The Free Spirit: Beghards and Béguines
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated:Thursday, 12 December 2002
Beghards and Béguines
Béguines were lay sisters in the Netherlands and Germany, the enclosed district within which they live being known as a beguinage. The equivalent brothers were also called Béguines, but more usually Beghards. The Béguines were earlier in origin than the Beghards. The Béguines and Beghards spread a network of ascetic communities all over Europe, more like the ancient Essenes and Therapeutae than the Christian monks. Some were severely persecuted, though their only heresy was that they did as the gospel Christ bade them do.
As early as the commencement of the twelfth century there were women in the Netherlands who lived alone, and without taking vows devoted themselves to prayer and good works. It was the age of the Crusades, and the land teemed with desolate women. These solitaries made their homes not in the forest, where the true hermit loves to dwell, but on the fringe of the town, where their work lay, for they served Christ in His poor. About the beginning of the thirteenth century some of them grouped their cabins together, and the community thus formed was the first Beguinage.
The first records are of communities at Louvain in 1220 and at Antwerp in 1228. Both the institution and the name of the Béguines might be derived from the name of a Belgian priest of Liège, Lambert le Bègue (d 1187). Le Bègue, as the chronicler Aegidius, a monk of Orval (Aureae Vallis), tells us, simply means “the stammerer,” so it means the same as Lollard (from Flemish löllen, to stammer). But, “Béguine” might be a corruption of “Albigan,” implying a link with the Cathars. The idea is strengthened by the alternative nicknames they have—Good Boys, Bons Garçons, Boni Pueri, Boni Valeti—all reminiscent of Bonhomme and Boni Homines, the names of the Cathar Perfects, whose lesser ranks were “sons” and therefore interpretable as boys. Both could be correct if Lambert’s surname had been Albiga, as the Latin name of the place of origin of his family, the surname being rationalized in the vernacular as Le Bègue.
About the year 1170, Lambert, like Peter Waldo and Francis of Assisi, renounced his wealth, to found the hospital of S Christopher at Liège, for the widows and children of crusaders. He set up an association for women, who, without taking the monastic vows, could devote themselves to a life of religion. He preached repentance, and attacked the vices of the clergy, sounding anti-sacerdotal, like the Cathars. Large numbers of women, many abandoned by the loss of their husbands on crusade, responded in a spirit of “revival,” and gathered into a convent-like community around his church of S Christopher.
The Béguines lived in separate small houses, subject to no vows or rule, in contrast to women who entered convents, save the obligation of good works, and of chastity so long as they remained members of the community. By 1210, contemporaries testify to the existence there of “whole troops of holy maidens.” The ascetic spirit took hold also of the married women, who frequently made vows of continence. Women could enter Beguinages having already been married and they could leave the Beguinages to marry. The first inmates were mostly women of position, who renounced their property and supported themselves by their own labors.
After Lambert’s death, the movement rapidly spread, first in the Netherlands and afterwards in France—encouraged by the saintly Louis IX, who erected a large Beguinage in Paris, in 1264—Germany, Switzerland and the countries beyond. Everywhere the community was modelled on the type established at Liège—a little city within the city, with separate houses, and usually a church, hospital and guest-house. The Béguines did not beg, and, when the endowments of the community were not sufficient, the poorer members had to support themselves by manual work, sick-nursing and by teaching the children of burghers.
As time went on, they came together in larger houses put at their disposal by pious gifts, and formed communities of a monastic type. The growth of these convents continued from the first third of the thirteenth century to the beginning of the fifteenth, by which time the majority of German towns had their convents of Béguines. The statutes varied much in the different houses. The number of occupants was between ten and twenty on an average. There was no uniform dress, but most of the members wore hoods and scapulars resembling a religious habit. Those who had property retained full control of it, or left it to the convent when they died or left. Celibacy was required as long as they stayed, but they were always free to leave and marry.
