Christian Heresy
Parousia of Christ? End of the World? 1000 AD The Millennium
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 29 July 2003
The Year 1000
William of Volpiano commissioned Rodulphus Glaber to write a history of the “events and prodigies” that occurred around the year 1000. Richard Landes uses the work of Glaber to describe the eleventh century, and does it fully on a website devoted to millennial matters. For Glaber, the millennium was time for the final battle, the beginning of the apocalypse.
All this accords with the prophecy of Saint John [Revelation], who said that Satan would be released once the thousand years had been completed.
Millennial movements emphasize not so much doctrine as social issues—justice, oppression and inequality. Apocalyptic belief subverted the established power. The fear of that power was the same fear in reverse—the clergy too thought the End was near, and the final battle with Satanic forces was beginning. The poor were promised, in Revelation, the millennium when all would change for them.
Jesus began it all, for Christians, and was crucified. Speaking of the End of the World, Jesus proclaimed to his disciples:
Verily I say unto you, this generation shall not pass, till all these things be fulfilled.Matthew 24:34
That was 2000 years ago, and many generations have passed. Nothing yet seems to have been fulfilled. The original Jerusalem Christians who were led by James the Just, and were Jews, expected that the generation to be up when the Jewish war was fought, but Satan—Rome—won that one. The Catholic Church then postponed the Parousia for a thousand years, but after another 400 years, to be on the safe side, it propounded a new excuse, in the fifth century—the kingdom of God was social and psychological, rather than an event ending reality. The kingdom had indeed come! S Augustine of Hippo told the established Church that it was the kingdom of God (The City of God), And so it seemed from the luxury of the high prelates of the Church, but the poor, who preferred the original simple Christianity, continued to wait patiently for the millennium.
From about 550, “Little Dennis”, Dionysus Exiguus, had worked out the system of dating as years from the supposed date of birth of Christ, denoted by AD. It was adopted in the West so any one willing to listen to a priest or prophet could know when the millennium was expected. If it was a millennium after the birth of Jesus, the correct date was about 1000. If the death of Jesus marked the beginning of the millennium then its end would be around 1030. Glaber relates these tales as part of the “wondrous events that occurred around the millennial year since the Incarnation”. The three decades from 1000 to 1030 must have been the significant ones. Glaber was writing in the 1020s, and he shows direct interest in the millennium at the time.
The clergy held to the Augustinian view that no one could know when the end was, even if it were near. Various earlier dates of a millennium had come and gone, and they hoped to remain blasé about the coming one. Augustine advised against executing the Circumcelliones as heretics because it made them into Christian martyrs. So, they were supposed to keep tolerant, but they suddenly did not. Church authority began using massive force against heresy. Execution was largely a millennial innovation in Christendom. To start executing people for heresy in the West must have signified witless fear.
Catharism rivalled Catholic Christianity, and would have ousted the more corrupt religion had it not been hacked down, brutally and savagely. During the eleventh century, people of this religion began to appear everywhere—most visibly on the stake and gibbet. Theirs was a pacific religion, as it had been taught to them! The Catholic Church, however, remembered it got where it was by being a battle totem for Constantine, and began using its historical holy weapons of persuasion—persecution, torture and murder.
In 1010, the news of the Moslem messiah, al-Hakim’s destruction of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem arrived, proof that the End was nigh. There is a close parallel between violence against heretics and the singular violence against Jews at just this time. Jews were being asked whether they were with the saved or the damned. To be with the saved, they were obliged to convert to Christianity, otherwise they were aligning themselves with Satan. Glaber, a contemporary chronicler, says that Christendom rose to destroy the Jews. Soon, heretics were in the same boat. In 1012, several “Manichæans” were prosecuted in Germany. In 1017, thirteen canons and priests of the diocese of Orleans were convicted of Manichæism and burned alive. In 1022, cases were recorded at Liège, in 1030, in Italy and Germany, in 1043, near Châlons in France, in 1052, again in Germany. Most documents on heresy are written after 1022, describing the continuing phenomenon once it had started.
