Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, 18 July 2003

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.

Mirror of Simple Souls

Marguerite Porete seems certainly a Béguine because so many sources gave her that designation. Between 1296 and January 1306, she wrote a book which was condemned and burned in her presence at Valenciennes. In Mirror of Simple Souls Marguerite Porete wrote that “a soul annihilated in the love of the Creator could, and should, grant to nature all that it desires”. She was burned as a heretic at the Place de Grieve in May 1310, but her book continued to be used by monks, and was attributed to Ruysbroeck. It was brought to England with the court of Philippa of Hainaut, when she arrived to marry Edward III in 1327.

The Mirror of Simple Souls postulates “seven states of grace” which lead up to the union of the soul with God. For Marguerite, only divine grace guides the soul to perfection. It first observes the Divine Commandments, then counsels of evangelical perfection as typified by Christ—these tasks overcoming “the will of the body”. The third stage is to gives up good works and destroy “the will of the spirit”. The fourth stage is a level of contemplation free of “all outward labors and obedience” and so abandoned to love that it thinks God has no greater gift to offer on earth. The soul is now ready for the spiritual part of its journey. The fifth state reduces the soul by Divine Goodness to humility and nothingness. Now the soul is mature, and without desires, wanting nothing. In the sixth state of “clarification”, God liberates and purifies it. The soul arrives at a state of “glorification” in the seventh step, when it leaves the body and achieves eternal glory and the perfection of paradise. The first six stages can take place “here below”, but the seventh, perfection, is the future, post mortem reception by God. The Perfect is therefore in Porete’s sixth step, and is not yet Perfect.

Marguerite says there is as much difference between each one of these states as between a drop of water and the ocean. The purpose of the book is to show the soul in the fifth and sixth states. She compares the “annihilated” or “liberated” soul to the angels. There are no intermediaries between its love and divine love, and the soul is also united with the Holy Trinity. Wherever it looks, God is to be found, and is within too.

In an early chapter the soul says a poem beginning, “virtues, I take leave of you forever”, which then becomes a recurrent theme. The gifts and comforts of God interfere with the process of liberation, and she says the soul “gives to nature, without remorse, all that it asks”, explaining that because of the soul’s transformation, nature is so well ordered that it does not demand anything prohibited. The soul does not take leave of the virtues to travel a path of immorality:

She is so far from the work of virtues that she no longer understands their language, but all the works of virtues are enclosed within the soul and obey her without contradiction.

In another passage “Reason” is astonished at the paradox of the soul taking leave of the virtues and yet still being with them, and “Love” patiently answers that if the soul was once the servant it has now become the master, but without any conflict—the virtues are always with the liberated soul and in perfect obedience. Marguerite’s accusers did not charge her with immorality and there is no evidence in her work that she advocated libertinism in any way.

Once the soul is unified with God it has no independent needs or desires. Its answer to all suggestions is, “No!” It needs neither salvation nor damnation, or anything at all. It needs none of the supposed aids to salvation—masses, sermons, fasts, or prayers, since God exists independently of all these. It “does not seek God by penance, nor by any sacrament of the Holy Church, nor by thoughts, words, or deeds”. Do not forget, Marguerite is talking about an already saved soul. In the earlier stages, it purged itself of these necessitites. Now it is saved by “faith without works”.

The Mirror distinguishes the liberated souls and those still under the dispensation of the Church. Marguerite even introduces a character, “Holy Church”, to be taught about liberated souls and admit such souls are above it. Elsewhere she distinguishes “Holy Church the Little”, governed by reason, and “Holy Church the Great”, governed by divine love. The community of liberated souls is the Holy Church and “Holy Church the Little” will not last much longer. This is an evident categorization of the Christian world into the established and the heretical churches. Marguerite constantly disparages the lesser Church. Her book was considered by some as simply anti-clerical.

Yet Marguerite concedes slightly to the established Church in that “Holy Church the Less” accepts that love dwells in the liberated souls not in itself, but the Church does not love, but commands and praises it in “the gloss of our scriptures”. The early stages in the soul’s journey toward perfection are traditional—obedience to the commandments and the imitation of Christ. The soul profits from its servitude to the virtues until it masters them. Liberation in perfection is not possible without servitude. The Mirror was meant only for those with “understanding”. Those with understanding had abandoned “reason”—the methods recommended by “Holy Church the Little”. This allowed the Church to pretend that this was just a work of mysticism, and not a heresy. Only mystics could know what it meant.

Marguerite listed in The Mirror Béguines, priests, clerks, Preachers, Augustinians, Carmelites, and Friars Minor as accusingher of error. That Béguines were among her critics shows she was attempting to straddle the divide between the Churches.

