The Free Spirit Tenets 1
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, 18 July 2003
Abstract
Schwester Katrei is heretical because of its Free Spirit ideas, including permanent union with God, and the acknowledgment of possible independence from the institutional Church. Sister Catherine, a Béguine, speaks to her father confessor. She remains respectful of her confessor throughout, but ends up his spiritual superior, and teaches him. Like the Cathar Perfects, she had become a Christ. She had “achieved by grace what Christ was by nature”. The Catholic calumny against the Free Spirit was that they became self indulgent because a perfect being could not sin. The confessor indeed thought the perfect Catherine would want to be free, but she wanted to be nothing but poor until her death. She would not deviate from the model of Jesus Christ, humble until death.
Tenets of the Free Spirit
The fourteenth century was an age of adversity. Even before the Black Death, the economy was reeling from falling agricultural yields, climatic disasters, internecine wars, high taxes, shortage of hard currency, and the contraction of trade routes, especially those to the East. Lerner finds a reason for the rise of the Free Spirit in the turbulence of the age, dissatisfaction with the Church and its clergy, and sacramental magic. People were living in bad times, and were sick of the corrupt clergy. John XXII, in a letter of 1323 to the Archbishop of Cologne, predicted that the results of his interdict on all churches and localities that remained loyal to the Emperor would be that:
Corpses would lie unburied in piles for so long that their stink would infect the healthy; the innocent would have to go without the sacraments for so long that irreverence would grow; heresy would thrive and so would distress of soul…
The heresy of the Free Spirit offered a new hope for godliness, but the heresy was not, in its essentials, new. Lerner finds an excuse for a new heresy, but it has the same basic tenets as the last, and must imply a single continuing system of belief, evolving in minor ways in different circumstances, and emerging into history when the authorities of the Church sought to suppress it. Lerner admits that the Free Spirit heresy was similar to the thirteenth-century heresies of Amaury of Bene, Ortlieb of Strasburg, and William Cornelius of Antwerp, but says no connexion between them could be proved. It is rather like saying that there are certain similarities between a bat and a dolphin but no connexion between them can be proved.
When essentially the same ideas are circulated among groups of people living in the same part of the world, and within only a few decades of each other, it looks churlish to deny a connexion, whether it can be proved or not. Our powers of reason let us deduce things, except when Christians do not like the conclusions. What Christians do not like is that there was an alternative Christianity widespread in western Europe which emerged with the millennium, and became the Reformation about 500 years later. It sprouted a variety of branches, some stronger than others, but with a fundamental set of beliefs in common, and quite different from those of Catholicism. The central such beliefs were that they could:
- become one with God, “man is able to become God”
- dispense with the ministrations of the Church,
- violate without sin the moral law.
Of these the last one might be a Church calumny, the basis of which was that those who had united with God were perfect and therefore could do no wrong. The heretics of the Ries were shown as lawless, claiming deified people could no longer sin. Supposedly, sin was not sin to the Perfect, and they could commit mortal sin without sinning. They could rob, lie or perjure themselves without sin, and, if a servant, could give away the property of their master. They could eat in secret as much and whatever they wished, and need not work. They believed they were full of the Holy Spirit and beyond good and evil.
The Church assumed they meant anything they did was permitted, but they actually meant that the Perfect could do no wrong because it was impossible for Perfect people to do wrong—not that anything they did was deemed right. Rogues and opportunists used the gullibility of Christians to fool them that everything they did was right, but that is not the sincere heretical belief. Their belief was exactly that excuse used by modern Christians to explain away Christian crookery. Christians are automatically good. If someone is wicked then they could not have been Christian, whatever they claimed.
Some heretical tenets seemed pantheistic in that everything created is God or is “full of God”, but the basic heresy was Gnostic and rejected all of the material world as evil. What they believed was that living creatures had souls, and these were fragments of God. Thus everything created is God at soul. Humans became God by attaining a state in which God is active in them. The Church was able to accept this heresy to a degree by calling it mysticism, but there is a world of difference between the supposed glimpse of God that the mystic had, and the permanent state of being God, that the heretics thought their Perfects were.
For the heretics, identification between God and the soul was so immediate and complete that there was no need for any mediation of the Church through its pseudo-magic ceremonies and sacraments. Worshipping saints was useless and unnecessary for those already deified, and they similarly rejected prayers, fasting, and confession.
