The Triumph of Christianity (35 page)

Leo’s efforts were continued by Pope Victor II (served 1055–1057) and by Stephen IX (served 1057–1058), who were followed by the dynamic innovator Nicholas II (1059–1061). Having assembled a synod in Rome, Nicholas initiated a new and very dangerous policy. He ordered rank-and-file Christians to boycott masses and other sacraments if performed by priests who kept concubines or who had purchased their offices. Thus he opened the door for the laity to take an active role in church reform and acknowledged that the moral status of clergy influenced the validity of sacraments, a position that the church had rejected vis-à-vis the Donatists and would soon repudiate again when faced with “heretical” reformers.
²³
Nicholas also reformed the process by which popes were selected. No longer would they be seated by powerful secular families or rulers—ever after popes were elected by the College of Cardinals.

Nicholas was followed by Alexander II (served 1061–1073), another eager reformer who also tried, with little success, to institute a crusade to drive the Muslims from Spain. After him came the famous Gregory VII (served 1073–1085), the first monk to become pope in centuries. Gregory too continued to attempt to end priestly misbehavior. Thus, he thundered that priests “persisting in fornication must not celebrate the mass, but are to be driven from the choir.”
²⁴
Following Gregory, the next three popes also were monks, including Urban II (served 1088–1099) who launched the First Crusade to recapture Jerusalem from Islam. And if Leo had initiated popular preaching, Urban not only preached far and wide on behalf of the crusade, but prompted hundreds, possibly thousands, of others to go out preaching to the public as well. The initial mission was to preach the Crusade, but soon the topic of church reform began to dominate. And all this agitation resulted in unprecedented levels of lay involvement in the affairs of the church. However, it was mainly the nobility and well-to-do urbanites who were aroused by the evangelists, while the “masses” remained little interested in the church even in this era. Even so, encouraging the laity to demand and help to sustain church reforms led to an outburst of protest movements when the Church of Power regained control. In response to these challenges, some reform movements were encapsulated and controlled within the structure of the church. The others were brutally attacked.

Encapsulation

F
OR CENTURIES, THE CHURCH
was able to deflect popular reformers from dangerous confrontations by channeling their energy into the formation of new monastic orders. Consider the careers of three men called by Pope Urban II from lives of ascetic seclusion to preach the First Crusade: Robert of Arbrissel (1045–1116), Vitalis of Mortain (1060–1122), and Bernard of Tiron (1046–1117). Each proved to be an extraordinarily effective evangelist able to draw and arouse large crowds. Each began by preaching the crusade, but once it was launched they continued their evangelism and turned most of their attention to denouncing the sins of the clergy in graphic fashion, never being reluctant to name dissolute local clergy. In response, many bishops attempted to stop their public preaching. One argued to the pope that “revelation of the sins of churchmen to the common people would be ‘not to preach but to undermine.’ ”
²⁵
Had the pope ordered them to stop, each may have been tempted to lead an opposition movement. But, of course, the pope was a former monk and strongly committed to reform. So, instead of becoming dissenters, each of the three ended up directing his energies to the formation of a new monastic organization. A few years later it became more dangerous to preach reform and more difficult to found an order.

It often has been remarked that St. Francis (1181–1226) was very lucky not to have been prosecuted for heresy. He was never ordained. He engaged in public preaching on the virtues of poverty and humility, especially for the clergy. In 1209 Francis led his eleven followers to Rome, seeking papal permission to found a new religious order—it was a close-run thing. There was so much opposition to allowing any new religious orders that six years later, in 1215, the Fourth Lateran Council banned the creation of new orders entirely. Hence, Pope Innocent III (served 1198–1216) was reluctant to meet Francis, but finally was persuaded to do so and granted him the right to recruit more members, promising that if and when he had enough followers he could reapply for official recognition. In 1223 Pope Honorius III (served 1216–1227) approved the final Rule for the Order of Friars Minor (little friars) that came to be known as the
Franciscans
.