Bishop Wazo tells Roger of Châlons, in Anselm's Gesta episcoporum leodiensium, the authorities should not be doing God’s job for him in sorting “the tares from the wheat”, and especially burning them, and Wazo called on S Augustine as evidence of it. The tares naturally were the heretics. Heribert wrote to all the churches of the world about the heretics of Perigord, while John of Ripoll wrote to his bishop telling him to beware the presence of heretics of the same “type” as those burned at Orleans, and to search for them everywhere in his bishopric.
From the execution of heretics, in 1022 by the king, killing heretics must have been widespread in France, though they must mainly have been commoners at such an early date when the nobility would not have been easily intimidated, or failed to protect themselves. Indeed, the nobility and the higher clergy must have been in league to suppress popular religion. There was nothing unusual about this. The Frankish aristocracy, with clerical backing, had slaughtered common people of Orleanais in 859 for arming themselves against the Vikings. Paradoxically, similar violence had been later directed against Norman peasants towards the end of the millennium. Anselm added in a comment on the French, which Landes cites for us:
For he had heard that they identified heretics by pallor alone, as if it were certain fact that those who have a pale complexion are heretics. Thus, through error coupled with cruelty, many truly Catholic people had been killed in the past.
Both Glaber and Ademar confirm it. Ademar writes:
And from the secular judges of Christian dignity not a few [accused heretics] when submitted to torture, preferred to choose execution to the salvation of conversion.
Glaber (from Landes) describes the the millennial case of Leutard of Châlons-sur-Marne:
It occurred around the end of the millennial year that a common man in Gaul in the village of Vertus in the county of Châlons appeared. As events proved in the end, it is probable that he was an envoy of Satan. This is how his most vicious insanity began. One day when he was working alone in the field, he fell asleep and dreamt that a great swarm of bees entered his secret parts. They came out of his mouth and stung him all over many times, but eventually spoke, ordering him to do things impossible for humans. Exhausted, he arose, went home and dismissed his wife in divorce as if following the evangelical precept. He went out as if to pray but, entering into a church and ripping down a crucifix, he broke it. Whoever saw him was struck with fear, believing him to be what he was, insane. But he managed to persuade them, as rustics have inconstant minds, that he did all this from a wondrous revelation from God.
He poured forth a great many useless and empty sermons and, desiring to be a teacher, he led people away from the master of doctrine. For he claimed that tithes were unnecessary and senseless. And just as the other heresies, the more craftily to deceive, he claimed that the scriptures were divine although he opposed them, and similarly he claimed that though the prophets said many good things, they were also mistaken in some matters. His fame, as if that of one of a religious person of sound mind, rapidly won him a not inconsiderable following among the commoners.
When the aged bishop of the diocese, Gebuin, heard of this, he ordered Leutard brought before him. When Gebuin questioned him about all that he was reported to have said or done, Leutard began to hide the poison of his vileness, wishing that he had not learnt to take texts from Holy Scripture for his purposes. But the able bishop saw that his teachings were not only incorrect but filled with great and damnable error, and so he revealed to all how Leutard’s madness had led to heresy. In this way he rescued many of those who had been deceived, and restored them more firmly than ever to the Catholic faith. As for Leutard, when he saw that he was defeated and deprived of the support of the commoners, he committed suicide by throwing himself in a well.
Leutard was a charismatic messianic figure, who arose around the end of the millennial year, and Glaber thought it relevant to note this. The end of 1000 was the moment where people, as Augustine had warned, would lose faith, disappointed by the failure of ecclesiastical promises for that year. The significance of Leutard and the apostolic tradition of the High Middle Ages is that the faith lost in post apocalyptic times was not faith in Christianity, but in ecclesiastical Christianity. It was the failure of the millennium to bring believing peasant Christians any nearer to the Parousia and the kingdom of heaven on earth that led to the realization that the clergy of the established church were phonies.
