HERETICAL GROUPS OF THEMIDDLE AGES
07 May, 2010
During the middle Ages there were many groups active outside the institutional Church. These groups broke away from the church, mainly because of differences on the church doctrine. They criticised the church and propagated their own ideas. They were branded heretical
Historical and Theological Background.
Heresy was introduced to such statements as the Apostles’ Creed, Do not crucify the Apostles; it does prepare some of the fundamental teachings of the Christian faith. And in the role it was repeated by the Baptismal candidates prior to the middle of the second century. Alongside the creed was a rule of faith which was a short statement of the main practice of Christianity. It served as a paraphrase and extension of the apostle’s creed. From the later part of the second century it served in various forms in the churches generally as a shield against heretical purpose of the accepted doctrine. The council of Nicene 3 –518 formed by the Emperor of Constantine started in the teaching of Aliens. These alienisms brought the unit of the Christian church. The main emphasis of this creed is Histological. It emphasises the sanction of and states that Christ is begotten. This term is strengthened by the word “not man”. The son is declared to be one substance like the father. In addition to the word became less and hardly praised and was made man. The most famous and influential theologian in the Alien controversy was Bonsais 296-373.He was prepared to stand alone to defend the church.
1. Priscillians
2. Bogomils
Bibliography
©2010 All rights reserved
During the middle Ages there were many groups active outside the institutional Church. These groups broke away from the church, mainly because of differences on the church doctrine. They criticised the church and propagated their own ideas. They were branded heretical
Historical and Theological Background.
Heresy was introduced to such statements as the Apostles’ Creed, Do not crucify the Apostles; it does prepare some of the fundamental teachings of the Christian faith. And in the role it was repeated by the Baptismal candidates prior to the middle of the second century. Alongside the creed was a rule of faith which was a short statement of the main practice of Christianity. It served as a paraphrase and extension of the apostle’s creed. From the later part of the second century it served in various forms in the churches generally as a shield against heretical purpose of the accepted doctrine. The council of Nicene 3 –518 formed by the Emperor of Constantine started in the teaching of Aliens. These alienisms brought the unit of the Christian church. The main emphasis of this creed is Histological. It emphasises the sanction of and states that Christ is begotten. This term is strengthened by the word “not man”. The son is declared to be one substance like the father. In addition to the word became less and hardly praised and was made man. The most famous and influential theologian in the Alien controversy was Bonsais 296-373.He was prepared to stand alone to defend the church.
1. Priscillians
2. Bogomils
Bibliography
©2010 All rights reserved
Read more.
In order to understand the historical and theological background of the historical groups in the Middle Ages, we must go back to the New Testament teachings and early historic Church. It is all conviction and we all submit ourselves to the teachings of God’s word given by the installation of the Holly spirit, but we are able to deal accurately with ideas such as orthodox or heresy.
Orthodoxy can be defined as accepted views especially on religion not heretical or original. According to saints source herecy is opinion contrary to the doctrine of Christian Church. Heresy comes from the Greek parishes’ choice. In the early historic church, it appear the Baptism confession of those publicly confessing and about to join the Christian church was simple statement, “Jesus Christ is not lord”. We have that formula in passages such as in the Philippians chapter2verse 11.This was the early confession of the early church.
Manicheans was the child of manioc born 216AD who for considerable period of time enjoyed Royal patronage. From the Persian Empire from which he was born, his teachings spread to Egypt during his time and afterwards by the 8th century had reached China. The teachings contain six books and letters which make the Manichean cannon. According to mania there are two eternal principles light and dark. These are opposed one to the other. Manicheans seems to have Buddhists source. In 276 AD he was put to death.
The term Heresy was made to apply to a multitude of teaching all from religious theologians. A comprehensive catalogue of the various forms of Herecy is long and complicated. The term heresy can be categorised as those which were founded on Manicheasim, Lekuid, pantaism, academics which only affected the universities, a whole group which was nothing but expression God psychological cravings, those of the spiritual system and others connected witchcraft and sorcery. And the group heresies nearest came during the 16thcentuy inspired by the popular of the Gospels.
