Religious Movements in the Middle Ages

Herbert Grundmann, Steven Rowan

• Publisher: University of Notre Dame Press
• Year: 1995
• Print ISBN: 9780268016531, 9780268016494
• eBook ISBN: 9780268080891
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: European Medieval History

Medievalists, historians, and women's studies specialists will welcome this translation of Herbert Grundmann's classic study of religious movements in the Middle Ages because it provides a much-needed history of medieval religious life--one that lies between the extremes of doctrinal classification and materialistic analysis--and because it represents the first major effort to underline the importance of women in the development of the language and practice of religion in the Middle Ages.

CHAPTER 1

The Religious Movement in the Twelfth Century: ‘‘Apostolic Life” and “Christian Poverty”

The movement for ecclesiastical reform under Gregory VII completed the structure or ordo of the hierarchical Church, which rested on the idea of apostolic succession, reserving the execution of Christian salvation to those who had been ordained to it either directly or indirectly by the successors of Peter and the apostles. At the same time, the monastic reform movement originating in Cluny had begun to transform monasticism from a plethora of separate religious houses relying on their own efforts into a unified, centralized association, integrated within the ecclesiastical hierarchy by placing the leading houses directly under the curia. Both movements, the hierarchical as well as the monastic reform of the eleventh century, did not prevail in a struggle against other religious ideas, but they did assert themselves in struggles against the claims and force of temporal powers. Gregory VII himself made use of the same weapons which would later be turned against the hierarchical Church. He held that only worthy priests had the power to carry out their religious functions, so that he branded simoniac priests, who had not been called by the Church alone, as well as married and unchaste priests, to be illegitimate, ineffectual usurpers of the priestly office.¹ He also had such simoniac and unchaste priests as dared perform the mass or the other duties of ecclesiastical office prosecuted as heretics.²

Yet as soon as the hierarchical ordo of the Church had been perfected and prevailed, the idea of the “worthiness of the priest,” having penetrated the consciousness of other groups, began to be turned against the concept of ecclesiastical ordination itself. Many who had been awakened by the Gregorian Reform Movement began to ask whether the ecclesiastical ordination of a priest should be the sole entitlement for carrying out the work of Christian salvation; whether the Church alone was called and ordained to realize the divine plan for salvation proclaimed by the gospels and the apostles solely through ecclesiastical representatives; whether each and every Christian might not be called by the command of the gospels and the example of the apostles to model his or her life on the gospels and apostolic standards; and whether anyone who was ordained by the Church but did not live as the gospels demanded and as the apostles had in fact lived could be a true priest. Out of such questions and doubts arose a religious consciousness which no longer saw the essence of Christianity as fulfilled in the Church alone as an order of salvation or in the doctrine of the Church alone as its dogma and tradition. Instead, this new consciousness sought to realize Christianity as a religious way of life immediately binding upon every individual genuine Christian, a commitment more essential to the salvation of his soul than his position in the hierarchical ordo of the Church or his belief in the doctrines of the Fathers of the Church and its theologians. The ecclesiastical order of salvation and the theological doctrinal structure had rather to prove their validity and commitment in terms of those biblical norms of Christian life obligating every true confessor of Christianity to follow the example of the apostles, meaning to abandon the goods of this world and work for the gospel in the discipleship of Christ, just as the apostles had done. These two concepts, the demand for Christian, evangelical poverty, as well as for apostolic life and work, became the foci of a new conception of the essence of Christianity, criticizing the Church order and doctrine which had obtained up to that time, supplying a new standard for evaluating the truly Christian life. Heretical phenomena in the region governed by the Roman Church before the Investiture Controversy, so far as we know, had demanded neither voluntary poverty nor apostolic preaching.^2a The monastic reform movement, in its effort to renew Benedictine monasticism, had also demanded the renunciation of private property in all strictness, but it had never subscribed to an “ideal of poverty” or a renunciation of property on the part of the monastic community, but instead had sought substantial wealth for the houses.³ Gregory VII fought simony and priestly marriage in order to win the day for the concept of ordo, but he never demanded either voluntary poverty of a Christian or the apostolic life of an individual.

