The Movement of
the Free Spirit
Raoul Vaneigem

General Considerations and Firsthand Testimony
Concerning Some Brief Flowerings ofLife in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and,
Incidentally, Our Own Time

Trans I ate d by Rand a II Cherry and Ian Patterson

ZONE

BOOKS

•

1998

NEW

YORK

CoNTENTS

The publisher would like to thank Donald Nicholson-Smithfor his assistance in the production of this book. Ian Patterson
would like to thank Dr. James Simpson, of Robinson College, Cambridge, for his generous help with the translationof Margaret Porete's French.

© 1994 Urzone, Inc.
ZONE BOOKS
6u Broadway, Suite 6oS
New York, NY 10012
First Paperback Edition
All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying, microfilming,
recording or otherwise (except for that copying permitted
by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law andexcept by reviewers for the public press) without written
permission from the Publisher.
Originally published in France as Le Mouvement du libre-esprit© 1986 Editions Ramsay.
Printed in the United States of America.

Preface to the American Edition

7

Introduction: The Perspective of the Market andI

the Perspective of Life 11
From the Twilieht of the Bureaucrats to the
Dawn of Divine Economics 15

II
III

The Church Strunnles to Evolve 59
The Principal Manifestations of the Movementof the Free Spirit from the Thirteenth to the
Sixteenth Century 95

Distributed by The MIT Press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, EnglandIV

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vaneigem, Raoul, 1934[Mouvement du Libre-Esprit. English]
The Movement of the Free Spirit: general considerations andfirsthand testimony concerning some brief flowerings oflife in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and, incidentally,
our own time / Raoul Vaneigem; translated by Randall
Cherry and Ian Patterson.
p. em.
Translation of: Mouvement du Libre-Esprit.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-942299-71-X
1. Brethren of the Free Spirit. 2. Sects, Medieval. 1. Title.
BT1358.V3613 1993
273'.6-dc2o
92-..p232
CIP

Outline for an Alchemy of the Self
Notes 259
Index 297

233

PREFACE TO THE
AMERICAN EDITION

The decline and fall of totalitarian regimes has pointed up
the underlying totalitarianism of ideologies that only yesterday were able to buttress their credibility with vocabularies of emancipation. With the crumbling of the old
dichotomy between Eastern bureaucratic despotism andWestern democratic bureaucracy, one thing has become
perfectly clear: all ideologies are totalitarian. Cut off fromthe very life they are supposed to represent in the spectacle, they invariably take over a repressive power that has
been in place for thousands of years: the power of heaven
over earth, of the spirit over the body, of lucrative laborover creative pleasure.
Arising from a philosophy in rebellion against theology's
hermetic and pervasive vision of the world, ideologies wereassured victory in their relentless undermining of the religious edifice when the agrarian mode of production gave
way to industrial capitalism. The French Revolution rendered obsolete the long-held conviction that God was thearbiter of well-being and misfortune.
Paradoxically, however, though they smashed the yokeof the Church and the priests, ideologies preserved the7THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPREFACEThe present-day collapse of mass ideologies - of nationalism, liberalism, socialism, fascism, communism - encourages the increasingly widespread turning away fromthe political sphere per se. This reaction also reflects theconfusion of people ill-prepared for independence andpoorly schooled in the art of deciding their own fate.
The inability of the most diverse governments to resolve
the present economic crisis has produced contradictoryand fluctuating tendencies: on the one hand, a regression
toward the archaisms of religion; on the other, a new consciousness, that of the individual who banks on the will
to live in order to rebuild the environment so horribly
abused by traditional rulers.
So brutal has the exploitation of nature been that its
resources- the very nature of its profitability- are threatened with exhaustion; there is thus no choice but to develop ecological markets in order to get the economy outof its present morass. People have already been aroused,then hoodwinked, by the imperatives of consumption at
any cost. There is a good chance that people moved by realdesire will easily discern tenderness and creativity among
the dividends of this "renaturalization," and that, for thesake of their own happiness, they will treat this process
as an incitement to transcend the venal co-optation of life.
It is not, however, inconceivable that the religious spirit,

weary of Churches but not of itself, may find a niche inecology; that Gaia may be conscripted to lend a semblanceof life to those mortal relics of God that still dictate somany actions governed by fear, submission, dependency
and repression alternating with temporary release.
It is worth recalling, therefore, that religion has neverbeen anything but the relational mode employed by theState as a replac,e ment for the former osmosis between
human and earthly nature. More than any other religious
cult Catholicism and its dissenting offshoots have maintained their power through constant ecclesiastical control,using the spatial grid of parishes and the calendar's ritualmarking off of time to track down indifference or resistance to the inculcation of the faith.
By labeling as heresy all views of which it disapproved
the Church successfully passed its orthodoxy off as a uniquescale for weighing the true meanings of words, beings andthings. It nevertheless felt inadequate and disarmed in theface of certain attitudes that it deemed "meaningless anddemented." With some unease the Inquisition attached thewords "free spirit" and "madness" to men and women who
renounced all spiritual and temporal authority, seeking no
more than to live in accordance with their own desires.
As this book attempts to show, the partisans of the Free
Spirit were divided on one fundamental issue. Driven by
their will to follow nature, some identified with God andthe ordinariness of his tyranny, using force, violence, constraint and seduction to secure the right to gratify theirwhims and passions. Others refused to countenance sucha union between a despotic God and a denatured nature,a union whose exploitation found perfect expression in themyth of a divinity at once pitiful and pitiless. Instead they

8

9essence of religion over everyday existence by exercising
control that; as secular as it might claim to be, perpetuated traditional Judeo-Christian forms of behavior: guHt,
self-hatred, fear of pleasure, the hope for a future heavenon earth, and, above all, the contempt for the body andfor the earth that gives our upside-down world its intolerable reality.

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

saw the refinement of their desires and the quest for aubiquitous and sovereign amorous pleasure as a way for
replacing the spiritualized animal and its labor of adaptation
with an authentic human species capable of creating theconditions favorable to its own harmonious development.
Historians for the most part have ignored or misapprehended the struggle waged through the ages against religion's impregnation of consciousness and behavior. The
disappearance of dictatorships calls for an end to further
tolerance of religion's arrogant attempt to regulate thethoughts and actions of human beings by an infantilizing
subjection that is no longer acceptable even in raising children. Emerging from beneath the rubble of lies and fraud
the present is beginning to re-experience some plain truthsof the distant past. The Middle Ages were no more Christian than the late Eastern bloc was communist. The heaviest burdens imposed by barbarism have never completely
smothered the ever-present yearning for true humanity.
That the commitment to life which is increasingly evident
today should once have dared manifest itself in the sinister light of the burning stake is a lesson that, I venture tohope, will not be lost in the United States, where the gulf
between technological modernity and an archaic agrarian
mentality still nourishes the spirit of Calvinism and themorbid teachings of the Bible.
Raoul Vaneigem
March 1993
Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith

10

INTRODUCTION:
THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE MARKETAND THE PERSPECTIVE OF LIFE

Everything that is said, written and thought today is increasingly irrelevant, and dangerously so, to life. Yet life,
though threatened from all sides, manifests its presence
ever more strongly as artifice loses its hold.
Over several millennia the pleasure of life was totally
disregarded while a seemingly more profitable discourseon survival was being carefully woven; but, in the past
decade, almost nothing could be said that did not demonstrate just how threadbare this discourse had become,as its very fabric seemed on the verge of unraveling.
After fighting for capital in the name of progress, against
capital in the name of the proletariat, for bureaucracy inthe name of revolution, and - without fail - for survivalin the name of life, those who remain to keep fighting thegood fight into the twentieth century seem to have gained
nothing on the traditional battlefields except a tremendous
sense of weariness and resignation.
The absurdity of the situation hardly incites us to wear
ourselves out in the name of what must surely seem entirely futile. Only inertia still drives a few politicized sheep
and power-hungry dogs into the crumbling arenas of the
11

THE

MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITINTRODUCTION

spectacle. Nonetheless I am willing to wager that we mightsome day emerge from the ambiguities of this general apathy; we might find the will to create ourselves anew sothat society and our personal hopes of fulfillment are better reconciled. There is, of course, no guarantee that thiswill ever come about, but with every passing moment, I
hold on and refuse to abandon hope.
This stubborn determination not to let anything takeprecedence over the will to live, to reject at whatever costeven the most imperative calls of survival, first took shapein my books The Revolution of Everyday Life and The Book
of Pleasures. The latter was needed to clarify and correct
the former, to remove the intellectual cast that won it highesteem from people incapable of putting its lessons into
practice but who, instead, used them as a consoling alibi
for their own premature aging.
If it is true that the test of a book's intelligence is what
it can offer toward the pleasure of living better, let mesay, right from the start, that there is no such intention in
my study of the movement of the Free Spirit. Not untilthat glad hour when we are at last rid of our delusions
about the science of the experts, and are content simply
to choose among pleasures, can we face the unknown witha lucid, passionate gaze. Until then I have chosen, in these
uncomfortable and precarious times, to do no more thansatisfy a personal curiosity. I want to challenge the viewof those who dehumanize history, seeing it as fated andfatal: hence my wish to pay homage to those who refused
to give in to the idea that history moves toward some inevitable outcome. I want also to seek out signs of life,
behind the edifices of religious and ideological obscurantism, and in so doing I hope to dispense once and for allwith the cherished but no less dubious notion of a Christian Middle Ages.
Perhaps a lighter hand, with a touch of the 9ai savoir, iscalled for here; but I do not have the real freedom or luxury which that would require. I am not so much offering
an excuse as giving an honest assessment of the obstacles
society sets up against itself every time it infringes upon
the slightest space set aside for creative expression - hemming it in with the petty and cumbersdme demands ofwork or of turning a profit.
The sheer number of texts that had to be uncovered
and translated added to the cursory character of this project. And if this contributed to its lack of completeness I
must reserve myself that right - just as I also claim theright to the biases that can be found in this book. For these
are the biases of anyone who undertakes subjective investigations, whether he does so under the pretense of objectivity or not; and I prefer to own up to the influence of
those personal desires that move in accordance with theunfolding of one's own tangled destiny.
Historians ~ill lose their way in this book just as they
do in their everyday lives, for they no more see the life
underlying events than they see the life in their own bodies. The specialist will discover nothing here that he does
not already know: alienated thought is always sufficient
unto itself.
But readers who take pleasure in paying history thesame undivided attention they pay the struggles of theirown passions will discover a naive but valuable confirmation in this book: lies serve their own purposes, their own
ends; while the love of pleasure has none.

12

13

I
fROM THE TWILIGHT OF THE
BUREAUCRATS TO THE DAWN OFDIVINE EcoNOMics

Economic Totalitarianism and Its Self-Destruction
1

No one looks back any farther than his or her present.
No previous era, however clouded by its unavoidable confusions, has more successfully propagated the idea thateverything rides on the present moment.
What can be learned from the past which is not already
implicit in the very act of contemplating it? Those who
set off, trying to escape past fears and anxieties over wealthor poverty, will only find constant reminders of their present state of exile. What one looks for in the past is precisely what one has already found.
When the body limps, thoughts also hobble; but one's
gait becomes the most unsteady as one loses pace with,and falls behind, one's very self, becoming conspicuousby one's absence. Does it not make more sense, then,if only in the interest of one's health and spiritual wellbeing, to remain true to one's desires, whatever the outcome? Why straggle back and forth into undertakings that,from the very outset, stray from what one really feels anddesires at the moment? What needs to be sought out is

2

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITFROM THE TWILIGHT OF THE BUREAUCRATS

the kind of fulfillment that comes when the heart learns
to extract from the uncertain or the unknown a quintessence of love that allows these circumstances to seem
somehow favorable.

representation is paid for in terms of world-weariness andself-contempt. These ideas are already so deeply entrenched
that, in the absence of any real lived experience to dispel
them, they still nourish not only nostalgic theorizirlg but
even the most fashionably glib talk.
This vicious cycle continues out of an old inertia: theneed to work in order to survive compensates for the life
lost in wage labor (an even costlier form of survival). The
effect on consciousness is fatal, with two sets of prejudicescontributing to the mortification: in the first, survival
takes precedence over living; and in the second, the exercise of the intellect- through critical analysis of society, ofpolitical issues, of cultural decay, of the future of humanity - takes the place of existence, while the body is left
to express its discontent through sickness and malaise. And
one need not get very close to these ideas to detect a whiffof the cassock.

There was a time when everything seemed gray and uniform and the whole range of human concerns appeared tobe dictated by daily routine and economic reality; but asudden openness to life has begun to shine through, likea ray of light illuminating a horizon beyond the bleaknessof everyday life.
Since the upheavals of 1968 the forces of life have
gradually become more distinguishable from what had
once corrupted them. All that was needed was for a few
individuals to begin wondering why they were in such ahurry to reach a place they could never get to. Before long,large numbers of people began to question their tendency
to sacrifice the pleasure of being themselves for the paltry rewards of wealth and power.
The more we seemed locked into the mechanical gestures imposed on us since childhood, the more we became
convinced of some indescribable, barely fathomable, luxuriance that can only be called life- to distinguish it fromsurvival, its economic, and economized, form.
Many observations that were considered ludicrous in1967 have now become commonplace. For it is obvious
today that "surviving" has so far prevented us from "living"; that man's insistence on making himself useful in
his work is actually of little use to him in his own life,and even kills him. It is clear, too, that life usually ends
precisely ~ecause it has never begun (which most people
realize only in their last moments); and that the price of
16

3

The economy is everywhere that life is not: but howeverintertwined the two may become, they simply do not meld,and one can never be confused with the other. Most people
do not really live: their overly precise calculations aboutmoney, work, exchange, guilt and power govern their lives
so thoroughly and irremediably that the only thing to escape this bloodlessly cold calculus is the warm pathos ofsweat and tears - which is all that is left to take on the
aspects of human reality.
How can one help but feel ever lost and rootless in an
upside-down world where the energy of unused passions
has turned self-destructive? Yet the anguish of constantly
having to deal with setbacks, failure, poverty and death
is not the result of some eternal curse, nor of some in17

4

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITFROM THE TWILIGHT OF THE BUREAUCRATS

curable illness indistinguishable from existence itself.
Only an exercise in self-mutilation could have given riseto the idea that the human condition is essentially miserable. Not so long ago many held that spirit dominated thematerial world; and yet, even while they proclaimed theiraversion to the body and to all sordid, material interests,
they were merely affecting outrage at talk of economic
determinism, as they secretly engaged in the ordinary traffic of survival.
Today the modernist spirit prophesies its own glorious
annihilation, followed by a state of ultimate lucidity, when
it will continue to dominate the relics of the material
world. Even as the proponents of this idea buy into thelatest offerings of survivalist thinking they try to washthemselves clean of their daily compromise, scrubbing
their soiled garments in whatever detergent promises thewhiter-than-white gleam of revolutionary virtue.
Nothing better expresses the omnipresence of the economy than the separation between thought and life. Mental
and manual labor take part in the same ignominy. Ideology, be it that of the salon, the pub, the family, or philosophical circles, refers to life only insofar as it confirms
its absence.

parts. A long and bloody striptease has deprived it of mythand ideology. First the priestly robes were tossed into thedustbin, followed by the reversible coat of "democratic"
states. Now the machine has been stripped down completely, exposing what _in each of us has served as the cogs
of its fundamental inhumanity._It no longer uses - norneeds - illusions and subterfuge to parody what it is andalways has been: a system designed to ensure the survivalof human beings at the expense of livin9.
Ironically, at the very moment that consciousness isawakening, the flood waters of the economic tidal wave
have poured in, and the survival of the species can be assured only at a growing rate of devaluation and degradation. The end of ideology coincides with the bankruptcyof the welfare state and the collapse of systems of administrative supervision.
It is precisely at the historical moment least conducive to belief in any certainty - God, Devil, State, Revolution, Supreme Savior, Left and Right - that religion
tightens its net. The absolute dogma, according to which
the existing world assumes reality only to the degree that
it is governed by market forces, is based on a universal
superstition instilled in us from infancy: the belief in theirreparable powerlessness ofhuman beings.

Economics has been the most durable lie of the approximately ten millennia mistakenly accepted as history. Fromit stem all those eternal truths and sacred causes thathave governed master and slave alike, truths and causes towhich generations, born simply to live, have been wantonly sacrificed.
The time has come when the economic machine has
begun to expose the cynical nakedness of its component
18

5 The apocalypse has been announced so many times that it

cannot occur. And even if it did it would be hard to distinguish it from the everyday fate already reserved for individual and community alike.
Is it hard to imagine a more sinister dance ..,o f deClth thanwar, torture, tyranny, disaster, sickness, boredom, guilty
pleasures, and the kind of gratification that prefers self19

T HE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITFROM THE TWILIGHT OF THE BUREAUCRATS

torture to self-enlightenment? Is not survival cut from thevery same cloth of apocalypse?
At worst the fall of the market empire will bring about
the same descent into inhumanity that was seen at its start.
What is at the end is also at the beginning.
One calamity conceals another: behind the wreckage ofthe capitalism of monopolies and the State lies the wholeof mercantile civilization that is disappearing, as was longprophesied. Age-old fables foretelling the death of the gods
in a universal annihilation are now echoed in the visionsof the Nuclear Dawn, or the carnage and unrelenting suffering of the Final Hour - all of which take their place inthe pantheon dedicated to whatever lies on the other side

ing rumors that are exaggerated according to the fashionof the moment, under such horrifying names as terrorism, unemployment, bankruptcy, famine, crime, cancer,
AIDS, pollution?
No: there is only one terror, from which all others
derive. For most people it is the fear of losing the last illusion separating them from themselves, the panic of having to create their own lives. An age-old fear, certainly, but
one that did not trouble early humanity- though it may
originally have arisen from animal-like fear. What we arehearing today is the echo of the old divine curse whosebaying has long terrified human beings. It has expropriatedtheir lives and condemned them to produce its inhumanity for the sake of profit.

of life.
6

The end of the reign of the economy is not the end of theworld - merely the end of the economy's totalitarian
hold over the world. But as we well know, a dead tyrannycontinues to kill. The first response to the signs of beneficial change is neither joie de vivre nor creative release,but fear- a fear so intense that a moribund economy can
exploit it to keep a certain market active and well-supplied: it is the insecurity market, in which consumers,
reduced to a basic state of frailty and decrepitude, mustbeg for strong-armed protection as they rush through thewell-lit, clearly displayed aisles of consumable hedonism.
To what can one attribute this terror, which strikes
the proletarianized anthill, wears away old insurrectionalreflexes and replaces them with a morose, bad-tempered
apathy? Is it fear of breaking with patriarchal power, whose
bureaucratic senility can be traced from the heads of state
to the heads of families? Or does it stem from the alarm20

7

Many people blithely proclaim that God is dead, yet they
continue to genuflect. Once it was shown that the economy's promise of "salvation" for all humanity could beachieved only after mankind had been forced to wadethrough its own blood and filth, economics seemed,
henceforth, to assure us of nothing except future ruin;
and so one might have supposed that a great shift of opinion would have led the exhausted and those excluded
from the hopes placed in communitarianism, to place
their faith only in themselves, their creativity and theirwill to live. Alas, even the economy's opponents continue
to seek a little last warmth in the dying embers of the very
fire that consumes our great civilization, as though they
had no other choice than to celebrate its long-awaited
demise by perishing along with it.
Religion's skin is tougher than its bones. There isno corpse that it cannot dress up in new clothes. The
21

8

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITFROM THE TWILIGHT OF THE BUREAUCRATS

Enlightenment was still busy rooting out Catholic obscurantism when the authority of the Church reemerged in
the guise of the self-proclaimed authority of the State andset loose swarms of preachers of atheist morality in cities
and throughout the countryside - like so many travelingsalesmen hawking their wares in the name of the Apostolic
and Roman enterprise.
Even among those who once lambasted social activism
and its ritual worship at the altar of the proletariat, there
are those who have since donned a sacristan's cap. What
started as a revolution against misery turned into a miserably failed revolution, all because of a reluctance to be anything for oneself; and this failure still condemns even themost vociferous seekers of emancipation and happiness to
the gall of an impotence in which they acquiesce. Anyone
who has the intelligence to comprehend the world but notenough to learn how to live, or who takes his self-hatredout on others, blaming and judging so as not to be blamed
and judged himself, is, deep inside, no different from thepriest. And even though he does not want to know himself he caws as loudly as all the other crows of living death.
The gods die twice: once in the thoughts of the men who
conceived them, and once again in the body reduced byeconomics to a mere instrument of labor. No sooner had
industrial capitalism shattered the old agrarian structure
under the pressure of its inexorable advance than it got ridof all the gods and kings. But then it resuscitated them,for the purposes of its ideological spectacle, like so many
characters in an operetta.
When it discovered the omnipresence of the market
system, like some great landfall across the waters, nine-

teenth-century consciousness was no longer burdened by
divine transcendence. After all, was it not this new omnipresence that promised to organize the new world in accordance with the tangible mechanisms of exchange, profit
and competition? It brough_t the gods down to earth andbecame a universal spirit sufficient unto itself. The materiality of capitalism revealed, in fact, the human origin of
the laws that had governed society since the appearanceof commodities. It reduced the entity God to the "nature"of things; and it was in man's "nature" to make it productive, and profitable.
But this version of nature separated the world from lifeand reduced the world to the market system. With God
thus brought into conformity with nature, he was sold off
at a discount to a religion that was now just one ideology
among others; and so he became the last shoddy remnantof the heavenly order under which had first emerged thesystem of survival that humanity imposed on itself at somespecific point in its development.
God is dead as a sovereign entity, as master of the world,but he lives on in the religious form that gave birth to him
by submitting manki~d to economic alienation: thought
separated from life; or the body weakened or broken in
the name oflabor.
As he analyzed the reproduction and self-destructionof commodities Marx never asked himself how far his personal behavior obeyed economic reflexes. His critique isthe product of an intellectualism that reproduces the powerof the mind over the body; it is the work of a lasting influence of God on the material world. However liberating its
intentions it can only effect changes in a world where commodities are everywhere and humanity is nowhere; it is a22

23

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITFROM THE TWILIGHT OF THE BUREAUCRATS

world where abstraction, being the ultimate and initial
form of the divine, empties individuals of their vital substance, before crushing them under the weight of forces
they are too weak to withstand. The hordes of bureaucrats,
now in their twilight, wrestle to save an economy that can
do no more than reinvest its successive failures into evengreater losses, proving that the age of sacrifice is at an end.
But the form that binds individuals to a society hostile tolife can be broken only by the emancipation of life.
9

While constantly changing, man's exploitation of man has
remained essentially the same. Economic necessity, which
directly exiles us from life, perpetuates the decree of thegods who expelled our ancestors from the domain of pleasure. Immutable frontiers delimit the closed universe of
exchange in which the commodity evolves.
Form, whose contours always shape a supposedly uniquereality, was depicted as a divine sphere even before it took
on the simultaneously concrete and abstract character ofa bureaucratic organization, turning on its own axis, anddrawing everyone into its gravitational field. The heavenly economy has given way to the earthly one, economic
thought to economic materiality, spiritual alienation tobodily alienation, collective sacrifice to individual sacrifice. The· separations remain as sharp as they have always
been, but today the wound is plain to see.
Just as bath water spirals faster and faster as the last of
it is drawn down the drain, the whirlpool of life empties
at its fastest as the economy uses up the final resources oflibidinal energy. The only ones not to hear its final gurglings are the statisticians and computer scientists whohear only the din of their own calculating. Although allcommodity-based civilizations, without exception, haveplaced a prohibition on pleasure and sexual enjoyment, themost urgent appeals of profitability now invite us toplunge
into hedonism, to consume pleasure piecemeal and pay for
it in installments.
The last unopened market verges on the free play ofdesire. So the last die is about to be cast on the same table
where the first was thrown, so long ago, under the eye ofthe gods.
10

The economy has given birth to a two-headed monster:religion and the State. It originated in the first agricultural
settlements (in the Neolithic period, circa 7000 B.c.),when Paleolithic civilizations based on hunting, gatheringand fishing were replaced by a communitarian organization founded on agriculture and trade.
It was at this point in human development that the fallfrom life into survival occurred. In place of a unitary modeof existence, slowly disengaging from nature without everbreaking with it, a society arose in which human beings,
having become both their ow~ enemy and the enemy of
their fellow humans, saw the object of their actions turned
against them.
Instead of moving toward a human transcendence of thecontradiction between a free life and the fight for survivalthat characterizes the animal kingdom, market civilizationsocialized both. The freedom of nature was sacrificed to acompetitive struggle whose aim was no longer the brutal
satisfaction of drives (which would now be satisfied in theform of a secret, shameful tribute to repressed animality)
but rather the maintenance of a parasitic system offering
the social collectivity an abstract guarantee of survival: the

11

12

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITFROM THE TWILIGHT OF THE BUREAUCRATS

exploitation of nature through man's exploitation of man.
The earliest legends, indelibly marked by nostalgia fora golden age and by hatred of women, admirably demonstrate what portion of real life the worshipers of the ithyphallic stone renounced and so fiercely repressed beneaththe weight of the mind and the gods.

dom of night and day. The hours devoted to production
relegated the natural drives to a state ofrestorative repose,confining them to time intervals or spaces not dominatedby productivity: night, holidays, secret places, imaginationand dreams.
This is the fundamental division: necessary labor places
a prohibition on desires, which know no law but pleasure,and condemns them to seek satisfaction in a shameful,clandestine world of uselessness and obscurity - a world
diametrically opposed to the life that originally nourished them.
With the intrusion of work the body loses its sensual
wholeness. It splits into two principles: the head, the controlling element, whose thought regulates and represses
libidinal energy; and the body, the element that is controlled, reduced to a money-making musculature and menial hand.2

With the advent of cultivation the use of tools came to be
associated with an exchange value- a price- that was bothan abstraction and a concrete reality. I
To what may be properly called from this point on "oursociety," labor and exchange lent a stability-in-turbulencemarked by the predominance of abstraction and by the
inversion oflife.
To possess, use or enjoy anything, even one's own life,
meant that one was obliged henceforward not only to produce goods but also, and simultaneously, the prices and thesocial power that their possession implied. Hence the concrete was assigned an abstract equivalence. By a reversal ofperspective, the life force of the body was transformed into
labor power; the body was now shadowed by its double, anintangible soul that existed in a universe unconcerned withearthly survival, a universe accessible only through death.
We make our way forward in an upside-down worldthat many still persist in taking for reality - for the only
reality. And the driving force behind this inversion is fueledby the very thing that recognizes only those who accept
their own abjection, namely work.
The institution of collective labor enforced by agriculture
and trade forced all human beings to redistribute theirspace and time. It put an end to nomadism and to the free-

I use the term inverted perspective, or market perspective,
to describe the state in which pleasure is repressed because
it is seen as a force hostile to work and to the civilizationof work. It is a state in which life degenerates into survival; and pleasures, carefully proscribed, appear only as
mortal wounds. It is a civilization in which the freedom
and openness of life are considered absolute evils, forcedback into the night of negativity, burdened with anguishand guilt and driven to forms of release that pay tributeonly to death.
Ten thousand years ago the necessity of sacrificing thequest for gratuitous pleasure to the social obligation oflabor imposed a global inversion on the evolution of human
life, just as this life was slowly disengaging itself fromnature, like a child developing in the womb. We are made

26

27

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THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITFROM THE TWILIGHT OF THE BUREAUCRATS

even more acutely aware of this today, when every birth
exposes the distortion that inevitably affects each child,and condemns it to a life that is the negation of humanexistence.
No heavenly or earthly illusion can hide it any longer:
the path artificially laid down for humanity is that of life
separated from self. And life - which in its essence cannot exist anywhere without asserting its will to be everywhere - is condemned to be an object in a world of things,
to the point where it becomes a perfectly inert object, a
corpse - the ultimate social model of humanity, finallyindistinguishable from the commodities that it produces.
Desire is under an eternal, unremitting curse to punish itself for not being profitable - a curse never to belifted so long as individuals remain in this state of alienation that makes them strangers to themselves, and so longas they construct the image of a God of terror3 and of consolation, a God of retribution who must be paid and who
pays in return.
There is no god whose power is not based on the negation of life, on the inversion of pleasures and on the ignoble
and exhausting work of imposing repression and then lifting it, if only temporarily.

matched by a corresponding concern for the division ofthese tasks, for assessing property lines and establishingnorms of exchange. The split between manual and intellectual labor corresponded in the social body to classantagonism, and in the individual body to the opposition
between the mind and muscles, giving the hand priority
over other biological or instinctual functions.
Thus the mutilation of life entailed a chronic fragmentation that could be repaired and made into a meaningfulwhole only if the pieces were seen from the vantage of agod. A cynical, hypocritical god allowed survival to supply an artificial unity: disjointedness replaced the concrete
unity of natural life; and a mythical unity was founded on
the universality of exchange value. It was this god who had
shifted the blame for all the disintegration, divergences ofinterests and antagonisms onto human beings, as in thestory of the Tower of Babel. For trying to recapture heavenand bring the gods back to earth, the builders of the tower
were struck by a divine malediction that forced them into
mutual incomprehension and individual and collective
self-destruction. Somewhat later the same god, addressing human beings from atop the scaffold from which hehad just hung his son, generously advised them to love
one another.

Work existed from the moment one part of life was devoted to the service of the economy while the other wasdenied and repressed. Placed at odds with themselves by
the transformation of the life force into a force of production, people were also alienated from each other by thedemands of making a profit.
The physical tasks of ensuring that the land was tilled
and sown, the crops harvested and the tools made, were
28

14

Civilization was identified with obedience to a universal
and eternal market relationship. Thought, derived from anallegedly higher organization, with a mandate from heaven
to transcend the material practice of men, denied the designation of "human" to those who had lived before thebirth of the exchange economy.
The so-called Paleolithic era, with its hunting, gather-

1~

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITFROM THE TWILIGHT OF THE BUREAUCRATS

ing and fishing nomadism, engendered the monster-ridden
universe of the old mythologies. The Garden of Eden lay
in ruins, having been destroyed by a God who had not been
heeded there. But it was eventually overtaken by memories of fascinating and disturbing creatures - fallen angels,elves, fairies, gnomes, ghouls and dragons.
Even modern historians are condescending in their accounts of the peoples who wandered through luxuriant ·nature without the need to violate or exploit it. Insteadof looking for traces of a distinct Aurignacian or Magdalenian culture they usually try to find in these civilizations
only the faltering beginnings of our era. It does not occur
to them that the unity from which the diverse mineral,vegetable, animal and human elements originated may haveundergone a radically different development from the social
orientation imposed on it since Neolithic times. One day
we must analyze th~ cave paintings and artifacts - with
their frequent feminine symbols, their fusion of male andfemale principles, and their graceful depiction of humans
and animals. We may expect to discover traces of a milieu
that actually favored life. Perhaps we shall discover a society careful not to disavow its connection with nature, acivilization that, through its analogical mode of understanding, was moving toward a living science that could takewhatever the natural forces blindly offered, whether harmful or beneficial, and tum it to the advantage of the living.
The exploitation of man by man and the brutal exploitation of nature are, in fact, one and the same practice. Fromthe moment the market system minimizes the fruits of theearth by seeing them only in terms of the fruits of labor
the market system treats nature as its slave. Today the global

disintegration of ecological equilibrium is completely tied
up with the logic of an economy founded on dehumanization: as life expires beneath the growing exploitationthat negates and turns it into survival, the preconditionsof survival itself are threatened with destruction by the
profit mechanism. The commodity is the original formof pollution.
As economic thought imposed its superiority on boththe social and individual body, there also emerged the willto domesticate human nature and transform its energy into ·intellectual life and manual labor.
The prohibitions placed on life's pleasures and the restrictions placed on lives lived in pursuit of pleasure weresuch that satisfactions were allowed, but only if pleasure
could be repressed, and sporadically unleashed, but in certain forms. Sensual pleasure was restricted to blind indulgence: rape, debauchery, drunkenness, gluttony, the artof torturing oneself and others. (However extravagantly
and sumptuously they may seem to enjoy their pleasures,
hedonists cannot indulge themselves without experiencing an aftertaste of death.)Once expelled from the body, the animality of passion
reenters through the head. Market civilization does nottranscend bestiality, it socializes it. It polices and urbanizes it in the rivalry of competition, greed for profit, legal
and illegal appropriation, the survival of the fittest. The
most destructive animality is exercised in the name ofthe spirit that denies it. Used in market wars and social
stn1ggles, animality resurfaces, in the guise of civilization,
to exacerbate the brutality inherent in business relations
and power rivalries. From Sumerian conquests to concentration camps the ferocity of the animal world seems minor

30

31

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THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITFROM THE TWILIGHT OF THE BUREAUCRATS

in comparison with the iron fist of power that lies inside
the velvet glove of solidarity, justice, equality and love.

material economy from which it itself had sprung. But thesame division is still in place. Nature cannot be liberated
from the economy until the economy has been driven out
ofhuman life.