Glaber seemed to have modelled Leutard on Gregory’s “false Christ”, driven to his religious madness by flies, but bees drove Leutard mad. Flies are unquestionably from the devil, being part of the Zoroastrian evil creation—bees are symbols of good, and compunction, which drives the soul to repent, feels like bee-stings in Gregory the Great’s teachings. Moreover, bees had some religious significance in early Christianity, if Joseph and Aseneth means anything. Conceivably the flies of the earlier prophet were really bees but Gregory could not bring himself to say so.
The ending is not convincing. Heretical leaders did not normally end so resignedly. Apocalyptic prophets manage to retain the loyalty of their followers. Both Ademar and Wazo of Liège said that once won to heresy, people were lost forever to the church. Heresy certainly continued in the diocese of Châlons for centuries more. Wazo’s letter of the mid-1040s, answered an inquiry from the Bishop of Châlons about how to handle the continuing problem. Glaber’s ending looks like a Church calumny, the sort of thing the historian has to be alert for.
Leutard is perhaps a cautionary fiction. Landes thinks he stands for a much broader range of millennial protest against the church, a range which is rich compared with the previous 500 years, but one that corroborates many points Glaber makes. Vilgard, the worshipper of the classics mentioned below is similar. Through these two men, Landes thinks Glaber shows the two extreme reactions to the advent of the apocalyptic year 1000—popular surges of millennialism and elite retreats from Christianity.
Though the messages of the messianic leaders of this time differ, they are more alike than they are different. The consistency of the message suggests they was a reservoir of consistent beliefs, that were anti-ecclesiastical and upon which the messianic leaders drew in a series of revolts. Some of them were reported to have done bizarre things without upsetting their followers, but the critical reader has to consider that the reports come from clerics and they had a motive for making the revolutionaries seem ludicrous. If, these reports are factual or close to the truth, they serve to indicate the depth of conviction that the followers had for their leaders. Some, mainly clergy converted to heresiarch, were just opportunists and rogues out for what they could get. Leutard seemed not to be in this category, and did not even claim to be a Christ, unless the report suppresses it.
Apostolic Hopes
The simple Christianity of the first two centuries after the crucifixion had been bypassed by the Christianity that was adopted by Constantine and the emperors. But it did not go away. The illiterate masses stuck with it, especially in places that were relatively outlying direct Roman influence—Spain, Gaul and Germany in the West and Armenia and Syria in the East, and among travelling craftsmen and tinkers. It became Paulicianism and Bogomilism in the East and Catharism in the West. The Roman Church was not concerned too much with the heretical practices of the ignorant, so long as they paid their tithes, and the wealthy and noble patronised their grand churches and basilicas.
Glaber’s accounts of the “heresies of the year 1000” can be read as a “perverse doctrine” of popular Christianity breaking with the Church in favour of an egalitarian apostolic life.
Many, throughout Italy at this time were found to be tainted with this perverse doctrine, and they too perished, by the sword or by fire. At this very same time more emerged from Sardinia, an island that generally abounds in heresy. They managed to corrupt some of the people of Spain, but they too were exterminated by the orthodox.
Sardinia would have been just one of the places where primitive Christianity might have survived unmolested and untainted by the established Church. The primitive form of Christianity would have had closer links with classical Paganism, and especially solar religion. Glaber implies that already the established Church was murderously lashing out, even in the early eleventh century.
The heresy alluded to—the worship of the classics, Landes assures us—seems to date to the episcopacy of Peter VI (927-71) which was over a half a century past, and hardly seems worthy of extermination by fire and sword. Landes notes with amazement, Augustine had explicitly banned the interpretation of current events in terms of apocalyptic prophecy of any kind, and especially those drawn from Revelation, yet Glaber not only openly invoked the most dangerous book of the Bible, but went straight to the most dangerous passage in the book, the textual source of all millennial beliefs, the passage Augustine had worked so hard to cage up.
