HENRY OF LAUSANNE. - Opponent of the ecclesiastical hierarchy and of the priestly order, b. in the last decades of the 11th century, d. after 1145. He is variously named: "Henry the Italian," without, however, his origin from Italy being documented; "Henry of Cluny," because a Benedictine, expelled from the cloister, or "black monk," without his necessarily having to be considered a Cluniac; "Henry of Lausanne," where he dwelt before appearing notoriously in France; "Henry the Hermit," on account of his austere dress, barefoot, with a long beard, a cross in his hand, preaching penance and living from hand to mouth. He stirred up the crowds with a seductive popular eloquence, making himself believed a prophet of God, endowed with the penetration of hearts. The favor of the people caused him to be received benevolently by the celebrated bishop Hildebert of Lavardin in the city of Le Mans for the Lent of 1101.
With demagogic tactics he inveighed against the worldly life and the vices of the clergy and, according to a system common to these free and equivocal preachers of austerity, he channeled toward mere revolutionaries and heterodox princes the desire for an evangelical reform, always alive in the Christian conscience and in the work of authentic apostles. The bishop Hildebert, on his return from Italy, unmasked his ignorance, forcing him to confess that he did not know how to read the Breviary; yet other sources call him a man of letters. He further denounced his poorly concealed immorality, which is also reproached to him by St. Bernard, as the reason for his expulsion from the monastery and from other places of his pseudo-apostolic wandering. And he passed into the Périgord, into Aquitaine and into Languedoc. The bishop of Arles had him appear at the Council of Pisa of 1135, in which, convicted of heresy, he abjured his errors. St. Bernard invited him to retire to the monastery of Clairvaux; Henry, instead, continued his anti-ecclesiastical propaganda in the south of France, combining his action with that of Peter of Bruys (v.), of whom he was considered the heir and continuator. The effects were disastrous: the people abandon the churches, desert the festal liturgies, despise the priests, neglect the Eucharist, the Baptism of children and the other Sacraments; even the lords take advantage of it to plunder ecclesiastical goods and abandon themselves to license. The mission of 1145 led by the cardinal legate Alberic of Ostia called to its aid St. Bernard, who with the prestige of his virtue and word reawakened Christian sentiments and checked the evil, without however removing its pernicious infection. Henry was arrested by the bishop of Toulouse and ended his life in prison.
There is no particular formulation of his doctrines, in relation to those of Peter of Bruys; Peter the Venerable (Adversus Petrobrusianos: PL 180, 723) considers him a worsen of the errors of the aforesaid and informs us of the existence of a volume that contained the preaching of Henry. Ch. 23 of the Second Lateran Council of 1130 condemns those spiritual hypocrites who rejected the Eucharist, the Baptism of children, the priesthood and the ecclesiastical Orders, legitimate marriages. In manuscript no. 3 (R. 18) of the city Library of Nice there is preserved a short treatise of the 13th century (fl. 136b-145b) by Guillelmus monachus contra Henricum seismaticum et hereticum, in which there is discussed the right of bishops and priests to be honored and to have money, their power to loose and to bind, the evangelical precepts, marriage, the application of merits to the deceased. Henry, with a free interpretation of the Scriptures, must have accentuated the opposition to the dogmatic and moral magisterium of the hierarchy and to the priestly, sacramental and liturgical ordering of the Christian life, arriving consequently at the contestation of the connected dogmatic truths, without constructing an ordered doctrinal system. On the historical ground, the Henricians prepared minds to receive the dualistic doctrines of the neo-Manichaeans or Cathars (v.), also called Albigensians (v.), who invaded the aforesaid regions in the middle of the 1100s.