Lerner concludes that The Mirror describes such a union between the soul and God outside paradise, and such a state of passivity that denies the spiritual ministrations of the Church that they would have been rejected by most Catholic mystics. But grace not nature propels the soul toward God. Moreover, the libertine and licentious acts attributed by the Church to the Free Spirit are denied by omission. If Marguerite had entered a cloister like Mechthild of Magdeburg, with whom she is compared, she would have attracted little notice. Obviously, the Church could tolerate heretics who kept quiet about it.

The Decree of Vienne

In 1311, under Pope Clement V, the Béguines and Beghards were accused at the council of Vienne of being heretics who had a “spirit of liberty”, and decrees were passed suppressing their organization and demanding their severe punishment. A pope has to declare heresy as such, and the decree of Vienne made the Free Spirit a heresy. It censured women “commonly known as Béguines” who took no vows of obedience nor followed an approved rule. These women wore a special habit, and “as if insane” discoursed on the Trinity and the divine essence. The decrees were put into execution by Pope John XXII, and a persecution raged in which, though the pope protected the female Béguine communities of the Netherlands, the orthodox and unorthodox Béguines were not distinguished, but the secular authorities supported the Béguine communities against the Church.

The decree of Vienne listed eight errors of “an abominable sect of malignant men known as Beghards and faithless women known as Béguines in the Kingdom of Germany” considered to be Free Spirit heretics.

1. People can attain perfection in earthly life and thus be incapable of sin. Any additional grace is impossible because it would confer on them a perfection superior to Christ.
2. In this state, such a person need not fast or pray because in the perfect state sensuality is so subordinated to reason that they can accord freely to their body all that pleases them.
3. Such a person is not subject to human obedience or to any laws of the Church because “where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” (2 Cor 3:17).

A further five propositions were consequences of the first three.

4. People can attain final blessedness just as much in this life as in the other.
5. People do not need the light of glory to be elevated to the vision and enjoyment of God.
6. Acts of virtue are only necessary for imperfect men, but the perfect soul no longer needs them.
7. A kiss is a mortal sin when nature does not demand it, but the sexual act itself is not sinful when demanded by nature.
8. People need show no sign of reverence during the elevation of the host because to think of the sacrament of the Eucharist or the passion of Christ would be a sign of imperfection and a descent from the heights of contemplation.

Besides these horrors, the heretics did and said other things offensive to God, and perilous to souls. The decree concluded, the sect should be exterminated and those belonging to it punished according to the laws prescribed by the Church.

Had Beghards and Béguines actually expressed such errors? The Catholic Church imagined Free Spirits indulged in liberties after deification, yet Free Spirit writings give no evidence of self-indulgence or libertine conduct. Marguerite Porete’s “simple soul” was first a servant of the virtues and, after deification, their master, but Marguerite saw no conflict between them. Sister Catherine, after “becoming God”, sank into a trance then relaxed her discipline, but rejected the call to self-indulgence, preferring to remain humble. They were lords of the spirit not of the flesh, and far from the poor seeking wealth through it, the rich were abandoning their own wealth for apostolic rags. Free Spirits were generally ascetic in their pursuit of Perfection and both bodily and spiritual abnegation were necessary for deification. The austerities needed for Perfection precluded its use for material gain. Moreover, despite the supposed criminality of the Free Spirits, none on record were charged with theft or murder, and charges of licentious behaviour are hard to credit except in perverse sub-sects.

One source for these accusations seems to be the list in The Mirror of Simple Souls. The sixth article of the decree is almost the first tenet of Marguerite Porete. The eighth article matches one in Porete that the soul does not care for the consolations of God because such would disturb the concentration on divine union. Dispensation from fasting or prayer and justifying sexual intercourse if demanded by nature correspond in Porete that the annihilated soul can accord to nature all that it desires without remorse of conscience.

But these statements were taken out of context and do not represent fairly Marguerite’s views. Some tenets of the decree of Vienne are closer to Albertus Magnus denouncing the heretics of the Ries of forty to fifty years earlier. The first article of the former is an elaboration of Albertus’ article 94 that man can so advance in this life as to become “impeccable”.

Bishop John’s description has survived in only one copy, but there is another record of the examination in Strasburg surviving. In John of Durbheim’s letter of condemnation of 1317, he writes what they believed. Only a single copy exists but two manuscripts exist entitled, Articles and errors which were found in the inquisition made by lord John, Bishop of Strasburg, among those of the sect of Beghards and among those who adhere to them and shelter them, that cover almost the same ground:

God is all that exists and that man can be so united to Him that everything he does and wills is identical to divine action and will. Man can become God “by nature” without distinction, in which state he cannot sin. Such men comprise the kingdom of heaven and are unmovable: nothing can cause them to rejoice or be disturbed. They have no need to pray and since they are God they should be adored like God.

This adoration at the end of this passage is just what Cathars did to their own Perfects. Also like the Cathars, in Christology, they said not only that every perfect man is Christ “by nature”, but that any man could transcend him in merit. They did not revere his body, asserted that he was crucified not for mankind but for himself, and blasphemed against the consecration of the host, saying that a perfect man should be free from all acts of virtue and should not meditate on Christ’s passion or on God.