The millennium year should have been the end of apocalyptic hopes. Millennial movements should proliferate before the millennium, in expectation of it. The protests and movements came after 1000. The clergy had promised something at the millennium, and people were happy to wait for it more or less resignedly. Their horror was that nothing happened. Everything would continue as before. They were not going to be saved. Christ could no longer be expected at all, let alone “soon”. In 1011, an Anglo-Saxon monk used the uneventful passing of the year 1000 in an anti-apocalyptic argument.
But believers in the coming End, have no trouble in excusing its failure to arrive. Christianity is based on the excusing of the non-event that Jesus expected—the splitting apart of the Mount of Olives, followed by the arrival of Michael and the hosts of heaven. No matter what happens, as long as events continue to be sufficiently uncertain and horrific, believers sustain their belief. They simply revise their hopes or their chronology, just as the Essenes did. Glaber says in Book IV, written in the later 1030s, that the believers had redated the millennium to 1033, just as the earliest Christians did after Jesus was caught and hanged. Jesus had expected the apocalypse while he prayed in the Garden of Gethsemane, but his followers re-calculated that the death and resurrection of Jesus had signified the beginning of forty years of cosmic conflict before his return at the revised apocalypse. The End was delayed by a Jewish generation of 40 years, after which Jesus would return personally in the place of the anchangel Michael. No Parousia occurred forty years on, and so the bishops again revised their dates, claiming, like Zoroastrianism, there would be a millennium before the return.
The bishops were again ready to revise their date, but not a lot of the poor. They turned to the alternative, those who said the Church was wrong and corrupt—the heretics. After the eleventh century, dissent was more apostolic than apocalyptic. The first apostolic community was exactly the response to disappointed apocalyptic expectations—the Crucifixion. The resulting Christian community was at once post-apocalyptic in the sense of being after the first Coming, and pre-apocalyptic in that it awaited the second Coming (Acts 1:7)).
The failure of the prophesy of the millennial Parousia led to mass skepticism with the established Church. The poor increasingly favoured the primitive Christianity of provincial craftsmen, and often preached by prophetae, an early order of the Church that the establishment had banned. The peasant prophet was the clerics’ worst nightmare, and just what the millennium had been meant to avoid. The failure of the millennium to bring about the return of Christ as promised caused the revival of the primitive Christianity of the smiths, carpenters, weavers and dyers—people who considered themselves like the Jesus the carpenter of the gospels.
It took a thousand years for some Christians to realise that their own bishops and cardinals were as vicious and as avaricious for temporal power as the Roman emperors, indeed, more so—they willingly sacrificed their own disciples. It was the failure of the second coming that jolted them awake. Then it was that they noticed the difference between the Church of the establishment and the simple spirituality of a neglected Church at the base of society claiming the true inheritance of the apostles. The established Church called them heretics as soon as they began to be significant, but it was the established Church that had changed moct from the original Christianity of the Gentile Romans. The Catholic Church was the heretical one, in fact. If change was satanic, then Satan had infected the Catholic bishops, not the primitive Christianity that emerged as Catharism.
The primitive Christianity, which had been tolerated at the grass roots of European society, only emerged as a trouble around the end of the first millennium. No notion is more subversive than apocalypse. People think that the final transformation is about to happen, and lose all fear of earthly consequences. People who hate their current situation hope that they would be beneficially transfigured, and that evil people, who have abused their power to seize unjustly what is not rightfully theirs, would be punished. When the millennium has been a promise of the established Church for the whole of its thousand year duration, what would happen when the promise failed to be fulfilled?
When the millennium came and nothing changed, poor people had a clear reason to be disillusioned. The new demand for apostolic Christianity meant equality, poverty and evangelizing. The sources tell of apostolic heresies across western Europe. These could have been independent movements simply based on what Acts related about apostolic life, but bibles were written in Latin that only the educated could understand, bibles were not freely available to be read, few peasants could read anyway, and most important, the movements had many common beliefs that were not apostolic anyway—they were Gnostic!
