HIST-338 Lecture Notes - Lecture 26: The Imitation Of Christ, Ipso Facto, Waldensians
23 Nov 2020
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This attitude, in part, lay behind the twelfthcentury heresies like waldensianism and. Catharism, the conviction that the established church, perhaps unintentionally, had vitiated its spiritual authority by becoming one of the powers of this world. The church in the thirteenth century was wealthy, according to non-heretic reformers, was ipso facto spiritually lost, or at the very least in danger of becoming so. The only solution was to revive the idea of christ"s own personal poverty. To renounce money when one has none is not exactly a great virtue. What drove many of the people who emphasized the importance of poverty was a sense of guilt, maybe simple dissatisfaction, over their own relatively comfortable position. He was the son of a well-to-do merchant, after a carefree youth he experienced an intense religious transformation in his early twenties. He decided to renounce his inheritance and dedicate his life to evangelical poverty serving the urban poor.
