The Grand Inquisitor's Manual by Jonathan Kirsch Read Free Book Online Page A

incest. As a practical matter, however, the new rule reduced the number of available marriage partners, especially in smaller towns and villages. And so, when Henry the Monk called on young men of good families to take harlots as wives—but only after he ritually cut their long hair, burned their alluring garments, and thus purified them—he was creating a fresh supply of marriage partners to replace the ones declared off-limits by Pope Gregory.
    Sometimes the reformers inside and outside the Church embraced the same aspirations and the same approach to achieving them. Both Francis of Assisi (1181/82–1226) and Domingo de Guzmán (ca. 1170–1221) sought to purify themselves by taking strict vows of poverty and going out into the world as barefoot beggars to preach the Christian faith, all in imitation of Jesus and the disciples. The religious orders that they founded were embraced by the Church, and they were canonized as saints upon their deaths. A man named Peter Valdes (sometimes inaccurately rendered as “Waldo”) (1140–ca. 1205) also vowed to pursue the via apostolica, but he suffered a very different fate. His followers were among the first targets of the Inquisition, and they remained within its crosshairs for centuries. By a further irony, the Inquisition was staffed by Dominicans and Franciscans, thus turning the imitators of Christ into the persecutors of their fellow Christians.
    Valdes was living a privileged life in the town of Lyons in southern France when, like Francis and Dominic, he experienced a life-changing revelation. One day he passed a street minstrel who was singing about Saint Alexius, the son of a rich man who refused the marriage that had been arranged for him and chose instead a life of pious destitution. Thus inspired, Valdes settled a portion of his fortune on his baffled wife, installed his daughters in a convent, took a vow of poverty, and embarked on his own self-appointed ministry. During the famine of 1176, for example, he fed the poor at his own expense while, at the same time, eating only what was offered to him by others. His followers called themselves the Poor Men of Lyons and later, after the death of their founder about 1205, they came to be known as the Waldensians.
    “They go about two by two, barefoot, clad in woolen garments, owning nothing, holding all things in common like the apostles,” wrote Walter Map (ca. 1140–ca. 1209), an English delegate to the Third Lateran Council in 1179, “naked, following a naked Christ.” 19 By yet another irony, the vivid but also unsettling phrase that Map used—“naked, following a naked Christ”—is borrowed from Jerome, the fifth-century church father who translated the Bible from its original Hebrew and Greek into Latin. Jerome himself was canonized for his efforts, but the translation of Holy Writ into vernacular languages soon came to be condemned by the Church as a threat to its monopoly on interpretation and instruction. The Waldensians, who imitated Jerome by preparing and using their own translations of various biblical texts, and who insisted on the right to preach even though they were not ordained as members of the clergy, were defying two of the prerogatives that the Church valued and protected with fierce determination. “If we admit them,” concluded Walter Map, “we shall be driven out.” 20
    Here we see the tripwire between the kind of Christian rigorism that the Church was willing to sanction and the kind that it insisted on punishing. The Franciscans and the Dominicans were chartered orders of the Roman Catholic church who lived and worked under the authority of the pope, but the Waldensians and others like them were outsiders whose true belief did not permit them to bend to the will of the Church. They all aspired to a reformed and purified Christianity, but Francis and Dominic were raised to sainthood while Peter Valdes and his followers were condemned as heretics.
     
     
    By the year 1000, the