The Hansel and Gretel Code Episode 7 - Woodcutting is Risky Business

In episode 7 we run quite a few risks and open a jar of Nutella in the library...

Hi and welcome to Episode 7 of the Hansel and Gretel Code...

🎶 Haydn piano Sonata in F Major I 🎶

well, here we are again, back in the library... researching our woodcutter’s genealogy...

and what we’ve discovered so far is that we can trace the religious branch of his family tree all the way back to and beyond two of his most illustrious ancestors:

John the Baptist and John’s cousin... uh, you know who...

except, we also found out: the evidence behind the old family legend claiming those two guys as ancestors is awfully thin...

even so, as we’re slowly piecing together the family album, we have plenty of solid evidence for including all sorts of monks and nuns in its pages...

and while some of them were saints and some of them were involved in all sorts of monastic hanky panky, all of them (except for the few black sheep in the family) were honest-to-god, dyed in the wool poverty lovers...

back in episode 6 we went through a good thousand years of family history before they kicked us out of the library for the night..

today, we’re back at the same table, in the same room of the religion section...

and we’re back to researching the voluminous history of voluntary poverty in the West all because of that pesky, ponderous word, “poor” in the first sentence of our fairytale...

to wit:

Once upon a time, there was a poor woodcutter, who lived before a great forest.

alrighty then, let’s get to it and see what we can see...

[01:47]

* * *

Christian Charity and Pietro Lombardo

So logically, we can’t talk about begging and voluntary poverty without mentioning Christian Charity...

I mean, many of those ancestors couldn’t possibly have chosen to be poor, not unless they knew for sure they could count on Christian Charity to keep them from immediately starving to death...

and that brings us to Pietro Lombardo, a celebrated, more or less orthodox theologian in 12^th Century Paris...

Peter was super-famous for a very important written work known as the Four Books of Sentences, which was required reading for all theologians for over 300 years...

and I do mean ALL of them...

everybody from Aquinas to Luther read these 4 books, and then wrote extensive commentaries on the individual sentences...

(hmmm.. kinda sounds like what we’re doing here with the individual sentences of this one fairytale... dontcha think...?)

Apparently, the most famous and most controversial doctrine in the Sentences was Peter’s identification of charity with the Holy Spirit (Book I, distinction 17).

According to Peter, when a Christian loves God and loves his neighbor — which would naturally include giving alms to the poor — this love literally is God; and the person practicing charity then becomes divine and is taken up into the life of the Trinity. (whatever that means...)

so is Peter really an ancestor...?

hard to say...

he’s certainly a good friend of the family because this business of equating Charity with the Holy Spirit may be all fine and dandy —

🎶 Haydn piano Sonata in F Major II 🎶 [03:43]

it’s the implication that someone becomes divine by giving alms to the poor and that has him treading on dangerous, heretical ground...

because it takes us right back to the Christian idea of mystical union: becoming one with God... not to mention, the Gnostic idea of Henosis or Union with the One...

and if we remember from the last episode, both ideas are encoded in the very aim of our fairytale children which is: to return or re-unite with the father...

so there it is: we’ve already come across ideas from Mysticism and Gnosticism once before — and like a broken record, this is something the fairytale will be bringing us back to a few more times before we’re through...

okay, now it's time to get down and dirty...

* * *

[04:44]

🎶 Beethoven - Appassionata I 🎶

among our woodcutter’s more obvious ancestors is another guy from the same neck of the woods as Pietro Lombardo

Arnaldo da Brescia and Beppe Grillo

Arno was a 12^th Century poverty lover who had some pretty strong opinions and made sure everyone heard them...

To be sure, he loudly and publicly criticized the Vatican, calling for the pope to relinquish all temporal power

(just remember, the papal states included a good chunk of the Italian peninsula for over 1,000 years, from the 8^th century until 1870 when the whole thing was finally shrunk down to the confines of Vatican City)

Arno, may have been loud, he just wasn’t full of hot air...

like so many of our woodcutter’s ancestors, Arno put his money (or lack of it) where his mouth was:

as a kindred spirit and forefather of both the Occupy Movement and Italy’s 5 Star Movement, Arno participated in something known as the Commune of Rome...

in 1144, the ordinary citizens of the city revolted and took civil government away from the Pope and the nobility...

so, while never declared a heretic, Arnaldo WAS excommunicated, and in 1155 he was hanged by the Holy Roman Emperor, Friedrich Barbarossa, who had some sort of arrangement going with Adrian IV, the only ever English Pope.

