HENRY THE CLUNIACENSIAN. 601 distinctions among men, he got free-born young men to take wives from the class of bond-women, and then used the money placed at his command to provide the latter with decent raiment. Henry's virulent antagonist, from whom we have the account of his labors in Mans, brings up against him the unhappy issue of the marriages which were formed by his arrangement. This certainly would be an argument to show his want of a knowledge of mankind, or his want of wisdom and prudence, but no argument against the purity of his motives. As with a view to promote practical Christianity, Henry attacked every opinion which might serve to nourish a false confidence, so he seems to have been led by this interest to attack various customs, which could not be directly proved from the Sacred Scriptures as corruptions of primitive Christianity; such, for example, as the worship of saints and infant baptism.2 But it may be doubted whether at this particular time he had as yet so distinctly evolved the points of his opposition to the doctrines of the church. Though even then he was accused of error in doctrine, yet heresies of so striking a character were not expressly alleged against him. But we must allow that the tendency which would inevitably lead him to such results may be clearly discerned in what his opponents say of him; for they charge that he held only to the historical sense and letter of the prophets, and therefore set up a perverse doctrine.3 From which language it may be inferred, that he acknowledged no doctrine which could not be expressly pointed out, as contained in so many words in the Bible; that he was an opponent of all allegorizing interpretation. 66 When Hildebert returned from his journey to Rome, he found the tone of feeling in his community strangely altered. He was no longer received with the usual demonstrations of joy, and the usual veneration. His episcopal blessing was treated with contempt. Henry was everything to the people. We have a father," exclaimed the people, "a priest, an intercessor, still more exalted in authority, more honorable in life, more eminent in knowledge. The clergy abhor him as a godless man, because they are afraid he will attack with the weapons of the Sacred Scriptures their vices, their incontinence, and their false doctrines."4 By an imperious, violent mode of procedure, bishop Hildebert would only have increased Henry's influence, and alienated the popular feeling still more from himself. By wisdom and love, gentleness and forbearance, he could effect more. Henry himself he was determined not to put down by force. He had an interview with him, which, as we might presume, would not be a satisfactory one. In the theology and liturgy of the church, Henry could exhibit but 602 HENRY THE CLUNIACENSIAN. little proficiency; in the knowledge of the New Testament he might perhaps have sustained a better examination.1 Bishop Hildebert simply directed Henry to leave his diocese and betake himself to some other field. Would the bishop have pursued so gentle a course with him, if it could have been proved that he was really guilty of the clandestine vices which were whispered against him amongst his enemies? Would not the placing him on his trial for such offences, and suspending over him the punishment affixed to them by the church laws, have been the most direct and certain means of undeceiving the people who reverenced him as a saint? But the mild measures pursued by the bishop towards the clergy who had gone over to Henry, and whom he endeavored to win back from him by degrees, and recover to a more churchlike mode of thinking, may justly claim our respect.2 In the disputes against saint-worship, which Hildebert was under the necessity of defending, we certainly recognize also, though Henry's name is not mentioned in this connection, a reaction of the ideas which he had disseminated. The opponents of saint-worship appealed to concessions of bishop Hildebert himself. How they could do so may easily be explained, if we call to mind the prevailing bent of the man; for we have already spoken of him as the representative of a more spiritual Christianity, the opponent of a worship of mere ceremonies. We may conjecture that they had in view those declarations of Hildebert in which he protested against certain excrescences of superstition, and exhorted men to copy the living walk of the saints. The genuinely Christian element lying at bottom of the church doctrine and practice in this respect, he knew very well how to insist upon and use against those who denied that the saints had any concern with that which is done on earth."4 "Without controversy," says he, "love stands preeminent above all the other virtues. On love, hang the law and the prophets: all else must pass away, but charity never ceaseth. Charity is not confined to the measure with which God and our neighbor are loved in this present life; but it becomes more perfect in the life to come, the more perfectly both our neighbor is known in God, and God is known in himself." He refers to this more perfect love existing among the saints, for the purpose of intimating their sympathy in the concerns of their contending brethren on earth. Henry now turned his face to the South, and made his appearance in Provence. He came into those districts where Peter of Bruis had labored before him. There he put himself at the head of the antichurchly tendency, which he seems to have shaped into a more systematic doctrinal form.5 Here he joined himself to a number of The writer of the report in the Actis Cenomanensibus, represents him as an altogether ignorant man, thus contradicting himself. Hildebert says of him, ep. 24: Huic et habitu religionem et verbis literaturam simulanti. He may have been well versed in the New Testament and yet otherwise unlearned. ? See ep. 24. 