The following were the major groups which were termed heretical by the Institutional Church:
This group was founded by a man known as Priscilla. He was a heretical bishop of Avilla in “Hispania Tarraconensis”. He was of noble birth, rich, learned, pious, ascetic, and eloquent. He was influenced by Gnostic doctrines brought to Spain by an Egyptian named Marcus.
In the eyes of the orthodox he was soon judged a heretic. He caused real problems to the church, since his view and influence were widely spread. He soon had many followers (Priscillianists) who included a few bishops. Eight of the canons of the council of Saragossa (380) were directly against them. They retaliated by consecrating Priscillian Bishop of Avila.
In 381, the Church and empire combined to force the Priscillianists now accused of teaching Manichaeism into exile in France. They appealed to different authorities and finally were restored. Priscilla was tried by the Order at Trier, and found guilty of using “magic art” (associated with Gnosticism). He was put to death with six others in 385. They were the first people to suffer death as heretics in the history of Christianity. They were buried in Spain, given a martyr burial.
Priscillians was condemned at the council of Toledo in 400 and was still flourishing in 447. Modern scholarship is divided on the question of whether Priscillian was a heretic or merely an eccentric enthusiast. His doctrines are only known through the statements of others, since manuscripts attributed to him are probably not genuinely his.
This is a group that arose towards the later part of the eleventh century, especially in Bulgaria and was considered heretical by the Eastern Orthodox Church. The organiser of the new movement it appears was a priest named Bogomils. His name means “beloved of god”. Much that is known about them comes from hostile writers sympathetic to the established church of the day. Their views of the sacraments were in some ways similar to several protestant groups in later centuries both in Western Europe and in America.
The Bogomils opposed the sacramental materialism of the church. They rejected water baptism as well as the material elements used in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. Instead they advocated a spiritual baptism which was conferred by the laying of a gospel of John on the head of the recipient and the chanting of the Lord’s Prayer. Likewise, the Lord’s Supper was to be practiced spiritually for the bread and the wine could not be transubstantiated into the blood of Christ.
The non-acceptance of almost all of the Old Testament by the Bogomiles bears close resemblance to the views of the Paulicians, another heretical group in Eastern Christianity. The patriarchs in the Pentateuch, the Bogomiles stated, were in reality inspired by Satan. Satan was originally at the right hand of God but was expelled because of his revolutionaly planning. The creation of the earth was given to Satan so that all of creation becomes basically evil, including the human body. Only things of the spirit would be considered good. Birth is the imprisonment of the good spirit in evil flesh as punishment for sins in a pre-existent state. They despised marriage although they permitted it in the case of less than perfect believers. As part of this logic, sex would also be considered wrong. Moses and John the Baptist according to Bogomil teaching were both servants of Satanael. But God sent Logos, his second son, to save humanity from the control of Satanael. Although satanael killed the incarnate Logos (Jesus), his spiritual body was resurrected to the right hand of God. Satanael in this way was defeated.
The natural result of such an incorrect interpretation of scripture led to a definite dualism of two world principles, good and evil in contention throughout creation. Bogomils flourished in Bulgaria when it was an independent country in the tenth and the thirteenth centuries. When the Turks destroyed the Bulgarian Empire in the 13th century the sect of Bogomils disappeared.
3. Cathari (Albigensians)
The Cathars (Greek katharoi, ’puritans’) flourished in Western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries’ .In Bulgaria they were called Bogomiles while in France Albigensians. Like the Manicheans, they believed in two gods, a good god who created the invisible spiritual world, and an evil god who created the visible material world. Matter, including the human body was evil and was ruled by the evil god whom the Cathars identified with the God of the Old Testament. He had, they claimed, imprisoned the human soul in its earthly body, and death merely caused the soul to migrate to another body human or animal. Salvation could be attained only by breaking free from this miserable cycle and Christ, the son of the good God had been sent by him to reveal to the human race the way of this salvation. Christ was a live giving spirit whose earthly body was only an appearance.