Treating nature as a thing in itself- whether nature in general or human nature in particular - is a concession to thisprevailing abstraction, this intellectualism imposed on us
by the dissociative effect of the economy. The human environment and the natural environment do not exist outside
the relationship that establishes them as part of the same
evolution of life, since each follows the same progressive
mutations, retrograding plateaus and dead ends. 4
From the perspective of the market nature plays an unpredictable role in the system of exploitation. For, while
nature is capable of being exploited, it can itself play a partin exploitation, in association with the lowest and most
turbulent social group: the laboring masses, whose function is, precisely, to open up nature's entrails, extract stones
and ore, and to plant seeds. Like this blind mass (which
always seems to need an enlightened master) nature has
unpredictable fits of anger, sudden jolts that threaten theedifice of civilization. And the moment it refuses to produce, nature, like workers in revolt, is deemed stupid, pitiless and cruel.
True to the history of the commodity, the glorificationof a denatured nature has come soon after the glorification of the denatured man of the proletariat. The celebration of the body (which is now open to a whole newmarket based on pleasure) and the ascendency of a newscience of bodily well-being are supplanting the sense of
shame that was long perpetuated by a great fiction: From
its supposed position of superiority the divine economy
looked on materiality with shame and hence scorned the

The Gods
17

The gods are the mythic form of the exchange economy,
the abstract and absolute guarantee of a kind of survival
to which the social collectivity sacrifices the lives of theindividuals who compose it. The gods alone oversee theprohibitions that heaven imposes on earth - as the mind
imposes them on the body. They are the supreme expression of the domination of use value by exchange value.
The blood in which they are born is the blood of a sacrifice at once real and symbolic. The slaughtered victim,
paying the price of the survival granted to all, perfectly
epitomizes the sacrifice of life force to labor power- thesacrifice that pays for the right to the benefits of the market system.
· The heavenly masters were cast in the mold of the ruling class and require similar sacrifices. Because the rulers
are conceived _through alienated thought their power isitself a mutilated one: as mere intellectual workers, they
act as sheepdogs to a herdlike society, and they have dis:tinct duties toward that community. The tribute the rulers are paid for providing protection is offset, in spiritual
terms, by the obedience they pay to the gods.
What are we to make of these gods, supposedly robed inomnipotence yet beholden to humans like masters answerable to their slaves? Are they the sum of absent life? No,
not even that. They are merely the gaping void that swal33

18

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITFROM THE TWILIGHT OF THE BUREAUCRATS

lows up all the impotence that we call the power of thestrong, all the despair that we call the hope of the weak.
They are merely the totalitarian projection of the economics of exchange and survival - nothing more than the false
illusion of life.

ultimate price is paid in hell. Life is sacrificed in the nameof survival, and survival is sacrificed in the name of an annihilated economy, all of which suggests nothing so muchas a slightly cheeri_er version of the Last Judgment thatonce so preoccupied the pious.

If men die as they lend life to the gods, the gods die intum from the economy that gives birth to them and finally
devours them. The deeper into human behavior economic
imperialism penetrates, the clearer its purely terrestrial origin becomes. God disappears when the vanishing point of
the perspective of profit becomes the starting point of theeconomics of exchange. Marx, with his discovery of thelaws of the social economy, and Freud, with his discoveryof the laws of the libidinal economy, marked two stages
in the progress of the market. w:th the advent of capitalism the material reality of the omnipresence of economics inevitably penetrates consciousness.
The nineteenth century saw the end of the ancient
struggle between the two Hydra heads of Church and State.
Temporal power defeated spiritual power; the earthly economy displaced the heavenly economy; the social contract
secularized the divine pact; and spectacle rescued and restored the desacralized fragments of myth, while its ideologies heavily discounted any spiritual values that remained
after the religious enterprise had gone into liquidation.
The commodity thus comes back to earth, which it
never should have left. Draped in a humanity stolen fromits slaves, it sets up shop on a site seized from God andtries to cash in on the ·idea of an economic paradise; but
no amount of marketing can stave off the impending bankruptcy. After all, according to the logic of exchange, theHistory

34

19

What has been called "History" is nothing but the historyof commodities and of human beings who dehumanize
themselves to produce them. The triumph of a bloodless
humanism shows today that economic expansion has been
not a victory but, rather, the final blow delivered to the
expansion of human life, for which it has parasitically substituted itself.
To argue either that the world progresses or that nothing
ever really changes is to confuse two opposite movementsthe continuing struggle for survival and the emergence o'flife. The former grew out of market processes, whereas thelatter does not follow the regular course of history: survival only erupts into life at unpredictable intervals. The
only change that might influence it is the increased debility threatened by the accelerated burden of work; and thedialectic of death must be factored into all human activities as they become more and more mechanized in accordance with economic imperatives.
As for the rest it is safe .to assume that the overwhelming intensity of lovemaking, rare as true love may be, isno different today from the pleasure felt by the lovers wesee coupling face to face in a Paleolithic sculpture on display at British Museum.
History acts as a catalyst between the dialectic of death,

35

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MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITFROM THE TWILIGHT OF THE BUREAUCRATS

which underlies the integration of humans into the market, and the dialectic of life, which is always present but
never acknowledged. As the economy's hold weakens, life
is more able to clear a path for itself.
Periods of violent destruction mark the eruption of thewill to live and the amount of repressive force needed tohold it in check. When they are frustrated, life lets out ahowl of fury against savage wars, barbarous tyrannies, thebrutality of everyday mores- and the great fallout of epidemics (plague, tuberculosis, cancer, AIDS and suicide).
Most of the time these give way to a period of either
economic upturn or economic turmoil, at which tim~ a
new phase is announced. It is as if spring had suddenly broken through where there had never before been seasons.
All thoughts turn to love: patriarchy's vulgarity is ridiculed and martial virility is seen for the absurdity that it
is. Laughter rings out, children are about - and woman
appears, clothed for pleasure, magisterial in her certainty
that she is entirely useless, indeed harmful, to the economy
the priests invented when they sacrificed love to power.

Kinos and Priests
20

As it organized itself according to the dictates of the market
the universe was perceived as an emanation of the divine.
When theology interpreted what it claimed was the speechof the gods, the meaning given to these inaudible words
was naturally liable to reflect the interests of the priests the real masters of the community posing as its servants.
The attribution of earthly effects to heavenly causes
depended on the inversion and separation caused by labor,
which represses pleasure and sets up a division between

the intellectual and the manual. The essence of all things,
eternal truth and life after death, thus belonged to the
kingdom of heaven, while the earth and those who tarriedon it experienced nothing but lies, deceptions, and fleetingand furtive pleasures in the shadow of death. Even today
all claims to liberated attitudes notwithstanding, this mentality is rife among all creatures, great and small, who
inhabit this social aquarium.
There has only ever been one genuine historical regression, and that was the transition to the rule of the economy, under which life was prematurely sequestered andsheltered, as living came to be considered more a matterof surviving. Priests have interpreted this as just punishment for an error: for them, humanity deserves its miseryfor having had the temerity to insult the gods. Conversely
temporal power, which is firmly rooted in the worldly
economy, has deconsecrated theology and turned it into
philosophy, replacing a divine curse with an ontologicalone: the claim that it is inherent in man's condition to bedispossessed of his own life.
21

History as the history of survival is completely circumscribed by the contradictory relationship that underlies
it - that between the immutable structure of agriculture
and the conquering spirit of commerce. The East longremained largely entrenched in agrarian immobility: theirrigation required by the policies of maximizing the land's
productivity created a tentacular bureaucracy whose inertia rapidly paralyzed the potential progress of any commodity market. In the West, however, the primitive agrarian
structure offered scant resistance to conquest first by
r k, then by Roman, mercantile imperialism.
37

22

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITFROM THE TWILIGHT OF THE BUREAUCRATS

The agrarian economy reasserted its dominance after
the fall of the Roman Empire, but the legal, political andcultural structures created by Greco-Roman mercantilism
never completely disappeared. As early as the eleventh
century these structures reappeared, inspiring the growthof towns and providing the great commercial undertakings, known as the Crusades, with the justifications theyneeded: pragmatically underwriting mercenary freedoms,
the rationality of free trade and the all-conquering profit
motive. These structures ultimately opened the road toindustrial society - a road along which the year 1789 would
signal, not the end of agrarian production, but certainly
the end of its hegemony.

So long as agriculture effectively restrained the rise of
the commodity, myth remained the paramount mode ofcommunication and comprehension, painting everything
in the colors of eternity - from the progressive forcesthat negated it, to the Promethean virtues of justice andequality, which were destined ultimately to smash andfragment it.

Myth expresses the immobility of the agrarian mode of production; philosophy expresses the mobility of craftsmanship. Priests are the guardians of myth. Their attempts totreat philosophy as theology's handmaiden could not succeed, because philosophy was ever the insolent, argumentative offspring of mercantile activity, of reality as modeled
after the reign of the producer.
While priests made sure that society respected the lawof exchange, which was the foundation of civilization,kings, whose ministry was strictly earthly, were responsible for manipulating state power in order to control the
precarious market equilibrium and conquer new markets.
The conflicted unity of temporal and spiritual power,
the stormy marriage of sword and censer, represented theattempt to integrate earthly and heavenly economies asgiven concrete form by the masters who ruled production
and the masters who claimed authority over the soul - thetwo halves of the Supreme Being.

23

If the abstract standard of money made different sorts ofobjects comparable, at least on the basis of price, how
could the first owners and organizers of labor possiblyrefuse the chance, indeed the privilege, of setting themselves up as masters of exchange? Enclosing their basic economic practice within the reliquary of transcendence theyplaced the universal measure of things and beings securely
in the hands of the gods, out of reach of an ephemeral
earthly destiny. If there was one ambition that motiva,ted
this flesh-eating elite- these elite servants of a spirit thatwas beyond human understanding, and holders of suchhigh-sounding titles (high priest, pharoah, Living God,Sun King, Holy Father of the People and of All Poor Bastards)- it was, quite simply, to be compensated like gods
while here on earth.
At first the priests of the immutable possessed knowledge that th_ey claimed came from the gods. It was notthat they had invented some technique for burnishing or
tempering, for sowing or weaving, for making arms ortools. Rather, ruling as they did over the relationship between men and the things men produced, they appropriatedknowledge by virtue of their position as human mediums
f exchange - a position that enabled them to collect taxes
th frontier between the gods and human society.
39

THE

MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

Just as their mission was to freeze the turbulence ofmarket expansionism into myth, so their science was directed less toward technical progress- which would sooner
or later spell their disappearance - than toward reinforcing their own power and holiness.
If indeed they arranged megaliths into a calendar ofrural labor, or into an astronomical clock, their primary goal, amid stones erected to celestial progenitors,
was to usurp the mantle of divine authority. For this thegods were paid in blood, the blood of a victim chosen
by the peasant community as a way of ensuring a good
harvest.
Ritual sacrifice marked every phase of seasonal labor.
Blood sealed time's passing, as the never-ending cycle ofrenewal returned time after time to altar or temple. And
with every advance in the conditions of survival the priestly
caste exacted not only greater obedience but more andmore of the community's own flesh.
Fortunately once science was wrested from the priests,
it totally extirpated the barbarity of religion; except, however, that "science" today endorses the claim that all progress has its drawbacks, that boredom is the price of comfort,
that nuclear power is well worth the risk of cancer, andthat a good wage is adequate compensation for a failed,wasted life.

Lannuane
24

What form molds the essence of the economy? Surely, inthe broadest sense, it is language - the combination ofsigns "exchanged" by the members of a social community
governed by a single principle.

40

FROM THE TWILIGHT OF THE BUREAUCRATS

The language of the masters contains the language of
their negation: the dominant language always serves eventually as a weapon of revolt and subversion. The languageof the masters, like that of revolt, is expressed in the mostabstract and detached terms; yet both belong to an identical process. Just as a dying power gives birth to a new
power, just as society mutates, and one mode of production replaces another, so language, in its infinite variety,obeys that constant law of the economy's rule according
to which all change, however radical it may appear, is stilla form of exchange. sWork, appropriation, profit, exchange and money- theabstract measure of all things - have ordered the diversityof the universe according to the perspective of the market. The mind, separated from concrete or practical concerns, has risen above the body and the earth, exactly as
foretold in the Judeo-Christian fable of Genesis.
Language likewise is elevated above human beings, binding them together in a network of abstractions, woven
together into a web of myth. Once transformed into thelanguage of the gods, it is so pure that no one can speak
it or hear it unless it falls to a register low enough thathumans can understand it (since they are a little hardfhearing).
Priests were the first to be given language's symbols tod ·cipher. It provided them with encrypted mysteries incantations, which sometimes seemed to work, if one
w r to judge by the hysteria of possession that overtook
th body of the magus as he was caught up in a great surge
f n rgy. Later, language shed its sacred inspiration tob·
th v hicle of the thought of the masters, of thein II tual workers who managed, governed and gave

THE

MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

orders. And finally, in its lowest role, it became the voiceof the laborer, adapting itself to the wily stratagems of theslaves: it became practical enough to cut as sharply as thecraftsman's cutting tool; it could be used to haggle withthe horsetrader; it could be kept to a murmur, as whenrepression held it back, or it could be used to cry out at a
moment of release. And it was of course from this point,
when it could sink no lower, that language really began
to develop. As long as the power of myth endured, theological and religious language sought to impose its law, tocontrol the meaning of signs and words.
The legend of the Tower of Babel is a warning to priests.
It reveals the incoherence that threatens to undermine thelanguage of temporal power (the profane communication
between master and slave). From the moment that themateriality of the worldly language challenges the universal language of the gods the message of the heavenly economy is confronted by the crude and servile earthly languagethat emanated from it.
25

The sacred, which the priestly function excretes as its raison d'etre, confers on the words of the dominant language
the force and value of acts. The oath, the giving of one's
word, the vow, the promise - all such legal formalities
obey a ritual that seems guided by a divine hand (that is:they guarantee payment). Thus form prevailed over content, just as the market value of persons and objects continues to prevail over their true worth and quality.
Once words received divine approval, the priests ruled
over language as judges and wise men. Whereas kings tried
to disentangle the complexity of earthly affairs, priests(sometimes combining the functions of priest and king)

FROM THE TWILIGHT OF THE BUREAUCRATS

claimed that the extent of their jurisdiction had been codified and was under the aegis of the heavenly kingdom. Forthem proClamation was superior to investigation: Galen
and biblical astronomy were truer than anatomical observation or Galileo's experiments. A village priest could
blithely lift the skirts of his female parishioners so long as
he declared his obedience to Church and dogma. But woe
unto the most devout of Christians should they decide tostray from some aspect of holy writ.
Thos.e who were put to death for changing so muchas a comma in the scriptures did not perish as a result ofsome strange plot. Their pitiful end served the greater
glory not of a bloodthirsty god but of a system for which,even today, the slaves of labor docilely sacrifice their lives.
We still die for the economy and for what seems mosteconomical.
Beyond the political and social rationales they embody, theological duels represent the struggle between
the sacred and the secular. This is a struggle, however, inwhich the vanquished must live on in the victor, in which
the site of the encounter is ultimately more important thanthe confrontation itself. Just as the most merciless war
between two capitalist countries is never intended to put
an end to capitalism itself, so the priests were charged with
the impossible mission of preventing the purity of theheavenly order from degrading into a material, worldly
order, even though they were quite aware that the shadowof the gods would perpetuate itself and merge with theshow of their evictors - so long as labor continued to passfor a source of enlightenment.
It would take an extraordinary perspicuity to unravelth se complexities without falling into one or another of
43

THE

MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

the many ridiculous or convoluted discourses of the twentieth century.
26

While the agrarian mode of production controlled thedevelopment of the commodity, myth prevailed over thesecular; religion treated philosophy as its servant; the wrathof the gods subdued ideologies; cyclical time suppressed
linear time; and so the key words of religious language
drew all forms of expression into their vortex. By trying to
explain everything, these words ended up meaning almost
anything. In the dominant mythology of the Middle Ages
religion was most vulnerable when words such as "God,""salvation," "divine love," "paradise," "hell," "sin," "perfection," "apostolate" and "charity" suddenly acquired
unexpected meanings. The scandal attached to such newmeanings was so clear that the Church did all in its power
to ignore them. Papal decrees and catalogs of heresies
served as permanent lexicons, constantly updating andclarifying correct meanings and denouncing as "diabolical" or "perverted" the panoply of definitions that competed with the ecclesiastical definitions. The Churchchose its enemies because its enemies were part of itself.
The heresies were religions that had failed - or had not
yet succeeded. Philosophy shattered theology only to perpetuate it in a different form. However, once it was clearthat Rome could not silence the mounting calls for natural freedom and openness to life, the Church conceded,albeit reluctantly, to this burgeoning movement of the"free spirit," giving its blessing to the advocates of this newheresy. This strategy has succeeded, to a certain degree,
since, to this day, the same silence and the same co-optation
hold their sway even over the most erudite.

44

FROM THE TWILIGHT OF THE BUREAUCRATS

27

With the end of agrarian society came the end of myths,
which were dispersed, spread out among myriad ideologies. Industrialization transformed the kingdom of divinetranscendence into a people's republic; it cut the loop of
cyclical time and recreated it as a linear time that could
be tracked, accounted for and made profitable. Human
freedom became identified with freedom of exchange, taking the words of the "in pace" and recasting them to fit
the vocabulary of the Revolution.
Theology (the language of the gods) and philosophy(the language of men) are both moments in a single progression. They are both nothing more than ways of abstracting life. Thus spiritual and temporal power vie with one
another in order to carry out one goal: to perpetuate slavery.
In spectacles honoring fanciful ideologies there havebeen vain attempts to revive this lost unity, a unity thatonce bonded ceremony and now-abolished myths. Having
achieved its freedom from the sclerosis of feudalism, however, philosophy says nothing that is not already expressedby economic practice. All would-be universal ideologies such as nationalism, socialism, fascism, communism- wear
the withering skin of religion until they, too, begin to
shrivel up, turning cancerous at the same uncontrollable
rate at which capital proliferates.
Words have not ceased to lose their appearance in losing their power. Even though discourse is still, mistakenly,
substituted for experience, who now would agree to die
for their country, the revolution, honor, the family, thecommon good or an endangered economy?

8

rision has become so much a part of language that,
finally, it is all that will remain. We have learned to dis-45

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITFROM THE TWILIGHT OF THE BUREAUCRATS

trust words, not because they so easily mislead, but because the world they belong to is one that does not reallyconcern us. Beneath the pathetic speeches that have disturbed the lives of millions of people, the grimace of repressed life has finally been revealed. The man of power,
worried about maintaining his reputation or bestowing
advice and wielding authority, is so cramped in his soundproof shell that his calls for freedom and happiness only
leave him hoarse, as his words grate ineffectually against
the hardness of his body and his spirit. Whatever he may
want to proclaim he can only convey in terms of commodities, since he is one himself.
The misappropriation of language that surrounds life
has made society more sensitive to the tide of pleasuresand vexations. The irksome buzzing of alienated thought
is perceived as a pointless annoyance, as something to be
avoided. Words only have importance in life where they areforgotten and only have charm at the moment when theygive way to the eloquent silence of the gestures oflove.

could unite the austerity of the divine economy with themercantilism of the earthly economy.
Failing to surrender to the demands of the modernizing market Rome surrendered instead to invading barbarians. Bureaucracy faltered and crumbled, having been an
outgrowth of agrarianism and the archaism of its slave society. And this failure cut off in mid-growth the flourishingeconomic imperialism that, at the point of a sword, had
civilized much of Europe and North Africa.
Christianity triumphed by drawing on the spoils of thefirst commercial empire to have international pretensions.
Its booty was a considerable albeit odd mixture: devalued
myths, a changing society in which slaves had the ambitionsof proletarians, a system of exchange based on the rationality of Greek philosophy, and the quintessence of Latin
culture- mercantile pragmatism and a cult of efficiency.
For a long time religion had aroused more amused skepticism than fervor. The polytheism of the Roman state
easily assimilated the gods of its conquered or colonizedpeoples. Such ecumenism corresponds to a commercial
reality in which all religions are valid the moment they
have something to sell. 6 Neither my!h nor the various formsof religion had anything to sustain them except a multitude of soulless divinities, statuettes hurriedly assembled
for display in a prototype of an ethnological museum.
Born in the lands of Jericho, where the economy firstemerged, the Hebraic religion tempered this doctrine attributed to an Essene agitator - in the fires of millenarian
revolts. At the most opportune moment it was therefore
able consciously to take up the movement to emancipate
the slaves, where Spartacus had left off, and this with the
implicit consent of an emerging modern economy.

Christian Syncretism
29

Christianity was credit~d with closing the wounds openedby the fall of the Roman Empire. And in homage to thegreat healer who was most skilled at repairing wounds,
Christianity made its great contribution- in fact, its only
true contribution- which consisted in adapting itselfto
the homeostatic mechanisms of the economy; that is, it
had discovered how to mend the two contradictory prinCiples that had defined economics until the end of theeighteenth century. The Church was the rigid yet flexible
bridge that, although constantly set asway by struggles,

47

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

Greek philosophy's lively critique of the sacred established the Logos as the rational medium of exchange thateveryone could understand, providing a weapon that could
be used to dismember the gods. Christianity swallowed
Greek thought whole without fully digesting it, which
explains the Church's interminable case of indigestion.
Christianized Rome finally assumed the bureaucratic
apparatus that had made and unmade emperors. Its inertia and the efficiency of its policing, as much as its spiritof conquest, enabled it to erect the beacon of sovereign
obscurantism that would stand.for thousands of years, andbe seen throughout the world, as the universal lantern of
extinguished life and of voluntary death.
30

In order to restore myth and resacralize the economy,
Christianity borrowed spare parts from Greek thoughtand drew on the idea of the Great Becoming in order totopple the gods. In the hands of the bureaucratic Roman
and Apostolic Church, Hebraic monotheism created a
God-Logos that expressed the unity that fused market
value with the three powers that ensure its immanence:
the Father, or spiritual power; the Son, or temporal power;
and the Holy Spirit, or Church, which governs relations
between God and men.
Teams of industrious men, who felt that all forms oflife were odious, manipulated legendary stories, oral traditions and fragments of Aristotle, Plato and Plotinus.
All material served their purpose, which was to cut andshape the dogmatic stones on which an institution could
be erected that professed to embody at once fixity andflux, stability and change, linear time and cyclical time.
To what do these compilers and concept-shapers, hon-

FROM THE TWILIGHT OF THE BUREAUCRATS

ored as the Founding Fathers of the Church, owe theirsanctification if not their keen sense of smell? For this,after all, was how they were able to follow the shifting
scent of profit ~ Origen and Pelagius had no less talent thanMatthew, Augustine, Jerome and the rest; but the former
were no different from members of the board of directors
who urged their company to cut off its main source ofprofit. It was pointless for the Church to condemn sin andcarnal temptation if, at the same time, it was going toallow Origen to guarantee chastity by castrating himself or
to allow Pelagius to refute the idea of original sin. Their acts
amounted to "cutting the purse strings" of all the moneythat flowed into the Church for penitence and redemption.
Once Roman decadence had shifted into recession anda return to an agrarian society, Christian theocracy proliferated, only to find itself at the crossroads - of retreat andmomentum, regression and nostalgia for conquest, immobility and progress. While the myth of the all-providing
Father restored the magnificence of the divine economy
and set up the earthly economy according to the modelof the sacrificed Son, a certain humanist rationalism prevailed during the Church's first millennium, giving the
Church an air of enlightenment? and an exemplary progressive outlook: in the hereafter at least, master and slave alike
could attain the democracy of salvation.
Through Christianity, economic imperialism lived onin the spiritual heritage of myth. In the romanized world,
where civilizing and commercializing went hand in hand,the commercial zones set up by Rome were soon invaded
by the cruciform symbol of the economy, a symbol thatstood for something that never disappeared but simply
remanifested itself in various changing, earthly forms.

49

31

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITFROM THE TWILIGHT OF THE BUREAUCRATS

There is certainly an inverted logic to the way ideologies
of love, peace, serenity and the idyllic life flourishedaround churches, abbeys and monasteries - like so manycankers gnawing away at the living and dead alike.
The Church was built on slowly accumulating and hardening layers of sedimentary rock: there was the permanence of Roman law, Latin as the sacred language, and thecross that was passed off as marking the holiest of sites inmuch the same way that the habitats of rural deities weremarked by springs, pools, forests, hillocks, dolmens andfree-standing stones. Above all else there was Rome, which,like a great spider, drew into the web of the celestial bureaucracy everything that moved.
At the heart of this civilization, whose heartlessness
had become Christianity's most noticeable trait, lay Rome,out of which swarmed the traveling salesmen of angelic
purity. In Rome the pope incarnated God while wearing
garbs more suited to a charlatan or a banker; and as one
side of his Janus-face looked toward the mythical Jerusalem
the other remained fixed on the whore of Babylon. Even
today, with Rome no more than a caricature of itself, it
has remained an object of ridicule thanks to the stunts of
the Polish clown and the escapades behind the Ambrosianbank scandal; and it continues to revert to the same oldpractices - its obsession with power, envy, avarice, repression, violence, hatred and contempt - despite its
superficial commitment to the purer forms of exchange:
self-sacrifice, selflessness, forgiveness, free will, justice,altruistic love and charity.
By embracing the mercantile imperialism of ancient Rome,and allowing it to penetrate and then seep into theocracy,

the Church took the same poison that had infiltrated Romeand led to its decline and fall. The Church was impregnated by the very thing that would condemn it to death,just as Herod had tried to kill the rival savior in his infancy,
after baptizing him with the name of the Antichrist.
During the first millennium Christianity had become
the obedient servant of economic omnipresence. With theChristocentric calendar it seized possession of time as well
as space and made it possible for the Church to look backon the agrarian period as a stable point of reference fromwhich it could measure its own progress. Instead of thestagnation of archaic peasant beliefs (which were called"pagan," implying all the same condescension and contempt that the city dweller held for the countryman), theChurch seemed to be fertile with ideas for a more progressive faith. It replaced the cruelty of fertility rites withthe more humane notion of sacrifice, where blood was
no longer shed except through the symbolic mediationof Christ.
This balance was destroyed when agrarian predominance began to be threatened by the rise of towns, thedevelopment of commerce, the renewed mercantile expansion and the appearance of a bourgeoisie that sought its
right to freedom in the freedom of exchange. Christianity
had scarcely triumphed over paganism before it was forced
to confront the very spirit of economic modernity. Christianity was no longer its sole spokesman, as it had been
when society was locked into the agrarian system.
The communalist insurrections of the eleventh century
revived progressive ideology; the Church was consumed
from within by the materialism that had penetrated it.
Concrete reasoning mocked the abstruse assertions of

50

51

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

dogma, which seemed to be expounded by leisured commentators who concocted such absurd notions as a virgin
impregnated by a spirit, and a God that existed simultaneously in three forms, who could be swallowed in a hunkof bread and who, though a corpse, left his tomb and flew
off into thin air. And, most confounding of all, he was aloving being yet encouraged the worst atrocities to be carried out in his name.
Once industrialization establishes a universal market
that expands across the entire world, or at least a market
that is large enough to fit its needs, that will be the endof Christianity. The Church, which stores old memoriesof eternalized exchanges, will be obliterated under theweight of the immediate reality of the economy. Modern
capitalism will relegate divine transcendence to the past,
tossing it off like a pathetic, worn-out skin that is shed in
the final stages of metamorphosis.
32

Jesus Christ was more successful than Mithras and Manes
because he best expressed the future of the economy. He
made man the finest, matchless promoter of material goods;
for the more goods and possessions a worker acquires, themore he is dispossessed of his true life.
In the same way that God was incarnate in Jesus Christ,
so the commodity· takes a human form. It is humanizedby virtue of a sacrifice in which the producer renounces
life in order to win the love of the Father, who produced
humanity (and is mistakenly called the Creator in Christian mythology).
Christianity sanctioned the end of slavery by making
slavery voluntary. While Mithraism and Manichaeanism lay
their stakes on a return to the agrarian mode of produc-

52

FROM THE TWILIGH T

OF THE BUREAUCRATS

tion the spiritual and temporal imperialism of Christianity
lay the ground for the ascendency of the modern State.
Christianity will endure as long as is necessary for the modem State to impose itself as the sole and supreme embodiment of the market relationship.
Unlike Manichaean dualism, and its revival in Catharism- neither of which could reconcile the purity of thedivine order with the sordid materiality of the earthly
economy - the Catholic Church married heaven and hellat the altar of balance, moderation and equity. It honed
down the extreme images of angels and devils, but left justthe right proportion of flesh and spirit that could be soldoff profitably in the divine and earthly economies.
The Catholic church followed a third path: it tried totranscend conflicting private interests the same way theState would later try to overcome class antagonisms. (Hencethe massacre of the anti-Trinitarians and the fight for thearchaic magic of the Trinity - three being the figure bywhich contradictions are overcome.)
33 Wherever merchandising and commercial trade came into
wide use Christianity entrenched itself by renewing andadjusting theological language accordingly. Latin was usedin commercial transactions, official government and military business, and slowly replaced the distinctive languages
in the conquered territories, setting up a universal monopoly over communication. Likewise Christian mythology
permeated all thinking, taking over the old religious symbols, marking off intellectual guideposts, while being constantly hammered into people's minds through a repetitionof signs that controlled space and time, conditioned minds
and governed behavior.
53

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITFROM THE TWILIGHT OF THE BUREAUCRATSIn Rome theologians labored to unify and standardize
Latin and give it a universal exchange value. In this way it
perpetuated and extended Rome's conquest, intellectually,
across a huge network of meanings centered around a textual nucleus that claimed to be inspired by revelation, andinterpretable only by the pontifical Pythia. But in thisupside-down world entities and objects had no true natureof their own but belonged to a set of categories producedby the socioeconomic system. The power to determine
and name what does or does not exist and the power tocall something into existence were absolute; for whatever
was not named had no official existence. Furthermore
whatever is named must obey the laws of language - lawsthat define and specify, name, classify and hierarchize.
In the empire of alienated thought anything that involves the spirit or the mind also involves the earth. The
Church wages a relentless struggle to control the spiritual market, fighting within and against a gradual movement
toward change and decay. It is the struggle of a kind ofdeath that does not want to die, unless all humanity dieswith it and at the latest moment possible. And the fact thatthe words "No salvation without the Church" could havebeen so disparaged by the very people who repeated themin the name of nation, community, party or group amply
demonstrated that the real meaning behind these words
was "No survival without the economy."
Yet, beneath the ridiculous and unceasing battle waged
by the dominant religion against its numerous rivals (heresies) and against mercantilism (ironically mirroring its
own materiality), there was another, more secret confrontation, with an enemy who struck, then dodged any blows
and always remained unassailable. This was the war waged

by the gods and their slaves against the natural rights oflife, against the experience of pleasure, which threatens at
every moment to break the economic yoke that attempts
to subdue it.

54

34

The poverty of the nineteenth century, which could only
engender an impoverished conscience, also spawned a grotesque legend of a Middle Ages drenched in Christian faith
like sardines in oil. The unity of myth was shattered into
ideologies; individualism claimed its own share in the collective alienation; and God, after having been dismissedfrom the universe, was now being summoned back by imperial decree. Factory smoke blackened the idyllic pictureof the rights of man, and although happiness no longer
meant holding to the lie of the hereafter, there was nocompensating truth to offer for the present. But theseruins were actually all that was needed to erect a glorious,
nostalgic monument to the past.
Of course even this shift from bein9 to havin9 was boundto preserve some slimy trace of the divine. After all thereligious form was the lie that artificially restored wholeness to humanity, healing what had been set at odds withitself, repairing what had been broken and alienated by
the economy.
The religious form had changed, nevertheless: once
desecrated, myth became spectacle. Christianity is now
simply one pill in the pillbox of ideologies, and it has been
still further discredited by the widespread disparagementof all kinds of medicine that are as bad as the diseases they
are supposed to cure. Yet some inexpiable vileness has
been transmitted from the crowds of the faithful mesmerized by aTe Deum or an auto-da-fe to crowds of citizens
55

THE

MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

cheering some political clown, from the pietist proclaiming his guilt to any modern-day person who has so low an
opinion of himself that he places his fate in the handsof others.
Religiosity is survival's shroud, the death that everything seized by the economy carries within itself. But if
the fabric of that shroud seems to have been spun from thevery threads used by the Fates to weave their tapestry, thatwork is undone and unraveled, daily, by the innocence andgratuitousness of pleasure. The arsenal of prohibitions andterrors that all religions set up, without exception, in
conquered territory is sufficient demonstration that theirconquest is illusory, that they have never conquered anything except the power of illusion.
I am astounded that people who talk about natural religion or spontaneous faith are always in such a hurry to grab
hold of children and baptize them, catechize them andsubject them to their idiotic rituals. This is, quite simply,
the kind of kidnapping that the so-called lay morality often
resorts to. To imagine that human beings have a naturalpropensity for religious feeling is to identify religiositywith life and life with survival. Any such identification isa result of the economy's influence and is founded on the
inversion of life into survival.
The right to sexual pleasure, which challenges survival
at its very heart, is only one of the aspects of life that cannot be reconciled with the economy or the economy's religious form: survival itself rebels at the stranglehold of
religions. Religions are completely powerless to render lifein economic terms or to convert it into a question of gains,losses, exchanges - a failure that is exemplified in religion's inability to account for the unpredictable move-

FROM THE TWILIGHT OF THE BUREAUCRATS

ment, starting in childhood, that is traced by the tirelessquest for love. For the only victory religion can offer is thatof death, which diverts pleasure, and degrades it.
Christianity takes flight on the wings of death, which
touch on everything, but disapproves of any hasty departure to the beyond. Survival's duration must be lengthened, from the horror of life to the horror of its end. Under
the watchful eye of the Church, Christianized man learns
to traverse the "vale of tears," to love suffering as muchas he hates himself and to seek out the trail to mortification so that after death he might be worthy of- whatelse? - eternal survival.
Christianity tried but failed to control the licentious behavior that ran rampant in taverns, throughout the streets,in brothels, steam rooms, and at parties and wild, nightlong
feasts- all places where oppressed nature was unleashed.
It could never call on enough Inquisitors or clerical police
to comb the parishes, or informers to lurk in confessionals - despite the fact that they all carried the official regalia of crosses, and invoked countless sermons, lectures
and anathemas. These inspectors, who knew the lucrative
power of vice and were well versed in purification-forprofit did not succeed in channeling into faith the excessesof epicurism, which totally discounted survival, or theexcesses of asceticism, which pushed the expiation of sin
to the point of the eagerly awaited annihilation of thiswicked world.
To extend its conquest of space and time, Christianity
drew on the most effective weapon in its arsenal: the power
to standardize theological language. It set the limits ofpublic communication, which only meant that, incessantly, the Church had to make an effort to revive sym57

THE

MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

II

bois, alter meanings, offer new connotations and prohibit
free interpretation. The Middle Ages were, in short, Christian in the same way that the countries of Eastern Europe
were communist.

