The Prophetic Faith of Our Fathers, vol. 1

IX. The Humiliati and the Waldenses

These different movements that we have considered had in part strongly heretical conceptions or were partly inspired by some great personality, and were therefore short-lived. But of the nonconforming groups the purest of all was that of the Waldenses, who were less heretics than schismatics, even their enemies admitting their general orthodoxy while denouncing their resistance to the hierarchy. The Passau Inquisitor compresses the issue into a single sentence, as he declares in the thirteenth century: PFF1 826.5

“They [the “Leonists”] live righteously before men, they believe well everything concerning God and all the articles which are contained in the creed; only they blaspheme the Roman Church and the clergy.” ⁵⁶ PFF1 826.6

Because of their importance the Waldensians will be discussed at greater length in the following chapters, but another group must be mentioned first. PFF1 827.1

Perhaps about the time when Milan was coming under papal control, there was arising in Lombardy a party under the name of the Humiliati-the humiliated or humble ones. Nothing is known definitely of their origin, and little of their views. They seem to have been at first a semicommunal lay movement, centering in Milan and other north Italian cities, mostly engaged in wool weaving. They abstained from oaths and dressed in simple, undyed wool garments. Celibacy was not required, but poverty was enjoined—not the rejection of all possessions, but labor for the bare necessities of life and for the support of the cause. PFF1 827.2

By the close of the twelfth century, after their preaching had been forbidden by the pope, part of the Humiliati disregarded the ban, and were excommunicated at the Council of Verona, along with the Waldenses of Lyons. The other part, the “orthodox Humiliati,” who were later given a rule (under three orders: lay, monastic, and clerical) by Innocent III, with limited permission to preach, does not concern us; but the “false Humiliati,” who withstood the pope, fused with the Waldensian movement. PFF1 827.3

The bull of excommunication in 1181 or 1184 implies that “those who falsely call themselves the Humiliati or the Poor Men of Lyons” were one party. This would indicate that they were already in, or on the verge of, union with the Poor Men of Lyons in that complex of groups, now known under the name Waldenses, the most important and the most successful representatives of the western protesters who scattered as an “unreformed” church through the very heart of Western Europe, survived in sufficient numbers to constitute links of evangelical truth between the early church and the Reformed churches of the sixteenth century. ⁵⁷ PFF1 827.4

Picture 1: WALDENSIAN MISSIONARY TRAINING SCHOOL IN PIEDMONTESE ALPS
In the innermost Angrogna valley, nestled high amid the eternal snows, Waldensian youth were trained as missionaries to bear the gospel to the far flung lands of europe in the middle ages the Waldensian candlestick insigne appers on the wall behind their teacher.
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