Amalrician

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The Amalrician heresy was a pantheist belief named after Amalric of Bena. The beliefs are thought to have influenced the Brethren of the Free Spirit.

[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 beliefs 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 persecution. 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, evolving into the Brethren of the Free Spirit