The Origin, Persecutions, and Doctrines of The Waldenses by Pius Melia. The original was published in 1870. The copy I read was a 1978 AMS re-print of James Toovey's 1870 edition published in London.
It's a short book but packed with useful information. The
Jesuit theologian pulls no punches. It is his intention to dismantle and
deconstruct many of the popular narratives surrounding The Waldenses. The book
despite its significant flaws is not without value.
Melia targets chroniclers like Jean Leger and Samuel Morland
and accuses them of blatant and deliberate falsehood in their accounts of the
Waldenses and the attacks made them – in particular the crusade of 1487-88 and
the campaign of 1655.
Honesty demands an admission that there have been problems
and exaggerations when it comes to Waldensian history. Numbers are manipulated
and the history suffers from anachronism at times. Sadly this has generated
confusion and has discredited these histories to the point that they are
reduced to a footnote in many historical works.
That said, I trust Melia's sources no more than I would Leger
or Morland. The accounts of the fourteenth century Inquistor Bernard Gui and
other enemies of the Waldenses must be met with no small degree of scepticism.
As far as the violence and slaughter being exaggerated – no,
it's in perfect keeping with the violence of the times. One need only read an
account of The Thirty Years War to find similar accounts and behaviour on the
part of looting troops.
Were the Waldenses simply suffering civil penalties as Melia
suggests? He wants to argue that no persecution took place in the proper sense
but these were rebel subjects being put down. It's an interesting point and
once the Waldenses joined forces with the Magisterial Reformation (and turned
their backs on many aspects of their ancient doctrine), the line does in fact
blur. This is one of the tragedies of sacralism. It breeds and fosters
confusion and an honest assessment of groups the French Huguenots leaves some
real doubts. There were episodes of persecution but in many respects they were
a militant faction engaged in violence against the state and sometimes
collaborating with foreign powers. The line between civil punishment and
persecution certainly blurs. This does not excuse the brutality and intrigues
of the Valois-Medici and later Bourbon rulers, especially in an event like the
St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, but it's hard to argue that someone like Gaspard
de Coligny was a martyr. A victim of assassination, yes – but a martyr? I think
not. Rejecting Christ's warning, he lived by the sword and died by it.
As far as the dating of documents, there are admitted
difficulties and some historians have tried to make the Waldenses more
Protestant than they were and in other cases push them back further into the
past than can be easily proved. And we must admit that Melia has a point when
it comes to some of the translations, as some of the Protestant apologists
played fast and loose with these works in order to mask (we must assume) the
less than fully Protestant nature of the Waldenses.
All that said, Melia's arguments ultimately fail. If he wants
to indict Protestant Church historians then he has a case, but not against the
Waldenses. He focuses exclusively on the Piedmont group which gets the most
attention in the history books even though they represented but one small
segment of the larger movement or spectrum. The Piedmont communities retained
their identity after the sixteenth century even though they effectively became
a branch of the Genevan Reformation. The other and far more numerous Waldensian
groups throughout Europe are ignored because over the course of the sixteenth
century they either became Lutherans, Calvinists, Utraquists, Moravian
Brethren, or Anabaptists, and as such disappear from history.
Melia ignores the existence of the Lombard wing which was
much more Biblicist in orientation than the Lyonist wing associated with Peter
Waldo. The Piedmont communities were of the Lyonist stripe. And so while Melia
labours to demonstrate the sect began only with Waldo in the twelth century,
his point isn't made. He wants to rebuff the claims that the group arose in the
time of Constantine, a legend that arose from these groups adopting the
Constantinian Shift or Fall of the Church narrative. Regardless of the
innacurate and muddled claim, the Lyonists were not first and as the 1218
disputation at Bergamo reveals, the Lombard groups not only did not view Waldo
or Valdez as a founder but were not particularly keen on him. Now where these
Poor Lombards came from is a subject that can be debated, but one doesn't have
to embrace the fantasy narratives of Waldensian romantic historians to at the
same time dismiss Melia's arguments and conclusions.
Melia wants to argue that the Lyonists were more or less
Roman Catholic in their beliefs and the only dispute was over lay preaching. He
cites their appearance at the Third Lateran Council in 1179, making the point
that they were still part of the doctrinal mainstream. As said, the Lyonists
were much closer to Rome than some of the other dissident bodies and if Melia
had bothered to look at the Council of Verona in 1184 he would have found a
long list of condemned groups, some of which also belong to the Waldensian
spectrum. He errs in focusing exclusively on the Lyonist branch. This explains
why the Lyonists and Lombards didn't get on all that well. They had significant
differences – the Lombards (which is just a catch-all phrase) were far more
virulent in their opposition to the Papacy and so forth.
Melia also launches an assault on Claudius of Turin (fl.
810-827) and dismisses him as an outlier and someone universally condemned. Some
have suggested that Claudius founded the Waldenses in the ninth century –
attesting to their antiquity, without falling into the absurdities of the
fourth century argument.
As I've argued before, such arguments miss the point when it
comes to Claudius and what his episode can teach us. They fail to address the
fact that Claudius coming from Southern Gaul and Northern Spain was genuinely
suprised and shocked by the degree and level of image worship that he
encountered in Northern Italy. It indicates there was a divergence in practice,
the enforced Catholicity that would come about with the Gregorian Reform was
not yet in effect and at that point in time (the ninth century) there were
still churches and perhaps regions that were resisting the papal tide or had
not fully embraced the liturgical corruptions that appeared in earnest
post-Constantine. This doesn't mean Claudius founded the Waldenses, but Melia's
point certainly misses the mark. It reveals a context in which the Waldenses as
a separate community wouldn't have needed to exist yet as there were still
areas where the full breadth of corruption and idolatry had not yet come to
bear. The coming Gregorian Reform would generate a crisis and lead to the
deliberate formation and consolidation of protesting individuals and bodies.