Flanders was the weaving centre of the continent since Roman times, and, from the eleventh century to the thirteenth, the whole of north eastern France and Belgium became “industrialised” as the textile centre of Europe. The whole of the region from the north of France through the Low Countries and into the Rhine valley became a place of religious and economic revolution with weavers and cloth workers at the centre of it all.
On the face of it the unrest was economic, with uprisings protesting against excessive taxes, poor wages and lack of freedom, but since the comparisons were made with the rich, it was natural for the theology of poverty to be used to sustain it. Christ himself had condemned the rich and exalted the poor, and should have returned by then and put his redistribution into effect. Economic rebels at Ypres in 1377 were actually condemned by the Inquistition but hanged for rebellion.
This early phase of industrialisation based on cloth manufacture had provided the best chance for wandering preachers or revolutionaries to get occasional work and keep from starving. Many of the voluntary poor were connected with cloth making as weavers, combers and dyers. Cohn writes:
The voluntary poor found a mobile, restless intelligentsia, members of which were constantly travelling along the trade routes from town to town, operating mainly underground, and finding an audience and a following among all the disoriented and anxious elements in urban society.
In northern Europe, the Free Spirit of Beghards and Béguines led the war against the established Church. Cohn confidently asserts, from around 1250, they assimilated any and every heretical doctrine there was, citing Cathars, Waldenses, and Joachites, and had no common beliefs. He gives no authority for it, and his own evidence of the beliefs held by the heretics contraducts what he says here. They had some constant beliefs among them all—hatred of the Church, a belief that sacraments are worthless, a belief in the spiritual value of poverty, and most important of all, the belief that each of us can become God. Cohn mentions their ability to split into small groups and to fade away when trouble threatened, “migrating from mountain to mountain like strange sparows”. This is a good description of the lifestyle the fleeing Cathars were obliged to follow. If they differed, they were merely variations on the Cathar original.
Cohn highlights that they were “all alike” articulate and literate. How could this be? Because the Cathars and Waldenses taught literacy as part of their mission. They wanted everyone to be able to read in the vernacular, and to be able to preach. The Church had no such duties, except to teach the clerics some Latin to be able to read the mass and the Lord's prayer, but learning them by heart would suffice. At the Ecumentical Council of Lyons in 1274, an outraged Franciscan complained that Béguines had translated the bible into French, and even discussed it!
Again Cohn, giving no authority says Béguines had “no positive heretical intentions”. It cannot be true. The Franciscans made strong efforts to take control of many beguinages, succeeding with many, but why, if they were no heretical danger? By 1320, the Church had driven the Beghards underground again. These men were the descendents of the Cathar Perfects in hiding, and depended on the Béguines, who still operated openly, for support. Béguine communities took in these men, giving them food and shelter, and sending on messengers to nearby beguinages that “an angel of the divine word” had descended on them. Béguines poured in to hear his address.
Cohn concludes that the Free Spirit became an “invisible empire”, while continuing to propagate the Church calumny that these men were super studs servicing whole nunneries of randy nymphomaniacs. He knows and even mentions that such fiction was the stock in trade of the Church's propaganda.
The earliest Flemish Beghard communities were associations mainly of artisans who earned their living by weaving and craft skills. They were all of them laymen of humble origin—weavers, dyers, fullers—intimately connected with the craft gilds. Indeed, no man could be admitted to the Beghards’ convent at Brussels unless he were a member of the Weavers’ Company, and this was in all probability not a unique case. Like the Béguines, they were not bound by vows.
The rule of life which they observed was not uniform, and the members of each community were subject only to their own local superiors, but, unlike the Béguines, they had no private property. Just like Essenes, the brethren of each cloister had a common purse, dwelt together under one roof, and ate at the same board. Under the influence of the mendicant orders of the thirteenth century, these tended to be incorporated as secular associates of the orders of friars. The name of Beghard then became what it is today, beggar, as the name of wandering mendicants who made religion a cloak for living on charity.