The Cathars accepted the New Testament and various Christian teachings but of course they rejected the incarnation and the sacraments since they made the soul to escape the spirit and matter. The one Cathar sacrament which they believed enabled the soul to escape from the evil material world was the consolamentum or spiritual baptism administered by the laying on of hands. This they held was the baptism instituted by Christ which gave to recipients the holly spirit, removed their original sin and enabled them on death to enter the pure world of spirit and be united with the good God.
The consolamentum had been handed down from the apostles by a succession of good men but the church had perverted Christ’s teachings and ordinances and was enslaved by the evil god of matter.
The cantharis was divided into two classes. The perfect, who had received the consolamentum and the believers who had not. The former lived in strict poverty as ascetics involving chastity, frequent fasts, vegetarianism and the renunciation of marriage and oaths. They received unquestioning obedience and great veneration from the believers as the perfect alone could pray directly to God. Most believers delayed receiving the consolamentum until they were in danger of death, as the rigour necessary among the perfect was too much for them.
After 1100 and especially after 1140, Catharism spread through Western Europe gaining its greatest strength in northern Italy and Southern France where it developed an advanced organization. The French Cathars were called ‘Albigensians’, being most numerous in the District of Albi. The Holiness and simplicity of the perfect undoubtedly contrasted with the riches of the Catholic church and the corruptions of many of its clergy and large numbers must have found that Catharism answered their spiritual needs in away that Catholicism did not. By 1200 it seemed possible that southern France might become entirely Cathar as the Cathars were protected by the sophisticated and anti-clerical merchants and nobles notably the count of Toulouse.
The church and the papacy were naturally alarmed by the rapid growth of the Cathars. In 1208 pope Innocent III launched a crusade against it in southern France. The crusade was successful destroying Cathar political power by 1250 and ruining the civilization of the area in the process. After the crusade, the Inquisition was established in 1231-33 to root out heresy by relentless persecution. However, the preaching of the newly established friars was also effective in winning people from catharsis and in Italy this was the chief cause of its disappearance in the late fourteenth century.
4. Waldensians.
A wealthy merchant of Lyons who came to be known as Peter Waldo or Valdes, experienced conversion about 1175 or 1176.He gave away his world goods and decided to follow the example of Christ by leading a simple life of poverty and preaching. He had translations made from the Latin New Testament into vernacular which formed the basis of his evangelism.
Similarly dedicated men and women rallied to him and this ideal of illiterate lay folk living in simple poverty was given the approval of Pope Alexander III at the third Lateran Council (1179). The pope added a condition, however that they must first obtain the permission and supervision of local church authorities before engaging in preaching. The Waldensians spread the message of the Bible and exalted the virtues of poverty. By so doing they were a living condemnation of the wealth and laxity of the established church. Waldo’s original aims were entirely orthodox.
When the Archbishop of Lyons prohibited their scriptural preaching around 1181, the Waldensians responded by preaching even more zealously. In taking upon themselves the role of the church, expounding the Bible, they shared a trait common to many other medieval dissenters. By living lives of poverty they only emphasized the worldliness of many clergy. The 1181 condemnation was an excommunication of 1181 at Verona, this time by pope Lucius 111 who also directed that the Waldensians and other similar groups should be eliminated by Episcopal inquisition and secular punishment. In not much more than a decade, what had begun as an enthusiastic popular movement had been branded as heresy. Before long Waldo himself faded from the picture although the movement he founded went on increasing in membership and self-confidence to survive both medieval and modern persecution.
The Waldensians fled from Lyons rather than submit. They started to organise the movement as a church with bishops, priests and deacons. Eventually they began to claim to be the ‘true’ church. They spread throughout two regions of Europe notorious for unorthodox beliefs, Lombardy and Provence. These were also regions of Cathar strength. Their growth was something the reigning pope, the powerful Innocent III, would not allow.
