Brethren of the Free Spirit

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

You have new messages (last change).
The neutrality of this article is disputed.
Please see the discussion on the talk page.

The Brothers - or Brethren of the Free Spirit (Brüder und Schwestern des Freien Geistes), also known as Amalricians (in Latin Almarici, Amauriani) after their founder, were a medieval heretical movement which was condemned by Pope Clement V at the Council of Vienne (1311).

Contents

[edit] Doctrine

The Amalricians, like their founder Amaury de Bène or de Chartres (Latin Almaricus, Amalricus or Amauricus), a cleric and professor in the Sorbonne University of Paris, who died between 1204 and 1207, professed a species of pantheism, maintaining, as the fundamental principle of their system, that God and the universe are one; that God is everything and everything is God. This led them, naturally, to the denial of Transubstantiation, the confounding of good and evil–since good and sinful acts, so called, are equally of God–and to the consequent rejection of the laws of morality.

They also held peculiar views on the Trinity, distinguishing three periods in the Divine economy with regard to man: the reign of the Father, become incarnate in Abraham, which lasted until the coming of Christ; the reign of the Son, become incarnate in the Virgin Mary, which had endured until their own time; and the reign of the Holy Ghost, which, taking its beginning from the dawn of the twelfth century, was to last until the end of time. Unlike the Father and the Son, the Holy Ghost was to become incarnate, not merely in one individual of mankind, but in every member of the human race.

Moreover, as the Old Law had lost its efficacy at the coming of Christ, so, in their day, the law of the Gospel was to be supplanted by the interior guidance of the Holy Ghost, indwelling in each human soul. In consequence of this they rejected the sacraments as obsolete and useless. Those in whom the Holy Spirit had already taken up His abode were called "the spiritualized", and were supposed to be already enjoying the life of the Resurrection. The signs of this interior illumination were the rejection of faith and hope, as tending to keep the soul in darkness, and the acceptance, in their place, of the light of positive knowledge. It followed from this, that in knowledge and the acquisition of new truths consisted their paradise; while ignorance, which meant adherence to the old order of things, was their substitute for hell.

[edit] History

The beginnings of medieval pantheistic Christian theology lie in the early 13th century, with theologians at Paris, such as David of Dinant and Amalric of Bena (died 1207, after which adherents are also known as 'Amalricians), as well as Ortlieb of Strassburg and was later mixed with the millenarist theories of Gioacchino da Fiore.

Fourteen followers of Amalric began to preach that "all things are One, because whatever is, is God." They believed that after an age of the Father (the Patriarchal Age) and an age of the Son (Christianity), a new age of the Holy Spirit was at hand. The Amalricians, who included many priests and clerics, succeeded for some time in propogating their errors without being detected by the ecclesiastical authorities.

In 1210, Peter, bishop of Paris, and the Chevalier Guérin, an adviser of the French king Philip II Augustus, obtained secret information from one Master Ralph, an undercover agent, laying bare the inner workings of the sect, the principals and proselytes were arrested. In the year 1210 a council of bishops and doctors of the University of Paris assembled to take measures for the punishment of the offenders. The ignorant converts, including many women, were pardoned. Of the principals, four were condemned to imprisonment for life. Nine members were burned at the stake. Five years later (1215) the writings of Aristotle, which had been used by the Brethren in support of their belief, were forbidden to be read either in public or in private.

Amaury himself, though dead some years, did not escape the penalty of his heresy. Besides being included in the condemnation of his disciples, in the council of 1210 special sentence of excommunication was pronounced against him, and his bones were exhumed from their resting-place and cast into unconsecrated ground. The doctrine was again condemned by Pope Innocent III in the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) "as insanity rather than heresy", and Pope Honorius III condemned in 1225 the work of Scotus Erigena, "De Divisione Naturæ", from which Amaury was supposed to have derived the beginnings of his heresy.

The movement survived however, and later followers went even further. They rejected the Christian concepts of creation and redemption, saying that since all was God, there could be no sin, and any action whatsoever was permitted. They taught the "Freedom of the Spirit" in the sense that the human soul, like God, was considered beyond and above the concepts of Good and Evil, an argument similar to teachings of Tantric Buddhism. They also referred to themselves as illuminati[citation needed].

During the 14th century, the heresy spread widely across the Champagne, Thüringen and Bavaria. The Beghards of Cologne celebrated masses naked[citation needed]. It was a time of great social unrest, and there were other movements such as Catharism and flagellantism. [dubious — see talk page] Meister Eckhart's teachings were precariously close to those of the Brethren, but he escaped excommunication by retracting 28 incriminated theses in 1327. Other Christian mystics, such as Jordan von Quedlinburg openly preached against the teachings of the Free Spirit as unchristian. [dubious — see talk page]

The beliefs of some members of the movement may have bordered on positive atheism. A man called Löffler, who was burned in Bern in 1375 for confessing adherence to the movement, is reported to have taunted his executioners that they would not have enough wood to burn "Chance, which rules the world".

From 1300 to 1350 they were found largely on the Rhine from Cologne to Strasburg. In Brussels they appeared as the Homines intelligentiae or Men of Understanding. Many edicts were published against them; but, notwithstanding the severities which they suffered, they continued till about the middle of the fifteenth century.[1]

[edit] Sources and references

[edit] See also

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Cyclopædia of Biblical, Theological, and Ecclesiastical Literature, vol. 1, A-B, pp.885-886, John McClintock, James Strong, editors, New York, Harper & Brothers, 1896. - Google Books

[edit] References

  • Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium, Secker and Warburg, London, 1957
  • Robert Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages, Berkeley, 1972.
  • Raoul Vaneigem, The Movement of the Free Spirit, Zone Books, 1994
  • Walter Wakefield and Austin Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages, Columbia University Press, New York, 1991.

[edit] External links

Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org../../../b/r/e/Brethren_of_the_Free_Spirit_471d.html"
In other languages