Free Spirit texts have been preserved and show by their survival as well as their contents, that Free Spirit thought cannot just be cast off as worthless heresy. Yet, in the Middle Ages, the Free Spirit was depicted as shocking. In Constance in 1339, they were said to believe:
- there was as much divinity or divine goodness in a louse as in man or any other creature,
- communion bread should be served to pigs,
- if a man and a woman had sexual intercourse on an altar at the same time as the consecration of the host both acts would have the same worth.
The reason was they disdained the material world, thought by the Church as God’s Creation, they disdained the sacraments of the Church as worthless, and they disdained the rituals of the Church as equally worthless. Other examples of their disdain for worldly Christian beliefs were that, in sexual matters, the unmarried were allowed sexual relations, though some limited it to kissing, and a child born out of wedlock is without original sin.
The original heresy at the root of these was sexual prudism, just as it was in the Church, but the heretics believed all souls were angelic, and would be saved as soon as they realised what the true situation was. Angels could not be forced to do what the Church prescribed. They had to learn for themselves. So, angels, in the sinful world, made mistakes, and could not be stopped from doing so without inhibiting their development. From their mistakes, they learnt correct angelic behaviours, and when they eventually aspired to unity with God, it could happen.
In the Nordlingen list of Free Spirit heretical errors, whoever is unified with God can satisfy the desires of his flesh in every way. This means that the spiritual God (God!) is superior to the material God (Satan). The spiritual God can therefore do just as He likes in fact, but God is good, and so spiritual people behave like God, not like the wicked material God. To read the errors they made, according to the monkish chroniclers, the heretics of the Ries sound like scandalous libertines, but it is doubtful that they were, unless they were one of the groups gulled by a charismatic leader out for his own advantage. Tenets which contradict the licentious impression are for the imitation of Christ, scarcely a lecher to any Christian, and that people should abstain from all exterior things.
The various lists of heretical beliefs have to be looked at critically. There are threads of belief that go through them unchanging, or changing little, like the notion of becoming God or Christ, and the disdain of sacraments, but supposedly scandalous beliefs might be:
- taken from marginal sources such as the groups who followed a charismatic confidence trickster,
- calumnies of the interrogators,
- genuine but unqualified explanations by the heretics in answer to hypothetical questions by the examiners.
So, because everything is possible for God, the answer to the question, “Can a soul united with God do just as it likes?” must have been, “Yes”, even though the unspoken qualification is that of course it would not! Porete writes “the soul neither desires nor despises poverty, tribulation, masses, sermons, fasts, or prayers and gives to nature, without remorse, all that it asks”, but immediately adds that because of the soul’s miraculous transformation nature is “so well ordered” that it “does not demand anything prohibited”.
Mechthild of Magdeburg, who entered her community in 1235, exulted in the wonder and thrill of knowing God, a union like that between bride and bridegroom: “thou art in Me and I in thee”. She thought she could reach God without the need of the sacraments, and she said that a soul united with God is free of sin:
When the soul begins to rise, the dust of sin falls away and the soul becomes a god with God, because what God wills the soul wills, otherwise the two could not be united in perfect union.
The uncleanliness of sin disappears before His divine eyes.
Lerner concludes that even if the heretics of the Ries were far more radical than Mechthild, the similarity of many of their tenets with positions she took in her Flowing Light suggests that heretical and orthodox mystics were close relatives. Quite so!
Norman Cohn tells us that the Free Spirit were Gnostics. The Ranters of the English revolutionary period held the same beliefs. The Church has always labelled these types of beliefs as mystical and thereby detracted from their utter difference and, indeed, contradiction of Catholicism, thus giving them a sort of hesitant acceptance, like an eccentric aunt. Yet Christian mysticism began with the century of the millennium, according to historians like Cohn, the very time that the Gnostic Cathar heresy emerged into the light. The two are really the same phenomenon, the Free Spirit being the child of its ravaged and tortured Cathar parent cast destitute, alone and persecuted into the world after its parent’s death.
The Catholic mystics were the equivalent of the Catholic mendicant orders—a response by the Church to Catharism. The true Gnostics disdained the Church. The Catholic mystics accepted it utterly, or implied a mild criticism and need for reform. Cohn admits that the Free Spirit cannot be traced back before about 1200, just when Catharism was brutally scattered by Innocent III (1198-1216). Even so, there were earlier sects with similar beliefs such as the Euchites and Messalians of fourth century Edessa (Urfa). Cohn also sees a connexion with the twelfth century Sufis of Moslem Spain.
Moses and Exodus
