are by no means to regard the Waldensians as having adopted the tres status mundi of Joachim, or as having assigned to the three persons three successive reigns. We have already intimated that they were not of the class of Joachites proper; and the Noble Lesson proves it. For there we find three states, or, as they are termed, three laws ;* and those three are the natural or patriarchal, the Levitical, and the Christian. The Christian law, described as the present law, is also the third and final one, for "Other law from henceforwards are we not to have." 3. Amaury of Chartres, or Amalricus Carnotensis, was a native of the village of Bene in the Pays Chartrain; and having entered into holy orders, became an assiduous scholar in theology at the University of Paris, which then excelled all others in that faculty. He is described as a man of excellent natural endowments, without the discretion to employ them rightly. He was a contemporary, but whether an acquaintance we know not, of Joachimus Abbas. But he began to make himself conspicuous in A.D. 1204, being the fourth year of the pretended transition from the second status mundi to the third, and from the dominion of Christ and the Letter to that of the Holy Ghost and the Spiritual Intelligence, and from two to three years after the Abbot of Flore had closed his mortal career. In that year he maintained at Paris that all Christians were firmly held and bound to believe that they were, each of them, members of Christ, and united to his body; and except he so believed, no man could be saved. This proposition was received with general dissent by the University of Paris, who condemned it in a very full and solemn assembly of their body.+ And upon appeal made by Amaury to Innocent III., that pope confirmed their judgment, and obliged him to retract his opinion. To those who believe in the sacramental presence, the speculations of Amaury (when separated from the damnatory clause which he had the audacity to introduce) will perhaps not appear calculated to excite such alarm, or provoke such decided condemnation, in an assembly of catholics. But the probability is, that Amaury's lofty doctrine did not appear sacramental in its origin or character, but was viewed as an attempt to engraft upon Christianity the debasing and almost atheistical principles of Pantheism. The humiliation he experienced on this occasion is supposed to have shortened his life, which he ended, in apparent peace with the church, in A.D. 1207. More does not appear to be known of his views and tenets, except as they were afterwards developed in the proceedings of the Amalricians. After his death he became possessed of an importance which he had not when living; for his followers and admirers lost no time in forming themselves openly into a sect which professed doctrines such as he had not in his lifetime been generally known to cherish. Not con See Nobla Leyczon, vss. 437-454. 66 + Celeberrima comitia. C. E. Du Boulay Hist. Univers. Paris. anno 1204, tom. 3, p. 25. "When our Lord was crucified," (said Amaury,) his faithful disciples experienced in their members the same pains as he did in his." Gaguin cit. ibid. p. 48. tented with repeating his tenet concerning the union of Christians with the body of Christ, they avowed that his body was not more present in the eucharist then it was in every other thing whatsoever, and that God did not speak by the mouth of St. Augustine any more than by that of Ovid. Here it is impossible not to see that the Amalrician mystery is pantheistical, and not sacramental. The sacred writings (to which class the writings of the Fathers are here considered to belong) only proceed from God as all things do; and the consecrated elements are Christ, only because all things are. This is the Rosicrucian Christianity, of which the motto or device was "Jesus mihi Omnia" and "Jesus nobis Omnia,"† and which Van Helmont thus affirms, "Deus, id est Omnia, in omnibus est." They denied the resurrection of the body, and condemned the worship of saints and images. They had a prophet among them called Gulielmus Aurifex, or Aurifaber, William the goldsmith, who declared that in ancient times the Father had operated under certain forms contained in the Old Testament, and that afterwards the Son had operated in certain formsviz., the sacraments. But then, as he taught, all forms were to fall, as the forms of the law had fallen at Christ's coming; and the Holy Ghost was to be displayed in those men in whom he would be incarnate. The time of the Holy Ghost was then arrived, and the sacraments of the New Testament were to come to an end, and every one would be saved by the Spirit without any outward works. And so they held (as Bulæus phrases it) "Trinitatis personas singulas sua habuisse tempora." The volume in which the opinions of the Amalricians were committed to writing was entitled the Liber Pamphyseon.