The Free Spirit: Eckhart and Sister Catherine
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, 18 July 2003
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.
