La Beata de Piedrahita

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La Beata de Piedrahita (died 1511), was an untutored Spanish mystic of the early 16th century, whose particular visionary character links her with the much earlier Cathars of southern France and demonstrates the continuity of Catharist heretical beliefs in peasant society.

Piedrahita, near Ávila, where the Inquisitor General Torquemada had gone to live in the Dominican monastery, was the spiritual home of this visionary (perhaps born at Salamanca), who confounded her contemporaries in the early sixteenth century. The daughter of a local peasant, she became a tertiary sister (beata) in the same Dominican order in Piedrahita that had fostered the young Torquemada, taking the name of María de Santo Domingo. María was gifted with numerous revelations, in which she held celestial converse with the Virgin Mary and the Savior. She informed her contemporaries that Christ was with her, that she was Christ, and that she was Christ's bride, a concept that offers parallels with her neighbor in Ávila, Saint Theresa of Avila. For hours María would remain in an ecstatic trance, unmoving, her arms and legs rigidly extended, dissolving herself in the arms of the Deity. Though unlearned she was reputed to be the equal of the most sophisticated theologians, her supernatural lights easily compensating for her lack of schooling. Some of these theologians, however, suspected that she was inspired by the devil rather than God, and serious charges were made regarding her orthodoxy. But King Ferdinand and the episcopal hierarchy were convinced that she enjoyed a special inspiration available to very few, and their support was largely responsible for the failure of María's critics to bring about her downfall as a heretic.

The name of alumbrados ("illuminati") is severely criticised by the orthodox Catholic Encyclopedia (1908) as assumed by some 16th century Spanish "false mystics" who claimed like La Beata de Piedrahita to have a direct connection with God. "They held that the human soul can reach such a degree of perfection that it contemplates even in the present life the essence of God and comprehends the mystery of the Trinity. All external worship, they declared, is superfluous, the reception of the sacraments useless, and sin impossible in this state of complete union with Him Who is Perfection Itself. Carnal desires may be indulged and other sinful actions committed freely without staining the soul." These are recognizable as central tenets of Catharism, which had been exterminated, it would have seemed, in the human bonfires of the Albigensian Crusade centuries before. The highest perfection attainable by the Christian, according to the alumbrados consists in the elimination of all activity, the loss of individuality, and complete absorption in God, all direct connections with the aspects of spirituality called Quietism.

La Beata was not alone. At Toledo, which was one of the main centers of these Spanish illuminati, "Isabella of the Cross" is said to have actively proselytized, and "Magdalen of the Cross", a Poor Clare of Aguilar near Cordova, was even more famous. The Inquisition convinced her to abjure her heretical errors in 1546, however. Such ideas found wide responses among Spanish Catholics though the Inquisition proceeded with relentless energy against all suspects, even citing before its tribunal St. John of Avila and St. Ignatius of Loyola. In spite of this determined action, however, the heresy maintained itself until the middle of the seventeenth century and some of its features reappear in the quietism of Michel de Molinos.