§ That work was unequivocally pantheistical. It asserted that God was "therefore the end of all things, because all things would return unto him, and rest immutably in him, and remain in him one individual and unchangeable thing; and that God was the essence of all creatures, and the ESSE of all things." The Pamphyseon likewise declared that in the resurrection the two sexes will be united, as they were before Eve's separation from Adam. In denying the resurrection of the body, and in condemning the invocation of saints and the use of images, but more preeminently in the first-mentioned respect, the doctrine of the Amalricians partly warrants the assertion of Bulæus, that Amaury "altiora sapiens abiit in reprobum sensum et Albigensium novitatem amplexus est." In another important particular the Amalricians were at variance with the Abbé Joachim, for they taught that the pope was Antichrist, and that the church of Rome was Babylon. That change was in itself sufficient See Bulæus (or Du Boulay) Hist. Univ. 3, p. 48. Labbe Concilia, tom. 22, anno 1209. This latter is the motto of the Rosa Florescens, ascribed to J. Valentine Andrea; the former is that of the Fama Fraternitatis. This may perhaps furnish a fresh indication that the corporeal union with Christ was not sacramental. $Herman. Corner. Chron. in A.D. 1219, ap. Eccard. II. p. 849. Hist. Univ. 3, p. 674. entirely to upset his apocalyptic exposition, and to divert into entirely new channels the dangerous speculations he had set in motion. But the basis of the Amalrician heresy is such a pure and simple transcript of the great theory of Joachim, that it scarcely merits to be cited as an independent system. It never would have been so if urgent considerations had not dissuaded the condemnation of Joachim, and even the unnecessary mention of his very name. The Calabrian had announced the impending termination of the ancient gospel and its sacraments, and the approaching rise of the everlasting gospel and the reign of the Spirit. And again and again had he cried aloud, "Where the Spirit is, there is liberty." But such was the blackness of his soul, and the shallow short-sighted subtlety of his wit, that he abstained from defining in any way the liberty which he preached. A generation, sufficiently corrupt by his own shewing, were left by him to make their choice between freedom from all sin and the perfect law of liberty, on the one hand, and freedom from duty, obedience, and self-control, on the other. But the sect of Amalricus Carnotensis without loss of time proceeded to remove all the inconvenient restraints in which society had been held in the second status. God (they said) was in this new dispensation only good, and not just. Love was the principle of the spiritual reign, and no action that was done in charity could now be sinful. Adultery, in particular, and fornication, and every other description of sensual indulgence, if it were pursued in a spirit of charity, was divested of all unholiness. In 1209, being two years after the death of Amalricus Carnotensis, a council was convened at Paris to take cognizance of this heresy.* Women and simple folks, whose ignorance had been seduced into this defection from the church, were discharged. But the leaders of the sect were given up to the secular arm, and burnt at Paris. The serious character of this affair may be estimated from the number and ecclesiastical rank of the principal offenders, among whom we find the academician Jarinus Magister, the priests Stephanus, Stephanus surnamed de Cellâ, John, Dudo, Peter, and Ulric, the deacons Odo and Stephen, the subdeacons William of Poictiers and Bernard, and the acolyte Elmangus; while their deplorable fanaticism may be imagined from their placing themselves under the guidance of an ignorant layman and artizan like Gulielmus Aurifaber. As it was made clearly apparent to the council of Paris that the offensive tenets of the Amalricians were really derived from the deceased Amaury, the latter was included in the condemnation, and his bones were dug up and burnt.↑ Having condemned him, and absolved him, and buried him, and condemned him again, and dug him up, and burnt him, and given his ashes to the safe-keeping of the winds, it might well be supposed that we had done with him at last. Not so, however; for six years afterwards we are destined to hear of him again, and in a curious way. In the year 1215, Pope Innocent III. held the fourth council in La * See Concil. Paris. apud Labbe, tom. 22, p. 801, ets. teran, at which (for certain reasons not quite obvious at first sight) he proceeded to censure at considerable length the opinions which, as hath been premised, the Abbé Joachim, then thirteen years dead, had long before his death advanced against Peter Lombard. This censure was mollified with praises of the order of Flore, and salvos in favour of the obedience which its founder had always shewn to the holy see. Those who were acquainted, as most people then were, with the daring and flagitious machinations of that false prophet, must have been anxious to hear what next the pope and council would say concerning Joachim and the Joachitic doctrines. An old metaphysical quibble, well nigh forgotten before he died, could not be the only thing in the career of Joachim which appeared worthy of observation. If he had shaken the faith of thousands, and endangered the peace of Europe and the church for sixty years to come, it was not by that. And if there was anything that Joachim had hazarded, and with which Pope Innocent was not thoroughly well acquainted, it was certainly no fault of Joachim's; for by the solemn testamentary document which he signed in A.D. 1200 he placed all his works under the superintendence and correction of Innocent himself, and directed fair copies of them to be lodged in his hands. Of that fact the papal censure made express acknowledgment. Now let us see what follows. The council of Lateran having finished its censure of Joachim's definition of the divine unity, subjoins to it the following brief sentence :-"We also reprobate and condemn (reprobamus etiam etc.) the very perverse dogma of the impious Amalricus, whose mind was so blinded by the father of lies that his doctrine should rather he esteemed mad than heretical."