Yet with the turn of the eleventh to the twelfth century, these two ideas emerged simultaneously in widely separated places, and they proceeded to determine the course of the religious movement. At the same time that a French preacher for the first time labeled as heretics people who asserted they were living the apostolic life, though they also proclaimed the dualistic doctrines of the Manichees and the ascetic implications that entailed,⁴ the itinerant preacher Robert of Arbrissel⁵ was wandering through northern France barefoot, with wild hair and beard and in poor clothing, gathering about him through his preaching the “poor of Christ,” who renounced all the goods of this world to join their master in wandering and poverty. A few years later (1114) two men were arrested in Bucy near Soissons who were believed to be heretical leaders; they admitted to holding conventicula, but not to propagating heretical doctrines. Although they swore that they neither taught nor believed other than the Church, and although they gave orthodox answers to all the questions of the episcopal inquisition, Guibert of Nogent, who participated in the investigation, accused them of holding the errors Saint Augustine had imputed in his polemical writings to the Manichees. Guibert added that matters which had once interested the learned alone had now descended to the unlearned, who had come to boast of leading the life of the apostles!⁶ At almost the same time, however, Norbert of Xanten was wandering the same region, having given up his promising career with the Imperial court and the archbishop of Cologne after a sudden conversion to ascetic rigor. He now trudged through France, gathering about himself the “poor of Christ” in the same manner as Robert of Arbrissel.

There was obviously a common motivation behind these contemporary episodes: the model of the apostles had become an ideal, expressing itself in a demand for evangelical itinerant preaching and voluntary Christian poverty. For the time being, however, no unified religious movement arose from these themes. In some cases, they led to novel forms of monasteries or orders following a brief transitional stage of apostolic itinerant preaching; in other cases, when tied with heretical ideas in open opposition to the hierarchical Church and persecuted by it to the death, they would come to conjure up the great heretical challenge to the twelfth-century Church. These two developments can only be studied separately, but their common motivations have to be kept in mind in order to understand the course and destiny of the movement for religious poverty, in which the two strands eventually reconverged into a single force after developing separately throughout the twelfth century.

1. THE HERETICAL MOVEMENT OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY

The special character of the heretical movement of the twelfth century and the importance which the ideas of the apostolic life and Christian poverty had within it can best be illustrated by two letters from the middle decades of the century. In one of them, Abbot Evervin of Steinfeld reported to Bernard of Clairvaux about heretics interrogated in Cologne in 1143.⁷ In the second, a monk named Heribert reports on heretics in the region of Périgueux under the leadership of a man named Poncius, otherwise unknown, probably around 1163.⁸ These two letters are an improvement on many other documents about heresy in the twelfth century because they do not repeat the usual fantasies of Manichaean doctrines derived from old polemics against heresy but rather describe heretics on the basis of their own knowledge—in the case of Heribert the monk, with superstitious exaggeration, but in Abbot Evervin’s case with thoughtful openness. The abbot had attended the interrogation of the heretics discovered in Cologne, and he gives their testimony without hostility or literary prejudice, in fact providing an honest account which shows he was deeply impressed by the religious content of their testimony.⁹ Most of the heretics had returned to the Church and done penance, but the “heretic bishop” and his companions demanded a public disputation, under the presidency of the archbishop, in which learned representatives of their party were to participate. They declared themselves ready to give up their errors if disproved, but otherwise they intended to be faithful to their beliefs until death. The Cologne clergy did not submit to a disputation, preferring to attempt to convert them, but, as so often with heresy trials in the twelfth century, the mob intervened before matters were decided and dragged the heretics to the pyre. The heretics had sought to convince their judges by citing the gospels and the apostles to support their convictions. Because they were convinced they lived in keeping with the gospels and the example of the apostles, they claimed to represent the true Church, the true followers of Christ. Having no need for the goods of the world, like Christ’s apostles they possessed neither house nor field nor cattle. In contrast to this, the Catholic clergy piled house upon house and field upon field, heaping up wealth. Even if the members of orders, monks and canons, did not have these goods as private property, still they held them in common. They, the heretics, were the “Poor of Christ” who moved restlessly and painfully from place to place like the apostles and martyrs, in the face of persecution, satisfied to have only enough to live on. The heretical words recorded by Abbot Evervin were filled with the unshakable certainty and security of faith:

