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THE PASAGIANS.

591 ture ? As multitudes of Jews were scattered in all directions, and these, though oppressed and persecuted in various ways, yet oftentimes arose by means of their wealth to great influence, creating friends by their money among the great and mighty by whom they were protected, and as we may elsewhere observe many indications of an influence exerted by Jews upon the convictions of those Christians with whom they frequently associated, it is not inconceivable, that some such influence of habitual intercourse with Jews, may have given rise to a sect blending Judaism with Christianity, and which may thus have had a purely domestic origin in the West itself. Lucas, bishop of Tuy, looked upon it as an adroit contrivance of the heretics, that they submitted to circumcision, pretended to be Jews, under this mask promulgated their opinions, and so easily found protection and a hearing from the patrons and friends of the Jews. But what can be more improbable than that men who were not themselves Jews, especially that Catharists, the class of heretics evidently here meant, those enemies of Judaism, should subject themselves to that detested rite of circumcision, instituted, according to their opinion, by the evil principle; should pretend to be Jews, in order to secure such outward objects, for the securing of which this was by no means the best course; for if on the one hand they might, under this mask, more easily find protection and a hearing from some, yet on the other hand they would disgust still greater numbers, over whom, by other means, they might have succeeded in exerting an influence. The matter of fact, which must be separated from the subjective reflections of the reporter, we should be inclined to regard as simply this: that there was an heretical tendency, leaning to the side of Judaism; which leaning, however, was wrongly supposed to be hypocritically put on for the purpose of compassing certain ends. The name of this sect reminds one of the word pasagium (passage), which signifies a tour, and was very commonly employed to denote pilgrimages to the East, to the holy sepulchre, -crusades. May not this word, then, be regarded as an index, pointing to the origin of the sect as one that came from the East, intimating that it grew out of the intercourse with Palestine? May we not suppose that from very ancient times a party of Judaizing Christians had survived, of which this sect must be regarded as an offshoot? The way in which they expressed themselves concerning Christ as being the firstborn of creation, would point also, more directly, at

Over which Lucas Tudensis laments, lib. iii, c. iii: Audiunt saeculi princeps et judices urbium doctrinam haeresium a Judaeis, quos familiares sibi annumerant et amicos. Si aliquis, ductus zelo legis Dei, aliquem horum exasperavit, punitur quasi qui tangit pupillam oculi judicis civitatis. * See the above-cited examples, where we were speaking of the abbot Guibert and the fall of pope Nicholas the Third, of the year 1288, in which he alleges, which admits of being easily explained from the kind of conversions, that not only many

Jews who had embraced Christianity had turned back again to Judaism, verum etiam quam plurimi Christiani, veritatem catholicae fidei abnegantes, se damnabiliter ad Judaïcum ritum transtulerunt.

Haeretici quadam excogitata malitia plerumque circumciduntur et sub specie Judacorum quasi gratia disputandi ad Christianos veniunt et haereticas quaestiones proponunt. Liberius tanquam Judaei haereses seminant, qui primo verbum haeresis dicere non audebant. Lib. iii, c. iii.

592

DISAPPEARANCE OF THE DUALISTIC ELEMENT.

the connection of their doctrine with some older Jewish theology, than at that later purely Western origin.

The impulse given by oriental Dualism had contributed, it is true, in a great measure, to call forth a reaction of the Christian consciousness, longing after liberty, against the churchly theocratic system; yet this was not the only cause by which such appearances were produced. That secularization of the church, that confusion of Jewish and Christian elements in its forms and doctrines, could not fail, of itself, to arouse the opposition of a Christian consciousness, repelling this foreign matter; an opposition which was not to be kept under by any force, but which must continually break forth with increasing strength, till, with the fulness of time, it reached its triumph in the Reformation. As the progressive development of the church, proceeding on the foundation of faith in Christ as the only Saviour, pressed onwards to the Reformation, many kindred appearances would precede it. Those sects of oriental origin were but transient appearances, leaving behind them no after-effects of their own particular form. What continued to operate longer than themselves, was the opposition they set at work; which, however, cast aside the oriental and Dualistic element, and started on other principles. Of the Catharists, we afterwards meet with no further traces; but that reaction of the Christian consciousness, of which we spoke, was continually exhibiting itself in other forms, till it obtained a more durable shape in the sect of the Waldenses. Various influences coöperated to produce such reactions. We saw how the reforming bent of the Hildebrandian epoch invited the laity to rise against a corrupt clergy. The pope himself took the lead in a movement of popular reform. And we saw how, after the first impulse had been given, it might lead farther than was intended. The name Pata renes, which, signifying in the first place a union of the people against the corrupt clergy, passed over into an appellation of the Catharists, may serve as an illustration. Thus arose separatist tendencies. The laity would have nothing to do with the corrupt clergy. Such people, they thought, were unfitted to perform any sacramental act. these beginnings it was easy to proceed further, to declare the sacraments of the corrupt church, generally, null and void. In laymen, would be awakened the consciousness of the universal priesthood, and they would soon consider themselves capable of administering the sacraments to one another. There needed but a man of some power over the minds of others, and of an enterprising spirit, to furnish a centre for the revolutionary movement, and, by the intermingling of savage passion and fanaticism, the most violent scenes might have been witnessed. Thus that wild demagogue Tanchelm, of whom to be sure we know nothing except from the reports of embittered opponents,2 placed him

