Chapter 26: Christs and Reformers: Popular Resistance to the Institutional Church

By confirming the personal and temporal authority of the lax priests, bishops and collaborators, against whom Tertullian, Hippolyte, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Novatian, Donat and those faithful to popular Christianity had rebelled, the Church loosed upon the world — with the mission of circumventing kings, lords and worldly owners — a horde of clerics who were most often avid and unscrupulous.

The intention of Gregoire of Tours’ Historia Francorum was to draft an devastating affidavit concerning clerical morals in Sixth Century Gaul. With rare exceptions, the men in question were merely debauched parish priests and dignitaries, looters and murderers — rivals in violence and deception with the masters of the earth — who attempted the extract the greatest possible profit from the peasants and artisans. While the purely formal reprobation of the Bishop of Tours relieved his own bad conscience — for pages he deplored the fact that conditions had not permitted him to remedy a state of affairs that he condemned from the depths of his heart — , the lay people, the monks and the priests who, sensitive to the misery of their parishioners, invested themselves in a sacred mission, of which the Church showed itself (in their eyes) to be unworthy. Their intention would end up inspiring in Rome (but only in the course of the Sixth Century) a reformist politics, the goals of which — to suppress the sale of the sacraments and the purchase of ecclesiastical offices, and to constrain the priests to celibacy — also responded to the desire to free the Church, the parishes and monasteries from their dependence upon monarchs and nobles, who were the masters of all levels of ecclesiastical denomination. The idea that ordination did not suffice to absolve the priest of the duty to lead an exemplary and “apostolic” life would only fit comfortably with the views of Rome after the Council of Trent, which came after the success of the moral campaign of the Reformation.

The Christ Of Bourges

In his chronicle of the year 591, Gregoire, Bishop of Tours, reported that an inhabitant of Bourges, exhausted in a forest, experienced a kind of traumatism or ecstasy upon seeing himself suddenly surrounded by a swarm of flies or wasps.[320] (The same phenomenon was evoked in the revelation of the peasant of Vertus. [See below.])

Living in a state of shock for two years, this man finally reached the Arles region, where, dressed in animal hides, he lived like a hermit and reserved all his time for prayer. At the end of a long period of asceticism, he claimed that he was invested with the supernatural gifts to heal and prophetize.

Wandering through Cevennes and le Gevaudan, he presented himself as the reincarnated Christ and consecrated his country in the name of Mary.

Gregoire attributes to the demon the exceptional powers that he demonstrated, and that drew to him a growing number of partisans. The man distributed to the poor gold, money and clothing (with which his wealthy believers had honored him).

The chronicler accused him of having formed and led an armed band that pillaged the towns and killed the priests. Aurelius, Bishop of Puy — before whom the army of the Christ surged — sent to him an ambassador who assassinated him through treachery. His partisans having been massacred or dispersed, Mary, subjected to torture, avowed that this Christ had resorted to diabolical proceedings so as to assure his control over the people.

Gregoire himself admitted to having met several of these saints of the Last Days, who awakened a fleeting hope among the people who, due to their miserable lot in the ordinary course of wars, pillage, torture, famine, epidemics and death, were quite naturally disposed to sedition, which was reined in by the apostolic seal of the divine.[321]

Aldebert

In 744, Winfrid, much later sanctified under the name Boniface, united in Soissons — with the approval of Pope Zacharias and the Frankish Kings Pepin and Carloman — a synod intended to break the popular movement of the monk named Aldebert.[322]

A wandering preacher, self-avowed monk and practicer of voluntary poverty, Aldebert was attacked by the Bishops of Soissons, who prohibited him from preaching in the churches.

Aldebert then erected crosses in the countryside, at the foot of which he addressed crowds seduced by his remarks. Soon his faithful built little chapels, then churches, in which he could preach.

To those who heard him, he affirmed having been invested with divine grace from the bosom of his mother. In the manner of Mary, and in the fashion reported in the gospels of the childhood [of Jesus], she placed him in the world through the right flank, by this designating him to be the second Christ. Aldebert’s privileged relationship with God was expressed in a prayer that Boniface retranscribed for the Pope’s sake. In it, Aldebert evoked the support of the angels, thanks to whom he obtained — for himself and his faithful — the grace of being fulfilled in his desires. Like King Abgar, Aldebert kept a personal letter from Jesus, from which he derived his own teachings.

The synodal report noted with disdain that the simple people and the women were neglecting to follow the priests and bishops. They seemed to follow a cult of nature that competed with the traditional trade in relics, because they deemed precious and preserved the fingernail clippings and locks of hair with which Aldebert gratified them.

Arrested and condemned by the synod of Soissons in 744, Aldebert managed to escape. The following year, another synod presided over by Boniface and King Carloman would excommunicate him but without appreciable results, because, in 745, a synod in Rome of twenty-seven bishops presided over by Pope Zacharias himself decided to declare Aldebert mad, no doubt due to the difficulty of raging against so popular a man, whose disciples had not ceased to grow. One knows nothing of his end, but in 746 an ambassador of King Pepin, who was close to the Pope, attested to the persistant vogue for the Christ in North France.