THE CHURCHSTRUGGLES TO EVOLVEOn Philosophy
35

In the dialectic of the history of the market- which is thehistory of economized life - every moment bears the possibility of death and rebirth but builds toward an ultimate
death. In this sense the Church had no better enemy thanitself; for it developed and perpetuated itself within thevery system of thought that would destroy it. The Church's
worst enemy, however, came from without, from a dialectic of life according to which everything was transformed
as life proliferated.
As the stronghold of the divine economy the Church
was continually betrayed by its own materiality. In the eyesof the Church pure exchange and mercantile practice hadoriginated in one and the same power. Its god, crowned
with an impalpable halo of luminous gold, understood
how to get hold of the more tangible and profit-yielding
gold. And the same eye that watched over the heavens
merely winked at the clergy's wheeling and dealing.
Sheep and wolves were so intermingled that being a
shepherd could be ris~y. Although the pope had author59

THE

THE CHURCH STRUGGLES TO EVOLVE

MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIR I T

powerlessness to improve the lot of individuals, it invented
ontological suffering, a kind of suffering that was inherent to the human condition itself.
How could philosophy do otherwise, since it, too, participated in the work of commodities, separating the individual body from the social body, denying pleasure andsentencing people to the air-conditioned hell of survival?
Where philosophy falters - at the brink of the existential abyss - religion lies in wait with its panoply of consolations. If suffering is eternal, is it not better to surrender
to the splendid absurdity of a god than to embrace thecheap desperation inspired by an equally absurd godlessuniverse? It is easy enough to demonstrate the fallacy ofthe claim that this reasoning is a sort of anachronistic flatus still emanating solely from the mumJ!lified figure residing in the Vatican: just replace the word "God" by "Cause,""Revolution," "Necessity," or "Economy."

ity other temporal powers actually wielded the shepherd's
staff. The Church could sound the sacred horn, but philosophy resounded with the metallic jangling of coins. The
Church, however, after securing its spiritual and material
monopoly by claiming an exclusive monotheism, had tofight off competition across various markets: poverty, penitence and fear, not to mention death and denied life.
Rome was the frenzied seismograph that registered not
only the bumpy decline of the agrarian economy but also
the dramatic upsurge of the modern markets, from which
Rome found itself excluded.
36

Philosophy was theology's necessary evil, absorbing anddigesting it until the earthly economy absorbed the heavenly economy and excreted the sacred. Philosophy - theprofane, evil spirit of temporal power- created criticism,
negativity, insolence, rebellion, contempt for holy things,
equality and freedom, according to the law of exchange. In
its diversity, it encompassed the antagonistic interests ofmaster and slave, both offspring of the same system: a market economy. And so, with the Enlightenment, Minerva's
owl devoured theology's rat.
It was not, however, a concern for the sheer enjoymentof life that led philosophy to smash the ecclesiastical yoke,
to dismember the lie of myth and to ridicule the gods.
Rather, it was simply its malaise, which resulted whenoverly alienated thought grappled with the stark humanmisery of survival. When philosophy took the absolutely
abstract and life-denying qualities of God and broughtthem to bear on an abstract image of man, the result was ahumanized reverse-image of nature: self-alienation broughton by economic necessity. Because it had to admit its
6o7

The historic steeplechase in which Jesus rode Prometheus
ended with both horse and rider being cheered at socialism's victory circle. Yet, at the starting gate, there was alively animosity between these two mythological heroes.
Prometheus, the champion of Greek philosophy, set off
in the name of human productivity, hoping to win selfdetermination for mankind by abolishing divine tyranny.
Opposed to the obscurantism of agrarian society, he stoodfor the enlightened ideologies of free exchange - equality, justice, freedom and brotherhood.
Christ's lead at the end of the first leg of the race marksa r treat from the commodity system and Greek rationality back toward the archaic structures of feudalism. The
lvation of humanity, now relegated to the hereafter, was
6J

THE

MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

to be paid for in the coin of servility toward God, in thecoin of that voluntary self-renunciation whose model andperfect form is death. The producer was obliged to relinquish any claim of ownership with respect to his product,
and learn to love and produce the very things that served
to dispossess him. In lieu of wages he would now receive
eternal survival.
Later, benefiting from the rapid expansion of the economy, Prometheus was able to retake the lead, eventuallyclaiming victory - and donning the martyr's wreath. For
in the end his rebellion against the gods had unleashedeternal torments. To be sure, the Promethean insurrection
was doomed from the start. Its perpetual renewals andprogrammed setbacks gave it the pathetic grandeur andsacred aura to which social revolutions had consistently
sacrificed themselves.
By the way they began and the way they ended thebound hero of the Caucasus is, without a doubt, frighteningly similar to the mounted figure of Golgotha. Both werehom under the same convergence of economic forces, andtheir deaths further reinforced the belief- supported byvirtue of theological faith as by virtue of philosophical reasoning - that humans are absolutely powerless.
Everyone knows how the two rival brothers were reconciled by Marxism and its political and military aftereffects, in the course of spectacle where the economy was
freed of the gods and men were given their freedom.
38

The materialism that was used to undo the gods borrowed
its critical weaponry from Greek philosophy, that body ofthought that most encouraged desacralization in antiquity.
In this hymn to reason one could already detect the faint62

THE CHURCH STRUGGLES TO EVOLVE

notes that would one day sound the end of the sacred kingdom. As they took on greater resonance they all but blared
out man's call to victory, especially when reverberated in
the works of the most lucid minds of the Middle Ages:John Scotus Erigena, Avicenna, Avicebron, David of Dinant
and Thomas Scoto.
In certain regards their work avenged Greek speculative thought, which had been badly wounded by the unintelligible jargon of the theologians. After Christianity usedcertain elements of rationalism against the ancient pagan
religions, the response on the part of rational criticism wasto develop ways to defend itself more effectively and pointedly against both temporal and spiritual challengers.
As towns began to develop, the bourgeoisie demanded
greater freedom of trade, and emperors, hoping to solidify their power, asserted the rights of the State against thespiritual bureaucracy of Rome. Within the entourage ofFrederick of Hohenstaufen, emperor of Germany and forerunner of the modern head of State, an empirical philosophy began to spread in which things divine were treatedin the same manner as the condemned man who was shutup in a hermetically sealed barrel so that the scholarsof Palermo could see, upon opening it, whether a soul
would escape.
At Frederick's court there surfaced, if not the actual
book, at least the legend of a text that everyone was talking
about. Entitled The Three Impostors (referring, namely, toMoses, Jesus and Muhammad), Geoffroy Vallee would later
refer to it in his Fleau de la Joy. State-sanctioned atheism
was no less bloodthirsty than Church-sanctioned belief.
The tolerance of the philosopher-king fluctuated according to the demands of power. If there was anything to beTHE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

gained from a rapprochement with the pope, he would
happily feign devoutness and pursue heretics with exemplary brutality.
The same versatility ruled in the cities. These essentially embryonic states were isolated one day and embraced
the next, depending on their lucrative potential - which
proved a perfect environment for ecclesiastical parasitism.
For seemingly religious policies were dictated by ·immediate interests, also leaving the way open for a good measure of hedonism. It was on the basis of the right to thesepleasures, which the rich claimed for themselves and which
the poor constantly demanded, that the movement of theFree Spirit founded its project of transcendence.

Joachite Millenarianism~9

In the twelfth century, even as mythical forms still prevailed, new social and political forces took shape, giving
rise to a sense of history that belonged to the revolutionary process introduced by a new market of goods and services. In millenarianism philosophy was concerned lesswith wresting itself from the hold of theology than withclearing a path to the kingdom of God on earth.
Reclaiming Eden from the hereafter and imagining it
in a not-too-distant future was the most precise expression of a current of social revolution linked to economicchange. It was a vision that the bourgeoisie and the proletariat alike would preserve by secularizing.
It is ironic that this idea was originally developed by
Joachim of Fiore, a monk who did not at all seem inclined
to sow the seeds of turmoil in the ecclesiastical universe.
It is true that the Joachite theories worried the Church

THE CHURCH STRUGGLES TO EVOLVE

only when they were seized by different movements, plunging a vision built on stability into the restless agitation of
the century.
In the ninth century Bishop Ratherius of Verona expressed the immobility of a society founded on the agrarian mode of production by reducing it to a perfect balanceof three orders: the armatores (warriors), who protectedcollective survival against predators; the ora to res (monks
and priests), whose prayers obtained the goodwill of God;and the laboratores (workers), who produced indispensable goods under the protection of the temporal and thespiritual.
In the circular conception of the world each order occupied a hierarchical but complementary place, so that all
three were the same distance from the center, that pointof divine fusion at which the universe disappears and isreborn in a democracy of the damned and the chosen.
The growth of towns and the rise of commerce led
Joachim to alter Ratherius's static and cyclical model, flattening it and stretching it into a line that was divided into
three ages. Corresponding to the armatores was the age ofthe patriarchs and kings; corresponding to the laboratores
was the age of the secular clergy, whose works fructified
God's earth. The third age, that of monks and saints, oforantes, represented the highest form of perfection.
The first age, in which men lived by the flesh - thatis, like animals- lasted from Adam to Christ; the second,in which men live between the flesh and the spirit, beganwith Saint Benedict and will last until the end of time.
An extract from the Agreement of the Old and New Testaments, written around 1180, provides an illustration of
Joachim's formulations, none of which contain anything

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITTHE CHURCH STRUGGLES TO EVOLVE

that would arouse the Church's distrust, but whose meaning, as elicited by history, would put formidable weapons
into the hands of Rome's enemies and all who scorned thehold of religion.

the reign of freedom. Joachim calculated the period from
Adam to Christ as being forty-two generations of thirty
years each, or 1,260 years. According to the cyciical conception, to which he was still partially committed, thesame lapse of time had to intervene after Christ. The onsetof the new era was thus determined to be around 1260.
This then became the fateful year in which hope, love, fear
and hatred would mark the beginning of a new era in history, one that would be agitated by social revolution, repression and resurgence.

The first period was that of knowledge, the second that ofunderstanding, and the third will be the period of complete
intelligence. 1 The first was servile obedience, the second filial servitude, and the third will be freedom. The first wasaffliction, the second action, and the third will be contemplation. The first was fear, the second faith , and the third
will be love. The first was the age of slaves, the second theage of sons, and the third will be the age of friends. The firstwas the age of old people, the second of young people, andthe third will be an age of children. The first was spent instarlight, the second in the dawn, and the third will be in
the full light of day. The first was winter, the second the
beginning of spring, and the third will be summer. The firstbore nettles, the second roses, and the third will bear lilies.
The first gave us grass, the second spices, and the third will
give us wheat. The first gave us water, the second wine, andthe third will give us oil. The first relates to Septuagesima,
the second to Quadragesima, and the third will be Easter.
The first age therefore relates to the Father, who is the authorof all things, the second to the Son, who deigned to take on
our filth, and the third will be the age of the Holy Spirit, ofwhom the apostle said, "Where the Spirit of the Lord is,there is freedom." 2
40

The detonation of this explosive mixture of Joachite
thought and history coincided with the precise date fixedby the Calabrian monk for the advent of the third age, ·66Superimposed on Joachim's outmoded cyclical calculation was the modernity of a political strategy. He foresaw the importance of the mendicant orders- a veritable
war machine set in motion by Catholicism soon after his
death - under threat from the increasing destitution of
the towns and from the progress of the Waldensian heresy. Unlike the Dominican order, whose work as inquisitorial police had done little to sensitize them to theprospect of the third age, the Franciscan order, charged
with "tactfully" taking over the Waldensian doctrine ofvoluntary poverty, was happy to identify with the monastic movement that Joachim felt was destined to found theage of saints.
41

In the case of most revolutionaries the original virtue of
militant sacrifice eventually reappears as the blood of sacrificed revolutions. The oppressed body is under a similarcurse, for it too eventually takes out its revenge on its
oppressors and those who have manipulated it with lies.
Zealous preachings about submission and self-contempt like th e religious recluse's cant on lustful desire - may
sudd enly be worn down by the reverberations from one

THE CHURCHTHE

MOVEMENT OF

THE

remark that threatens to break through the carefully constructed edifice of repression.
Saint Paul writes in an Epistle to the Corinthians:"Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom." Saint
Augustine affirms: "Love, and do what you will." Joachim
declares: "The Holy Spirit produces freedom in broad daylight, which is love" and "Charity is part of the freedomof the Holy Spirit." These expressions, intended by theirauthors to be in complete agreement with Catholic orthodoxy, are among the quotations most frequently seized byadherents of the movement of the Free Spirit, who would
subvert their meaning and restore them to the clandestine
life from which they came.
The three characteristics of the third age, as conceived
by Joachim, were in complete accordance with the teachings of the Church. Perfection implied the sinlessness ofthe spiritually perfect man, a state attained only in absolute obedience to dogma. In contrast to the Cathars, who
declared themselves "perfect" without the support of the
Church, Joachim presented a true community of official
saints - exceptional beings, deemed worthy of pontificalsanctification, whose numbers would be encouraged tomultiply by the example of monastic purity.
Joachim prudently reserved contemplation for the few
who "repose in the silence of the hermitage, where flourish neither the study of letters nor the teachings of a Christian education, but only simplicity oflife, honesty, sobriety
and charity sprung from a pure heart and an unfeigned
faith." 3 The status of the contemplative hermit was not tobe confused with that of "simple people" of the working
class. The latter, who had abandoned work to seek divine
contemplation outside the religiously consecrated days
68

STRUGGLES TO EVOLVEFREE SP I RIT

of rest, were merely succumbing to the sin of idleness.
Ultimately, freedom, neatly assimilated with love, wasconceived of only in terms of angelic grace, which is theeffect of love emptied of its substance and purged of all
flesh. As disincarnate as it may have been (though withsuch a degree of precision in absolute spirituality that it
bordered on absolute materiality), the prospect of thereign of an earthly paradise within the scope of history
exercised a tumultuous attraction to what the century had
considered constrained passions, but which were, in fact,
passions longing to be fulfilled.
In its ambiguous enthusiasm the third Joachite age
abolished the reign of the Church. There would be neither Father, nor Son, nor rituals, sacrifices or sacraments;
there would be only a single law - the lex libertatis- which
had already been set forth in the first half of the twelfth
century, in the rationalist arguments of both Peter of Bruys
and Henry of Lausanne. With such a society imminent, andits paradisaical nature leased directly from God, how could
the most abstract concepts have been prevented from taking shape among those who had been exiled from all pleasures by the ecclesiastical dictatorship?
Thus words desiccated by religious speculation foundnew life in the fertile earth from which they had first
sprung. Within the notion of perfectibility germinatedthe rejection of all guilt; contemplation became the illumination of the god of desire that all people carried inside; charity was the art of courtly love; love expressed theeffusiveness of lovers; and freedom evoked, at worst, thefreedom of nature and, at best, the dissolution and transcendence of the unfortunate coupling of nature and God.

THE

MOVEMENT OF THE

FREE SPIRITCatharism
42

THE CHURCH STRUGGLES TO EVOLVE

Christianity inherited the same aversion to agrarian
cults. It, too, initially had been accused of orgiastic practices, and, in its battles against the various forms ofheretical asceticism it had learned to make good useof coalitions. More totalitarian than ancient Rome, theChurch regarded the whole of nature with disfavor. It
socialized and centralized the repression of instinctual
drives, the animality that boiled in the devil's cauldronthis god of lower earth who kept rearing his head - evenas the Church drew on all its powers to keep him at bay.
Yet Christianity was very careful not to encourage any
virtues that might cause the source of its profits to dry up.
It stood at the gateway of transgression and demanded payment from the thirsty who came to drink from the cup of
sensual pleasures.
At a time when duplicitous ecclesiastics were spreading the idea of a corrupt and corrupting nature throughout
the countryside, and tolerating sin as merely human weakness as long as it was redeemed, the absolute Apollinianismof the Cathars profited by harnessing the rampant despairthat was casting a pall on the ancient pagan exuberance.
Above the natural chaos ruled over by the Demiurge -a
corrupt god, producer of an inhuman universe - shines
the light of a pure God who refuses to illuminate thedark, absurd material world so as not to fade out and extinguish Himself.
The radical critique of the perfect completely rejected
the existing world and invited followers to abandon life
here on earth, which was doomed to failure. Scorning themercantile compromises of Christianity, Cathar abstinence
traced the shortest and most rational route out of a labyrinthine vale of tears. It is difficult not to interpret thischoice - made in the context of a Languedoc civilization where life's sweetness, for the first time in history,
encouraged the idea of a society devoted to love r~therthan money- as a gamble in which all stakes were placedon death, as if that were preferable to the suffering causedby refusing what life had to offer.
The Cathar desire for the annihilation of the earth expressed a refusal oflife degraded to mere survival, a refusalthat the Cathar religiosity condemned to self-destruction

7071

While the Roman and apostolic conglomerate marked its
advance on the market by destroying its competitors,
which it called "heresies,"4 the Cathar enemy took up a
position midway between urban rationality and paganism,
both of which the Church was having difficulty removingfrom rural areas in the twelfth century.s But there werenumerous pockets of resistance in which fertility cults dating from Neolithic times persisted, having been transmitted through the Dionysiac religions of Asia Minor, Greece
and Rome.
Even the Roman Empire, imbued as it was with its
mercantile humanism, cringed with horror at mention of
the Bacchic mysteries, in which orgiastic release paid its
tribute directly to,repressed nature, without going throughthe State. The discovery, in 186 A.D., of secret Dionysiancelebrations in several towns in Latium aroused intense
indignation in Roman society, whose cruel customs, fierce
proscriptions and circus entertainments were well known.6
This indignation was probably due less to cynical moralizing than to the sheer astonishment of a businessman confronted with a barter system.

THE

MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

Only recently has it become possible to see the similarities
among the various ways in which nature, the proletariat
and life itself are exploited - forms of exploitation thatare the driving forces behind survival. The exploiters andthe exploited are like two arrows, both shooting off course,
though steadily aimed at the same mark: the absent life.
As the heavenly economy grieves over its materialism, as
the spirit groans in the prison of the body, as the hand,which despises nature, is despised by the intelligence thatguides it, so poverty, weighed down by private ownership,sinks deeper into the sewer in which flounder the selfimportant of the business world.
Christian mythology proposed to exorcise the old curse
inherent in the lucrative production of inhumanity bypropagating the reversible model of king-slave, warriorcapitulator and the human corpse resuscitated as God. It
offered a pact to the oppressed: posthumous equality inexchange for submission to the spiritual and temporal powers ("Render unto Caesar ..." is one example). Better yet,as a special incentive, it offered prime consideration forentry into the kingdom of God for those who had learned
to feel real love for their enslavement and contempt for
all forms of pleasure.
Whereas ceaseless propaganda was necessary to achieve
temporary docility among the masses, the Church excelled
at demanding similar obedience from the princes and patricians who were the chief beneficiaries of the people's
submissiveness. By bowing to the power of Rome and byimproving their spiritual credit through generous donations, those who already possessed wealth and authority
gained even more: they cleared their bad consciences andwashed away the shit and blood that soiled their purses andth ir bills of exchange.
n the tightrope of death, where survival was left danling, the Church wobbled as it tried to maintain a pre< ri us equilibrium. That was to be its horrible fate, until

72

73

as the only remedy. 7 Their disgust for materiality, theirrevulsion at touching anything living (as if it were impure),
the refusal to kill humans and animals (except fish), abstinence from lovemaking, exaltation of asceticism, thepractice of suicide by endura, or prolonged starvation- allappear to lay the foundation for a pure economy, one thatwould not need people.
Catharism transformed fertility cults into sterility cultsbecause fecundity added to the evil in the world; it baseda kind of courtly love on spiritual castration, which marked
both the emergence of life and a social conscience likely
to acknowledge and refine it.
In short it reduced survival to a fundamental nullity;
it proposed, in a condensed version, the long-term planthat the Church had drawn unconsciously from the economic model of survival on credit. Faced with this impatience to empty life of its substance, Catholicism sent out
its soldiers of deferred death until confidence in its enterprise was restored. Bloodthirsty repression by the northern crusaders lay waste to a civilization that had been on
the verge of finding their own approach to happiness. The
victory was a matter of real profits over the rarefied abstraction of exchange; and so, paradoxically, a slow deathon the installment plan took revenge on immediate, gratuitous death.

The Poverty Market
43

THE CHURCH STRUGGLES TO EVOLVETHE

MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

the triumphant bourgeoisie replaced the Church with themodern State, which was scarcely more stable.
Each time pauperization threatened the social order of
the towns, Rome bestowed upon the underprivileged theemblem of a Christ, poorest among the poor, proud of thisindignity. Occasionally, by encouraging popular agitation,
Rome reminded the temporal powers - indeed, its own
clerical hierarchy - that its intercession was not without cost. The Church reminded them that if it had notinsured the docility of the laboring classes through thereiterated promise of socialism in the hereafter, the swordof social justice might have fallen on the heads of kings.
In Laon in 1077 the cleric Rhamirdus, who led a revoltof weavers and preached against simony (the sale of indulgences) and the corruption of the clergy, was condemnedby the bishop of Cambrai and died at 'the stake. The pope,
who was disturbed by the growing wealth and power of the
dignitaries of the Church, sided with the rebels and restored
Rhamirdus to favor. The frequently repeated example of
popular resentfulness, instigated by the lower clergy against
the class enemy enabled papal politics, to give full support as it so chose, to contrast the hedonism of the "haves"with the enforced asceticism of the "have-nots" and dispossessed, which Rome compared with Christ's voluntaryand salutary deprivation.
Similarly, when the Emperor Frederick railed against
the Church, the pope used the mendicant orders to undermine the emperor's credibility among Italian simple people
and to foment revolt that would benefit the papal party,
the Guelfs.
However, what was gained in terms of devotion was lostin terms of tactics. Throughout the emerging proletariat,
74

THE CHURCH STRUGGLES TO EVOLVE

scarcely Christianized peasants now had access to cities
where they could be initiated into rational criticism andindividual freedom; and they could gain access to forbidden pleasures. The idea of an earthly paradise free of spiritual or temporal oppression came into clear view amid
an otherwise permanent confusion.
In the place of foreign crusades a new diversion developed in towns threatened by a conflagration of pauperism.
It was a defusing of social antagonisms through the creation of a movement of voluntary poverty, often within thebourgeoisie. The Church was quick to realize the importance of such a movement, and tried to control it, if necessary, by destroying any independent initiative.
44

The Waldensian heresy illustrates Rome's lost opportunity
in its struggle against the Cathars and against the subversive effects of urban pauperization. Founded around 117 3
in Lyons by the rich merchant Peter Waldo, the voluntary
poverty movement was intended to revive the Church tradition originally practiced by the apostles. At the instigation of Waldo, who had renounced all his goods andpossessions, the group called the Poor Men of Lyons spreadthe word of Matthew's gospel: "If thou wilt be perfect,
go and sell what thou hast, and give to the poor." Thisappeal to the guilty conscience of the merchant was so
successful that the Waldensians were a significant force
before the Lateran Council of 1179. The pope, although
impressed by their piety and attracted by the evangelicalsubmissiveness they propagated, was nonetheless resistant - perhaps due to pressure from the secular clergy 8
who were hostile to anyone who would do charitably whatth ey did for money. He hesitated to embrace them and75

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITTHE CHURCH STRUGGLES TO EVOLVE

imposed the condition of absolute Church control, forbidding them to preach freely.
But either because he foresaw that he might one day
be compromised or because the growing number of his disciples encouraged him to challenge the authority of Rome,
Waldo refused to bow to these terms. In 1181 the pope
thundered against him and ordered his excommunication.
After 1184 the Waldensians were hunted down and burned
as heretics.
Followed by real bounty hunters, who were later to beenrolled by Saint Dominic in the ranks of the Inquisition,
the Poor Men of Lyons aroused sympathy everywhere by
their gentleness and their rejection of violence, just as, by
their submissiveness and their vocatiop of martyrdom, they
inevitably attracted the attention of cowardly sadists.
From Lyons the movement spread across Provence,
Languedoc and Aragon. It gained ground in Italy, where
Milan, already converted to Catharism, was considered oneof its spiritual strongholds. It reached Liege, Trier, Metz,
Strasbourg, Mainz and the Rhine area, before extending
to Bavaria and Austria.
The Lateran Council of 1215, by enjoining the bishops,
under penalty of dismissal, to .hunt down and punish heretics in their dioceses and to encourage spies and informers
to help them, showed what little tolerance the authorities had for those people who preached the virtues of submissive poverty.
Instead of using Waldensian asceticism, or apostolic
behavior motivated by charity as an effective way to oppose
Cathar perfection - which was simply detachment fromthe world - Rome brought the two movements together
in senseless persecution. Rome treated them as if theyboth contributed in similar ways to the hostilities directedagainst the Church. Both were seen as rejecting ecclesiastical pretense; and both exhibited an anticlericalism that
won the support of the laboring classes because of theirhatred of tyranny, the support of the bourgeoisie becauseof their dislike of parasitism and the support of the nobility when it suited the rivalry between temporal and spiritual power (which would culminate in the confrontation
between Rome and the emperors of Germany).
Accused of holding secret orgies the Waldensians' reputation for exemplary asceticism was recast, and they werecharged with the kind of hypocrisy that was usually reserved for priests who, while feigning perfect obedience toRome, let the left hand stray into debauchery as the righthand reached out for absolution. The alleged Waldensianorgy, which prefigures the witches' sabbath and recurs inthe barilotto9 of the Fraticelli condemned in 1449, wasviewed during the inquisitorial proceedings as a sacred act
harking back to the agrarian cults. The idea of such archaism created abject horror among humanists.
At the same time, the papacy tried to correct the disastrous effects of its unsuccessful encounter with voluntary
poverty. A group of pauperes catholici, hastily assembled
from converted Waldensians and charged with countering
the heresy, was a complete failure. Thus Pope Innocent III
was careful to miss the meeting he had been invited to havewith the new Waldo- now more diplomatic, less scrupulous and acutely aware of the vacancy within the orthodoxy of a glorious calling: that of shepherd of the poor.
45"

Francis of Assisi responded to the austerity of the Cathars
and Waldensians with a more subtle approach to renunci-

77

46

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITTHE CHURCH STRUGGLES TO EVOLVE

ation. His forgiveness of human weaknesses, by legitimating the attractive power of sin, encouraged the Church torecognize the one power capable of effectively containing
it. For those who did not possess the compulsive strength
an apostolate of poverty required, Rome had the exclusive
privilege of providing it. Given human weakness pardon
was granted in return for the simony and sordid little transactions such weakness regularly led to.
The exaltation of a virtue known to be fallible createda veritable elitism of humility within the Franciscan order.
By restoring sinlessness to the ce.nter of a church so armed
against sin that it barricaded itself in, Francis slashed thepromotional prices of Waldensian virtue, which stalled theindulgence market.
But his talent for unassuming wiliness allowed him
to make the most of the situation. Outdoing both theCathars, who neither mistreated nor killed animals, and
the Waldensians, who respected life and were against thedeath penalty, the Poverello of service affixed the seal of
the sinister cross to the concordat he established between
man, nature and God. By catechizing the wolf, the lamb,the crow and the sun, he provided. the appearance of sanctity for the shamanism that still lay dormant in the heartof the countryside. It was as if he had set up God's special
showcases for the animal, vegetable and mineral kingdoms,
although he had taken little notice of them before.

by declaring their fidelity to a pontifical policy increasingly dictated by the slogan "Get rich!" which seemed tounderlie the rise of mercantilism. The "Spirituals," to thecontrary, flaunted their contempt for earthly goods, sometimes to the point that havina resembled beina in the life
which the movement of the Free Spirit was trying to bringto light.
The elitism of the Spirituals found nourishment for its
chiliastic pretensions in the theories of Joachim of Fiore.
In 1254 Gerard of Borgo San Donnino, a Spiritual from
Pisa, radicalized and popularized Joachite ideas in his Introduction to the Eternal Gospel. Laying great emphasis on thefateful year of 1260, he prophesied the disappearance of
the Roman Church and the advent of a Spiritual church,which would grow out of Franciscanism. The condemnation of the book in 1255 reflected poorly on the abbot of
Fiore, who was already suspected of heresy. Gerard, condemned to seclusion for life, died after eighteen years ofharsh imprisonment without ever retracting his beliefs.
Joachism nevertheless continued to find defenders
among the Spirituals in the Franciscan order. According
to Peter John Olivi and Ubertino of Casale the reign of theHoly Spirit had already begun. The Church was "Babylon,
the great whore who destroys humanity and poisons it,delivering it up to the pleasures of the flesh, and to pride
and avarice." Monasticism would succeed the pope, whomthey regarded as the Antichrist, and would lead to thereign of the saints. Then the virtues of poverty, chastity
and humility would be worn like scapulars by revolutionary movements, old and new.
This was a purely religious attitude of two clerics rebelling against a papacy that they deemed to have devalued

Too hurriedly digested, Waldo's apostolic practice continued to afflict the papacy with a headache and the orderof Saint Francis with indigestion for more than a century.
Two movements rapidly arose in opposition to the Franciscan observance of poverty. The "Conventuals" protested

79

47

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITTHE CHURCH STRUGGLES TO EVOLVE

Christianity. They were united in their condemnation of
the body, which was the site of guilty pleasures, and themateriality of the market, as the sites of avarice and the
pride of power. It is not surprising that Ubertino, later
forced into exile to escape the displeasure of John XXII,
was so zealous in his suppression of the movement of theFree Spirit in Tuscany, the valley of Spoleto and the areaaround Ancona, "which no inquisitor before him had daredto undertake." tO
Such a step corresponds precisely with the need toensure that the Spiritual movement not include the kind of
suspicious Free Spirit ideas that the Church associated with
Fraticelli, which stood somewhere between Franciscanismand heresy. The agenda of political and social struggle thatappeared in the I tali an towns had dual repercussions for
the Franciscan movement. It gave rise to the revolutionary millenarianism of Gerard Segarelli and, particularly,
of Dolcino of Novara, and to intellectual speculation intended to purge the Church of corruption (which, in 1491,
was still on Savonarola's agenda). Both options encouragedth~ greatest contempt for the seductiveness that the demand for the freedom of nature held for simple people.

burg forbade the faithful to give food. or shelter to thewandering Apostolics who wore extravagant clothing andwere called "gluttons" (leccatores, nhiottoni, scrocconi).
Although Segarelli's doctrine was closely related tovoluntary poverty it is possible that, within the idea ofperfection associated with abandoning material possessions, some of the people's aspirations for the freedom ofnature may have gradually been assimilated. While Angelo
Clareno may have been yielding to polemic when he accused Segarelli of introducing the doctrine called "thespirit of freedom" into Italy, there is nonetheless a degreeof similarity between the theses of William Cornelius of
Antwerp and the ideas of Segarelli. Both assert that a lifeof poverty is the true life of the Apostolics because it "isfree and the most perfect of lives ... freedom in adoring
God, freedom in the vow, freedom in the relations between man and woman."In the Joachite year of 1260, Segarelli, a Parma shopkeeper,gave up all his goods and possessions and founded the sectof the Apostolics, much as Waldo had done before him.
This was too much for the Church. Initially encouragedby the bishop of Parma the Apostolics outdid the Franciscans by spreading their rallying cry of "Penitencanite!"(Do penance!) throughout the streets. They worried Pope
Honorius IV, who accused them of heresy in a Bull ofMarch 11, 1286.11 One year later, the Council of Wiirz-

After Segarelli was burned to death in Parma on July 18~
1300, a dissident Franciscan, Dolcino of Novara, assumed
leadership of the Apostolics. Dolcino brought together the
insurrectional movement of the countryside and Joachist
millenarian ism as radicalized by Gerard of Borgo San Donnino and Segarelli. From 1304 to 1307 Dolcino and his
companion Margarita organized a rural commune in Piedmont where they planned to organize an agenda for collectivist survival along millenarian lines. 12
Around this couple, the Apostolics formed the nucleus
of a new world in which the goods necessary for survival
were held in common, property was abolished and marriage, which reduced women to an object of ownership,
was done away with. (This last tenet was deemed by the
repressed inquisitors to be "collective rape.")So

81

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

After the execution of Dolcino and his companion on
July 2, 1307, in Vercelli, most of the Apostolics would
merge with the Beghards and Beguines.
48

Toward the end of the twelfth century associations thatwere both lay and religious began to appear, usually at theinitiative of magistrates or rich bourgeois. The membersof these groups, known either as Beghards or Beguines,
lived in communal houses called beguinages.
Founded in the public interest to check the rate at
which the poor were fleeing to the towns, draining surplus labor from the countryside, these communities wer~
independent of any monastic order and placed under thesupervision of the bishop alone. The influx of beggars
increased the size of the communities, especially in northem towns like Liege - where the first establishments datefrom 1180-84 (and are contemporary with Waldo's efforts
in Lyons)- Tirlemont (1202), Valenciennes (1212), Douai(1219), Ghent (1227) and Antwerp (1230). In 1250 there
were more than 1,000 adherents in Paris and Cambrai, and
2,000 in Cologne.
In Jundt's idyllic description of the beguinages, there wasa particular manifestation of the Free Spirit tendency, inwhich individual and community interests were entangled:
In France and in Germany the Beguines stayed together infairly large numbers in a single house, whereas in Belgium
their dwellings were less like a cloister than one of our modern workers' districts, composed, then as now, of a series offairly small houses, each home to two or three Beguines, nomore; in the center there was a church and a hospital for elderly or sick sisters, and nearby there was a cemetery. These82

THE CHURCH STRUGGLES TO EVOLVE

women lived in a manner that was halfway between monastic and profane life. They did not renounce the companionship of men at all, nor earthly matters and preoccupations;they took vows of chastity and obedience, but not of theabsolute sort taken by nuns. They reserved the freedom toleave the association whenever they wanted and to get married. Those who were not entirely poor could leave a willaccounting for a certain part of their possessions. Within
their houses they busied themselves with different femaletasks, devoting part of their time to prayers and pious reading. They also often visited different families in the town tocare for the sick; if they received legacies, they were sure
to celebrate the anniversary of their benefactors' death byattending masses for the repose of their soul and by saying
prayers over their tomb. The Beguines thus enjoyed most of
the benefits of convent life without having to endure thedisadvantages.
Other people soon began to imitate them. Brotherhoodsof artisans, usually weavers, were formed after their example
in the various towns that housed Beguine establishments.
Generally known as Beghards, the members of these almost
entirely lay associations enjoyed the same independence as
the Beguines. They devoted their lives to manual work andpiety, and thereby won the support of simple people.
However, the success of these two religi~us societies
brought them enemies, especially among the secular clergy
who had grown jealous of them. Parish priests received anannual compensation for the losses they sustained as a resultof the presence of a priest especially attached to each of theseassociations; they even lost a share ofthe cost ofburial whensome rich bourgeois, and this happened quite frequently,
asked to be buried in the cemetery belonging to the estab-THE

MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITTHE CHURCH STRUGGLES TO EVOLVE

lishment. As for the religious orders, they could only lose

Innocent X with the tertiary Franciscans of Lombardy andby the growing prestige of the pious foundations that were

was, from then on, no more than a province of the order ofdepriving them not only of the support of many of theirSaint Francis. 13

members but also of important donations.
The Lateran Council had decreed that no new order

The Penitence Market

would in the future obtain pontifical approval, a decisionthat was used against the Beguines and Beghards, who wereaccused, among other grievances, of forming an association
the Church did not recognize. Already in 12 40 Joan of Flanders saw fit to order her magistrates to defend them against
their attackers; five years later Innocent IV expressly tookthem under his protection. In 1261 Urban IV wrote to thedean of Louvain "to protect them against their recklesspersecutors, and to prevent them from abuse during legal
proceedings, either directed against their person or theirproperty." But in 1274 Gregory X renewed the Lateran Council's s·e ntence, and thus began the decline of the institutionof Beguines and Beghards, further hastened by the accusations of heresy that rapidly followed. Since the end of thethirteenth century these religious associations were repeatedly forced, in order to survive, to sacrifice their independence and place themselves under the protection ofFranciscans or Dominicans by accepting the third rule ofthese orders. Their persecution and, more importantly, theirgradual absorption into the regular clergy meant their eventual disappearance from France and Germany. In the middle of the fifteenth century in the Netherlands they formed
the Congregation of Beghards of the Third Rule of SaintFrancis, organized by an annual assembly that met at Zipperen (hence the name Congregatio Zipperensis). Afterthe torments of the sixteenth century this congregation,
reduced to a very small number of members, was united by

49

The Church despised all sin that was not profitable. It
hated nature, that sewer of all temptations, but could nothate sinful nature, the source of its revenue. The Church's
kindness, like that of psychoanalysis, was boundless because it simply absolved the offense, always repeated, by
demanding payment for it.
Rather than direct its wrath at the avaricious, the dissolute, the drunkards, the torturers and the murderers,
the Church reserved it for the ascetic, who felt no desire;the honest man, whose virtue required no ecclesiasticalinsurance; the "pure" Waldensians and Cathars, who practiced their own remission of sins; the simple people, whowere ignorant of sin, and the supporters of the movementof the Free Spirit, who comforted them in the innocenceof nature.
Although they condemned pleasure the ancient religions at least tolerated its occasional release. Orgiastic
feasts, bloodthirsty sacrifices, warmongering, potlatch,rape and delirium of the senses governed the compensatory flux oflives sacrificed to work.
But Catholicism was so well schooled by the mercantile imperialism of Rome that it began to tax the expression of the passions. To the repression and distortion ofpleasure that were already exacted as the price of the rightto survival, the Church added a tax on indulgence. Release
now had its cost: the vices engendered by an impossible

THE CHURCH STRUGGLES TO EVOLVE

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

virtue would have to be paid for at both retail and wholesale prices.
To insure that irreproachable behavior could not be used
to avoid the toll collectors in the confessionals, Christianity
universalized and rationalized the ancient idea of unwor.;.
thiness, stemming from the gods' usurpation of human
merit, and renamed it "original sin." This spiritual cleansing enterprise plunged the whole of humanity into themire of guilt. Because Adam and Eve challenged the prohibition of God the producer, their amorous union sullied
love forever. From the moment of birth, and through later
suffering, guilt tarnishes every child born of sensual coupling, which only the mother of Christ was able to escape.
(It is true that the Passion of the Son born untainted is, incontrast to amorous passion, the art of learning to suffer
and die: this is the essence and sole meaning of survival,
as poets and philosophers have well understood.)
Armed with the privilege of taking confessions, punishing and absolving, none was so sacred for the priests those black crows of the Last Judgment - than those of
zealous collectors of taxes on natural inclinations. Historians have also often identified anticlericalism with a nostalgia for religion purged of ecclesiastical mercantilism, as
seen in the Cathars, the Waldensians, the Apostolics andthe adherents of other sects whose Christian morality prefigured the moralistic atheists of the nineteenth century.
Simple people developed a similar instinctive repugnancefor tithe collectors, indulgence sellers, confessional priests
and religions in which everything - birth, death, copulation, pleasures and pains- had to be paid for. (It was onlyaround the fifteenth century that the Church, through its
monopoly on the markets of fear and death, was able to86

impose itself in people's minds as a public service as natural and unavoid_a ble as death itself.)
50

The Church's battle for absolute supremacy over markets in
sin and penitence dominated the fourth-century polemic
against Pelagius, who denied original sin and argued thata good man armed with a steadfast will could resist temptation. Although Pelagius recognized the attraction of evil
and the power of triumphing over it, he did not understandthat the Christian disparagement of the body and its pleasures was related to man's experience of the pull of naturaldrives and the pain of succumbing to them in one single,
irrepressible fall. The condemnation of the Pelagian heresy
condemned all seekers of moral perfection. For the innocents, who were ignorant of sin, and for the naive, whowere indignant that a child could be considered guilty atbirth and were therefore dismissive of baptism, the Church
developed a contract of spiritual and material profitability that denied them existence.

The Market in Fear and Death51

The fear of death, as the logical form of the fear of living,
was a terrain well disposed for conquest by the Roman
Church. However dying in order to pass through to the
kingdom of heaven first implied that one deserved death,
which is God's gift of welcome. If future happiness is notbased on present sacrifice, no power will guarantee its
attainment. The clerical bureaucracy had no rationale forits existence except its control of heavenly survival within
earthly survival, a control that bourgeois and proletarian
millenarians merely desacralized. The end of the world,

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITTHE CHURCH STRUGGLES TO EVOLVE

with or without renewal, is profitable only in its anticipation. The economy prophesies the apocalyptic horror of
the world's disappearance only on the condition of thehorror of an already ruined life.
The famine of 1250, the plague of 1259, the bloody
struggle between the Guelfs and the Ghibellines, the fallof Gerard of Borgo San Donnino's radicalized Joachism -allhave a connection with the appearance in Perugia, around
1260, of the Flagellant movement.
At first encouraged by the Church - the holy inquisitor Vincent Ferrer instigated the flagellant tendency inSpain - this hysterical, collective self-punishment soon
began to threaten the clergy's privilege of punishing andconsoling. The demand for hell on earth deprived the merchants of the hereafter of all their influence, especially as
the idea was propagated among the Flagellants that voluntary injury and mortification was a way to identify with
Christ, who was incapable of sin, and thus to be released
from the hold of the Church.
Among other heresiarchs Mecco Sacconi (also known
as Dominico Savi), who was burned to death at Ascoli in
1344 and had been the leader of a group of Fraticelli andFlagellants since 1320, preached a mode of behavior that
seems to have been indirectly influenced by the movementof the Free Spirit. He taught: "Shameless fondling, eventaken as far as orgasm, is not a sin; men and women praying
together in the darkness of the night do not commit sin,whatever else they do at the same time; women are permitted to flagellate themselves, for their sins, naked andin public; laymen also have the ability to absolve all sins." 14
Once the difficult equilibrium was upset between theinterests of life and the interests of death, from which sur-vival was monstrously formed, the Church was led towardboth annihilation and hedonism. While repressing the flagellant movement the Church also founded a true devoutness on the basis of collective self-punishment and thedances of death that celebrated the interminable festivalof living death in the fifteenth century. W~thin this devotion, the time of accepted suffering was paid for on the
day of reckoning - not before and not after - by the deliverance of a consolatory death, of a mother come from thepurity of the beyond to clasp to her breast the lost children of humanity. If death remained frightening, that was
because it was fatally female, and only the Church had thepower to lend it a maternal benevolence.

88

On the Exorcised Woman or the Cloistered Nun
52

The misogyny that haunts the economy and its representations derives from woman's role as the bearer of life:
she offers life to a society that has no use for it. There
has never been a market civilization that has not reduced
women either to the immateriality of the virgin or to thematernal production of flesh for profit. Women must be
unsullied by useless sensuality before engendering future
producers in a similar sensual uselessness.
Having no acknowledged body, except as a hired-out
uterus, celebrated as an object of pleasure and despised forthe love it encloses - the love of life - woman sows in her
path the fascination of the forbidden. The power of hergaze promises access to the secret universe of sexual pleasure, and her odor is that of the arcane, vegetal earth of
all creation. Thus the somewhat confused perception that
Gnostics had of her.

THE

MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

Each time an epoch bears the traces of feminine illumination, it is a sign that there is renewed life in the foreststhat have been freed from the spell cast by the wretchedsorcery of the old world. But it seldom takes long for the
fleeting radiance of its presence to be followed by the pestilent breath of repression, that mutilates it, and consequently, misrepresents it.
Femininity, already repudiated among the priestessesof the ancient cults, was further denied in the male wisdom of Athena and in the remorseless liberations of themaenads. The Church acted no differently when it forced
women, who were useless, to regulate their behavior bymarrying Christ or the devil.
The development of cloisters in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries coincided with women's increased importance in society. (Their rights were then more extensive
than those granted by the famous Napoleonic Code, inwhich Bonaparte compensated for his amorous weaknesses
with military harshness.) The mystical exaltation of "holywomanhood" provided an outlet for the spiritually sealed
sensuality of the repressed. Hierogamy sacralized the erotic
surplus.
As virgin, wife, mother and daughter of Christ a nun
consecrated her sexual exuberance to a phantom - theincarnation of the disembodied, the symbolic flesh of theimmaterial, the tree of love tom up at its roots and carved
into images of death, with black stains coagulating onthem instead of come. With so much incendiary passion
directed at an icy corpse it is hardly surprising that, within
the love given to an infinite God, there was forged an infinity oflove in which God was annihilated.
The Church, which rarely saw beyond its nexus of90

THE CHURCH STRUGGLES TO EVOLVE

heaven and earth, body and spirit, angel and beast, conferred a seal of sanctity on those passionate enthusiasts
who sought absolute love in the exaltation of the senses.
Those whose exuberance ridiculed authority were burned
as heretics or witches. Escaping the Church's hold necessarily meant serving another master. Unwittingly nuns
rode broomsticks.
In the debate on love that dominated the twelfth andthirteenth centuries, the movement of the Free Spirit had
a natural point of entry. Because the Free Spirit radicalized courtly love, and restored the shrivelled idea of loveembodied in the detumescent effigy of Christ on the Cross
to its authentic lawless wholeness, the movement's greatest enemy was inevitably that primarily masculine theology which simultaneously spiritualized love and treated it
as a perversiOn.
The mysticism of the likes of Johannes Eckhart, Henry
Suso, John Tauler, Jan van Ruysbroeck and Gerhard Grooteamounted to the revenge of the spirit for attempts toemancipate the body. The very designation "Free Spirit,"
meant to evoke natural liberty and its transmutation, reflected a wish to reduce things to spiritual terms- which
is of course the essence of all religion. But the label, whichplaced the Free Spirit on the same shelf as heresies andpure ideas, was the despair of the ecclesiastical storekeepers: the mold did not fit, and because it bore the imprintof a reality that it could not contain, it broke.
Eckhart accused proponents of the Free Spirit of interpreting spiritual thoughts literally, while Ruysbroeck
called down the wrath of the Inquisition on Heilwige
Bloemardine. In the fourteenth century Groote founded
the movement of Modern Devotion in order to release the91THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

movement of the Free Spirit from the contemplative doctrine in which, under the guise of divine love, it brought
God back to man. This attempt had neither beginning nor
end, and was ultimately a continuum of amorous attraction.
In 1380 Groote denounced Bartholomew, an Augustinian
supporter of the movement of the Free Spirit in Eastern
Holland, and had the corpse of Matthew of Gouda disintered because, according to him, Matthew had "morereasons than Christ to be called God." IS
In its attempt to remain separate from life, of which
it was the absolute negation, mystical theology was apt
to descend to the lowest depths of the earth to glorify
the executioner.
53

The quarrel over the Holy Spirit ran deeper than the scars
opened by theological speculation, and opened a woundthat threatened the Church's survival. By assuming controlof the spirit, pontifical Rome saw itself as civilization's savior. It had a divine mandate to govern the individual bodyand the social body. It had to defend the citadel of economic order against the threat of animal instincts and theviolence of the exploited. It guaranteed its sovereignty
through its ceaseless work on the raw material of the passions and on that social mass, which the clerics contemptuously called "simple people."
Simple people escaped their bestial nature thanks to
the divine form granted them by the Church: through baptism they inherited a spirit that had to be sustained by scrupulous observance of the rites and sacraments. This is why
simple people were usually spared the punishments metedout to the heretics. They were, after all, only beasts, tobe treated in cases of sedition as one would treat rabid ani-

THE CHURCH STRUGGLES TO EVOLVE

mals. The exemplary punishment was reserved for bad
shepherds, depraved guides and heresiarchs, in whom thesin of pride encouraged the usurpation of the Church's roleof conferring holiness of spirit. 16 The Church had a duty
to destroy all who hindered it or competed with it.
The spiritual preserve was the only terrain from which
the Church could launch its assault on the temporal. By
crowning both the Father's authority and the Son's complacent rebellion, the Holy Spirit ruled the earth without
seeming to, in much the same way that the Church did notcondemn people to death, did not spill blood, but hypocritically recommended clemency as it handed its victims
over to lay justice.
The Holy Spirit was the antithesis of this Free Spirit.
That is, it represented alienated thought dispersed in natural freedom. The Holy Spirit was the moving circle of theimmobile, where possible transcendence was reversed andexchange was substituted for change.
Beneath the name Free Spirit were concealed the most
unfathomable parts of life, those parts of living that could
not be expressed in either economic or religious terms(the mythic form of economy). Its trail is crisscrossed withgleams of light that are inexplicable to historians - heresies, millenarianisms, social demands and ideologies - but
not ones that belong to heresy or millenarianism or social
movements or philosophy. Through the emancipation ofsexual pleasure and the nurturing of love, it expresseda desire to transcend a life turned against itself, and toannihilate the pitiful pairing of oppressive God and oppressed nature.
That is why what has filtered down through language
across time bears the seal of the immutable. The theses
93

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITIII

of Eloi Pruystinck and Quintin of Tournai in the sixteenth
century differ little from the opinions of the Amauriansin the twelfth. The spring has never dried up; it gushes
from the fissures of history, bursting through the earth
at the slightest shift of the mercantile terrain. If it now
appears in the full light of day, in a language whose words
have turned God and his fables into economics, it is because the illusions of our epoch have lost their force in aworld in which the only real issue is whether to live or
to survive.

THE PRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS
OF THE MOVEMENT OF THE
FREE SPIRIT FROM THE THIRTEENTH
TO THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

The Amaurians
54

The concern to associate behavior that evaded the Church's
control with a particular heresy resulted in the disciplesof Amaury of Bene being grouped together under the nameof "Amaurians" or "Amalricians." They were supporters ofa doctrine first condemned in Paris in 1209 and in Amiensin 1211.
Amaury was a cleric who originally came from Bene, not
far from Chartres, but who taught in Paris, where he had areputation as a subtle thinker. He first excelled in logic andliterature, but later became increasingly interested in theology, in which, according to Auguste Jundt, he displayed
original opinions and great independence of judgment.
The reputation he enjoyed brought him to the attention ofLouis, the dauphin of France. The fundamental thesis of histheology was that all Christians were bound to believe thatthey were members of Christ and that they had actually suffered the punishment of the cross with him. This argument
was fiercely opposed at the university, and in 1204 Amaury94

95

PRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRITTHE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

Like Johannes Eckhart, whose condemned propositions
stated philosophically what the behavior of simple people
expressed in a more confused way, Amaury and, more precisely, the Amaurians, were doing no more than exploiting and rationalizing the stark but banal truth: that there
was already so much hell on earth that it would be betterfor people to stop tormenting themselves and to learn toenjoy pleasure.

was obliged to submit the debate to the pope, who pronounced against him.
Back in Paris, he was compelled by his colleagues toretract his discredited proposition, which he did, but notwithout protesting vehemently against the admission they
had extracted from him. He was so consumed with distressat his humiliation that he fell ill and died soon after 1207. He
was buried near the monastery of Saint-Martin-des-Champs.
No mention was made anywhere of the books he had written. I
55

A truly subversive doctrine would have required amore serious punishment than the pope's disapproval andAmaury's retraction. Everything suggests that the interruption in his theological career was caused rather by the hateful kind of campaign that is so often mounted in sects anduniversities, inspired by those who want to ruin the posthumous reputation of a thinker sufficiently original to
arouse envy. In Amaury's case this was achieved by attributing to him certain "coarse" individuals as his disciples,whom the Church regarded as concerned more with Epicurism than with metaphysics)
Yet there is a rationality behind the pope's condemnation of the thesis that all Christians were members ofChrist and had actually suffered the punishment of thecross with him. Though watered down by the context oftheological speculation the thesis contains echoes of a popular opinion that resembled the doctrine of the so-called
Amaurians. This belief inferred from Christ's sacrifice,from his death for the sins of humanity, that the offense
had thereby been redeemed, and that men were exempt
from having to pay a second time through suffering, sinand penance.

The Amaurians arrested in the Paris region in 1209 wereneither the only group nor the largest. However, their
inclusion of educated men, some of whom were close toAmaury, provided an opportunity to tarnish the master's
orthodoxy while meting out punishment with an exemplary effectiveness.
In his Dialogue on Miracles Caesarius of Heisterbach3
lists the principals accused:
At the same time that the Albigensian heresies were active,
diabolical thoughts seized the perverse minds of certain
educated persons in Paris, source of all learning and font of
divine writings. Here are their names:- Master William of Poi tiers, subdeacon. He had taught thearts in Paris, where he studied theology for three years. 4-The Subdeacon Bernard.
-William the Goldsmith, their prophet.s-Stephen, parish priest ofVieux-Corbeil.
-Stephen, parish priest of La Celle-Saint-Cloud.
-John, parish priest of Occines. 6
All these wretches except Bernard7 had studied theology.
- Dudon, private clerk to Master Amaury. A priest who hadstudied theology for some ten years.
97THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT- Elmange, acolyte.
- Odo, deacon.
- Master Guerin [or Garin], who was taught the arts at Paris,
where he had studied theology with Master Stephen, Arch-bishop of Sens and Peter of Paris they were condemned,
dismissed from their order, and delivered ·to the justice ofbishop of Canterbury.
- Ulric, parish priest of Lucri, 8 a sexagenarian who had longstudied theology.
- Peter of Saint-Cloud, parish priest and sexagenarian, alsoThis took place in Paris, outside the walls, in a place called
Les Champeaux. 12

King Philip. He, as a most Christian and Catholic king, sent
for executioners and had all the condemned men burned.

However, all the women and other simple people, mostof whom were misled or corrupted, were spared.13 On

well versed in theology.
- Stephen, deacon ofVieux-Corbeil.
It was these men who, inspired by the devil, devised greatand numerous heresies, and sedulously propagated them inthe other hand, as it had been claimed that the sect originated with the heresiarch and preacher Amaury, he, who
had thought that he would rest forever in the peace of the
Church, was posthumously excommunicated by the Council. His bones were removed from the holy cemetery, re-many areas. 956

duced to ashes and scattered on dung heaps. Blessed be God
in all things, who denounces the impious. 14

The arrest and conviction were described by the chronicler
William the Breton.
57

Rumor [of the group's activities Jcame secretly to the attention of venerable individuals such as Peter, Bishop of Paris, 10
and Brother Garin, counselor of King Philip [Augustus]. In
order to conduct a diligent inquiry into the members of thissect, they sent a cleric named Master Rudolph of Namur on
a secret mission. 11
Thus mandated, Rudolph, who was devious, astute anda true Catholic, feigned enthusiasm for the sect every time
he visited one of its members, and expressed interest in joining. They, in turn, thinking he was one of them, revealed
their secrets.
Thus it pleased the Lord that, after long years of dissimulation, several members of the sect were located, captured
and taken to Paris. There they were brought in front of theCouncil, which was in session. In the presence of the arch-

While the Church was preoccupied with discovering anddenouncing diabolical spirits, which they held responsible
for "heretical perversion," the so-called Amaurians were
multiplying. Their presence, first acknowledged in four
dioceses around Paris, spread to Alsace and Switzerland.
In 1211 a cleric, Master Godin, was arrested and burnedin Amiens. After his trial the original list of charges compiled after the conviction of the Amaurians in Paris was
extended by the Cistercian Gam ius of Rochefort, .who wasbishop of Langres. This new list was essentially a noticeof investigation allowing agents of the Church to identify,'
interrogate and convict those suspected of disseminating
Free Spirit ideas. IS
In 1215 Robert of Couryon, papal legate and rector of
the University of Paris, banned both Amaury's writings andAristotle's works on natural history. He attacked the pan99

THE

MOVEMENT OF

THE

FREE

SPIRIT

PRINCIPAL

theism of David of Dinant. Later, the works of John Scotus
Erigena were condemned as another source of the pernicious doctrine.
In that same year the Lateran Council renewed thecondemnation of the Amaurian doctrine, which it judged"more nonsense than heresy." This was a revealing statement, suggesting that beyond heresy- the negative provinceof orthodoxy - there was nothing that was not nonsense. 16
Most of the eighty people, from all classes, who wereburned in Strasbourg in 1215, belonged to the Waldensian
movement. Nevertheless, some of them affirmed that "thegrossest sins are permitted and are in accordance withnature." 17
In 1216, "a new and shameful heresy" appeared ·in Alsace
and Thuringia: !8 "Its supporters were convinced that it was
permissible, and in conformity with nature, to eat meatand other foodstuffs any day and in any season, and evento indulge in every kind of sensual pleasure without being
obliged to expiate it [nullo piaculo contracto ]."19
According to Jundt some Amaurians found refuge in
Lyons among the Waldensians, who had, like them, rejected the sacraments and the ecclesiastical hierarchy.
However, they did not share the Waldensians' total commitment to asceticism and the apostolic vocation. This
coalition may be the origin of the calumny that attributed
an essentially Amaurian freedom to the Waldensians, something the morbid imaginations of the inquisitors equatedwith orgiastic license.
An unknown man was burned at Troyes in 1220 for having claimed that the Holy Spirit was incarnate in him. A
similar theory, proposing that God's presence in man left
him absolved of sin, is illustrated in a Life of Saint Thomas
100

MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

Aquinas, in a knight's response to a theologian who has bid
him to do penance for his sins: "If Saint Peter was saved,

then I shall be also, for the same spirit inhabits us."
Yet repression, powerless to halt the freedom of natureand the spirit it inspired, would gradually lessen, as thequarrel intensified between the "two halves of God": thepope and the emperor of Germany.
58

Like most of the ideas of the movement of the Free Spirit,
the so-called Amaurian doctrine is revealed only throughthe filter of the Church. Historians who believe the accusations of the inquisitors are followed by others who believe
the opposite. To uncover the truth behind the lie it isnecessary to understand the debauchery attributed to heretics - and to good Catholics, as well - which was often
only the fanciful product of lustful imaginations tormented
by deprivation or guilt.
If the pathetically credible admissions extracted under
torture were appearing more and more often in sermons
that criticized the very people who protested the horrors of the flesh, it was because the Church needed to use
shame for tactical advantage. For, increasingly, the "pure"
were leveling accusations of defilement against the Church
because of its lucrative control of debauchery.
Ecclesiastical calumny lost many of its reasons for virulence in the proceedings instituted against the supporters of the movement of the Free Spirit, simply because thefreedom of nature was not denied but demanded. If there
was any slander, it was in the inquisitor's confusion of thesearch for a more refined and carnal love with a sort ofsacred prostitution in which, at least, God was still celebrated in an underground church.
101

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRITThe lie stems directly from the religious expressionthat was forced on life, and from the idea of a world whose
only reality was survival, a world that existed only by virtue of God. That view oflife, repressed and yet everywherevisible in the various virulent forms of reversals that it
effected, is what sustained the Church. The justificationof its Herculean labors depended on the incessant rebellion of oppressed nature. Clergymen and laymen, peasantsand proletarians, bourgeoisie and nobility, priests and popes
were all eventually caught in the grip of dissoluteness,debauchery, rape, adultery, drunkenness or gluttony, andtheir corrupted state led them to a dissatisfaction, disgustand fatigue that became a desperate need to expiate theirown sins as well as to make the rest of sinful humanity
expiate theirs.
Petrus Comestor described the students at the University of Paris at the time of Robert of Cour~on and theAmaurians. His description could certainly be applied tomore than one community: "In eating and drinking they
have no equals. They are ravenous at table, but far fromdevout at Mass. At work, they yawn; at a banquet, they fear
no one. They abhor thinking about the sacred books, butthey love seeing the wine sparkling in their glass and swallow it down undaunted."20
But the Church knew that whatever was done with aguilty conscience would, sooner or later, lead to remorseor penance. It could wait until desires became tiresome
and fading pleasures took on the asheri taste of sin.
At worst, heresy collected whatever was not sanctified
by the sacraments of the Church. PhiJip the Chancellor
continued to make bitter condemnations, but in vain:"Hypocrites, heretics and false brothers and bad Christians

are the work of the devil .... Their furnace is the fire ofconcupiscence; for the cause of all heresies is either lechery, concupiscence or pride."21
The attitude that plunged Christianity into the mostcomplete disarray came from the most ordinary of resolutions, and from the most popular and shortest of credos:"Enjoy life and laugh at everything else." In the eyes of
the Church there was no more urgent task than to silence
anyone who encouraged the idea that such freedom could
be pursued without fear or blame, or without any constraint whatever; hence it smothered and destroyed themor clothed them in the tawdry religious garb of heresiarchs. It might be said that both the clergy and the godless intellectuals who succeeded them achieved in theseventeenth and nineteenth centuries what Rome had
failed to achieve during the Middle Ages. 22

102

59

The Contra amaurianos, attributed to Gamius of Rochefort,
was drawn up in accordance with the list of accusations
at the Paris trial, but after the trial of Master Godin of
Ami ens, which is referred to in the text. It revealed not
so much a coherent doctrine as a number of tendencies
and, above all, a distinction between educated men andsimple people. The questions posed by the interrogatingclerics were conveyed solely in theological, even scholastic language. Some points reveal that certain questions,which might make the difference between life and death,revolved around a dispute among scholastics over the meaning of one word. This is evident in the first, ninth andtenth paragraphs, which contain the arguments amongsuch thinkers as William of Poi tiers, Bernard, William theGoldsmith and, in 1211, Master Godin.
103THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITThe opinions of simple people express more practicalconsiderations, as is confirmed by the interrogation of theparish priest, John, who shared the life of his parishioners
and declared very simply:

PRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

Jacob said: "Surely the Lord ~s in this place." Therefore,
God is in some place. 26
In Sunday prayers, we pray, "Our Father, who art in
Heaven." If he is in heaven, then it is the case that he is insome place.

God made all, the good and the evil: the good to show theAugustine asks: "Where was God before the world wasgood will of man and the evil to show the evil will of man.

made?" And replies: "In himself." It seems that, if he had

Thus the good works and the bad ought to please us alike,not been somewhere, the question would have had no ob-

since they are the good works of God and since it is God who

ject, since it entailed an error. Therefore, he was somewhere.

makes everything, not man." [John] said that he had heard

Therefore, he was in some place in this eternity. Therefore

the reading of the schedule, 23 that there were some points

some place was eternal with God. And, finally, such a placethat smacked ofheresy and that he had not denied. He admit-

was God, because nothing is eternal except God.

ted that he was wrong in that .... On the other hand, there

Whoever cannot be in every place is not omnipotent.

were some things in the schedule that he had not completely

Could God be elsewhere than in himself? God is in himself

understood. When he was arrested and taken away from his

and in every thing that is not him. God is elsewhere than inparish he told his parishioners that they should not trust any-himself Therefore, he is in a place different from himself.

one who spoke against his doctrine and taught them differ-

Therefore, he is himself a place different from that in which

ently from him.24

he happens to be.
Would God be in time? God is always; therefore, he is

6oin time. But he is in all times; therefore he is in time.27

Contra amaurianos

The Bible says: "As it was in the beginning, is now and
1. God is everywhere. No one dares deny that. There-

ever shall be." Therefore, it is now. It is, therefore, in timefore, God is in every place.25 If something is everywhere, itthat we live. Does that mean that everything would be incan be anywhere at all. God is everywhere. Therefore, he can

God? The apostle said: "In him we live, and move and havebe in a particular place.

our being." And, elsewhere: "All comes of him, throughOn the other hand, the proposition is false that claims:

him and in him." Therefore, good as well as evil. There-

God is somewhere. Therefore, this is true: God is notfore, the evil is in God. But whatever is in God, is God.

somewhere. Therefore, he is nowhere. Therefore, he is not

Therefore, the evil is God and the creature (the devil) is

everywhere.

in God. Because "it comes of him, through him and in

Gregory says: "If the young king had had faith, there canbe no doubt he would have had knowledge, because there
is nowhere that God is not." Therefore, God is in every place.

104him." Therefore, approving this creature, he does not reprove it.
As God and the divine essence are one and the same thing,

105

THE

MOVEMENT OF THE

FREE SPIRIT

and nothing other - since everything is God - let us ask
whether all things are in the divine essence.
But Saint Augustine said: "Of him and through him and

PRINCIPALMANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

penance in question.
Whoever knows that God is within him need never besad, but should laugh.35

in him, all things are of the same principle." Therefore, if

7. Everything the Parisian masters36 have affirmed about

everything is of God and through him, all things are of his

the Resurrection, they treat as fable; for complete knowl-

essence.

edge is the resurrection, and no other may be expected.3 7

2. God produces everything in everything; therefore, theevil things as well as the good things.28 Therefore, whoever

Christ was not resuscitated in the flesh.38

understands that God achieves everything in himself cannot

8. No one can be saved if he is not a member of Christ. 39
9. God is all in all things. God, in fact, will be all in all;sin. It is thus that they attribute to God and not to them-but whatever it may be, it is, because it cannot change into

selves the deed of committing a sin. For, if God cannot do

God. Therefore, God is in all things: God is the stone in theit [commit evil], then that means he is not omnipotent.

stone, Godin in Godin. It may thus follow that Godin should

The prophet says: "Shall there be evil in a city, and the
Lord hath not done it?" And Isaiah: "I make peace, and create evil. I, the Lord, do all these things."
Even if he gives himself up to fornication, 29 someone
who has learned30 that God achieves everything in himself
does not commit a sin.

be adored not only out of the respect due to men, but also
for divine adoration, because he is God. 40
God is whatever resides within him. Everything is God,
"for what has developed was life in him." Therefore, God iseverything.
All things are in God. The apostle, to the Colossians: "ForThe totality of everything one does must be attributed
to God, not to oneself.

by him were all things created, that are in heaven, and thatare in earth, visible and invisible."I

Whoever attributes to himself any action, whatever it

The power of God and the power of divine charity are

may be, instead of attributing the totality of his deeds toone and the same thing. But the power of God is in the stone;

God, is in ignorance, which is hell.31

therefore, the power of God's charity is in the stone.

3. Hell is nothing other than ignorance. Paradise is nothing other than the acquired knowledge of truth. 32

the effect subsists. Therefore, when the effect is corrupt, the4. They say that paradise is the apprenticeship to truththat they are proud to hold. 33

cause is also. But the body is corruptible, and is so by virtueof God. Therefore, God is corruptible. 41

5. If a Jew has the same knowledge of the truth as we

The cause of deprivation or possession, that is, of oppo-

do, there is no need for him to be baptized. 34

God is the origin of all causes. When the cause subsists,

sites, is not the same. But evil and good, like deprivation and6. If someone has been compelled to do a long pen-possession, are opposites. They do not have the same cause.

ance on the orders of a priest, and then becomes aware of

God is the constructive cause, not the destructive cause. But[our] doctrines, there is no need for him to complete theevil destroys rather than constructs. God is therefore not the

106

107

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

cause of evil, and it therefore seems that he is not the causeof everything. 4 2

PRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE

FREE SPIRIT

size very forcefully that the internal body is everywhere.
12. The body of the Lord is as well adored in plain bread

10. The Father incarnate was in Abraham and in all theas it is in bread consecrated on the altar.

other fathers of the Old Testament. The Son of God was in

For the Spiritual, who possesses this understanding ofChrist and in the other Christians. And the Holy Spirit was

the truth, which they claim to have, all the sacraments ceasein those who are called spiritual. Christ was incarnate in

to exist, because the sacraments are manifestations of theGodin. 43

Church. Just as certain ways of worship ended under the old

The Son is the incarnation of God, and God the Son is thesame, and is one, numerically, with God the Father. Althoughlaw, with the coming of Christ, so must all others disappear. with the arrival of the Holy Spirit.

the Father and the Son are different, the similarity of their

What more can be conferred, they ask, than sanctifica-

divine condition seems to indicate that the Father was incar-

tion in everyday life and glory in society? Well then, that isnate like the Son, the diversity of their condition not pre-what brings knowledge of the truth, without any need forventing such an incarnation.

sacraments!

Since the works of the Trinity are indivisible, if the Son

Five years from now, all men will be Spirituals, and they

became flesh, then the Father and the Spirit underwent thewill all be able to say: "I am the Holy Spirit" and "Before

same fate. 44

Abraham was, I was," just as Christ was able to say: "I am

11. The body of the Lord is everywhere.

the Son of God" and "Before Abraham was born, I was." 4 6

They say that there is no resurrection of the body. Somedraw a distinction between external bodies and internal bodies. 45 The visible and palpable body they call external, theone that was fixed to the cross. By internal body, they designate a certain divine power which, in Plato, is the conceptof the spirit, Us, idea.

