The Millennium
Abstract
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 29 July 2003
Abstract
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.