Thus bishop Yves of Chartres must maintain the necessary recognition of a special priesthood against such as supposed quascunque personas, etiam sacrum ordinem non habentes, verba dominica proferentes, sacramenta altaris et caetera ecclesiastica sacramenta posse conficere et salu

From

briter accipientibus ministrare. Ep. 63. Ed. Paris, 1610.

2 See Norbert's life, c. xiii, Jun. t. i, f. 843, and the letter of the church of Utrecht to the bishop Frederic of Cologne, first published by Sebastian Tengnagel, Cologne, f. 845. What gave him acceptance in Ant

ANTI-CHURCH TENDENCY AROUND COLOGNE.

593

self at the head of a separatistic popular movement of this kind in Flanders. As he undertook to visit Rome, we may certainly infer that he was not following out any wholly anti-churchly direction, but was hoping, in consideration of his zeal against the unchaste clergy, to find some support in the Hildebrandian system at Rome. In addition to all this, came the ideas put into circulation by the disputes about investiture, those ideas which, in opposition to the earthly glory of the church, favored the copying after the apostolical life in evangelical poverty, which sometimes allied themselves with existing customs in various forms of the monastic life, sometimes rose in resistance to the church herself. Thus we find in many districts, indications of societies of the so-called apostolicals, who were for bringing back the apostolical simplicity of the church, and whom we must take care to distinguish from the Catharists, with which sect, owing to many points of resemblance, they might easily be confounded.

When the provost Everwin of Steinfeld drew up his report to abbot Bernard of Clairvaux, of the sects in the territory of Cologne, he expressly distinguished from the Catharists another party, which probably, although agreeing with them in opposing the Catholic church, yet differed from them by their more biblical tendency, by combating Dualism, Gnosticism, etc., and it was just the disputes between these two anti-church parties which had drawn upon them the attention of their common opponent. The worldly and corrupt church, they taught, had lost the power of administering the sacraments; the successors of Peter had forfeited their title to the spiritual authority conferred upon them, because they had not followed him in a life consecrated to God. Baptism in the church was the only rite they would still acknowledge, and they acknowledged this because, whoever might administer the rite, it was still Christ that baptized. As then they did not substitute the consolamentum in the place of baptism, they were by this circumstance alone sufficiently distinguished from the Catharists. Yet infant baptism they opposed as a non-apostolic institution. So too they were very far from rejecting, with the Catharists, the institution of marriage, which they recognized as a holy estate instituted by God. But they reckoned it to the sacredness of marriage that it should only be contracted between parties who had never been married before, as being an indissoluble connection. What God had joined together, no man should put asunder. They rejected the intercession of saints, denied the necessity of fasting and of ecclesiastical satisfactions for sins. Neither the sinner nor the righteous man needed it; for if the sinner did but sigh after God, his sins would be forgiven him. They would recognize no ordinance but such as had proceeded

werp was the bad management of the church; for it is stated, in the above life, that the whole large diocese was governed by a priest, who gave himself but little concern about the flock, and was scorned by the people on account of his unlawful intercourse with his niece.

'Everwin, after having described the Catharists, says: Sunt item alii haeretici quidam in terra nostra, omnino ab istis discordantes, per quorum mutuam discordiam et contentionem utrique nobis sunt detecti. Mabillon, Analecta, t. iii, p. 456.

594

THE SECTS AT PERIGUEUX.

from the institution of Christ and the apostles; all else they declared to be superstition. They combated the doctrine of purgatory, maintaining that when souls departed from this life, their everlasting destiny was already decided; hence they were opposed to all prayers and other works for the repose of departed souls.

