The Free Spirit
Primitivists lurked in mute and ragged rebellion in a hundred little hamlets. Only the more literate were actually more heretical, and their heresy lay in trying to whip the Church back towards a simplicity and a purity which it had early lost.W Woods, A History of the Devil
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated:Thursday, 12 December 2002
Abstract
In northern Europe, the Free Spirit of Beghards and Béguines led the war against the established Church. From around 1250, they cited Cathars, Waldenses, and Joachites. Their common beliefs included hatred of the Church, that sacraments are worthless, the spiritual value of poverty, and most important of all, that each of us can become God. Organized in small groups, they faded away when trouble threatened, “migrating from mountain to mountain like strange sparrows”, a good description of the lifestyle the fleeing Cathars were obliged to follow. If they differed, they were merely variations on the Cathar original.
The Heresy of the Free Spirit
Almost everything we know about Catharism comes from hostile sources, whether polemics written against heretical doctrine, chronicles narrating the successes of orthodoxy, or the complex and problematic records of inquisitors. Knowing the truth requires a completeness that history lacks. Once absolute truth is accepted as impossible in history, then the study of history must be seen as at least implying a code of practice that demands honesty, reliability and trust. This is where Christian historians fall short. They are not historically reliable or truthworthy because they insist first on being theologically correct. How then can there be a “community of belief”, a popular idea among historians? It requires mutual respect in addition to honesty, but dishonesty must be exposed, and there can be no respect where dishonesty arises.
Academic historians generally do respect each other, but unwarranted respect can only lead to falling standards, making any approach towards historical truth more difficult. Here a community of false belief, set by Christian interpretations, made historians inclined to invent any theory rather than accept that Catharism was a major influence on Europe at the start of the second millennium. They prefer to pretend that a variety of different heresies arose over a period of about 500 years all with little or nothing in common. It is rubbish.
The motivation of the Free Spiriters was the search for religious perfection. Free Spirits hoped to achieve this through imitating the apostolic life and reaching union with God, two goals that dominated the spirituality of the High and later Middle Ages.
The Cathar rejection of corporeality provided one foundation for their faith, leading to the ritual of consolamentum that transformed a believer into one of the “Perfect”, the Perfects’ abstention from meat and sex, and their belief that marriage was innately sinful because it pretended to sanctify bodily relations. The example set by the lifestyle of the Perfecti was more important than their dualistic belief as such. Another foundation was the Cathar belief that they were the true inheritors of the early, apostolic church. From this sprang the need for the Perfects to minister to their flock, to preach and to practice poverty, their mendicancy providing the example whence Guzman was inspired to form the Dominicans. The Languedocian Cathars had a church structure, including bishops, deacons and other officials for different areas, and enjoyed the support of much of the southern French nobility.
Initially, the description “Free Spirit” was not insulting. Abbot Joachim of Fiore (1145-1202), who had inspired Francis and his followers, is credited with a tripartite theory of history based on the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Joachim, according to Ronald A Knox, of Trinity College, Oxford:
Seems to have been the patentee of these speculations about world-history which are for dividing it not into two periods, pre-Christian and Christian, but into three separate Dispensations, that of the Father, that of the Son, and that of the Holy Ghost.
Each was responsible for an era of history. The father was the old period of the Jewish scriptures. The son stood for the period of the New Testament and history until then. Joachim characterized his “third age” as one of liberty of the spirit. A commentator glossed this as “liberty of the spirit is the apostolic life which has been renewed through Saint Francis”. So, the dawning age was the age of the Holy Spirit, which would be like the summer compared with the winter and spring that went before.
Joachim did not originate the idea, but was the first monk to express it in writing. The contemporary fourteen Amaurians of the Sorbonne had the same tripartite theory of history, even though they could not have known the work of the Italian monk. The idea was therefore not Joachim's but already had been formulated, even if Joachim had refined it in his own way. What could have been most likely to have been the source of this belief in an age of the spirit other than Catharism in which everyone’s soul could and eventually would unite with God—and no magical sacraments or Catholic Church needed. Joachim preceded the Cathar crusade, and so had no certain knowledge that the Church was ready to use totalitarian violence against the heresy, and perhaps saw his dispensations as a way of allowing the two streams of Christianity to merge. It was a way of synthesising Catharism and Catholicism. He was naïve enough to think the Cardinals would want to. He seemed anything but intentioanllly heretical, and three popes allegedly inquired about his ideas, but they dropped him when they realised it contradicted Augustine’s dogma that the kingdom of God was already present with us as the Catholic Church. Even so, the idea of a coming age of the spirit was to inspire heretics and eventually the Reformation and secularism.
