of centuries
without once meeting any serious check or repulse for of the 130 Popes between
Boniface III. (606), who, in partnership with Phocas, laid the foundations of
the Papal grandeur, and Gregory VII., who tint realized it, onward through other
two centuries to Innocent III. (1216) and Boniface VIII. (1303), who at last put
the top-stone upon it, not one lost an inch of ground which his predecessor had
gained! to do all this is, we repeat, something out of the ordinary course.
There is nothing like it again in the whole history of the world. This success,
continued through seven centuries, was audaciously interpreted into a proof of
the divinity of the Papacy. Behold, it has been said, when the throne of Caesar
was overturned, how the chair of Peter stood erect! Behold, when the barbarous
nations rushed like a torrent into Italy, overwhelming laws, extinguishing
knowledge, and dissolving society itself, how the ark of the Church rode in
safety on the flood! Behold, when the victorious hosts of the Saracen approached
the gates of Italy, how they were turned back! Behold, when the miter waged its
great contest with the empire, how it triumphed! Behold, when the Reformation
broke out, and it seemed as if the kingdom of the Pope was numbered and
finished, how three centuries have been added to its sway! Behold, in fine, when
revolution broke out in France, and swept like a whirlwind over Europe, bearing
down thrones and dynasties, how the bark of Peter outlived the storm, and rode
triumphant above the waves that engulfed apparently stronger structures! Is not
this the Church of which Christ said, "The gates of hell shall not prevail
against it?"
What else do the words of Cardinal Baronius mean? Boasting
of a supposed donation of the kingdom of Hungary to the Roman See by Stephen, he
says, "It fell out by a wonderful providence of God, that at the very time when
the Roman Church might appear ready to fall and perish, even then distant kings
approach the Apostolic See, which they acknowledge and venerate as the only
temple of the universe, the sanctuary of piety, the pillar of truth, the
immovable rock. Behold, kings not from the East, as of old they came to the
cradle of Christ, but from the North led by faith, they humbly approach the
cottage of the fisher, the Church of Rome herself, offering not only gifts out
of their treasures, but bringing even kingdoms to her, and asking kingdoms from
her. Whoso is wise, and will record these things, even he shall understand the
lovingkindness of the Lord."[11]
But the success of
the Papacy, when closely examined, is not so surprising as it looks. It cannot
be justly pronounced legitimate, or fairly won. Rome has ever been swimming with
the tide. The evils and passions of society, which a true benefactress would
have made it her business to cure at least, to alleviate Rome has studied
rather to foster into strength, that she might be borne to power on the foul
current which she herself had created. Amid battles, bloodshed, and confusion,
has her path lain. The edicts of subservient Councils, the forgeries of hireling
priests, the arms of craven monarchs, and the thunderbolts of excommunication
have never been wanting to open her path. Exploits won by weapons of this sort
are what her historians delight to chronicle. These are the victories that
constitute her glory! And then, there remains yet another and great deduction
from the apparent grandeur of her success, in that, after all, it is the success
of only a few a caste the clergy. For although, during her early career, the
Roman Church rendered certain important services to society of which it will
delight us to make mention in fitting place when she grew to maturity, and was
able to develop her real genius, it was felt and acknowledged by all that her
principles implied the ruin of all interests save her own, and that there was
room in the world for none but herself. If her march, as shown in history down
to the sixteenth century, is ever onwards, it is not less true that behind, on
her path, lie the wrecks of nations, and the ashes of literature, of liberty,
and of civilization.
Nor can we help observing that the career of Rome,
with all the fictitious brilliance that encompasses it, is utterly eclipsed when
placed beside the silent and sublime progress of the Gospel. The latter we see
winning its way over mighty obstacles solely by the force and sweetness of its
own truth. It touches the deep wounds of society only to heal them. It speaks
not to awaken but to hush the rough voice of strife and war. It enlightens,
purifies, and blesses men wherever it comes, and it does all this so gently and
unboastingly! Reviled, it reviles not again. For curses it returns blessings. It
unsheathes no sword; it spills no blood. Cast into chains, its victories are as
many as when free, and more glorious; dragged to the stake and burned, from the
ashes of the martyr there start up a thousand confessors, to speed on its career
and swell the glory of its triumph. Compared with this how different has been
the career of Rome! as different, in fact, as the thunder-cloud which comes
onward, mantling the skies in gloom and scathing the earth with fiery bolts, is
different from the morning descending from the mountain-tops, scattering around
it the silvery light, and awakening at its presence songs of
joy.
CHAPTER 5
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MEDIAEVAL PROTESTANT
WITNESSES.
Ambrose of Milan His Diocese His Theology Rufinus,
Presbyter of Aquileia Laurentius of Milan The Bishops of the Grisons
Churches of Lombardy in Seventh and Eighth Centuries Claude in the Ninth
Century His Labors Outline of his Theology His Doctrine of the Eucharist
His Battle against Images His Views on the Roman Primacy Proof thence
arising Councils in France approve his Views Question of the Services of the
Roman Church to the Western Nations.
The apostasy was not universal. At no time did God
leave His ancient Gospel without witnesses. When one body of confessors yielded
to the darkness, or was cut off by violence, another arose in some other land,
so that there was no age in which, in some country or other of Christendom,
public testimony was not borne against the errors of Rome, and in behalf of the
Gospel which she sought to destroy.
The country in which we find the
earliest of these Protesters is Italy. The See of Rome, in those days, embraced
only the capital and the surrounding provinces. The diocese of Milan, which
included the plain of Lombardy, the Alps of Piedmont, and the southern provinces
of France, greatly exceeded it in extent.[1] It is an undoubted
historical fact that this powerful diocese was not then tributary to the Papal
chair. "The Bishops of Milan," says Pope Pelagius I. (555), "do not come to Rome
for ordination." He further informs us that this "was an ancient custom of
theirs."[2] Pope Pelagius, however,
attempted to subvert this "ancient custom," but his efforts resulted only in a
wider estrangement between the two dioceses of Milan and Rome. For when Platina
speaks of the subjection of Milan to the Pope under Stephen IX.,[3] in the middle of the
eleventh century, he admits that "for 200 years together the Church of Milan had
been separated from the Church of Rome." Even then, though on the very eve of
the Hildebrandine era, the destruction of the independence of the diocese was
not accomplished without a protest on the part of its clergy, and a tumult on
the part of the people. The former affirmed that "the Ambrosian Church was not
subject to the laws of Rome; that it had been always free, and could not, with
honor, surrender its liberties." The latter broke out into clamor, and
threatened violence to Damianus, the deputy sent to receive their submission.
"The people grew into higher ferment," says Baronius;[4] "the bells were rung; the
episcopal palace beset; and the legate threatened with death." Traces of its
early independence remain to this day in the Rito or Culto Ambrogiano, still in
use throughout the whole of the ancient Archbishopric of Milan.
One
consequence of this ecclesiastical independence of Northern Italy was, that the
corruptions of which Rome was the source were late in being introduced into
Milan and its diocese. The evangelical light shone there some centuries after
the darkness had gathered in the southern part of the peninsula. Ambrose, who
died A.D. 397, was Bishop of Milan for twenty-three years. His theology, and
that of his diocese, was in no essential respects different from that which
Protestants hold at this day. The Bible alone was his rule of faith; Christ
alone was the foundation of the Church; the justification of the sinner and the
remission of sins were not of human merit, but by the expiatory sacrifice of the
Cross; there were but two Sacraments, Baptism and the Lord's Supper, and in the
latter Christ was held to be present only figuratively.[5] Such is a summary of the
faith professed and taught by the chief bishop of the north of Italy in the end
of the fourth century.[6]
Rufinus, of
Aquileia, first metropolitan in the diocese of Milan, taught substantially the
same doctrine in the fifth century. His treatise on the Creed no more agrees
with the catechism of the Council of Trent than does the catechism of
Protestants.[7] His successors at
Aquileia, so far as can be gathered from the writings which they have left
behind them, shared the sentiments of Rufinus.
To come to the sixth
century, we find Laurentius, Bishop of Milan, holding that the penitence of the
heart, without the absolution of a priest, suffices for pardon; and in the end
of the same century (A.D. 590) we find the bishops of Italy and of the Grisons,
to the number of nine, rejecting the communion of the Pope, as a heretic, so
little then was the infallibility believed in, or the Roman supremacy
acknowledged.[8] In the seventh century we
find Mansuetus, Bishop of Milan, declaring that the whole faith of the Church is
contained in the Apostles' Creed; from which it is evident that he did not
regard as necessary to salvation the additions which Rome had then begun to
make, and the many she has since appended to the apostolic doctrine. The
Ambrosian Liturgy, which, as we have said, continues to be used in the diocese
of Milan, is a monument to the comparative purity of the faith and worship of
the early Churches of Lombardy.
In the eighth century we find Paulinus,
Bishop of Aquileia, declaring that "we feed upon the divine nature of Jesus
Christ, which cannot be said but only with respect to believers, and must be
understood metaphorically." Thus manifest is it that he rejected the corporeal
manducation of the Church at Rome. He also warns men against approaching God
through any other mediator or advocate than Jesus Christ, affirming that He
alone was conceived without sin; that He is the only Redeemer, and that He is
the one foundation of the Church. "If any one," says Allix, "will take the pains
to examine the opinions of this bishop, he will find it a hard thing not to take
notice that he denies what the Church of Rome affirms with relation to all these
articles, and that he affirms what the Church of Rome denies."[9]
It must be
acknowledged that these men, despite their great talents and their ardent piety,
had not entirely escaped the degeneracy of their age. The light that was in them
was partly mixed with darkness. Even the great Ambrose was touched with a
veneration for relics, and a weakness for other superstitious of his times. But
as regards the cardinal doctrines of salvation, the faith of these men was
essentially Protestant, and stood out in bold antagonism to the leading
principles of the Roman creed. And such, with more or less of clearness, must be
held to have been the profession of the pastors over whom they presided. And the
Churches they ruled and taught were numerous and widely planted. They flourished
in the towns and villages which dot the vast plain that stretches like a garden
for 200 miles along the foot of the Alps; they existed in those romantic and
fertile valleys over which the great mountains hang their pine forests and
snows, and, passing the summit, they extended into the southern provinces of
France, even as far as to the Rhone, on the banks of which Polycarp, the
disciple of John, in early times had planted the Gospel, to be watered in the
succeeding centuries by the blood of thousands of martyrs. Darkness gives relief
to the light, and error necessitates a fuller development and a clearer
definition of truth. On this principle the ninth century produced the most
remarkable perhaps of all those great champions who strove to set limits to the
growing superstition, and to preserve, pure and undefiled, the faith which
apostles had preached. The mantle of Ambrose descended on Claudius, Archbishop
of Turin. This man beheld with dismay the stealthy approaches of a power which,
putting out the eyes of men, bowed their necks to its yoke, and bent their knees
to idols. He grasped the sword of the Spirit, which is the Word of God, and the
battle which he so courageously waged, delayed, though it could not prevent, the
fall of his Church's independence, and for two centuries longer the light
continued to shine at the foot of the Alps. Claudius was an earnest and
indefatigable student of Holy Scripture. That Book carried him back to the first
age, and set him down at the feet of apostles, at the feet of One greater than
apostles; and, while darkness was descending on the earth, around Claude still
shone the day.
The truth, drawn from its primeval fountains, he
proclaimed throughout his diocese, which included the valleys of the Waldenses.
Where his voice could not reach, he labored to convey instruction by his pen. He
wrote commentaries on the Gospels; he published expositions of almost all the
epistles of Paul, and several books of the Old Testament; and thus he furnished
his contemporaries with the means of judging how far it became them to submit to
a jurisdiction so manifestly usurped as that of Rome, or to embrace tenets so
undeniably novel as those which she was now foisting upon the world.[10] The sum of what Claude
maintained was that there is but one Sovereign in the Church, and He is not on
earth; that Peter had no superiority over the other apostles, save in this, that
he was the first who preached the Gospel to both Jews and Gentiles; that human
merit is of no avail for salvation, and that faith alone saves us. On this
cardinal point he insists with a clearness and breadth which remind one of
Luther. The authority of tradition he repudiates, prayers for the dead he
condemns, as also the notion that the Church cannot err. As regards relics,
instead of holiness he can find in them nothing but rottenness, and advises that
they be instantly returned to the grave, from which they ought never to have
been taken.
Of the Eucharist, he writes in his commentary on Matthew
(A.D. 815) in a way which shows that he stood at the greatest distance from the
opinions which Paschasius Radbertus broached eighteen years
afterwards.
Paschasius Radbertus, a monk, afterwards Abbot of Corbei,
pretended to explain with precision the manner in which the body and blood of
Christ are present in the Eucharist. He published (831) a treatise, "Concerning
the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ." His doctrine amounted to the two
following propositions:
This new doctrine excited the astonishment of not a
few, and called forth several powerful opponents amongst others, Johannes
Scotus.[11] Claudius, however, thought
that the Lord's Supper was a memorial of Christ's death, and not a repetition of
it, and that the elements of bread and wine were only symbols of the flesh and
blood of the Savior.[12] It is clear from this that
transubstantiation was unknown in the ninth century to the Churches at the foot
of the Alps. Nor was it the Bishop of Turin only who held this doctrine of the
Eucharist; we are entitled to infer that the bishops of neighboring dioceses,
both north and south of the Alps, shared the opinion of Claude. For though they
differed from him on some other points, and did not conceal their difference,
they expressed no dissent from his views respecting the Sacrament, and in proof
of their concurrence in his general policy, strongly urged him to continue his
expositions of the Sacred Scriptures. Specially was this the case as regards two
leading ecclesiastics of that day, Jonas, Bishop of Orleans, and the Abbot
Theodemirus. Even in the century following, we find certain bishops of the north
of Italy saying that "wicked men eat the goat and not the lamb," language wholly
incomprehensible from the lips of men who believe in transubstantiation.[13]
The worship of
images was then making rapid strides. The Bishop of Rome was the great advocate
of this ominous innovation; it was on this point that Claude fought his great
battle. He resisted it with all the logic of his pen and all the force of his
eloquence; he condemned the practice as idolatrous, and he purged those churches
in his diocese which had begun to admit representations of saints and divine
persons within their walls, not even sparing the cross itself.[14] It is instructive to mark
that the advocates of images in the ninth century justified their use of them by
the very same arguments which Romanists employ at this day; and that Claude
refutes them on the same ground taken by Protestant writers still. We do not
worship the image, say the former, we use it simply as the medium through which
our worship ascends to Him whom the image represents; and if we kiss the cross
we do so in adoration of Him who died upon it. But, replied Claude as the
Protestant polemic at this hour replies in kneeling to the image, or kissing the
cross, you do what the second commandment forbids, and what the Scripture
condemns as idolatry. Your worship terminates in the image, and is the worship
not of God, but simply of the image. With his argument the Bishop of Turin
mingles at times a little raillery. "God commands one thing," says he, "and
these people do quite the contrary. God commands us to bear our cross, and not
to worship it; but these are all for worshipping it, whereas they do not bear it
at all. To serve God after this manner is to go away from Him. For if we ought
to adore the cross because Christ was fastened to it, how many other things are
there which touched Jesus Christ! Why don't they adore mangers and old clothes,
because He was laid in a manger and wrapped in swaddling clothes? Let them adore
asses, because He, entered into Jerusalem upon the foal of an ass."[15]
On the subject of
the Roman primacy, he leaves it in no wise doubtful what his sentiments were.
"We know very well," says he, "that this passage of the Gospel is very ill
understood 'Thou art Peter, and upon this rock will I build my church: and I
will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven,' under pretense of which
words the stupid and ignorant common people, destitute of all spiritual
knowledge, betake themselves to Rome in hopes of acquiring eternal life. The
ministry belongs to all the true superintendents and pastors of the Church, who
discharge the same as long as they are in this world; and when they have paid
the debt of death, others succeed in their places, who enjoy the same authority
and power. Know thou that he only is apostolic who is the keeper and guardian of
the apostle's doctrine, and not he who boasts himself to be seated in the chair
of the apostle, and in the meantime doth not acquit himself of the charge of the
apostle."[16]
We have dwelt the
longer on Claude, and the doctrines which he so powerfully advocated by both
voice and pen, because, although the picture of his times a luxurious clergy
but an ignorant people, Churches growing in magnificence but declining in piety,
images adored but the true God forsaken is not a pleasant one, yet it
establishes two points of great importance. The first is that the Bishop of Rome
had not yet succeeded in compelling universal submission to his jurisdiction;
and the second that he had not yet been able to persuade all the Churches of
Christendom to adopt his novel doctrines, and follow his peculiar customs.