In similar fashion, St. Dominic (1170–1221) founded a mendicant order of friars in Toulouse in 1214, and (despite the council ban) it was approved by Pope Honorius III in 1216. They too were soon known by the name of their founder, becoming the
Dominicans
. Like the Franciscans, they also began with a mission of public preaching on behalf of church reform. However, their mission soon shifted to public preaching in support of the pope.

These examples display the remarkable capacity of the church to encapsulate potential dissident movements within its structure. A study of the writings of founders and leading members of various accepted religious orders reveals a remarkable level of theological variety—often involving greater differences than existed between the “mainstream” Catholic theology and that of groups denounced as heretics. The main difference between many sanctioned orders and others eventually denounced as heretical lay not in doctrinal differences but in whether the group was careful to fully acknowledge the authority of the Church of Power, especially in their public preaching. Thus, rather than continuing to press for church reforms, the Dominicans soon specialized in public preaching against all religious groups they judged to be insufficiently submissive.

Persecution

M
EANWHILE, THE REFORMING IMPULSE
was arousing substantial opposition to the Church of Power. A monk named Tanchelm (died 1115) preached reform in the Low Countries (he said that the church had become a brothel) and was murdered by a priest.
²⁶
Several very popular reformers, including Henry the Monk (died 1148) and Arnold of Brescia (1090–1155), both of them ordained members of the clergy, were crushed by the church for persisting in their public preaching of reform. Henry was imprisoned and Arnold was hanged.
²⁷
But it was too late. The reform spirit had become deeply embedded in the general public, and if the church could not be reformed from within, there were large numbers of people ready to turn elsewhere for genuine piety.

Keep in mind that religious monopolies are not the
normal
state of affairs in societies, although they have been the
usual
state. Monopolies are not normal because no one institution can adequately serve the great range of religious tastes that always exist in any society—from those wishing very intense religion to those wanting little or none. Monopolies can only exist by repressing the formation of other religious groups, especially the higher intensity groups known as sects. As Gordon Leff put it so well, heresy in medieval Europe “was the outlet of a society with no outlets. Their absence made tensions into explosions.”
²⁸

It was a tribute to the administrative creativity of the church that it was able to divert and encapsulate so many sectarian initiatives through monasticism. But this solution was no longer sufficient when the papacy was fully recaptured by the Roman aristocracy in the person of Clement III (served 1187–1191). Once again ascending the papal throne became a family affair. Clement’s nephew became Pope Innocent III (served 1198–1216). Innocent’s nephew became, in turn, Pope Gregory IX (served 1227–1241), and Innocent’s grandnephew was elected Pope Alexander IV (served 1254–1261). The return of the papacy to open worldliness so affronted the widespread demands for church reform that an eruption of new sect movements was inevitable. Sadly, so too was their vicious repression.

Cathars

The first great heresy to confront the Roman Church probably did not originate within the reform movement, but was greatly facilitated by the discontent the reformers aroused and reflected. The Cathars may have originated in the Bogomil movement that arose in Bulgaria in the tenth century. Whether or not that was where they began, the Cathars “offered a direct, headlong challenge to the Catholic Church, which [they] dismissed outright as the Church of Satan.”
²⁹
They quickly gained a following in the West because of the widespread discontent with the moral inadequacies of the church.
³⁰

Cathar theology closely resembled that of the early Gnostics. There are two gods, one good, the other evil. Human history proves that because the material world is so tragic, brutal, and wicked, the good god could not have had any involvement in it. Hence, the Cathars taught that the world was created by the evil god (a fallen angel), who is the god of the Old Testament. Christ was an angel sent by the good god with a message of salvation—that one must reject the evils of this world and form a personal relationship with the good god.
³¹

Catharism offered two degrees of membership. The
perfecti
made extreme efforts to reject the world: no sex, no meat, eggs, or dairy products, no swearing of oaths, and an absolute prohibition on killing not only humans but animals. However, regular members “remained in the world, married, had children and ate meat,” and were quite prepared to fight, kill, and die for their faith.
³²
The Cathars had no priests, only bishops, all of whom were required to be
perfecti
.