Leuthard

While the Bogomile missionaries, who were Slavic or Byzantine merchants, began to propagate their doctrine in Germany, France and Italy around 1000, the example of Leuthard — a peasant from Vertus in Champagne — is less the first manifestation of Catharism than [the most recent in] the tradition of wandering messiahs and prophets.

One day Leuthard returned from the fields, after having an illumination, (*) and decided to leave his wife and break the crucifix of his church. With a sudden eloquence, nourished by the feeling of having the word [parole] of God, he preached a return to the apostolic virtues. He enjoined his many adepts to no longer pay tithes and to accord no faith in the Old Testament.

(*) Raoul Glauber says that Leuthard (somewhat like the Messiah of Bourges) was surrounded by a swarm of bees, as attested to by folklore and tales.

Arrested in 1004 and taken before Bishop Gebuin II of Chalons (an instructed and cunning man), Leuthard became aware of the vanity of his enterprise; he found himself alone, habitually described as mad; he threw himself into a well that same year.

Leuthard’s rejection of the cross, the Old Testament and marriage does not suggest — beyond the ordinary condemnations of the Church and tithes — the possibly confused influence of Bogomilism. In the same way that, less than a century later, peasants in the Chalons region fell under the accusation of Catharism. But it is true that, around 1025, the Italian Gandulf openly preached Bogomilism.

Eudes De L’etoile, Or Eudo De Stella

Originally from Loudeac in Britain, perhaps from minor nobility, Eudes preached in the name of Christ against the priests and monks in 1145 or so, while Bernard of Clairvaux was hastening to restore the monastical orders and the clergy to dignity and holy appearance. Eudes lived in a community that was supposedly quite numerous, and exalted asceticism and the evangelical life.

His faithful called him the Lord of Lords. At a time when the myth of an immanent justice nourished the hopes of the disinherited, Eudes came to judge the living and the dead. Chroniclers have mocked his completely personal interpretation of the formula for exorcism: “Per eum qui venturus est judicare vivos et mortuous,” which meant, according to him, “Through Eudes, who will come to judge the living and the dead.” What have we got here, other than a Jewish, Gnostic or Judeo-Christian exegesis of the Bible? Wasn’t this the way that the famous evangelical truths were taken from Hebrew and Aramaic midrashim?

In the forests in which his partisans took refuge as if in a new “desert,” Eudes founded a Church with archbishops and bishops to whom he gave such names as Wisdom, Knowledge, and Judgment, each endowed with a singular Gnostic connotation. (A systematic study, in the manner of [Robert] Graves, of all Christian mythology would show the progress, nay, the wandering, the recreation, the reoccurrence and the transformation of [certain] fundamental themes.)

While Bretagne, ravaged by famine in 1144 and 1145, was prey to pillage and brigandage, the partisans of Eudes conducted the raids that, destroying churches and monasteries, assured their own subsistance.

According to William of Newburg, Eudes and his faithful lived in luxury, were magnificently dressed and [lived] in a state of “perfect joy,” an expression that perhaps suggests a faraway influence of the Bogomiles or Cathars, but one must remember that William drafted his chronicle 50 years after the events he describes.[323]

Like Paul of Samosate or Gaianus, Eudes celebrated Mass in his own name. An even more curious trait: he possessed a scepter in the form of a Y. The two branches of the fork elevated towards heaven meant that two tiers of the world belonged to God and one tier belonged to Eudes. The proportion was inverted in the contrary movement, conferring upon Eudes a nearly absolute power over the world, which was the old dream of the Marcosians, Simon of Samaria, and the Barbelites: memories of ancient trinitary conceptions that were no doubt unfamiliar to the gentleman from Breton.

As is frequently the case when fatuity has the upper hand on the quest for a richer life, Eudes was confronted by the representatives of the Church who met sin Rouen in 1148. Thrown in the archbishop’s prison, he perished there from hunger and ill-treatment. His partisans, arrested, died on the pyre.

Two Reformers: Pierre De Bruys And Henri Du Mans

While the new towns attempted to use insurrection to obtain the independence that was refused them by the lay lords and the prince-bishops — who were increasingly objects of a growing hatred because they, residing in the city, publicly insulted the Church’s principles of holiness through their dissolute morals and rapacity — , preachers wandered around France, where peasants and artisans were the most disposed to receive their messages. Two figures, identified by ecclesiastical repression, stand out from the others, who remain unknown: independent preachers, communalist agitators, Bogomile missionaries, and Cathars, who denounced clerics and monks attached to the privileges of Rome, who in their turn, stipended by the Church, hunted down heretics.

Around 1105, Pierre de Bruys, an old Provencal priest, traveled the south of France, preaching especially on the eastern side of the Rhone. He called for the destruction of churches, because one could pray just as well in a youth hostel or a stable. He burned crosses, instruments of the martyrdom of the Christ, the symbolism of which only too perfectly accorded itself with the cruel oppression of the Church.