Claude was not left to fight that battle alone, nor was he crushed as he
inevitably would have been, had Rome been the dominant power it came soon
thereafter to be. On the contrary, this Protestant of the ninth century received
a large amount of sympathy and support both from bishops and from synods of his
time. Agobardus, the Bishop of Lyons, fought by the side of his brother of Turin
[17] In fact, he was as great
an iconoclast as Claude himself.[18] The emperor, Louis the
Pious (le Debonnaire), summoned a Council (824) of "the most learned and
judicious bishops of his realm," says Dupin, to discuss this question. For in
that age the emperors summoned synods and appointed bishops. And when the
Council had assembled, did it wait till Peter should speak, or a Papal
allocution had decided the point? "It knew no other way," says Dupin, "to settle
the question, than by determining what they should find upon the most impartial
examination to be true, by plain text of Holy Scripture, and the judgment of the
Fathers."[19] This Council at Paris
justified most of the principles for which Claude had contended,[20] as the great Council at
Frankfort (794) had done before it. It is worthy of notice further, as bearing
on this point, that only two men stood up publicly to oppose Claude during the
twenty years he was incessantly occupied in this controversy. The first was
Dungulas, a recluse of the Abbey of St. Denis, an Italian, it is believed, and
biased naturally in favor of the opinions of the Pope; and the second was Jonas,
Bishop of Orleans, who differed from Claude on but the one question of images,
and only to the extent of tolerating their use, but condemning as idolatrous
their worship a distinction which it is easy to maintain in theory, but
impossible to observe, as experience has demonstrated, in practice.
And
here let us interpose an observation. We speak at times of the signal benefits
which the "Church" conferred upon the Gothic nations during the Middle Ages. She
put herself in the place of a mother to those barbarous tribes; she weaned them
from the savage usages of their original homes; she bowed their stubborn necks
to the authority of law; she opened their minds to the charms of knowledge and
art; and thus laid the foundation of those civilized and prosperous communities
which have since arisen in the West. But when we so speak it behooves us to
specify with some distinctness what we mean by the "Church" to which we ascribe
the glory of this service. Is it the Church of Rome, or is it the Church
universal of Christendom? If we mean the former, the facts of history do not
bear out our conclusion. The Church of Rome was not then the Church, but only
one of many Churches. The slow but beneficent and laborious work of evangelizing
and civilizing the Northern nations, was the joint result of the action of all
the Churches of Northern Italy, of France, of Spain, of Germany, of Britain
and each performed its part in this great work with a measure of success exactly
corresponding to the degree in which it retained the pure principles of
primitive Christianity. The Churches would have done their task much more
effectually and speedily but for the adverse influence of Rome. She hung upon
their rear, by her perpetual attempts to bow them to her yoke, and to seduce
them from their first purity to her thinly disguised paganisms. Emphatically,
the power that molded the Gothic nations, and planted among them the seeds of
religion and virtue, was Christianity that same Christianity which apostles
preached to men in the first age, which all the ignorance and superstition of
subsequent times had not quite extinguished, and which, with immense toil and
suffering dug up from under the heaps of rubbish that had been piled above it,
was anew, in the sixteenth century, given to the world under the name of
Protestantism.
CHAPTER 6
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THE WALDENSES THEIR
VALLEYS
Submission of the Churches of Lombardy to Rome The Old
Faith maintained in the Mountains The Waldensian Churches Question of their
Antiquity Approach to their Mountains Arrangement of their Valleys Picture
of blended Beauty and Grandeur.
WHEN Claude died it can hardly be said that his
mantle was taken up by any one. The battle, although not altogether dropped, was
henceforward languidly maintained. Before this time not a few Churches beyond
the Alps had submitted to the yoke of Rome, and that arrogant power must have
felt it not a little humiliating to find her authority withstood on what she
might regard as her own territory. She was venerated abroad but contemned at
home. Attempts were renewed to induce the Bishops of Milan to accept the
episcopal pall, the badge of spiritual vassalage, from the Pope; but it was not
till the middle of the eleventh century (1059), under Nicholas II., that these
attempts were successful.[1] Petrus Damianus, Bishop of
Ostia, and Anselm, Bishop of Lucca, were dispatched by the Pontiff to receive
the submission of the Lombard Churches, and the popular tumults amid which that
submission was extorted sufficiently show that the spirit of Claude still
lingered at the foot of the Alps. Nor did the clergy conceal the regret with
which they laid their ancient liberties at the feet of a power before which the
whole earth was then bowing down; for the Papal legate, Damianus, informs us
that the clergy of Milan maintained in his presence, "That the Ambrosian Church,
according to the ancient institutions of the Fathers, was always free, without
being subject to the laws of Rome, and that the Pope of Rome had no jurisdiction
over their Church as to the government or constitution of it."[2]
But if the plains
were conquered, not so the mountains. A considerable body of Protesters stood
out against this deed of submission. Of these some crossed the Alps, descended
the Rhine, and raised the standard of opposition in the diocese of Cologne,
where they were branded as Manicheans, and rewarded with the stake. Others
retired into the valleys of the Piedmontese Alps, and there maintained their
scriptural faith and their ancient independence. What we have just related
respecting the dioceses of Milan and Turin settles the question, in our opinion,
of the apostolicity of the Churches of the Waldensian valleys. It is not
necessary to show that missionaries were sent from Rome in the first age to
plant Christianity in these valleys, nor is it necessary to show that these
Churches have existed as distinct and separate communities from early days;
enough that they formed a part, as unquestionably they did, of the great
evangelical Church of the north of Italy. This is the proof at once of their
apostolicity and their independence. It attests their descent from apostolic
men, if doctrine be the life of Churches. When their co-religionists on the
plains entered within the pale of the Roman jurisdiction, they retired within
the mountains, and, spurning alike the tyrannical yoke and the corrupt tenets of
the Church of the Seven Hills, they preserved in its purity and simplicity the
faith their fathers had handed down to them. Rome manifestly was the schismatic,
she it was that had abandoned what was once the common faith of Christendom,
leaving by that step to all who remained on the old ground the indisputably
valid title of the True Church.
Behind this rampart of mountains, which
Providence, foreseeing the approach of evil days, would almost seem to have
reared on purpose, did the remnant of the early apostolic Church of Italy kindle
their lamp, and here did that lamp continue to burn all through the long night
which descended on Christendom. There is a singular concurrence of evidence in
favor of their high antiquity. Their traditions invariably point to an unbroken
descent from the earliest times, as regards their religious belief. The Nobla
Leycon, which dates from the year 1100, [3] goes
to prove that the Waldenses of Piedmont did not owe their rise to Peter
Waldo of Lyons, who did not appear till the latter half of that century (1160).
The Nobla Leycon, though a poem, is in reality a confession of faith, and could
have been composed only after some considerable study of the system of
Christianity, in contradistinction to the errors of Rome. How could a Church
have arisen with such a document in her hands? Or how could these herdsmen and
vine-dressers, shut up in their mountains, have detected the errors against
which they bore testimony, and found their way to the truths of which they made
open profession in times of darkness like these? If we grant that their
religious beliefs were the heritage of former ages, handed down from an
evangelical ancestry, all is plain; but if we maintain that they were the
discovery of the men of those days, we assert what approaches almost to a
miracle. Their greatest enemies, Claude Seyssel of Turin (1517), and Reynerius
the Inquisitor (1250), have admitted their antiquity, and stigmatized them as
"the most dangerous of all heretics, because the most ancient."
Rorenco,
Prior of St. Roch, Turin (1640), was employed to investigate the origin and
antiquity of the Waldenses, and of course had access to all the Waldensian
documents in the ducal archives, and being their bitter enemy he may be presumed
to have made his report not more favorable than he could help. Yet he states
that "they were not a new sect in the ninth and tenth centuries, and that Claude
of Turin must have detached them from the Church in the ninth
century."
Within the limits of her own land did God provide a dwelling
for this venerable Church. Let us bestow a glance upon the region. As one comes
from the south, across the level plain of Piedmont, while yet nearly a hundred
miles off, he sees the Alps rise before him, stretching like a great wall along
the horizon. From the gates of the morning to those of the setting sun, the
mountains run on in a line of towering magnificence. Pasturages and
chestnut-forests clothe their base; eternal snows crown their summits. How
varied are their forms! Some rise strong and massy as castles; others shoot up
tall and tapering like needles; while others again run along in serrated lines,
their summits torn and cleft by the storms of many thousand winters. At the hour
of sunrise, what a glory kindles along the crest of that snowy rampart! At
sunset the spectacle is again renewed, and a line of pyres is seen to burn in
the evening sky.
Drawing nearer the hills, on a line about thirty miles
west of Turin, there opens before one what seems a great mountain portal. This
is the entrance to the Waldensian territory. A low hill drawn along in front
serves as a defense against all who may come with hostile intent, as but too
frequently happened in times gone by, while a stupendous monolith the
Castelluzzo shoots up to the clouds, and stands sentinel at the gate of this
renowned region. As one approaches La Torre the Castelluzzo rises higher and
higher, and irresistibly fixes the eye by the perfect beauty of its pillar-like
form. But; to this mountain a higher interest belongs than any that mere
symmetry can give it. It is indissolubly linked with martyr-memories, and
borrows a halo from the achievements of the past. How often, in days of old, was
the confessor hurled sheer down its awful steep and dashed on the rocks at its
foot! And there, commingled in one ghastly heap, growing ever the bigger and
ghastlier as another and yet another victim was added to it, lay the mangled
bodies of pastor and peasant, of mother and child! It was the tragedies
connected with this mountain mainly that called forth Milton's well-known
sonnet:
The elegant temple of the Waldenses rises near the
foot of the Castelluzzo. The Waldensian valleys are seven in number; they were
more in ancient times, but the limits of the Vaudois territory have undergone
repeated curtailment, and now only the number we have stated remain, lying
between Pinerolo on the east and Monte Viso on the west that pyramidal hill
which forms so prominent an object from every part of the plain of Piedmont,
towering as it does above the surrounding mountains, and, like a horn of silver,
cutting the ebon of the firmament.
The first three valleys run out
somewhat like the spokes of a wheel, the spot on which we stand the gateway,
namely being the nave. The first is Luserna, or Valley of Light. It runs right
out in a grand gorge of some twelve miles in length by about two in width. It
wears a carpeting of meadows, which the waters of the Pelice keep ever fresh and
bright. A profusion of vines, acacias, and mulberry-trees fleck it with their
shadows; and a wall of lofty mountains encloses it on either hand. The second is
Rora, or Valley of Dews. It is a vast cup, some fifty miles in circumference,
its sides luxuriantly clothed with meadow and corn-field, with fruit and forest
trees, and its rim formed of craggy and spiky mountains, many of them snow-clad.
The third is Angrogna, or Valley of Groans. Of it we shall speak more
particularly afterwards. Beyond the extremity of the first three valleys are the
remaining four, forming, as it were, the rim of the wheel. These last are
enclosed in their turn by a line of lofty and craggy mountains, which form a
wall of defense around the entire territory. Each valley is a fortress, having
its own gate of ingress and egress, with its caves, and rocks, and mighty
chestnut-trees, forming places of retreat and shelter, so that the highest
engineering skill could not have better adapted each several valley to its end.
It is not less remarkable that, taking all these valleys together, each is so
related to each, and the one opens so into the other, that they may be said to
form one fortress of amazing and matchless strength wholly impregnable, in
fact. All the fortresses of Europe, though combined, would not form a citadel so
enormously strong, and so dazzlingly magnificent, as the mountain dwelling of
the Vaudois. "The Eternal, our God," says Leger "having destined this land to be
the theater of His marvels, and the bulwark of His ark, has, by natural means,
most marvelously fortified it." The battle begun in one valley could be
continued in another, and carried round the entire territory, till at last the
invading foe, overpowered by the rocks rolled upon him from the mountains, or
assailed by enemies which would start suddenly out of the mist or issue from
some unsuspected cave, found retreat impossible, and, cut off in detail, left
his bones to whiten the mountains he had come to subdue.
These valleys
are lovely and fertile, as well as strong. They are watered by numerous
torrents, which descend from the snows of the summits. The grassy carpet of
their bottom; the mantling vine and the golden grain of their lower slopes; the
chalets that dot their sides, sweetly embowered amid fruit-trees; and, higher
up, the great chestnut-forests and the pasture-lands, where the herdsmen keep
watch over their flocks all through the summer days and the starlit nights: the
nodding crags, from which the torrent leaps into the light; the rivulet, singing
with quiet gladness in the shady nook; the mists, moving grandly among the
mountains, now veiling, now revealing their majesty; and the far-off summits,
tipped with silver, to be changed at eve into gleaming gold make up a picture
of blended beauty and grandeur, not equaled perhaps, and certainly not
surpassed, in any other region of the earth.
In the heart of their
mountains is situated the most interesting, perhaps, of all their valleys. It
was in this retreat, walled round by "hills whose heads touch heaven," that
their barbes or pastors, from all their several parishes, were wont to meet in
annual synod. It was here that their college stood, and it was here that their
missionaries were trained, and, after ordination, were sent forth to sow the
good seed, as opportunity offered, in other lands. Let us visit this valley. We
ascend to it by the long, narrow, and winding Angrogna. Bright meadows enliven
its entrance. The mountains on either hand are clothed with the vine, the
mulberry, and the chestnut. Anon the valley contracts. It becomes rough with
projecting rocks, and shady with great trees. A few paces farther, and it
expands into a circular basin, feathery with birches, musical with falling
waters, environed atop by naked crags, fringed with dark pines, while the white
peak looks down upon one out of heaven. A little in advance the valley seems
shut in by a mountainous wall, drawn right across it; and beyond, towering
sublimely upward, is seen an assemblage of snow-clad Alps, amid which is placed
the valley we are in quest of, where burned of old the candle of the Waldenses.
Some terrible convulsion has rent this mountain from top to bottom, opening a
path through it to the valley beyond. We enter the dark chasm, and proceed along
on a narrow ledge in the mountain's side, hung half-way between the torrent,
which is heard thundering in the abyss below, and the summits which lean over us
above. Journeying thus for about two miles, we find the pass beginning to widen,
the light to break in, and now we arrive at the gate of the Pra.
There
opens before us a noble circular valley, its grassy bottom watered by torrents,
its sides dotted with dwellings and clothed with corn-fields and pasturages,
while a ring of white peaks guards it above. This was the inner sanctuary of the
Waldensian temple. The rest of Italy had turned aside to idols, the Waldensian
territory alone had been reserved for the worship of the true God. And was it
not meet that on its native soil a remnant of the apostolic Church of Italy
should be maintained, that Rome and all Christendom might have before their eyes
a perpetual monument of what they themselves had once been, and a living witness
to testify how far they had departed from their first faith?[4]
CHAPTER 7
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THE WALDENSES THEIR
MISSIONS AND MARTYRDOMS
Their Synod and College Their Theological
Tenets Romaunt Version of the New Testament The Constitution of their Church
Their Missionary Labors Wide Diffusion of their Tenets The Stone Smiting
the Image.
ONE would like to have a near view of the barbes or
pastors, who presided over the school of early Protestant theology that existed
here, and to know how it fared with evangelical Christianity in the ages that
preceded the Reformation. But the time is remote, and the events are dim. We can
but doubtfully glean from a variety of sources the facts necessary to form a
picture of this venerable Church, and even then the picture is not complete. The
theology of which this was one of the fountainheads was not the clear,
well-defined, and comprehensive system which the sixteenth century gave its; it
was only what the faithful men of the Lombard Churches had been able to save
from the wreck of primitive Christianity. True religion, being a revelation, was
from the beginning complete and perfect; nevertheless, in this as in every other
branch of knowledge, it is only by patient labor that man is able to extricate
and arrange all its parts, and to come into the full possession of truth. The
theology taught in former ages, in the peak-environed valley in which we have in
imagination placed ourselves, was drawn from the Bible. The atoning death and
justifying righteousness of Christ was its cardinal truth. This, the Nobla
Leycon and other ancient documents abundantly testify. The Nobla Leycon sets
forth with tolerable clearness the doctrine of the Trinity, the fall of man, the
incarnation of the Son, the perpetual authority of the Decalogue as given by
God,[1] the need of Divine grace
in order to good works, the necessity of holiness, the institution of the
ministry, the resurrection of the body, and the eternal bliss of heaven.[2] This creed, its professors
exemplified in lives of evangelical virtue. The blamelessness of the Waldenses
passed into a proverb, so that one more than ordinarily exempt from the vices of
his time was sure to be suspected of being a Vaudes.[3] If doubt there were
regarding the tenets of the Waldenses, the charges which their enemies have
preferred against them would set that doubt at rest, and make it tolerably
certain that they held substantially what the apostles before their day, and the
Reformers after it, taught. The indictment against the Waldenses included a
formidable list of "heresies." They held that there had been no true Pope since
the days of Sylvester; that temporal offices and dignities were not meet for
preachers of the Gospel; that the Pope's pardons were a cheat; that purgatory
was a fable; that relics were simply rotten bones which had belonged to no one
knew whom; that to go on pilgrimage served no end, save to empty one's purse;
that flesh might be eaten any day if one's appetite served him; that holy water
was not a whit more efficacious than rain water; and that prayer in a barn was
just as effectual as if offered in a church. They were accused, moreover, of
having scoffed at the doctrine of transubstantiation, and of having spoken
blasphemously of Rome, as the harlot of the Apocalypse.[4] There is reason to
believe, from recent historical researches, that the Waldenses possessed the New
Testament in the vernacular. The "Lingua Romana" or Romaunt tongue was the
common language of the south of Europe from the eighth to the fourteenth
century. It was the language of the troubadours and of men of letters in the
Dark Ages. Into this tongue the Romaunt was the first translation of the
whole of the New Testament made so early as the twelfth century. This fact Dr.