The poor in the country and the growing towns saw the millennium pass with no End of the World or appearance of Christ, and many realised for the first time since the Jewish war that they had been fooled. Their answer, it seems, was to turn to the more sincere religion of the heretics that had been tolerated at the grass roots as powerless and inconsequential. A Jewish writer, like Cohn, apparently fearful of laying the enormity of the Church on too thick, joins the ranks of apologists by claiming that the Church taught a humane way of life, tending the poor and the sick. If there were any Churchmen intent on this, they were a despised minority. Cohn cites the monks and friars, but he knows fully that the mendicant orders were a response to the popularity of the heresy and its apostolic poverty. The voluntary poverty of these monks was meant to match the voluntary poverty of the Parfaits and the Cathar and Waldensian missionaries who wandered around in pairs emulating the life of Christ and his apostles.
Cohn speaks of the capacity of the Church to face up to its own shortcomings, but that is what it did not do. It hid behind the initial enthusiasm of the monks and friars while not changing itself in any important way. Indeed, within a generation or so, the monasteries had been given such a wealth of property that they had already started to degenerate into the same state as the rest of the clergy. As for the peripatetic friars, copying the Waldensian missionaries, they quickly degenerated into travelling mountebanks and lechers. The Church was not wholly black, Cohn hopefully pleads. Indeed not, but there were too few exceptions to test the general rule. Doubtless, there were always sincere people with a genuine calling among the ranks of the corrupt medieval clergy, and some tried to introduce reform, but there was no living model for it within the Church itself.
Where did this ideal of primitive Christianity come from? The living model was that of the heretical Perfecti who practised the simple lives of the Essenes whence Christianity emerged. Like the Essenian monks, the Cathar Perfects aimed to be living Christs. Sincere Churchmen could read their Latin bibles, something the ordinary people could not do, and were not permitted to do—the Church copied the bible only in Latin that only literate clerics could read—and could see that the heretics really behaved like the man in the gospels the established Christians considered as God. A peasant preacher had to get hold of a bible in the vernacular, and also had to have been taught to read it.
None of this was legally possible within the Church. It follows that the strand of primitive Christianity must have been kept alive despite the established Church. The motivation for clerical reform was heresy. Those persuaded of the need for reform by seeing the Perfects, were brought via the New Testament to realise the real hypocrisy of the Church. The Church did not face up to its own shortcomings, but had no choice but to respond to the abandonment by the masses of the corruption of material Christianity for the spiritual apostolic Christianity of the heretics.
The poor, who listened to sermons about them being blessed, and so on, were no longer fooled when the millennium came and went without the promised return of Christ to save them. When the chroniclers themselves at the time linked the eleventh century revival with apocalypse and the coming of the millennium, then it is churlish and unscholarly to dismiss such events as illusions. Yet historians have often tried desperately to dismiss such movements in this facile manner. They fear that the Christian religion will be shown never to have been monolithic, even after its establishment.
The passing of the millennium with no Parousia was, for the poor, the Great Revelation. Thereafter, Catholic Christianity was up against the constant accusation of fraud, and its reaction was that of the trapped animal—to turn on its enemies and rivals and murder them all in the cruellest possible way, to deter the others. Even so, they could not kill off the example the Primitives had set and the basic theology they had taught—living humbly and simply, with the conviction that ordinary people could aspire to God with no need of magical sacraments, but through their own efforts to do what is Godly. It took a half-millennium more of strife before part of this was achieved.
The beginning of the revival increased the zealotry of both Cathars and Catholics alike. The Cathar religion had been defensive and waning as the established Church spread to all social levels, but Catholicism still had not become monolithic by the time of the millennium. That is when Catharism experienced a turn of fortunes. As Cohn puts it:
By the end of the eleventh century newly awakened religious energies were beginning to escape from ecclesiastical control and to turn against the Church. It was now widely felt that the test of the true priest lay not in the fact of ordination but in his fidelity to the apostolic way of life.