The Catholic Church and Christianity were foolish. The perfect man is free from all ecclesiastical precepts and statutes. He need not honor his parents nor work with his hands, and he can receive alms, even if not in orders, or indeed steal, since all property is held in common. Any good layman is more able to confer the Eucharist than a sinful priest, Christ’s body is found equally in all bread as much as in that of the altar, and confession is unnecessary for salvation. Under the same heading, though not directly related, is the interesting tenet that all sexual relations in marriage except those leading to offspring are sinful.

The list goes on to deny the existence of hell, purgatory, and last judgment. Man is judged on death, when his spirit or soul returns from whence it came, and nothing is left except God who exists eternally. Even Jews and Saracens are not damned, because their spirits also return to God. Believers should follow their own interior instincts. Some scripture contains no truth because it is merely imagery, and all the books of the Catholic faith could be destroyed and replaced by better ones.

Heretics supposedly claimed they could surpass the saints, were more perfect than the Virgin, could neither increase nor decrease in holiness, and had no need of faith, hope and charity. Finally, John’s letter says sexual relations even in marriage were sinful unless they led to propagation, but the inquisitorial list contains the contradictory statement that the free in spirit can do whatever they wish with their bodies without sin. Some additional differences are: The free in spirit need not observe the fasts of the Church and may eat meat on Fridays. A perfect woman need not obey her husband concerning acts of matrimony. Men, though healthy and strong, do not have to engage in bodily labour, even though by receiving alms they take that much away from the truly poor. And the state of freedom releases all from servitude including those who had been previously bound to a king or other lord.

Were Beghards, known until the fourteenth century for their extreme piety, really uttering all these outrageous tenets summed up by the statement that Christianity was mere foolishness? On the face of it, it appears astonishing that a group hitherto criticized primarily for unlicensed religiosity should so suddenly become avowedly licentious.

“God is formally all that is”, taken literally, contradicts that only some men could become God as a Perfect. In that they thought only the spiritual world of God was real, the material world being an illusion crated by the Devil, might be the truth. As in the case of the Cathar Inquisition, John’s inquisitors, probably Dominicans, had a crib sheet of leading questions to be asked based on a distortion of the heretics true views. That the body of Christ could be found in any bread meant that the bread of the altar was merely bread! The heretics were really disdaining the sacramental wafers. Expressed this way, it is attributed to the Amaurians of Paris in 1210 and was used by the wicked Guichard of Troyes a century later. That this bishop used this very accusation suggests that it could not be taken literally.

An important statement not in the earlier lists is the claim that all human spirits return to God whence they came. It is given as an heretical belief in Cologne at the same time as Bishop John’s examinations. The belief that parts of the Bible were only poetic was illustrated Matthew 25:32:

And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats: And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.

The sheep on the right hand were to get the kingdom but the goats were to get the eternal flames. The heretics had no interest in eschatology believing that salvation was to be earned, and that Christ, the archangel Michael had already been with his salvific message and triumph over his brother, Satan.

Meister Eckhart

The identification of Free Spirit heretics is not easy. The use of the term Beghard is the least reliable of criteria. Eckhart was often taken for a Free Spirit who might have known The Mirror of Simple Souls. In 1311, Meister Eckhart, a German Dominican, went to Paris and evidently came in touch with heretics like Porete. From Paris, Eckhart left for Strasburg and was there just at the time of John of Durbheim’s campaign against heretical Beghards and Béguines.

Eckhart criticizes “people who say ‘if I have God and God’s love, I can do everything that I please’”. For him, “so long as one wishes something that is against God and his commandments one does not have God’s love… but the man who observes God’s will and has God’s love gladly does everything that God loves and shuns everything that is ungodly”. He also attacks those who do not consider sin to be sin, who do not practice virtues or recognize the nobility of Christ, but speak of divine secrets which in truth are foreign to them. He warns against believing that anyone can sin without regard for the consequences, and urges the need to distinguish right and wrong.

In his Book of Divine Consolation, he insists that man is naturally a creature of evil and infirmity whose only goodness is borrowed from God.

If I assume that the goodness that I have is given to me for my own and not merely borrowed, then I am saying that I am the master and am God’s son from nature, when, in fact, I am not even God’s son from grace.

He is denying the heresy that “man can become God by nature without distinction” that the Bishop of Strasburg explicitly attributed to Beghards and Béguines in 1317. So, it seems peculiar that Eckhart was indicted for heresy by Henry of Virneburg, the Archbishop of Cologne who had condemned Beghards in 1307, and after a vigorous defence was posthumously condemned by Pope John XXII. Yet, in 1329, a bull of John XXII listed twenty-eight items from Eckhart as heretical or suspect, such as Article 15:

I am converted into Him, not as a similar being but so that He makes me one with Himself… If a man is rightly disposed he should not regret having committed a thousand mortal sins.

