Bruys, Peter of

BRUYS, Peter of. - Heresiarch of the first half of the 12th century, named after his place of origin, perhaps Bruis in the department of Hautes-Alpes, or Les Broues there or in that of Drôme. He cannot have led the life of a believing and upright priest, since he was deprived of his parochial office and became a agitator of the people against the priests, whom he branded impostors and who, together with the monks, were maltreated, imprisoned and forced to marry by his troop of reactionaries. The various dates of his death, fixed by historians by inference, fall between 1132 and 1140; we know that about twenty years earlier, that is between 1112 and 1120, he had begun his heretical propaganda in the dioceses of Embrun, Gap and Die in the Dauphiné, before moving on to Gascony, to the regions of Narbonne, Toulouse and Arles. At St-Gilles, near the mouth of the Rhône, on Good Friday the indignant populace finished him off in the flames, which he himself had kindled to burn the crosses he had mocked and broken.

Abelard condemns him, in general terms, as a subverter of the divine institutions and of ecclesiastical doctrines, and specifies certain errors that are set out in the fuller list of the refutation by Peter the Venerable (v.): the invalidity of the Baptism of children, because they are incapable of an act of faith; adults were forced to be rebaptized; the uselessness of material churches, which were torn down, and of liturgical chant, as of every religious art, because prayer can be made anywhere and interior sentiments have no need of obligatory cultic manifestations; rejection of the cross and of Friday abstinence, because they remind us of the ignominy to which Jesus Christ was subjected; denial of the sacrifice of the Mass and of the Eucharistic Sacrament, which were accomplished by Jesus once and for all; prayers and good works cannot benefit the dead, because they are incapable of merit. In his aversion to the Church he rejects the foundations of its authority, namely Holy Scripture, of which he seems to have retained only the Gospels, and perhaps also the letters of St. Paul, to be left however to the free interpretation of the faithful, and patristic tradition. It does not appear what the positive principles of his religious personalism and spiritualism were; it cannot be said that he foreshadows the doctrine of justification by faith, since he recognizes the necessity of Baptism for adults. His heresy does not belong to the Cathar dualistic current; he is rather a representative of those heretical movements which, on various pretexts, sought to laicize religiosity, withdrawing it from the divine institutions of the Church. B. found in the heretic Henry the Deacon (v.) one who worsened his anti-ecclesiastical line. His followers were called P(i)terobru(i)sians. By way of information we note the adventurous hypothesis of the Waldensian E. Tron, who would make of B. the founder of the Poor of Lyons or Waldensians, identifying him with P. Valdes or Waldo.

Ilarino da Milano