Our earliest knowledge of the Cathars in the West comes from Cologne in 1143, and by then they already had a local bishop and a significant number of members.
³³
Having been denounced as heretics, the Cathar bishop and his aide were brought before the local archbishop, and they frankly admitted teaching that theirs was the one true church. What the archbishop might have done in response to such a challenge is uncertain because at that point a mob rose from the audience, seized the two Cathars, and burned them. Several similar mob actions took place in England in 1156 and again in Cologne as well as in Metz in 1164.

However, the center of the Cathar movement was not in Germany or England, but in the Languedoc area of southern France, where they often were referred to as the Albigensians because their headquarters was in the city of Albi. Keep in mind that even in southern France the Cathars probably made up only about 1 percent of the population and probably no more than 10 percent in the cities such as Béziers that were most closely associated with them
.
³⁴
However, their influence was far greater than their numbers might suggest, since so many Cathars, including many
perfecti,
were members of the nobility and many others were recruited from the local Catholic clergy.
³⁵
This is consistent with the point established in chapter 5, that religious movements usually are initiated by people of privilege.

Given the strength of the Cathars in southern France, when Pope Innocent III (a member of a Roman ecclesiastical family that produced nine popes) initiated a “crusade” against the Cathars in 1208, the persecuting forces consisted of knights from northern France, a leader of whom complained that “the lords of the Languedoc almost all protected and harboured the heretics, showing them excessive love and defending them against God and church.”
³⁶
In July 1209 the Cathar-controlled city of Béziers fell to the papal forces led by Arnaud, a Cistercian abbot, and all of its inhabitants were butchered, many having first been blinded, dragged behind horses, and used for target practice.
³⁷
Arnaud wrote to Pope Innocent that “Today your Holiness, twenty thousand heretics were put to the sword, regardless of rank, age, or sex.”
³⁸

Even so, the Cathars continued to resist and their persecution continued. More than two hundred
perfecti
were burned in 1244 and another group of
perfecti
were executed in 1321. Eventually groups of Cathars found sanctuary in various mountain areas, where they may have survived into modern times.

Waldensians

Although the Cathars were outside the church by choice and from the beginning, the Waldensians began as an incipient monastic movement committed to church reform.
³⁹
The group was originated by Peter Waldo (or Valdes), a very rich merchant in Lyon, France. In 1176, having commissioned translations of the New Testament into French so he could discover what the Gospels actually taught, Waldo gave away his wealth and began to preach a message of apostolic poverty. He rapidly attracted followers, most of them also possessed of wealth,
⁴⁰
and they began to refer to themselves as the Poor Men of Lyon. In 1179 Waldensian representatives went to Rome to seek official recognition from the pope. Instead, they aroused considerable anxiety. As the Welsh chronicler and gossip Walter Map (1140–1210) observed: “They go about two by two, barefoot, clad in woolen garments, owning nothing, holding all things in common like the Apostles.... If we admit them, we shall be driven out.”
⁴¹
The pope blessed their lifestyle, but forbade them to preach. Had they conformed they probably would have eventually been recognized as an order (their teachings were very close to those of St. Francis). But they continued to preach and hence in 1184 they were condemned as heretics by Pope Lucius III.

Initially, no serious efforts were made to suppress the Waldensians, probably because their area of greatest strength was not in southern France where they had begun, but along the Rhine in Germany. Here they benefitted from the local political disorganization and conflicts and from their substantial over-recruitment of upper-class followers.
⁴²
But in 1211 the church was able to begin a campaign of persecution—more than eighty Waldensians were seized and burned in Strasbourg. Over the next several centuries a series of battles took place, but by slowly withdrawing into the Alps the Waldensians survived until 1532 when they became affiliated with the Swiss Calvinists. A Waldensian church still exists.