The Joachite element was called on to justify, seemingly for the first time, the liquidation of religion andthe pulverization of God in the crucible of nature. In his
Chronicle, William the Breton states:
They thus said that the sacraments of the New Testament

Whence Plato's opinion that the divinity is the eternalcame to an end in our epoch, and that the period of the Holy

artisan who works preexistent material rather than creating

Spirit had started, in which there was no place for confes-

from nothingness. According to him, the Hyle (primordial

sion, baptism, Eucharist and the other guarantees of salva-

matter) is coeternal with its artisan, like the concept oftion. Henceforth, there would be no salvation except by thespirit, which Plato calls idea, that is, form, and Aristotle,

inward grace of the Holy Spirit, with no outward works. And

aspect. And because Plato talked about artisans, and Aristotle

they thought of the virtue of charity in such a broad sense thatabout the effective principle, they imagined several coeternal

they ensured that every act regarded as a sin ceased to be so

principles. Some call the internal body this concept of spirit,

if it was performed out of charity. This is why they devoted

or ideas, or, following Aristotle, aspect. And they empha-

themselves, in the name of charity, to debauchery, adultery

108

109

PRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRITTHE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

treachery, they are secretly committed to spreading the belief that one c'an sin with impunity. They are convinced that
there is no sin, and that, therefore, there is no one who
ought to be punished by God for having offended. Although. outwardly, on their faces and in their speech, they can affectan air of piety, inwardly, in their spirit and their secret works,
they reject virtue. 51
An accumulation of the most extreme folly and the mostshameless lies: they neither fear nor blush to assert that they
are God!52 Infinite extravagance! Abominable presumption!
They call God the adulterous man, the companion of othermen's beds, the being defiled by all kinds of infamy, thereceptacle of all crimes. This surpasses the aberrations of thegentiles, who lied more modestly when they claimed thatthe greatest of their princes would become gods after their
death. Assuredly, anyone who could say "God does not exist"
is talking raving nonsense. But the individual who claims "Iand all the other pleasures of the body. And they promised
impunity [penance was unnecessary] to the women withwhom they sinned and to simple people whom they misled,preaching that God is a being of goodness and not a judge. 47
Caesarius of Heisterbach similarly states: "They said that if
a Spiritual (someone who is in the Holy Spirit) indulges infornication or some other defilement, he does not commit
sin, because that spirit is God, separate from the flesh, andcannot sin. And man, who is nothing in himself, does not sin
as long as this spirit, which is God, resides within him."48
Bread is the bread you eat and not a symbol consecrated
by the affectations of a priest. Likewise, God is in thepleasures of nature ("God is a being of goodness") and notin the authority that represses them (God is not a judge).
The rejection of the sacraments has nothing in common,in its fundamental rationale, with the sacramental protestsof the Cathars, the Waldensians and the Apostolics. Among
the Amaurians, sexual pleasure takes the place of baptism.
The Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis notes: "They say,untruthfully, that the little children born of their blood are
not deprived of the benefits of baptism if they are the issue
of a carnal relationship with the women in their group."49
That is a privilege of love which reveals a still littleknown dimension of the courtly spirit.
61

A sermon by Johannes Teutonicus,50 probably contemporary with the trial of 1209, stresses the identification
with God:
Look at these profane novelties, propagated by people whoare disciples of Epicurus rather than Christ. With fearsome
IIO

am God" is even more insane.
Oh, let us hope at least that such a plague does not pollute this city, the source of all learning and the true flowerof wisdom! 53
62

About sixty years later, in 1277,5 4 Bishop Stephen Tempiercondemned a series of theses that were arousing quarrels
and debates at the University of Paris. Several of thesewere reminiscent of the Amaurian doctrines. Yet the more
prominent element was an intellectualized version of ideasthat had proliferated among simple people, the speculative echo of immediacy experienced by the yrossi homines
who did not care about religion. Among the anathematizedpropositions were the following:
One can know nothing about God except that he exists. 55
I I I

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

auto-da-fe ordered by the sinister Robert le Bougre59 Aleydis was believed to profess Amaurian opinions. She
was identified with the Beguine who was condemned 60 for
her "just love," which Hadewijch mentions in her "Listof the perfect."61
In the absence of any more direct information on thedoctrine of Aleydis, we can only refer to Hadewijch's ideas,
though these suffered serious adulteration at the hands of
the Church, and to the treaty of "refined love," as developed fifty years later by Margaret Porete, who assimilated
pure love into a life force that transcended the power of
God and denatured nature.

Nothing is the effect of chance. Everything is the product of immutable necessity.
There can be no sin in the higher faculties of the soul. 56
Simple fornication between unmarried people is nota sin.
Death is the end of all fear. 57
It is in this life, not the other, that man possesses hap-piness.
There is absolutely no need to pray. 58

63

The new towns, with their bourgeoisie made rich by commerce and restless by the spirit of independence, viewed
anti-Church sentiments favorably. It was in the cities of
the Rhine - Cologne, Mainz and Strasbourg - and thenorthern cities ofValenciennes, Amiens, Cambrai, Tournai,
Brussels and Antwerp that the movement of the Free Spirit
was most resolutely manifest, and where it took, as thehistorians say, its crudest forms. Its more intellectualized
penetration into Italy was caused by the keenness of thepolitical struggles between the Guelfs, who supported thepope, and the Ghibellines, who supported the German
emperor. The violence of liberation, in these struggles,
amply revealed the movement of the Free Spirit's alibi, its
ideological justification, its illusory rationale.
In 1236 the execution of Aleydis and approximately
twenty of her companions at Cambrai emphasized the persistence of the movement of the Free Spirit in the Picardy
region, whence the heirs of Godin of Amiens and Margaret of Valenciennes, and the predecessors of Quintin ofTournai and Antoine Pocques of Lille set out to radicalize
the Hussite revolution.
Unlike the Waldensians - the principal victims of the
1 12William Cornelius of Antwerp
64

The name William Cornelius, preceded by the title Master,
appears in the deed of a gift from a priest named Eustace,apparently the chaplain of the church of Notre-Dame of
Antwerp in 1243. According to Thomas of Can tim pre,William Cornelius was a member of the low clergy.62 He
received a prebend, but relinquished his position to founda movement of voluntary poverty.
His views illustrate how deeply the ideas of the movement of the Free Spirit had penetrated into a movement
that, at first, was very similar to the evangelism of theWaldensians. The situation was similar to that of theAmaurian priests, with a parish priest living among theworking classes, particularly with weavers.63
The agitation that began around 1243 or 1244, continued until William's death (from natural causes) around1253. Its pretext seems to have been popular opposition
to the bishops of Cambrai (to which Antwerp was subor113

PRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRITTHE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

poverty and annulled in the eyes of God. 72

dinate ), who were accused of tyranny and extortion.
In 1248 Guyard of Laon, bishop of Cambrai,64left for
Antwerp in order to punish the supporters of William
Cornelius. The bishop was responding to the urgings of the
Dominicans, who were critical of his lack of zeal in crushing the movement. On June 23, however, he was detained byillness at the Abbey of Afflighem, where he died on September 16. Bishop Nicholas of Fountains, who succeeded
him in 1249, both organized and financed the repression.65
Around 1257 Nicholas had William Cornelius's corpse
exhumed and burned. This did not, however, discourage
William Cornelius's s~pporters. In 1280 Dominican inquisitors were once again scouring Brabant, where Duke John
ordered his subjects and officials to give them whateverassistance they required. 66
65

The most radical propositions were spread between about
1240 and 1280 among the poor and exploited of Antwerp
and Brabant, whose spokesman was William Cornelius.
They show the climate in which Hadewijch's "mystical"
texts were written, and those of her group, the Nuwen,
as well as Bloemardine's later teachings in Brussels:
The indulgences of prelates do not help souls. 67
No one can give alms [if they deduct them] from theirown surplus. 68
No rich man can be saved, and all the rich are miserly. 69
It is permissible to take from the rich and give to thepoor. 70
No poor person can be damned, for they will all be saved.
There is no hell after Judgment Day. 71
As rust is consumed by fire, so all sin is consumed by

114

Simple fornication is not a sin for those who live inpoverty. 73
There are only three mortal sins: envy, avarice and ostentatious prodigality; 74 and also having one's wife when sh.e
is pregnant. 75
That which is called sin against nature is not a sin. 76
No man should take his wife more than three times a
week.
If a woman is poor and indigent, she can give herself
without sin. 77

Thomas of Cantimpre adds: "It is better to be a public
courtesan than to be chaste, observing the most perfectcontinence and keeping one's resources to oneself. This
is why all members of religious orders will be damned
without exception. He [William Jalso said that the lust of
the poor is not a sin."78

The New Spirit in Swabia
66

Around 1270 a cleric charged by the Inquisition with investigating the state of faith in the diocese of Passau compiled a list of deeds and doctrines hostile to Christianity.
The text, known by the title Anonymous of Passau or PseudoRainerius79 is a violent attack on the Jews, Cathars andWaldensians (here called "Lyonists," a reference to Lyons,or "runcarri," from John of Ronco, leader of one of theWaldensian branches).
The manuscript also includes a text entitled Determinatio de novo spiritu [An Examination of the New Spirit].
A manuscript from Mainz states that the Determinatio is
ll5

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

the work of Albertus Magnus. 80 In ninety-seven propositions Albertus draws up a list of heterodox attitudes that,for the instruction of the inquisitors, he links to older
heresies. Everything involved with sin is thus derived from
Pelagius.
The theses most resolutely inspired by the movementof the Free Spirit are imputed to a movement based in the
Riess, a region close to Augsburg. But the group must havebeen more widespread because one text, repeating withslight variations the points examined by Albertus, is entitled Twenty-nine Articles of the Sect of the New Spirit ... ,Recently Discovered Close to Nordlingen.
The recourse to the authority of Albertus may correspond to the clergy's need to dam up the currents of freedom that were spreading everywhere. 81
In 1245, after the first Council of Lyons, the Bishop of
Olmtz complained of the presence in his diocese of wandering agitators of both sexes. Dressed as members of religious orders, but resolutely hostile to the ecclesiasticalhierarchies, they spread the idea that God should be servedin absolute freedom, outside any rule or discipline.82
In 124 7, while the ideas of William Cornelius were
winning substantial support in Antwerp, William of SaintAmour, an enemy of the mendicant orders, campaigned
against a sect that maintained: "People should do no workwith their hands, but pray unceasingly; and, if men prayin this way, the earth will bear more fruits, without being
cultivated, than if it were worked."83
In this diversity of proliferating movements so longovershadowed by the myth of Christian unity, how are thetendencies that were simply in opposition to Rome distinguished from those that rejected religious forms alto116

PRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

gether? Are we dealing with quietists who preached aform of non-action comparable to that of Taoist teachings? Beghards and Beguines also shared a scorn of work;in the state of perfection, the laborious necessities of survival are unnecessary. They were replaced, most obviously, by mendicancy (as in Margaret Po rete), theft (JohnofBriinn) and exploitation of the work of others (the nunsof Schweidni tz ).
Whatever the case, their sense of the absolute incompatibility of sensual pleasure and work, manual or intellectual, justified the frightened hatred with which the
Church, as the absolute agent of earthly and heavenly survival, pursued the partisans of the movement of the Free
Spirit.
For geographical reasons a plurality of influences met
in the Riess region under the twin banners of novelty andfreedom. The old Brenner route from Italy to the lower
Rhine and through Nordlingen and Augsburg to northern
Germany intersects with the ancient Roman road leadingfrom France, across the Palatinate and Swabia, over the
Danube and beyond Bavaria to the eastern frontiers.
Albertus's Determinatio collates a number of reports
from inquisitors in different regions. Among its propositions, certain of those formulated by women shed lighton the chronicled accounts of the nuns of Swabia and on
how the so-called feminine mystique was viewed during
the period.
A fifteenth-century historian from Tobingen, Martin
Crusius, basing his account on a chronicle written a century earlier by the Dominican Felix Faber, relates that, in
1261, several houses of enclosed orders began to reveal thepresence of "those adversaries of the monastic rule that are
117

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

called Fraticelli, Beghards and Beguines. These persuaded
many of the cenobites to live without rule, claiming that
God could thus better be served in freedom of spirit."84
The bishops intervened to force the communities "that
had already enjoyed the freedom promoted by the Fraticelli" either to disperse or to submit to the rule. Crusius
records that the women's convents did not give up theirfreedom without resistance. It is worth noting that acknowledgment of a rule, even assurances of obedience to
the Church, were among the practices recommended by
the movement of the Free Spirit for the purpose of prudent dissimulation. 85

PRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

There is no need to believe in the Resurrection.
The good man need not confess his sins, however important they may be, but only tell them to another good man,or say in the presence of God, in secret, "I have sinned."88
They assert that, during the elevation of the Host, they
are themselves elevated; whether they are seated or standing, it is to themselves that they address the signs of reverence, but they perform all the usual gestures in order not toscandalize others.
People hinder and retard their perfection and their goodqualities when they indulge in fasting, flagellation, discipline, vigils and similar things.
It is not right to take part in work, but it is good to taste

67

The Determinatio de novo spiritu86 includes a series of propositions relating to the movement in the Riess and concludes with some articles from the Nordlingen list:

the sweetness of the Lord in leisure. 89 Prayers have no validity when they are under the yoke of manual labor. 90
They can take over the goods of anyone with impunity,
without sin and without fear, on God's behalf.

To say that truth can be found in the Riess is a Donatianheresy, akin to saying that God is in Africa and not elsewhere.
Man can be united with God in such a way that he nolonger sins, whatever he does.

They also say that they eat in secret and without sin whenever they want and whenever they are able to.9t
It is not necessary to admit sins in confession. It is enoughto say: "I have sinned."92

According to them, there are no angels apart from human

Because the educated are ignorant, they do not have to

virtues, no devils except men's sins and vices. There is noshow them the grace they have. They do not suffer by fall-hell. All creation is God in his plenitude. The angels would

ing into sin, because God has foreseen it, and no one can

not have fallen if they had behaved as they should have incounteract the designs of God. They enjoy evil as much as

their union with Lucifer. 87

good, and when it occurs they say: "That happens and that

Man united with God, as they claim to be, is not boundto accord honor or respect to the saints, nor to observe fasts
and similar things on the day of the Lord.

is in accordance with divine foresight."93
Those of them who want to become perfect do not haveto think about the Passion of Christ.

Whoever is united with God can assuage his carnal desire

There is no need to feel concern, neither sorrow nor

with impunity and in any way, with either sex, and even bybitterness, at faults committed and days wasted. Suffering of

inverting the roles.

that sort retards their access to a fuller grace. 94

n8.

119

PRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRITTHE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITThe case of Beatrice of Nazareth ( 1205-68 ), founderand prioress of the monastery of Nazareth in Flanders,is more dubious, although she was a member of the Cistercian order. Her biographer wrote that in 1231 "she hadarrived at such freedom of spirit, such constancy of heart,and such purity of conscience ... that, in all her deeds andthoughts, she neither feared nor was in awe of man, nordevil, nor angel, nor even divine judgment."
Her treatise, Seven manieren van minnen [Seven Ways ofLove], written between 1230 and 1250, gives an important place to spiritual freedom and "pure love." In it she
speaks of serving love with a free conscience, by paying
no heed to the remembrance of sins committed." She identifies paradise with "the reign of perpetual freedom" andcelebrates the "desire to attain that freedom, purity andnobility of spirit in which she was created in the image
and likeness of the Creator."99

In their view, the blood of good men like themselves, orof others who had achieved a similar level of completeness,
ought to be venerated in the same way as the body and bloodof Christ on the altar. They are convinced that freedom, evil,
rest and bodily well-being create in man a place and habitation for the Holy Spirit.95
They say that Christ knows them carnally, that a woman
can become God, that a mother of five children can be a
virgin,96 that one of them had suckled the baby Jesus
with his mother until she was exhausted and faint.97
68

In considering the convents, where repressed sexuality
found a multitude of clandestine and tumultuous outlets,
how are we to distinguish between the ecstatic hysteria on
which the hagiographers so love to dwell and cases where
the eroticism of amorous adventure, whether homosexualor heterosexual, is couched in the language of passion for
the All-Loving God? We can but speculate as to what wasveiled by the solemn declaration of fidelity to Rome,
whose continual reiteration was in fact the sole yardstickof a man or woman's orthodoxy or heterodoxy, no matter what license he or she might secretly indulge. A~ong
women, not a few bound their ambiguous exaltation to thepillar of the Church: Lutgard ofTongres (1182-1246), loverof the Sacred Heart, for whom "no day went by without
the Virgin appearing to her" and who, the Jesuit Axters
asserted, "fasted for seven years because the Holy Virgin,
in sadness, had told her that the Albigensians were crucifying her Son";98 Ida of Nivelles (died in 1231), lover ofthe Holy Trinity; Juliana of Montcornillon (1193-1258);
Marie of Oignies (1177-1213 ); and Christine the Admirable (1150-1224 ).
120

69

The lacunae in the biography, and some manifestations oforthodoxy, led Catholicism imprudently to enroll Hadewijch of Antwerp, the author of poems and visions in which
amorous exaltation is allied with the courtly speculationof the south of France and the New Spirit of Swabia, in
its repertory of the devout.
According to the Jesuit Jozef van Mierlo, Hadewijch,
who was born in Antwerp toward the beginning of thetwelfth century, ended her days among the Beguines of
Nivelles, in Brabant, between 1260 and 1269. too Van
Mierlo's research disproves the arguments of several scholars, including Paul Fredericq, according to whom Hadewijch was none other than Heilwige Bloemardine, theenemy of Jan van Ruysbroeck. The identification, however
121THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

erroneous, reveals the difficulties that fanatics of orthodoxy face when they read her work.
Despite her contemplative life the confines of which
she was hesitant to escape, her Jtlsion 3 expresses the ideaof a God assimilated into an eternal flow of love. The producer of the material world, the guardian of the earthly
economy, is dissolved into individual experience and transformed there into a lover and creator of sensual pleasures.
Exile from the self and return to the self do not adequately
describe the resolved tension of sexual pleasure in theunion of the lovers:
Later, one Easter Sunday, I had gone to God; and he embraced me in my interior senses and took me away in spirit.
He brought me before the Countenance of the Holy Spirit,
who possesses the Father and the Son in one Essence. And
from the total Being of that Countenance I received all understanding, and thus I read all my judgments. A voice issuingfrom this Countenance resounded so fearfully that it madeitself heard above everything. And it said to me: "Behold,ancient one, you have called me and sought me, what and
who I, Love, am, myriads of years before the birth of man!
See and receive my Spirit! With regard to all things, knowwhat I, Love, am in them! And when you fully bring me
yourself, as pure humanity in myself, through all the waysof perfect Love, you shall have fruition of me as the Love who
I am. Until that day, you ~hall love what I, Love, am. And
then you will be love, as I am Love. And you shall not live
less than what I, Love, am, from that day until the death thatwill make you alive. In my unity, you have received me andI have received you. Go forth, and live what I am; and return
bringing me full divinity, and have fruition of me as who I am.
12 2

PRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

Then I returned into myself, and I understood all I havejust said; and I remained to gaze fixedly upon my delightful
sweet Love. lOt

Vision 7, in its utterly sensual persuasion, recalls the
proposition "They say that Christ knew them carnally" of
the New Spirit ofSwabia: "After that he [Christ] came himself to me, took me · entirely in his arms, and pressed me
to him; and all my members felt his in full felicity, in
accordance with the desire of my heart and my humanity.
So I was outwardly satisfied and fully transported [in allen
vollen sade ]."102
As in Margaret Porete's The Mirror of Simple Souls, thedominant theme is the absolute sovereignty realized inlove, around which the life of each person and the whole
universe are meant to be ordered. "The soul can have noother desire but that oflove," including even its tempests(storme) and its torments ( erewoet). There is nothing basein the service of love. We must risk everything for it, andbe able to renounce self-love and vanities in order to be
purified in it and by it. "The soul," she says, "is united
with love by sensual pleasure, not by one's being." Theangels who accompany the soul in its upward journey toward love prefigure the seraphims of Bloemardine.
As Christians have been quick to emphasize, several
apocryphal texts may have circulated under Hadewijch's
name. That is one hypothesis. Yet the work of censorshipis less doubtful. Translators and commentators have set
about disincarnating the poems in which love is celebrated, as in poems of courtly love.103 And what are we tothink of the texts when we know that even Ruysbroeck's
writings were revised? One Latin version attests to the fact
123THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

that he spoke of the Free Spirit in two poems in Flemish,which were destroyed! 104
Van Mierlo regards as "extremely curious and somewhat
disturbing" the List of Perfect Lovers, lOS which follows Jtlsion
13 and seems intended for the Nuwen as opposed to the
Vremden (the Foreigners). Similarly Margaret distinguishes
the Greater Church, in which God is realized in love, fromthe Lesser- the Church of"the asses of asses."
The first twelve centuries account for only twenty ofthe perfect (including Mary, John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene and Saint Augustine). Most of the names cited havestill not been identified (although there is a Beguine called
Helsewant, from Vilvorde, near Brussels). The twentyninth is Aleydis, "a Beguine sentenced to death by Master
Robert for her just love." The thirtieth is a man named
Constant: "He lived for nine years on all fours, on hands
and feet, like an animal." The return to nature and the
nakedness of the animals is not unrelated to the state of
innocence also demanded by the Men of Intelligence, andwhich William Cornelius attributed to the poor - to thosefor whom having nothing means having everything.

ers of the movement of the Free Spirit, of whom there
seem to have been a fair number. Before his arrival there
was a Congregatio Libertatis at-Spoleto, centered aroundsomeone called Ottonello, which was criticized by Jacopoof Bevagna (whom Clare of Montefalco later suspected ofFree Spirit beliefs tO?). His influence was such that the wandering Flagellants in the valley abandoned their practices todiscover the rewards of pleasure liberated from suffering.
In his biography of Saint Clare, Berengarius of San Africano describes the quarrel between her and Bentivenga:
A certain friar of the Order of Minors came to the conventto put three propositions to Clare. He pretended to ask her
advice about something he claimed to have heard from a friarin Gubbio who had long been highly regarded for his sanctity. He claimed to have doubts about the three following
points: man can do what he wishes; hell does not exist; thesoul can lose desire in this life.
Clare did not respond immediately, because these propositions seemed to her to contain the poison of error and toreveal the exaggerated influence of the intellect. But the nextnight, in fervent and numerous prayers, she asked the Lord

Bentivenoa of Gubbio

to explain the meaning of such words. And when she had
understood them, the following day, she replied to the friar:

70

The trial of Bentivenga of Gubbio reveals the presence ofa Free Spirit current within the Franciscan movement thatwas similar - whether the result of direct influence or
not - to conceptions that were widespread in Swabia between about 1240 and 1280. In Pram, Bentivenga belonged
to Gerard Segarelli's Apostolic group until the Episcopal
interdict of 1281 dispersed Segarelli's followers. He thenjoined the Minorites106 and, in Umbria, gathered support-"The propositions about which you have consulted me carryin them a most harmful poison if they are not understooddiscerningly. Insofar as it applies to good men, hell does notexist as a place designed for their punishment. Man can doas he wishes, but in such a manner that his will is orderedin accordance with the divine will. It may be, in fact, that
God thus rules the will of a being by taking to himself thewill of the man and giving him his own ordered will, the will
12 5"

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

of God himself. And God adapts the will of this being to his

permission, which is always good. From this it follows thatown will, so that he no longer desires anything that could

what God does is good, that is the permission itself and the

oppose the divine will. Thus such a person can do as hegood which flows from it, because it is by the meanness ofwishes, for what he wishes will not differ in any way fromvice that the noble fruit of virtue is made manifest."

what God wishes. But if they are not in. the state of which I[!Jentivenga said] that he regarded her as simplistic, stu-

have spoken, those who claim to do what they wish do notpid, absolutely ignorant in all things, because she would not

speak truly. In truth, the soul can lose desire in this way:

attain the state he had attained, a state, in his view, superior

not because it does not desire anything when it is in thisto all others. For whoever can sin without remorse, with-life, but because sometimes, during fervent contemplation,out sorrow, without fear of punishment is considered [byand by virtue of ecstasy or of some elevation toward God,

Bentivenga] better, superior and happier, as· he has no re-the soul can be absorbed, immersed, bathed in love, in amorse at all, whatever sin he commits.

wonderful union. And in the extreme state it' attains, thesoul desires nothing beyond what it has."Those who behave according to his beliefs say that creatures can do nothing except insofar as God makes them act.

At these words, the heresiarch, surprised and disturbed

So that if they are praying, everything is done by God, andby the little faith that Clare allowed to these errors, asked:

if they are indulging in love or some other infamous activ-"Can a man who knows a woman carnally receive the body ofity, everything is done by God. They can therefore not feel

Christ the next morning, even if he has known her without

any remorse. lOS

the excuse of marriage, solely out of the desire of the flesh?"
Although, in truth, disturbed by these shameful words,
Clare replied, in defense of faith and truth, "No!"The heresiarch said, "God could have done it."Clare replied, "God is not the author of sin; if he sinned
he would not be God, and that itself would be a sin."
Then the heresiarch, as if scorning her and her arguments,
added, laughing, "Nothing happens without God's agreement, for, according to the Scriptures, even the leaves of thetree do not fall to the ground without the permission ofGod. It therefore follows that what God allows is good, because God, who is good, would not allow anything that was
not good."
Clare said, "There are two things here. In man resides
the work of forbidden sin, which is always bad; in God lies
126

Handed over to the Inquisition by Clare, Bentivenga
and six other Minorites were sentenced, in the summerof 1307, to life imprisonment in Florence.
Yet, in Avignon, the Spirituals were indignant at theaccusation that they looked favorably on the "very wicked
error of the freedom of the spirit." Arnaud of Villeneuve,in a similar statement of censure, merges the Joachismradicalized by Dolcino of Novara with the movement of
the Free Spirit. According to him the doctrine allows unrestrained sexual license and the freedom to do anything,under the pretext that God approves everything, even thekilling of the pope or the king or the raping of women andgirls, 109 "because henceforth the time has come for the
spirit of freedom to rule."
127THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

Ubertino of Casale - erstwhile inquisitor in the Spoleto
region - had already, in 1305, enumerated the theses ofBentivenga "inspired by the devil to corrupt the spirit ofsimple people" in his Arbor vitae crucijixae Jesu:

someone of influence, perhaps from the Burgundian court
at Mons.IIJ

She originally appears under the name of Margaret of
Hainaut - known as Porete or Porrette or Poirette - inthe documents of the Inquisition.112 The consideration
paid to her until she was burned at the stake suggests
either that she belonged to the upper classes or, at least,that she had benefited from the secret intervention of

She is sometimes described as a very wise Beguine
cleric, sometimes as a pseudo-mulier (pseudo-woman), theterm applied to wandering Beguines. In a fragment of The
Mirror of Simple Souls - suppressed in the English translation for reasons of orthodoxy - she admits to being a wandering cleric in disagreement with the clergy, from which
she does not exclude the Beguines or the Minorites, though
they were still suspected of Free Spirit ideas: "Friends,
what will Beguines and people of religion say when they
hear the excellence of your divine song? Beguines will saythat I am in error, [as do J priests, clerics and preachers,
Augustinians and Carmelites and Minor friars."114
One of her early works, on "the being of refined love,"
was burned in her presence in the main square of Valenciennes in the last years of the thirteenth century. Guy II
of Colmieu, bishop of Cambrai from 1296 to 1306, who
had ordered the destruction of the text, forbade Margaret
to disseminate other books and teachings, under penalty
of being deemed a heretic and apostate and handed overto secular justice.
Yet the condemned text was authorized with the admittedly reserved and cautious - approval of Godfreyof Fountains, 11 5 Fran~ois, a Cistercian from the Abbey ofVillers-en-Brabant, and a Minor friar, John of Quaregnon.
Margaret immediately repeated the offense and sent abook entitled The Mirror of Simple Souls to other simple
people and to the bishop of Chalons-sur-Marne.
She was denounced to the inquisitor of Haute-Lorraine,
whose jurisdiction extended from Valenciennes to Cambrai, and was arrested in 1307 and brought before William

128

129

1. Apathy: an impious deception has appeared, inspiredby the enemy, that corrupts the spirit of simple people, andmaintains, under the pretext of serenity in the will of God,
that they should remain unmoved by both the Passion of
Christ and the suffering of their fellow man, and enjoy themselves, so to speak, in the sole pleasure of God, having noheed for the injury done to God nor for the pain of theirfellow man. And they say, "God leads everything to the best
choice." Ito
2. Sinlessness: they say that men who have the grace of

God and charity cannot sin. They assert that those who sinin any way have never had charity or the grace of God.
3. From the very true principle of the death of the Sonthat we can do nothing good without grace - they infer thatwhatever we do, everything is done by grace. For this reason, they say that eating and making love and other similar
things represent no fault in us, because they are convincedthat grace incites them to these things. Ill

Marnaret Porete
71THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

Humbert, the Inquisitor General of France, confessor toPhilip the Fair and the future accomplice of Philip ofMarigny in the trial and massacre of the Templars.
She refused to pronounce the oath binding her to tell
the whole and complete truth, remaining loyal to the belief that "the free soul does not respond to anyone if it does
not want to." 116
On April 11, 1310, after a year and a half of imprisonment, she was judged ipso facto a heretic and an apostate.
A commission of some twenty theologians condemned fifteen extracts from the text, which they used as the basis
for the Ad nostrum and the anathema against the Beghards
and Beguines, tainted with the ideas of the Free Spirit, at
the Council ofVienne in 1311.
On May 31, 1310, the ecclesiastical authorities handed
her over to the provost of Paris with the usual recommendation to "act mercifully with quick death." Her book was
to be burned with her. Anyone possessing a copy was torelinquish it to the competent authority, under penalty
of excommunication.
Margaret was executed on June 1, in the Place de Greve.
According to the continuator of the Chronicle of William
of Nanais,ll7 her noble attitude and her devotion 11 8 moved
the watching crowd to tears. A cleric from the diocese of
Cambrai, Guion of Cressonaert - it is not known whether
he was a disciple or a companion - was arrested for trying to save her. He was defrocked and sentenced to life
imprisonment.
Margaret's concepts were no bolder than those of
Johannes Eckhart. 11 9 Eckhart however did not lead a mendicant way of life. While the Master scornfully (and cunningly) attacked those who were interested in the letter
130

PRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

and not the spirit of his theses, the author of the Mirror
addreSsed simple people in their own language.
The ecclesiastical rationale for Margaret's execution
was to set an example for agitators in Germany and theLangres region, where there were large numbers of people"who propagated their own impurities under the cloak
of devotion."
In 1310 the Franciscan Nicholas of Lira, one of Margaret's accusers, fulminated against the heretics who maintained that preachers were to be disregarded, and that,instead, one should live freely, according to the flesh.
In 1311, at the Council of Vienne, the new bishop of
Cambrai, Peter III of Levis - successor to Philip III of
Marigny, who had sentenced Margaret - worked actively
against the Beghards and Beguines. His jurisdiction extended to Brussels, where the mysterious star of Bloemardine would soon shine.
72

The Mirror of Simple Souls is one of the few texts directly
inspired by the movement of the Free Spirit to have survived for posterity. The text begins in the tradition of theorthodox mystics by developing the theme that the soul
touched by grace is without sin. Then, just as Beatrice ofNazareth discusses seven ways of loving, Margaret presentsa scale of seven initiatory graces through which the soulcomes to the enjoyment of God. Once the soul is annihilated in God, it loses its will, its desires, even its essence,
and, having become seraphic, is transformed by God andidentified with his totality. This stage still includes ecstaticlove, the beatific vision of the mystics. But the soul's identification with God is also the way to freedom, which isthe freedom oflife at one with God:
131

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

need when necessity demands it? It would be a loss of inno-

How This Sou/Is like the Deity. Chapter 51.
[Love.] It is proper, said Love, that this Soul should be likecence for these souls, and troubling to the peace in which

the Deity, for it is changed in God, said Love, from whom

the soul has drawn back from all things. Who should scruple

it took its true form; that which was conferred on it with-to take what he needs from the four elements, taking lightout beginning and given by one alone, who has always loved

from the sky, heat from fire, dew from water and support

it out of his goodness.

And also, why should such souls scruple to take what theyfrom the earth? We take the service of the four elements in

Soul. Ah, Love, said this Soul, the meaning of that which

all the ways that Nature has needs, without the reproach of

you have spoken has made me nothing, and the nothingness

Reason; these gracious elements are made by God, like allof this one being has cast me into an abyss deeper than mea-other things; and thus such souls use all things made and cre-sureless nothingness. And the knowledge of my nothingness,ated of which Nature has need, in the same peace of heartsaid this Soul, has given me all, and the nothingness of thisas they use the earth on which they walk.120

all, said this Soul, has taken away orison and prayer, and asks
for nothing in return.

Henceforth the ideal was to create a nature in which
God was reincarnated, as he is reincarnated in the individual united with nature. Through divine obedience thepresent would reclaim the innocence that Adam had lostin the earthly paradise due to his disobedience.
Whereas the Church was hostile to nature, Margaret
proposed that it might be rehabilitated to its state before
the Fall, before the appearance of sin and the inventionof exchange. Access to it lies in the refinement oflove, in
an identification with the power it generates in everyone.
Such a practice arouses the "sleeping god" by an alchemical process whereby desires are awakened and pursued
freely, in total innocence, and with no sense of.guilt.
While the mystic process leads to contemplative communion with the divine phantom, eroticized by the negation of the body, Margaret identifies the soul with God
in order to reinvent the body and give love of the self theright to exercise an absolute hold over the world:Holy Church. And so what will you do, most sweet lady
and our mistress? said the Lesser Holy Church.

Soul. I shall rest totally in peace, said this Soul, entirely
alone, and completely in the service of the sole goodness ofGod, without being moved by a single wish, except for whatever riches there may be in him. The end of all my work,
said this Soul, is always to want nothing. For, inasmuch as I
want nothing, said this Soul, I am alone in him without
myself, and completely free, and when I want anything, saidshe, I am with myself, and therefore have lost freedom. But
when I want nothing, and I have lost all my will, then I neednothing: being free is my way. I want nothing from anyone.

Love. 0 most precious Hester, said Love, who have lost all
your customary things, and by that loss have become accustomed to doing nothing, truly you are very precious; for intruth this custom and this loss is done for the nothing of yourlover, and in this nothing, said Love, you are enraptured anddead. But you live, beloved, said Love, in his desire of theall; it is his chamber, and he is pleased to stay there .... 121

132

133

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRITHow This Soul Has Given All by Candor of Nobility. Chapter 89.