On the face of it, in the Apostolic Movement, the Church was against a lot of ecclesiastical volunteers stirring up religious enthusiasm. It ought not to have been, but the lay preachers were not teaching what the Church wanted taught. They were teaching Catharism. When the Church finally responded, an arms race of zealotry began, then a hot war, but the Church always had the big battalions, and when they were turned loose on the Cathars, there was only going to be one outcome. It is proof of the power of the simpler Christianity, that it was never utterly wiped out.
More Lay Preachers
One of the lay preachers, Henri of Lausanne, arrived at Le Man in 1116 and was granted permission from the local bishop to preach some Lenten Sermons. The Bishop then made the mistake of going elsewhere on his ecclesiastical duties and the preacher began to denounce the clergy as having no sexual morals and as acting as stooges of the landowners. Since the townsmen or burghers were trying to get more independence from the nobility, the preacher suited them and soon the clerics were being assaulted by the people. The Church, sexually amoral and corrupt as it was, accused its enemies of the same crimes. It was the standard accusation of the Church historians for whom truth was whatever the cardinals said. Most of the heretics were far more chaste than the typical clergyman.
This man, like most of the heretical sects, taught what was remembered about Essenism—the beliefs of the apostles. That meant sexual austerity and poverty. Rich women were persuaded to burn their fine frocks on bonfires, and prostitutes were urged to reform and join the evangelical movement. Henri went on to preach in Provence and Italy, rejecting the authority of the Church, denying that Catholic priests could consecrate the host, giving absolution himself to many people, teaching that baptism was merely symbolic not salvific in itself, Church buildings and crosses were valueless, regalia and paraphernalia were useless, and that an Almighty God would hear anyone’s prayers wherever they were.
The true Church was no more than the body of people who followed the apostolic life in simplicity and poverty, and those who truly loved their neighbours. Henri thought God had commisioned him directly to preach all this. It is essentially Catharism. The Church responded by commissioning its own travelling preachers, and setting up orders of monks vowed to apostolic poverty, saving the rich prelates, the bishops and cardinals, from having to forego their grand lifestyles. It was good enough to fool the simple folk at the outset, and then the monkish orders provided the fanatics—the Franciscans and the Dominicans—who would willingly hound the Catharists into premature cremation. Cohn concludes:
Without the various attempts to realize the ideal of primitive Christianity within the framework of the institutionalized Church, the movement of dissent would certainly have been far longer than it was.
He probably means it might have been successful and ousted Catholicism, because the movement of dissent never thereafter ceased.
Etudes de l’Etoile, a Breton noble, preached as a Christ to the landless and starving peasants of the twelfth century during a famine that had gone on for years. He formed the peasants into bands, and set them to looting Churches and monasteries. While the starving peasants wandered the countryside shoeless except for rags tied round their feet, and dressed only in rags in northern European winters, the monks were described, according to W Woods, as sitting at dinner with their double chins “as big as goose’s eggs”. Eventually, the heretic was arrested and died in prison in Rouen. His followers were made to repudiate him, and those who refused were burnt.
A better known preacher was Tanchelm who from 1112 preached around Zeeland, Holland. He is described as being “like an angel of light”. But he attacked the clergy and the Church, declared that unworthy people were not fit to administer the sacraments, which were rendered worthless. His hearers stopped attending mass all together, though they will have been unlikely to have attended often anyway. Most serious was that he encouraged people to withhold their tithes.
Tanchelm was a contemporary of Henri of Lausanne, teaching similar principles and in the same circumstances of the struggle of the burghers for freedom from the lords. Feudal laws intended to regulate the pseudo-slavery of peasants, tied and owing service to the land, were holding back the enterprise of of the urban merchants and craftsmen. They wanted to be free of feudal ties, and run the towns themselves. When a lord would not hear of it, the burghers arranged demonstrations and even insurrections. The lords who were most stubborn were those whose main interest was already in the cities—the bishops.