After the hanging, Arnaldo’s body was burned at the stake, and then his ashes were dumped in the Tiber. A gesture, very much like a book burning, which, naturally, was meant to dispose of him and his ideas forever...

As is usual with book burnings, reducing Arnaldo to ashes couldn’t prevent his influence and teachings — especially those on apostolic poverty — from spreading far and wide — specifically, through a branch of our woodcutter’s family tree known as “Arnoldisti”...

around the same time that Arnaldo was busy making a ruckus in Rome, 2 of our woodcutter’s ancestors were busy making friends and influencing people — and of course, annoying the hell out of the pope — all on the French side of the Alps...

* * *

[07:20]

A little French excursion with Guido the Killer Pimp

Henri de Lausanne was a poverty loving, Cluniac Benedictine who died in prison around 1148... he was, apparently, a very charismatic character whose followers became known as Henricians, although he himself was a follower of Pierre de Bruys who had died around 17 years earlier, and whose followers were known as Petrobrusians...

both Pierre and Henri were especially infamous for being the first monks in history to reject infant baptism — otherwise known among theologians by the disturbing name of paedobaptism...

over the centuries paedobaptism became a huge dogmatic hot potato, although it doesn’t make much of an impact on our story — not until much later on...

Of course, Henri and Pierre, unlike Arnaldo, were declared heretics, and Pierre was even burned at the stake...

although that alone isn’t enough to identify them as ancestors of our woodcutter...

instead, we have all the genealogic evidence we need thanks to a certain Pierre le Vénérable... otherwise known as Peter the Venerable

According to this Pierre, there were 5 horrible heretical errors that the other Pierre — Pierre de Bruys — was guilty of... and let me tell you, Pierre le Vénérable goes on and on and on about those 5 things in 130 pages of dense Latin text...

This Pierre le Vénérable, who died on Christmas day in 1156, deserves special mention here if only because he was "Dedicated to God" at birth — that is, he was an Oblate, abandoned by, er, I mean gifted by his parents to the Benedictine monastery at Sauxillanges.

so, here’s what Pierre le Vénérable had to say about Pierre de Bruys in his Tractatus adversus Petrobrussianos Haereticos that puts Pierre de Bruys right in line with the rest of our woodcutter’s naughty ancestors:

of course, it being all in Latin, I’m quoting just a few tiny snippets from a translation done in 1891

The first error of the Petrobrusians was their denial "that children, before the age of understanding, can be saved by the baptism...”

okay, we’ve already mentioned this... so, moving on, this second error is much more interesting:

“Edifices for temples and churches should not be erected...” then Pierre quotes the Petrobrusians as saying, “It is superfluous to build temples, since the church of God does not consist in a multitude of stones joined together....”

This is pretty cool since it takes us right back to Tacitus, and everything we've already said about sacred groves and forests for the Germans...

The third error was that the Petrobrussians “command the sacred crosses to be broken in pieces and burned...”

actually, Pierre de Bruys must have felt that a cross was symbolic of the cruelty of those responsible for the crucifixion, so for him, worshiping a cross was worshiping that cruelty...

regardless of his reasons, that makes him the first cross burner in history to be identified.

and historians — in a rare and tasteless stab at humor — love repeating what some ecclesiastic comedian once wrote: “the pious citizens of Saint-Gilles-du-Gard, enraged by Pierre’s cross burning, threw him into one of his own bonfires...”

yuk-yuk-yuk...

The fourth error involves the sacrament of communion... however, it’s such a complicated piece of dogmatic hair-splitting

we’re gonna give that as wide a berth as possible... even though it has relevance for our interpretation of the fairytale...

the problem is, it’s like an active beehive that we have no business poking our noses into...

sure there’s plenty of honey in it, we’re just not properly attired or prepared for extracting it.

okay, so the fifth and final error was a real doozy, because it’s the one that stepped on more well-shod toes than any of the other four...

— hey, you don’t ever see cardinals or bishops, and certainly not popes wearing sandals, do you...? —

I quote:

they deride sacrifices, prayers, alms, and other good works by the faithful living for the faithful dead, and say that these things cannot aid any of the dead even in the least...The good deeds of the living cannot profit the dead...