In 1230, Wilhelm Cornelis of Antwerp, who renounced a benefice to follow the apostolic life, declared that clerics who were not poor were damned, but poverty abolished sin. The choniclers say he therefore gave himself up to lust. This was the time when robbing the rich to feed the poor, in the Robin Hood mould, was fashionable. The Church founded the mendicant orders at this time to try to neutralise the anticlerical movement. It worked for a while confusing the poor and winning many that the Church might have lost to heresy, but clerical corruption was too easy to enjoy and too hard to resist, and the Franciscans and Dominicans soon fell for it.
The Franciscans, of course, believed in the poverty of Christ and the apostles. No one other than the artists who depicted the risen Christ as a Byzantine potentate bedecked with jewels, seems to have dissented for a millennium from the notion of apostolic poverty. It was John XXII who realised that such teaching was supporting the heretics and the millions of Christian paupers who contrasted it with the conspicuous consumption of the bishops and abbots. The Franciscan order had, of course, quickly got property, adopting the characteristic clerical habits of luxury, sloth and idleness, but some were shocked and outraged that this debasement of S Francis had happened so quickly.
In 1323, John XXII condemned the doctrine of Christ’s poverty as heretical! Many Franciscans were astonished, and concluded that John was the real heretic to make such a declaration. The Joachites among them had thought the formation of the new orders of mendicant monks was one of the signs of the coming new age, and would supply leaders and prepare the way to the spiritual age. Some, in the very place where Catharism had been strong, the south of France and Italy, took it very seriously. Coming out openly against the pope, they split off to form the Spiritual Franciscans, the Poor Brethren of Saint Francis, or the Fraticelli. These monks had realised they were fighting the wrong enemy.
The Fraticelli in Sicily would have it that the Gospel of Christ had been wholly extinguished, to be revived in their own order. The Church of Rome, they added, instinctively falling back on a Montanist habit of speech, was the carnal Church, theirs the spiritual.Ronald Knox
Montanist, perhaps, but they did not have to go back so far. Their contemporary Cathars thought the same thing. The Spirituals insisted on remaining poor, as they had vowed. They also forged further works by Joachim prophesying them as the moving order of the spiritual age. Needless to say, they were hunted and hounded, arrested and burnt at the stake.
Brother Michael of Florence was among them. He preached that people should attend more to God’s word in the gospels than anything the divines of the Church said. He was reported to the bishop. Arrested along with his companions, he was told to sign a document ackowledging John XXII as a “Catholic and holy man”, but refused, calling the pope a heretic. He had his hair and fingertips cut off and was taken to be burnt. A contemporary account in the National Library of Florence records moment by moment the events en route to his death. The attendant friars chanted continuously for him to confess, the calls and questions of the crowd, and the Franciscan’s replies. “I die for Christ.” “I die for truth.” “The people’s voice crucified Christ.” “Christ died for us.” While Brother Michael was being bound to the stake, and onlooker asked, “What is this for which thou wilt die?” He replied, “It is truth which is lodged in my soul, so I cannot testify to it except in death”.
After saying his Credo, he got to verse eight of his Te Deum before he made a snort as if sneezing and cried out, Lord, into thy hands I commend my spirit, whereupon, his bonds having burnt through, he fell on to his knees with his body backwards, face to heaven and mouth silently open, dead. The whole spectacle was about an hour, and the crowd went off saying he died like a martyr and a saint. The account has it that his fellow Fraticelli took away the corpse, so that the crowd arriving to gawp on the following day found it missing. The Fraticelli were nominally Catholics and accepted the Catholic sacraments but had the faith of the first Christians, that of the primitive heretics. Like the Cathar Perfecti, they wanted to emulate Jesus but thought it should be possible as a Catholic Christian too. The Church thought otherwise. This story paints Brother Michael as a new Christ. The people wanted the redeemer promised by the Church. It was the heretics that offered them.