3 See above, p. 306. 4 See ep. 23. He himself, as Peter of Cluny states, was the author of a tract directed against the church doctrine, in which still more of an heretical character occurred, than in the above-cited propositions of the Petrobru HENRY THE CLUNIACENSIAN. 603 like-minded individuals. When Peter of Cluny's letter, mentioned on a former page, had stirred up the zeal of the bishops of that district to contend against the encroaching anti-churchly tendency, the archbishop of Arles succeeded in securing the person of Henry, and took him along with him, in 1134, to the council of Pisa, held under the presidency of pope Innocent the Second. This council declared him a heretic, and condemned him to confinement in a cell. Subsequently, however, he was set at liberty, when he betook himself again to South France, to the districts of Toulouse and Alby, a principal seat of anti-churchly tendencies, where also the great lords who were striving to make themselves independent, favored these tendencies, from hatred to the dominion of the clergy. Among the lower class and the nobles, Henry found great acceptance; and after he had labored for ten years in those regions, Bernard of Clairvaux, in writing to a nobleman, and inviting him to put down the heretics, could say: "The churches are without flocks, the flocks without priests, the priests are nowhere treated with due reverence, the churches are levelled down to synagogues, the sacraments are not esteemed holy, the festivals are no longer celebrated." When Bernard says, in the words just quoted, that the communities are without priests, he means the priests had gone over to the Henricians; for so he complains in a sermon,3 where he speaks of the rapid spread of this sect:4" Women forsake their husbands, and husbands their wives, and run over to this sect. Clergymen and priests desert their communities and churches; and they have been found sitting with long beards (to mark the habitus apostolicus), among weavers.' As this party made such rapid advances, pope Eugene the Third, who was then residing in France, deemed it necessary to resort to other still more energetic measures for its suppression. With this in view, he sent to those districts the cardinal bishop Alberic of Ostia, who took with him the abbot Bernard. If the legate, in all the pomp of his office, was scoffed at, Bernard, on the other hand, whose very appearance refuted the charge that the whole church had become secular, and the clergy and monks sunk in luxury, made quite a different impression, and his great power over the minds of men was manifested also in the present case. Some said he even wrought miracles; and it may be that he appealed to them himself. Probably, however, he did not find it quite so easy to manage sians. Peter the Venerable says, in the above-cited letter (opp. f. 1119), concerning the relation of Henry to Peter of Bruis: Haeres nequitiae ejus Henricus cum nescio quibus (it seems, then, there were several), doctrinam diabolicam non quidem emendavit, sed immutavit et sicut nuper in tomo, qui ab ore ejus exceptus dicebatur, scriptum vidi, non quinque tantum, sed plura capitula edidit. 2 Acta Cenomanensia, p. 342. In Cantica Canticorum, Sermo. lxv, § 5. treat merely or particularly of the Henricians, but also and especially of the Catharists. The allusion is doubtless to the Henricians, when from those who wholly rejected marriage, he distinguishes those who required marriage between young men and maidens, as a connection which was only once to be formed for the whole life. Sermo. Ixvi, § 4. "Clerici et sacerdotes populis ecclesiisque relictis intonsi et barbati quod eos inter textores et textrinas plerumque inventi sunt. Sermo. lxv, § 5. See above, p. 257. · 604 HENRY THE CLUNIACENSIAN. these sectaries, as his enthusiastic admirers who have given us the account of his life would represent. A writer belonging to these very districts relates that Bernard once came to a strong-hold, constituting one of the principal seats of the sect, and commenced preaching against it, when the leaders of the sect left the church, and were followed by the whole congregation. Bernard hurried after them into the street, and continued his sermon in the open air; but the sectaries were so noisy, citing against him passages from the sacred Scriptures, that he was obliged to stop. The bishops afterwards succeeded in once more apprehending Henry, and the archbishop Samson, of Rheims, brought him before the council held in that city, in 1148. On the information of the archbishop, who disapproved of capital and corporeal punishments against heretics, he was simply condemned to imprisonment during life, with a meagre diet, that he might be brought to repentance.2 On observing the remarkable affinity of spirit and of principles between the Apostolicals in Cologne and Perigueux, the Petrobrusians and the Henricians, we might be led to suppose that this agreement must have been owing to a common external descent. But the question immediately occurs whether we should be justified in so doing; for when certain ideas and tendencies have once become incorporated in the process in which the spirit of a determinate period is developing itself, and prevail therein, they are wont to diffuse themselves abroad without any external cause, as through an atmosphere; and we see them breaking to view in one place