Well, on the surface that may be too wordy to sound like such a big deal, except it means that Pierre de Bruys was attempting to cut the very legs out from under simony.

Let's face it, indulgences, especially for dead relatives and loved ones, were among the chief products — if not the top sellers — marketed by the Vatican...

fuggedabout all of those crosses and crucifixes being sold in the gift shops...

If indulgences are shown to be worthless...what's the sense in buying them?

So it seems a little hinky, yet awfully logical, for the pope to denounce what amounts to a serious threat to his livelihood...

just remember what Guido the killer pimp told young Joel in Risky Business...

So for my money, this fifth "error" makes Pierre sound quite a bit like Ralph Nader. And I’ll bet he was.

* * *

Back to the Future

[14:03]

🎶 Haydn piano Sonata in F Major II 🎶

Okay now we get to one of our woodcutter’s most interesting and influential medieval ancestors:

Gioacchino da Fiore, who died in 1201, and whose branch of the family tree belongs to his followers, the Gioacchimiti...

The most basic facts about him are that he was a Cistercian monk from Calabria who went off into the mountains as a hermit, and then with all papal blessings founded his own monastery...

I gotta say, though, these bare facts are serious over-simplifications... there’s nothing simple about Gioacchino, except maybe his humility and sincerity...

Gioacchino spent most of his time contemplating and interpreting the bible and writing out his findings... except he wasn’t studying the bible the way any orthodox theologian would... and he wasn’t writing intellectual commentary the way all the logically-minded, Scholastic theologians like Aquinas did...

Gioacchino was no Scholastic... he was an intuitive thinker who found Truth and Meaning in the bible by treating it as metaphor.

(which isn’t any different from what we’re doing here and now with this fairy tale.)

[15:22]

🎶 Mozart Requiem in D Minor / Liszt arrangement 🎶

what made Gioacchino both famous AND infamous came out of his interpretation of the book of Revelation — otherwise known as the Apocalypse — which, as everyone knows, is a pretty bizarre fairy tale itself...

over the centuries, plenty of people had tried their hand at interpreting Revelation...

nobody, however, came up with anything like Gioacchino’s interpretations...

His Intuition gave him a Back to the Future moment that he is most famous for, which is the division of Time into 3 ages, namely: an Age of the Father, an Age of the Son and a future Age of the Holy Ghost.

As simple as that sounds, predicting and describing that Age of the Holy Spirit made Gioacchino the Godfather of the New Age...

and the hope of reaching that amazing age of utter peace, prosperity and understanding — 🎶 sympathy and trust abound 🎶 — inspired a great many historical personages... from Christopher Columbus to Dante to Michelangelo — just to name a few famous Italians...

the fact that Gioacchino's New Age — 🎶 mystic crystal revelation 🎶 — was predicted to happen in 1260, some 60 years after his death, holds little or no significance for our story. Except to say that it wasn’t something Gioacchino himself prophesied...

and yes, he was known as a prophet...

anyway, this 1260 business was a kinda silly assumption made by some of his ardent followers... and yet that silly assumption had everybody in the Christian world on tenterhooks waiting for the apocalyptic hammer to fall...

and that’s because according to Gioacchino himself, this age of Aquarius...er, I mean the Holy Ghost, would only arrive after a serious ordeal...

something way more difficult than Covid-19, although just as wide spread...

whatever it was meant to be was likened to the Israelites marching through the wilderness for 40 years and finally crossing the Jordan River into the Promised Land...

and oh yeah, just to remind you of the way Hansel and Gretel ends, before they arrive safe at the house of the father, they have to cross some great piece of water, too...

hmmmm...

Gioacchino’s written works are pretty dense stuff, so it’s hard to imagine how his ideas could have reached so many people...

On that account, one of his works, the Liber figurarum (“Book of Figures”) — which was only discovered in 1937 — is something that’s kinda like Carl Jung's Red Book...

[18:26]

🎶 Haydn piano Sonata in F Major III 🎶

although, it’s way heavier on graphics, so much so, it might as well be considered a kind of fascinating comic book... sorta like those Classics Illustrated comics most of us Boomers are familiar with...

actually, what it amounts to is a collection of amazingly beautiful and intricate mind maps of his ideas...

and, according to Marjorie Reeves, the foremost Gioacchino scholar of the 20^th century, this book:

probably carried his ideas in exciting and popular form far more widely than his indigestible writings.