The dead had no need of prayer [for Pierre de Bruys]. What value were the sacraments administered by priests who most often were themselves unworthy, and why did not faith assure the salvation of the faithful, who were so badly served by the clergy of Rome?

Not content with encouraging the traditional refusal to pay tithes (which itself sufficed to bring about accusations of heresy), Pierre de Bruys denounced the market in penitence and indulgences.

He thus attracted the animosity of Cluny, where Bernard de Claivaux was simultaneously moralizing to the clergy about the respect and obedience that were due to the dignitaries of the clergy, and inciting ad capiendos vulpes to capture the foxes of heresy. The Council of Toulouse would condemn Pierre’s doctrine in 1119, no doubt due to the agitation that he had fomented, in the course of which (one believes) he met his disciple and successor, Henri du Mans.

Pierre de Bruys perished in an ambush near the Abbey of Sant-Gilles, where he preached around 1126. A faction probably incited by Cluny seized him and lynched him, before throwing his body into a pyre. (The cross sculpted on the tympanum of the Cathedral, then being constructed, was erected in defiance of Peter’s partisans, who denounced the cross’s morbid and mortifying character.)

Several years later, Pierre the Venerable, Abbey of Cluny, would distribute a Treatise against the Petrobrusians that justified the [repression of the] doctrines adopted by Henri du Mans, around whom the partisans of Pierre de Bruys rallied. The Councils of Pisa (1134) and Lateran (1139) would make the condemnation precise.

Deceased around 1148, Henri du Mans (also called Henri de Lausanne) founded his agitation on communalist struggles that opposed the cities to the Church and the terrestrial aristocracy, which was often hostile to the emerging bourgeoisie. His doctrine, which was perfectly coherent, mixed ideas defended by Pierre de Bruys with elements derived from Bogomilism, and prepared the way for Catharism, nay, the competing movement, Valdeism.

The origins of Henri du Mans remain obscure. A monk or hermit, he was highly cultured; Bernard de Clairvaux called him litteratus. Perhaps he preached in Lausanne against the general corruption of the clergy and in the Petrobrusian spirit that opposed the ekklesia, identified with a community of believers, to the Roman Church. In 1116, the success of Henri’s predictions in Mans worried Bishop Hildebert of Lavardin, who prohibited him from preaching. Henri ignored him and enjoyed, it seems, a considerable role in the government of the city. It is probable that the bishops at first tolerated some of Henri’s reforms. As Pope Innocent III had recommended raising the moral state of prostitutes and saving them from scorn, Henri persuaded them to cut their hair, burn their rich clothes, and divest themselves of their finery. The sect offered them an outfit and their adepts married these “impure” women, without dowries. In place of marriage, the celebration as Henri prescribed it was accomplished with the mutual consent and sincere union of their hearts.

A clear break with the misogyny harbored by the Church participated in this courteous current, which, even today, is only superficially studied, but was certainly noticed by the court of Champagne, where Andrew the Chaplain (*) treated it antithetically to the way it was treated in the Languedoc, where the freedom of women was translated into the juridical domain, as well.

(*) A Twelfth Century Champenois cleric, the author of De amore (around 1185) in two parts: one that exalted women and carnal love, another that collated the most excessive instances of misogyny.

Henri’s exaltation of apostolic virtues did not tip over into ascetic rigor, because he estimated — contrary to the Cathars — that the flesh merited neither an excess of dignity nor an excess of indignity.

In 1116, chased from the town, or leaving it voluntarily (one isn’t sure), Henri traveled in Poitou, Bordelais and the region of Albi. No doubt he participated in the agitation in Toulouse, where it is possible that encountering Pierre de Bruys radicalized his evangelical doctrine. In 1119, the Council of Toulouse thrashed Henri’s “errors.” It seems that, at the same time, his partisans were sacking churches, demolishing altars, burning the crosses and roughing up the Church’s representatives.

Arrested by the Archbishop of Arles, Henri was brought before the Council of Pisa; put before Bernard de Clairvaux, Henri feigned that he accepted his arguments and agreed to enter Citeaux, so as to avoid prison, if not the pyre.

He soon escaped and returned to Provence. If we believe the words of Bernard de Clairvaux, who was resolved to finish off the Henricians, Toulouse lived under the influence of this reformer. It is true that the Count did not discourage the anti-Roman movement, which was widely popular and from which Catharism would freely benefit. One doesn’t know if Henri fell into the hands of Cardinal Alberic, papal legatee of Rome, who had sworn Henri’s downfall. His traces disappear in 1144.

Around 1135, a community in Liege claimed the Henrician doctrine for itself: the rejection of the baptism of infants and prayers for the dead, and the refusal of the sacrament of marriage in the name of the union of hearts.

Like the Bogomiles, Henri was inclined to reject the Old Testament. His condemnation of the ornamental luxury of the churches, to which Bernard de Calirvaux had subscribed, announced the voluntary poverty of the Vaudois.