Of the twenty-eight articles in the bull of condemnation, In agro Dominico, the first twenty-six were extracted directly from Eckhart’s published writings. Many were similar to the errors of the Beghards. He also says:

Wwe are transformed totally into God and converted into Him in a similar manner as in the Sacrament the bread is converted into the Body of Christ.

He adds that all good men are equal to Christ, and that men can will whatever God wills. William of Ockham called him insane, probably a conscious echo of the condemnation of Amaury of Bene by the Fourth Lateran Council. Jan van Leeuwen, though a devoted follower of Ruysbroeck, said Eckhart knew only as much doctrine as a mushroom, and was the Antichrist because he taught that we can become God’s son without distinction. Van Leeuwen thought Eckhart was the founder of the heresy of the Free Spirit.

Before Eckhart’s time no one knew of these awful free spirits nor of their false teachings which all originate in the stupid doctrine he used to preach that we are God’s sons like Christ without distinction.

Jan van Leeuwen

Many persecuted by the Church did regard themselves as disciples of Meister Eckhart.

Free Spirits believed that they could attain union with God on earth, but they thought that they could only reach this state by means of bodily austerities and spiritual abnegation and that attainment of the state resulted in detachment from daily concerns rather than in radical engagement in them.

Robert E Lerner

If this is true then the accusation that Free Spirits were sexually licentious is the usual calumny of the Church against its enemies.

Sister Catherine (Schwester Katrei)

Schwester Katrei is a “spurious” book in the German vernacular from the early 1300s which unites the sermons of Meister Eckhart and the heresy of the Free Spirit. Oswald of Brentzahusen, a Benedictine monk from Swabia in the mid-fourteenth century, took it to be written by Eckhart. It is considered heretical because of its Free Spirit ideas, including permanent union with God, and the acknowledgment of possible independence from the institutional Church, though it seems never to have been banned. Indeed, it circulated among Catholics as well as the heretics, even though Eckhart’s own works were neglected. It survived in various copies, and a nun of the fifteenth century included the work in a spiritual anthology. It is a dialogue between Sister Catherine, a Béguine, and her father confessor. Eckhart is not explicitly the father confessor, though he clearly is him, and the work includes whole chunks of Eckhart’s writings. The Béguine remains respectful of her confessor throughout but ends up the spiritual superior of her father confessor, and teaches him.

At first, Sister Catherine is an obedient daughter, following the path outlined by her confessor, and under his guidance. He urges her to obey the Ten Commandments and conquer her sins, and she obeys. She then wonders whether she has found the best way to eternal bliss. She feels he is keeping her from a greater spiritual life. She tells the confessor that only doing one’s best in following Christ is insufficient to become one with God. She assures her doubtful confessor him that God helps those that surrender themselves to Him, and takes her instruction upon herself, vowing to listen to none but the Holy Spirit. The confessor objects that she is not strong enough, but she pursues the apostolic life becoming the most scorned and insignificant of creatures in Christ. Though she has forsaken everything, she still has not surrendered herself. The confessor marvels that she can endure all the scorn she has provoked, but she says she has found more of God in such bitterness than she ever had formerly “in all the sweetness that ever happened in creatures”. Thus saying, she departs for further persecution and exile.

She returns from “foreign lands” so transformed that her confessor thought she was an angel. She had transcended all obstacles to union with God, but had not yet achieved it. Her confessor regreted that he had never experienced the direct knowledge of God his daughter sought, but he prayed for her in her quest, urging her to rid herself of all desire, whereupon she sank into nothingness and God drew her into a divine light so illuminating that she thought that she has become one with Him. She was struggling in this ecstatic condition in which “heaven and earth have become too narrow” for her until she sensationally announced: “Sir, rejoice with me, I have become God”. Sister Katrei retired into solitude in a corner of the church, where she lay for three days as if dead. When she rose up again, she had achieved the state she sought of “being established in God”. The confessor asked her, after she came, out of her trance whether she was permanently confirmed in “the naked divinity” and she answered, “Yes”.

Like the Cathar Perfects, she had become a Christ. She had “achieved by grace what Christ was by nature”. There are no shocking consequences from unification with God. The author exults “praised and honored be the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that he has revealed to us how we might receive in grace what He Himself is by nature”. The Catholic calumny against the Free Spirit was that they used this condition as an excuse for unrestrained self-indulgence on the grounds that a perfect being could not sin, and this expectation is expressed in the final parts of the dialogue. The confessor thought Catherine would want to lead a life of freedom—to dress, eat, drink, and sleep as she liked. But she wanted to be nothing poor until her death. She would not deviate from the model of Jesus Christ. He remained humble until death and so would she. She no longer mortified herself as before, but she was still fully concerned with the life, humanity, and teachings of Christ, and her goal was to help all men away from sin.