Gilly has been at great pains to prove in his work, The Romaunt Version [5] of the Gospel according to
John. The sum of what Dr. Gilly, by a patient investigation into facts, and a
great array of historic documents, maintains, is that all the books of the New
Testament were translated from the Latin Vulgate into the Romaunt, that this was
the first literal version since the fall of the empire, that it was made in the
twelfth century, and was the first translation available for popular use. There
were numerous earlier translations, but only of parts of the Word of God, and
many of these were rather paraphrases or digests of Scripture than translations,
and, moreover, they were so bulky, and by consequence so costly, as to be
utterly beyond the reach of the common people. This Romaunt version was the
first complete and literal translation of the New Testament of Holy Scripture;
it was made, as Dr Gilly, by a chain of proofs, shows, most probably under the
superintendence and at the expense of Peter Waldo of Lyons, not later than 1180,
and so is older than any complete version in German, French, Italian, Spanish,
or English. This version was widely spread in the south of France, and in the
cities of Lombardy. It was in common use among the Waldenses of Piedmont, and it
was no small part, doubtless, of the testimony borne to truth by these
mountaineers to preserve and circulate it. Of the Romaunt New Testament six
copies have come down to our day. A copy is preserved at each of the four
following places, Lyons, Grenoble, Zurich, Dublin; and two copies are at Paris.
These are plain and portable volumes, contrasting with those splendid and
ponderous folios of the Latin Vulgate, penned in characters of gold and silver,
richly illuminated, their bindings decorated with gems, inviting admiration
rather than study, and unfitted by their size and splendor for the use of the
People.
The Church of the Alps, in the simplicity of its constitution,
may be held to have been a reflection of the Church of the first centuries. The
entire territory included in the Waldensian limits was divided into parishes. In
each parish was placed a pastor, who led his flock to the living waters of the
Word of God. He preached, he dispensed the Sacraments, he visited the sick, and
catechized the young. With him was associated in the government of his
congregation a consistory of laymen. The synod met once a year. It was composed
of all the pastors, with an equal number of laymen, and its most frequent place
of meeting was the secluded mountain-engirdled valley at the head of Angrogna.
Sometimes as many as a hundred and fifty barbes, with the same number of lay
members, would assemble. We can imagine them seated it may be on the grassy
slopes of the valley a venerable company of humble, learned, earnest men,
presided over by a simple moderator (for higher office or authority was unknown
amongst them), and intermitting their deliberations respecting the affairs of
their Churches, and the condition of their flocks, only to offer their prayers
and praises to the Eternal, while the majestic snow-clad peaks looked down upon
them from the silent firmament. There needed, verily, no magnificent fane, no
blazonry of mystic rites to make their assembly august.
The youth who
here sat at the feet of the more venerable and learned of their barbes used as
their text-book the Holy Scriptures. And not only did they study the sacred
volume; they were required to commit to memory, and be able accurately to
recite, whole Gospels and Epistles. This was a necessary accomplishment on the
part of public instructors, in those ages when printing was unknown, and copies
of the Word of God were rare. Part of their time was occupied in transcribing
the Holy Scriptures, or portions of them, which they were to distribute when
they went forth as missionaries. By this, and by other agencies, the seed of the
Divine Word was scattered throughout Europe more widely than is commonly
supposed. To this a variety of causes contributed. There was then a general
impression that the world was soon to end. Men thought that they saw the
prognostications of its dissolution in the disorder into which all things had
fallen. The pride, luxury, and profligacy of the clergy led not a few laymen to
ask if better and more certain guides were not to be had. Many of the
troubadours were religious men, whose lays were sermons. The hour of deep and
universal slumber had passed; the serf was contending with his seigneur for
personal freedom, and the city was waging war with the baronial castle for civic
and corporate independence. The New Testament and, as we learn from incidental
notices, portions of the Old coming at this juncture, in a language understood
alike in the court as in the camp, in the city as in the rural hamlet, was
welcome to many, and its truths obtained a wider promulgation than perhaps had
taken place since the publication of the Vulgate by Jerome.
After passing
a certain time in the school of the barbes, it was not uncommon for the
Waldensian youth to proceed to the seminaries in the great cities of Lombardy,
or to the Sorbonne at Paris. There they saw other customs, were initiated into
other studies, and had a wider horizon around them than in the seclusion of
their native valleys. Many of them became expert dialecticians, and often made
converts of the rich merchants with whom they traded, and the landlords in whose
houses they lodged. The priests seldom cared to meet in argument the Waldensian
missionary. To maintain the truth in their own mountains was not the only object
of this people. They felt their relations to the rest of Christendom. They
sought to drive back the darkness, and re-conquer the kingdoms which Rome had
overwhelmed. They were an evangelistic as well as an evangelical Church. It was
an old law among them that all who took orders in their Church should, before
being eligible to a home charge, serve three years in the mission field. The
youth on whose head the assembled barbes laid their hands saw in prospect not a
rich benefice, but a possible martyrdom. The ocean they did not cross. Their
mission field was the realms that lay outspread at the foot of their own
mountains. They went forth two and two, concealing their real character under
the guise of a secular profession, most commonly that of merchants or peddlers.
They carried silks, jewelry, and other articles, at that time not easily
purchasable save at distant marts, and they were welcomed as merchants where
they would have been spurned as missionaries. The door of the cottage and the
portal of the baron's castle stood equally open to them. But their address was
mainly shown in vending, without money and without price, rarer and more
valuable merchandise than the gems and silks which had procured them entrance.
They took care to carry with them, concealed among their wares or about their
persons, portions of the Word of God, their own transcription commonly, and to
this they would draw the attention of the inmates. When they saw a desire to
possess it, they would freely make a gift of it where the means to purchase were
absent.
There was no kingdom of Southern and Central Europe to which
these missionaries did not find their way, and where they did not leave traces
of their visit in the disciples whom they made. On the west they penetrated into
Spain. In Southern France they found congenial fellow-laborers in the
Albigenses, by whom the seeds of truth were plentifully scattered over Dauphine
and Languedoc. On the east, descending the Rhine and the Danube, they leavened
Germany, Bohemia, and Poland [6] with their doctrines,
their track being marked with the edifices for worship and the stakes of
martyrdom that arose around their steps. Even the Seven-hilled City they feared
not to enter, scattering the seed on ungenial soil, if perchance some of it
might take root and grow. Their naked feet and coarse woolen garments made them
somewhat marked figures, in the streets of a city that clothed itself in purple
and fine linen; and when their real errand was discovered, as sometimes chanced,
the rulers of Christendom took care to further, in their own way, the springing
of the seed, by watering it with the blood of the men who had sowed it.[7]
Thus did the Bible
in those ages, veiling its majesty and its mission, travel silently through
Christendom, entering homes and hearts, and there making its abode. From her
lofty seat Rome looked down with contempt upon the Book and its humble bearers.
She aimed at bowing the necks of kings, thinking if they were obedient meaner
men would not dare revolt, and so she took little heed of a power which, weak as
it seemed, was destined at a future day to break in pieces the fabric of her
dominion. By-and-by she began to be uneasy, and to have a boding of calamity.
The penetrating eye of Innocent III. detected the quarter whence danger was to
arise. He saw in the labors of these humble men the beginning of a movement
which, if permitted to go on and gather strength, would one day sweep away all
that it had taken the toils and intrigues of centuries to achieve. He
straightway commenced those terrible crusades which wasted the sowers but
watered the seed, and helped to bring on, at its appointed hour, the catastrophe
which he sought to avert.[8]
CHAPTER 8
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THE PAULICIANS
The
Paulicians the Protesters against the Eastern, as the Waldenses against the
Western Apostasy Their Rise in A.D. 653 Constantine of Samosata-Their Tenets
Scriptural Constantine Stoned to Death Simeon Succeeds Is put to Death
Sergius His Missionary Travels Terrible Persecutions-The Paulicians Rise in
Arms Civil War The Government Triumphs Dispersion of the Paulicians over
the West They Blend with the Waldenses Movement in the South of Europe The
Troubadour, the Barbe, and the Bible, the Three Missionaries Innocent III.
The Crusades.
BESIDES this central and main body of oppositionists
to Rome Protestants before Protestantism placed here as in an impregnable
fortress, upreared on purpose, in the very center of Roman Christendom, other
communities and individuals arose, and maintained a continuous line of
Protestant testimony all along to the sixteenth century. These we shall
compendiously group and rapidly describe. First, there are the Paulicians. They
occupy an analogous place in the East to that which the Waldenses held in the
West. Some obscurity rests upon their origin, and additional mystery has on
purpose been cast over it, but a fair and impartial examination of the matter
leaves no doubt that the Paulicians are the remnant that escaped the apostasy of
the Eastern Church, just as the Waldenses are the remnant saved from the
apostasy of the Western Church. Doubt, too, has been thrown upon their religious
opinions; they have been painted as a confederacy of Manicheans, just as the
Waldenses were branded as a synagogue of heretics; but in the former case, as in
the latter, an examination of the matter satisfies us that these imputations had
no sufficient foundation, that the Paulicians repudiated the errors imputed to
them, and that as a body their opinions were in substantial agreement with the
doctrine of Holy Writ. Nearly all the information we have of them is that which
Petrus Siculus, their bitter enemy, has communicated. He visited them when they
were in their most flourishing condition, and the account he has given of their
distinguishing doctrines sufficiently proves that the Paulicians had rejected
the leading errors of the Greek and Roman Churches; but it fails to show that
they had embraced the doctrine of Manes,[1] or were justly liable to
be styled Manicheans.
In A.D. 653, a deacon returning from captivity in
Syria rested a night in the house of an Armenian named Constantine, who lived in
the neighborhood of Samosata. On the morrow, before taking his departure, he
presented his host with a copy of the New Testament. Constantine studied the
sacred volume. A new light broke upon his mind: the errors of the Greek Church
stood clearly revealed, and he instantly resolved to separate himself from so
corrupt a communion. He drew others to the study of the Scriptures, and the same
light shone into their minds which had irradiated his. Sharing his views, they
shared with him his secession from the established Church of the Empire. It was
the boast of this new party, now grown to considerable numbers, that they
adhered to the Scriptures, and especially to the writings of Paul. "I am
Sylvanus," said Constantine, "and ye are Macedonians," intimating thereby that
the Gospel which he would teach, and they should learn, was that of Paul; hence
the name of Paulicians, a designation they would not have been ambitious to wear
had their doctrine been Manichean.[2]
These disciples
multiplied. A congenial soil favored their increase, for in these same
mountains, where are placed the sources of the Euphrates, the Nestorian remnant
had found a refuge. The attention of the Government at Constantinople was at
length turned to them, and persecution followed. Constantine, whose zeal,
constancy, and piety had been amply tested by the labors of twenty-seven years,
was stoned to death. From his ashes arose a leader still more powerful. Simeon,
an officer of the palace who had been sent with a body of troops to superintend
his execution, was converted by his martyrdom; and, like Paul after the stoning
of Stephen, forthwith began to preach the faith which he had once persecuted.
Simeon ended his career, as Constantine had done, by sealing his testimony with
his blood; the stake being planted beside the heap of stones piled above the
ashes of Constantine.
Still the Paulicians multiplied; other leaders
arose to fill the place of those who had fallen, and neither the anathemas of
the hierarchy nor the sword of the State could check their growth. All through
the eighth century they continued to flourish. The worship of images was now the
fashionable superstition in the Eastern Church, and the Paulicians rendered
themselves still more obnoxious to the Greek authorities, lay and clerical, by
the strenuous opposition which they offered to that idolatry of which the Greeks
were the great advocates and patrons. This drew upon them yet sorer persecution.
It was now, in the end of the eighth century, that the most remarkable perhaps
of all their leaders, Sergius, rose to head them, a man of truly missionary
spirit and of indomitable energy. Petrus Siculus has given us an account of the
conversion of Sergius. We should take it for a satire, were it not for the
manifest earnestness and simplicity of the writer. Siculus tells us that Satan
appeared to Sergius in the shape of an old woman, and asked him why he did not
read the New Testament? The tempter proceeded further to recite portions of Holy
Writ, whereby Sergius was seduced to read the Scripture, and so perverted to
heresy; and "from sheep," says Siculus, "turned numbers into wolves, and by
their means ravaged the sheepfolds of Christ."[3]
During thirty-four
years, and in the course of innumerable journeys, he preached the Gospel from
East to West, and converted great numbers of his countrymen. The result was more
terrible persecutions, which were continued through successive reigns. Foremost
in this work we find the Emperor Leo, the Patriarch Nicephorus, and notably the
Empress Theodora. Under the latter it was affirmed, says Gibbon, "that one
hundred thousand Paulicians were extirpated by the sword, the gibbet, or the
flames." It is admitted by the same historian that the chief guilt of many of
those who were thus destroyed lay in their being Iconoclasts.[4] The sanguinary zeal of
Theodora kindled a flame which had well-nigh consumed the Empire of the East.
The Paulicians, stung by these cruel injuries, now prolonged for two centuries,
at last took up arms, as the Waldenses of Piedmont, the Hussites of Bohemia, and
the Huguenots of France did in similar circumstances. They placed their camp in
the mountains between Sewas and Trebizond, and for thirty-five years (A.D. 845
880) the Empire of Constantinople was afflicted with the calamities of civil
war. Repeated victories, won over the troops of the emperor, crowned the arms of
the Paulicians, and at length the insurgents were joined by the Saracens, who
hung on the frontier of the Empire. The flames of battle extended into the heart
of Asia; and as it is impossible to restrain the ravages of the sword when once
unsheathed, the Paulicians passed from a righteous defense to an inexcusable
revenge. Entire provinces were wasted, opulent cities were sacked, ancient and
famous churches were turned into stables, and troops of captives were held to
ransom or delivered to the executioner. But it must not be forgotten that the
original cause of these manifold miseries was the bigotry of the government and
the zeal of the clergy for image-worship. The fortune of war at last declared in
favor of the troops of the emperor, and the insurgents were driven back into
their mountains, where for a century afterwards they enjoyed a partial
independence, and maintained the profession of their religious
faith.
After this, the Paulicians were transported across the Bosphorus,
and settled in Thrace.[5] This removal was begun by
the Emperor Constantine Copronymus in the middle of the eighth century, was
continued in successive colonies in the ninth, and completed about the end of
the tenth. The shadow of the Saracenic woe was already blackening over the
Eastern Empire, and God removed His witnesses betimes from the destined scene of
judgment. The arrival of the Paulicians in Europe was regarded with favor rather
than disapproval. Rome was becoming by her tyranny the terror and by her
profligacy the scandal of the West, and men were disposed to welcome whatever
promised to throw additional weight into the opposing scale. The Paulicians soon
spread themselves over Europe, and though no chronicle records their dispersion,
the fact is attested by the sudden and simultaneous outbreak of their opinions
in many of the Western countries.[6] They mingled with the
hosts of the Crusaders returning from the Holy Land through Hungary and Germany;
they joined themselves to the caravans of merchants who entered the harbor of
Venice and the gates of Lombardy; or they followed the Byzantine standard into
Southern Italy, and by these various routes settled themselves in the West.[7] They incorporated with the
preexisting bodies of oppositionists, and from this time a new life is seen to
animate the efforts of the Waldenses of Piedmont, the Albigenses of Southern
France, and of others who, in other parts of Europe, revolted by the growing
superstitions, had begun to retrace their steps towards the primeval fountains
of truth. "Their opinions," says Gibbon, "were silently propagated in Rome,
Milan, and the kingdoms beyond the Alps. It was soon discovered that many
thousand Catholics of every rank, and of either sex, had embraced the Manichean
heresy."[8] From this point the
Paulician stream becomes blended with that of the other early confessors of the
Truth. To these we now return.
When we cast our eyes over Europe in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, our attention is irresistibly riveted on the
south of France. There a great movement is on the eve of breaking out. Cities
and provinces are seen rising in revolt against the Church of Rome. Judging from
the aspect of things on the surface, one would have inferred that all opposition
to Rome had died out. Every succeeding century was deepening the foundations and
widening the limits of the Romish Church, and it seemed now as if there awaited
her ages of quiet and unchallenged dominion. It is at this moment that her power
begins to totter; and though she will rise higher ere terminating her career,
her decadence has already begun, and her fall may be postponed, but cannot be
averted. But how do we account for the powerful movement that begins to show
itself at the foot of the Alps, at a moment when, as it seems, every enemy has
been vanquished, and Rome has won the battle? To attack her now, seated as we
behold her amid vassal kings, obedient nations, and entrenched behind a triple
rampart of darkness, is surely to invite destruction.
