Peter of Bruys - Death and Legacy

Death and Legacy

As Peter the Venerable recorded, crosses were singled out for special iconoclasm. Peter of Bruys felt that crosses should not deserve veneration. Crosses became for the Petrobrusians objects of desecration and were destroyed in bonfires. In or around the year 1126, Peter was publicly burning crosses in St Gilles near Nîmes. The local Roman Catholic populace, angered by Peter's destruction of the crosses, cast him into the flames of his own bonfire.

Henry of Lausanne, a former Cluniac monk, adopted the Petrobrusians' teachings about 1135 and spread them in a modified form after Peter's death. The teachings of Peter of Bruys continued to be frequently condemned by the Roman Catholic Church, meriting mention at the Second Lateran Council in 1139.

Henry of Lausanne's followers became known as Henricians. Both the Henrician and the Petrobrusian sects began to die out in 1145, the year St Bernard of Clairvaux began preaching for a return to Roman orthodoxy in southern France. Soon afterwards Henry of Lausanne was arrested, brought before the bishop of Toulouse, and probably imprisoned for life. In a letter to the people of Toulouse, undoubtedly written at the end of 1146, Bernard calls upon them to extirpate the last remnants of the heresy. As late as 1151, however, some Henricians still remained active in Languedoc. In that year, the Benedictine monk and English chronicler Matthew Paris related that a young girl who claimed to be miraculously inspired by the Virgin Mary was reputed to have converted a great number of the disciples of Henry of Lausanne. The sects both disappear from the historical record after this reference.

There is no evidence that Peter Waldo or any other later religious figures were directly influenced by Peter of Bruys. His low view of the Old Testament and the New Testament epistles was not shared by later Protestant figures such as Martin Luther or John Smyth. In spite of this, Peter of Bruys is considered a prophet of the Reformation by some evangelical Protestants and Anabaptists.