Neither do we perceive in another sect which made its appearance about this time in the department of Perigueux, in South France, the least signs of any peculiarity of the Catharists; though we see other peculiarities still more fanatical. They were for following the apostles in a total renunciation of all earthly goods. They abstained from meat, and drank very little wine. Opposition to the mass, which was common to all the anti-churchly tendencies, seems to have been carried by them to the extreme of rejecting the Lord's supper altogether. They combated all veneration of the cross and of the images of Christ as idolatry. The frequent bowing of the knee, a custom which we find ascribed to them, would not warrant the inference that they were a branch of the Catharists, but should be regarded, probably, as simply a mark of the Pietistic element. One of their doxologies is cited, which shows that, contrary to the Dualism of the Catharists, they acknowledged God as the creator of all things. As they adopted that idea of evangelical poverty which was grounded in the religious spirit of the times, as much truth lay at the bottom of their attacks on the dominant church, and as they often appealed to Scripture, they might find acceptance with many; and it is reported that not only people of rank left their possessions and joined them, but also clergymen, priests, monks, and nuns, were among their adherents. And it is mentioned as a characteristic fact, that the rudest and most unlettered peasant who joined their sect, would in less than eight days gain so much knowledge of the Scriptures, that he could not be foiled in argument by any man. They were accused of practising necromancy.

Sometimes such tendencies proceeded from the midst of the people, without being connected with any individual of note. Although some individual may have given the first impulse, yet afterwards he retired into the general mass. Sometimes it was individuals who constituted from the beginning the central point of such a reformatory movement. While some stood forth, who had been awakened within the body of the clergy, and, seized with indignation at the depraved members of their order, felt themselves impelled to travel about as preachers of repentance in the sense of the church, there were others, in whose case the awakening seems rather to have proceeded from the spirit which breathed on them from the Bible than from the general spirit of the church, and whose labors as reformatory preachers of repentance were chiefly guided and determined by that circumstance. These latter were not only zealous against practical corruptions, but, as they had been led by their study of the Bible to perceive an element foreign to Bible Christianity in the church as it then was, many things false in

1 Petragorium. * See the report of the monk Heribert, in Mabillon, 1. c. p. 467.

PETER OF BRUIS.

595 its doctrines and its rites, felt themselves impelled to attack the corrupt church herself on this particular side, and to stand forth not barely as reformers of life, but also of doctrine. Frequently, however, the prudence of such men did not come up to the measure of their zeal. In combating one error, they often fell into the opposite extreme, and in what they attacked as false, they had no skill to discern the particle of truth at the bottom. They went too far on the side of negation; and to their polemics against the unauthenticated mysteries of church doctrine, a one-sided negative and subjective tendency might easily attach itself.

One of the first among these reformers was the priest Peter of Bruis, who appeared, near the close of the twelfth or in the beginning of the thirteenth century, in South France. It is certain that he rejected the authority of the church and of the great teachers, to whom it was customary to appeal, and would recognize nothing as obligatory on faith, but what could be proved from the Bible. But it may be questioned, whether he attributed this authority to the whole Bible; whether he did not make a difference between the Old and New Testament; whether he attributed equal authority even to the entire New Testament; whether he did not make a difference in this respect between the gospels and the epistles; whether he ascribed an altogether decisive force to anything except that which Christ had taught with his own words. The last is repeatedly laid to his charge; and if he refused to acknowledge the celebration of the Holy supper as valid for all times of the church, and denied the significance of the redemptive sufferings of Christ, the charge might seem to be well grounded. The biblical Protestant element would in this case have passed over into a rationalistic, critical one. Still, what is said on this point is too uncertain and fluctuating to afford any ground for a safe conclusion; and so the venerable abbot Peter of Cluny, with a reservation of judgment which does him honor, declines expressing any opinion here, lest he might bring a false charge upon the man after his death. He was an opponent of infant baptism, since he regarded personal faith as a necessary condition for true baptism, and denied the benefit in this case of another's faith. As he could not allow, according to this, any validity whatever to infant baptism, he must consequently rebaptize, or bestow true baptism for the first time on those who joined his party. The followers of Peter of Bruis refused to be called Anabaptists, a name given to them for the reason just mentioned: because the only baptism, they said, which they could regard as the true one, was a

We can very nearly calculate the time, if we put together the two facts, that he labored during a period of twenty years, and that Abelard, in his Introduction to Theology, written before the year 1121, speaks of him as a person deceased. See Opp. p. 1066.

The words are in his letter in refutation of the Petrobrusians: Videndum est, utrum hi, qui tantis orbis terrarum magistris non credunt, saltem Christo, prophetis

vel apostolis adquiescant. Hoc ideo dico, quoniam nec ipsi Christo vel prophetis aut apostolis ipsique majestati veteris ac novi

testamenti vos ex toto credere fama vulgavit. Sed quia fallaci rumorum monstro non facile assensum praebere debeo, maxime cum quidam vos totum divinum canonem abjecisse affirment, alii quaedam ex ipso vos suscepisse contendant, culpare vos de incertis nolo.

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