The Free Spirit
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Friday, 18 July 2003
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 treatise 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 immortal 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 Adamites:
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 was 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 year 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.
