The tireless Lea has made a long list of preachers who went up and down crying against the wealth and vices of the clergy. Sometimes they opposed a crude abuse of Christian symbols as tending towards idolatry. Sometimes they taught that the sacraments had no virtue when administered by a priest unshriven from mortal sin. This idea, however strongly it might appeal to natural feeling, was utterly anarchic. For instance, marriage was a sacrament and therefore entirely in the Church’s hands, civil marriage being unknown. What a charming state of affairs, then, if a marriage could be pronounced null and void if it were discovered, no matter how many years afterward, that the priest had been in a state of mortal sin when he performed the ceremony! We know to-day how wide is the no man’s land between destructive and constructive reform. We are familiar with the typical, noisy evangelist, whose stock in trade is his abuse of established Churches. The early twelfth century shouters began by playing lone hands, like our own Billy Sunday and his tribe. Their stormy careers left little definite trace. At most they set in motion a general criticism of the wealth and pride of the Church in comparison with the poverty of her founder and of the humility which she taught.
After a while these sporadic reformers, each setting up his own little whirlpool or eddy, began to be merged into distinguishable currents each flowing in a definite direction. In the third decade of the century we begin to hear of “Waldenses,” members of a religious body so called after its founder Waldo, a rich but unlearned merchant of Lyons. The Waldenses began in reform and ended in heresy. They are heard of principally in Languedoc, in North-Eastern Spain, and in Lombardy. They were loosely organized, consequently their teaching varied; but, in general, they prized the letter of the Gospel and minimized the distinction between clergy and laity. They translated the Scriptures into the vernacular, read them zealously, and applied rigorously their commandments against lying or oaths of any sort whatsoever. To forbid even “white” lies is certainly harmless enough, although if pushed to an extreme it partakes of the character of impossibilism and eccentricity which the Catholic Church has always avoided. But, in a society knit together by the feudal oath of allegiance, to say that a Christian man ought not to take any sort of oath smelled of nihilism and anarchy. So too, the Waldensian enlargement of the functions of the laity. Granting, for the sake of the argument, that even in those times it might have been wise to enlarge the part to be played by laymen in the work of Christian teaching, still nothing but harmful irregularities could be expected from the Waldensian idea that “any good man” might perform the Sacraments. For instance, take their practice of confession to a layman. Personal and private confessions give to the one who hears them great power for good or evil in families and communities. If his secrecy cannot be guaranteed by the strongest possible means we must admit (whatever our view of confession in general) that the thing would be dangerous. Further, the Waldenses seem to have gone beyond even the Quakers, in that they had their doubts as to the moral right of judges to punish. Nevertheless, Waldensianism had considerable momentum.
At first they insisted vehemently that they were good Catholics, and came not to destroy but to fulfil. After being forbidden to preach by the Archbishop of Lyons, they appealed boldly to the Lateran Council of 1179. When that Council forbade them to preach without permission from the local bishop the turning point came. Waldo, their leader, preferred his own private judgment to obedience to constituted authority, and refused to abide by the Council’s decision. In a phrase that many have since used he said that he preferred to obey God rather than man.
Still they were slow to break completely with the Church. Not until 1184, five years after the Council, were they definitely excommunicated by the Pope, Lucius III. This was done at the Council of Verona, an assembly of which we shall hear again. Even then, a distinction was sometimes made between them and more pestilent forms of heresy. The fact that, as late as 1218 in the ninth year of the Albigensian crusade, a sort of Waldensian Council including delegates from north and west of the Alps could meet in Bergamo may possibly stand as evidence of an easy-going attitude of the authorities toward them. To-day, the Protestant remembers affectionately that their Provençal translation of the Scriptures, or at least of the New Testament, was the first rendering of the Bible into the vernacular tongues of Western Europe, and the most that a militant Roman Catholic can find to say of their system is that it was a “vapid degradation of religion.”[10] Now “vapid degradations” do not produce great wars like the Albigensian crusade or great systems of persecution like the Inquisition established after that crusade. For my own part I am convinced that, had the Waldenses been the only heretical body in the field, there would have been no crusade against heresy and perhaps no Inquisition.
The movement which called out such resistance from those who repeated the ancient creed of Europe was of a different sort. On its negative side it echoed the same charges brought against the Church by the isolated heretics and by the Waldenses, repeating them so exactly that certain superficial Protestant scholars once maintained that it was little more than a protest against Roman abuses. Even Limborch, whose learning forces him to admit that it was more than this, naively remarks à propos of their genial custom of starving themselves to death as the highest possible act of faith:—
“’Tis rather to be wondered at, that in so barbarous an age, they should throw off so many errors rather than that they should retain some.”[11] It now seems certain that the movement based itself on a philosophy fundamentally hostile to Christianity and nauseous to us who have breathed no other air than that of Christendom.
Before considering the nature of this philosophy, and of its logical developments in the sphere of morals, let us reject the various names by which it has been called by modern scholars, and refer to it as the “Albigensian” movement. It is true that “Manichean,” “neo-Manichean,” and “Catharist” (after the habit of the sect of referring to themselves as the “Cathari” or “pure”), are more descriptive. “Albigensian” is sanctioned by usage, and usage should prevail over the preciosity of the pedant.
The un-Christian creed of the “Albigenses” began to sift into Western Europe soon after the year 1000. It was very old, for it represented one of the few fundamentally different ways of looking at life, and it is probably indestructible as long as the world endures. Its central idea is that the universe is dual and was created by two Gods, or if you will, two principles, of about equal strength, one Good and one Evil. The attempt to reconcile this idea with Christianity is as old as Manes who lived in Mesopotamia in the third century and founded the heretical sect of the Manicheans. Back of Manes, again, at the very beginning of recorded history, we find the Persians with a dualist religion which they attributed to a shadowy prophet Zoroaster, or Zarathustra. To-day three striking examples of its survival come to mind. First, Dualism, with its scorn for matter as inherently evil, is not far from Mrs. Eddy’s Christian Science. Second, in 1909, Paul Elmer More, one of the foremost of American scholars and critics, who would rank among the great critics of all times did he but possess the gift of vivid phrase, published a book, “Studies in Dualism,” which bore on its title page the following quotation from another modern worthy, Sir Leslie Stephen:—
“Manicheanism may be disavowed in words. It cannot be exiled from the actual belief of mankind.”[12]
Third, in 1917, under the influence of the war, H. G. Wells (whom I hesitate whether to characterize as a sort of prose Shelley, “beating in the void his luminous wings in vain,” or as an æolian harp upon which almost any passing wind of doctrine can play) thus sets forth the thoughts of his imaginary Englishman mourning for the death of his soldier son:—