The Heresies of the first Millennium are far too subtle for me, born of Greek pedantry and literalism that leaves me floundering. Was this Bishop a Montanist or an Arian? Don’t know, don’t care! Apart from the successfully eliminated Gnosticism, it is late in the first thousand years of Christianity that believers start to find paths that strike me as significantly deviant. The excesses of the Crusades (People’s or otherwise), the Dualism of Catharism and the wildness of the Flagellants are all well documented and fascinating. Also very widespread but little known was The Heresy of the Free Spirit, a pernicious problem for the church as, unusually, this was a rather enjoyable heresy!
Virtually all heresies seem to start and end with John’s hallucegenic poem Revelations. After book upon book devoted to God’s Love, of rules and regulations for following a Good Life, there at the very end of the bible, the Old Jehovah rises again, the Old God not interested in saving the souls of man, but purely in demanding allegiance or threatening eternal suffering. However you read the complete timetable for the End Times, the rise of the Anti-Christ, The Last Trump, the Final Battle of Armageddon the basic fact is that only a tiny, tiny few will find their way to an everlasting life.
Who will make it to the final salvation? Will it be the rich, pompous, overbearing princes of the Church? The wandering friars? The poor of the flock? The hermits? The monks? With the numbers so tight, it can’t be everyone. So what is required, with the End Times so imminent, is a sure fire way to book a place on that final ride to ecstasy.
So whether it is by walling yourself into the walls of a church as an Anchorite, flogging yourself half to death with the flagellants or the receipt of Gnostic ‘secret knowledge’ the objective is the same; to be one of that final number, the saved.
But let us take the story on a bit. Once you have studied, preyed, suffered deprivations, seen visions and are finally on a different plane, the plane that will take you to the place you want to be, one of the chosen few (so few), what then is your relationship to Ordinary Man? It seems obvious that you tower above Ordinary Man, as does God. Are you, in fact bound by Common Man’s laws? Even to frame the question is a nonsense. If you, one of the Elect, need food, then it should be given to you with joy, just as man pays his tithe to the Church. If a man is misguided enough to refuse you, then just take it. It is a trivial matter for a member of the Amoral Superbeings. No consequence. You need a place to live? Who could argue with God’s Anointed? And within the community of the Chosen, ordinary morality has no place. And if the Elect chose to live a continual sexual orgy, that is their right and no man may argue with them. And that is precisely the logic that led to the Heresy of the Free Spirit practising free love and sex 700 years before the Summer of Love, a heresy the Catholic Church really did detest!
The Brethren of the Free Spirit were first noted in the early 13th Century and continued in one form or another until after the Reformation. They flourished particularly in the Rhinelands and low Countries though France and Italy also had their cells. Their beliefs came from a number of sources; philosophically they were neo-Platonists. They shared many beliefs with groups who believed in Absolute Poverty. As an example Willem Cornelius in Antwerp in 1233 was certain that monks were damned for not attaining Perfect Poverty, but that absolute poverty, perfect practised, abolished all sin, particularly fornication.
As with many groups, they believed in the Three Ages of the world – The First, the Age of God lasting until Jesus’ birth, the 2nd Age of The Son would be superceded by the Age of The Spirit. The brethren were the heirs of Jesus, those who would lead the World into the Third Age, the Age of the Spirit.
The heresy was particularly associated with the Begherds. These were vagabond monks, characterised by their distinctive call of ‘Bread for God’s Sake!’ Typically of such groups, these ascetic nomads were seen as practising voluntary poverty, living solely off alms. Despite their simple lives, these wandering holy men were often (usually!) better educated and informed than the local priesthood. Although not essentially heretical, many of these groups included adepts of the Free Spirit.
Rather opposite to The Cathars, the Brethren of the Free Spirit believed that God was in everything, as much in an ordinary stone as in the bread of the Eucharist. Every thing created by God was equally divine. At the end of life, all living things were re-absorbed into the Divine Origin; so on death the human soul was reabsorbed into this Divine Origin. A man who had knowledge of his own divinity was resurrected as a Spiritual, while failure to recognise your own divinity was the only true Sin.
Despite this Unitarian divinity, the Brethren nonetheless did believe that they were superior to others; they divided the world into those who were Crude in Spirit and those who were Subtle in Spirit. Since absorption into Christ was possible during a human lifetime, an adept could be considered superior to Christ. For some there was no longer any need for God.
The path towards enlightenment was suitably hard and long, involving complete subservience to a Master, and many long years of poverty, manual labour, contemplation and meditation. In this they were relatively orthodox in their unorthodoxy. Their uniqueness lay in their metamorphosis into the amoral adept. The Brethren did not live a secluded life, but were part of t he society of the towns, displaying their strange morality for all to witness. Once an adept achieved Subtlety of Spirit they must use all created things for their own purposes. Just as cattle were created for the use of human beings so a woman was created for the use of the Brethren. Indeed a woman who had sex with an adept became a virgin once more. Whatever an Adept needed it was his right to have, either freely given, but alternatively simply taken. Above man, an equal with God these were his rights.
One of the groups who were particularly attracted to all such groups of holy men were unmarried and widowed women. These were often educated yet had no defined role in society at that time. The Beguines adopted a religious life, but within society, and like the Begherds, many were attracted to the Free Spirit and became local sources for the heresy. Given the sexual nature of the heresy, clearly some complicated emotional and intellectual situations could arise between these spiritual religious. Recognising the connection between the Begherds, the Beguines and the Free Spirit, Clement V called for these religious communities to be investigated by the Inquisition; unsurprisingly this simply resulted in persecution of many innocent people, and increased resentment against the Catholic authority.
The Free Spirit was along-lasting heresy, and even Luther was forced to preach against it in the midst of the maelstrom of the reformation, though it does not seem to have survived long into those changed times. In a time when self-abnegation, total poverty and withdrawal from the world were seen as the routes to spiritual salvation, the adepts of the Free Spirit were unique in deciding to take some of the rewards for their asceticism in the hear and now. They had done their time of poverty and rather than wait until after death for their just rewards, they took the precaution of taking some of them now. As such this is perhaps a heresy that is closer to the current Western mind than the masochistic Flagellants, the dualist Cathars or indeed the other cults of the voluntary poor. That the Church has fought this Heresy largely in secret perhaps also tells us just how pernicious they thought it could be.
* The basic book of reference for the topic is Norman Cohn’s excellent ‘In Pursuit of the Millennium’, one of the best and most readable books on Medieval Heresy I’ve ever read.