Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/347

WALDENSES 323 overgrown and worldly church. Its popular aim and its rationalistic method made men overlook its real contents, which were not put clearly before them. It may be said generally that Catharism formed the abiding background of mediaeval heresy. Its dualistic system and its anti social principles were known only to a few, but its anti- ecclesiastical organization formed a permanent nucleus round which gathered a great deal of political and ecclesi astical discontent. When this discontent took any in dependent form of expression, zeal, which was not always accompanied by discretion, brought the movement into collision with the ecclesiastical authorities, by whom it was condemned as heretical. When once it was in conflict with authority it was driven to strengthen its basis by a more pronounced hostility against the system of the church, and generally ended by borrowing something from Catharism. The result was that in the beginning of the 13th century there was a tendency to class all bodies of heretics together : partly their opinions had coalesced ; partly they were assumed to be identical. Most of these sects were stamped out before the period of the Middle Ages came to a close. The Waldenses, under their more modern name of the Vaudois, have sur vived to the present day in the valleys of Piedmont, and have been regarded as at once the most ancient and the most evangelical of the mediaeval sects. It is, however, by no means easy to determine their original tenets, as in the 13th and 14th centuries they were a body of obscure and unlettered peasants, hiding themselves in a corner, while in the 16th century they were absorbed into the general movement of the Eeformation. As regards their antiquity, the attempts to claim for them an earlier origin than the end of the 12th century can no longer be sus tained. They rested upon the supposed antiquity of a body of Waldensian literature, which modern criticism has shown to have been tampered with. The most important of these documents, a poem in Provengal, " La Nobla Leyczon," contains two lines which claimed for it the date of 1100: Ben ha mil c cent anez compli entierament Que fo scripta 1 ora, car sen al derier temp. But it was pointed out 1 that in the oldest MS. existing in the Cambridge university library the figure 4 had been imperfectly erased before the word "cent," a discovery which harmonized with the results of a criticism of the contents of the poem itself. This discovery did away with the ingenious attempts to account for the name of Waldenses from some other source than from the historical founder of the sect, Peter Waldo or Valdez. To get rid of Waldo, whose date was known, the name Waldenses or Vallenses was derived from Vallis, because they dwelt in the valleys, or from a supposed Provencal word Vaudes, which meant a sorcerer. Putting these views aside as unsubstantial, we will con sider the relation of the Waldenses as they appear in actual history with the sects which preceded them. Already in the 9th century there were several protests against the rigidity and want of spirituality of a purely sacerdotal church. Thus Berengar of Tours (999-1088) upheld the symbolic character of the Eucharist and the superiority of the Bible over tradition. The Paterines in Milan (1045) raised a protest against simony and other abuses of the clergy, and Pope Gregory VII. did not hesitate to enlist their Puritanism on the side of the papacy and make them his allies in imposing clerical celibacy. In 1110 an apos tate monk in Zceland, Tanchelm, carried their views still further, and asserted that the sacraments were only valid through the merits and sanctity of the ministers. In 1 Bradshaw, in Transactions of Cambridge Antiquarian Society, 1842. The text edited by Montet, 4to, 1887. France, at Embrun, Peter de Bruys founded a sect known as Petrobrusians, who denied infant baptism, the need of consecrated churches, transubstantiation, and masses for the dead. A follower of his, a monk, Henry, gave the name to another body known as Henricians, who centred in Tours. The teachers of these new opinions were men of high character and holy lives, who in spite of persecution wandered from place to place, and made many converts from those who were dissatisfied at the want of clerical discipline which followed upon the struggle for temporal supremacy into which the reforming projects of Gregory VII. had carried the church. It was at this time (1170) that a rich merchant of Lyons, Peter Waldo, sold his goods and gave them to the poor ; then he went forth as a preacher of voluntary poverty. His followers, the Waldenses, or poor men of Lyons, were moved by a religious feeling which could find no satisfaction within the actual system of the church, as they saw it before them. Like St Francis, Waldo adopted a life of poverty that he might be free to preach, but with this difference that the Waldenses preached the doctrine of Christ while the Franciscans preached the person of Christ, Waldo reformed teaching while Francis kindled love ; hence the one awakened antagonisms which the other escaped. For Waldo had a translation of the New Testament made into Provencal, and his preachers not only stirred up men to more holy lives but explained the Scriptures at their will. Such an interference with the ecclesiastical authorities led to difficulties. Pope Alexander III., who had approved of the poverty of the Waldensians, prohibited them from preaching without the permission of the bishops (1179). Waldo answered that he must obey God rather than man. The result of this disobedience was excommunication by Lucius III. in 1184. Thus a reforming movement became heresy through disobedience to authority, and after being condemned embarked on a course of polemical investigation how to justify its own position. Some were readmitted into the Catholic Church, and one, Durandus de Osca (1210), attempted to found an order of Pauperes Catholici, which was the forerunner of the order of St Dominic. Many were swept away in the crusade against the ALBIGENSES (q.v.). Others made an appeal to Innocent III., protesting their orthodoxy. Their appeal was not successful, for they were formally condemned by the Lateran council of 1215. The earliest definite account given of the Waldensian opinion is that of the inquisitor Sacconi about 1250. 2 He divides them into two classes, those north of the Alps and those of Lombardy. The first class hold (1) that oaths are forbidden by the gospel, (2) that capital punish ment is not allowed to the civil power, (3) that any lay man may consecrate the sacrament of the altar, and (4) that the Roman Church is not the church of Christ. The Lombard sect went farther in (3) and (4), holding that no one in mortal sin could consecrate the sacrament, and that the Roman Church was the scarlet woman of the Apocalypse, whose precepts ought not to be obeyed, especially those appointing fast-days. This account sufficiently shows the difference of the Waldenses from the Cathari : they were opposed to asceticism, and had no official priesthood ; at the same time their objection to oaths apd to capital punishment are closely related to the principles of the Cathari. Their other opinions were forced upon them by their conflict with the authority of the church. When forbidden to preach without the permission of the bishop, they were driven to assert the right of all to preach, with out distinction of age or sex. This led to the further step of setting up personal merit rather than ecclesiastical ordination as the ground of the priestly office. From this

D Argentru, Collectio Judiciorum de Novis Erroribus, i. 50, &c.