THE WALDENSES.
Literature.
I. The Waldensian MSS., mostly in the libraries of Geneva, Cambridge, Dublin, and Strasburg. The older prints are not reliable. See a description of these MSS. in Herzog, Die romanischen Waldenser, pp. 46 sqq. The Morland MSS. of Cambridge were brought to light again by Henry Bradshaw, 1862.
II. The accounts of mediæval Catholic writers: Bernard Abbas Fontis Calidi (Fonte Claude, d. 1193); Alanus de Insulis (d. 1202); Stephanus de Borbone (Etienne de Bourbon, d. 1225); Yvonet (1275); Rainerius (1250); Pseudo-Rainerius; Moneta of Cremona; Gualter Mapes, of Oxford.
Roman Catholic historians are apt to confound the Waldenses with the heretical Albigenses and Cathari, and include them in the same condemnation; while some of the older Protestant historians reverse the process to clear the Albigenses of the charge of Manicheism.
III. Historical works, mostly in the interest of the Waldenses:
J. P. Perrin: Histoire des Vaudois. Geneva, 1619. English translation with additions by R. Baird and S. Miller. Philadelphia, 1847.
Pierre Gilles: Histoire ecclésiastique des églises réformées--autrefois appellées églises Voudoises. Geneva, 1655.
Jean Leger (pastor and moderator of the Waldensian churches, afterwards of a Walloon church at Leyden): Histoire générale des églises évangéliques des vallées de Piémont ou Vaudoises. Leyden, 1669, 2 vols. fol. A German translation by Von Schweinitz. Breslau, 1750.
S. Morland: History of the Evangelical Churches of the Valleys of Piedmont. London, 1658. Morland was sent by Cromwell to Piedmont; he brought back a number of Waldensian MSS., and deposited them in Cambridge.
Jacques Brez (Waldensian): Histoire des Vaudois. Paris, Lausanne, and Utrecht, 1796.
S. R. Maitland: Tracts and Documents illustrative of the History of the Doctrines and Rites of the Ancient Albigenses and Waldenses. London, 1832.
Ant. Monastier: Histoire de l'église Vaudoise. Paris and Toulouse, 1847, 2 vols.
Alexis Muston (Waldensian): Histoire des Vaudois. Paris, 1834. The same: L'Israel des Alpes, première histoire complète des Vaudois. Paris, 1851, 4 vols.
Chr. U. Hahn: Geschichte der Waldenser. Stuttgart, 1847. (The second volume of his learned Geschichte der Ketzer im Mittelalter.) Contains many valuable documents.
A. W. Dieckhoff: Die Waldenser im Mittelalter. Göttingen, 1851. Marks an epoch in the critical sifting of the documents, but is too negative, and unjust to the Waldenses.
Herzog: Die romanischen Waldenser. Halle, 1853. Also his valuable art. Waldenser in his Real-Encyklop. Vol. XVII. pp. 502 sqq. Based upon a careful examination of the Waldensian MSS.
C. A. G. von Zezschwitz: Die Katechismen der Waldenser und Böhmischen Brüder als Documente ihres wechselseitigen Lehraustausches. Kritische Textausgabe, etc. Erlangen, 1863. Compare his System der christl. kirchl. Katechetik, Leipz. 1863, Vol. I. pp. 548 sqq.
Palacky: Verhältniss der Waldenser zu den böhmischen Secten. Prag, 1869. (38 pp.)
Edmund de Schweinitz: The Catechism of the Bohemian Brethren. Translated from the Old German. Bethlehem, Pa., 1869.
G. Lechler: Johann von Wiclif und die Vorgeschichte der Reformation. Leipz. 1873, Vol. I. pp. 46-63.
F. Wagenmann: Waldenser, in Schmidt's Encyklop. des gesammten Erziehungs- und Unterrichtswesens, Vol. X. (1875), pp. 259-274.
Soon after their organization the Brethren came into friendly contact with the older and like-minded Waldenses (Vaudois), so called from their founder, Peter Waldo, or Waldus, a lay evangelist of Lyons (about 1170), who gave his rich possessions to the poor. They called themselves originally the Poor of Lyons, who by voluntary poverty and celibacy aimed at evangelical perfection. [1079] The early confessional and catechetical books of the two sects are closely connected. The Brethren derived, as already noted, their episcopate from the Waldenses, and in 1497 they sent two delegates, Lucas of Prague and Thomas of Landskron (Germanus), to France and Italy, who reported that the Waldenses in those countries were far advanced in the knowledge of Scripture truth, while elsewhere they found nothing but false doctrine, superstition, loose discipline, and corrupt morals. [1080] On the other hand, many of the exiled Waldenses, who spread in every direction, [1081] emigrated to Bohemia, attracted by the religious commotions of that country, and coalesced with the Brethren into one community.