And I mention this specifically, because this concept of expressing difficult to understand ideas in popular form is pretty interesting...

consider the fact that opera, very much like modern musicals, was practically invented to present more intellectually challenging books and plays in a less demanding, musical form...

that is to say, less demanding on the audience, making it easier for people to enjoy those works on something other than a strictly intellectual basis...

it’s even a concept connected to the author of our fairy tale.

And that’s another important theme we’re going to run into as we get deeper into this fairytale forest...

anyway, the arrival of this New Age... was to be heralded by a number of very specific milestones:

the most impossibly ambitious, grandiose and narcissistic of these was that everyone on the face of the Earth would convert to christianity...

of course, this being an absolute prerequisite for getting through that metaphoric wilderness, a great number of people considered it their sacred duty to make sure it happened in their own lifetime...

so we’re not just talking about Christian missionaries, we’re talking about Columbus and various other European explorers, not to mention Crusaders — many of whom took Gioacchino’s prophesy as license to subjugate, er, um, convert, everyone they came across...

[20:40]

🎶 Mozart Idomeneo Act III 🎶

now, just to be clear, this 3^rd and final age wasn't the more orthodox Second Coming of Christ...

which itself, included all sorts of amazeball, night of the living dead kinda of stuff with everybody coming back out of the grave for that blockbuster, Michelangelo, pissed-off Jesus, Last Judgment business...

phoof...

no, no...

this age of the Holy Ghost would be such a utopian Era of Peace, Harmony and Understanding on Earth, that all Church hierarchy would be rendered unnecessary.

As you can imagine, this was an even more thorough AND dangerous proposition than the one poor Pierre de Bruys came up with...

all Pierre wanted to do was eliminate the sale of indulgences...

Gioacchino’s prophesy wouldn’t just stop there, it would completely eliminate the middle man in everyone’s quest for Atonement, Salvation and Redemption...

naturally, SOME of his ideas were judged to be heretical, although, oddly enough, no pope ever bothered to declare him an official heretic...

they did, however throw the book at some of his most famous followers... and we’ll get to them in the next episode...

* * *

Crazy Eddie and Free Love, Baby...!

[22:04]

right now, we’ve got another one of our woodcutter’s French ancestors to add to the album:

Amaury de Beynes, who died c. 1207

oddly enough, Amaury — otherwise known as Amalricus — wasn't a poverty lover... he taught philosophy and theology at the University of Paris. Unlike Peter Lombard, who also taught in Paris, Amaury WAS declared a heretic.

🎶 Beethoven Piano Sonata No. 8 in C minor, Op. 13 Pathétique I 🎶

Being particularly erudite and educated, his doctrines were bound to contradict dogma and at first, his ideas only pissed off his University employer, who then complained about him to the Vatican.

Amaury was so sure of the logic of his arguments, he made a personal appeal to Pope Innocent III who promptly sided with the university and ordered him to recant his errors.

which he did...

Unfortunately, this seems to make him something of a coward... and not at all unlike our woodcutter himself who reluctantly agrees to abandon his 2 beloved children in the forest...

Of course, it’s possible that Amaury had his fingers crossed, since he not only saved his own skin... very much like Galileo, his ideas lived on through another branch of the woodcutter family tree: the Amalricians...

[23:51]

🎶 Beethoven - Appassionata III 🎶

Those ideas, which included a number of complicated dogmatic no-no’s, were formally condemned by the fourth Lateran Council in 1215 — some 8 -10 years after his death...

addressing them in a single sentence the Council pronounced his ideas as:

“...non tam heretica censenda sit quam insana.”

...“not so much heretical as insane.”

it’s apparently no coincidence that this sentence comes at the end of the council’s lengthier condemnation of one of Gioacchino da Fiore’s no-no’s...

apparently, Amaury’s disciples were convinced that he had singlehandedly inaugurated Gioacchino's era of the Holy Ghost...

Canon 2 (Last sentence)

We also reprobate and condemn the perverse teaching of he impious Amaury (Almaricus, Amalricus) de Bene, whose mind the father of lies has so darkened that his teaching is to be regarded not so much heretical as insane.

. . .