Moreover, the Church was utterly conservative. The world was the way it was through God’s will, and no merchants had any business to try to alter it. They were to remain in the place God had ordained for them. Not surprisingly, the burghers joined the outcry against the corruptness of the Church and its priests, and readily sided with the heretics who promoted honesty and thought little of the established Church.
Tanchelm seemed to take his inspiration from the Cathar Christs, and expected to be treated as one. The records, always supplied by the monks, paint people like Tanchelm as megalomaniacs. Doubtless some were, but the sincere Cathar belief that their Perfects were living Christs was easily depicted in this way. Yet, these megalomaniacs went willingly to their deaths for their beliefs. Tanchelm, it is said claimed betrothal to the Virgin Mary, and asked his followers for wedding gifts. People brought in money and jewels, the chroniclers record in horror. They present the motive as greed and self-aggrandisement but again the preachers, except for the few who were opportunists, distributed the money to the poor. They told the rich that their money was mere vanity and was ungodly unless it was used for the poor.
Tanchelm had a wide influence and struck fear into the complacent Church prelates. They accused him of having an armed bodyguard who acted as assassins, but despite it, a priest managed to kill him about 1115. A letter to the Bishop of Cologne says the preacher and his followers organised themselves as twelve apostles and a virgin—a coven.
In France, at Embrun, Peter de Bruys founded a sect known as the Petrobrusians, who denied infant baptism, the need of consecrated churches, transubstantiation and masses for the dead. These were men of high character and holy lives, who, in spite of persecution, went from place to place making converts of those dissatisfied at the lack of clerical discipline and spirituality.
Norman Cohn says that the evangelists who claimed to be divine “appealed particularly to the lower strata of society”. That might be so, but Cohn also says that “even when they were clearly heretical, like the Cathars in Languedoc, they often enjoyed the support of great nobles and prosperous burghers”. The bulk of support of any charismatic preacher would be the lower classes—there were a lot of them.
Revivalism, Unorthdoxy and Heresy
By the middle of the twelfth century, Europe was seething and bubbling with heresy. Brother Yois describes a poor woman he met on the street, no doubt considered deranged by the Christians of the time, but a woman who proved that she had a better understanding of Christianity than the clerics and their flocks. She held a dish of live glowing charcoal in one hand and a flagon of water in the other. Asked what it meant, she replied that, with the coals, she intended to burn up paradise, and, with the water, she intended to quench hell fire. By these means she would let men live their lives for the pure love of God, and not in the hope of an eternal reward or to avoid an eternal punishment.
The Cathars, with their Paulician religion, loathed Christendom’s consecrated immorality of its priests, monks and nuns, and kept advocating morality to disturb the pleasures of the Catholic priesthood. The anti-sacerdotal heresy was directed against the abuses in doctrine and practice which priestcraft had invented. 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) protested against simony and clerical abuses, and Pope Gregory VII used their Puritanism on the side of the papacy, making them his allies in imposing clerical celibacy.
In an age when torture was a common spectacle, Denis the Carthusian described the horrors of hell:
Imagine a white hot oven and in this oven a naked man, never to be released from such torment. Does not the mere sight of it seem insupportable? Hoe miserable this man would seem to us! Think how he would sprawl in the oven, how he would yell and scream, how he could live, and in what would be his agony and his sorrow when he understood that this unbearable punishment was never to end.
Of course, the only people who experienced anything like this evil torture were those burnt or cooked by the Christians.
Why did so many of the Catholic saints have to fight with the Devil for their souls on their deathbed? The reason is that the Church taught that the last moment before death was the important one. At that moment, you repented and were saved. A lifetime of dissolution was wiped clean in that moment from the perpetual agony of eternal torment.
The Cathars did not think so. For them, you were judged on the balance of your life, and if found wanting would have to be reincarnated for the soul to to learn more lessons in this world which was hell itself. The consolamentum did indeed wipe the slate clean for those who were ready for it, but required a pure life to be lived thereafter until death.
