“And what do these things have to do with Fra Dolcino?”
“They are connected, and this shows you how heresy survives even the destruction of the heretics. This Dolcino was a priest’s bastard, living in the Novara diocese, this part of Italy, a bit farther north. He was a youth of sharp mind and he was educated in letters, but he stole from the priest who housed him and fled eastward, to the city of Trent. And there he resumed the preaching of Gherardo, but in a more heretical vein, declaring that he was the only true apostle of God and that everything should be common in love, and that it was licit to lie indiscriminately with all women, whereby no one could be accused of concubinage, even if he went with both a wife and a daughter…”
“Did he truly preach those things, or was he just accused of preaching them? I have heard that the Spirituals, like those monks of Montefalco, were accused of similar crimes…”
“De hoc satis,” Ubertino interrupted me sharply. “They were no longer monks. They were heretics. And befouled by Fra Dolcino himself. And, furthermore, listen to me: it is enough to know what Fra Dolcino did afterward to call him a wicked man. How he became familiar with the Pseudo Apostles’ teachings, I do not even know. Perhaps he went through Parma as a youth and heard Gherardo. It is known that in the Bologna region he kept in touch with those heretics after Segarelli’s death. And it is known for certain that he began his preaching at Trent. There he seduced a very beautiful maiden of noble family, Margaret, or she seduced him, as Heloise seduced Abelard, because — never forget — it is through woman that the Devil penetrates men’s hearts! At that point, the Bishop of Trent drove him from the diocese, but by then Dolcino had gathered more than a thousand followers, and he began a long march, which took him back to the area where he was born. And along the way other deluded folk joined him, seduced by his words, and perhaps he was also joined by many Waldensian heretics who lived in the mountains he passed through, or he himself wanted to join the Waldensians of these lands to the north. When he reached the Novara region, Dolcino found a situation favorable to his revolt, cause the vassals governing the town of Gattinara in the name of the Bishop of Vercelli had been driven out by the populace, who then welcomed Dolcino’s outlaws as their worthy allies.”
“What had the bishop’s vassals done?”
“I do not know, and it is not my place to judge. But as you see, heresy in many cases is wed to the revolt against overlords, and this is why the heretic begins by preaching Madonna Poverty and then falls prey to all the temptations of power, war, violence. There was a conflict among certain families in the city of Vercelli, and the Pseudo Apostles took advantage of it, and these families exploited the disorder brought by the Pseudo Apostles. The feudal lords hired mercenaries to rob the citizens, and the citizens sought the protection of the Bishop of Novara.”
“What a complicated story. But whose side was Dolcino on?”
“I do not know; he was a faction unto himself; he entered into all these disputes and saw them as an opportunity for preaching the struggle against private ownership in the name of poverty. Dolcino and his followers, who were now three thousand strong, camped on a hill near Novara known as Bald Mountain, and they built hovels and fortifications, and Dolcino ruled over that whole throng of men and women, who lived in the most shameful promiscuity. From there he sent letters to his faithful in which he expounded his heretical doctrine. He said and he wrote that their ideal was poverty and they were not bound by any vow of external obedience, and that he, Dolcino, had been sent by God to break the seals of the prophecies and to understand the writings of the Old and the New Testaments. And he called secular clerics — preachers and Minorites — ministers of the Devil, and he absolved everyone from the duty of obeying them. And he identified four ages in the life of the people of God: The first was that of the Old Testament, the patriarchs and prophets, before the coming of Christ, when marriage was good because God’s people had to multiply. The second was the age of Christ and the apostles, and this was the epoch of saintliness and chastity. Then came the third, when the popes had first to accept earthly riches in order to govern the people; but when mankind began to stray from the love of God, Benedict came, and spoke against all temporal possessions. When the monks of Benedict also then went back to accumulating wealth, the monks of Saint Francis and Saint Dominic came, even more stern than Benedict in preaching against earthly power and riches. But finally now, when again the lives of so many prelates were contradicting all those good precepts, we had reached the end of the third age, and it was necessary to follow the teachings of the Apostles.”
“Then Dolcino was preaching the things that the Franciscans had preached, and among the Franciscans, the Spirituals in particular, and you yourself, Father!”
“Ah, yes, but he derived a perfidious syllogism from them! He said that to bring to an end this third age of corruption, all the clergy, monks, and friars had to die a very cruel death; he said that all prelates of the church, all clerics, nuns, religious male and female, all those who belong to the preaching orders and the Minorites, the hermits, and even Boniface the Pope had to be exterminated by the Emperor he, Dolcino, had chosen, and this was to be Frederick of Sicily.”
“But didn’t that same Frederick receive with favor in Sicily the Spirituals expelled from Umbria, and isn’t it the Minorites who ask that the Emperor, though he is now Louis, destroy the temporal power of the Pope and the cardinals?”
“It is characteristic of heresy, or of madness, that it transforms the most upright thoughts and aims them at consequences contrary to the law of God and man. The Minorites have never asked the Emperor to kill other priests.
He was mistaken, I know now. Because, a few months later, when the Bavarian established his own order in Rome, Marsilius and other Minorites did to religious who were faithful to the Pope exactly what Dolcino had asked to have done. By this I don’t mean that Dolcino was right; if anything, Marsilius was equally wrong. But I was beginning to wonder, especially after that afternoon’s conversation with William, if it were possible for the simple people who followed Dolcino to distinguish between the promises of the Spirituals and Dolcino’s enactment of them. Was he not perhaps guilty of putting into practice what presumably orthodox men had preached, in a purely mystical fashion? Or was that perhaps where the difference lay? Did holiness consist to waiting for God to give us what His saints had promised, without trying to obtain it through earthly means? Now I know this is the case and I know why Dolcino was in error: the order of things must not be transformed, even if we must fervently hope for its transformation. But that evening I was in the grip of contradictory thoughts.
“Finally,” Ubertino was saying to me, “you always find the mark of heresy in pride. In a second letter, to the year 1303, Dolcino appointed himself supreme head of the Apostolic congregation, and named as his lieutenants the perfidious Margaret — a woman — and Longinus of Bergamo, Frederick of Novara, Albert Carentinus, and Walderic of Brescia. And he began raving about a sequence of future popes, two good — the first and the last — and two wicked, the second and the third. The first is Celestine, the second is Boniface the Eighth, of whom the prophets say, ‘The pride of your heart has dishonored you, O you who live in the fissures of cliffs.’ The third Pope is not named, but of him Jeremiah is supposed to have said, ‘There, like a lion.’ And — infamy! — Dolcino recognized the lion in Frederick of Sicily. For Dolcino the fourth Pope was still unknown, and he was to be the Sainted Pope, the Angelic Pope of whom the abbot Joachim spoke. He would be chosen by God, and then Dolcino and all his people (who at this point were already four thousand) would receive together the grace of the Holy Spirit, and it would renew the church until the end of the world. But in the three years preceding his coming, all evil would have to be consummated. And this Dolcino tried to do, carrying war everywhere. And the fourth pope, and here you see how the Devil mocks his familiars, was in fact Clement the Fifth, who proclaimed the crusade against Dolcino. And it was right, because in his letters at this point Dolcino sustained theories that could not be reconciled with orthodoxy. He declared the Roman church a whore, said that obedience is not due priests, that all spiritual power had now passed to the sect of the Apostles, that only the Apostles represented the new church, the Apostles could annul matrimony, no one would be saved unless he was a member of the sect, no pope could absolve sin, tithes should not be paid, a more perfect life was lived without vows than with vows, and a consecrated church was worthless for prayer, no better than a stable, and Christ could be worshiped both in the woods and in the churches.”