The Bohemian Brethren and the Waldenses made a near approach to evangelical Protestantism, and are the only mediæval sects which have maintained their existence to this day. But we must distinguish between their position before and their position after the Reformation, which marks an important epoch in their creed. Much confusion (as Gieseler observes) has been introduced into their history both by friend and foe.
The Waldenses formed at first no separate church, but an ecclesiola in ecclesia, a pious lay community of Bible-readers. They were well-versed in Scripture, and maintained its supremacy over the traditions of men; they preached the gospel to the poor, allowing women also to preach; and gradually rejected the papal hierarchy, purgatory, prayers for the dead, the worship of saints and relics, the mass, transubstantiation, the oath, and capital punishment. Being excommunicated by Lucius III. (1184) and other popes as schismatics and heretics, they seceded and became a persecuted church. They had a clergy of their own with bishops, priests, and deacons. The origin and succession of their orders are involved in obscurity. They survived the fierce persecutions in France and the valleys of Piedmont, and extended their influence through emigrants to other countries, kindling a zeal for the study of the Scriptures in the vernacular, and strengthening the opposition to the papal Church. When they heard the glad tidings of the Reformation, they sent a deputation--Morel and Masson--to OEcolampadius, Bucer, and other reformers, in 1530, and derived from them clearer views of the distinction between canonical and apocryphal books, justification by faith, election and free-will, the marriage of the clergy, and the nature and number of sacraments. At a synod in the valley of Angrogne, Sept. 12-18, 1532, which was attended also by Farel and two other Reformed preachers of French Switzerland, the Reformation was adopted by a large majority, and subsequently carried out. Since that time the Waldenses became and remained a regular branch of the Reformed Church. [1082]
In the course of time the consciousness of this change was obscured, and in their polemic zeal against Romanism they traced the Reformed doctrines to their fathers, who certainly prepared the way for them. Their manuscripts were interpolated and assigned to a much earlier date. [1083] Some of their historians even constructed an imaginary Waldensian succession of pure evangelical catholicity up to the apostolic age, in opposition to the papal succession of an apostate pseudo-catholicity, which they dated from the fictitious donation of Constantine to Pope Sylvester and the consequent secularization of the Church. This is the Protestant counterpart of the Romish caricatures of the Reformation, and deserves equal condemnation in the name of common honesty and historical truth.
A critical examination and comparison of the Waldensian manuscripts and the reports of the conferences with the Reformers have exposed these literary frauds, and produced at first a reaction against the Waldenses and in favor of the Bohemian Brethren, from whom some of their books were supposed to be derived. But on still further examination it appears that there was a mutual exchange of views and writings between the two, and that the assertions of some later Bohemian Brethren concerning their independence are as little to be trusted and as clearly unfounded as the claims of the Waldenses. Their oldest writings, from the twelfth to the fourteenth century, were popular translations of the Scriptures and extracts from the fathers, followed by more extended works, such as La Nobla Leyczon [1084] (i.e., lectio, a didactic poem on Bible history and an exhortation to repentance), the Cantica, an allegorical exposition, or application rather, of the Song of Songs, and several poems and ascetic tracts. The second class embraces the writings of the fifteenth century (on Purgatory, the Invocation of Saints, and the Sacraments), which are more or less dependent on the Confessio Taboritarum (1433), and other Hussite documents. [1085] The third class was not composed or put into its present shape till after the adoption of the Reformation in 1532. Their chief confession is based upon the Gallican (1559), and was issued during the fearful massacre of 1655. [1086]
The indebtedness of the Waldenses to the Reformation for a purer creed does not deprive them of a claim to the deep sympathy of all Protestant Christians, which in the period of their fiercest persecution in Piedmont (1655) provoked the threat of Cromwell to make the thunder of English cannon resound in the castle of St. Angelo, and inspired the sublime sonnet of Milton--
'Avenge, O Lord, thy slaughtered saints, whose bones
Lie scattered on the Alpine mountains cold;
Even them who kept thy truth so pure of old,
When all our fathers worshiped stocks and stones.
Forget not: in thy book record their groans,
Who were thy sheep, and in their ancient fold
Slain by the bloody Piedmontese, that rolled
Mother with infant down the rocks. Their moans
The vales redoubled to the hills, and they
To heaven. Their martyred blood and ashes sow
O'er all the Italian fields, where still doth sway
The triple tyrant; that from these may grow
A hundredfold, who having learnt thy way
Early may fly the Babylonian woe.'
The last lines sound like a prophecy; for since the day of liberty dawned on Italy (in 1848), that venerable martyr church has, from its mountain retreats in Piedmont, with youthful vigor established missions in nearly all the cities of the peninsula.