How One May Come to Perfection to Do the Contrary of One's[Soul?] This Soul has given through the candor of nobility

Will. Chapter 90. .

of the work of the Trinity; in which Trinity this Soul plants[Love.] I have said, said Love, that whoever follows theher will so deeply that she may not sin, unless she unplant

prompting of his inward spirit, if he is called to come with

it. For she has nothing wherewith to sin, for without will

good will - for I cannot speak of other ways - and if he aban-no creature may sin. Now she has no fear of sin, if she leavedons all his will for external things to live the life of theher will where it is planted- that is, in him who has given it

spirit, he will come to full lordship.

to her freely, out of his goodness- and he wants it back forthis reason, by his goodness and his love, nakedly and freely,

Spirit. Ah! for God, said the Spirit, who seeks the verysame in [this] sad life, tell us how!

without any questioning on her part, but for two things:

SouL This no one can say, said the Free Soul, save he alone

because he wishes it, and because he finds it good. And until

who is in such a created being, of his goodness toward cre-this time she has no abundant nor constant peace, until she

ated being. But I can tell you this, said the Free Soul, that it

is purely denuded ofher will.

is right, when one reaches this stage, to look perfectly on

This soul, in this state, is like the drunken man. For thethe contrary of one's will, feeding the Virtues until they are

drunken man never cares what may befall him, whatever it

sated, and holding steadfast without weakening, so that the

may chance to be, any more than if it were nothing; and if

spirit always has lordship without vexation.

he does care, then he is not truly drunk. Thus if this Soul
has anything with which to will, this means it is ill-planted

Truth. Ah, God, said Truth, surely the body will be sickthat has a heart in which there is such a spirit?

and that it can still fall if it be assailed by adversity or pros-

Soul. I dare say, said the Free Soul, that a will which isperity. And it is not whole; for it is not nothing, for it hassuited to sad life, that is to the life of the spirit, will destroy

that with which to will; for its poverty or its wealth is in

the humors of all forms of sickness in one brief moment,

wishing to give or retain. And so I want to say, said Love, tosuch is the medicinal power of the ardor of the spirit.

all those who are bidden or called by inward desire to theLove. This is true, said Love, let anyone who doubts it

work of perfection, by the study of Reason, willing or not,try it and see whether it is the truth. Now I shall tell you,that if they wish to be what they might be, they will comesaid Love. Contrary to the Free Soul, the life of which weto the being of which we speak, and will thus be lords ofspoke, which we call the life of the spirit, can have no peace

themselves and of the earth and heaven.

if the body does not always do the contrary of its will; by

Reason. How will they be lords? said Reason.

this I mean that such people do the contrary of sensuality,

Soul. This nobody can say, said the Free Soul, who takes

or else they would fall back into perdition of such a life, if

everything without heart and has everything without heart,they did not live in contradiction of their pleasure. And thoseand if the heart feels it, that is not it.

who are free do entirely the contrary. For, just as it ,is rightin the life of the spirit to do everything contrary to their will

134

135

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

if they do not want to lose their peace, so, on the contrary,Love by nobility has made me

the free do everything that pleases them if they do not want

Compose the lines of this song.

to lose their peace, because they have arrived at the state of

It is about the pure Deity,

freedom, that is, they have moved from Virtues into Love andOf which Reason c_annot speak,from Love into nothingness .... 122

And about a beloved friend I have,
Who has no mother,

So foolish was I

Who was born

At the time when I served them [the Virtues]

Of God the Father

That I could not express to you

And about God the Son also.

What my heart felt.

His name is the Holy Spirit,

And while I served them,

For whom I have such a meeting place in my heart,

And while I loved them better,That it gives me joy to be led there.

Love, for joy of her,

It is the land of green pastures

Made me listen.

That the beloved gives in love.

And yet, simple as I am,

I do not want to ask anything of him,

Although I did not think about it at all,Too much would be a great misfortune to me.

So I began to wish to love.

Therefore I must entrust myself completely
To the loving of such a lover.

And when Love saw me thinking of her, then, on accountof the Virtues, she did not refuse me; but thus sheltered me

Gentle-natured beloved

from their petty service, and led me to the divine school,

You are greatly to be praised:and kept me there without having to do any service, andGenerous, courtly beyond measure,there I was filled and assuaged by her.

Sum of all goodness,
You do not want to do anything more,

Thought is worth nothing to me anymore,

Beloved, without my wilf.

Nor works, nor eloquence.

And therefore I must not be silent

Love draws me so highAbout your beauty and goodness.

(Thought is worth nothing to me anymo~e)This I cannot conceal.

With its divine gaze,

Ah! whom shall I tell?

That I have no understanding.

Seraphim cannot speak of it.

Thought is worth nothing to me anymore,

Beloved, you have taken me into your love,

Nor works, nor eloquence.

To give me your great treasure,137

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRITThat is to say, the gift of you yourself,

Truth tells my heart,

Who are divine goodness.

That I am loved by one alone,

The heart cannot express this,And says that there is no returning

But pure nothingness refines the will,

The love that he has given me.

Which has made me climb so high,This gift kills my thought

In union of concord,

With the pleasure ofhis love,That can never be revealed.

Pleasure which raises me and transforms me through union
Into the enduring joy of being of divine Love.

Once I was shut up in the servitude of prison,
When desire kept me there in the will for affection.

And divine Love tells me, that it has entered into me,

There I found the light of ardor of divine love,

And because of this it can do whatever it wishes,

Which soon killed my desire, my will and my affection,

Such strength it has given me,

Which were hindering my entering into the fullness of divine

From a beloved that I love,
To whom I am devoted,love.

Who wants me to love him,
Now divine light has delivered me from prison,
And joined me through gentleness to the divine will of Love,
In which the Trinity gives me the pleasure of its love.
No man knows this gift,
None w~o serves virtue knows it,
Nor has sentiment of nature, by the exercise of reason.
Friends, what wiH Beguines and people of religion say,When they hear the excellence of your divine song?
Beguines will say that I err, priests, clerics and preachers,
Augustinians and Carmelites and Minor Friars,
On account of what I write about the being of refined Love.
Their Reason, which makes them say this to me, will notsave them.

And for that I will love him.
I have said that I will love him.
I lie, I am not the one.
It is he alone who loves me:
He is, and I am not;And I need no more,Than what he wishes,
And that he is good.
He is fullness,
And I am full therefore.
This is the divine center
And faithful love ....
How Justice and Mercy and Love Come to the Soul, When It Has

Desire, Will and Fear indeed take away their knowledge,

Emerned from Its Childhood. Chapter 132.

And abundance, and the union of the highest light

There I saw the land of Freedom. There Justice came to me,

Of ardor of divine love.

and asked me what saving I wished ofher. And I replied, such
138

139

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

as I was, that I wished for no saving from her, nor from any-

showed me both him and me. That is, him on high, and me

thing that torment could do to me. Afterward came Mercy,

so low, that I could not rise up from there, nor help myself:

who asked me what help I wished ofher. And I immediately

and there my better self was born.

rep}ied, such as I was, that I wished for no help from her,nor for anything that she might do for me.
Then Love approached me, full of goodness, who had
cast me out of my senses, and had given me death in the end:
you have heard something about that. And she said to me:

If you do not understand, I cannot put it differently. It
is a miraculous work, of which, without lying, nothing canbe said ....

Here Divine Love speaks. Ah! Gods, said Divine Love, who
reposed in the annihilated soul, what a long road and whata great distance it is from such lost life to free life, from free

Beloved, what do you wish of me?

life which wants nothing to do with lordship! And this want-

I contain all that has been,

ing nothing sows the divine seed, taken from the divine will.

And is, and will be,

Such a seed can never fail, but few people are able to receive

I am filled with all things.

this seed. I have found many destroyed in affection of spirit,

Take from me all that pleases you:by works of virtue, in desires of good will; but I have foundIf you want all of me, I shall not deny you.

few graciously lost; and I have found even fewer who are free,

Say, beloved, what do you wish of me?

· that is, who live the free life, who are such as this book

I a~ Love, who am filled with the goodness of everything:

demands; that is, who have one sole wish instilled in them

Whatever you want, we want.

by Refined Love. For Refined Love makes you have one love

Beloved, tell us nakedly your will.

and one will, and therefore my will has become a will fornothingness. And such Love is for one who is so solely refined

Therefore, I replied immediately that I was pure noth-that it is the divine work. Such a· Soul is naked, and there-

ingness. Alas, what should I want? Pure nothingness has nofore is not afraid, in its nakedness, ofbeing bitten by the ser-will at all, and I want nothing. The goodness of Love is noth-pent. And since God cannot increase his joy, neither can theing to me; therefore, everything about Love is nothing to me.

joy of this Soul move nor increase by its work, if he does not

She is truly filled with herself. She is: nothing is -if she is not;do it by his work. If she is moved by her work, she would

and therefore I say that it has completely assuaged me, andbe "for" herself; and if she is naked, this being cannot be.

it is enough for me.

And since her goodness cannot decrease, malaise cannot

Then I began to emerge from childhood, and my spirit

increase ·by her doing; and therefore she does not increasebegan to grow older, when my will was dead, and my works

her work; for if she increased by herself, she would be "for"finished, and my love who made me happy. For the spread-herself; and if she is naked, this being cannot be.

ing rays of divine love, which revealed itself to me by divine

The Free Soul. It is true, said the Free Soul; to that ex-

light, with piercing bolt of lightning from on high, suddenly

tent am I perfectly myself by means of relinquishment; forPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRITTHE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

miracles are due to Faith, and these miracles give me true

ing in the form of goodness and in the guise of necessity thatknowledge of the divine gifts: Faith is the cause of this.

in which it has nothing. Certainly, that which it demands isoften dangerous; for amidst such tricks it often receives what

How the Soul Is in Perfection of Bein9, When the Holy Church

does not belong to it, by concealing its force and vigor, andCannot Take Example from Her Life. Chapter 134.
[Love.] Such a Soul, said Love, is in the greatest perfection

its gentleness. I have suffered this to my great misfortune;
but that has been to my great fortune, surpassing that which

ofbeing, and closest to the Distant and Close, when the Holy

I set out to do, or divine knowledge, without my knowing.

Church draws no example from her life. She is thus beneathAnd this divine knowledge and this rest hindered me fromthe work of Humility, and beyond the work of Poverty, andfinding the road to my country, by hiding from me the mat-above the work of Charity. She is so far from the work of theter, in which I should take humility, so as to know my own.

Virtues, that she could not understand their language ....

And therefore I lost in that that which was mine, which
never was that which I had.

How the Soul Returns to Her Ori9inal Bein9. Chapter 138.

It happens sometimes that one never finds two creatures

Now this Soul is in the being of this original being which is

who are of one spirit in one realm, but when it happens by

her being, and has left three behind, and has made two intochance that these two creatures find each other, they open

one. This one is, when the Soul is restored to that simple

themselves to each other, and cannot hide themselves, andDeity, who is one simple being of widespread fruition, in full

if they then want to do so, they cannot, because of the con-knowledge, without sentiment, above thought. This simple

dition of their hopes and natures, and the custom of life, tobeing does by Charity in the Soul everything the Soul does,

which they are called, whether they are willing or not. Suchfor the will has become simple; which simple will has nopeople have great need to be on their guard, if they have notdeeds in it, since it has conquered the necessity of two na-

attained the crown and perfection of freedom.

tures, where will was given for simple being. And this simple

And therefore I tell you, in conclusion, if God has given

will, which is divine will, puts the Soul into divine being;

you high creation and excellent light and singular love, in-

no one can go any higher, nor aspire any more profoundly, norcrease and multiply this creation without fail; for his two

can any man be more than this. Whoever wishes to under-eyes see you all; and if you consider and look, this gaze brings

stand this should beware the ruses of Nature, for thus sub-the simple Soul into being.t23

tly, as the sun draws water out of cloth, unseen by anybody,

Heilwine Bloemardine

however closely one watches, so Nature is deceived without
knowing, if it is not on its guard through great suffering.

73

How Nature Is Subtle in Several Points. Chapter 139.
Ah, Gods! How subtle Nature is in several points, in demand-

When Jan van Ruysbroeck, the mystic ofGroenendael, wasstill the parish priest of Saint Gudula in Brussels, he was involved in a lively polemic against a Beguine from the upper143

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

ranks of society whose character and ideas caught the imaginations of both the common people and the aristocracy.
Bloemardine was, in all probability, the daughter ofAlderman Wilhelmus Bloemart, who died between 1283
and 1287 and came from one of the most influential families in Brussels. She must have been born between 1250
(Wilhelmus was already an alderman in 1261) and 1287.
Her death certificate is dated August 23, 1335.124
The silence surrounding Bloemardine was partiallybroken by Henry Pomerius, author of a Life of Jan van
Ruysbroeck, 12 5 based on the evidence of Ruysbroeck's
companion and successor, John of Schoonhoven: "How he[Jan van Ruysbroeck] refuted a certain occult heresy, responsibility for which lay with a woman popularly known
as Bloemardine, of great renown in the city of Brussels."
In Bruss~ls, when the servant of God [Ruysbroeck J was asecular priest there, there was a women of perverse beliefs,
whom the people called Bloemardine. She had acquired sucha reputation that when she approached the altar to take Holy
Communion, she was popularly believed to be flanked oneach side by seraphim.
She had written much on the spirit of freedom and on
the most infamous carnal love, which she called seraphic
love. Her many disciples, who shared her beliefs, venerated
her as the originator of a new doctrine.
It was said that when she wrote or taught she sat in achair made of silver. 12 6 After her death the chair was said tohave been offered to the duchess of Brabant, in the belief

PRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

Being a man of true piety, he [Ruysbroeck J suffered tosee error so widespread, and he rose at once against the perversity of this doctrine and, though her followers were very
numerous, he unmasked writings which, under the guise oftruth, contained nothing but heresies, which Bloemardine,contemptuous of our faith, had for so long attributed todivine inspiration. In this, he demonstrated both wisdom andcourage, showing himself unafraid of the difficulties placedin his way by Bloemardine's followers, and refusing to allow
himself to be taken in by the look and smell of truth of these
false doctrines. I can attest from personal experience thatthese wicked writings were, to begin with, clothed in a veilof truth, to such an extent that no one could have revealed
the seed of error in them without grace and the aid of Him
who teaches all truth. 127

Bloemardine enjoyed the exceptional privilege of living a public life of self-deification, with the Inquisition
powerless to condemn her, 128 except indirectly, throughRuysbroeck and through the destruction of her writings.
Ruysbroeck, whom by the irony of fate John Gerson
suspected of Free Spirit ideas, failed in the end to counter Bloemardine's influence. Tradition has it that popularresentment of his opp~sition to the Beguine's Free Spirit
beliefs forced him to fllee Brussels and take refuge in the
Abbey of Groenendael, where he spent the rest of his life.
Although she is never named in the text, it is Bloemardine whom the mystic attacks in his book The Ornament of Spiritual Weddings (or The Spiritual Espousals):that it was still imbued with Bloemardine's thought. Similarly, the maimed touched her dead body in the belief thatNow note this with great care, so that you may grasp it.

they might thereby be healed.

Those of whom I speak imagine themselves occupied in the

144

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THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE .SPIRIT

contemplation of God, and believe themselves to be the holi-

mind (spirit) than to attain these virtues. And therefore they

est men in the world. Yet they live in opposition to God, towish to be free, and obedient to no one, neither to pope nor

all saints and to good men. Now observe the sign that will

bishop nor parish priest. Though they may have the appear-

allow you to recognize them both in their words and in theirance of it on the outside, in their hearts they are submissive

deeds. Through the natural repose which they enjoy in idle-

to no one, neither in will nor in deed, for they are com-ness, they consider themselves free and united with God

pletely disengaged from everything concerned with the Holy

without intermediary, raised above all the practices of the

Church. And therefore they say that as long as man strives

Holy Church, the commandments of God, and the law andafter virtue and desires to accomplish the dearest will of

all the virtuous deeds whatever they may be. For their idle-

God, he is still imperfect, for he still seeks to accumulate

ness seems of such great importance to them that no ob-virtue, and knows nothing of their spiritual poverty nor of

stacle should be put before them by any deed, however good

the idleness they advocate. But to them they are exalted

it may be, for their idleness is of greater excellence than areabove all the choirs of saints and angels and above all rewards,

all the virtues. Thus, they indulge in mere passivity without

which can be merited in any way. And therefore they say

any operation, directed up toward God or down toward man,that they can never grow more virtuous, that they can neverjust like the loom, which is itself passive and waits for its

deserve a greater reward and that they can never commit aowner to work, lest, by doing anything, they would hindersin. For they live without will, and they have relinquished

God in his work. Their idleness thus extends to all virtue, toto God their spirit devoted to repose and idleness; they are

the point that they will neither thank, nor praise God. They

one with God and have been reduced to nothing themselves.

devote themselves neither to knowledge, nor to love, nor to

And therefore they may freely consent to the desires of nature,

will, nor to prayer, nor to desire, for they are convinced thatfor they have attained innocence, and laws do not apply tothey already possess all they could ask or wish for.

them. Henceforth, if nature is inclined to do what gives sat-

Thus they are poor in spirit, for they are without will ofisfaction, and if, in order to resist it, idleness of their spirits

any sort, having forsaken everything, and making no choices

must be in some way diverted or hindered, they obey theof their own in their lives. For, freed from everything, having

instincts of nature, so that their spirits' idleness will remain

surpassed all things, they think they possess that for which

unhindered. Thus, they pay no attention to fasting or saints'

all the exercises of the Holy Church were instituted anddays, or to any commandment or precept whatever, save forordained. And thus, according to them, no one is able to givethe sake of men's opinion: for in all things they live their lives

to them or to take from them, not even God himself; for, in

without conscience.

their opinion, they are beyond all exercises and all virtues,

I hope that such people will not be found in great num-and they have attained a pure idleness in which they arebers, but where there are such people, they are the most evil

emancipated from virtues. And they claim that it is more dif-and most dangerous of all men. Sometimes, they are evenficult to be emancipated from virtue through an idleness ofpossessed by the devil, and then they are so skilled in trick147

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

ery that it is hard to defeat them by rational argument. But

they are so obstinate and so full of their own spirit, that they

Holy Scripture, the teachings of Christ and our faith show

would rather die than abandon any of their dreams. For they

us clearly that they are in error....

consider themselves to be the holiest and most enlightened

There are other perverted men who differ from the firston some points. These men also claim idleness in regard tomen in the world.
What distinguishes them from the first category is that

all works, in order to be no more than a tool with which

they think it is possible for them to grow and to obtain merit,

God does what he will. Therefore, they say that they live inwhile the others claim to be incapable of new merits, forpure passivity' and believe that the work that God accom-

they have attained the unity and idleness which excludes allplishes with them is more noble and more meritorious thangrowth and suppresses all exercise. These men are equally

all those which any man can perform himself with the grace

perverse and the worst of men, and are therefore to beof God. They bear divine action and do nothing themselves,for it is God who acts when they act. Incapable of sinning,

shunned like demons from hell.
if you have well understood the teaching which I havesince God acts, while they are completely passive, they ac-

expounded at such length, it will be easy to see that they

complish what'God desires and nothing else. With no activ-

are in error, for they live in opposition to God, to justiceity, these men have completely abandoned their inner life

and to all the saints. They are all forerunners of the Anti-

and want to live without choice. They affect a resigned andchrist, preparing the way for all unbelieving. 129

humble manner, and they can endure and suffer in equanimity all that happens to them, for they believe that they are

Sister Kat,r ei

in God's hands like the tool with which he accomplishes his
will. Their ways and their acts often resemble those of goodmen, and they are different from them only in certain cir-

74

The lucidity of intellectuals is most often evident in theirability to draw on the life they find around them, or evencumstances. They maintain that the things they are impelledwithin them, in order to nourish the speculations thatto do come from the Holy Spirit, whether they conform tomaintain the separation between alienated thought andthe law or not. lp this and in like matters they are deceived.

the concrete. This was certainly the case with Johannes

For the spirit of God cannot desire, or counsel, or do in any

Eckhart, who was condemned by the pope on March 27,

man, things in contradiction to the teachings of Christ or

1329, for several of his seventeen sentences. Although he

the Holy Church.

was to die unexpectedly en route to Avignon, where he

It is difficult to recognize such men unless one is divinely

intended to defend them, his writings bear the mark of theenlightened and possesses the power to discern spirits andFree Spirit ideas he so vehemently condemned, berating

divine truth. They are extremely subtle and know how to dis-

all those who took his work literally when it was meantguise beneath appearances or excuses those of their beliefs

to be understood spiritually.
The treatise attributed to Johannes Eckhart, This Was

which are in contradiction to God. But at the same time,149THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

Sister Katrei, the Daunhter of Johannes Eckhart at Strasbour9,
is generally held to be apocryphal. Yet there-can be no

certainty that the clever Dominican was not secretly delighted to see his ideas returned to their living source. He
came from Thuringea, where Hadewijch had followers
who were named in her List of the Perfect. After the time
he spent in Paris he must have been aware of the Amauriim
ideas condemned by Stephen Tempier in 1277 and 'more
importantly, of the theories of Margaret Porete.
The movement was given its just due, as This Was Sister Katrei describes the passage of a novice toward knowledge of the movement of the Free Spirit. The initiatory
trials of asceticism and deprivation in the external world
lead to the stage of perfection, in which everything is permissible. Gertrude of Civitatis and her companions would
do the same at Schweidnitz:

PRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

know that what you make use of is in God, to the glory ofGod." 130 She said, "I know, and you speak truly. But knowthat I desire nothing but to be poor until I die." He said,"V. wrong. I want.ou are wrong."Sh e sa1"d , "I want to remam
to be poor and wretched, no one can change my desire in
this." He said, "By my soul, you do your God wrong." Shesaid, "How is that?" He said, "By obeying your own will."
She said, "God knows that I do this only to honor the paththat has led me to my eternal bliss. If this path has been
wrong in time and in eternity, this is what I want to be intime and in eternity. Know that I have no wish to deviate
from the path of our Lord Jesus Christ." He said, "Yet you
must know that God grants you fully everything." She said,"I accept many comforts, so that I no longer do as muchpenance as before. Know that if I could help all the goodsouls who are on the way to their eternal bliss but are notyet confirmed, I would do it with joy; and that if I might"Counsel me how I should now best be guided, you whoknow my life better than anyone." He said, "I shall do thatgladly: you must eat when you are hungry, and drink when
you are thirsty, and wear fine linen and sleep whenever you
wish, and live in pleasure, and whatever your heart desiresin the way of good food or pleasure, you must grant it to
yourself, and not live for anyone except yourself. Even if you
saw the whole world collapsing before your eyes, you should
on no account intervene, even with an ave, and you shouldcommand all creatures to serve you according to your will,
for the glory of God. You should wear fine and delicate garments and remain in one place and leave everything to thehelp all men to overcome their infirmities, I would do it
willingly for the love of God. You must know, as our Lord
Jesus Christ practiced such things until his death, it is rightthat I should do as much. I wish to occupy my outward powers with the noble life and the noble humanity of our Lord
Jesus Christ and with his noble teaching, as long as I live
within time. Know that the sublime powers of my soul workin the soul of Christ, in the heavenly father, and are united
there in a single being, and are never diminished. Startingfrom God the Father, by means ofhis powers, the Holy Spirit
moves from the Father to the soul and back from the soul
to God, and every power does its own work here below incare of God. If you want to make use of any other creatures,the Holy Spirit and in the Father and with the Son, our Lord

you may do so at will, for every creature you make use of

Jesus Christ. This you must understand, as is fitting: hewill thereby be brought closer to its original state. You well

wishes to know all my thoughts and all my deeds, since theTHE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

time I became capable of distinguishing good frorri evil."errors in anything, understanding things as the master of a

He said, "My dear girl, enlighten me. The scholars say:house understands his servants, then the moment will be ripe

In heaven a thousand souls can stand on the point of a needle.

for you to understand the difference between God and divin-

Tell me how this should be interpreted." She said, "The mas-ity. And you will also understand the difference between

ters speak truly, and must be understood thus: The soul thatspirit and spirituality.

has entered into God knows neither time nor place, nor any"Only then will you be able to aspire to be confirmed.

other thing that can be expressed in words. What is more: I

You must not be misled, you must divert yourself with thewould say to you that if one examines the condition of thecreatures in complete innocence and they themselves willsoul, one finds that it is far above the heaven and the earth

not be doing anything wrong. Through this you must direct

and anything God has ever created. And I say further: if God

your powers so that you do not fall into insanity. And you

had created as many heavens and earths and worlds as he hasmust do this assiduously until the powers of your soul are

created creatures, next to the place occupied by the soul

awakened and you arrive at that knowledge of which we haveunited with God, these would count for no more than thealready spoken.

point of a needle." And Sister Katrei continued to speak"Praised and blessed be the sweet name of our Lord

for so long about the greatness of God, and his power andJesus Christ." 131providence, that he lost his senses and fainted, so that he had
to be carried to a separate cell, and remained there a long

The Movement of the Free Spirit A mono the
Benhards and Benuines

time before regaining his senses. When he had recovered his
senses, he asked for Sister Katrei to be brought to him. She
approached him and said to him, "How are you now?" Andhe replied, "Extremely well. God be praised for having madea creature such as you. You have shown me the way of myeternal bliss, I have been plunged into the contemplation ofGod, and real understanding has been given to me by everything I have heard from your mouth. Ah, I beg you, my deargirl, by the love you have for God, to help me by your works
to remain lastingly in the state I am in now." She said, "Knowthat that cannot be done. You are not yet apt. When yoursoul and your powers have become accustomed to going up
and down the path, as servants go in and out of houses, andwhen you have learned to distinguish the celestial people andeverything that God has ever created, and to commit no more

75

The siege mentality of the Church envisioned the Beguine
convents as ramparts against the Waldensian menace andthe unrest caused by widespread pauperization. But, likethe language of theology, the citadel, with all its trappingsof divine steadfastness, started to crumble from within,beleaguered by a freedom of nature that the prospect ofdeath never completely crushes.
What better protection against the ferment of moral
emancipation than the indifferent control of bishops whose
main preoccupations were political strategy, the imbecilities of tradition, decrepit libertinism and profiteering?
What more appropriate place could there be for the sensual origins of the debate about love, so deeply rooted

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

in the heart of medieval life, than in those places of refuge and meeting where men and women enjoyed a beneficent idleness that left them free to live according totheir desires?
From time to time, a too obvious disorder aroused thesuspicions of the Church's most zealous servants, who werealways anxious that their authority should not be criticizedby either the emperor or the pope, depending on whomthey supported. In 1239 Reinbotto, bishop of Eichstatt,threatened the ill-famed Beguines of his diocese with themost severe punishments.
In 1244 the Archbishop of Mainz, Siegfried Ill, "toprevent the misuse which the younger Beguines weremaking of their freedom, ordered their establishments in
his diocese not to accept new members under the ageof forty." 132
At first the mirror of Beguine devotion, by deflecting
toward heaven the suspicious gaze of the inquisitors, protected the Beguines from the resentment of those rivals
in mendicancy, the Franciscans and the Dominicans. In
1240 Joan of Flanders ordered her magistrates to defend
Beguines and Beghards from the attempted extortion ofreligious brotherhoods and parish priests, who were losing
profitable business (for example, the burial of the dead)as a result of the unwelcome zeal of some communities.
In 1245 Pope Urban IV was still able to order the deanof Louvain "to protect them against the reckless who
afflict them, and to prevent them from being abused bytrials, either personally or through their possessions."133
During the second half of the thirteenth century, however, condemnation began to intensify. The Synod ofFritzlar, over which Archbishop Gerard of Mainz presided,

attacked the wandering Beguines and Beghards, who beggedwith cries of "Brod durch Gott!" and preached in secretunderground locations.134
In 1277 the Synod of Trier was angered by the Beghards
and other illiteratil3S who were spreading heresies and fallacies among the people.l36
The attack, which ended in condemnation by theCouncil of Vienne, took on a systematically repressive
character on February 14, 1307; the Synod of Cologne,
over which Henry II of Virneburg presided, .included
Beghards, Beguines, apostolic followers of Gerard Segarelli,partisans of voluntary poverty, Fraticelli and Joachites ina single anathema. A text by Vimeburg criticizes them "forpracticing a new sort of life under the pretext of poverty,
begging instead of working, to the great detriment of Christianity, and for preaching their doctrine in public although
they are lay people."137
This confusion is reflected in the list of"errors":

Despite the Bishop's threats, the number of agitatorsin Cologne continued to increase. "Their audacity," writes
Jundt, "was such that they even disturbed religious gath-

154

155

God is in a state of perdition.l38
Those who are led by the Spirit of God are no longer subject to the law, for the law is not imposed on the just, on
those who live without sin.l39
No one who does not follow me can be saved.l40· Simple fornication is not a sin.141
Any man may leave his lawful wife to follow God.l42

If a woman does not deplore the loss of her virginity inmarriage, she cannot be saved.143

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

erings held by Dominicans and Franciscans, and heckled
mendicant friars in the middle of church when they daredto condemn their doctrines from the height of the pulpit. At the same time the income of both orders declined
noticeably. It was therefore thought necessary to bring oneof the period's most illustrious theologians to the city inorder to refute a doctrine the local clergy were powerlessto prove wrong. Duns Scotus arrived in Cologne in 1307
and immediately set about his task, but he died the following year without having completed it." 144
At Trier the proceedings of the Council of 1310 stated:"In the city and diocese of Trier there are a number oflay people, called Beghards, after an imaginary congregation they pretend to belong to; they appear in public
dressed in long tunics with large cowls, and eschew all
manual work. At certain times they hold meetings, 145 during which they appear, according to believers, to give profound interpretations of the sacred writings. We object totheir association as belonging to no congregation recognized by the Church, and to their customs of mendicancy
and vagabondage."In 1311 Pope Clement V, author of the propositions
known as the Clementines, became disturbed at the successof the movement of the Free Spirit in Italy: "In some partsof Italy, in the province of Spoleto and neighboring areas,
there are a number of men and women, both members of
religious orders and lay persons, who wish to introduce
into the Church an abominable kind of life, which theycall the freedom of the spirit, which means the freedom
to do anything they like."l46
At the Council ofVienne, which took place in the same
year, the pope directed two decrees against the Beghards

PRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

and the Beguines, both of which are collected in the Clemen tines, the first being the Ad nostrum:
We have learned from a trustworthy source that there are acertain number of Beguines, doubtless touched with madness, who indulge in discussion and preaching about the
Trinity and the divine essence, and who manifest heterodox
opinions about the articles of faith and the sacraments of the
Church. As a result, they lead many simple and credulous folk
into a variety of errors; furthermore, they commit many deeds
under the veil of sanctity which are a danger to the soul. 147[The second proposition, Cum de quibusdam mulieribus,
says:] It is not without great displeasure that we have learned
that an abominable and damnable sect has arisen in Germany,
formed by a number of perverse men and faithless women,
popularly known as Beghards and Beguines. [It points out
the following errors:] They divide the time between the creation and the end of the world into three epochs: according
to them, the time between the creation and the advent of
the Lord is the epoch of the Father, that between Christ's
incarnation and the coming of the Holy Spirit is the epochof the Son, and the time of redemption, which extends fromthe sending out of the Holy Spirit until the end of the world,is the epoch of the Holy Spirit, a time of freedom for man
to do as he wishes, in which nothing he does can be called
evil. -Man can acquire in this life the plenitude ofheavenly
felicity that he will obtain after death. - Each intellectual
being possesses this perfect felicity in himself by virtue of
his nature; the soul therefore has no need of divine enlightenment to rise to the contemplation and enjoyment of God. Man can attain such a degree of perfection in his current
existence that he becomes incapable of sinning, and can1)7PRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRITTHE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

of various German or Dutch works, among them the De
novem rupibus spiritualibus [The Nine Spiritual Rocks], mentioned by John of Diirbheim in 1217. The manuscript, now
lost, was regarded by Johann Lorenz von Mosheim, who
consulted it in the eighteenth century, as a genuine Free
Spirit manual "dearer to the Beghards than any other."t49
Johannes Trithemiustso calls Walter the "leader of the
Fraticelli and Lollards."tSt Writing and preaching in vernacular language, and therefore for simple people, Walter
was one of the victims of the repression set in motion by
Bishop Henry II of Virneburg. He was burned at the stakein 1322. The chronicler William of Egmont estimated thenumber of victims executed at the stake or drowned in the
Rhine to be fifty. He recounts how nocturnal gatherings,
held at a secret location called "paradise," were presided
over by a couple representing Jesus and Mary, celebrating
the return of the innocence of Eden. After a sort of Masscelebrated by the Chris-t figure, dressed in fine clothes
and wearing a diadem, a naked preacher would appear andinvite the company to take off their clothes in observanceof innocence regained. A banquet modeled on the Last
Supper, with singing and liveliness, concluded in orgy.

make no further progress in divine grace. For if he could
progress further, he would reach a higher perfection here on
earth than that possessed by Jesus Christ. - When man has
attained the last degree of perfection, he has no further needto fast or to pray, for his senses are then so completely subject to reason that he can freely allow his body all it likes. Those who live in this state of perfection, animated by thespirit of God, are no longer subject to any human law, or any
ecclesiastical precept, for wherever the spirit of God is, there
is freedom. -The practical exercise of the virtues is a markof an imperfect man. - Sexual union is a mortal sin if it is
not performed under the impulse of nature. In such cases,by contrast, it is not a sin, especially if it is preceded by
temptation. - When the body of Christ is presented in divine
service, it must not be elevated, nor shown any respect, for it
would be a sign of imperfection to descend from the heights
of pure contemplation, to pause on any thought touching themystery of the Eucharist or the passion of the Lord.148

The Clementines were to serve as such a good model toinquisitors that, in many trials, all that was necessary wasfor the accused to acquiesce to each of the points and tosign the protocol sending him to the stake. This was particularly true of orthodox Beghards and Beguines, whowere condemned, despite their attachment to the Church,
by an edict that lent the whole of their congregation thesmell of the stake.