The causes of this
movement had been long in silent operation. In fact, this was the very quarter
of Christendom where opposition to the growing tyranny and superstitions of Rome
might be expected first to show itself. Here it was that Polycarp and Irenaeus
had labored. Over all those goodly plains which the Rhone waters, and in those
numerous cities and villages over which the Alps stretch their shadows, these
apostolic men had planted Christianity. Hundreds of thousands of martyrs had
here watered it with their blood, and though a thousand years well-nigh had
passed since that day, the story of their terrible torments and heroic deaths
had not been altogether forgotten. In the Cottian Alps and the province of
Languedoc, Vigilantius had raised his powerful protest against the errors of his
times. This region was included, as we have seen, in the diocese of Milan, and,
as a consequence, it enjoyed the light which shone on the south of the Alps long
after Churches not a few on the north of these mountains were plunged in
darkness. In the ninth century Claude of Turin had found in the Archbishop of
Lyons, Agobardus, a man willing to entertain his views and to share his
conflicts. Since that time the night had deepened here as everywhere else. But
still, as may be conceived, there were memories of the past, there were seeds in
the soil, which new forces might quicken and make to spring up. Such a force did
now begin to act. It was, moreover, on this spot, and among these peoples the
best prepared of all the nations of the West that the Word of God was first
published in the vernacular. When the Romance version of the New Testament was
issued, the people that sat in darkness saw a great light. This was in fact a
second giving of Divine Revelation to the nations of Europe; for the early Saxon
renderings of portions of Holy Writ had fallen aside and gone utterly into
disuse; and though Jerome's translation, the Vulgate, was still known, it was in
Latin, now a dead language, and its use was confined to the priests, who though
they possessed it cannot be said to have known it; for the reverence paid it lay
in the rich illuminations of its writing, in the gold and gems of its binding,
and the curiously-carved and costly cabinets in which it was locked up, and not
in the earnestness with which its pages were studied. Now the nations of
Southern Europe could read, each in "the tongue wherein he was born," the
wonderful works of God.
This inestimable boon they owed to Peter Valdes
or Waldo, a rich merchant in Lyons, who had been awakened to serious thought by
the sudden death of a companion, according to some, by the chance lay of a
traveling troubadour, according to others. We can imagine the wonder and joy of
these people when this light broke upon them through the clouds that environed
them. But we must not picture to ourselves a diffusion of the Bible, in those
ages, at all so wide and rapid as would take place in our day when copies can be
so easily multiplied by the printing press. Each copy was laboriously produced
by the pen; its price corresponded to the time and labor expended in its
production; it had to be carried long distances, often by slow and uncertain
conveyances; and, last of all, it had to encounter the frowns and ultimately the
prohibitory edicts of a hostile hierarchy. But there were compensatory
advantages. Difficulties but tended to whet the desire of the people to obtain
the Book, and when once their eyes lighted on its page, its truths made the
deeper an impression on their minds. It stood out in its sublimity from the
fables on which they had been fed. The conscience felt that a greater than man
was speaking from its page. Each copy served scores and hundreds of
readers.
Besides, if the mechanical appliances were lacking to those
ages, which the progress of invention has conferred on ours, there existed a
living machinery which worked indefatigably. The Bible was sung in the lays of
troubadours and minnesingers. It was recited in the sermons of barbes. And these
efforts reacted on the Book from which they had sprung, by leading men to the
yet more earnest perusal and the yet wider diffusion of it. The Troubadour, the
Barbe, and, mightiest of all, the Bible, were the three missionaries that
traversed the south of Europe. Disciples were multiplied: congregations were
formed: barons, cities, provinces, joined the movement. It seemed as if the
Reformation was come. Not yet. Rome had not filled up her cup; nor had the
nations of Europe that full and woeful demonstration they have since received,
how crushing to liberty, to knowledge, to order, is her yoke, to induce them to
join universally in the struggle to break it.
Besides, it happened, as
has often been seen at historic crises of the Papacy, that a Pope equal to the
occasion filled the Papal throne. Of remarkable vigor, of dauntless spirit, and
of sanguinary temper, Innocent III. but too truly guessed the character and
divined the issue of the movement. He sounded the tocsin of persecution.
Mail-clad abbots, lordly prelates, "who wielded by turns the crosier, the
scepter, and the sword;"[9] barons and counts
ambitious of enlarging their domains, and mobs eager to wreak their savage
fanaticism on their neighbors, whose persons they hated and whose goods they
coveted, assembled at the Pontiff's summons. Fire and sword speedily did the
work of extermination. Where before had been seen smiling provinces, flourishing
cities, and a numerous, virtuous, and orderly population, there was now a
blackened and silent desert. That nothing might be lacking to carry on this
terrible work, Innocent III. set up the tribunal of the Inquisition. Behind the
soldiers of the Cross marched the monks of St. Dominic, and what escaped the
sword of the one perished by the racks of the other. In one of those dismal
tragedies not fewer than a hundred thousand persons are said to have been
destroyed.[10] Over wide areas not a
living thing was left: all were given to the sword. Mounds of ruins and ashes
alone marked the spot where cities and villages had formerly stood. But this
violence recoiled in the end on the power which had employed it. It did not
extinguish the movement: it but made the roots strike deeper, to spring up again
and again, and each time with greater vigor and over a wider area, till at last
it was seen that Rome by these deeds was only preparing for Protestantism a more
glorious triumph, and for herself a more signal overthrow.
But these
events are too intimately connected with the early history of Protestantism, and
they too truly depict the genius and policy of that power against which
Protestantism found it so hard a matter to struggle into existence, to be passed
over in silence, or dismissed with a mere general description. We must go a
little into detail.
CHAPTER 9
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CRUSADES AGAINST THE
ALBIGENSES
Rome founded on the Dogma of Persecution Begins to act
upon it Territory of the Albigenses Innocent III. Persecuting Edicts of
Councils Crusade preached by the Monks of Citeaux First Crusade launched
Paradise Simon de Montfort Raymond of Toulouse His Territories Overrun and
Devastated Crusade against Raymond Roger of Beziers Burning of his Towns
Massacre of their Inhabitants Destruction of the
Albigenses.
THE torch of persecution was fairly kindled in the
beginning of the thirteenth century. Those baleful fires, which had smoldered
since the fall of the Empire, were now re-lighted, but it must be noted that
this was the act not of the State but of the Church. Rome had founded her
dominion upon the dogma of persecution. She sustained herself "Lord of the
conscience." Out of this prolific but pestiferous root came a whole century of
fulminating edicts, to be followed by centuries of blazing piles. It could not
be but that this maxim, placed at the foundation of her system, should inspire
and mold the whole policy of the Church of Rome. Divine mistress of the
conscience and of the faith, she claimed the exclusive right to prescribe to
every human being what he was to believe, and to pursue with temporal and
spiritual terrors every form of worship different from her own, till she had
chased it out of the world. The first exemplification, on a great scale, of her
office which she gave mankind was the crusades. As the professors of an impure
creed, she pronounced sentence of extermination on the Saracens of the Holy
Land; she sent thither some millions of crusaders to execute her ban; and the
lands, cities, and wealth of the slaughtered infidels she bestowed upon her
orthodox sons. If it was right to apply this principle to one pagan country, we
do not see what should hinder Rome unless indeed lack of power from sending
her missionaries to every land where infidelity and heresy prevailed, emptying
them of their evil creed and their evil inhabitants together, and re-peopling
them anew with a pure race from within her own orthodox pale.
But now the
fervor of the crusades had begun sensibly to abate. The result had not responded
either to the expectations of the Church that had planned them, or to the masses
that had carried them out. The golden crowns of Paradise had been all duly
bestowed, doubtless, but of course on those of the crusaders only who had
fallen; the survivors had as yet inherited little save wounds, poverty, and
disease. The Church, too, began to see that the zeal and blood which were being
so freely expended on the shores of Asia might be turned to better account
nearer home. The Albigenses and other sects springing up at her door were more
dangerous foes of the Papacy than the Saracens of the distant East. For a while
the Popes saw with comparative indifference the growth of these religious
communities; they dreaded no harm from bodies apparently so insignificant; and
even entertained at times the thought of grafting them on their own system as
separate orders, or as resuscitating and purifying forces. With the advent of
Innocent III., however, came a new policy. He perceived that the principles of
these communities were wholly alien in their nature to those of the Papacy, that
they never could be made to work in concert with it, and that if left to develop
themselves they would most surely effect its overthrow. Accordingly the cloud of
exterminating vengeance which rolled in the skies of the world, whithersoever he
was pleased to command, was ordered to halt, to return westward, and discharge
its chastisement on the South of Europe.
Let us take a glance at the
region which this dreadful tempest is about to smite. The France of those days,
instead of forming an entire monarchy, was parted into four grand divisions. It
is the most southerly of the four, or Narbonne-Gaul, to which our attention is
now to be turned. This was an ample and goodly territory, stretching from the
Dauphinese Alps on the east to the Pyrenees on the south-west, and comprising
the modern provinces of Dauphine, Provence, Languedoc or Gascogne. It was
watered throughout by the Rhone, which descended upon it from the north, and it
was washed along its southern boundary by the Mediterranean. Occupied by an
intelligent population, it had become under their skillful husbandry one vast
expanse of corn-land and vineyard, of fruit and forest tree. To the riches of
the soil were added the wealth of commerce, in which the inhabitants were
tempted to engage by the proximity of the sea and the neighborhood of the
Italian republics. Above all, its people were addicted to the pursuits of art
and poetry. It was the land of the troubadour. It was further embellished by the
numerous castles of a powerful nobility, who spent their time in elegant
festivities and gay tournaments.
But better things than poetry and feats
of mimic war flourished here. The towns, formed into communes, and placed under
municipal institutions, enjoyed no small measure of freedom. The lively and
poetic genius of the people had enabled them to form a language of their own
namely, the Provencal. In richness of vocables, softness of cadence, and
picturesqueness of idiom, the Provencal excelled all the languages of Europe,
and promised to become the universal tongue of Christendom. Best of all, a pure
Christianity was developing in the region. It was here, on the banks of the
Rhone, that Irenaeus and the other early apostles of Gaul had labored, and the
seeds which their hands had deposited in its soil, watered by the blood of
martyrs who had fought in the first ranks in the terrible combats of those days,
had never wholly perished. Influences of recent birth had helped to quicken
these seeds into a second growth. Foremost among these was the translation of
the New Testament into the Provencal, the earliest, as we have shown, of all our
modern versions of the Scriptures. The barons protected the people in their
evangelical sentiments, some because they shared their opinions, others because
they found them to be industrious and skillful cultivators of their lands. A
cordial welcome awaited the troubadour at their castle-gates; he departed loaded
with gifts; and he enjoyed the baron's protection as he passed on through the
cities and villages, concealing, not unfrequently, the colporteur and missionary
under the guise of the songster. The hour of a great revolt against Rome
appeared to be near. Surrounded by the fostering influences of art,
intelligence, and liberty, primitive Christianity was here powerfully developing
itself. It seemed verily that the thirteenth and not the sixteenth century would
be the date of the Reformation, and that its cradle would be placed not in
Germany but in the south of France.
The penetrating and far-seeing eye of
Innocent III. saw all this very clearly. Not at the foot of the Alps and the
Pyrenees only did he detect a new life: in other countries of Europe, in Italy,
in Spain, in Flanders, in Hungary wherever, in short, dispersion had driven
the sectaries, he discovered the same fermentation below the surface, the same
incipient revolt against the Papal power. He resolved without loss of time to
grapple with and crush the movement. He issued an edict enjoining the
extermination of all heretics.[1] Cities would be drowned in
blood, kingdoms would be laid waste, art and civilization would perish, and the
progress of the world would be rolled back for centuries; but not otherwise
could the movement be arrested, and Rome saved.
A long series of
persecuting edicts and canons paved the way for these horrible butcheries. The
Council of Toulouse, in 1119, presided over by Pope Calixtus II., pronounced a
general excommunication upon all who held the sentiments of the Albigenses, cast
them out of the Church, delivered them to the sword of the State to be punished,
and included in the same condemnation all who should afford them defense or
protection.[2] This canon was renewed in
the second General Council of Lateran, 1139, under Innocent II.[3] Each succeeding Council
strove to excel its predecessor in its sanguinary and pitiless spirit. The
Council of Tours, 1163, under Alexander III., stripped the heretics of their
goods, forbade, under peril of excommunication, any to relieve them, and left
them to perish without succor.[4] The third General Council
of Lateran, 1179, under Alexander III., enjoined princes to make war upon them,
to take their possessions for a spoil, to reduce their persons to slavery, and
to withhold from them Christian burial.[5] The fourth General Council
of Lateran bears the stern and comprehensive stamp of the man under whom it was
held. The Council commanded princes to take an oath to extirpate heretics from
their dominions. Fearing that some, from motives of self-interest, might
hesitate to destroy the more industrious of their subjects, the Council sought
to quicken their obedience by appealing to their avarice. It made over the
heritages of the excommunicated to those who should carry out the sentence
pronounced upon them. Still further to stimulate to this pious work, the Council
rewarded a service of forty days in it with the same ample indulgences which had
aforetime been bestowed on those who served in the distant and dangerous
crusades of Syria. If any prince should still hold back, he was himself, after a
year's grace, to be smitten with excommunication, his vassals were to be loosed
from their allegiance, and his lands given to whoever had the will or the power
to seize them, after having first purged them of heresy. That this work of
extirpation might be thoroughly done, the bishops were empowered to make an
annual visitation of their dioceses, to institute a very close search for
heretics, and to extract an oath from the leading inhabitants that they would
report to the ecclesiastics from time to time those among their neighbors and
acquaintances who had strayed from the faith.[6] It is hardly necessary to
say that it is Innocent III. who speaks in this Council. It was assembled in his
palace of the Lateran in 1215; it was one of the most brilliant Councils that
ever were convened, being composed of 800 abbots and priors, 400 bishops,
besides patriarchs, deputies, and ambassadors from all nations. It was opened by
Innocent in person, with a discourse from the words, "With desire have I desired
to eat this Passover with you."
We cannot pursue farther this series of
terrific edicts, which runs on till the end of the century and into the next.
Each is like that which went before it, save only that it surpasses it in
cruelty and terror. The fearful pillagings and massacrings which instantly
followed in the south of France, and which were re-enacted in following
centuries in all the countries of Christendom, were but too faithful
transcripts, both in spirit and letter, of these ecclesiastical enactments.
Meanwhile, we must note that it is out of the chair of the Pope out of the
dogma that the Church is mistress of the conscience that this river of blood
is seen to flow.
Three years was this storm in gathering. Its first
heralds were the monks of Citeaux, sent abroad by Innocent III. in 1206 to
preach the crusade throughout France and the adjoining kingdoms. There followed
St. Dominic and his band, who traveled on foot, two and two, with full powers
from the Pope to search out heretics, dispute with them, and set a mark on those
who were to be burned when opportunity should offer. In this mission of
inquisition we see the first beginnings of a tribunal which came afterwards to
bear the terrible name of the "Inquisition." These gave themselves to the work
with an ardor which had not been equaled since the times of Peter the Hermit.
The fiery orators of the Vatican but too easily succeeded in kindling the
fanaticism of the masses. War was at all times the delight of the peoples among
whom this mission was discharged; but to engage in this war what dazzling
temptations were held out! The foes they were to march against were accursed of
God and the Church. To shed their blood was to wash away their own sins it was
to atone for all the vices and crimes of a lifetime. And then to think of the
dwellings of the Albigenses, replenished with elegances and stored with wealth,
and of their fields blooming with the richest cultivation, all to become the
lawful spoil of the crossed invader! But this was only a first installment of a
great and brilliant recompense in the future. They had the word of the Pope that
at the moment of death they should find the angels prepared to carry them aloft,
the gates of Paradise open for their entrance, and the crowns and delights of
the upper world waiting their choice. The crusader of the previous century had
to buy forgiveness with a great sum: he had to cross the sea, to face the
Saracen, to linger out years amid unknown toils and perils, and to return if
he should ever return with broken health and ruined fortune. But now a
campaign of forty days in one's own country, involving no hardship and very
little risk, was all that was demanded for one's eternal salvation. Never before
had Paradise been so cheap! The preparations for this war of extermination went
on throughout the years 1207 and 1208. Like the mutterings of the distant
thunder or the hoarse roar of ocean when the tempest is rising, the dreadful
sounds filled Europe, and their echoes reached the doomed provinces, where they
were heard with terror. In the spring of 1209 these armed fanatics were ready to
march,[7] One body had assembled at
Lyons. Led by Arnold, Abbot of Citeaux and legate of the Pope, it descended by
the valley of the Rhone. A second army gathered in the Agenois under the
Archbishop of Bordeaux. A third horde of militant pilgrims marshaled in the
north, the subjects of Philip Augustus, and at their head marched the Bishop of
Puy.[8] The near neighbors of the
Albigenses rose in a body, and swelled this already overgrown host. The chief
director of this sacred war was the Papal legate, the Abbot of Citeaux. Its
chief military commander was Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester a French
nobleman, who had practiced war and learnt cruelty in the crusades of the Holy
Land. In putting himself at the head of these crossed and fanatical hordes he
was influenced, it is believed, quite as much by a covetous greed of the ample
and rich territories of Raymond, Count of Toulouse, as by hatred of the heresy
that Raymond was suspected of protecting. The number of crusaders who now put
themselves in motion is variously estimated at from 50,000 to 500,000. The
former is the reckoning of the Abbot of Vaux Cernay, the Popish chronicler of
the war; but his calculation, says Sismondi, does not include "the ignorant and
fanatical multitude which followed each preacher armed with scythes and clubs,
and promised to themselves that if they were not in a condition to combat the
knights of Languedoc, they might, at least, be able to murder the women and
children of the heretics."[9]
This overwhelming
host precipitated itself upon the estates of Raymond VI., Count of Toulouse.