Although some Waldensians were re-converted to the established church following a debate in 1207, Pope Innocent readily received them back and gave them his special protection, this success was not to be repeated. In 1214 he described the Waldensians as heretics and schismatics and in 1215 at the great Fourth Lateran Council; Innocent III repeated the general denunciation of heretics including waldensians.
As for the Waldensians, such outbursts by the pope only tended to convince them that the Catholic Church was the ‘whore of Babylon’ and need not to be acknowledged. The Waldensians had expanded so far geographically and doctrinally that in 1218 they called a general council at Bergamo (Italy) where certain doctrinal differences between the Waldensians of Lombardy and France were discussed. By the end of the thirteenth century, though hounded by the newly strengthened Inquisition, the Waldensians had infiltrated practically the whole of Europe except Britain, and had become one of the most common and widespread persecuted movements.
What the Waldensians believed in
The doctrines which distinguished the Waldensians and which the church considered heretical were however simple in origin, many and varied and some were altered during the later middle ages. The greatest objection to the Waldensians who began within the church was that they ended by rejecting the church altogether. The unauthorized preaching of the Bible and the rejection of the intermediary role of the clergy were the two fundamental issues which gained the Waldensians the description of heretics.
One of the most convenient sources of their doctrines is a treatise written about 1320 by Bernard Gui, a famous inquisitor of Southern France at a time when the Waldensians were still among the strongest of dissident movements. Obviously he writes as a critical outsider. Gui emphasized that the Waldensians rejected ecclesiastical authority especially by their conviction that they were not subject to the pope or his decrees of excommunication. They rejected or re-interpreted for themselves all the catholic sacraments except confession and absolution and the Eucharist. In theory all Waldensians men or women could administer these sacraments and the Eucharist was usually held only once a year. There seems also to have been some kind of Waldensians baptism.
All catholic feast days, festivals and prayers were rejected as human creations and not based on the New Testament. They made exceptions in the case of Sundays, the feast-day of Mary the mother of Christ and the Lord’s Prayer. Gui accused them of setting themselves up as an alternative church in which the priest was simply the good individual rather than someone in clerical orders.
These groups grew in numbers. They were mainly opposed to the doctrine of the church. They also rejected human government as wicked and evil. They accused church and the state for being insensitive to the suffering of the people who lacked basic needs. These groups identified themselves with the suffering which made many people to turn away from the church. These led church and the state to be threatened. And the church and state came together and eventually it led to inquisitions of the groups.
1. Dowley, T. (ed); The History of Christianity
2. Douglas, D(ed) 1978.The New International Dictionary of the Christian Church ‘Exeter, The Paternoster Press
3. Carter, C.S, and Weeks G.E. A, (ed) 1933: The Protestant Dictionary; London, The Harrison Trust
4. George, L. 1995: The Encyclopaedia of Heresies and Heretics; London, Robinson Books
5. Channels.J R, 1997: A new Handbook of living Religions: London, Penguin Books
6. Metford, J C J, 1983: Dictionary of Christian Lore and Legend; London, Thames and Hudson.
7. Sinclair.M(ed) 1998; Collins English Dictionary, Harper Collin Publishers.
In order to understand the historical and theological background of the historical groups in the Middle Ages, we must go back to the New Testament teachings and early historic Church. It is all conviction and we all submit ourselves to the teachings of God’s word given by the installation of the Holly spirit, but we are able to deal accurately with ideas such as orthodox or heresy.
Orthodoxy can be defined as accepted views especially on religion not heretical or original. According to saints source herecy is opinion contrary to the doctrine of Christian Church. Heresy comes from the Greek parishes’ choice. In the early historic church, it appear the Baptism confession of those publicly confessing and about to join the Christian church was simple statement, “Jesus Christ is not lord”. We have that formula in passages such as in the Philippians chapter2verse 11.This was the early confession of the early church.