Amazingly like the Essenes as described by Pliny, the Beghards were often men to whom fortune had not been kind, and felt unable to stand alone, through personal misfortune and disaster. Thanks to their connexion with the craft gilds, they were able to influence the religious life and opinions of the cities and towns of the Netherlands. As time went on, they acquired endowments, but they were never rich. They waned with the waning of the cloth trade, and, when that industry died, gradually dwindled away. The male communities apparently did not survive the fourteenth century, even in the Netherlands, where they had maintained their original character least impaired.
More serious still, from the point of view of the Church, was the association of these wandering mendicants with the mystic heresies of the Fraticelli, the Apostolici and the Brethren of the Free Spirit. The Béguine, Marguerite Porete, was called before the inquisitors on suspicion of promoting the heresy of the Free Spirit. Inquisitors identified the Free Spirit heresy with all Béguines and the less numerous but perhaps more active Beghards. She was burned to death in 1310. But Béguines in Belgium were regarded as a bulwark against heresy, and Mary of Oignies, an early solitary, supported the crusade against the Albigensians.
The heretical tendencies of the Beghards and Béguines necessitated severe disciplinary measures by the Church, and they were repeatedly condemned by the Holy See, the bishops notably in Germany, and the Inquisition. Catholics accuse them of Quietism, a denial of the desire for salvation. Yet, one of the common threads running through the new religious groups, like the Waldensians, Lollards, Brothers and Sisters of the Free Spirit, Spiritual Franciscans, Apostolici, Joachimites, and Flagellants, as well as the mendicant orders, was the appeal of the vita apostolica, a life of freedom, travelling about preaching, and living frugally.
The Cathar Perfects valued total poverty. For what few needs they had, their regime being so severe, they depended on the Credentes. This example led, from the beginning of the millennium, to the fashion for voluntary poverty, something quite unknown to the bishops. The opulent wealth of the Catholic Church was the image of Christ it offered. Perhaps a few Catholic priests turned to voluntary poverty in protest against the Church and to try to impress God before he ended the world, but even they were shamed into it by the Cathar example rather than any twinges of guilt from reading about Ananias and Sapphira.
Max Weber stressed the importance of Protestant ethics for the development of capitalism and its social role. The rapid growth of trade and capitalism also motivated some merchants who had rapidly become wealthy to renounce it all and become peripatetic teachers. Waldo was the famous one. Voluntary poverty meant that starvation and destitution could be certainly avoided only if the poor person had some skill to offer on a casual basis. The vita apostolica was a return to primitive Christianity, a simple life and simple spirituality. The Béguines were called the “voluntary poor.” Their strict poverty designated them as the true followers of Christ. They were apt to withdraw themselves from the teaching of the clergy and listen rather to the exciting exhortations of wandering preachers, the Vaudois, the followers of Peter Waldo, in sympathy with their beliefs. These Waldensians, also of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, called themselves the “Poor in Spirit,” and literally obeyed every word of Christ, and so they were branded as heretics and burned in batches, sixty at one time being committed to the flames in Germany in 1211, and some being burned in Spain even earlier.
Béguines preached and taught scripture in the vernacular, inviting ecclesiastical venom for a practice that the Church thought was heretical and faithless. In the middle ages, holy communion was not taken often. Indeed, there were Catholic churches where no mass had been said for thirty years! Members of religious orders might receive communion three times a year, but Béguines wanted communion weekly or even more often. Such devotion does not suggest they were Cathars. However, like all mystics, they believed that the individual human soul could be directly united to God, and that sounds more Catharistic. The work of William of S Thierry, who was from Liège, was influential for Béguine mysticism. This sounds Cathar, but William was a trinitarian unlike Cathars:
It is well said that we shall see him fully as he is when we are like him, that is when we are what he is. For those who have been enabled to become sons of God have been enabled to become not indeed God, but what God is: holy, and in the future, fully happy as God is.
William’s friend, S Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153), echoing the Old Testament book Song of Songs, allegorized the relationship between the individual and God as a spiritual marriage between a human bride (the soul) and a heavenly bridegroom (Christ), and that sounds Cathar. S Bernard was trying to convert them, so might have used imagery they liked. Most often Béguines accused of heresy were said to share in the errors of the Brothers of the Free Spirit, who were said to be pantheistic and to reject the Church and its sacraments. Every human soul could realize its divine nature, and for the soul that had come to this awareness that it was God, there could be no sin. That sounds Cathar, not Béguine. Although scandalized by greed and corruption, Béguines did not reject the Church nor its teaching authority.