Seeing the storm approach, he was seized with dread, wrote submissive letters to
Rome, and offered to accept whatever terms the Papal legate might please to
dictate. As the price of his reconciliation, he had to deliver up to the Pope
seven of his strongest towns, to appear at the door of the Church, where the
dead body of the legate Castelneau, who had been murdered in his dominions, lay,
and to be there beaten with rods.[10] Next, a rope was put about
his neck, and he was dragged by the legate to the tomb of the friar, in the
presence of several bishops and an immense multitude of spectators. After all
this, he was obliged to take the cross, and join with those who were seizing and
plundering his cities, massacring his subjects, and carrying fire and sword
throughout his territories. Stung by these humiliations and calamities, he again
changed sides. But his resolution to brave the Papal wrath came too late. He was
again smitten with interdict; his possessions were given to Simon de Montfort,
and in the end he saw himself reft of all.[11]
Among the princes
of the region now visited with this devastating scourge, the next in rank and
influence to the Count of Toulouse was the young Raymond Roger, Viscount of
Beziers. Every day this horde of murderers drew nearer and nearer to his
territories. Submission would only invite destruction. He hastened to put his
kingdom into a posture of defense. His vassals were numerous and valiant, their
fortified castles covered the face of the country; of his towns, two, Beziers
and Carcassonne, were of great size and strength, and he judged that in these
circumstances it was not too rash to hope to turn the brunt of the impending
tempest. He called round him his armed knights, and told them that his purpose
was to fight: many of them were Papists, as he himself was; but he pointed to
the character of the hordes that were approaching, who made it their sole
business to drown the earth in blood, without much distinction whether it was
Catholic or Albigensian blood that they spilled. His knights applauded the
resolution of their young and brave liege lord.
The castles were
garrisoned and provisioned, the peasantry of the surrounding districts gathered
into them, and the cities were provided against a siege. Placing in Beziers a
number of valiant knights, and telling the inhabitants that their only hope of
safety lay in making a stout defense, Raymond shut himself up in Carcassonne,
and waited the approach of the army of crusaders. Onward came the host: before
them a smiling country, in their rear a piteous picture of devastation
battered castles, the blackened walls and towers of silent cities, homesteads in
ashes, and a desert scathed with fire and stained with blood.
In the
middle of July, 1209, the three bodies of crusaders arrived, and sat down under
the walls of Beziers. The stoutest heart among its citizens quailed, as they
surveyed from the ramparts this host that seemed to cover the face of the earth.
"So great was the assemblage," says the old chronicle, "both of tents and
pavilions, that it appeared as if all the world was collected there."[12] Astonished but not
daunted, the men of Beziers made a rush upon the pilgrims before they should
have time to fortify their encampment. It was all in vain The assault was
repelled, and the crusaders, mingling with the citizens as they hurried back to
the town in broken crowds, entered the gates along with them, and Beziers was in
their hands before they had even formed the plan of attack. The knights inquired
of the Papal legate, the Abbot of Citeaux, how they might distinguish the
Catholics from the heretics. Arnold at once cut the knot which time did not
suffice to loose by the following reply, which has since become famous; "Kill
all! kill all! The Lord will know His own.[13] "
The bloody work
now began. The ordinary population of Beziers was some 15,000; at this moment it
could not be less than four times its usual number, for being the capital of the
province, and a place of great strength, the inhabitants of the country and the
open villages had been collected into it. The multitude, when they saw that the
city was taken, fled to the churches, and began to toll the bells by way of
supplication. This only the sooner drew upon themselves the swords of the
assassins. The wretched citizens were slaughtered in a trice. Their dead bodies
covered the floor of the church; they were piled in heaps round the altar; their
blood flowed in torrents at the door. "Seven thousand dead bodies," says
Sismondi, "were counted in the Magdalen alone. When the crusaders had massacred
the last living creature in Beziers, and had pillaged the houses of all that
they thought worth carrying off, they set fire to the city in every part at
once, and reduced it to a vast funeral pile. Not a house remained standing, not
one human being alive. Historians differ as to the number of victims. The Abbot
of Citoaux, feeling some shame for the butchery which he had ordered, in his
letter to Innocent III. reduces it to 15,000; others make it amount to
60,000."[14]
The terrible fate
which had overtaken Beziers in one day converted into a mound of ruins dreary
and silent as any on the plain of Chaldaea told the other towns and villages
the destiny that awaited them. The inhabitants, terror-stricken, fled to the
woods and caves. Even the strong castles were left tenantless, their defenders
deeming it vain to think of opposing so furious and overwhelming a host.
Pillaging, burning, and massacring as they had a mind, the crusaders advanced to
Carcassonne, where they arrived on the lst of August. The city stood on the
right bank of the Aude; its fortifications were strong, its garrison numerous
and brave, and the young count, Raymond Roger, was at their head. The assailants
advanced to the walls, but met a stout resistance. The defenders poured upon
them streams of boiling water and oil, and crushed them with great stones and
projectiles. The attack was again and again renewed, but was as often repulsed.
Meanwhile the forty days' service was drawing to an end, and bands of crusaders,
having fulfilled their term and earned heaven, were departing to their homes.
The Papal legate, seeing the host melting away, judged it perfectly right to
call wiles to the aid of his arms. Holding out to Raymond Roger the hope of an
honorable capitulation, and swearing to respect his liberty, Arnold induced the
viscount, with 300 of his knights, to present himself at his tent. "The latter,"
says Sismondi, "profoundly penetrated with the maxim of Innocent III., that 'to
keep faith with those that have it not is an offense against the faith,' caused
the young viscount to be arrested, with all the knights who had followed
him."
When the garrison saw that their leader had been imprisoned, they
resolved, along with the inhabitants, to make their escape overnight by a secret
passage known only to themselves a cavern three leagues in length, extending
from Carcassonne to the towers of Cabardes. The crusaders were astonished on the
morrow, when not a man could be seen upon the walls; and still more mortified
was the Papal legate to find that his prey had escaped him, for his purpose was
to make a bonfire of the city, with every man, woman, and child within it. But
if this greater revenge was now out of his reach, he did not disdain a smaller
one still in his power. He collected a body of some 450 persons, partly
fugitives from Carcassonne whom he had captured, and partly the 300 knights who
had accompanied the viscount, and of these he burned 400 alive and the remaining
50 he hanged.[15]
CHAPTER
10 Back to
Top
ERECTION OF TRIBUNAL OF
INQUISITION
The Crusades still continued in the Albigensian Territory
Council of Toulouse, 1229 Organizes the Inquisition Condemns the Reading
of the Bible in the Vernacular Gregory IX., 1233, further perfects the
Organization of the Inquisition, and commits it to the Dominicans The Crusades
continued under the form of the Inquisition These Butcheries the deliberate
Act of Rome Revived and Sanctioned by her in our own day Protestantism of
Thirteenth Century Crushed Not alone Final Ends.
THE main object of the crusades was now accomplished.
The principalities of Raymond VI., Count of Toulouse, and Raymond Roger,
Viscount of Beziers, had been "purged" and made over to that faithful son of the
Church, Simon de Montfort. The lands of the Count of Foix were likewise overrun,
and joined with the neighboring provinces in a common desolation. The Viscount
of Narbonne contrived to avoid a visit of the crusaders, but at the price of
becoming himself the Grand Inquisitor of his dominions, and purging them with
laws even more rigorous than the Church demanded,[1]
The twenty years
that followed were devoted to the cruel work of rooting out any seeds of heresy
that might possibly yet remain in the soil. Every year a crowd of monks issued
from the convents of Citeaux, and, taking possession of the pulpits, preached a
new crusade. For the same easy service they offered the same prodigious reward
Paradise and the consequence was, that every year a new wave of fanatics
gathered and rolled toward the devoted provinces. The villages and the woods
were searched, and some gleanings, left from the harvests of previous years,
were found and made food for the gibbets and stakes that in such dismal array
covered the face of the country. The first instigators of these terrible
proceedings Innocent III., Simon de Montfort, the Abbot of Citeaux soon
passed from the scene, but the tragedies they had begun went on. In the lands
which the Albigenses now all but extinct had once peopled, and which they
had so greatly enriched by their industry and adorned by their art, blood never
ceased to flow nor the flames to devour their victims. It would be remote from
the object of our history to enter here into details, but we must dwell a little
on the events of 1229. This year a Council was held at Toulouse, under the Papal
legate, the Cardinal of St. Angelo. The foundation of the Inquisition had
already been laid. Innocent III. and St. Dominic share between them the merit of
this good work.[2] In the year of the fourth
Lateran, 1215, St. Dominic received the Pontiff's commission to judge and
deliver to punishment apostate and relapsed and obstinate heretics.[3] This was the Inquisition,
though lacking as yet its full organization and equipment. That St. Dominic died
before it was completed alters not the question touching his connection with its
authorship, though of late a vindication of him has been attempted on this
ground, only by shifting the guilt to his Church. The fact remains that St.
Dominic accompanied the armies of Simon de Montfort, that he delivered the
Albigenses to the secular judge to be put to death in short, worked the
Inquisition so far as it had received shape and form in his day. But the Council
of Toulouse still further perfected the organization and developed the working
of this terrible tribunal. It erected in every city a council of Inquisitors
consisting of one priest and three laymen,[4] whose business it was to
search for heretics in towns, houses, cellars, and other lurking-places, as also
in caves, woods, and fields, and to denounce them to the bishops, lords, or
their bailiffs. Once discovered, a summary but dreadful ordeal conducted them to
the stake. The houses of heretics were to be razed to their foundations, and the
ground on which they stood condemned and confiscated for heresy, like the
leprosy, polluted the very stones, and timber, and soil. Lords were held
responsible for the orthodoxy of their estates, and so far also for those of
their neighbors. If remiss in their search, the sharp admonition of the Church
soon quickened their diligence. A last will and testament was of no validity
unless a priest had been by when it was made. A physician suspected was
forbidden to practice. All above the age of fourteen were required on oath to
abjure heresy, and to aid in the search for heretics.[5] As a fitting appendage to
those tyrannical acts, and a sure and lasting evidence of the real source whence
that thing called "heresy," on the extirpation of which they were so intent, was
derived, the same Council condemned the reading of the Holy Scriptures. "We
prohibit," says the fourteenth canon, "the laics from having the books of the
Old and New Testament, unless it be at most that any one wishes to have, from
devotion, a psalter, a breviary for the Divine offices, or the hours of the
blessed Mary; but we forbid them in the most express manner to have the above
books translated into the vulgar tongue."[6] In 1233, Pope Gregory IX.
issued a bull, by which he confided the working of the Inquisition to the
Dominicans.[7] He appointed his legate,
the Bishop of Tournay, to carry out the bull in the way of completing the
organization of that tribunal which has since become the terror of Christendom,
and which has caused to perish such a prodigious number of human beings. In
discharge of his commission, the bishop named two Dominicans in Toulouse, and
two in each city of the province, to form the Tribunal of the Faith;[8] and soon, under the warm
patronage of Saint Louis (Louis IX.) of France, this court was extended to the
whole kingdom. An instruction was at the same time furnished to the Inquisitors,
in which the bishop enumerated the errors of the heretics. The document bears
undesigned testimony to the Scriptural faith of the men whom the newly-erected
court was meant to root out. "In the exposition made by the Bishop of Tournay,
of the errors of the Albigenses," says Sismondi, "we find nearly all the
principles upon which Luther and Calvin founded the Reformation of the sixteenth
century."[9]
Although the
crusades, as hitherto waged, were now ended, they continued under the more
dreadful form of the Inquisition. We say more dreadful form, for not so terrible
was the crusader's sword as the Inquisitor's rack, and to die fighting in the
open field or on the ramparts of the beleaguered city, was a fate less horrible
than to expire amid prolonged and excruciating tortures in the dungeons of the
"Holy Office." The tempests of the crusades, however terrible, had yet their
intermissions; they burst, passed away, and left a breathing-space between their
explosions. Not so the Inquisition. It worked on and on, day and night, century
after century, with a regularity that was appalling. With steady march it
extended its area, till at last it embraced almost all the countries of Europe,
and kept piling up its dead year by year in ever larger and ghastlier heaps.
These awful tragedies were the sole and deliberate acts of the Church of Rome.
She planned them in solemn council, she enunciated them in dogma and canon, and
in executing them she claimed to act as the vicegerent of Heaven, who had power
to save or to destroy nations. Never can that Church be in fairer circumstances
than she was then for displaying her true genius, and showing what she holds to
be her real rights. She was in the noon of her power; she was free from all
coercion whether of force or of fear; she could afford to be magnanimous and
tolerant were it possible she ever could be so; yet the sword was the only
argument she condescended to employ. She blew the trumpet of vengeance, summoned
to arms the half of Europe, and crushed the rising forces of reason and religion
under an avalanche of savage fanaticism. In our own day all these horrible deeds
have been reviewed, ratified, and sanctioned by the same Church that six
centuries ago enacted them: first in the Syllabus of 1864, which expressly
vindicates the ground on which these crusades were done namely, that the
Church of Rome possesses the supremacy of both powers, the spiritual and the
temporal; that she has the right to employ both swords in the extirpation of
heresy; that in the exercise of this right in the past she never exceeded by a
hair's breadth her just prerogatives, and that what she has done aforetime she
may do in time to come, as often as occasion shall require and opportunity may
serve. And, secondly, they have been endorsed over again by the decree of
Infallibility, which declares that the Popes who planned, ordered, and by their
bishops and monks executed all these crimes, were in these, as in all their
other official acts, infallibly guided by inspiration. The plea that it was the
thirteenth century when these horrible butcheries were committed, every one sees
to be wholly inadmissible. An infallible Church has no need to wait for the
coming of the lights of philosophy and science. Her sun is always in the zenith.
The thirteenth and the nineteenth century are the same to her, for she is just
as infallible in the one as in the other.
So fell, smitten down by this
terrible blow, to rise no more in the same age and among the same people, the
Protestantism of the thirteenth century. It did not perish alone. All the
regenerative forces of a social and intellectual kind which Protestantism even
at that early stage had evoked were rooted out along with it. Letters had begun
to refine, liberty to emancipate, art to beautify, and commerce to enrich the
region, but all were swept away by a vengeful power that was regardless of what
it destroyed, provided only it reached its end in the extirpation of
Protestantism. How changed the region from what it once was! There the song of
the troubadour was heard no more. No more was the gallant knight seen riding
forth to display his prowess in the gay tournament; no more were the cheerful
voices of the reaper and grape-gatherer heard in the fields. The rich harvests
of the region were trodden into the dust, its fruitful vines and flourishing
olive-trees were torn up; hamlet and city were swept away; ruins, blood, and
ashes covered the face of this now "purified" land.
But Rome was not
able, with all her violence, to arrest the movement of the human mind. So far as
it was religious, she but scattered the sparks to break out on a wider area at a
future day; and so far as it was intellectual, she but forced it into another
channel. Instead of Albigensianism, Scholasticism now arose in France, which,
after flourishing for some centuries in the schools of Paris, passed into the
Skeptical Philosophy, and that again, in our day, into Atheistic Communism. It
will be curious if in the future the progeny should cross the path of the
parent.
It turned out that this enforced halt of three centuries, after
all, resulted only in the goal being more quickly reached. While the movement
paused, instrumentalities of prodigious power, unknown to that age, were being
prepared to give quicker transmission and wider diffusion to the Divine
principle when next it should show itself. And, further, a more robust and
capable stock than the Romanesque namely, the Teutonic was silently growing
up, destined to receive the heavenly graft, and to shoot forth on every side
larger boughs, to cover Christendom with their shadow and solace it with their
fruits.
