and masses for the dead. A follower of his, a monk, Henry, gave the name to another body known as Henricians, who centred in Tours. The teachers of these new opinions were men of high character and holy lives, who in spite of persecution wandered from place to place, and made many converts from those who were dissatisfied at the want of clerical discipline which followed upon the struggle for temporal supremacy into which the reforming projects of Gregory VII. had carried the church.
It was at this time (1170) that a rich merchant of Lyons, Peter Waldo, sold his goods and gave them to the poor; then he went forth as a preacher of voluntary poverty. His followers, the Waldenses, or poor men of Lyons, were moved by a religious feeling which could find no satisfaction within the actual system of the church, as they saw it before them. Like St Francis, Waldo adopted a life of poverty that he might be free to preach, but with this difference that the Waldenses preached the doctrine of Christ while the Franciscans preached the person of Christ, Waldo reformed teaching while Francis kindled love; hence the one awakened antagonisms which the other escaped. For Waldo had a translation of the New Testament made into Provençal, and his preachers not only stirred up men to more holy lives but explained the Scriptures at their will. Such an interference with the ecclesiastical authorities led to difficulties. Pope Alexander III., who had approved of the poverty of the Waldensians, prohibited them from preaching without the permission of the bishops (1179). Waldo answered that he must obey God rather than man. The result of this disobedience was excommunication by Lucius III. in 1184. Thus a reforming movement became heresy through disobedience to authority, and after being condemned embarked on a course of polemical investigation how to justify its own position. Some were readmitted into the Catholic Church, and one, Durandus de Osca (1210), attempted to found an order of Pauperes Catholici, which was the forerunner of the order of St Dominic. Many were swept away in the crusade against the Albigenses (q.v.). Others made an appeal to Innocent III., protesting their orthodoxy. Their appeal was not successful, for they were formally condemned by the Lateran council of 1215.
The earliest definite account given of the Waldensian opinion is that of the inquisitor Sacconi about 1250.[1] He divides them into two classes: those north of the Alps and those of Lombardy. The first class hold (1) that oaths are forbidden by the gospel, (2) that capital punishment is not allowed to the civil power, (3) that any layman may consecrate the sacrament of the altar, and (4) that the Roman Church is not the Church of Christ. The Lombard sect went farther in (3) and (4), holding that no one in mortal sin could consecrate the sacrament, and that the Roman Church was the scarlet woman of the Apocalypse, whose precepts ought not to be obeyed, especially those appointing fast-days. This account sufficiently shows the difference of the Waldenses from the Cathari: they were opposed to asceticism, and had no official priesthood; at the same time their objection to oaths and to capital punishment are closely related to the principles of the Cathari. Their other opinions were forced upon them by their conflict with the authority of the Church. When forbidden to preach without the permission of the bishop, they were driven to assert the right of all to preach, without distinction of age or sex. This led to the further step of setting up personal merit rather than ecclesiastical ordination as the ground of the priestly office. From this followed again the conclusion that obedience was not due to an unworthy priest, and that his ministrations were invalid.
These opinions were subversive of the system of the medieval church, and were naturally viewed with great disfavour by its officials; but it cannot fairly be said that they have much in common with the opinions of the Reformers of the 16th century. The medieval church set forth Christ as present in the orderly community of the faithful; Protestantism aimed at setting the individual in immediate communion with Christ, without the mechanical intervention of the officers of the community; the Waldenses merely set forward a new criterion of the orderly arrangement of the church, according to which each member was to sit in judgment on the works of the ministers, and consequently on the validity of their ministerial acts. It was a rude way of expressing a desire for a more spiritual community. The earliest known document proceeding from the Waldensians is an account of a conference held at Bergamo in 1218 between the Ultramontane and the Lombard divisions, in which the Lombards showed a greater opposition to the recognized priesthood than did their northern brethren.[2]
As these opinions became more pronounced persecution became more severe, and the breach between the Waldenses and the church widened. The Waldenses withdrew altogether from the ministrations of the church, and chose ministers for themselves whose merits were recognized by the body of the faithful. Election took the place of ordination, but even here the Lombards showed their difference from the Ultramontanes, and recognized only two orders, like the Cathari, while the northern body kept the old three orders of bishops, priests and deacons. Gradually the separation from the church became more complete: the sacraments were regarded as merely symbolical; the priests became helpers of the faithful; ceremonies disappeared; and a new religious society arose equally unlike the medieval church and the Protestantism of the 16th century.
The spread of these heretical sects led to resolute attempts at their suppression. The crusade against the Albigensians could destroy prosperous cities and hand over lands from a heedless lord to one who was obedient to the church; but it could not get rid of heresy. The revival of preaching, which was the work of the order of St Dominic, did more to combat heresy, especially where its persuasions were enforced by law. The work of inquisition into cases of heresy proceeded slowly in the hands of the bishops, who were too busy with other matters to find much time for sitting in judgment on theological points about which they were imperfectly informed. The greatest blow struck against heresy was the transference of the duty of inquiry into heresy from the bishops to Dominican inquisitors. The secular power, which shared in the proceeds of the confiscation of those who were found guilty of heresy, was ready to help in carrying out the judgments of the spiritual courts. Everywhere, and especially in the district round Toulouse, heretics were keenly prosecuted, and before the continued zeal of persecution the Waldenses slowly disappeared from the chief centres of population and tcok refuge in the retired valleys of the Alps. There, in the recesses of Piedmont, where the streams of the Pelice, the Angrogne, the Clusone and others cleave the sides of the Alps into valleys which converge at Susa, a settlement of the Waldensians was made who gave their name to these valleys of the Vaudois. In the more accessible regions north and south heresy was exposed to a steady process of persecution, and tended to assume shifting forms. Among the valleys it was less easily reached, and retained its old organization and its old contents. Little settlements of heretics dispersed throughout Italy and Provence looked to the valleys as a place of refuge, and tacitly regarded them as the centre of their faith. At times attempts were made to suppress the sect of the Vaudois, but the nature of the country which they inhabited, their obscurity and their isolation made the difficulties of their suppression greater than the advantages to be gained from it. However, in 1487 Innocent VIII. issued a bull for their extermination, and Alberto de' Capitanei, archdeacon of Cremona, put himself at the head of a crusade against them. Attacked in Dauphine and Piedmont at the same time, the Vaudois were hard pressed; but luckily their enemies were encircled by a fog when marching upon their chief refuge in the valley of the Angrogne, and were repulsed with great loss. After this Charles II., duke of Piedmont, interfered to save his territories from further confusion, and promised the Vaudois peace. They were, however, sorely reduced by the onslaught which had been made upon them, and lost their ancient spirit of independence. When the Lutheran movement began they were ready to sympathize with it, and ultimately to adapt their old
