Europe's inner demons

This report is followed by what purports to be a summary of the heretics’ doctrine. God, in their view, acted contrary to all justice when he cast Lucifer down to hell. Lucifer is the real creator of heaven; and one day he will cast God out and resume his rightful and glorious place. Then the heretics, as they hope, will attain eternal blessedness through him and with him. From this they conclude that they should avoid doing anything that is pleasing to God and should do whatever is hateful to him. This doctrinal summary confirms what one would in any case have assumed — that the toad, the cat, the pale ice-cold man and the man half radiant and half black are so many guises of Lucifer or Satan.

Vox in Rama is concerned specifically with heretics in Germany. It is addressed to the archbishop of Mainz, as primate of Germany, but also, by name, to Conrad of Marburg and his ally the bishop of Hildesheim. It is in fact based on a report which those correspondents had previously sent to the pope, concerning heretics along the Rhine. That earlier report is lost, but there can be little doubt that it was mainly, if not wholly, Conrad’s work. When, after Conrad’s death, the archbishop of Mainz wrote his letter of protest to the pope, he complained that the inquisitor had forced his victims to confess to kissing the toad, the cat, the pale man and other monsters.⁽²³⁾

Conrad of Marburg was a man driven by intense inner needs. It was his own personality that enabled and impelled this solitary priest, unsupported by any monastic order, to terrify German society from top to bottom. Far more of the impetus to persecution came from him than from the real situation: although there certainly were heretics in the land, they were far less numerous and powerful than he imagined. Even while he was active, reports of heresy were confined to the areas he visited; the rest of the land was uninterested. And once he was dead, there was a great silence: the chronicles have practically nothing more to report about heretics and before long even the pope forgot about them. Clearly the Satanic menace had no real existence but was the creation of a single obsessed mind.

The episode was nevertheless of crucial importance. For the first time the traditional demonological fantasies had figured not simply as a by-product of persecution but as a stimulus to it. For the first time, too, the pope himself had lent his authority to those fantasies: Vox in Rama transformed mere tales into established truths. These were important precedents. In the next two centuries other persecutions were to be stimulated in the same way, also with support and approval from the highest quarters. And each new persecution in turn lent fresh credibility and authority to the fantasies that had stimulated and legitimated it, until those fantasies came to be accepted as self-evidently true — first by many of the educated, and in the long run by the bulk of society.

3. THE DEMONIZATION OF MEDIEVAL HERETICS (2)

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When the archbishop of Mainz wrote to Pope Gregory IX about Conrad of Marburg, he referred to the sect which the deceased inquisitor had tried to track down as “the poor of Lyons”.⁽¹⁾ But “the poor of Lyons” was simply another name for the Waldensians or Vaudois.

The true history and nature of the Waldensian heresy have long been established.⁽²⁾ In 1173 a rich merchant of Lyons called Valdes or Valdo was moved by a passionate craving for salvation. The words of Jesus, in the parable of the rich young man, seemed to point the way: “If thou wouldst be perfect, go, sell that thou hast, and give to the poor....”⁽³⁾ Valdes disposed of all his possessions and became a beggar. A group formed around him, intent on following the way of absolute poverty, after the example of the apostles. And soon these men began to preach.

So far the story exactly parallels the beginning of the Franciscan venture which was to come a generation later. But whereas St Francis and his companions succeeded, with some difficulty, in obtaining papal approbation for their way of life, and with it permission to preach, Valdes and his followers failed: when they appeared at the Lateran Council in Rome in 1179, the pope, though impressed by their piety, imposed restrictions on their preaching. Faced with the alternatives of giving up preaching or of disobeying the pope, “the poor of Lyons” chose the latter course, with the inevitable consequence that in 1181 they were excommunicated; and in 1184 were formally condemned as heretics.