CHAPTER
11 Back to
Top
PROTESTANTS BEFORE
PROTESTANTISM
Berengarius The First Opponent of Transubstantiation
Numerous Councils Condemn him His Recantation The Martyrs of Orleans Their
Confession Their Condemnation and Martyrdom Peter de Bruys and the
Petrobrusians Henri Effects of his Eloquence St. Bernard sent to Oppose
him Henri Apprehended His Fate unknown Arnold of Brescia Birth and
Education His Picture of his Times His Scheme of Reform Inveighs against
the Wealth of the Hierarchy His Popularity Condemned by Innocent II. and
Banished from Italy Returns on the Pope's Death Labors Ten Years in Rome
Demands the Separation of the Temporal and Spiritual Authority Adrian IV. He
Suppresses the Movement Arnold is Burned
IN pursuing to an end the history of the Albigensian
crusades, we have been carried somewhat beyond the point of time at which we had
arrived. We now return. A succession of lights which shine out at intervals amid
the darkness of the ages guides our eye onward. In the middle of the eleventh
century appears Berengarius of Tours in France. He is the first public opponent
of transubstantiation.[1] A century had now passed
since the monk, Paschasius Radbertus, had hatched that astounding dogma. In an
age of knowledge such a tenet would have subjected its author to the suspicion
of lunacy, but in times of darkness like those in which this opinion first
issued from the convent of Corbei, the more mysterious the doctrine the more
likely was it to find believers. The words of Scripture, "this is my body," torn
from their context and held up before the eyes of ignorant men, seemed to give
some countenance to the tenet. Besides, it was the interest of the priesthood to
believe it, and to make others believe it too; for the gift of working a prodigy
like this invested them with a superhuman power, and gave them immense reverence
in the eyes of the people. The battle that Berengarius now opened enables us to
judge of the wide extent which the belief in transubstantiation had already
acquired. Everywhere in France, in Germany, in Italy, we find a commotion
arising on the appearance of its opponent. We see bishops bestirring themselves
to oppose his "impious and sacrilegious" heresy, and numerous Councils convoked
to condemn it. The Council of Vercelli in 1049, under Leo IX., which was
attended by many foreign prelates, condemned it, and in doing so condemned also,
as Berengarius maintained, the doctrine of Ambrose, of Augustine, and of Jerome.
There followed a succession of Councils: at Paris, 1050; at Tours, 1055; at
Rome, 1059; at Rouen, 1063; at Poitiers, 1075; and again at Rome, 1078: at all
of which the opinions of Berengarius were discussed and condemned.[2] This shows us how eager
Rome was to establish the fiction of Paschasius, and the alarm she felt lest the
adherents of Berengarius should multiply, and her dogma be extinguished before
it had time to establish itself. Twice did Berengarius appear before the famous
Hildebrand: first in the Council of Tours, where Hildebrand filled the post of
Papal legate, and secondly at the Council of Rome, where he presided as Gregory
VII.
The piety of Berengarius was admitted, his eloquence was great, but
his courage was not equal to his genius and convictions. When brought face to
face with the stake he shrank from the fire. A second and a third time did he
recant his opinions; he even sealed his recantation, according to Dupin, with
his subscription and oath.[3] But no sooner was he back
again in France than he began publishing his old opinions anew. Numbers in all
the countries of Christendom, who had not accepted the fiction of Paschasius,
broke silence, emboldened by the stand made by Berengarius, and declared
themselves of the same sentiments. Matthew of Westminster (1087) says, "that
Berengarius of Tours, being fallen into heresy, had already almost corrupted all
the French, Italians, and English."[4] His great opponent was
Lanfranc, Archbishop of Canterbury, who attacked him not on the head of
transubstantiation only, but as guilty of all the heresies of the Waldenses, and
as maintaining with them that the Church remained with them alone, and that Rome
was "the congregation of the wicked, and the seat of Satan."[5] Berengarius died in his
bed (1088), expressing deep sorrow for the weakness and dissimulation which had
tarnished his testimony for the truth. "His followers," says Mosheim, "were
numerous, as his fame was illustrious."[6]
We come to a nobler
band. At Orleans there flourished, in the beginning of the eleventh century, two
canons, Stephen and Lesoie, distinguished by their rank, revered for their
learning, and beloved for their numerous alms-givings. Taught of the Spirit and
the Word, these men cherished in secret the faith of the first ages. They were
betrayed by a feigned disciple named Arefaste. Craving to be instructed in the
things of God, he seemed to listen not with the ear only, but with the heart
also, as the two canons discoursed to him of the corruption of human nature and
the renewal of the Spirit, of the vanity of praying to the saints, and the folly
of thinking to find salvation in baptism, or the literal flesh of Christ in the
Eucharist. His earnestness seemed to become yet greater when they promised him
that if, forsaking these "broken cisterns," he would come to the Savior himself,
he should have living water to drink, and celestial bread to eat, and, filled
with "the treasures of wisdom and knowledge," would never know want again.
Arefaste heard these things, and returned with his report to those who had sent
him. A Council of the bishops of Orleans was immediately summoned, presided over
by King Robert of France. The two canons were brought before it. The pretended
disciple now became the accuser.[7] The canons confessed
boldly the truth which they had long held; the arguments and threats of the
Council were alike powerless to change their belief, or to shake their
resolution. "As to the burning threatened," says one, "they made light of it
even as if persuaded that they would come out of it unhurt."[8] Wearied, it would seem,
with the futile reasonings of their enemies, and desirous of bringing the matter
to an issue, they gave their final answer thus "You may say these things to
those whose taste is earthly, and who believe the figments of men written on
parchment. But to us who have the law written on the inner man by the Holy
Spirit, and savor nothing but what we learn from God, the Creator of all, ye
speak things vain and unworthy of the Deity. Put therefore an end to your words!
Do with us even as you wish. Even now we see our King reigning in the heavenly
places, who with His right hand is conducting us to immortal triumphs and
heavenly joys."[9]
They were condemned
as Manicheans. Had they been so indeed, Rome would have visited them with
contempt, not with persecution. She was too wise to pursue with fire and sword a
thing so shadowy as Manicheism, which she knew could do her no manner of harm.
The power that confronted her in these two canons and their disciples came from
another sphere, hence the rage with which she assailed it. These two martyrs
were not alone in their death. Of the citizens of Orleans there were ten,[10] some say twelve, who
shared their faith, and who were willing to share their stake.[11] They were first stripped
of their clerical vestments, then buffeted like their Master, then smitten with
rods; the queen, who was present, setting the example in these acts of violence
by striking one of them, and putting out his eye. Finally, they were led outside
the city, where a great fire had been kindled to consume them. They entered the
flames with a smile upon their faces [12] Together this little
company of fourteen stood at the stake, and when the fire had set them free,
together they mounted into the sky; and if they smiled when they entered the
flames, how much more when they passed in at the eternal gates! They were burned
in the year 1022. So far as the light of history serves us, theirs were the
first stakes planted in France since the era of primitive persecutions.[13] Illustrious pioneers! They
go, but they leave their ineffaceable traces on the road, that the hundreds and
thousands of their countrymen who are to follow may not faint, when called to
pass through the same torments to the same everlasting joys.
We next
mention Peter de Bruys, who appeared in the following century (the twelfth),
because it enables us to indicate the rise of, and explain the name borne by,
the Petrobrussians. Their founder, who labored in the provinces of Dauphine,
Provence, and Languedoc, taught no novelties of doctrine; he trod, touching the
faith, in the steps of apostolic men, even as Felix Neff, five centuries later,
followed in his. After twenty years of missionary labors, Peter de Bruys was
seized and burned to death (1126)[14] in the town of St. Giles,
near Toulouse. The leading tenets professed by his followers, the
Petrobrussians, as we learn from the accusations of their enemies, were that
baptism avails not without faith; that Christ is only spiritually present in the
Sacrament; that prayers and alms profit not dead men; that purgatory is a mere
invention; and that the Church is not made up of cemented stones, but of
believing men. This identifies them, in their religious creed, with the
Waldenses; and if further evidence were wanted of this, we have it in the
treatise which Peter de Clugny published against them, in which he accuses them
of having fallen into those errors which have shown such an inveterate tendency
to spring up amid the perpetual snows and icy torrents of the Alps.[15]
When Peter de Bruys
had finished his course he was succeeded by a preacher of the name of Henri, an
Italian by birth, who also gave his name to his followers the Henricians.
Henri, who enjoyed a high repute for sanctity, wielded a most commanding
eloquence. The enchantment of his voice was enough, said his enemies, a little
envious, to melt the very stones. It performed what may perhaps be accounted a
still greater feat; it brought, according to an eye-witness, the very priests to
his feet, dissolved in tears. Beginning at Lausanne, Henri traversed the south
of France, the entire population gathering round him wherever he came, and
listening to his sermons. "His orations were powerful but noxious," said his
foes, "as if a whole legion of demons had been speaking through his mouth." St.
Bernard was sent to check the spiritual pestilence that was desolating the
region, and he arrived not a moment too soon, if we may judge from his picture
of the state of things which he found there. The orator was carrying all before
him; nor need we wonder if, as his enemies alleged, a legion of preachers spoke
in this one. The churches were emptied, the priests were without flocks, and the
time-honored and edifying customs of pilgrimages, of fasts, of invocations of
the saints, and oblations for the dead were all neglected. "How many disorders,"
says St. Bernard, writing to the Count of Toulouse, "do we every day hear that
Henri commits in the Church of God! That ravenous wolf is within your dominions,
clothed with a sheep's skin, but we know him by his works. The churches are like
synagogues, the sanctuary despoiled of its holiness, the Sacraments looked upon
as profane institutions, the feast days have lost their solemnity, men grow up
in sin, and every day souls are borne away before the terrible tribunal of
Christ without first being reconciled to and fortified by the Holy Communion. In
refusing Christians baptism they are denied the life of Jesus Christ."[16]
Such was the
condition in which, as he himself records in his letters, St. Bernard found the
populations in the south of France. He set to work, stemmed the tide of
apostasy, and brought back the wanderers from the Roman fold; but whether this
result was solely owing to the eloquence of his sermons may be fairly
questioned, for we find the civil arm operating along with him. Henri was
seized, carried before Pope Eugenius III., who presided at a Council then
assembled at Rheims, condemned and imprisoned.[17] From that time we hear no
more of him, and his fate can only be guessed at.[18]
It pleased God to
raise up, in the middle of the twelfth century, a yet more famous champion to do
battle for the truth. This was Arnold of Brescia, whose stormy but brilliant
career we must briefly sketch. His scheme of reform was bolder and more
comprehensive than that of any who had preceded him. His pioneers had called for
a purification of the faith of the Church, Arnold demanded a rectification of
her constitution. He was a simple reader in the Church of his native town, and
possessed no advantages of birth; but, fired with the love of learning, he
traveled into France that he might sit at the feet of Abelard, whose fame was
then filling Christendom. Admitted a pupil of the great scholastic, he drank in
the wisdom he imparted without imbibing along with it his mysticism. The scholar
in some respects was greater than the master, and was destined to leave traces
more lasting behind him. In subtlety of genius and scholastic lore he made no
pretensions to rival Abelard; but in a burning eloquence, in practical piety, in
resoluteness, and in entire devotion to the great cause of the emancipation of
his fellow-men from a tyranny that was oppressing both their minds and bodies,
he far excelled him.
From the school of Abelard, Arnold returned to Italy
not, as one might have feared, a mystic, to spend his life in scholastic
hair-splittings and wordy conflicts, but to wage an arduous and hazardous war
for great and much-needed reforms. One cannot but wish that the times had been
more propitious. A frightful confusion he saw had mingled in one anomalous
system the spiritual and the temporal. The clergy, from their head downwards,
were engrossed in secularities. They filled the offices of State, they presided
in the cabinets of princes, they led armies, they imposed taxes, they owned
lordly domains, they were attended by sumptuous retinues, and they sat at
luxurious tables. Here, said Arnold, is the source of a thousand evils the
Church is drowned in riches; from this immense wealth flow the corruption, the
profligacy, the ignorance, the wickedness, the intrigues, the wars and bloodshed
which have overwhelmed Church and State, and are ruining the world.
A
century earlier, Cardinal Damiani had congratulated the clergy of primitive
tunes on the simple lives which they led, contrasting their happier lot with
that of the prelates of those latter ages, who had to endure dignities which
would have been but little to the taste of their first predecessors. "What would
the bishops of old have done," he asked, concurring by anticipation in the
censure of the eloquent Breseian, "had they to endure the torments that now
attend the episcopate? To ride forth constantly attended by troops of soldiers,
with swords and lances; to be girt about by armed men like a heathen general!
Not amid the gentle music of hymns, but the din and clash of arms! Every day
royal banquets, every day parade! The table loaded with delicacies, not for the
poor, but for voluptuous guests! while the poor, to whom the property of light
belongs, are shut out, and pine away with famine."
Arnold based his
scheme of reform on a great principle. The Church of Christ, said he, is not of
this world. This shows us that he had sat at the feet of a greater than Abelard,
and had drawn his knowledge from diviner fountains than those of the scholastic
philosophy. The Church of Christ is not of this world; therefore, said Arnold,
its ministers ought not to fill temporal offices, and discharge temporal
employments.[19] Let these be left to the
men whose duty it is to see to them, even kings and statesmen. Nor do the
ministers of Christ need, in order to the discharge of their spiritual
functions, the enormous revenues which are continually flowing into their
coffers. Let all this wealth, those lands, palaces, and hoards, be surrendered
to the rulers of the State, and let the ministers of religion henceforward be
maintained by the frugal yet competent provision of the tithes, and the
voluntary offerings of their flocks. Set free from occupations which consume
their time, degrade their office, and corrupt their heart, the clergy will lead
their flocks to the pastures of the Gospel, and knowledge and piety will again
revisit the earth.
Attired in his monk's cloak, his countenance stamped
with courage, but already wearing traces of care, Arnold took his stand in the
streets of his native Brescia, and began to thunder forth his scheme of
reform.[20] His townsmen gathered
round him. For spiritual Christianity the men of that age had little value,
still Arnold had touched a chord in their hearts, to which they were able to
respond. The pomp, profligacy, and power of Churchmen had scandalized all
classes, and made a reformation so far welcome, even to those who were not
prepared to sympathize in the more exclusively spiritual views of the Waldenses
and Albigenses. The suddenness and boldness of the assault seem to have stunned
the ecclesiastical authorities; and it was not till the Bishop of Brescia found
his entire flock, deserting the cathedral, and assembling daily in the
marketplace, crowding round the eloquent preacher and listening with applause to
his fierce philippics, that he bestirred himself to silence the courageous
monk.
Arnold kept his course, however, and continued to launch his bolts,
not against his diocesan, for to strike at one miter was not worth his while,
but against that lordly hierarchy which, finding its center on the Seven Hills,
had stretched its circumference to the extremities of Christendom. He demanded
nothing less than that this hierarchy, which had crowned itself with temporal
dignities, and which sustained itself by temporal arms, should retrace its
steps, and become the lowly and purely spiritual institute it had been in the
first century. It was not very likely to do so at the bidding of one man,
however eloquent, but Arnold hoped to rouse the populations of Italy, and to
bring such a pressure to bear upon the Vatican as would compel the chiefs of the
Church to institute this most necessary and most just reform. Nor was he without
the countenance of some persons of consequence. Maifredus, the Consul of
Brescia, at the first supported his movement.[21]
The bishop, deeming
it hopeless to contend against Arnold on the spot, in the midst of his numerous
followers, complained of him to the Pope. Innocent II. convoked a General
Council in the Vatican, and summoned Arnold to Rome. The summons was obeyed. The
crime of the monk was of all others the most heinous in the eyes of the
hierarchy. He had attacked the authority, riches, and pleasures of the
priesthood; but other pretexts must be found on which to condemn him. "Besides
this, it was said of him that he was unsound in his judgment about the Sacrament
of the altar and infant baptism." "We find that St. Bernard sending to Pope
Innocent II. a catalogue of the errors of Abelardus," whose scholar Arnold had
been, "accuseth him of teaching, concerning the Eucharist, that the accidents
existed in the air, but not without a subject; and that when a rat doth eat the
Sacrament, God withdraweth whither He pleaseth, and preserves where He pleases
the body of Jesus Christ."[22] The sum of this is that
Arnold rejected transubstantiation, and did not believe in baptismal
regeneration; and on these grounds the Council found it convenient to rest their
sentence, condemning him to perpetual silence.
Arnold now retired from
Italy, and, passing the Alps, "he settled himself," Otho tells us, "in a place
of Germany called Turego, or Zurich, belonging to the diocese of Constance,
where he continued to disseminate his doctrine," the seeds of which, it may be
presumed, continued to vegetate until the times of Zwingle.