Criminals were seen on the gallows taking the holy wafer, showing they had confessed and been granted absolution. The next minute they were swinging and twitching in their death throws, while the crowds were now praying to the erstwhile villain as a saint to intercede in heaven on their behalf. Like Constantine, those absolved immediately before death had no time to sin and so went immediately to heaven. They were perfectly holy, like the saints. The reaction of the Church to this curiosity was that it refused to give absolution to criminals on the gallows, effectively condemning them to hell, in the Christian beliefs of that time. So, God’s men did not even pretend to be trying to save these sinners!
Sincere Cathars would wonder whether they had done enough good in life to merit the consolamentum, but smug Catholic priests—clerical timeservers—were certain that they were to be among the saved, rather like modern clappies. They might have been dissolute and had mistresses by the dozen, but they regularly confessed to each other, did a suitable penance, and handed each other absolution, so they were sure they were saved.
A revulsion against orthodox Christianity and its corrupt priests and monks spread over Europe like a salvation army. Revivalism is not a new phenomenon. In 1233, northern Italy for a month or so, did nothing but pray, praise and parade in pious processions. At the centre of this revival, called “The Great Halleluiah”, was John of Vincenza. John and his friars even wrote the statutes of important cities like Parma, objecting to its great cathedral being used as a huge barn for the storage of wheat. Eventually the success of these clerics went to their heads. John demanded to be made Duke and Count of Vincenza. He used his power so irresponsibly that he was then thrown into jail. His “Great Halleluiah” faded as quickly as it arose, and he was discredited thoroughly.
The Franciscan, Salimbene, was inspired to join his order by this revival. Salimbene saw nothing underhand, to judge by his frank descriptions of them, in the bogus miracles brother Gerard of Modena and John of Vincenza devised between them, and which led to the conversions of thousands of these guillible people. Nothing changes, except that believers perhaps get more gullible. Nowadays they do not even have to see the bogus miracles—being told about them is sufficient.
Berthold of Ratisbon (1220-1272), a much admired medieval preacher, once performed a miracle, the result of which should be a warning to modern day Christian smuggies. Brother Berthold sounded in his preaching like the Calvinists of later times, and a poor woman was so overcome by his invective against the sins that beset her that she died in the middle of his sermon. Berthold saw she was dead and prayed for her to be returned to life so that she could make her confession and receive absolution. A miracle! She revived, and told the fascinated and horrified assembly that 50,000 souls had departed this world at the moment that she had. All except three were despatched straight to hell. Two were held in purgatory and only one went to heaven. Modern Christians are certain that they will go to heaven simply by saying, “I believe, I believe!” but why they should imagine it to be so, when so much in their own tradition says otherwise is hard to understand.
The Cathars regarded the Church as a corrupt institution, scorned its sacraments, ritual and hierarchy, despised its dissolute monks and nuns, and tried to get back to the pure teaching of Christ—voluntary poverty, strict chastity for the consoled, brotherly love, proselytizing and ascetic living. The Church had, at that time given up all proselytizing. There was no need. Everyone had to be a Catholic and preaching took up too much leisure time for the priesthood. They left it to the new orders of monks. Yet, the Church was not so concerned that it could not send its monks to participate in public debates at Albi and Narbonne in 1165 with the Cathars. Perhaps they drew the intensity of the heresy to the attention of the top of the Catholic hierarchy. After these debates the Cathars were accused of heresy and repeatedly condemned by the Catholic Church.
In the early part of the twelfth century some “Poor Men of Christ” were burned in Germany. Persecution justified their anti-Catholic sentiments, which passed on to Wycliffe and Huss, and through these leaders produced the Reformation in Germany and England. Cities, the centres of civilization, were where these heresies spread. The growing sentiment of municipal independence, and the rise of a burgher class through commerce created a dissatisfaction with the worldly lives and interference of the clergy.
In the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Church classed all bodies of heretics together, so either they were all essentially the same anyway, or they had all coalesced around a dominant theology.
Further Reading
- More on Cathar beliefs
- More on the persecution of heretics
- More on documents pertaining to heresy
- More on the Inquisition
