Waldensian modernity

The title tells the main story that Lynn Hunt, Margaret Jacob, and Wijnand Mijnhardt want to tell: The Book That Changed Europe: Picart and Bernard’s Religious Ceremonies of the World . The book in question was a seven-volume illustrated encyclopedia of religious practices throughout Christendom, in Islam and the East, among Native Americans and Africans. And the book changed Europe because it elaborated in great detail a new and relativizing definition of “religion.” Bernard Picart (the illustrator) and Jean Frederic Bernard more or less ignored doctrinal differences, and when they looked at religious ceremonies they focused more on commonalities than differences.

Without a lot of overt commentary, text and engraving sent a persistent series of messages: Religions are not all that different, the Catholic Mass looks like Oriental idolatry and Orthodox Pentecostal celebrations are more frenzied than Inca sacrifices; ceremonies are secondary to the moral and spiritual dimensions of religion; the proto-Wellhausian thesis that religions – Judaism was the main example – degenerate from early simplicity to degenerate ceremonial complexity; priests are bad; religions arise from anxiety and guilty; and, wouldn’t it be grand if all religions could see through their meaningless ceremonies and unite in a single religion of toleration?

Given this set of themes, it is not at all surprising that Bernard came from a long line of Waldensian pastors in Provence. As the authors put it, “Pre-Reformation Waldensian theology laid overwhelming emphasis on morality, on the vices to be avoided and the virtues to be relentlessly pursued. In Waldensian belief Christianity consisted first and foremost in the law of God. However, the medieval Church had presented the sacraments, the intervention of saints, and the offices of pope and clergy as essential instruments of God’s forgiveness. Waldensian religious literature simply passed over the sacramental assistance of the Church. Only God had power over mortal sin; church rituals were meaningless. They were, as Bernard described the practices of all the religious cults in his general preface to volume one of Religious Ceremonies of the World , a ‘strange bizarreness’” (115).