and another without being able to trace the whole to any single point. It is manifest, at any rate, that Peter of Bruis and Henry made their appearance quite independently of each other; and so it may have happened also with other individuals and entire communities. Nothing therefore would be gained, even if the prelates succeeded in silencing the individual representatives and organs of such general tendencies to reform. These tendencies, especially in South France, had acquired too much strength to be suppressed by the destruction of the individual organs. The corruption of the clergy had, even in places where the church system of doctrine was still held fast, excited great dissatisfaction and violent complaints, as appears evident from the songs of the Troubadours, who came from these districts, where this tone of feeling is not to be mistaken.3 In such a tone of feeling a thorough and When he left this castle without having accomplished his object, he is said to have exclaimed with his characteristic assurance, which sometimes gave him the appearance of a prophet, alluding to the name of this castle, Viride folium: "Viride folium, desiccet te Deus." Which curse people believed was fulfilled. See the Chronica Guil. Pod. Laurent. in Du Chesne, t, v. f. 667. If this story were found only in the chronicle of Alberic (pp. 315, 317), we might regard it as not sufficiently well vouched; for this chronicler classes Henry with the crazy enthusiast Eudo, and other opponents of the dominant church. But he names his authority, which is perfectly trustworthy, the Verbum Abbreviatum of Peter Cantor, where we actually find the passage cited above (p. 587), where this Henry is undoubtedly meant. 3 See the examples of vehemence and boldness with which the Troubadours attacked the ambition and cupidity of the Roman court and of the clergy, and pointed their satire against the whole radical spirit of reformation, going back from the corruption of the church in life, to the corruption in doctrine, and aiming at the renovation of everything, as well in doctrine as in practice, after the pattern of the apostolic church, must have found its true element. The sect of the Waldenses, presently to be mentioned, which, free from the disturbing and fanatical elements hitherto seen intermingling with reformatory antagonisms, survived as the purest offspring of the reaction of a purified Christian consciousness all the earlier appearances of its kind, and propagated itself in spite of every form of persecution through the succeeding centuries, presents itself accordingly; not merely as the work of an individual man, excited to it by external occasions, but as a single link in the chain of reactions, running through this whole period of reactions of the Christian consciousness, against the churchly theocratic system of the Middle Ages; one form of the manifestation of that idea of following the apostles in evangelical poverty, which had its ground in the religious consciousness of the period, a product from the laboratory of the Christian mind in these districts. It was quite a mistake to think of deriving this sect from an outward connection with manifestations of some such reaction of the reforming spirit subsequent to the time of Claudius of Turin, and that too in districts whither this sect, which arose in another quarter, was certainly first transplanted at a later period. But it was not without some foundation of truth that the Waldenses of this period asserted the high antiquity of their sect, and maintained that from the time of the secularization of the church- that is, as they believed, from the time of Constantine's gift to the Roman bishop Silvester-such an opposition as finally broke forth in them, had been existing all along.1 We recognize this spirit, which gave birth to the Waldensian sect, in a writing on the antichrist in the Romance language, which certainly belongs to the twelfth century, though the date assigned in the manuscript (1120) is of uncertain authority, and the question whether this document proceeded from the Waldenses, or is of an older origin, cannot now be decided. The idea set forth in this production bears witness of the circumstances of the times in which it was produced. By the antichrist, is here understood the whole antichristlike principle, concealing itself under the guise of Christianity, which principle subject of indulgences, in Raynouard Choix des poésies originales des Troubadours, t. ii, Paris, 1817, in the Introductory Essay, p. 61. It is said of the church, that, yielding to the cupidity by which she suffered herself to be governed, she sold pardons for all kinds of iniquity at a paltry price; of the priests, that they were eager to grasp wealth with both hands, whatever wretchedness it might occasion; that they sometimes used prayer, and sometimes the sharp edge of the sword, as a means of persecution, deluding some with God, others with the devil; of Rome, that she despised God and the saints; that craft Published in Paul Perrin's and treachery of all kinds leagued together and lurked there. See Pilichdorf contra Waldenses, c. i, Bibl. patr. Lugd. t. xxv, f. 278: Coram simplicibus mentiuntur, sectam eorum durasse a temporibus Silvestri papae, quando videlicet ecclesia coepit habere proprias possessiones. It is remarkable that Rainer, who points to the true historical origin of the sect, still reckons among the reasons why this sect was more mischievous than any other, its longer duration: Aliqui enim dicunt, quod duraverit a tempore Silvestri, aliqui a tempore apostolorum. Histoire des Vaudois, lib. iii. |