Hearing that
Innocent II. was dead, Arnold returned to Rome in the beginning of the
Pontificate of Eugenius III. (1144-45). One feels surprise, bordering on
astonishment, to see a man with the condemnation of a Pope and Council resting
on his head, deliberately marching in at the gates of Rome, and throwing down
the gage of battle to the Vatican "the desperate measure," as Gibbon calls
it,[23] "of erecting his standard
in Rome itself, in the face of the successor of St. Peter." But the action was
not so desperate as it looks. The Italy of those days was perhaps the least
Papal of all the countries of Europe. "The Italians," says M'Crie, "could not,
indeed, be said to feel at this period" (the fifteenth century, but the remark
is equally applicable to the twelfth) "a superstitious devotion to the See of
Rome. This did not originally form a discriminating feature of their national
character; it was superinduced, and the formation of it can be distinctly traced
to causes which produced their full effect subsequently to the era of the
Reformation. The republics of Italy in the Middle Ages gave many proofs of
religious independence, and singly braved the menaces and excommunications of
the Vatican at a time when all Europe trembled at the sound of its thunder."[24] In truth, nowhere were
sedition and tumult more common than at the gates of the Vatican; in no city did
rebellion so often break out as in Rome, and no rulers were so frequently chased
ignominiously from their capital as the Popes.
Arnold, in fact, found
Rome on entering it in revolt. He strove to direct the agitation into a
wholesome channel. He essayed, if it were possible, to revive from its ashes the
flame of ancient liberty, and to restore, by cleansing it from its many
corruptions, the bright form of primitive Christianity. With an eloquence worthy
of the times he spoke of, he dwelt on the achievements of the heroes and
patriots of classic ages, the sufferings of the first Christian martyrs, and the
humble and holy lives of the first Christian bishops. Might it not be possible
to bring back those glorious times? He called on the Romans to arise and unite
with him in an attempt to do so. Let us drive out the buyers and sellers who
have entered the Temple, let us separate between the spiritual and the temporal
jurisdiction, let us give to the Pope the things of the Pope, the government of
the Church even, and let us give to the emperor the things of the emperor
namely, the government of the State; let us relieve the clergy from the wealth
that burdens them, and the dignities that disfigure them, and with the
simplicity and virtue of former times will return the lofty characters and the
heroic deeds that gave to those times their renown. Rome will become once more
the capital of the world. "He propounded to the multitude," says Bishop Otho,
"the examples of the ancient Romans, who by the maturity of their senators'
counsels, and the valor and integrity of their youth, made the whole world their
own. Wherefore he persuaded them to rebuild the Capitol, to restore the dignity
of the senate, to reform the order of knights. He maintained that nothing of the
government of the city did belong to the Pope, who ought to content himself only
with his ecclesiastical." Thus did the monk of Brescia raise the cry for
separation of the spiritual from the temporal at the very foot of the
Vatican.
For about ten years (1145-55) Arnold continued to prosecute his
mission in Rome. The city all that time may be said to have been in a state of
insurrection. The Pontifical chair was repeatedly emptied. The Popes of that era
were short-lived; their reigns were full of tumult, and their lives of care.
Seldom did they reside at Rome; more frequently they lived at Viterbo, or
retired to a foreign country; and when they did venture within the walls of
their capital, they entrusted the safety of their persons rather to the gates
and bars of their stronghold of St. Angelo than to the loyalty of their
subjects. The influence of Arnold meanwhile was great, his party numerous, and
had there been virtue enough among the Romans they might during these ten
favorable years, when Rome was, so to speak, in their hands, have founded a
movement which would have had important results for the cause of liberty and the
Gospel. But Arnold strove in vain to recall a spirit that was fled for
centuries. Rome was a sepulcher. Her citizens could be stirred into tumult, not
awakened into life.
The opportunity passed. And then came Adrian IV.,
Nicholas Breakspear, the only Englishman who ever ascended the throne of the
Vatican. Adrian addressed himself with rigor to quell the tempests which for ten
years had warred around the Papal chair. He smote the Romans with interdict.
They were vanquished by the ghostly terror. They banished Arnold, and the
portals of the churches, to them the gates of heaven, were re-opened to the
penitent citizens. But the exile of Arnold did not suffice to appease the anger
of Adrian. The Pontiff bargained with Frederic Barbarossa, who was then
soliciting from the Pope coronation as emperor, that the monk should be given
up. Arnold was seized, sent to Rome under a strong escort, and burned alive. We
are able to infer that his followers in Rome were numerous to the last, from the
reason given for the order to throw his ashes into the Tiber, "to prevent the
foolish rabble from expressing any veneration for his body."[25]
Arnold had been
burned to ashes, but the movement he had inaugurated was not extinguished by his
martyrdom. The men of his times had condemned his cause; it was destined,
nevertheless, seven centuries afterwards, to receive the favorable and all but
unanimous verdict of Europe. Every succeeding Reformer and patriot took up his
cry for a separation between the spiritual and temporal, seeing in the union of
the two in the Roman princedom one cause of the corruption and tyranny which
afflicted both Church and State. Wicliffe made this demand in the fourteenth
century; Savonarola in the fifteenth; and the Reformers in the sixteenth.
Political men in the following centuries reiterated and proclaimed, with
ever-growing emphasis, the doctrine of Arnold. At last, on the 20th of
September, 1870, it obtained its crowning victory. On that day the Italians
entered Rome, the temporal sovereignty of the Pope came to an end, the scepter
was disjoined from the miter, and the movement celebrated its triumph on the
same spot where its first champion had been burned.
CHAPTER
12 Back to
Top
ABELARD, AND RISE OF MODERN
SKEPTICISM
Number and Variety of Sects One Faith Who gave us the
Bible? Abelard of Paris His Fame Father of Modern Skepticism The Parting
of the Ways Since Abelard three currents in Christendom The Evangelical, the
Ultramontane, the Skeptical.
ONE is apt, from a cursory survey of the Christendom
of those days, to conceive it as speckled with an almost endless variety of
opinions and doctrines, and dotted all over with numerous and diverse religious
sects. We read of the Waldenses on the south of the Alps, and the Albigenses on
the north of these mountains. We are told of the Petrobrussians appearing in
this year, and the Henricians rising in that. We see a company of Manicheans
burned in one city, and a body of Paulicians martyred in another. We find the
Peterini planting themselves in this province, and the Cathari spreading
themselves over that other. We figure to ourselves as many conflicting creeds as
there are rival standards; and we are on the point, perhaps, of bewailing this
supposed diversity of opinion as a consequence of breaking loose from the
"center of unity" in Rome. Some even of our religious historians seem haunted by
the idea that each one of these many bodies is representative of a different
dogma, and that dogma an error. The impression is a natural one, we own, but it
is entirely erroneous. In this diversity there was a grand unity. It was
substantially the same creed that was professed by all these bodies. They were
all agreed in drawing their theology from the same Divine fountain. The Bible
was their one infallible rule and authority. Its cardinal doctrines they
embodied in their creed and exemplified in their lives.
Individuals
doubtless there were among them of erroneous belief and of immoral character. It
is of the general body that we speak. That body, though dispersed over many
kingdoms, and known by various names, found a common center in the "one Lord,"
and a common bond in the "one faith" Through one Mediator did they all offer
their worship, and on one foundation did they all rest for forgiveness and the
life eternal. They were in short the Church the one Church doing over again
what she did in the first ages. Overwhelmed by a second irruption of Paganism,
reinforced by a flood of Gothic superstitions, she was essaying to lay her
foundations anew in the truth, and to build herself up by the enlightening and
renewing of souls, and to give to herself outward visibility and form by her
ordinances, institutions, and assemblies, that as a universal spiritual empire
she might subjugate all nations to the obedience of the evangelical law and the
practice of evangelical virtue.
It is idle for Rome to say, "I gave you
the Bible, and therefore you must believe in me before you can believe in it."
The facts we have already narrated conclusively dispose of this claim. Rome did
not give us the Bible she did all in her power to keep it from us; she
retained it under the seal of a dead language; and when others broke that seal,
and threw open its pages to all, she stood over the book, and, unsheathing her
fiery sword, would permit none to read the message of life, save at the peril of
eternal anathema.
We owe the Bible that is, the transmission of it to
those persecuted communities which we have so rapidly passed in review. They
received it from the primitive Church, and carried it down to us. They
translated it into the mother tongues of the nations. They colported it over
Christendom, singing it in their lays as troubadours, preaching it in their
sermons as missionaries, and living it out as Christians. They fought the battle
of the Word of God against tradition, which sought to bury it. They sealed their
testimony for it at the stake. But for them, so far as human agency is
concerned, the Bible would, ere this day, have disappeared from the world. Their
care to keep this torch burning is one of the marks which indubitably certify
them as forming part of that one true Catholic Church, which God called into
existence at first by His word, and which, by the same instrumentality, He has,
in the conversion of souls, perpetuated from age to age.
But although
under great variety of names there is found substantial identity of doctrine
among these numerous bodies, it is clear that a host of new, contradictory, and
most heterogeneous opinions began to spring up in the age we speak of. The
opponents of the Albigenses and the Waldenses more especially Alanus, in his
little book against heretics; and Reynerius, the opponent of the Waldenses
have massed together all these discordant sentiments, and charged them upon the
evangelical communities. Their controversial tractates, in which they enumerate
and confute the errors of the sectaries, have this value even, that they present
a picture of their times, and show us the mental fermentation that began to
characterize the age. But are we to infer that the Albigenses and their allies
held all the opinions which their enemies impute to them? that they at one and
the same time believed that God did and did not exist; that the world had been
created, and yet that it had existed from eternity; that an atonement had been
made for the sin of man by Christ, and yet that the cross was a fable; that the
joys of Paradise were reserved for the righteous, and yet that there was neither
soul nor spirit, hell nor heaven? No. This were to impute to them an impossible
creed. Did these philosophical and skeptical opinions, then, exist only in the
imaginations of their accusers? No. What manifestly we are to infer is that
outside the Albigensian and evangelical pale there was a large growth of
sceptical and atheistical sentiment, more or less developed, and that the
superstition and tyranny of the Church of Rome had even then, in the thirteenth
and fourteenth centuries, impelled the rising intellect of Christendom into a
channel dangerous at once to her own power and to the existence of Christianity.
Her champions, partly from lack of discrimination, partly from a desire to paint
in odious colors those whom they denominated heretics, mingled in one the
doctrines drawn from Scripture and the speculations and impieties of an infidel
philosophy, and, compounding them into one creed, laid the monstrous thing at
the door of the Albigenses, just as in our own day we have seen Popes and Popish
writers include in the same category, and confound in the same condemnation, the
professors of Protestantism and the disciples of Pantheism.
From the
twelfth century and the times of Peter Abelard, we can discover three currents
of thought in Christendom. Peter Abelard was the first and in some respects the
greatest of modern skeptics. He was the first person in Christendom to attack
publicly the doctrine of the Church of Rome from the side of free-thinking. His
Skepticism was not the avowed and fully-formed infidelity of later times: he but
sowed the seeds; he but started the mind of Europe then just beginning to
awake on the path of doubt and of philosophic Skepticism, leaving the movement
to gather way in the following ages. But that he did sow the seeds which future
laborers took pains to cultivate, cannot be doubted by those who weigh carefully
his teachings on the head of the Trinity, of the person of Christ, of the power
of the human will, of the doctrine of sin, and other subjects.[1] And these seeds he sowed
widely. He was a man of vast erudition, keen wit, and elegant rhetoric, and the
novelty of his views and the fame of his genius attracted crowds of students
from all countries to his lectures. Dazzled by the eloquence of their teacher,
and completely captivated by the originality and subtlety of his daring genius,
these scholars carried back to their homes the views of Abelard, and diffused
them, from England on the one side to Sicily on the other. Had Rome possessed
the infallibility she boasts, she would have foreseen to what this would grow,
and provided an effectual remedy before the movement had gone beyond
control.
She did indeed divine, to some extent, the true character of the
principles which the renowned but unfortunate [2] teacher was so freely
scattering on the opening mind of Christendom. She assembled a Council, and
condemned them as erroneous. But Abelard went on as before, the laurel round his
brow, the thorn at his breast, propounding to yet greater crowds of scholars his
peculiar opinions and doctrines. Rome has always been more lenient to sceptical
than to evangelical views. And thus, whilst she burned Arnold, she permitted
Abelard to die a monk and canon in her communion.
But here, in the
twelfth century, at the chair of Abelard, we stand at the parting of the ways.
From this time we find three great parties and three great schools of thought in
Europe. First, there is the Protestant, in which we behold the Divine principle
struggling to disentangle itself from Pagan and Gothic corruptions. Secondly,
there is the Superstitious, which had now come to make all doctrine to consist
in a belief of "the Church's" inspiration, and all duty in an obedience to her
authority. And thirdly, there is the Intellectual, which was just the reason of
man endeavoring to shake off the trammels of Roman authority, and go forth and
expatiate in the fields of free inquiry. It did right to assert this freedom,
but, unhappily, it altogether ignored the existence of the spiritual faculty in
man, by which the things of the spiritual world are to be apprehended, and by
which the intellect itself has often to be controlled. Nevertheless, this
movement, of which Peter Abelard was the pioneer, went on deepening and widening
its current century after century, till at last it grew to be strong enough to
change the face of kingdoms, and to threaten the existence not only of the Roman
Church,[3] but of Christianity
itself.
FOOTNOTES
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none
VOLUME FIRST- BOOK FIRST- CHAPTER 2
[1] Eusebius, De Vita Const., lib. 4, cap. 27. Dupin, Eccles. Hist., vol. 1, p. 162; Dublin. 1723.
[2] Eusebius, De Vita Const., lib. 4, cap. 24. Mosheim, Eccles. Hist., vol. 1, cent. 4, p. 94; Glasgow, 1831.
[3] Eusebius, Eccles. Hist., lib. 3, cap. 12, p. 490; Parisiis, 1659. Dupin, Eccles. Hist., vol. 2, p. 14; Lond., 1693.
[4] Baronius admits that many things have been laudably translated from Gentile superstition into the Christian religion (Annal., ad An. 58). And Binnius, extolling the munificence of Constantine towards the Church, speaks of his superstitionis gentiliae justa aemulatio ("just emulation of the Gentile superstition"). Concil., tom. 7, notae in Donat. Constan.
[5] Ammian. Marcel., lib. 27, cap. 3. Mosheim, vol. 1, cent. 4, p. 95.
[6] Nisan corresponds with the latter half of our March and the first half of our April.
[7] The Council of Nicaea, A.D. 325, enacted that the 21st of March should thenceforward be accounted the vernal equinox, that the Lord's Day following the full moon next after the 21st of March should be kept as Easter Day, but that if the full moon happened on a Sabbath, Easter Day should be the Sabbath following. This is the canon that regulates the observance of Easter in the Church of England. "Easter Day," says the Common Prayer Book, "is always the first Sunday after the full moon which happens upon or next after the 21st day of March; and if the full moon happens upon a Sunday, Easter Day is the Sunday after."
[8] Bennet's Memorial of the Reformation, p. 20; Edin., 1748. 986
[9] These customs began thus. In times of persecution, assemblies often met in churchyards as the place of greatest safety, and the "elements" were placed on the tombstones. It became usual to pray that the dead might be made partakers in the "first resurrection." This was grounded on the idea which the primitive Christians entertained respecting the millennium. After Gregory I., prayers for the dead regarded their deliverance from purgatory.
[10] Dupin, EccIes. Hist., vol. 1, cent. 3.
VOLUME FIRST- BOOK FIRST- CHAPTER 3
[1] Hardouin, Acta Concil., tom. 1, col 325; Parisiis, 1715. Dupin, Eccles. Hist., vol. 1, p. 600; Dublin edition.
[2] Hard. 1. 1477; 2. 787,886. Baron. 6. 235.
[3] Muller, Univ. History, vol. 2, p. 21; Lond., 1818.
[4] Muller, vol. 2, p. 23.
[5] Muller, vol. 2, p. 74.
[6] We quote from the copy of the document in Pope Leo's letter in Hardouin's Collection. Epistola I., Leonis Papoe IX.; Acta Conciliorum et Epistoloe Decretales, tom. 6, pp. 934, 936; Parisiis, 1714. The English reader will find a copy of the pretended original document in full in Historical Essay on the Power of the Popes, vol. 2, Appendix, tr. from French; London, 1838.
[7] Etudes Religieuses, November, 1866.
[8] The Pope and the Council, by "Janus," p. 105; London, 1869.
[9] The above statement regarding the mode of electing bishops during the first three centuries rests on the authority of Clement, Bishop of Rome, in the first century; Cyprian, Bishop of Carthage, in the third century; and of Gregory Nazianzen. See also De Dominis, De Repub. Eccles.; Blondel, Apologia; Dean Waddington; Barrow, Supremacy; and Mosheim, Eccl. Hist., cent. 1.
VOLUME FIRST- BOOK FIRST- CHAPTER 4
[1] The Pope and the Council, p. 107.
[2] Binnius, Concilia, vol. 3, pars. 2, p. 297; Col. Agrip., 1618. 987
[3] Hallam, 2. 276.
[4] Hallam, 2. 284.
[5] P. Innocent III. in Decret. Greg., lib. 1, tit. 33.
[6] "Spiritualium plenitudinem, et latitudinem temporalium."
[7] Itinerar. Ital., part 2, De Coron. Rom. Pont.