Now the Béguine instructed the confessor in the secrets of her illumination—the daughter had become the greater spiritual authority, their roles thus being reversed, although both continued to expound teachings for the benefit of the reader. The confessor kept his priestly dignity, and the treatise ends with the daughter successfully bringing her father to a greater kind of knowledge, and eventually a personal experience of God.

Interpolated into the end of the manuscript is a short passage called the “ten points”, an earlier independent and non-heretical composition. The “ten points” are the stages on the way to eternal truth, like pain and endurance, resignation to poverty and self-sacrifice, endurance of insult and shame, and complete receptiveness to what God wishes to work through the individual, points coinciding so well with Sister Catherine’s teachings that they seemed appropriate.

Eckhart’s ideas were tried after his death in 1327, and he was posthumously pronounced guilty of heresy at Avignon in 1329. He was a poacher turned gamekeeper, as plainly as it is possible to be. He was a Cathar disguised as a Catholic. He believed that the purpose of the human soul was reunion with God. This was done by the soul learning certain knowledge. It must realise that the corporeal entities of Creation are nothing, but that the soul is continuous with God. To know it is to be it. This knowledge for the soul is that all external means of salvation are worthless, and it can unite itself with God, when God finds Himself existing in it. This is undiluted Catharism. Indeed, it might be a clearer exposition of Catharism than we get from the scholars who study the remnants of Cathar texts.

The author might have been among the community of Béguines and Beghards in fourteenth-century Strasburg, many of whom held ideas reflecting the heresy of the Free Spirit. The appellation “sister” often specifically meant a Béguine. Sister Catherine’s care in attempting to distance herself and other “friends of God” from false Free Spirits suggests she was aware of the charges leveled against Béguines and Beghards by John of Zürich, Bishop of Strasburg (c 1317). Yet, her use of the expression “friends of God”, the literal meaning of Bogomils, is an obvious heretical link.

Béguine piety in it included an emphasis on poverty, the achievement of union with God and emphasis on Christ. Gnostic theology is strong—especially the central role of Mary Magdalene, and the author’s claim to “becoming God”. Ruysbroeck complained that some heretics wanted to become God Himself. Some mystical nuns said similar things without being accused of heresy. Beatrice of Nazareth, for instance, wrote that the soul can reach a state wherein it “no longer can perceive difference between itself and God”. But Schwester Katrei’s proclamation was unqualified, and her union was complete and enduring, whereas a mystical experience is only fleeting.

Schwester Katrei is set in a church building, and the confessor, if Eckhart, is a Dominican, but the relationship between Father Confessor and daughter is ambivalent. It is impossible not to see the work as allegorical in that the confessor stands for the established church and the sister for the heretical one. The clergy are not living up to the apostolic ideal, but they are given more credit for their efforts than earlier heretics might have done. The Church is trying to give guidance but has lost something spiritual, and the tract is meant to show that the Church does not have the right answers, despite having a degree of sincerity. The student ends up teaching the teacher. Sister Katrei regrets that priests do not only preach the gospels. The confessor replies:

Saint Dominic sold his book and everything he had and gave to the poor for the sake of God, but we do not do that, nor other good deeds, but remain what we are, and say that we are great priests, though we do not live accordingly.

More strongly critical of the Church is the implication that laymen could reach God without priests or sacraments. During her transfiguration, Sister Katrei tells her confessor “wonderful things of pure godly truth” that he thought only clergymen knew. Elsewhere, he admits:

No one can resist one who is touched by God: not all the saints in heaven nor all the Dominicans and Franciscans on earth.

Radical religious individualism like this was the sign of heresy to the establishment and it could not take it in. In the latter portion of Scbwester Katrei, after her illumination, the sister became far wiser than the priest, but she never broke with him. She willingly accepted his advice even during her transfiguration and begged for his prayers. The book comes over as a manual of conciliation between the heretics and the Church, suggesting that the two were still compatible, even though the heretics were doing the godly thing, and the priesthood were lost. After Sister Katrei unites with God, she still lived in the world without violating evangelic teachings and resolved to help others. Schwester Katrei depicts personal divine guidance and God’s grace as sufficient to unite with him, the very essence of Protestantism.

Robert E Lerner thinks the Free Spirit were a priesthood of developed souls, a spiritual elite set apart from the many who had to settle for an inferior spiritual state. So, the leaders were the “chosen”, or the “elect” whose devotion and rigorous ascetism let them aspire to God. If so, they were, of course, the equivalent of the Cathar Perfecti, but then all the lesser souls could aspire to the same status, even if, as the Cathars thought, it was in another incarnation. In short, the Free Spirit seem to be an attempt to preserve the heresy of Catharism in a form imagined to be more acceptable to the Church.