We hold this, that we are not of this world. You, who are lovers of this world, have the peace of this world, since you are of this world. You and your fathers have become pseudo-apostles, adulterating the word of Christ—we and our fathers, having become apostles, dwell in the grace of Christ, and shall remain in it unto the end of the age. To distinguish them, Christ tells us and you, “By their fruits you shall know them! “Our fruit is the way of Christ.¹⁰

The goal of these heretics is to follow Christ through an apostolic life in poverty and ceaseless religious activity, in keeping with the counsels of the gospels and the writings of the apostles.

Yet these thoughts are not peculiar to the heretics in Cologne. The monk Heribert portrays heresy in Périgord in Southern France with less understanding for their doctrine and way of life, but showing the same characteristics. They, too, assert they are living the apostolic life,¹¹ and they also believe they achieve this not simply by renouncing meat, by moderation in drinking wine, and by external compliance with other biblical counsels, but particularly through complete poverty, renouncing the use of money.¹² Just as was the case with the heretics of Cologne, they judged ecclesiastical life strictly by the norms of the Bible, and they accepted only what Scripture demanded.¹³ They were thus intensely concerned with their own knowledge of Scripture,¹⁴ and they were ceaselessly occupied as preachers, undertaking their wanderings barefoot.¹⁵

In Cologne as well as in Southern France, the idea of Christian poverty and apostolic life as a wandering preacher is essential to their stance as “heresy,” and this idea indeed remains the main theme of heresy until the start of the thirteenth century, among Cathars as well as Waldensians. Leading the life of the apostles, being true followers of the apostles, is the heretics’ basic claim, and their break with the Church followed from that.¹⁶ Hence, the heretics were called “Good Christians,” or simply “Good People,” by all those who came in contact with them.¹⁷ No impartial observer can doubt their genuine and passionate conviction that they were reviving and realizing true evangelical and apostolic Christianity in their lives. They demonstrated this through their readiness to suffer martyrdom for these convictions far too often for it to be considered a mere phrase. The first condition for understanding the religious movements of the Middle Ages is to take these convictions and claims seriously.