Manicheans was the child of manioc born 216AD who for considerable period of time enjoyed Royal patronage. From the Persian Empire from which he was born, his teachings spread to Egypt during his time and afterwards by the 8th century had reached China. The teachings contain six books and letters which make the Manichean cannon. According to mania there are two eternal principles light and dark. These are opposed one to the other. Manicheans seems to have Buddhists source. In 276 AD he was put to death.
The term Heresy was made to apply to a multitude of teaching all from religious theologians. A comprehensive catalogue of the various forms of Herecy is long and complicated. The term heresy can be categorised as those which were founded on Manicheasim, Lekuid, pantaism, academics which only affected the universities, a whole group which was nothing but expression God psychological cravings, those of the spiritual system and others connected witchcraft and sorcery. And the group heresies nearest came during the 16thcentuy inspired by the popular of the Gospels.
The following were the major groups which were termed heretical by the Institutional Church:
This group was founded by a man known as Priscilla. He was a heretical bishop of Avilla in “Hispania Tarraconensis”. He was of noble birth, rich, learned, pious, ascetic, and eloquent. He was influenced by Gnostic doctrines brought to Spain by an Egyptian named Marcus.
In the eyes of the orthodox he was soon judged a heretic. He caused real problems to the church, since his view and influence were widely spread. He soon had many followers (Priscillianists) who included a few bishops. Eight of the canons of the council of Saragossa (380) were directly against them. They retaliated by consecrating Priscillian Bishop of Avila.
In 381, the Church and empire combined to force the Priscillianists now accused of teaching Manichaeism into exile in France. They appealed to different authorities and finally were restored. Priscilla was tried by the Order at Trier, and found guilty of using “magic art” (associated with Gnosticism). He was put to death with six others in 385. They were the first people to suffer death as heretics in the history of Christianity. They were buried in Spain, given a martyr burial.
Priscillians was condemned at the council of Toledo in 400 and was still flourishing in 447. Modern scholarship is divided on the question of whether Priscillian was a heretic or merely an eccentric enthusiast. His doctrines are only known through the statements of others, since manuscripts attributed to him are probably not genuinely his.
This is a group that arose towards the later part of the eleventh century, especially in Bulgaria and was considered heretical by the Eastern Orthodox Church. The organiser of the new movement it appears was a priest named Bogomils. His name means “beloved of god”. Much that is known about them comes from hostile writers sympathetic to the established church of the day. Their views of the sacraments were in some ways similar to several protestant groups in later centuries both in Western Europe and in America.
The Bogomils opposed the sacramental materialism of the church. They rejected water baptism as well as the material elements used in the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper. Instead they advocated a spiritual baptism which was conferred by the laying of a gospel of John on the head of the recipient and the chanting of the Lord’s Prayer. Likewise, the Lord’s Supper was to be practiced spiritually for the bread and the wine could not be transubstantiated into the blood of Christ.
The non-acceptance of almost all of the Old Testament by the Bogomiles bears close resemblance to the views of the Paulicians, another heretical group in Eastern Christianity. The patriarchs in the Pentateuch, the Bogomiles stated, were in reality inspired by Satan. Satan was originally at the right hand of God but was expelled because of his revolutionaly planning. The creation of the earth was given to Satan so that all of creation becomes basically evil, including the human body. Only things of the spirit would be considered good. Birth is the imprisonment of the good spirit in evil flesh as punishment for sins in a pre-existent state. They despised marriage although they permitted it in the case of less than perfect believers. As part of this logic, sex would also be considered wrong. Moses and John the Baptist according to Bogomil teaching were both servants of Satanael. But God sent Logos, his second son, to save humanity from the control of Satanael. Although satanael killed the incarnate Logos (Jesus), his spiritual body was resurrected to the right hand of God. Satanael in this way was defeated.