Walter of Holland
76

Walter of Holland, who established himself in Cologne
after a period in Mainz, is thought to have been the author

Voluntary Poverty in Colonne:
John and Albert of Brrinn
77

In 1335 John of Brunn, who, with his brother Albert, hadbeen living in a voluntary poverty group in Cologne fortwenty years, renounced his vows, joined the Dominicans
and collaborated in the persecution of his former companions. His treachery apparently resulted in an agreementwith Gallus of Novo Castro, the Prague inquisitor since159

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

1330. john was to escape the stake in return for a confession, part of which Gallus used to complete the Clementines. This "spontaneous" collaboration excluded the useof torture, but did not prohibit a degree of cautiousness
in the admissions. Like the interrogation of the nuns ofSchweidnitz, this document (translated in extenso) illuminates both the influence and the distortion of Free Spirit
ideas in para-ecclesiastical communities:

as they abominate our perfection of life above all else."
With his agreement, but not with that of my wife, I soldall my possessions. Half this sum I left with my wife and,taking the other half with me, I returned to Cologne. ThereI was received into the house of the poor, with my master,
Nicholas, the friend I spoke of just now.
The house was situated near Saint Stephen, in the newcity. When I came inside, I knelt down to hear the words
spoken by my master to the brothers of that house, whom I

I, Brother John of Brunn, of the Order of Domincans, 152 wasasked to take me in out of charity. They assured me that theyinterrogated by Brother Gallus, of the same Order, inquisitor

would receive me gladly in two or three days. I stayed withof heretic perversion in the Kingdom of Bohemia. Did I wish

them until the morning.

to tell the pure truth, on oath, about the sect of Beghards

When morning came, their procurator asked me, "Whatand Beguines, and those who lived in the freedom of thewill you do among the poor and the despised? Do you intend

spirit? I replied that I would do so willingly. ,For twenty years

to observe voluntary poverty and be despised by all?"I was a Beghard, and for eight of those years I lived in the

Humbly, I replied, "In truth, my brother, I desire to

freedom of the spirit. This is how I came to join the sect.

remain among you until God has led me to the state ofWhen I was living in Briinn 153 with a lawful wife, I asked ac.
"penectton.

friend, with whom I was then on close terms, how to achievea perfect life.

"This evening," he said to me, "when the brothers are
all gathered, you must kneel down before them and ask them

"The most perfect life in the world," he assured me, "ishumbly if you can stay with them." 155

the life of the Beghards, who have chosen to live in poverty.

Then the procurator took me, with some of the broth-For, with more perfection than all the clerics, lay or reli-ers, to a more private place. He then explained some of thegious, they thus follow an evangelical ~xistence."prescripts of the order.

"How may I attain such perfection?" I asked.

"Brother, if you desire to remain with us, you must put

He replied, "Sell all that you have and give everything to

all your money and possessions in our hands. When you

those who live in poverty, those I have just told you about."

present yourself to the brothers, place everything on the

To my question, "But what about my wife?" he replied

table before them. If they order you to leave, go, and leavethat nothing bound me to her except the fact that I takepleasure in her; I could therefore easily bid her goodbye.

the money.
I did as he said, and they welcomed me into their way

At first, I wanted to consult the priests. 15 4 "Useless,"of perfect life. Then the procurator told me about the aus-

he replied, "for they will dissuade you from your purpose,

terity of their order. He showed me that a true member of a

160

161

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

sect devoted to poverty possesses nothing, and rids himself
of all temporal possessions like Christ on the cross.
I was stripped of everything. I was naked in their presence. I had put everything into their hands. I knelt down in
my nakedness. Then they gave me a tunic, patched a hundred times, saying:tion, you will kneel down before him, you will kiss his feet,you will ask pardon ofhim if, on the way, you have offended
him in anything. When the brothers are seated at table, after
the benediction, you will eat what you are given in silence.
Similarly, in church, remain on your knees, your head covered with your cowl. When you have said your matins or"Wear this tunic, as Christ wore it, to arouse derision andcontempt. Like him, and for his sake, endure patiently thecontempt you will receive. The more you can bear, the moresanctified you will become. If, tomorrow, when you go into
the city, somebody treats you as a heretic, maltreats you,beats you or knocks you about in any way, do not respond.
Bear all patiently.

your prayers, stay there and meditate on the Passion of
Christ, without leaving the church; allow yourself to bepenetrated more deeply by divine plenitude. If you happen
to witness the elevation of the body of Christ a single time,that should suffice as much as seeing it a hundred times.
Watching the elevation is the act of those who simulate sanctity and who want to make a public show of what they neg-

"You will beg for your bread in company with the brother
who will be assigned to you. You will not raise your eyes,
you will keep them fixed on the ground, your face entirely
covered with your cowl.

lect within themselves.
If some place lends itself to prayer, they say that theyshould take Communion once on Sundays and twice during
the week: this is what is fitting for the poor of Christ. There"If your brother stops, you stop. Ifhe walks, you walk. If
he cries, you cry. Act like Christ, who, as he went about thecity with his apostles and his friends, was not really begging
for his bread, but everywhere seeking scorn and his Passion.

"If somebody calls o'ut behind you, 'Brother receivealms!', do not go back, nor look back, nor stop. Be content
to slow your pace until he catches up with you.
"If you are overtaken by hunger or weakness on the way,
it is permissible for you to comfort your nature by eating
secretly, under your cowl, to avoid shocking people; whether
it be at Easter, or any other day or season of the year. The
poor of Christ commit no sin when they refresh their nature,even if they eat meat on holy days. For charity tells us to eat
and drink what is given to us.
When you return to the house, with the brother in ques162

is no need at all to confess everything to priests. Did they
spend the night with a woman? Then they should feel noremorse, for true poverty, which proceeds from the divinepresence that they possess deep within them, will answer
for it.156 In truth, the priests understand nothing about thesematters. On the contrary, they see these devotees of poverty
only as ruined souls.

· "If your nature is overcome with sleep, do not feel any
remorse, whether you are sleeping at home, in church or
during divine service. Similarly, eat when you are hungry torefresh your nature. If, when you are walking on a Sunday,
you find some coins on the road, do not pick them up, outof respect for the Ten Commandments. But on the other six
days you may pick up whatever you find and take it back towherever you are staying. I 57

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT"Similarly, if some poor brother stops and asks you forserve him anew, so it is necessary to restore the part most

hospitality, you should follow the example of Christ and washclosely connected to the spirit. Therefore, eat as often as you

his feet. You will receive him by kneeling down before him

wish. Even if it is Lent, or the eve of the Sabbath, eat meatand you will do him charity by asking him to pray for you.

and milk products if you can procure them. There is no sin"Do any deeds that are contrary to_rour wishes in orderin that, for the simple reason that you need to restore yourthat your life may be annihilated and diminished and, thus,
totally subject to the spirit. 158 Because your nature is ster-nature, which has been weakened in the service of Christ.

ile, it is in your interest to annihilate it in all your deeds.

confess it to priests, because they regard as foolish any man

This is why your nature must be broken and subjected towho, having as his aim the attainment of supreme freedom,

divine will, so that by obedience to this will it will be able

allows divine nature and truth to act on him even in sleep.

to lead all desire and will to its realization.

"If you are seen to eat an egg in the morning during Easter
week, have no scruples about it, do not think it a sin and do

Do not let your conscience be troubled by it, and do not"And you will have a total right to lie and mislead people
in every possible way. Have no scruples about this: when you
are free in spirit, you are freed from sin."160

not confess it to a priest, under the pretext that this priest

If a brother has no money, he has the right to receive it

is subject to Christ and has yielded his flesh in his service.

from the hands of strangers; for, by spending this money, heSimilarly, when you are on the road, do not ask anyone fordoes nothing other than send it into eternity.161 As he is free

anything and avoid places where alms are distributed to others. 159 Do not hold out your hand for alms to anyone what-in spirit, there is no need for him to pay it back. If he did,soever. But if the hand of God has permitted you to receive

And if he finds some money on the road? "He should notany, take them gratefully. If anyone sends you on an errand,

give it up, but spend it with his brothers in the service ofobey in complete humility. When you are walking the streets,

Christ. God has decided so in his providence: the money is

keep from going into any houses; rather, ask for hospitality

just as much the possession ofhe who finds it as ofhe whoin a loud voice and, if you are not invited in, sleep on thehas lost it."doorstep. If you are maltreated by brigands, suffer patiently,
following Christ's example."it would sully his conscience.

And if the owner of the money reclaims it? "Ah, then the
one who is free in spirit should intimidate him with words

Then John received from the brothers the teaching re-and gestures. He should say, 'This money is yours as muchserved for those who have arrived at this stage [of initiation].

as mine, for God gave it to me so that I could spend it and"Brother, you have now completed the stage of which

send it into a state of poverty, which is the highest state. That

we have spoken. Henceforth, whenever your nature demands,

is why I have sent it into eternity.' "162you may sustain it by eating, drinking and making use of any-

If he is arrested, it is better for him to perish or to killthing available to it. Just as your external nature, annihilated

the other party than to agree to return the money; ifhe fails

in the service of Christ, needs to be refreshed in order toin this, he will lose his freedom of spirit and move from theTHE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

level of the eternal to that of the temporal, which is what

reply, 'It is better to see the Scriptures and the truth than to

he must guard against doing. But if he dies, his spirit passes

read them.' 164

immediately into eternal life.
And if he meets a sick man on the road? "He should sympathize with his sufferings, serve him with care, ask him"In answer to the question: 'Why do you say that?', retort,'Who sees in truth is freed from himself, has withdrawn from
himself, has abandoned himself and all other creatures.' 165

whether he has any money and relieve him of it, so that that

"To anyone who asks you, 'Where are you going?', say 'I dosum should not fall into the hands of the priests." And if the

not know, except that I am going where God and truth aresick man balks at this? "Oh, then have resort to violence,leading me. For I am not master of myself; I am utterly dis-steal the money, and then go off with your brothers and sis-

solved in the flux of eternity (totaliter in eternitate liquefactus).'ters to spend it in freedom of spirit and send it into eternity.

"If anyone asks you what kind of freedom you claim toAnd, above all, have no scruples! And no remorse if the manpossess, say, 'I am free through my truth. No one, and nodies of hunger! All you have done is returned him to his origi-

creature, can stand in my way.'

nal elements. Have no fear of the devil or hell or purgatory,"If anyone asks you, 'What is the basis of freedom andfor, in truth, nature does not recognize their existence. They

truth, and how are they to be attained?', reply, 'I belong to

are just inventions of priests and clerics to frighten men. The

the freedom of nature. I satisfy that in everything it asks ofself-aware man is himself the devil, hell and purgatory whenme and I give it everything in sufficiency.' 166

he tortures himself. But the free in spirit avoid this kind of
torment, because they are liberated by divine truth.""If I solicit a woman during the holiest of nights, I do
not feel the slightest scruple of conscience in thus assuaging

A brother of the Free Spirit has the right to preach when

my appetites. I see no sin in that since, by virtue of my free-

he is given hospitality. What if they ask him on what author-

dom of spirit, I am a man in accordance with nature. It is

ity he does this? He will reply: "Anyone may receive fromtherefore right that I should find free satisfaction in theme, just as well as from a priest, the truth which he can hearworks of nature.

and learn from my voice. When he preaches, someone who is"And that is perfect freedom: the hand may obtain every-

spiritually poor, sitting in a corner of the church, sees divine

thing the eye sees and desires! If any obstacle appears in histruth just as clearly as, and perhaps more clearly than, whenway, he has a total right to remove it. For if a man stands up

a priest addresses the people in a public sermon. If a Beghard

to what is vexing to him, his freedom is not compromised.

preaches in public, he expresses himself with much more

"Brother, when you strike he who strikes you, when you

clarity than a priest, because those who are called the poor

kill he who tries to kill you, do not have a bad conscience,of Christ have drawn from the abyss of the Trinity a truth to

do not confess it to a priest. The one you have killed has

which no one can accede unless they are free in spirit." 163merely been happily returned to his original element, whence"Yet if someone says, 'How do you know this truth when
you can neither read nor understand the Holy Scriptures?',166

he came."
When they have reached this degree of perfection in free-THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

dom, the brothers who live in the spirit are totally and cor-munion in the morning does not prevent them from mak-poreally transmuted: they have become one with God anding love in the evening without the slightest sin.171

God is totally and corporeally with them. Because of this

They take Communion very often and frequently go tounity, the angels are incapable of distinguishing, in the mir-confession, to set a good example for other people. Whenror of the Trinity, between God and a soul which has lived

they die, they say, they fly directly to the empyrean heaven,in freedom of spirit. 167

even if they die without extreme unction or confession,

If a brother and a sister living together in freedom ofwhich they regard as inventions of the priests and clerics.

spirit have together brought a child into the world, they have

They also say that there is neither hell nor devil, and thatevery right to put it to death or throw it into the water as
if it were a little worm. 168 And they need have no scruple

God does not impart himself to the hands of the priests inabout this, nor confess it to a priest, for they have merely

priests are neither in grace nor in charity, and this is some-returned it to its original element. They have every rightthing that nobody can be achieve only by withdrawing fromto declare what they have done, by reason of their perfectordinary mortals: "And I have never seen such a priest, there-

freedom of spirit, and without feeling the slightest sense ofsin - unlike priests. 169 And why should the poor in spirit

fore none of them can consecrate the body of Christ."

feel any scruple, since they possess nothing, neither any-

and not among priests, who are [so J given to vanity. The

thing with which to feed a child, nor anything for their own

priests do not possess God, nor do they understand the truth.

sustenance?

The poor of Christ therefore have no need to tell the truth

the transubstantiation of the bread during the Mass; for the

They say that truth is only to be found among the poor,

Even when they speak lying, misleading or harmful words,

to priests. Similarly, they need not confess their secrets tothey cannot sin; they are incapable of it. They have attained

the priests, nor obey the clergy. They neither recognize fast-

the highest degree of perfection; it is impossible for theming nor other good works.

to be more perfect.

When the poor in spirit becomes detached from all crea-

Among themselves, the brothers and sisters use special
signs of recognition, by means of which they make mutualtures, 172 he reaches the dignity of, and shares in, divine
nature. There is then no need for him to honor the saints.

contact and express their desire to be united. If a sister places

If a brother who is about to take Communion feels hun-a finger on her nose, she invites a brother to come to hergry, he may eat and then take Communion. Just as the spirit

house. If she touches her head, then the brother enters her

acts freely, so the flesh may freely and without sin perform

room and prepares the bed. If she touches her breast, he

the work of nature, with one women or with several. If

climbs into the bed and performs the task of nature and oflove as many times as he is able.1 70 Yes, those who live innature has become weakened to any extent, it is right togive it comfort, even if this entails theft or rape; because,

freedom of spirit can do everything without sin.

for the free man, all the things that God has created are

For a brother and a sister of this freedom, taking Com168

for everyone.173

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT"If somebody says to you, 'Brother, I am as free as you,because my nobility claims the same nature as you,' you

PRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

jurisdiction of any human being. This is why they pay noheed to the rules and commandments of the Church.

should reply, 'If you have spent your life with Jesus Christas your model, as I have done, then you are free to live [asThe Confession

you intend]. For myself, I have spent my life in the contempt"I admit to having lived in sin for eight years. I believed all

aroused by poverty, and, thanks to Christ, I have endured
many torments.' 174

that I said above to be true. I did not consider myself to be
in a state of sin because I was in freedom of spirit. That is"If I enter a tavern, and eat and drink with no means of

why I never regarded anything that I did as being a sin: eat-paying, I can leave freely without the slightest sin. And if

ing meat during Holy Week and on the eve of the Feasts ofanyone has the impertinence to demand that I should pay; I

the Apostles, or indulging in lechery, tricking people, steal-

am free to thrash the complainer, without sin; for God has

ing from them and beating them. I did not go to confession

assigned all goods to himself, so that I can help myself tothem and send them on to eternity." 175

before I took Communion."177

If a sister of freedom goes to a brother's house after hehas taken Communion, and says to him, "Brother, I ask char-

Among two hundred Beghards and partisans of freedom,hardly one is to be found who does not adhere to the above
articles ofbelief.

ity, sleep with me,"l76 he should not say, "I have taken Com-

Thus the Beghard Albertl 78 maintained that anyone who

munion," but should perform the work of nature, heartily,

lived in true freedom could say Mass beneath his cowl as well

two or four times, to satisfy nature, without scruple andas a priest, as he could be united with God just as much as awithout confession.

priest at the altar.

If he desires to perform the act of sodomy with a man,Frequent taking of the body and blood of Christ in Com-he may do so freely and lawfully. And without any feelingmunion, or multiple celebrations of the Mass, does not makeof wrongdoing; otherwise, he would not be free in spirit.

a man holy or increase his sanctity. For we can plainly see

If a brother who is still a novice commits gross sins, hethat priests who celebrate Mass every day are as bad as, if

should not say that they are grave, but only that they are
venial. For priests divulge what they hear, and, as they are

not worse than, people who rarely take Communion or seldom go to Mass.l79

not in the truth of perfection, it is important not to reveal

He also said that the man who is free in spirit enjoys God

everything to them.

more authentically than one who gets up every night to pray

To those who are in true freedom, they also say that noone can give them an order, excommunicate them or pro-on his knees, and that, in the elevation of the body of Christ,
man is not transported toward higher regions.

hibit them from doing anything whatsoever. Neither theEverything a man does below the belt is not a sin. In

pope, nor the archbishop, nor any other living being has

Brunn, I saw a Beghard give Communion to a Beguine withauthority over them: they are free, and are not subject to thewhom he had slept all night, in my presence.

170

171

THE

PRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRITMOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

It is, they say, only stupid men who are preoccupied

no free spirit. Any sin which is mortal is in itself venial. Thatwith Christ's Passion. They refer to these people vulgarly as

is why, when you confess, it is right to confess only venial

Blochwerg.

sins, however great your sins might actually have been." They
act thus solely to humor other people and to pass as saints

Man must transcend himself and be watchful, then heamong those around them.

can act as he likes. He should not fast or indulge in good

In this wretched freedom of spirit, I, John of Brunn, anddeeds, for such an attitude hinders [perfection] more thanit encourages it.

my brother Albert remained for twenty years. I believed in

They do not have to look at the body of Christ if they

what has been described. I never regarded it as a sin. We

can avoid it without causing a scandal. For they are con-would never have confessed if we had not been afraid of

vinced that the man of free spirit has the body of Christ inmen, and many other things that have not been written in

his heart as much as the priest has it in his hands. Thus I

this book.
Note here the errors of the heretics recorded in theheard one Beguine say that these damned priests behaved so

Clementines. 182

much like gods in church that it was no longer possible tofind repose there.

The Nuns of Schweidnitz

Hell is nothing but man's own will. There is no naturalfire there. When a man breaks his own will, he breaks his
own hell. 180
They say, and firmly believe, that all carnal sins and sins
against nature are not sins at all. Many Beghards do not believe the Scripture passages concerning the symbol of faith.
The word of the Beghard is more powerful than that of apreacher, because the Beghard has studied his doctrines fromthe book of the Trinity, 18 1 whereas the priest has studied
them from the skins of calves [parchments].
Albert was questioned by Father Gallus, of the Order ofDominicans, who asked him what fundamental principles
the Beghards acknowledged, since they neither regarded
sodomy as a sin nor even admitted that sin existed. He replied: "I thought and firmly believed what all the Beghards
believe: man can attain a freedom in which he becomes freein spirit. Then mortal sins are so venial that holy water expunges them. If you regard mortal sins as sins, then there is
172

78

On September 7, 1332, the inquisitor Johannes Schwenkenfeld, who was murdered in 1341, began an inquiry at
Schweidnitz 183 into the activities of a congregation of
caputiatae - Beguines or nuns living outside the rules recognized by the Church. The interrogation took place inthe refectory of the Dominican monastery. There, in thepresence of the inquisitor and ten clerics, sixteen novices
gave evidence against their mistresses.
All but two of the accused, who maintained a lofty
reserve, were "traveling" and stayed in other convents.
(The proceedings mention Strasbourg, Bratislava and Aixla-Chapelle.) No torture was used, but the constant reminder of the Clementines meant that a witness often foundit prudent to mumble her way through this or that article.
The evidence underlines clear similarities between the
Beghards of Cologne, to which John of Brunn belonged,
173

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

and the congregation of Schweidnitz, which the nuns had

were taken away, as they were reserved for the perfect. And

called the "Community of the Daughters of Udillynde"

they dressed her in rags that only partially covered her.186

since its foundation in 1306.184

And if she refused to wear these clothes? Then they told
her, "You are not fit for a life of poverty."

79

Interrogation of the nuns of Schweidnitz (extracts):

I have heard them say that a human being is realized only
in proportion to his perfection; those who are in such a state

Hedwig of Bratislava, 18 5 interrogated under oath, reported
that, in their view, their state of perfection permitted themof perfection and freedom of spirit are not bound to obey
anyone at all. 187

to regard sleeping, waking, eating, drinking and fasting as

When Hedwig said to them, "I must go to confession,equally meritorious. All the works they undertook for God

because I was weaving during the week of Pentecost,"188

were good, because their being was their own work.

they replied, "There is no need for confession, as what you

In their house, there was a small room into which no one
but the mistresses could go. The sect liked to induct young

did were good works." According to them, sin was whatwent against their own wills.

girls, who could be instructed according to its plans, rather

They told the novices, "Do what we tell you and you willthan older women, who could not be educated as the girls

not be sinning, for we do not order you to do anything that

could; for, as they said, you can't teach an old dog new tricks.

could be a sin." ...

They lashed themselves until their blood ran, using thongs

She heard Gertrude of Civitatis, here present, maintainand ropes with sharp points knotted into them. They had

that, as God is God, so she was God with God. And sheto do this, they said, to subdue nature.

was the same as Christ, who was never separated from

Hedwig said that sometimes, when there were several ofGod. And if she indulged in any impurity, 189 her equality

them in one room, the first would leave and would prostrateherself on the threshold, the second would trample her andwith God returned her immediately to God in her original
innocence. 190

lie by her side, the third would do likewise, and so on, until

And when Hedwig reproached Gertrude for her wound-they had all left the room. This happened at Bratislava, anding words, the others defended her.... They said, "We look

Hedwig took part in it ....

in the book of life, but priests and preachers look in calf... When young girls joined, said Hedwig, she taught
them to go without food, drink, etc., until they were per-skins [parchments]. We want to close our house and we want
to do what we like." ...

fect. However, those whom the mistresses deemed to have

According to Adelheide, 191 their teaching urged the nov-

attained perfection could and should eat their fill, because

ices to indulge in such serious mortification that some of themof the privations they had endured earlier.

succumbed to madness. One novice, who was found among[To the young novices] they claimed that there was nolepers, had lost her reason as a result of peculiar activities

need to possess clothing. If one arrived with fine clothes, theyand extravagant mortifications. When they asked a woman

174

175

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

named von Glatz why she did not eat although she lay on her

perfect and fully practiced, left the congregation, it was tobed prostrated by illness, she replied, "Because I have reachedtake their pleasure with the Beghards, on every occasion.

such a level of perfection that I no longer need to eat or

They ate meat at Easter and on the eve of the Feasts ofdrink, as Christ has fed me." Her presumption drove her mad.

the Apostles; whenever they could do so without causing aAdelheide had heard from those who associated withscandal. This did not disturb them, nor did they confess it,them that they called their sect the Union of the Daughtersnor did they have any scruples about it.

of Udillynde and had several principles. First, their sweet and

The Beghards and these women, who made such shows

flattering words attracted both virgins and married women,of sanctity and the most austere poverty in fact committed

whatever their state or condition. They then persuaded these

all the filthiness and all the sins ofSodom.

women to accept their authority and will, and to ignore the

Adelheide asserted that which follows with completemonastic orders, the Church and everyone. Second, theycertainty, because she heard it from the [novice J to whomstrongly advised these women to remain within the congre-

it had happened, and from many others who had had similar

gation house, to stay.in the kitchen or other rooms, and notexperiences. They abused their companionship and indulged

to go to church and listen to sermons. To judge by what theyin mutual and shameful contact in the anal region. The prel-' them, and the Lord God would
said, they had to believe

ude to their pleasures was to take turns sliding their tongues

inspire them as soon as they had broken their own will andinto one another's mouths. They did this at any time, even in

had given themselves up to the work of charity....

church, during the sermon, the Mass or other divine offices.

(They incited the women to act Jin ways that would break

By professing the opinion that all the most infamous

their natures and their wills. Hedwig of Bratislava confirmed

things were lawful, they attracted, and still attract, thethis by telling of the day she found, to her horror, that a cat-wicked, including some members of recognized religious

erpillar had been cooked with the vegetables. The mistresses

orders, priests and members of the secular clergy. One day,encouraged her to eat it and overcome her nature, but shein their house here in Schweidnitz, Adelheide was serving

refused and fled from the room in tears.

food to some Beghards. Later, when they wanted to talk to

Adelheide told of a dead cat that one novice found in abowl; it was to be skinned and then baked. She felt such a

the Beguines, they shouted at her, "Get out, you have nobusiness here!"strong repugnance at doing this that she tried to escape theFrom Gertrude de Civitatis, here present, Adelheide

obligation. But they forced her to extract the eat's fat andheard these words: "If God has created everything, then I

gather it as an ointment for their shoes. And then, to over-have shared in his creation, I created everything with him.

come her natural horror, they sent her to sell the skin in the

And I am God with God, and I am Christ, and I am more

public square. This happened in Strasbourg .... 192

than these." ...

Adelheide had this from a reliable source: when those

Catherine 193 recounted that one Beghard, a member of

who had attained their so-called freedom, and were deemeda sect in Glogovia, 194 said to her, when she was alone in177THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

church, "If you conquer yourself, if the higher virtues achieve
victory over the lower ones in your life, then you will attainperfection and you will have a subtle spirit. It is true to say
that, until now, you have shown only a coarse spirit. Once you
are perfect, nothing that happens in the charity195 of God
can harm your chastity. You will not be committing any sin."
When women experience shame and try to resist those
who impudently touch their breasts and other places, theBeghards and nuns say that this is a sign of their coarse spirits. [They add:] "You cannot have had enough spirit in all
your life, to behave like a courtesan [ curialiter] or to show
yourself off to a man!" ...
Margaret 196 heard them maintain that they wanted tostrengthen those tempted by concupiscence in this manner:
if the object [of desire] was a woman, they had to renounce
her and her company and seek a man. 197 It was important,however, that there was always to be two.

PRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

call for the transcendence of God through immediate sensual pleasure, he did emphasize antireligious irony, which
the supporters of the movement of the Free Spirit werefond of using to establish their authority. He prefigures
Herman of Rijswick and the skeptics of th~ Renaissance,
providing valuable evidence of the rationalist, materialist and atheist tendencies that official history has always
denied, and through which alienated thought has expressed
its rejection of the religious world.
Thomas Scoto, first a Dominican, then a Franciscan,
was educated in Portugal in the first half of the fourteenth
century and was a contemporary of Heilwige Bloemardine,John of Briinn and Johannes Eckhart. After challenging him
in Lisbon, Pelayo had him thrown into prison and, in allprobability, burned. In addition to accusations of necromancy and magic the author of the Collyrium lists seventeen other ofScoto's indictments.

Margaret was scandalized when she heard these propositions. Either she had not properly understood, or it was evil.

1. The longevity of the ancient patriarchs is a fable.

But an experience reassured her that the proposition was,

2. Isaiah's prophecy, Ecce vir9o concipiet, relates not toindeed, pernicious. One day, when she was disturbed, one

the Virgin Mary but to some servant or concubine of theof the women embraced her and spoke such words that her

prophet. The word vir9in should be understood in the sense

flesh was greatly moved. Then the woman confided to her:of puella or adolescentula, girl or young woman.

"If you will consent to my desires, I shall reveal a secret that

3. The world has been misled by three impostors: Moses

you are ready to hear, a secret such that you will never wantto leave us." 19 8 This woman was Anna the Blind.199

misled the Jews, Jesus the Christians and Muhammad theSaracens.
4. At the College of Canon Law in Lisbon, he taught

Thomas Scoto

that the words of Isaiah, Deus fortis, pater Juturi saeculi, did
not refer to Our Lord Jesus Christ.

So

Thomas Scoto, whom Alvaro Pelayo mentions in his Collyrium contra haereses (1344 ), occupied a marginal positionin the movement of the Free Spirit. Although he did not

5. After death, souls are annihilated.
6. Christ was not the true son or the natural son of God,but his adopted son.
179

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

7. He denied the perpetual virginity of Our Lady.
8. He taught that philosophical reason was a better support for faith than the Scriptures, and that the world would
be better governed by philosophers than by theologians.
9. He was a supporter of the concubinage of friars,
and spoke disrespectfully of Saint Augustine and Saint
Bernard.

concedes, indicate that the accused had no illusions whatsoever about his fate.
Undoubtedly, Hartmann was one of the two condemned
men sent to the stake at Erfurt in 1368 by Walter Kerling,
who was also responsible for the execution of seven
Beghards (out of a total of forty accused) at Nordhausen(in Thuringia) in the same year:

10. He denied that Christ gave his authority to SaintPeter and his successors or to the bishops.
11. He was a pre-Adamite.
12. He believed in the eternity of the world.
13. He denied the Last Judgment, the resurrection of
the dead and the glory to come.
14. He regarded Aristotle as wiser than Moses and better than Christ, who was a bad man, hanged for his sins andfor associating with prostitutes, whom he visited.
15. He blasphemed against the Eucharist and the authority of the dogmas.

The Interrogation ofjohn Hartmann at Ossmannstedt

In the name of God. Amen. In the year 1367, 6th deposition,
December 26, from nones to compline, at Erfurt, in the diocese of Mainz, in the papacy of our very holy Father in Christ,
our master Monseigneur Pope Urban V, and in the lands ofour honorable Master in Christ, the archbishop of Mainz, inthe great estuary, there appeared in public - in the presenceof my notary, the notaries public and the undersigned witnesses, and in the presence of the Venerable Religious Brother
Walter Kerling, Dominican, Professor of Sacred Theology

16. He attributed Christ's miracles to magic.
17. He held mistaken beliefs about the sacraments. 200

and inquisitor ofheretic perversion, delegated by apostolicauthority to several regions of Germany- a certain Beghardby the name of John Hartmann, from the town of Ossmann-

John Hartmann81

stedt, in the diocese of Mainz, who is known among theOn December 26, 1367, in Erfurt, John Hartmann, originally from Ossmannstedt, and known among the Beghards
as Spinner (the Weaver), appeared before Walter Kerling,
appointed inquisitor by Pope Urban V and highly regarded
by both the pope and the emperor.
The questions asked were based on the Clementines.
The loquaciousness of Hartmann's replies goes far beyond
the simple requirements of approbation. The plethora of
information and the mockery, to which Kerling, in his way,180

Beghards as John the Weaver.
He first took the oath in due and proper form, and swore
by the Holy Gospel to tell the truth, now and always. To thequestion of the inquisitor Walter, "In what does freedom ofspirit consist?" he replied, "It consists in the remorse of conscience ceasing to exist entirely, so that man is made incapable of sin."
On the subject of the first article of the Clementines (Adnostrum) - "If, in this life, a man is in this contemplation ofwhich we have spoken, in the highest degree of perfection

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

originally experienced when he was in the abyss of divinity,

chalice from its owner for his own use? Yes. Moreover, hewould there be a difference between him and God?" - hesaid, it would be preferable to steal a golden chalice than areplied that, in such perfection, and at the highest level, hepile of rags.

is with God and God with him, in a unity where nothing can

If the emperor prevented him from taking an object for

distinguish between them. He added, "In that consists true

his personal use, would he kill him? His reply implied a dis-

freedom of spirit. Thus, all remorse of conscience ceases, andtinction: if the emperor was not free in spirit, he would killsuch a man is rendered incapable of sin."him, certainly. But if the emperor had attained the highest

To the question of whether the man who attains such aperfection, in the freedom of spirit, then there was somestate of contemplation here on earth can progress any fur-

doubt, and he would not wish to pronounce on this ques-

ther, he replied, "No, in such freedom there is no progress.

tion for the time being.

He who has attained that degree of perfection has renderedhimself absolutely inaccessible to sin."

On the subject of the fourth article ( Qyod homo ita
poteste ), this is what he said: "Such a man who has attained,

On the second article of the Clementines ( Qyod jejunare),at the outset, the level of perfection, is assured of final bliss

he asserted that one need neither pray nor fast once the levelfrom that moment. It is the degree of perfection which di~­of perfection has been reached. The power of the senses thus

tributes this bliss in life, and he would attain it in the felic-submits to the spirit and to reason; it is therefore lawful toity of life, if only the body were not mortal."

grant the body whatever it wants.
Of the third article ( Qyod illi qui sunt), he said, "Those
who are in this degree of perfection and in the freedom of

According to him, a man who is free in spirit is as blessedas the Blessed Peter or the Blessed Virgin Mary, whether inheaven or in the beatific life.

spirit are no longer obliged to obey men, or any precept, orOnce united with God in such a degree of perfection,

the rules of the Church: they are truly free. Such a man is

can one dispense with intermediaries? Yes. In such a state,king and master of all creatures. Everything belongs to him.

neither the angels nor Mary could establish a distinction

He may legitimately receive whatever he likes and take it for

between him and God.

his own use. And if anyone should wish to prevent him, toIn the unity of the divine essence and the three persons

put an obstacle in his way or seize his possessions, he wouldof the Trinity, does the man who is free in spirit, and who

be justified in killing him. By putting him to death, he would

has reached his [Hartmann's] degree of perfection, want tobe returning him to his original element. He may legiti-

be the Father or the Holy Spirit in the deity? He reasoned

mately undertake anything that ensures his pleasure."20tthat, on the divine level, the Son is his brother, and that he

It would be better for the whole earth to perish than for
him to renounce an action to which his nature urges him.
This, he said, is as true for one region as for all.
May a man of free spirit legitimately appropriate a golden

is consubstantial with him.
In response to the fifth article ({)_yin to quod quolibet intellectualis), he affirmed that nobility of spirit is one with God,because it has come from the ebb of divinity and its flow

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

into the deity. That is where pure and true blessedness is tobe found. 202
The free in spirit do not need the light of elevated glory
to see God and enjoy him blissfully because there is nothing to separate them from God.
In response to the sixth article (Sexto quod in actibus),
he confirmed that the man of free spirit becomes incapableof committing an offense. He can do all he likes and wishes.