Evaluation

Many instances show that the Free Spirit continued as a heresy hated by the Church right through until the 1500s when the Reformation had already begun. It was often called Spiritual Liberty, and had all the usual characteristics but was hated by the Reformers as much as it was by the Catholics. Centuries of propaganda plainly made its mark. Calvin found Spiritual Libertines called Quintinists among the Protestants of Paris. He denounced them in his Institutes in 1539. Quintin was eventually incinerated. Calvin found 10,000 Quintinists at Tournai and Valenciennes, and the French protestants of Strasburg sent a minister to persuade them to Protestantism, but Catholics caught and burnt him. Calvin continued his polemics against them, and they seemed to disperse. In 1544, a Free Spirit leader called Loy Pruystinck was burnt to death on a slow fire, and five disciples were beheaded. The rest of his followers fled to England. A century later, the Ranters, with the same principles were briefly active in England. Equivalent heresies in Italy called the Freedom of Spirit and in Spain called the Alumbrados were active in this same period.

Cohn, in his otherwise brilliant seminal work, The Pursuit of the Millennium, cannot make up his mind how to interpret the plethora of heresies. Having denied they had anything in common, he then admits that all the Free Spirits had a single basic corpus of doctrine. He claims it was neo-Platonist pantheism based on the philosophy of Plotinus, but he also admits that the heretics show no interest in pantheistic metaphysics. John of Dürbheim said they believed, “God is all there is”, and Albertus Magnus said they believed, “Every created thing is divine”. It was not though their temporal existence that was divine but their “essence”. An heretical tretise found among the possessions of a Rhine hermit says:

The divine essence is my essence, and my essence is the divine essence… From eternity, man was God in God… From eternity, the soul of man was in God and is God… Man was not begotten, but was from eternity wholly unbegettable. And as he could not be begotten, so he is wholly immortal.

The conclusion that “every rational creature is in its nature blessed” seems to say that only humanity is divine of earthly creatures, but “rational” could mean that which is perceived by reason, and so “rational creature” means all created things. “Living” might be meant, if the soul or essence is identified with life. All of creation wanted to reunite with God, and individuals did so at death, their soul uniting with God like a drop of wine in an ocean. Eventually everything divine would unite with God. There was no post mortem punishment in hell or reward in heaven, both being descriptive words for states of the soul trapped in its material prison. The Spiritual adept was already in heaven.

The theology of the Free Spirit also seemed to divide humanity into two groups—those who were “subtle in spirit” (themselves), and the mass of the people who had not developed their divine consciousness, and were “crude in spirit”. According to Cohn, the Free Spirits themselves do not seem to be distinguished in any way. They accepted that everyone merged with God after death, but only they were already God. Even Plotinus did not imagine such a thing. And, if true that the Free Spirits thought everyone automatically merged with God at death, the theology had simplified since the original Catharism. But Albertus Magnus and others said that “adepts” “set themselves above the saints” or “thought they were God”, implying that Free Spirits had at least two classes—“adepts” who already were God and the rest who aspired to the Godly state. If everyone who professed the Free Spirit automatically became God, just like modern Christians who think they are automatically saved just by believing it, heretics would have had every incentive simply to cultivate their gardens and wait for it to happen. There could have been no need for Beguines to invite Beghards to give them secret inspirational talks. It looks like a crude caricature of Free Spirit belief. Like the Cathars, they must have had “adepts” and “aspirers”—Parfaits and Croyants. The Catholic chroniclers and accusers usually spoke of “adepts”, but did not always make clear distinctions among the Free Spiriters, causing confusion and making them all sound like megalomaniacs. Ruusbroeck makes his Free Spiriter sound superior to Christ, although initially it is simple Catharism:

It is the same with me, as with Christ, in every way, without exception. Just like him, I am eternal life and wisdom, born of the Father in my divine nature. Just like him too, I am born in time and after the way of human beings. So, I am one with him, God and Man. All that God has given him, He has given me too…

It is uncertain but likely that Free Spirit ideas became contaminated with Catholic ones, a dilution that led to Protestantism, and an attack on the traditional Free Spirit from its old enemy and a new one standing on its own ground. Certainly, the Catholic examiners, like the examiners of the witches, had their own story that they preferred. It is hard to understand how Ruusbroeck's Beghard could have truly claimed superiority to Christ without denying that God actually is God. A part of God must be more God-like than another, so that part of God must be superior to the rest, and that then is God, not the whole! Doubtless he heard what he wanted to hear, or reported what he thought was suitable for denigrating his enemy. Even so, the core beliefs which occur repeatedly and consistently are those of the Cathars.

It was by no means easy for the “Adept” to reach the goal of unity with God. For years, they had to practise “suffering”, meaning putting up with severe pain and personal austerity until they became passive or indifferent to it. Only then was there a chance that the unity could be achieved, as Maguerete Porete and Sister Catherine show. There cannot have been many adepts, and they do not seem the type of people to enjoy partying and sex. The Hermit's treatise, cited by Cohn, said:

The perfect man is God. … Because such a man is God, the Holy Spirit takes its essential being from him, as though from God. … The perfect man is more than a created being. … He has attained that most intimate union which Christ had with the Father. … He is God and man… The perfect man is the motionless cause.

