A church dictionary

by Walter Farquhar Hook

In fine, the errors of the Valentinians were wholly incompatible with the Christian doctrine. If they did not destroy the unity of God, they made of him a monstrous composition of different beings. They attributed the creation to another principle: they set up good and bad substances by nature. Jesus Christ, according to them, was but a man, on whom the celestial Christ descended. The Holy Ghost was but a simple Divine virtue. There is no resurrection of the body. Spiritual men do not merit eternal life; it is due to them by their nature; and do what they will they can never miss of it; as material men cannot escape annihilation, although they live an unblameable life.

VALESIANS. Christian heretics, disciples of Valesius, an Arabian philosopher, who appeared about the year 250, and maintained that concupiscence acted so strongly upon man, that it was not in his power to resist it, and that even the grace of God was not sufficient to enable him to get the better of it. Upon this principle he taught that the only way for a man to be saved was to make himself an eunuch. The Origenists afterwards fell into the same error; but it was Valesius who gave birth to it. The bishop of Philadelphia condemned this philosopher, and the other Churches of the East followed his example.

The maxims of the Valesians were very cruel. They were not satisfied to mutilate those of their sect, but they had the barbarity to make eunuchs of strangers who chanced to pass by where they lived. This heresy spread greatly in Arabia, and especially in the territory of Philadelphia.

VAUDOIS. (See Waldenses.)

VAULT. An arched roof, so constructed as to be supported by mutual compression. Vaulting and Gothic architecture are so intimately connected, that the latter has been defined as “the truthful elaboration of vaulted structure;” and vaulting has been called “the final cause of Gothic architecture, that to which all its members subserve, for which everything else is contrived, and without which the whole apparatus would be aimless and unmeaning.”[^[20]] To enter into the science of vaulting would be quite beyond our present purpose; we can only very loosely assign the various forms of vaults to the respective styles to which they belong.

The earliest and simplest vault is that called the waggon vault, i. e. a simple semi-cylindrical vault, one side of which rests throughout on each wall of the span to be vaulted. This vault was used by the Romans, and for a while in our Romanesque: but it was very soon discontinued for one in which the whole space to be vaulted was divided into equal squares, and a semi-cylinder being supposed to be thrown over each square in each direction, the one crossing and cutting the other, the points at which they would cut were taken as the groins, and all below these parts being removed, an arched way was left in either direction. This formed a simple quadripartite vault, but as yet of very rude construction. Some of the defects of this were remedied by supplying ribs at the groins, which not only strengthened the vault, but also served in a great degree to conceal its defects of form. By and by the compartments were also separated by a rib, springing transversely over the space to be vaulted. The introduction of bosses at the intersection of the diagonal ribs, and the various moulding of the ribs themselves, was as far as the Normans proceeded with this kind of vault, except that they had various methods of bringing the apex of the intersecting cylinders into the same plane, by stilting or depressing them, where they were obliged to apply low vaults to rectangles with unequal sides.

In the Early English, the pointed arch was applied to the vault, as well as to all other arched constructions, and groining ribs were never omitted; still the transverse rib, or that separating two bays, is by no means invariably found. The ribs were multiplied as architecture advanced; and, during the Geometrical period, we have often, in addition to the diagonal and transverse ribs, a rib along the apex of the vault, both longitudinal and transverse, and sometimes two or more additional ribs rising from the vaulting shaft to the ridge rib. In the later Decorated, these ribs are often tied together by little cross ribs, at various angles, and the vault thus formed is called a lierne vault: this was continued into the Perpendicular period; its complexity rather than richness gradually increasing with the multiplication of ribs and bosses. It is a long process to arrive at the exact office of each rib; but there is in each case a constructive reason for its adoption.

The later architects of England adopted a more gorgeous, and, in some respects, a more scientific vault than any of those mentioned, which, from the equal radiation of its numerous ribs over the whole surface of the inverted conoids, of which the whole surface consists, is called fan vaulting; a system really more simple and perfect than any of the others, though to the eye so exceedingly elaborate.

VENIAL SIN. The Church of Rome, following the schoolmen, represents some sins as pardonable, and others not. The first they call venial, the second, mortal, sins. Thomas Aquinas makes seven distinctions in sin. (See Sin.)

VENI, CREATOR SPIRITUS. A hymn to the Holy Ghost. The Holy Ghost is that person of the Blessed Trinity, to which the distributing of the several offices in the Church, and qualifying the persons for them, is generally ascribed in Scripture. (Acts xiii. 2, 4; xx. 28; 1 Cor. xii. 11.) And upon that ground it is fit that a particular address be made to the Spirit before the ordination, which we do by this hymn. It is said to have been composed by St. Ambrose, and is placed among his works as an hymn for Pentecost; and on that day it is annually used in the Roman Church, and was so of old. It was inserted into the office for consecrating a bishop as early as the year 1100; and with a later hand put into the ordination of a priest about 500 (620) years ago in the Roman Church, and so it stands there to this day. And the Protestants have so well approved of it, that the Lutheran Churches begin their office with the same hymn. And our reformers translated it into metre in the larger way in King Edward the Sixth’s first ordinal. Since which time (namely, in the review of the Common Prayer under King Charles the Second, Dr. Nicholls) it hath been abbreviated, and put into fewer words, but to the same case, as it stands foremost here.—Dean Comber.