The Influence of the Bible on Civilisation

by Ernst von Dobschütz

V

THE BIBLE STIRS NON-CONFORMIST MOVEMENTS (1150-1450)

Mediæval civilisation has a twofold aspect. It looks backward, to the old church and the old Roman empire; so far it is Biblical and classical. But it also looks forward, to the development of the nations and later to the development of the individual personality, as this has been realised in the Renaissance; so far it is secular and, in a way, modern. In the earlier part of the Middle Ages the nations did not feel strong enough by themselves. They were parts of the empire, and all children of the one mother church. The church was training them, and it fulfilled this task in an admirable way. But the children grew up and the church lost its power over them. They declared themselves of age and independent at the very moment when the church seemed to have the largest and most undoubted influence.

The church was training the nations by means of the Bible, and now it is the Bible which stirs the anti-ecclesiastical movements. The Bible had been used by the church chiefly in an indirect way; parts of the Bible or substitutes for it had taken its place. Now the complete Bible made its appeal to the people and gave directions which were exactly opposite to the training given by the church.

The Bible had originally been accessible to everybody. In the first centuries the church itself had insisted upon this publicity, as we have seen in the first chapter. Then came a time when almost no one could read and the clergy had the Bible practically to themselves. They did not take away the Bible from the hands of the laymen; the laymen themselves did not care for it because they could not read it; they were totally dependent on the clergy. But now civilisation had made a new start; the art of reading became again popular. And suddenly a desire for reading the Bible spread among the people. The clergy were astonished to find the laymen using their right of reading the Bible themselves. That was something new, and we see the clergy puzzled, we hear them complain. They did not want people to read the Bible, for—as they said—this would introduce them to heresy. And so it proved.

The movement starts from the south of France. As early as the eleventh century we hear of people here who gather in order to hear the Bible read. It is the cardinal Pietro Damiani, a friend of Gregory VII, who complains of their presumption. They are plain, simple folk, shopkeepers, farmers, women, having no theological education, and yet aiming at understanding the Bible. The theologians of this period treated the Bible as a book of secrets. In order to understand it aright one had to be initiated into the art of interpreting everything by allegory according to the authority of the fathers. They used to quote Saint Jerome, that the Bible was a mysterious stream; one man can walk through in safety while another would be drowned. They therefore disapproved earnestly of this reading of the Bible by unprepared tradesmen, women, and children. But reading did not stop. The same complaint occurs again and again during the next decades. We hear of people in the diocese of Metz, simple country folk, reading the Bible. The church authorities already began to be alarmed and to take a more severe attitude toward the offenders.

The main movement, to be mentioned here, is the one connected with the name of Peter Waldo, a merchant of Lyons, who was a zealous reader of the Bible himself, and travelling about held frequent meetings with people of the same sort. The story of his "conversion," as given by the best authorities, runs as follows. It was in 1176, the year of a great famine, that one Sunday afternoon he listened to a jongleur reciting the famous legend of Saint Alexis the poor. He was struck by this heroism of poverty, and the next day he asked a well-known master of theology what was the surest way to God. The master, following the best tradition of the mediæval church, told him to follow Christ's advice: "If thou wouldst be perfect, go, sell whatsoever thou hast, and give to the poor." So Peter separates himself from wife and children and begins to live the life of a poor man—a beggar. Others join him; two by two, on foot, they go preaching the gospel. They are not anxious for the morrow; they do not work; they have faith that whatever they need will be supplied to them. Thus they try to fulfil Christ's commandments and to imitate his disciples. They refuse to take an oath; they censure lying as a deadly sin; they condemn all shedding of blood either in war or in the execution of justice. The fraternity called itself the Poor in Spirit. At the beginning they thought themselves to be true members of the church; only later, when the church denied to them the right of preaching, did they form a sect, Peter being ordained bishop and giving orders to other members of the community.

Meanwhile a similar fraternity of poor men, or humiliati as they were called here, had made their appearance in the north of Italy. It was a kind of workmen's union. So far as we know there was no connection at the beginning between this movement and the one at Lyons. Both started independently, and it was only later that they came into contact, without, however, amalgamating. The Italian fraternity spread from Milan all through that region and was rapidly extended into Germany, while from Lyons the Poor went through France and even through Spain. It was an enormous movement among the laity, and it was stirred by the Bible. Peter Waldo desired to have the Bible translated into his own vernacular; and it was by reading the Bible that these people got their enthusiasm and their eagerness even to suffer persecution and death.

Many scholars in former days treated this Waldensian movement as truly Protestant; they used to call Peter Waldo and his followers reformers before the Reformation. The Protestant church in Italy, calling itself Waldensian and growing in our own day more and more vigorously in the spirit of Calvinistic Protestantism, seemed to support this view. And yet it is wrong. The true Protestantism of the Waldensians dates only from the sixteenth century, when they came in contact with Geneva, and then went over to Calvinism. Before this they had been something quite different, a purely mediæval form of Christianity. The characteristic point is that they take the gospel as a law, exactly as the monks did. If the monks kept to poverty, fasting, praying, and so on, in order to fulfil the gospel's commands, these people did the same; only they did not become monks and enter a monastery; they continued to live in the world, carrying on their ordinary business, because, they said, the commands of the gospel were not given to the monks only, but to every Christian. They abolished the double standard of morality which the church had established, the standard of perfection, reached only by the clergy and monks, and the standard of secular morality, kept by the average Christian; but they abolished it in the opposite way from the reformers, by making the ascetic ideal the rule for every Christian. It was from the Bible that they deduced this ideal and its binding force for every Christian, but it was, of course, the mediæval understanding of the Bible which they followed.