Another Joachite element was that of the leader of the new age (Novum Dux), and this quickly became identified with a Perfect Holy Roman Emperor, soon taken to be Frederick II, the grandson of Frederick Barbarossa. Frederick II was charismatic, ruthless and a great critic of the Church and its wealth which he blamed for its corruption. A forged Joachite work made him prophesy that Frederick II would overthrow the corrupt Church in 1260. When the Germans started pronouncing Frederick the Novum Dux, the Church put the whole of Germany under interdict. Unfortunately, along with the Joachite beliefs were the heretical idea that the sacraments were worthless, and interdicts by the corrupt Church were no better. The confidence of the Church in its main deterrent was dented by the preference for the beliefs it was aimed at.
Revolution simmered but soon Frederick died without fulfilling his prophesy. Expectations deflated, but in the fashion typical of religious beliefs, Frederick was soon resurrected and considered to be sleeping like Arthur and Charlemagne until his proper time comes for a return! A few years later, sure enough, madmen and opportunists started appearing claiming to be Frederick. One such pretender got some support from powerful princes hoping to restrict the accepted monarch Rudolf, the first Habsburg. Rudolf eventually captured the pretender and had him burnt at the stake. He seemed to have died with the conviction of the heretic, certain he would rise again in three days. His followers continued to believe he would return too!
The heresy of the Free Spirit spread widely in Champagne, Thüringen, Brussels, Cologne, Bavaria and other areas, disseminated by wandering weavers, dyers and mendicant religious travellers known as Beghards and Béguines. The Free Spirit is said not to have been a united organization, though Beghards and Béguines communicated widely across Europe in the first half of the fourteenth century.
Unlike the Cathars and the Waldensians, the adepts of the Free Spirit did not form a single church but rather a number of like-minded groups, each with its own messiah and each with its own particular practices, rites and articles of belief.Norman Cohn
Their beliefs were not exactly the same, though they had in common a substantial gamut of beliefs beyond which there were differences. Commentators cannot understand that all could be called Beghards and Béguines even when, like Martin of Mainz and William of Hildernissen, some were in orders. The distinct boundaries that Christians like to see are confounded, and so are blamed upon the confusing language of the heretics or their accusers. Certainly, the heretics were disproportionally women. Women seemed particularly attracted to the idea of spiritual perfection.
The attachment of women to the vita apostolica was both sociological and psychological. They had a much inferior status. The high male death rate and the removal of many men from availability as husbands because they were clerics meant a surplus of women. Few vocations were available for spinsters and not many could get into nunneries. The life of a Béguine was a way for unmarried women to work and feel secure in society. Nor could women preach, but Free Spirit doctrine let them, and better still unite with God in Perfection. A tract like Schwester Katrei encouraged women in their religious devotion.
The Free Spirits were supposed “entirely ignorant of letters”, as early as 1310 classed as untutored people. Many were poor landless artisans—it was an urban heresy—but were far from being entirely unlettered. Some were middle class, though the majority were working men and women. The Béguines in the nunnery-like beguinages seem to have been often from prosperous families, and commentators assume that someone of the time who could read was middle class. Robert Lerner (The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages 1972) writes:
The very literateness of the Free Spirit movement was a token of comfortable social status in an age when literary composition was a near monopoly of the well-off.
But heretics taught the poor how to read and write in the vernacular so that they could read their gospels. Heretics were authors, and many who were not could still read, and had a good theological vocabulary. They were called unlearned mainly because they did not read or write in Latin. They were not an ignorant rabble.
Albertus Magnus, one of the earliest opponents of Free Spirit heresy, preaching in Augsburg in 1257 or 1263, defined liberty of the spirit as the ability to turn one’s spirit toward all that one wishes without being impeded by the flesh. In this way, the free spirit could be next to the saints, next to the angels, and even next to God. Albert did not characterize such liberty as the ability to become one with God, but while he was preaching at Augsburg there were men and women in the nearby Ries who were saying just such things and Albert would later have to deal with them. By the fourteenth century, liberty of the spirit was the designation of a heresy.
Moses and Exodus
