§ 79. THE MEDIAEVAL DISSENTERS. 469
numerable.1 According to the statement of Neumeister, a heretical bishop who was burnt, the number of Waldensian heretics in Austria about 1300 was eighty thousand.2 The writer, usually designated "the Passau Anonymous," writing about 1315, said there was scarcely a land in which the Waldenses had not spread. The Cathari in Southern France mustered large armies and were massacred by the thousands. Of all these sects, the only one which has survived is the very honorable body, still known as the Waldenses.
The mediaeval dissenters have sometimes been classed with the Protestants. The classification is true only on the broad ground of their common refusal to be bound by the yoke of the Catholic hierarchy. Some of the tenets of the dissenters and some of their practices the Protestant Reformation re pudiated, fully as much as did the established Church of the Middle Ages. Interesting as they are in themselves and by reason of the terrible ordeals they were forced to undergo, the sects were side currents compared with the great stream of the Catholic Church, to which, with all its abuses and per secuting enormities, the credit belongs of Christianizing the barbarians, developing learning, building cathedrals, culti vating art, furnishing hymns, constructing theological sys tems, and in other ways contributing to the progress of man kind. That which makes them most interesting to us is their revolt against the priesthood, in which they all agreed, and the emphasis they laid upon purity of speech and purity of life. Their history shows many good men, but no great per sonality. Peter Waldo is the most notable among their leaders.
A clear classification of the mediaeval heretics is made difficult if not impossible by the uncertainty concerning the opinions held by some of them and also by the apparent con fusion of one sect with another by mediaeval writers.
The Cathari, or Manichsean heretics, form a class by them selves. The Waldenses, Humiliati, and probably the Arnoldists, represent the group of evangelical dissenters. The Amauricians and probably the Ortlibenses were pantheistic. 1 Ep. I. 94, Migne, 214. 81. 2 Flade, p. 17.
470 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1049-1294.
The isolated leaders, Peter de Bruys, Henry of Lausanne, Eudo, and Tanchelm, were preachers and iconoclasts — us ing the term in a good sense — rather than founders of sects. The Beguines and Beghards represented a reform movement within the Church, one wing going off into paths of doctrinal heresy and lawlessness, and incurring thereby the anathemas of the ecclesiastical authorities.
§ 80. The Cathari.
The most widely distributed of the heretical sects were the Cathari. The term comes from the Greek katharos, meaning pure, and has given to the German its word for her etic, Ketzer. It was first used by the Cathari themselves.1 A grotesque derivation, invented by their enemies, associated the sect with the cat, whose form it was the pleasure of the devil to assume.2 From their dualistic tenets they were called New Manichgeans. From the quarter they inhabited in Milan, called Pataria, or the abode of the junk dealers, they received the name Patarenes.3
1 Schmidt. II. 276; Bellinger, I. 127. The term "Cathari" occurs in the twelfth century in Ecbertus and the acts of the Third Lateran Council, 1179, which speak of the heretics in Southern France as Cathari, Patrini, Publicani, or as known by some other name. Quos alii Catharos, alii Patrinos, alii Publicanos, etc., alii aliis nominibus vacant. Innocent III. called them Cathari and Patarenes, Epp. I. 94 ; II. 228 ; VIII. 85, 105, etc.
2Alanus de Insulis, Migne, 210. 266, says, "The Cathari are so called from the cat, whose posterior parts they are said to kiss and in whose form, as they say, Lucifer appears to them." Jacob de Voragine, in his Legenda aurea, refers to the use made of the cat by Satan in connection with heresy. He relates that on one occasion some ladies, who had been heretics, were kneeling at St. Dominic's feet and suddenly cried out : " ' Servant of God, help us.' 'Tarry awhile,' Dominic said, 'and ye shall see what ye have been serving.' Suddenly a black cat sprang up in their midst, right horrible, with long tail standing upright and emitting from the after end a terrible stench. After a while the cat climbed up the bell rope to the steeple, and the ladies were converted."
8 Schmidt, who discusses the names in an elaborate note (II. 275-284), says that a portion of Milan was still called Contrada de' Patari in the eighteenth century. Frederick II., in his Sicilian code, derived the name Patarenes from patior, to suffer. Patarenos se nominant velut expositos passioni, Hui.llard-Bre'holles, IV. 6. So also Walter Map, De nugis, Wright's ed., p. 61, who says the devil persuaded the Patarenes that they would become perfect by suffering and doing what he commanded.