The disapproval of the Béguines by the papal authorities eventually made many join the mendicant orders for protection. Some retained their original character, but others were ultimately converted into Dominican, Franciscan or Augustinian tertiaries. In the fifteenth century, many Beguinages were transferred to the Augustinian order, but even by the end of the thirteenth century, the Béguines of France and Germany had been taken over by Franciscans and Dominicans to such an extent that, in the Latin-speaking countries, male and female secular associates of these orders were commonly called respectively beguini and beguinae. The aim of the friars was doubtless to ensure they did not lapse into the Cathar heresy.
In the thirteenth century, others evidently did fall into heresy, if they were not devised as heretical movements in the first place. They turned in increasing numbers from work to mendicancy in imitation of Christ. They practised extreme corporal austerity, and lost themselves in mystic speculations which increased their tendency to see visions and to condemn the sacraments and ritual of the Church. In short, they sounded close to Catharism.
Restrictions were placed upon them by the synods of Fritzlar (1269), Mainz and Eichstatt (1281), and Béziers (1299), when they were absolutely forbidden, Cologne in 1306, and Trier in 1310, when a decree was passed against those “who under a pretext of feigned religion call themselves Beghards, and, hating manual labour, go about begging, holding conventicles and posing among simple people as interpreters of the Scriptures”. This says that the Beghards were the same as the Vaudois.
Early in the fourteenth Century, the inquisitor Bernardo Gui investigated the lay followers of S Francis of Assisi. Gui reported, in his Inquisitor’s Manual, that many of both sexes were heretical. He began burning them from 1317. As they died, they cried out that they defended the gospel truth, the life of Christ and apostolic poverty. Gui thought their duty was to the Church, and thus to God, rather than directly to God! They listened to the Holy Spirit not the pope, and deserved to die for it. Gui said a Béguine or Waldensian had the habit of greeting each other in the street with the words, “Blessed be Jesus Christ.” Anyone using that greeting had to be arrested.
In 1311, under Pope Clement V, decrees were passed at the council of Vienne suppressing the Béguines and Beghards and demanding their severe punishment. The persecution died down, but was resumed from 1366 to 1378 by Popes Urban V and Gregory XI, and the Béguines were not formally reinstated until the pontificate of Eugenius IV (1431-1447). In 1421, Pope Martin V ordered “the archbishop of Cologne to search out and destroy any small convents of persons living under the cloak of religion without a definite Rule.” Many Béguines had a strong devotion to the Eucharist and the Corpus Christi, which feast some of them campaigned for and had granted by pope Urban IV.
Throughout the fourteenth century, Beghards and Béguines were persecuted for heresy when they were simply pious and disciplined in their beliefs. They sought the apostolic ideal by taking such names as “brothers of the highest poverty”, “the association of the poor”, “good daughters”, “little brothers”, “followers of Christ and the Apostles”, “poor good youths”, and simply “brothers” and “sisters”, but the friars, who also called themselves “brothers”, often resented them as rivals and the secular clergy resented their imitation of the friars and their frequent unwillingness to obey parish priests. Their pursuit of the vita apostolica embarrassed wealthy members of the clergy, who thought they could punishe the heretics by confiscating the property that they ought not to need as apostles. Popes ordered procedures against them to earn reputations as reformers and hammers of heresy, and Béguines were undefended targets.
At the Reformation the communities were suppressed in Protestant countries, but a few still survive as almshouses for poor spinsters. The beguinage of S Elizabeth at Ghent has some thousand sisters, and occupies quite a distinct quarter of the city, being surrounded by a wall and moat. The Béguines wear the old Flemish head-dress and a dark costume, and are conspicuous for their kindness among the poor and their sick nursing.