All the same, the Church combated these devotees of the apostolic life with all its might. There were three grounds for this. First of all, the idea that the counsels of the gospels and writings of the apostles were the uniquely binding measure for the Church as well as for every Christian¹⁸ generated a decisively negative critique of the doctrines and usages of the Church, leading to rejection not only of the sacraments in their Catholic form, but also of the veneration of saints, prayers for the dead, the doctrine of purgatory, and so on. Secondly, the heretics who asserted they were leading the apostolic life in poverty did not recognize the ordo of the hierarchical Church, placing the legitimacy of ecclesiastical ordination in question. On the basis of their consciousness of having been called to carry out the gospels, they brought into being a competing church of “good Christians” with “perfect” or “elect” as clergy, and their “faithful” as congregations in precise analogy to the Catholic Church, even developing a sort of episcopal organization.¹⁹ Thirdly and last, in the course of the twelfth century the idea of poverty and apostolic itinerant preaching had come to be combined with dualistic doctrines in many areas, especially in Southern France. Increasingly influenced by speculative ideas from the Greek East, it yielded a strange rebirth for much of Manichee cosmogony and mythology. After the end of the twelfth century, Catholic polemic against heresy placed the greatest emphasis on this third point, on dualistic speculation and its abuses, particularly because the Cathars at least tried to justify themselves with citations from the New Testament. This tactic has so influenced perception that dualism has been stressed as the foundation of heresy ever since, with everything else seen to derive from dualism. To tell the truth, before the end of the twelfth century it is not the speculative problem of dualism which constituted the central conflict between heretics and Catholicism, but rather the questions of religious life and the Church. So far as we know, at the time of the emergence of heresy in the West in the first half of the eleventh century, dualistic doctrine was nowhere to be found. To be sure, Catholic literature designated the heretics as Manichees from the very beginning.²⁰ This often enticed ecclesiastical writers to read St. Augustine to discover what Manichees taught, then simply to ascribe their doctrines to the heretics of their own time.²¹ When this did not happen, when they unmistakably dealt with the convictions and doctrines of contemporary heretics (even in official ecclesiastical documents on heresy), dualistic speculation either leaves little trace,²² or it fades entirely into the background in comparison to the major question: whether the true Church of Christ resides with those who claim the apostolic succession, and thereby the full and exclusive right to ordain all Church offices, or whether it belonged to those who lived like the apostles as the gospel demanded.²³ In the twelfth century, dualistic speculation provided the philosophic “superstructure” for heresy’s religious and moral demands. Dualism tells people more clearly what has to be done²⁴—and this was the service dualism performed for the heretical movement in the twelfth century. For persons aroused by religious and ethical inclinations to think about the nature of the world, the Catholic doctrine of the world was infinitely harder to understand, much less comprehensible than the Manichaean doctrine. The Catholic world-picture, largely influenced both by Augustine’s intellectual commitment against neo-Platonic monism on the one side and Manichaean dualism on the other, is neither monistic nor dualistic, since it recognized neither the unity and identity of all being with God nor the division of all being into the two principles of light and darkness, good and evil. Thus Augustine does not deny that evil exists, but he does deny it to be part of real existence: he interprets evil as a negation of the good. Neither of the two intellectual powers which had once struggled for the future of Christianity, monistic neo-Platonism and dualistic Manichaeism, disappeared from the scene. On the contrary, they have threateningly shadowed Christianity throughout the years. During the crisis of the hierarchical system which took place in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, both of these threats returned to the Christian West from the Greek East. But that return was only possible because primitive religious movements with newly awakened spiritual needs were seeking speculative doctrinal systems and were capable of absorbing new religious and ethical drives.

In any case, dualistic speculation emerged more clearly after the end of the twelfth century. As a result, the religious movement split. In contrast to the Cathars, who followed Manichaean dualism and in turn were repeatedly divided by speculative sectarian disputes, there stood groups within the movement for religious poverty and apostolic itinerant preaching who not only did not follow the transition to dualism, but in fact combated it. Yet the old concept of a singular religious movement continued to pursue them, and the Church continued to pers...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Translator’s Note
• Introduction to the Translation
• Preface to the Reprinted Edition (1961)
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: The Religious Movement in the Twelfth Century: “Apostolic Life” and “Christian Poverty”
• Chapter 2: The Religious Movement under Innocent III: The Rise of New Types of Orders
• Chapter 3: The Social Origins of Humiliati, Waldensians, and Franciscans
• Chapter 4: The Origins of the Women’s Religious Movement
• Chapter 5: The Incorporation of the Women’s Religious Movement into the Mendicant Orders
• Chapter 6: The Beguines in the Thirteenth Century
• Chapter 7: The Heresy of the “Free Spirit” in the Religious Movement of the Thirteenth Century
• Chapter 8: The Origins of a Religious Literature in the Vernacular
• Appendix: Heresy in the Eleventh Century
• New Contributions to the History of Religious Movements in the Middle Ages
• Notes
• Frequently Cited Works
• Index