§ 80. THE CATHAKI. 481
Our knowledge of the form of Church government prac tised by the Cathari is scant. Some of the groups of Italy and Languedoc had bishops. The bishop had as assistants a " major " and a " minor " son and a deacon, the two former taking the bishop's place in his absence.1 Assemblies were held, as in 1241, on the banks of the Larneta, under the presidency of the heretical bishop of Albi, Aymeri de Collet. A more compact organization would probably have been adopted but for the measures of repression everywhere put in force against the sect.
The steadfast endurance of the Catharan dissenters before hostile tribunals and in the face of death belong to the annals of heroism and must call forth our admiration as it called forth the wonder of contemporaries like Bernard.2 We live, said Everwin of Steinfeld,3 —
"A hard and wandering life. We flee from city to city like sheep in the midst of wolves. We suffer persecution like the Apostles and the martyrs because our life is holy and austere. It is passed amidst prayers, abstinences, and labors, but everything is easy for us because we are not of this world."
Dr. Lea, the eminent authority on the Inquisition, has said (1. 104) that no religion can show a more unbroken roll of victims who unshrinkingly and joyfully sought death in its most abhorrent form in preference to apostasy than the Cathari. Serious as some of the errors were which they held, nevertheless their effort to cultivate piety by other methods than the Church was offering calls for sympathy. Their rupture with the established organization can be to a Protestant no reason for condemnation; and their dependence upon the Scriptures and their moral tendencies must awaken within him a feeling of kinship. He cannot follow them in their rejection of baptism and the eucharist. In the repudiation of judicial oaths and war, they anticipated some of the later Christian bodies, such as the Quakers and Mennonites.
1 Rainerius, p. 1766 ; Dollinger, II. 82, 278, 295, 324. At the time of Nicetas1 visit, Bernard Raymund was ordained bishop of Toulouse, Guiraud Mercier, bishop of Carcassonne, and Raymund of Casalis, bishop of Val d' Aran.
2 Sermon, 65, Migne, 183. 1091. 8 Quoted by Schmidt, II. 94.
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482 THE MIDDLE AGES. A.D. 1049-1294.
§ 81. Peter de Bruys and Other Independent Leaders.
Independent of the Cathari and yet sharing some of their views and uniting with them in protest against the abuses of the established Church, were Peter de Bruys, Henry of Lausanne, and other leaders. Peter and Henry exercised their influence in Southern France. Tanchelm and Eudo preached in Flanders and Brittany. At least three of them died in prison or other wise suffered death by violence. Bernard of Clairvaux, Peter the Venerable, Otto of Freising, and other contemporary Catholic writers are very severe upon them and speak con temptuously of their followers as drawn from the ignorant classes.
Tanchelm, a layman, preached in the diocese of Cologne and westwards to Antwerp and Utrecht. There was at the time only a single priest in Antwerp, and he living in con cubinage. Tanchelm pronounced the sacraments of no avail when performed by a priest of immoral life and is said to have turned "very many from the faith and the sacra ments.1" l He surrounded himself with an armed retinue and went through the country carrying a sword and preceded by a flag. Success turned his head. According to his con temporary, Abtelard, he gave himself out to be the Son of God.2 He went through the public ceremony of marrying the Virgin Mary, with her portrait before him. The people are said by Norbert's biographer to have drunk the water Tanchelm washed in. He was imprisoned by the archbishop of Cologne, made his escape, and was killed by a priest, 1115. His preaching provoked the settlement of twelve P remonstrants in Antwerp, and Norbert himself preached in the Netherlands, 1124.
The movement in Brittany was led by Eudo de 1'Etoile, who also pretended to be the Son of God. He was one of the sect of the Apostolicals, a name given to heretical groups in France and Belgium whose members refused flesh and repu-
1 Fredericq, Corpus Inq., I. 6. For Tanchelm, see Fredericq, vols. I. and II., and Life of Norbert in Man. Germ., ch. 16.
- Introd. ad Thcol., in Migne, 178. 1056, and Fredericq, I. 26.