If someone is God, then many things follow in logic that Free Spirit adepts might have said in all humility, but which could have been cited by examiners as insanity. They could say they created the world. They could say they had no need of “God” or were superior to “God”, where “God” has quizzical marks because it means the human concept of God, not what they now were! Again there were plenty of rogues. Many clerics left the Church to become Free Spirits but with what degree of sincerity? We know that some were Church spies. To have the power of God over people must have appealed to plenty of opportunists. Yet, this movement survived widely against universal establishment oppression for five centuries, and that can only mean that most adepts were genuinely admirable and charismatic.

Cohn lists sayings of the Free Spiriters that he thinks proves their immorality:

• He who attributes anything he does to himself and does not attribute it all to God is in ignorance, which is hell… Nothing in a man's work is his own.
• He who recognises that God does all things in him, he shall not sin. For he must not attribute to himself, but to God, all that he does.
• A man who has a conscience is himself Devil and hell and purgatory, tormenting himself. He who is free in spirit escapes all these things.
• Nothing is sin except what is thought of a sin.
• One can be so united with God that whatever one may do, one cannot sin.
• I belong to the Liberty of Nature, and all that my nature desires, I satisfy… I am a natural man.
• The free man is quite right to do whatever gives him pleasure.

The source of these citations are critics of the Free Spirit. As in almost everything to do with established religions, the people who study these matters have an axe to grind, and it is difficult to feel confident that we are getting an objective assessment of them. The Church interprets these statements to mean that Free Spiriters were utterly immoral, and justified all acts that they chose to do. But an organisation with such beliefs could not be sustained. It would be chaotic, and must collapse into chaos. Members could kill each other with impunity, betray each other for money, teach anything they pleased. There could have been no continuous Free Spirit with such beliefs because to hold such views contradicted them! Plainly enough, the Free Spiriters held coherent views and held them over hundreds of years.

In short, if these statements truly represent the Free Spiriters, then some important qualification is being omitted that would bring order into them, and understood as fundamental, and therefore going without saying, to the Free Spirits themselves. As an example that might be related, the motto, “Do what thou wilt”, would seem to summarise the Free Spirit as understood in these lines. It was Aleister Crowley's motto, and transferred into the modern witch movement by Crowley's acquaintance, Gerald Gardner. But the witches qualify it with, “as long as you harm no one else”! So, no witch is free to do as they like. The qualification is severely restrictive. If the Free Spiriters were precursors of the witches, then the relevance of the motto is clear, but none of them were free to do as they liked—especially adepts.

These views seem recognisable in Cathar Gnosis and are eminently sensible. Croyants were free to do as they liked in the wicked world of Satan, but they have a sherd of the true spiritual God within them which learns from its experience in hell—material existence. Through this process of learning, the sherd of God within everyone ascends towards its proper place—unity with the Godhead. Parfaits have become God, and God is almighty. God can do just as He pleases, but is also perfectly good, which in practice restricts Him. God would not be perfectly good, if He did wicked things. As God, He can do them, but as God he will not. These must have been the views of the Free Spiriters, or something similar. Evidence comes from Roman Guarnieri who examined Poerete's Mirror in detail. He says the deified soul…

…has no will but the will of God who makes it will what it ought to will.

What the Catholics ignored is that God is purely spiritual, and the soul is aspiring to ascend to the same state. The spiritual entity cannot possible take pleasure in the material. The soul becomes indifferent. Wanting to fornicate or thieve is not indifference. The unity of the soul with God puts it above and beyond all desire. The physical world is, in gnosis, inferior—merely an outward bound course to test the worth of the soul. Nowhere does The Mirror of Simple Souls suggest that the deified soul should start getting enjoyment in its prison. The aim is to escape!

Modern Protestantism is plagued by cultism, and there is no reason to think that the Free Spirit then was not. So, the Church had a variety of cranks and cracked pots they could label with the Free Spirit, but, just as many Christian ministers would reject cults as not genuine Christianity, we have no reason to believe that the caricatures of the Catholic chroniclers or Calvin are a genuine picture of heresy.

Moreover, someone who had become God could expect to be obeyed, and must have had authority as a teacher and a guide. A Catholic criticism is that they gave up fasting and became gluttonous, gave up rags and dressed like princes. Yet, if this is what they did, making them the equal of the hated clergy, how could they have retained the respect of the poor people, over centuries? It is clerical projection of their own failings on to their enemies. The Beghards forced underground again must have given up their uniform with its patched cowl, because it would have been an obvious and idiotic give away. They must have travelled from beguinage to beguinage “disguised” as ordinary travellers.