The natural result of such an incorrect interpretation of scripture led to a definite dualism of two world principles, good and evil in contention throughout creation. Bogomils flourished in Bulgaria when it was an independent country in the tenth and the thirteenth centuries. When the Turks destroyed the Bulgarian Empire in the 13th century the sect of Bogomils disappeared.
3. Cathari (Albigensians)
The Cathars (Greek katharoi, ’puritans’) flourished in Western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries’ .In Bulgaria they were called Bogomiles while in France Albigensians. Like the Manicheans, they believed in two gods, a good god who created the invisible spiritual world, and an evil god who created the visible material world. Matter, including the human body was evil and was ruled by the evil god whom the Cathars identified with the God of the Old Testament. He had, they claimed, imprisoned the human soul in its earthly body, and death merely caused the soul to migrate to another body human or animal. Salvation could be attained only by breaking free from this miserable cycle and Christ, the son of the good God had been sent by him to reveal to the human race the way of this salvation. Christ was a live giving spirit whose earthly body was only an appearance.
The Cathars accepted the New Testament and various Christian teachings but of course they rejected the incarnation and the sacraments since they made the soul to escape the spirit and matter. The one Cathar sacrament which they believed enabled the soul to escape from the evil material world was the consolamentum or spiritual baptism administered by the laying on of hands. This they held was the baptism instituted by Christ which gave to recipients the holly spirit, removed their original sin and enabled them on death to enter the pure world of spirit and be united with the good God.
The consolamentum had been handed down from the apostles by a succession of good men but the church had perverted Christ’s teachings and ordinances and was enslaved by the evil god of matter.
The cantharis was divided into two classes. The perfect, who had received the consolamentum and the believers who had not. The former lived in strict poverty as ascetics involving chastity, frequent fasts, vegetarianism and the renunciation of marriage and oaths. They received unquestioning obedience and great veneration from the believers as the perfect alone could pray directly to God. Most believers delayed receiving the consolamentum until they were in danger of death, as the rigour necessary among the perfect was too much for them.
After 1100 and especially after 1140, Catharism spread through Western Europe gaining its greatest strength in northern Italy and Southern France where it developed an advanced organization. The French Cathars were called ‘Albigensians’, being most numerous in the District of Albi. The Holiness and simplicity of the perfect undoubtedly contrasted with the riches of the Catholic church and the corruptions of many of its clergy and large numbers must have found that Catharism answered their spiritual needs in away that Catholicism did not. By 1200 it seemed possible that southern France might become entirely Cathar as the Cathars were protected by the sophisticated and anti-clerical merchants and nobles notably the count of Toulouse.
The church and the papacy were naturally alarmed by the rapid growth of the Cathars. In 1208 pope Innocent III launched a crusade against it in southern France. The crusade was successful destroying Cathar political power by 1250 and ruining the civilization of the area in the process. After the crusade, the Inquisition was established in 1231-33 to root out heresy by relentless persecution. However, the preaching of the newly established friars was also effective in winning people from catharsis and in Italy this was the chief cause of its disappearance in the late fourteenth century.
4. Waldensians.
A wealthy merchant of Lyons who came to be known as Peter Waldo or Valdes, experienced conversion about 1175 or 1176.He gave away his world goods and decided to follow the example of Christ by leading a simple life of poverty and preaching. He had translations made from the Latin New Testament into vernacular which formed the basis of his evangelism.
Similarly dedicated men and women rallied to him and this ideal of illiterate lay folk living in simple poverty was given the approval of Pope Alexander III at the third Lateran Council (1179). The pope added a condition, however that they must first obtain the permission and supervision of local church authorities before engaging in preaching. The Waldensians spread the message of the Bible and exalted the virtues of poverty. By so doing they were a living condemnation of the wealth and laxity of the established church. Waldo’s original aims were entirely orthodox.