Reprobamus etiam et damnamus perversum dogma impii Amalrici, cuius mentem sic pater mendacity excaecavit, ut eius doctrina non tam heretica censenda sit quam insana.

From H. J. Schroeder, Disciplinary Decrees of the General Councils: Text, Translation and Commentary, (St. Louis: B. Herder, 1937). pp. 236-296.

Five years earlier, in 1210, a group of those disciples were thrown into prison for life, while about 9 or 10 of them were burnt at the stake just outside Paris, and at the same time, Amaury’s bones were dug up, excommunicated, and dumped somewhere.

[24:57]

🎶 Beethoven - Pathetique I 🎶

I said that Amalric's ideas lived on... and not least of which because some of his disciples translated and edited them into easy to understand language...

We even run into them in the next episode. And that’s because the surviving Amalricians took his ideas and ran with them:

one of them in particular... “he who remains in love of God can commit no sin” gave them license to follow their, um sacred desires... and eventually morph into yet another branch of our woodcutter’s family tree known as the Brethren of the Free Spirit.

And yes...in the spirit of the New Age, they pretty much practiced what it sounds like they preached: Free love, baby!

* * *

hey, who doesn't like Nutella...?

okay, it looks like we’re gonna get kicked out of the library before we can finish identifying all of our woodcutter’s poverty loving ancestors...

before we go, there’s one last guy and his followers worth mentioning...

especially if you like Nutella...

[26:04]

🎶 Haydn piano Sonata in F Major I 🎶

Peter Waldo, who died around 1218, was a wealthy merchant from Lyon who decided to go big and give everything he owned to his wife and take himself back to that old time religion and the age of the apostles.

He attracted a sizable group of followers and, like Arnaldo da Brescia, was famously vocal in his condemnation of the Vatican.

naturally, he and his followers earned the, by now, famous family merit badge as they were all condemned as heretics...

what makes him interesting to us is that he hated the pope so much he called him the Harlot of Babylon — an insult right out of the Book of Revelation...

And while it may have been a potent insult at the time, it sounds pretty lame to modern ears...

considering that Waldo was one of the better educated mendicants, it doesn't really suggest anything beyond a kind of very cultured hatred, although it also suggests that Waldo was the Left Wing, anti-Vatican equivalent of William F. Buckley, Jr.

except that’s not the point...

we’re eventually gonna see that this silly biblical insult has serious implications for the meaning of our story. And it's a meaning that won't be at all difficult to fathom, once we arrive at a certain moment in our fairytale journey.

Now, on a completely gratuitous note, I can report that Nutella was invented by this branch of our woodcutter’s family: the Waldensians.

Considering the fact that there were a number of bloody and barbaric attempts to exterminate the Waldensians over the centuries, we're extremely fortunate that at least some of them survived (and still do, even in America, both North and South).

Persecuted and hounded from place to place, the Waldensians who settled in Torino went on to dominate the chocolate industry there, and some exceedingly clever one of them invented the smashingly successful alchemical formula for mixing hazelnuts with chocolate known as gianduia, i.e. the very basis of Nutella.

you can read a very detailed and well written history of gianduia and Nutella online...

there are plenty of places you read about the violent hatred the Waldensians aroused and the, um, nutty, fanatical crusades sent against them...

all perpetrated by people who had no idea they were trying to deprive us all of Nutella...

and then you can also read how on June 22, 2015, Pope Francis became the first pontiff in history to visit a Waldensian church and officially said “oops, sorry.”

it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to find out that he’s probably no different from the rest of us and likes his Nutella...

* * *

okay, well, it’s officially closing time at the library, and we’re still not done with the poor branches of our woodcutter’s family tree...

I promise we’ll finish up our library research of apostolic poverty in the next episode and then we’ll finally be moving on to the second sentence of our fairytale...

[29:46]

🎶 Haydn piano Sonata in F Major III 🎶

just so you know what that’s going to be, here it is:

Es ging ihm gar jämmerlich, daß er kaum seine Frau, und seine zwei Kinder ernähren konnte.

Things were so rough for him that he could scarcely feed his wife and two children.

okay, so while there’s plenty of meaty meaning on that bare bone of a sentence, it’s not going to take us 8 long episodes to scarf it down...

and while we’re nowhere near ready for dessert...

any time is a good time for Nutella...

well...

thanks for listening...