* After censuring at length one specific error of one man, it proceeds also to condemn de novo the doctrine of another man, who had been condemned by a previous council and executed six years before, without even mentioning what that doctrine was. But we have seen that it comprehended, and was based upon, the most important and perilous parts of the Joachitic scheme. That consideration enables us to see through the whole transaction. Nobody cared, and few persons remembered, anything about Joachim's strictures upon Peter Lombard. But the scandal and dangers of the prophetic doctrine diffused among the Joachites, both proper and improper, were becoming such as to render it impossible longer to keep silence concerning him. But how was he to be approached? One of his principal works, containing the whole venom of his system, had obtained the approbation of Pope Lucius III., and the same pontiff had encouraged him to perPope Urban III. had continued to him the same patronage encouragement. His works were carried on and completed at the instance, nay, under the solemn adjurations, of Pope Clement III. And, lastly, they had all been publicly and solemnly deposited with Innocent III., to be by him examined, and either approved, corrected, or condemned, as they might seem to deserve; and for thirteen whole years he had cherished them in his paternal bosom without either severe. and * Conc. Lat. iv. ap. Labbe, tom. 22, ann. 1215. condemning or correcting one syllable of them. Thrice and once had Joachim been dipped in the infernal pool, and was become invulnerable. His bones could not be dug up and burned, without imminent danger to the skeletons of several sovereign pontiffs, or, at least, without exposing the holy see and its judgment to universal contempt. All that could now be done was to disavow in the most general, though in strong terms, the doctrines of the principal leader of the Joachites proper.* "Amaury's doctrine was also heretical, or rather maniacal." This subtle expedient of Pope Innocent was available in two ways. Say to him, "These dangerous notions of Joachim have never been discountenanced by you," and he replies, "I beg your pardon; I expressly censured them in the person of their principal and most troublesome advocate." Say to him, "You have condemned a person whom three popes approved and honoured ;" and he replies, "No; when I spoke of Amaury's dogma, I meant his union of Christians to Christ's body," or some other point of his doctrine that was not Joachitic. By this indirect, ambiguous, and equivocal slur cast upon the more formidable parts of Joachism, coupled with a direct condemnation of the old protest against the Lombard, (which no one had ever sanctioned, and which therefore lay at his mercy,) Innocent endeavoured to satisfy those who were become impatient of such a public nuisance. But he left it unabated, and it continued to increase. SPANISH ACCOUNTS OF THE MARIAN PERSECUTION. "In prima congressione devictum, victorem in secundo prælio Dominus reddidit; ut fortior ignibus fieret, qui ignibus ante cessisset, et unde superatus esset, inde superaret. .. Emersit enim novum genus cladis ; et quasi parum persecutionis procella sævierit, accessit ad cumulum sub misericordiæ titulo malum fallens, et blanda pernicies." CYPRIAN. De Lapsis. BEFORE I proceed to the immediate subject of this paper, I have to apologize to the reader for not having noticed that the statement quoted in my last note, p. 489, from Burnet, as on the authority of Archbishop Parker, has been traced to its source by Henry Wharton, Harmer's Remarks, p. 137. It is one of Burnet's credulous misstatements, and was never made by Parker. Henry Wharton finds that, in the diocese of Canterbury, where Thornden and Harpsfield were active enough in the prosecution, not more than seventy-three out of three hundred and eighty beneficed persons were for any cause expelled. Probably throughout the kingdom, therefore, the whole number did not amount to one thousand, including such clergymen as avoided any civil process by flight. The Spanish number of 30,000 of course refers chiefly to refugees, who went abroad confessedly in very large parties, with their wives, children, and families. Perhaps no one adopted the system, in every detail, unaltered and as its founder left it. But the distinction here meant is that which has been already pointed out; viz., between those who adopted the tenet of the three status mundi under the three persons of the Trinity, and those who do not appear to have done so. |