When the Archbishop of Lyons prohibited their scriptural preaching around 1181, the Waldensians responded by preaching even more zealously. In taking upon themselves the role of the church, expounding the Bible, they shared a trait common to many other medieval dissenters. By living lives of poverty they only emphasized the worldliness of many clergy. The 1181 condemnation was an excommunication of 1181 at Verona, this time by pope Lucius 111 who also directed that the Waldensians and other similar groups should be eliminated by Episcopal inquisition and secular punishment. In not much more than a decade, what had begun as an enthusiastic popular movement had been branded as heresy. Before long Waldo himself faded from the picture although the movement he founded went on increasing in membership and self-confidence to survive both medieval and modern persecution.
The Waldensians fled from Lyons rather than submit. They started to organise the movement as a church with bishops, priests and deacons. Eventually they began to claim to be the ‘true’ church. They spread throughout two regions of Europe notorious for unorthodox beliefs, Lombardy and Provence. These were also regions of Cathar strength. Their growth was something the reigning pope, the powerful Innocent III, would not allow.
Although some Waldensians were re-converted to the established church following a debate in 1207, Pope Innocent readily received them back and gave them his special protection, this success was not to be repeated. In 1214 he described the Waldensians as heretics and schismatics and in 1215 at the great Fourth Lateran Council; Innocent III repeated the general denunciation of heretics including waldensians.
As for the Waldensians, such outbursts by the pope only tended to convince them that the Catholic Church was the ‘whore of Babylon’ and need not to be acknowledged. The Waldensians had expanded so far geographically and doctrinally that in 1218 they called a general council at Bergamo (Italy) where certain doctrinal differences between the Waldensians of Lombardy and France were discussed. By the end of the thirteenth century, though hounded by the newly strengthened Inquisition, the Waldensians had infiltrated practically the whole of Europe except Britain, and had become one of the most common and widespread persecuted movements.
What the Waldensians believed in
The doctrines which distinguished the Waldensians and which the church considered heretical were however simple in origin, many and varied and some were altered during the later middle ages. The greatest objection to the Waldensians who began within the church was that they ended by rejecting the church altogether. The unauthorized preaching of the Bible and the rejection of the intermediary role of the clergy were the two fundamental issues which gained the Waldensians the description of heretics.
One of the most convenient sources of their doctrines is a treatise written about 1320 by Bernard Gui, a famous inquisitor of Southern France at a time when the Waldensians were still among the strongest of dissident movements. Obviously he writes as a critical outsider. Gui emphasized that the Waldensians rejected ecclesiastical authority especially by their conviction that they were not subject to the pope or his decrees of excommunication. They rejected or re-interpreted for themselves all the catholic sacraments except confession and absolution and the Eucharist. In theory all Waldensians men or women could administer these sacraments and the Eucharist was usually held only once a year. There seems also to have been some kind of Waldensians baptism.
All catholic feast days, festivals and prayers were rejected as human creations and not based on the New Testament. They made exceptions in the case of Sundays, the feast-day of Mary the mother of Christ and the Lord’s Prayer. Gui accused them of setting themselves up as an alternative church in which the priest was simply the good individual rather than someone in clerical orders.
These groups grew in numbers. They were mainly opposed to the doctrine of the church. They also rejected human government as wicked and evil. They accused church and the state for being insensitive to the suffering of the people who lacked basic needs. These groups identified themselves with the suffering which made many people to turn away from the church. These led church and the state to be threatened. And the church and state came together and eventually it led to inquisitions of the groups.
1. Dowley, T. (ed); The History of Christianity
2. Douglas, D(ed) 1978.The New International Dictionary of the Christian Church ‘Exeter, The Paternoster Press
3. Carter, C.S, and Weeks G.E. A, (ed) 1933: The Protestant Dictionary; London, The Harrison Trust
4. George, L. 1995: The Encyclopaedia of Heresies and Heretics; London, Robinson Books
5. Channels.J R, 1997: A new Handbook of living Religions: London, Penguin Books
6. Metford, J C J, 1983: Dictionary of Christian Lore and Legend; London, Thames and Hudson.
7. Sinclair.M(ed) 1998; Collins English Dictionary, Harper Collin Publishers.