[8] "Oportet gladium esse sub gladio, et temporalem authoritatem spirituali subjici potestati. Ergo, si deviat terrena potestas judicabitur a potestate spirituali." (Corp. Jur. Can. a Pithoeo, tom. 2, Extrav., lib. 1, tit. 8, cap. 1; Paris, 1671.)
[9] Paradiso, canto 24.
[10] Le Rime del Petrarca, tome 1, p. 325. ed. Lod. Castel.
[11] Baronius, Annal., ann. 1000, tom. 10, col. 963; Col. Agrip., 1609.
VOLUME FIRST- BOOK FIRST- CHAPTER 5
[1] Allix, Ancient Churches of Piedmont, chap. 1; Lond., 1690. M'Crie, Italy, p. 1; Edin., 1833.
[2] "Is mos antiquus fuit." (Labbei et Gab. Cossartii Concil., tom. 6, col. 482; Venetiis, 1729.)
[3] A mistake of the historian. It was under Nicholas II. (1059) that the independence of Milan was extinguished. Platina's words are: "Che [chiesa di Milano] era forse ducento anni stata dalla chiesa di Roma separata." (Historia delle Vite dei Sommi Pontefici, p. 128; Venetia, 1600.)
[4] Baronius, Annal., ann. 1059, tom. 11, col. 277; Col. Agrip., 1609.
[5] Allix, Churches of Piedmont, chap. 3.
[6] "This is not bodily but spiritual food," says St. Ambrose, in his Book of Mysteries and Sacraments, "for the body of the Lord is spiritual." (Dupin, Eccles. Hist., vol. 2, cent. 4.)
[7] Allix, Churches of Piedmont, chap. 4.
[8] Ibid., chap. 5.
[9] Allix, Churches of Piedmont, chap. 8. 988
[10] "Of all these works there is nothing printed," says Allix (p. 60), "but his commentary upon the Epistle to the Galatians. The monks of St. Germain have his commentary upon all the epistles in MS., in two volumes, which were found in the library of the Abbey of Fleury, near Orleans. They have also his MS. commentaries on Leviticus, which formerly belonged to the library of St. Remy at Rheims. As for his commentary on St. Matthew, there are several MS. copies of it in England, as well as elsewhere." See also list of his works in Dupin.
[11] See Mosheim, Eccles. Hist., cent. 9.
[12] "Hic [panis] ad corpus Christi mystice, illud [vinum] refertur ad sanguinem" (MS. of Com. on Matthew.)
[13] Allix, chap. 10.
[14] Dupin, Eccles. Hist., cent. 9. The worship of images was decreed by the second Council of Nice; but that decree was rejected by France, Spain, Germany, and the diocese of Milan. The worship of images was moreover condemned by the Council of Frankfort, 794. Claude, in his letter to Theodemir, says: "Appointed bishop by Louis, I came to Turin. I found all the churches full of the filth of abominations and images... If Christians venerate the images of saints, they have not abandoned idols, but only changed their names." (Mag. Bib., tome 4, part 2, p. 149.)
[15] Allix, chap. 9.
[16] Allix, pp. 76, 77.
[17] Dupin, Eccles. Hist., cent. 9.
[18] Allix, chap. 9.
[19] Dupin, vol. 7, p. 2; Lond., 1695.
[20] Allix, cent. 9.
VOLUME FIRST- BOOK FIRST- CHAPTER 6
[1] Baronius, Annal., ann. 1059, tom. 11, cols. 276, 277.
[2] Petrus Damianus, Opusc., p. 5. Allix, Churches of Piedmont, p. 113. M'Crie, Hist. of Reform. in Italy, p. 2. 989
[3] Recent German criticism refers the Nobla Leycon to a more recent date, but still one anterior to the Reformation.
[4] This short description of the Waldensian valleys is drawn from the author's personal observations. He may here be permitted to state that he has, in successive journeys, continued at intervals during the past thirty-five years, traveled over Christendom, and visited all the countries, Popish and Protestant, of which he will have occasion particularly to speak in the course of this history.
VOLUME FIRST- BOOK FIRST- CHAPTER 7
[1] This disproves the charge of Manicheism brought against them by their enemies.
[2] Sir Samuel Morland gives the Nobla Leycon in full in his History of the Churches of the Waldenses. Allix (chap. 18) gives a summary of it.
[3] The Nobla Leycon has the following passage: "If there be an honest man, who desires to love God and fear Jesus Christ, who will neither slander, nor swear, nor lie, nor commit adultery, nor kill, nor steal, nor avenge himself of his enemies, they presently say of such a one he is a Vaudes, and worthy of death."
[4] See a list of numerous heresies and blasphemies charged upon the Waldenses by the Inquisitor Reynerius, who wrote about the year 1250, and extracted by Allix (chap. 22).
[5] The Romaunt Version of the Gospel according to John, from MS. preserved in Trinity College, Dublin, and in the Bibliotheque du Roi, Paris. By William Stephen Gilly, D.D., Canon of Durham, and Vicar of Norham. Lond., 1848.
[6] Stranski, apud Lenfant's Concile de Constance, quoted by Count Valerian Krasinski in his History of the Rise, Progress, and Decline of the Reformation in Poland, vol. 1, p. 53; Lond., 1838. Illyricus Flaccins, in his Catalogus Testium Veritatis (Amstelodami, 1679), says: "Pars Valdensium in Germaniam transiit atque apud Bohemos, in Polonia ac Livonia sedem fixit." Leger says that the Waldenses had, about the year 1210, Churches in Slavonia, Sarmatia, and Livonia. (Histoire Generale des Eglises Evangeliques des Vallees du Piedmont ou Vaudois. vol. 2, pp. 336, 337; 1669.) 990
[7] M'Crie, Hist. Ref. in Italy, p. 4.
[8] Those who. wish to know more of this interesting people than is contained in the above rapid sketch may consult Leger, Des Eglises Evangeliques; Perrin, Hist. De Vaudois; Reynerius, Cont. Waldens.; Sir. S. Morland, History of the Evangelical Churches of Piedmont; Jones, Hist. Waldenses; Rorenco, Narative; besides a host of more modern writers Gilly, Waldensian Researches; Muston, Israed of the Alps; Monastier, etc. etc.
VOLUME FIRST- BOOK FIRST- CHAPTER 8
[1] Manes taught that there were two principles, or gods, the one good and the other evil; and that the evil principle was the creator of this world, the good principle of the world to come. Manicheism was employed as a term of compendious condemnation in the East, as Heresy was in the West. It was easier to calumniate these men than to refute them. For such aspersions a very ancient precedent might be pleaded. "He hath a devil and is mad," was said of the Master. The disciple is not above his Lord.
[2] "Among the prominent charges urged against the Paulicians before the Patriarch of Constantinople in the eighth century, and by Photius and Petrus Siculus in the ninth, we find the following that they dishonored the Virgin Mary, and rejected her worship; denied the life-giving efficacy of the cross, and refused it worship; and gainsaid the awful mystery of the conversion of the blood of Christ in the Eucharist; while by others they are branded as the originators of the Iconoclastic heresy and the war against the sacred images. In the first notice of the sectaries in Western Europe, I mean at Orleans, they were similarly accused of treating with contempt the worship of martyrs and saints, the sign of the holy cross, and mystery of transubstantiation; and much the same too at Arras." (Elliott, Horoe Apocalypticoe, 3rd ed., vol. 2, p. 277.)
[3] "Multos ex ovibus lupos fecit, et per eos Christi ovilia dissipavit." (Pet. Sic., Hist. Bib. Patr., vol. 16, p. 761.)
[4] Gibbon, vol. 10, p. 177; Edin., 1832. Sharon Turner, Hist. of England, vol. 5, p. 125; Lond., 1830.991
[5] Pet. Sic., p. 814.
[6] Emericus, in his Directory for Inquisitors, gives us the following piece of news, namely, that the founder of the Manicheans was a person called Manes, who lived in the diocese of Milan! (Allix, p. 134.)
[7] Mosheim, Eccl. Hist., cent. 11, part 2, chap. 5.
[8] Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vol. 10, p. 186. In perusing the chapter (54) which this historian has devoted to an account of the Paulicians, one hardly knows whether to be more delighted with his eloquence or amazed at his inconsistency. At one time he speaks of them as the "votaries of St. Paul and of Christ," and at another as the disciples of Manes. And though he says that "the Paulicians sincerely condemned the memory and opinions of the Manichean sect," he goes on to write of them as Manicheans. The historian has too slavishly followed his chief authority and their bitter enemy, Petrus Siculus.
[9] Gibbon, vol. 10, p. 185.
[10] Gerdesius, Historia Evangelii Renovati, tom. 1, p. 39; Groningae, 1744.
VOLUME FIRST- BOOK FIRST- CHAPTER 9
[1] Hardouin, Concil. Avenion. (1209), tom. 6, pars. 2, col. 1986. This edict enjoins bishops, counts, governors of castles, and all men-at-arms to give their aid to enforce spiritual censures against heretics. "Si opus fuerit," continues the edict, "jurare compellat sicut illi de Montepessulano juraverunt, praecipue circa exterminandos haereticos."
[2] "Tanquam haereticos ab ecclesia Dei pellimus et damnamus: et per porestates exteras coerceri praecipimus, defensores quoque ipsorum ejusdem damnationis vinculo donec resipuerint, mancipamus." (Concilium Tolosanum Hardouin, Acta Concil. et .Epistoloe Decretales, tom. 6, pars. 2, p. 1979; Parisiis, 1714.)
[3] Acta Concil., tom. 6, pars. 2, p. 1212.
[4] "Ubi cogniti fuerint illius haeresis sectatores, ne receptaculum quisquam eis in terra sua praebere, aut praesidium impertire praesumat. Sed nec in venditione aut eruptione aliqua cum eis omnino commercium habaetur: ut solatio saltem humanitatis amisso, ab errore viae suae resipiscere compellantur." Hardouin, Acta Concil., tom. 6, p. 1597. 992
[5] Ibid., can. 27, De Haereticis, p. 1684.
[6] Ibid., tom. 7, can. 3, pp. 19-23.
[7] Sismondi, Hist. of Crusades, p. 28.
[8] Petri Vallis, Cern. Hist. Albigens., cap. 16, p. 571. Sismondi, p. 30.
[9] Sismondi, p. 29.
[10] Hardouin, Concil. Montil., tom. 6, pars. 2, p. col. 1980.
[11] Hardouin, Concil. Lateran. 4., tom. 7, p. 79.
[12] Historia de los Faicts d'Armas de Tolosa, pp. 9, 10. quoted by Sismondi, p. 35.
[13] Caesar, Hiesterbachiensis, lib. 5, cap. 21. In Bibliotheca Patrum Cisterciensium, tom. 2, p. 139, Sismondi, p. 36.
[14] Hist. Gen. de Languedoc, lib. 21, cap. 57, p. 169. Historia de los Faicts d'Armas de Tolosa, p. 10. Sismondi, p. 37.
[15] Sismondi, History of the Crusades against the Albigenses, pp. 40-43.
VOLUME FIRST- BOOK FIRST- CHAPTER 10
[1] Histoire de Languedoc, lib. 21, cap. 58, p. 169. Sismondi, p. 43.
[2] Concil. Lateran. 4, can. 8, De Inquisitionibus. Hardouin, tom. 7, col. 26.
[3] Malvenda, ann. 1215; Alb. Butler, 76. Turner, Hist. Eng., vol 5, p. 103; ed. 1830.
[4] Hardouin, Concilia, tom. 7, p. 175.
[5] Concilium Tolosanum, cap. 1, p. 428. Sismondi, 220.
[6] Labbe, Concil. Tolosan., tom. 11, p. 427. Fleury, Hist. Eccles., lib. 79, n. 58.
[7] Percini, Historia Inquisit. Tholosanoe. Mosheim, vol. 1, p. 344; Glas. edit., 1831.
[8] Hist. de Languedoc, lib. 24, cap. 87, p. 394. Sismondi, 243.
[9] Hist. of Crusades against the Albigenses, p. 243.
VOLUME FIRST- BOOK FIRST- CHAPTER 11
[1] John Scotus Erigena had already published his book attacking and refuting the then comparatively new and strange idea of Paschasius, viz., that 993
by the words of consecration the bread and wine in the Eucharist became the real and veritable flesh and blood of Christ.
[2] Dupin, Eccl. Hist., cent. 11. Concil., tom. 10; edit. Lab., p. 379.
[3] Dupin, .Eccl. Hist., cent. 11, chap. 1, p. 9.
[4] Allix, p. 122.
[5] Among other works Berengarius published a commentary on the Apocalypse; this may perhaps explain his phraseology.
[6] Mosheim, Eccl. Hist., cent. 11, part 2, chap. 3, sec. 18. In a foot-note Mosheim quotes the following words as decisive of Berengarius' sentiments, that Christ's body is only spiritually present in the Sacrament, and that the bread and wine are only symbols: "The true body of Christ is set forth in the Supper; but spiritual to the inner man. The incorruptible, uncontaminated, and indestructible body of Christ is to be spiritually eaten [spiritualiter manducari] by those only who are members of Christ." (Berengarius' Letter to Almannus in Martene's Thesaur., tom. 2, p. 109.)
[7] Dupin, Eccles. Hist., cent. 11, chap. 13.
[8] Rodulphus Glaber, a monk of Dijon, who wrote a history of the occurrence.
[9] "Jam Regem nostrum in coelestibus regnantem videmus; qui ad immortales triumphos dextra sua nos sublevat, dans superna gandia." (Chartuulary of St. Pierre en Vallee at Chartres.)
[10] Hard., Acta Concil., tom. 6, p. 822.
[11] Mosheim, Eccles. Hist., vol. 1, p. 270. Dupin, Eccles. Hist., cent. 11, chap. 13.
[12] "Ridentes in medio ignis." (Hard., Acta Concil., tom. 6, p. 822.)
[13] Gibbon has mistakenly recorded their martyrdom as that of Manicheans. Of the trial and deaths of these martyrs, four contemporaneous accounts have come down to us. In addition to the one referred to above, there is the biographical relation of Arefaste, their betrayer, a knight of Rouen; there is the chronicle of Ademar, a monk of St. Martial, who lived at the time of the Council; and there is the narrative of John, a monk of Fleury, near Orleans, written probably within a few weeks of the transaction. Accounts, taken from these original 994
documents, are given in Baronius' Annals (tom. 11, col. 60, 61; Colon. ed.) and Hardouin's Councils.
[14] Mosheim says 1130. Bossuet, Faber, and others have assigned to Peter de Bruys a Paulician or Eastern origin. We are inclined to connect him with the Western or Waldensian confessors.
[15] Peter de Cluny's account of them will be found in Bibliotheca P. Max. 22, pp. 1034, 1035.
[16] Baron., Annal., ann. 1147, tom. 12, col. 350, 351. Dupin, Eccles. Hist., cent. 12, chap. 4
[17] Baron., Annal., ann. 1148, tom. 12, col. 356.
[18] Mosheim, cent. 12, part 2, chap. 5, sec. 8.
[19] Gibbon, Decline and Fall, vol. 12, p. 264.
[20] The original picture of Arnold is by an opponent Otho, Bishop of Frisingen (Chron. de Gestibus, Frederici I., lib. 1, cap. 27, and lib. 2, cap. 21).
[21] Otho Frisingensis, quoted by Allix, p. 171.
[22] Allix, pp. 171, 174. See also summary of St. Bernard's letters in Dupin, cent. 12, chap. 4.
[23] Gibbon, Hist., vol. 12, p. 266.
[24] M'Crie, Progress and Suppression of the Reformation in Italy, p. 41; 2nd edit., 1833.
[25] Allix, p. 172. We find St. Bernard writing letters to the Bishop of Constance and the Papal legate, urging the persecution of Arnold. (See Dupin, Life of St. Bernard, cent. 12, chap. 4.) Mosheim has touched the history of Arnold of Breseia, but not with discriminating judgment, nor sympathetic spirit. This remark applies to his accounts of all these early confessors.
VOLUME FIRST- BOOK FIRST- CHAPTER 12
[1] P. Bayle, Dictionary, Historical and Critical, vol. 1, arts. Abelard, Berenger, Amboise; 2nd edit., Lond., 1734. See also Dupin, Eccl. Hist., cent. 12, chap. 4, Life of Bernard. As also Mosheim, Eccl. Hist., cent. 12, chap. 2, secs. 18, 22; chap. 3, secs. 6 12. 995
[2] The moral weakness that is the frequent accompaniment of philosophic scepticism has very often been remarked. The case of Abelard was no exception. What a melancholy interest invests his story, as related by Bayle!
[3] Lord Macaulay, in his essay on the Church of Rome, has characterized the Waldensian and Albigensian movements as the revolt of the human intellect against Catholicism. We would apply that epithet rather to the great scholastic and pantheistic movement which Abelard inaugurated; that was the revolt of the intellect strictly viewed. The other was the revolt of the conscience quickened by the Spirit of God. It was the revival of the Divine principle.