The greatest obsession of the Church was open sensuality, and there is no reason to doubt that the Free Spiriters did not consider it a sin. They did not accept the Catholic idea of sins—behaviour that God did not like. God knew the soul was imprisoned, and its task was not to do what He liked while in prison, but to find its way back to unity with Him. Ultimately, it meant rejecting the carnal body, but not to have reached that level was not a sin. To become bored with earthly delights might have been a necessary stage. It is like saying ignorance is a sin. It is not something we desire, but we are all born ignorant and have to learn not to be. The soul was the same.

So, they did not have to approve of sexual promiscuity, even if they would not condemn it, and, in fact, actually excused it in this physical world as the sign of an immature soul. They aspired to be God, and an immoertal and all powerful being had no need for procreation. Sex for the unsophisticated soul was not a sin, but the sophisticated soul had no use for it. That the Catholics should have accused the heretics of using sex as a sacrament is again their own projection. The heretics had no use either for magic acts and objects. To regard the sexual act as sacramental is to accept Catholic theology not Cathar theology. In his inconsistency, Cohn, having accepted the Church's categorization of the Free Spirit as promiscuous, says of the Adamaites:

One can probably discount the chroniclers' claim that this cult involved communal sex orgies. From the days of the early Church onwards such tales have been told for the purpose of discrediting minority groups, and there is nothing in the extant documents to suggest that, even when told of adepts of the Free Spirit, they were justified.

It seems then that these people were promiscuous but not orgiastic! That is going too far. The Adamites merely thought that going about naked like Adam and Eve was natural.

But, of course, the Free Spiriters “really did develop an extraordinary skill in lying and pretence”. We know this because Calvin noted it. Their “blithe dishonesty” he noted as characteristic of them for “century after century”. The reason we are given is that they had utter disdain for the mass of humanity not of the Free Spirit. How do we know? Calvin said! The Free Spirt was hated by Catholics then Calvinists alike, but it stretches credulity, as we have observed, that an immoral, thieving, lying mob could retain a following for centuries while being persecuted. If they were the thread of primitive Christianity going back to the Essenes, they had been persecuted for two millennia. This trowelling on of horror after horror only convinces those who already have no doubts, the Catholic, and then the Protestant faithful. Doubtless impoverished and persecuted people did have to steal and lie to survive, but the fault is with those supposed to be loving who drove them to it. The established Church tried for centuries, using every foul means, to force them to collapse. It failed. It was Calvin and the Protestants, themselves the ugly hybrid of the Catharism and Catholicism, that finally succeeded.

If the Free Spirit had a theological justification for stealing, it was one that emerged later as an anarchist slogan, “Property is theft”. Adam and Eve had had no property, and mankind had been given the stewardship over nature—mankind! Not just a few of them! Jesus and his disciples had had no personal property, just like the Essenes, of which Jesus was one. The apostles had had no personal property, and keeping it was such a severe crime that Peter had killed two of the first Christians for keeping some private property against the rules of the Nazarenes. Common ownership was what what acceptable. Modern Christians of all denominations now regard it as Satanic, calling it “communism”, the worst possible insult. So, God's son on earth was a communist and was therefore Satanic. Do they know what they are saying?

If Christians are now certain that God wanted them all to have private wealth, then that is one thing, but in the middle ages, many Christians saw the ownership of obscene wealth by individuals, the Church and noble families as the opposite of Godliness. Then, it was wealth that was Satanic not voluntary poverty, and it is hard to see how the opposite can be considered sinful from the life of Christ himself. John of Dürbheim noted:

They believe that all things are common, whence they conclude that theft is lawful for them.

Wattanbach, who seems to have written a great deal to denigrate the Free Spiriters, says one of his interviewees, Johann Hartmann, says:

The truly free man is king and lord of all creatures.

Then Wattanbach tells us Hartmann said that, as a consequence, a free man could kill anyone who sought to deter him. Wattanbach also cites John of Brünn as saying God was free and had created all things in common. So, those who had excess food as wealth were to give it to the Brothers and Sisters of the Free Spirit. If a Free Spirit found money on the road, it weas his as a blessing from God. If another claimed it, the Free Spirit had no obligation to give it over. God had redistributed it to the voluntary poor. What did the lying and gluttonous Free Spirit do with the money? Have a night on the tiles? John of Brünn said God wanted it spent on the Brethren!

Accrding to Wattanbach, even if another Free Spirit claimed the money, the finder was entitled to keep it, and even to kill his colleague for it! Wattanbach said this was normal among the Beghards. Again, it is impossible to believe that any such lawless and unprincipled society could live for a years let alone for centuries, and continuously impress the poor and be a thorn in the side of the Holy Mother. The real point of the slanders is that the Free Spiriters held their goods in common, and considered private property as theft. The true early Christianity of Jesus and the apostles was preserved by those blackedned literally by the Church's propagandists and Inquisitors—the Cathars, then their descendents in the Free Spirit.

Further Reading

• More on the Millennium, when Christ failed to return, and notions of heresy began to take hold in the West
• More on beliefs of the heretics, Cathars, Albigensians
• More on documents pertaining to heresy
• More on the Inquisition

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