If his nature prompts him to the act of love, he may legitimately indulge it with his own sister or with his mother,wherever he likes, even on the altar. 203
Indeed, as a consequence of the kinship of nature, it ismore natural to make love with one's own sister than withanother woman.

PRINCIPAL . MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

if the last to possess her was free in spirit, the corrupted girlwould recover the virginity the others had taken from her,thanks to him.
According to him, women are like cows and calves.
Just as these were created for man, to be eaten, so women
were created, to be used by anyone who lives in the Free
Spirit.204"But," asked the interrogator, "what if two men, bothfree in spirit, want to know a woman: who will go first?""As before," he replied, "he who is the most free in spirit
should unite with her first, and then the other one.""And if they are both equally free in spirit?""Well, then they play dice, and the one who is lucky canknow her first."

He added, "The perfect and free man rejects what are

To the question "Was Christ free in spirit?" he replied,normally considered virtues, as he is not subject to any law,"No." He proved this with the Gospel. In his Passion, Christ

the rules of the Church or any other precepts. He is free in

said, "Father, if it is possible, take this cup from my lips: notspirit, he is ein freie Geist, a free man. Only spirits who haveaccording to my will, but according to yours." In. his view

made little progress in spirituality are bound to observe theit was not until the eve of the Sabbath that Christ attainedlaws and precepts of the Church." Free men generally refertrue freedom. This is why the sixth day of the week is called,

to the people who live within the law as coarse beings.

in the vulgar tongue, fritan (day of freedom).

Knowing his sister carnally would make her neither less

When he was asked whether Christ had known Maryvirgin nor less chaste. On the contrary, the carnal union

Magdalene carnally after his Resurrection, he replied thatwould increase her chastity.

this was the subject of serious and profound research, and,And a union with a girl? Neither he nor she would losethough he well knew the answer, he preferred not to give

their virginity. Moreover, if she had lost her virginity byhis opinion. But, he said, smiling, the inquisitor ought

being violated by others, she would recover it by sleeping

to be gracious enough to tell him whether, as some havewith a free man in a state of perfection.

claimed, men and women mix in the future life as they do

He gave an example of ten men who knew one girl car-here below. Because, if that were not the case, men would

nally. One of them, the coarsest in body and even in natural

certainly prefer to stay here with their wives than to aspire

capabilities, possessed her first. The others followed, until

to a future life.

the last, who was the smallest and the least of them. Well,

Mary was not free in spirit; otherwise, she would not soTHE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

often have deplored the absence ofher son: "Alas, my child,lations were worth more than all the money the consuls ofalas, when shall I see you again?"Erfurt kept in their tower. 207

For the seventh article (Septimo quod mulieris osculum ... ),He was then asked whether he put these propositions for-he stated that the carnal act to which nature impelled humanward as a result of some madness of the heart, debility of thebeings is not a sin for a man of free spirit. But some embracebody or other infirmity. In no way, he replied. He spoke

and kiss women so that their behavior cannot be distin-quite sincerely, because his conceptions were ones he had

guished from that of other men, and so that people will not

found within himself.

call them imbeciles (gabhardi) and say that they cannot act
as men[?].

The truth of these proposals could be expressed only by
those who had felt them in themselves. Preachers preach andOf the eighth article (Octavo quod ... ), he said that theteach out of books; in their attention to parchments, they

man of free spirit has a perfect right to ignore all the injunc-

forget what they are teaching about. But anyone who per-tions of the Church, and is not bound by any rule. In inward

ceives things in the intimate depth of the divine abyss cancontemplation, he need not participate in the elevation of

speak like him.

the body of Christ, in order not to be disturbed in the purity

But what was the reason for his pallor,208 he was asked;

and loftiness of his [own] contemplation. That would be to

was this the result of some weakness? He said it did stem

waste his time in the outward world. A man who is perfectfrom a weakness of some sort, but he did not wish to reveal

in the freedom of spirit does not need to receive any sacra-

its cause for the time being.

ment, unless he has wandered from the path so badly that
he wants to lose his way. 205

Would the freedom of spirit allow him to deny [what hehad admitted]? Yes. If there was a threat to his body, he could

Even if he has wandered that far, it is just as possible for

legitimately have denied and abjured as many times as was

him to find God in food as in the sacrament of the Eucharist; indeed, he would probably find more pleasure in it. 206

necessary to save himself, without sinning. He would not belying if he swore and denied in this way, but would be tell-

If he was never baptized, and nobody knew this, he would

ing the truth. If, for example, he had known his own sister

not worry about it, unless he had made up his mind to losecarnally, and had been accused of it, he would have had thehis way. If a heathen was in the freedom of spirit, he would

right to deny it and to swear that it was not true . By act-

have no need ofbaptism.

ing thus, a man of Free Spirit would not be uttering a lie,

Similarly, the man of free spirit need not confess, because
he cannot commit sin and he rejects all sacraments.

because he would mean by it that he had not done it in eternity. He does not have to express himself within the frame-

No one can express the truth of illumination except hework of the temporal. If he can thereby mislead the inquisitor

who has found it in himself and is truly free. The inquisitor

and his accuser, he is telling the truth on the basis of free-ought therefore to show intense gratitude for the revelations

dom, in which not even the slightest lie can exist.209

with which he had been illuminated. In his view, such reve186

THE MOVEMENT OF THE

FREE SPIRITPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRITThe Men of lntellioence82

the retreat where Ruysbroeck died in 1381.) A song ridiculing the inquisitor was also current in Brussels, according to Latomus.2 11 Appointed by Peter of Ailly, the bishopof Cambrai and a friend of John Gerson, Henry was given
the task of uprooting the considerable remnants of thewidespread movement instituted almost a century earlier
by Bloemardine.2t2 He succeeded in getting William toabjure the most subversive part of their doctrine and to
put the blame for it on the dead Giles. William was sentenced to three years in prison, then to seclusion in a monastery of his order.213
The leniency of this punishment may have been related
to the support this group enjoyed both among the working classes and the notables of Brussels (its meetings being
held in a tower belonging to an alderman).

On June 12, 1411, William of Hildemissem, of the Order ofCarmelites, appeared before the inquisitor Henry of Selles,
who was acting for the Episcopal court of Cambrai. He was
accused - along with a layman who had by then died, Gilesof Canter (or Giles the Cantor or Aegidius Cantor) - ofhaving carried out certain responsibilities in a Free Spiritgroup in Brussels known as the Men of Intelligence.
William was born at Malines.210 His brother was Jan of
Hildemissem, priest of one of the parishes of Neckerspoel,in Flanders, until 1394. In 1572 there was still a descendant of the Hildernissems, Brother Adrian, among the Carmelites at Malines.
According to Goyers, William was a reader of the Holy
Scriptures in the Carmelite monastery at Tirlemont. We
do not know the circumstances of his meeting with Giles,
a sexagenarian layman and illiteratus, claimed by some to
be of noble family. It is possible that they were brought
together through a common interest in the theories ofHeilwige Bloemardine, which were all more inveteratebecause they were drawn from the inexhaustible wellwhere the appetite for pleasure discovers in its subtleties
a justification for freedom.
No inquisitor, except Jan van Ruysbroeck, had daredattack Bloemardine, and even Ruysbroeck, in the sanctuary of Groenendael, still took care not to mention her byname (as if some mist of passion floated between the young
priest of Saint Gudula and the Lady Heilwige ). Likewise,
the supporters of the group led by Giles and William tried
to assassinate Henry of Selles as he was crossing a ford.
(Henry, in fact, was attached to the Abbey of Groenendael,
188

83

Articles submitted for retraction by William of Hildermssem:
1. The said lay seducer [Giles of Canter] repeated manytimes to a number of listeners, "I am the savior of mankind.
Through me they will see the Christ, as they see the Father
through the mediation of Christ."214

2. In the end, the devil will be saved. But then he will
no longer be the devil, and magnificent Lucifer will be themost humble of all. In the end, everyone will be saved.215
3. The devil did not carry Jesus to the top of the temple.

4. One day as he was walking along, Giles told me thatthe Holy Spirit inspired him and said to him, "You havereached the state of a three-year-old child. You will no longer
fast; quite the reverse, you will eat milk products during
Lent. All men and women of the sect should do this. TheyP RIN C IPA L

M A N I F E S TAT I 0 N S 0 F

T H E F· R E E S p I R 1T

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

should not bother with fasting. Wh~n they can do it without attracting the attention of people outside the sect, theyshould eat meat during Lent and on holy days."216

5. They pay no heed to the statutes, precepts and commandments of the Church, nor to prayer, because God does
what he intends and wishes to do, and there is no need toaddress prayers to him.217

6. They do not bother to confess, but, solely to avoid
arousing people's anger, they do sometimes go to a priest.
They admit some venial sin to him, but remain silent about .
their criminal lechery and their mortal sins. Thus, as someof them have explained, they cannot be accused of indifference (toward the Church or be accused of a lack offaith].218
7. They do not allow any of the rigors of penance, believ-

ing that we have no shortage of that [in life].219

8. Among the women of their sect, there is one who
refuses to make love with anyone. Therefore, she has to endure a great deal of persecution from the other members,both men and women, who blame her for abstaining fromall carnal relations. 220

9. The said Giles had a particular way of making love which was not, however, against nature - which he was certain Adam had used in paradise. Brother William did not
follow him in this path.22t
10. They developed a private language: they called theact of love "the pleasure of paradise" or "acclivity" [ascension]. They can thus describe their libidinous acts in irreproachable terms which other people cannot understand. 222
11. Among them there was an old woman whom the said

layman called Seraphine. She openly declared that it was
permissible to make love outside of marriage without sin.
Indeed, such acts were purely natural, like eating and drink-ing. Yet, unlike the other two, this act was condemned. This
is why she, and others, never ceased to be astonished at theblindness of men who commonly think this way. 223
12. One of the women, who was married, made no dis-tinction between one man and another. She admitted themall, without distinction, depending on the time and theplace. This practice is quite common among the women of
the group.
13. Brother William did not share his thoughts witheveryone. He shared only his intimate conviction with afew; namely, with those of the group who indulged in theact of carnal union without remorse or fear.
14. According to Brother William, all their acts could

be excused or justified by reference to the Holy Scriptures,
except coitus, which the Church condemned. He therefore
recommended that his disciples be very careful when talking
about this illicit copulation. 224

15. When some talked about the way Brother William
had been forced to repudiate the theses he had preached, thesaid Seraphine had replied, "He did not repudiate them, hemerely stated, 'I did not say that, but this,' and by adding or
removing a word here or there from his discourse, by correcting his manner of expressing himself, he escaped unpunished." The result was that he was regarded as having
confirmed his statements rather than repudiating them.
16. They related all their contrary and infamous acts to

divine will, saying that God willed it thus, not so much by his
permissive will as by his beneficent and efficacious will.225

17. They met outside the city walls of Brussels, in a tower
belonging to an alderman of the city, and there celebrated
their conventicles. 226

18. They say that the period of the old law was the age

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITof the Father, and the period of the new law, the age of theSon. Now the period of the Holy Spirit has arrived, which
they call the period of Eli. The Scriptures are abolished, withthe result that everything previously considered true is now
denied, including Catholic doctrine and the Catholic truths
which preach poverty, chastity and obedience. According tothem, it is the opposite of these truths that should be propagated in the reign of the Holy Spirit.227

19. They attribute all their inspirations and most secretsuggestions to the Holy Spirit. This is the source from which
the said layman frequently drew his prophecies. As a result of
one of these inspirations, he ran a long way, completely naked,
carrying a plate of meat on his head for some poor person. 228

20. They were surprised when anyone made the sign ofthe cross, and asked, "Are you worthy to be blessed at thispoint?" Similarly, the sect's supporters, especially the women,
persuaded several honest men not to preach chastity or virginity, or advocate continence, either in public or in private.
They claimed that no one was a virgin, with only one exception, whom they called wisdom.229

21. They defend ideas about purgatory, just as about hell,
which are opposed to those of the Church. 230 And they havea strange and false way of talking about these matters.23t

The Picards or Ada mites of Bohemia
84

The Hussite movement developed after the execution of
Jan Huss at Constance in 1415, and later liberated Bohemia from the yoke of the Church. The Taborites are a partof the movement related to Waldensian elements in which
voluntary poverty provided an entry for Free Spirit ideas.
Around 1418,232 groups ofPicards233 arrived in Bohemia,

PRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

fleeing the persecution that had been instituted against theMen of Intelligence, or using the Hussite insurrection as
an opportunity to practice their freedom unhindered.
The Picard doctrine prevailed, especially in regionswith weak Taborite influence, such as Zatec, Plzen andPrague. It manifested itself, in watered-down form, in theclosed arena of theological dispute, in the works of Sigmund of Repan and, primarily, in those of Martin Huska,
called Loquis, who preached a sort of Dolcinism, evoking the end of time and the rule of the saints.234 According to him there was to be "a new kingdom of saints onearth, and the good would have no more suffering." He
added, "If Christians would always have to suffer in thisway, I would not want to be a servant of God."235
In February 1421 Lawrence of Brezova recorded in his
chronicle that Free Spirit ideas were gaining ground in
Taborite areas. "On account of this heresy, alas, the brothers living at Tabor split into two fractions, one Picard andthe other Taborite. The more faithful section, the Taborites, expelled more than 200 men and women infectedwith the Picard heresy."236
The term Adamites, as I. de Beausobre called them,refers to the Edenic innocence of their behavior, which
they were beginning to propagate openly.237 According
to Lawrence:
As they went on their way through the forests and hills, someof them fell into such madness that men and women took
off their clothes and went naked, saying that clothes had
been adopted as a result of the sin committed by their firstparents, but that they were in a state of innocence. By a similar madness, they imagined that they did not sin if one of193

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

the brothers had commerce with one of the sisters. And if

in a forest outside Bematrice were captured and executed,
except for one whose life was spared so that he could givean account of the group's doctrine. Others briefly occupied the fortress at Ostrov before escaping to the south.
And there were accusations, dating back .to the time of
their retreat, that they had also raided and pillaged villages.
Although Huska abjured and severed his connection
with the Picards in March 1421, he became a sacrificial victim of the generalized terror. While he was traveling toMoravia with Procope the One-eyed, he fell into the handsof the Hussite Baron Borek. Zizka desired that the two ofthem be burned in Prague. But, because of the fear ofunrest- for Huska had large numbers of supporters in thecity- the magistrates sent their executioner to Rudnice,where, after lengthy torture, Huska and Procope were put
to death.

the woman had a child, they said that she had conceived by
the Holy Spirit.238 [Baptism does not exist, because] thechildren of parents living in sanctity [that is, as membersof the community] are conceived without original mortal
sin .... 239 They pray to the God that they possess withinthemselves, saying "Our Father, who art within us ...."2 40

Huska remained at a distance from the Picard radicalization. Loyal to the apostolic tradition he salvaged themore moderate demands and incorporated them into a
defense of religious modernism, then preoccupied withscholastic quarrels about the Eucharist. The true spokesman of the Picard community, which remained autonomous from December 1420 until January 1421, was Peter
Kanis, supported by ordinary men and women like Rohan
the Blacksmith, Nicholas, called Moses, Adam and Mary.
The chroniclers were indignant over sermons preachedin taverns and the sexual license celebrated throughout
the group.
The Taborite leader, Nicholas of Pehlrimov, publisheda treatise against Peter Kanis, and, around mid-April, John
Zizka, the military leader, sent his army against the groupthat had been expelled in Tabor. Fifty prisoners, including Peter Kanis, were burned at Klokoty. The survivors of
the Picard community withdrew to a place not far fromTabor, where they organized resistance under the leadership of Rohan the Blacksmith. On April 20, after violent
battles, they were defeated by Zizka, and twenty-five prisoners were sent to the stake. Others were burned at Prague,
yet the movement did not disappear entirely. On October
21, 1421, some supporters of Kanis who had taken refuge
194

Herman of Rijswick
85

The process of desanctification - which the Reformation
was to take over and develop into a rationalism underwritten by divine law- brought the Holy Spirit back down toa human reality of intellect. This was in sharp contrast to
the approach of the movement of the Free Spirit: no longer
was the deity resolved into a flux of passions for which the
body supplied an alchemical matrass and consciousness a
principle of transmutation. Even atheism, with its claim
to have deposed God, actually preserves him as a secularseparation - crystallized in a principle of intellectually
governing both the individual body and the social body.
Herman of Rijswick belongs not to the movement of
the Free Spirit, but to that of free thinking. He is one in a

PRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRITTHE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

the whole world and saved no one. For indeed men kill eachlong line of intellectuals whose boldness lies less in theircritical ideas than in the recklessness that impels them tobrave the stake in order to propagate openly those ideas that
outcasts have always secretly espoused from the moment
they escaped the clutches of fear and the priests: namely,that there is no God, that the world has existed for all eternity and that religions are a web of absurdities in which
imbeciles wrap themselves.24t
Like Thomas Scoto, Herman would have vanished frommemory, which is regularly purged by the Church and secular powers, if there had not been- ironically, within the
Church - those executioners who perpetuated their victims' memories.

other because of him and his farcical gospels [suum Evangelium fa tuum]. All Christ's deeds are contrary to human-kind and right reason. I openly deny that Christ is the Sonof Almighty God. I challenge that Mosaic law was received
directly from a visible God. I believe our faith to be a fable,
as is proved by the antics described in our Scriptures, biblical legends and evangelical ravings. I regard the Gospel as
false, for anyone who can create the world without incarnation can redeem it without incarnation.
I have admitted all these articles and similar ones with
my own mouth and while being of sane mind, before theinquisitor, the notary and witnesses. And I add, I was borna Christian, but I am not a Christian, because Christians are

86

utterly stupid.2 4 3Records of the Accusation of Herman of Rijswick:

Herman was sentenced to prison in The Hague, but hemanaged to escape. Arrested and condemned as an apostate for having distributed "several books written by his
hand," he was sent to the stake on December 15, 1512,
by the inquisitor Jacob van Hoogstraten. His books wereburned with him.

In the year 1502, Herman of Rijswick was sentenced to life
imprisonment by Brother John Ommaten, Dominican, Professor of Sacred Theology and inquisitor.
Here are the main heretical articles which cost him life
imprisonment. He said, first, that the world had existed forall eternity,2 4 2 and had not begun at the creation, which was
an invention of the foolish Moses, as it implies in the Bible.

The Alumbrados

Second, God never created angels, good or bad, as thatis not mentioned anywhere in the Scriptures. There is nohell, as we imagine it. After this life, we will have no otherlife at all as individuals. When Socrates died, his soul died,as it had begun, with his body.
The most wise Aristotle, and his commentator Averroes,
have come closest to the truth.
Christ was an imbecile, a visionary naif who misled
simple people. And I maintain that this Christ has damned

87

According to Bataillon, the first appearance of the qualifier alumbrado was in 1512, when it was applied to a Franciscan "illuminated by the darkness of Satan."244
In Toledo, where the ancient influence of heterodox
Sufis may have survived clandestinely, a group formed
around Isabel de La Cruz, who acquired such a reputation
for holiness that the Church was hesitant to take action
197

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

against her, even though her theories echoed those of
Margaret Porete.
On September 23, 1525, Grand Inquisitor Manriquepromulgated an edict against the Alumbrados in Toledo.
Among the forty-eight propositions it condemns, some,amalgamated with those of Lutheran origin, belong within
the movement of the Free Spirit.
Isabel de La Cruz was arrested in 1529 and sentenced
to life imprisonment. A year later one of her disciples, thepreacher Juan Lopez, was burned at Grenada.
The chronicler Alfonso de Santa Cruz has left a list of
the main articles condemned at the trial of the Alumbradosof Toledo:
They say that the love of God in man is God .... 245 [They]
assert that ecstasy, or illumination, leads to such perfectionthat men can no longer sin, neither mortally nor venially, andthat illumination makes them free and releases them fromall authority, and that they are not answerable to anyone,even God, as they have entrusted themselves to him.2 46
They call the host a bit of pastry, the cross a stick andgenuflection idolatry. They regard the annihilation of theirown will as the supreme glory.... 24 7 They deny hell. ...
Far from lamenting the Passion of Christ, they rejoiceover it, and indulge in every sort of pleasure during Holy
Week. They affirm that the Father was incarnate like theSon, and believe they can speak with this God neither more
nor less than they can speak with the Corregidor of Escalona.
When they want to remember Our Lady, they look at awoman's face instead of contemplating an image. They
called the conjugal act union with God. The sect centeredaround Isabel de La Cruz and a certain Father Alcazar. 248

PRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRITAt the same time, a group of Alumbrados was developing around the beata Francisca Hernandez, from Canillas,near Salamanca. Around 1519 her court was made up ofyoung clerics: Bernardino Tovar, the Franciscan Gil Lopez
and the young theologian Antonio of Medrano, whose
amorous relationship with Francisca was denounced to theInquisition, which condemned the lovers to live separately.
The saint thus left for Valladolid, where she lived firstwith Bernardino Tovar and then with the banker Pedro
Cazalla. There seems to have existed an occult center,called "paradise," where Edenic innocence presided overrefinements oflove. This same behavior also appears among
the Men of Intelligence, where chastity, libertinism and"refined love" existed together. After the trial Antonioof Medrano declared that, since he had known Francisca,
God had given him the grace to no longer experience thedesires of the flesh: he could now sleep in the same bed
with a woman without prejudice to his soul. Francisco
Ortiz, by contrast, affirmed: "After having had relations
with her for about twenty days, I realized I had acquired
more wisdom in Valladolid than if I had studied in Parisfor twenty years. For it was not Paris but paradise which
was able to teach me this wisdom."Francisca was regarded as having attained such a degreeof holiness that continence was no longer necessary. But theessence of her teaching is concerned with the impeccability conferred by love, which the theologian Melchior Cano
expresses in a formulation characteristic of the movementof the Free Spirit: "To remove fear and to give assurance." 249
In 1529 the Inquisition arrested Francisca and her follower, Maria Ramirez, using the usual hostile methods andtheir refinements, torture and the quemadero, to make the199THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

two women denounce as Lutherans Bernardino Tovar, hisbrother and fourteen other people.
Although it may seem ironic to associate Lutheranismwith people whom Luther and Calvin abhorred and called"spiritual libertines," the inquisitors' strategy was driven
by a fundamental caution. In s~veral regions of Spain the
Alumbrados represented such a powerful force that the
Church did not dare attack them directly, preferring totreat them as if they were Protestants, whose condemnation would not arouse any controversy. There were so manyof them in Seville that the Inquisition gave up trying tointervene. "The greater part of the city is infected," reported a letter of the period. "There is not a duchess or amarquise, or any woman of high or low condition, who
cannot be accused of some error of this heresy."250
The mysticism of Teresa of Avila and Saint John of the
Cross - first held in suspicion, then later endorsed by
the Church - would channel passions and natural urges
toward less carnal ecstasies, including the trick of selfdivinization.
A group in Llerena ( Estremadura) provides evidence ofthe persistence of the movement in the second half of thesixteenth century. In 1578 a Dominican, Alonso de La
Fuente, while attacking the Alumbrados in a sermon, wasinterrupted by a woman from Llerena who said, "Padre,
the life they lead is better than yours, as is their doctrine." Her movements were subsequently shadowed by
the Holy Office, after which she confessed the names ofher companions.
The teaching was spread by eight members of the secular clergy, whose two leaders, Fernando Alvarez and Father
Chamizo, advised novices to pray and meditate on thewounds of the crucified Christ with such ardor that it
would provoke violent emotion, a flushed complexion,
sweats, heart pain and nausea, and would finally culminate
in a movement of desire they called "melting in the loveof God."2 51
Rendered incapable of sin through this orgasmic ecstasy,
believers reached a state of perfection wherein they were
justified in following their desires and in challenging therites and authority of the Church. The accusation described
them, like the Beghards, as permanently plunged into asort of inward exaltation.
Apart from Alvarez and Chamizo, who were accused ofhaving initiated thirty-four people into the heavenly pleasures, the group in and around Llerena comprised Juan
Garcia, cleric of Almendralejo; the theologian Rodrigo
Vasquez, parish priest of La Morera, who declared, "If
the Turks had been able to capture and govern Spain, we
would all live as we liked"; Doctor Cristobal Mejia, clericof Cazalla; Pedro de Santa Maria, a Franciscan from Valladolid, age sixty-three; and a priest from Za&a, Francisco
de Mesa, who frequently said, when speaking of the Passion of Christ, "What is the point of thinking about thisman's death every day?"
At Za&a the followers met at the home of Lari Gomez,
the widow of Francisco Garcia of Barcarota. One of themost enthusiastic of them, a cobbler from Llerena named
Juan Bernal, planned to present a memorandum to thecourt in defense of the Alumbrados.
The group had been in existence for four years before
the bishop of Salamanca, Francisco de So to, was instructedto conduct an inquisition into it, in 1578. His death at
Llerena on June 21, of that year was blamed on the Alum-

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PRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

brados, who were said to have poisoned him. Most of them
perished at the stake.252

Doctrine and Teachinns of Eloi the Roofer.

The Loyists and Eloi Pruystinck"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom ofheaven."256

Eloi Pruystinck, whom Antwerp chronicles call Loy (orLodewick Schaliedecker, or Eloi the Roofer), and theSumma doctrinae, Eligius Pruystinck, came from a proletarian background. He was described as "illiteratus etmecchanicus" and "die yeen yeleerdeyt hebbende" (the uneducated).253 The bill of indictment confirmed that heworked as a "slate roofer" and that he lived in the heartof the working-class neighborhood of Saint-Andre in the
Rijke Beukelaarstraat. 254
In the wake of its economic success Antwerp saw aproliferation of personal fortunes, which would either beused to increase profits or for charity. The new wave of
individual initiative recklessly crashed onto the shore of asociety sterilized by: its agrarian archaisms; the belief that
the Protestants found themselves in a divine capital; freeexchange, which provided the basis of a godless social contract; and brazen private enterprise, in which the businessman willingly considered himself a demiurge.
During these years of intellectual ferment, often coloredby Protestantism, it is likely that Eloi attended the secretmeetings on Eikerstraat, where the Scriptures were freely
discussed, before the law put a stop to them. He may havemet David Joris of Delft,255 who was certainly in Antwerp
in 1524.Joris's Wonderboeck, published around 1542, shows
Eloi's influence, as well as how the two men diverged.
Jules Frederichs published a short text by David directedagainst the Roofer:
202

What Is Meant Exactly by BeinB Poor in Spirit: Anainst theGiven that we participate in the image and glory of God,and that we are created to praise him ...
Some people, nevertheless, think that I have indeed (byall appearances) wished to attribute too much power to man;and that, far from having been created by God, I created him
myself. But it shall be said that no one will preach contrary
to my thought. I shall explain how it is to be understood.
In doing so, I shall prove that I seek not my own glory but
only the glory of God; that I intend to indicate and enlarge
the one and only door which leads to the Lord, namely thatwhich lies in all the Saints and the Faithful. By this, I mean
to reduce and annihilate by the power of my attack certain
people who deny the resurrection . . ..
"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdomof heaven."
Some people try to use this verse to claim that no one ispoor in spirit unless they have neither will, nor possessions,nor knowledge. They explain it anew, with their own interpretation, which they present as the truth, as they mockrepentance and penance. And they say that those who worry
about the Lord, who seek to do good and to respect the mostprecious wishes of God as expressed in the Gospel, are fools.
For, no matter how long man tries to fulfill the most precious will of God, he is not poor at all, because he still has
the will to accomplish the divine will. Man would be empty
if he acted as if he were not, as if he neither wished nor
desired anything, neither God, nor Truth, nor himself, since,
being empty, he would recognize himself as such and would
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want nothing else but himself (which is now, however, himself again, as was said earlier): what I wanted was Me, andwhat I was was what I wanted, etc.
Thus, we pray to God (he says) to make us lose God, andto deny life to everything: oneself, truth, God and knowledge. Not to live, nor feel, nor know that God lives withinyou, to lose your will, your knowledge and your life, boththat of God and your own life (or the life of any creature),
and, further, not to occupy any place in the universal system

PRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

for asserting in his Confession that there was no "otherguide but the inward world of God, which comes from theHoly Spirit"?260 There is no proof that he did, but there
are several points of agreement between the two men.
Eloi confronted Philip Melanchthon in the presence ofLuther, who was so scandalized by the opinions of his
interlocutor and the workings of the devil he saw in them,that he sent the Protestants of Antwerp a warning aboutthe "Rumpelaeist":

in which God could act to manifest himselfby some distinctive sign: this, according to his teachings, is what primarily

Luther - An die Christen zu Antwerpen [To the Christians

defines a poor man.257

of Antwerp]
I have heard how much your region is being agitated by minds

While Eloi was developing ideas in the Free Spirit tradition David Joris was throwing himself into the free-forall inaugurated by Luther and Calvin, which spawned alitany of popes founding new churches on the stumbling
blocks of their own personal problems. 258 Less naive andless scrupulous than Eloi, Joris, chased from the Netherlands to Switzerland by the ecumenical police of the Inquisition, the Consistory and humanist informers, would liveon the money of his disciples and die peacefully in Basel,
after having lived a life of wealth and distinction under thename of john ofBruges.259
In February 15 25 Eloi set off for Wittenberg, convincedof the correctness of his ideas and determined to havethem accepted by Luther, whom all Europe was watching;a man caught up in his sudden fame, and whose shadow, outof all proportion to the pettiness of the person, was spreading across the world. Did Eloi meet Hans (or Johannes)
Denck, banished from Nuremberg at the age of twentythree for having located forty paradoxes in the Bible and204

full of error, who do all they can to impede the progress ofChristian truth; I know that a devil incarnate has arrived
among you, with the intention of leading you into error anddistorting the true meaning of the Gospel so that you will
fall into his darkness. So that you can avoid his traps moreeasily, I shall tell you some ofhis propositions: "Every man,"according to him, "has the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit isnothing else but our reason. - Every man has faith; natureteaches me to do to my neighbor what I would have him do
to me; to want to act thus is to have faith. -Everyone will
have eternal life; there is neither hell, nor damnation; theflesh alone will be damned. -The law is violated by wicked
desires, so long as the will does not give way to desire. Whoever does not possess the Holy Spirit does not possess
sin, either, because he does not possess reason." Everyone
wants to be more learned than Luther, and to win their spurs
at my expense. Once your devil had left my presence, hedenied all these articles, although they had been shown tobe his and although he had betrayed himself by defending205

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

several of them. Truthfully, he is unreliable and a liar, full of
insolence and audacity, quite capable of both affirming anddenying something, at the same time, not daring to argue anyof the propositions he puts forward: the only reason he camehere was so that he could boast that he had disputed withus. He energetically maintained that God's commandments
are good, and that God did not wish sin to exist, to both ofwhich I willingly agreed; but what he obstinately refused toadmit is that God, while not willing sin, allows it to govern
men. I have no doubt that he will tell you that I have said
that sin is willed by God .... 261

The letter262 is not dated, but its wording places it
somewhere around March 27, 1525, the day Martin Lutherwrote to Spalatin: "I have had a new species of prophet
here, from Antwerp, who affirmed that the Holy Spirit isnothing other than intelligence and natural reason. How
furiously Satan has unleashed his forces against the Word!
I regard it as one of the harbingers of the Day of Judgmentthat Satan can see that day approaching, and is therefore
spewing out all his anger."263
Back in Antwerp Eloi continued his agitation. In allprobability he met the humanist Johannes Campanus, agentle man and a dreamer with no aggressions and no pretensions to being a great thinker. 264 His project On the Possibility of a Union of the Christians and the Turks was partly
inspired by Eloi's ideas.265
Eloi and nine of his friends were arrested in February
1526 for the crime of heresy and reading prohibited books.
On the twenty-fifth they were sentenced to do public penance, a light punishment due to the relatively moderate
penal regime that the regent, Margaret of Austria, encour206

PRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

aged in the Netherlands. 266 Eloi and his friends were hostile to all forms of martyrdom, and they did not hesitate
to deny and retract everything. The fact that the pectoralia,
in which the accused were dressed, bore effigies of Luther,and that the accounts of the hearing named the guilty parties as Lutherans, was a normal consequence of the indiscriminate malice behind the Inquisition, which delighted
in mixing libertarian thinking with Lutheran asceticism.
Of the eight accused - a bookbinder; his servant Peter;
Jan Schoelant; the wife of Adrian Formant and her sister;Roch de Kelnere, a fabric cutter; Master Peter Barbier; andRut, a stocking maker - none reappeared before the Antwerp courts until 1544.
After making honorable amends Eloi was sentenced towear a sign on his chest designating him a heretic, but,
according to van Meteren, he simulated such perfect devotion that the magistrates excused him from wearing it.2 67
Thus protected by the shadow of the law the group
set to work with renewed energy amid the general atmosphere of pleasure that arose at the end of the plague in
15 30. Some Loyist texts were published and diffused in the
Netherlands and Germany. These were the work of either
Eloi or of Dominic ofUccle (Dominicus van Oucle), who
was described in the 1544 accusation as "writer of all theirbooks~"268 Emanuel van Meteren points to the presence ofseveral members of the bourgeoisie among the many followers,269 "the best, the richest and most highly regarded,
who lived with the others joyously and in an epicurean
manner." Later he talks of their "impious opinions, gratifying the world and the flesh, abusing and making fun of
the Roman Catholic religion as well as the Protestants."
The Loyists gradually stopped hiding and revealed them207

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

selves with a lack of caution regarded by some as impudence. Thus Camovianus, while passing through Antwerp
in 1533, witnessed the execution of some heretics on May
3, and later (in 1534) indignantly described the Illuminati
of Antwerp in a letter sent from Freiburg-in-Breisgau toJohannes Hess of Breslau. He wrote: "These men are far
more perverse and more obstinate than the Anabaptists."
Although he does not name them, the Loyists were theonly group in Antwerp at that time who were capable ofarousing more hatred in an austere reformer by their "perversity" and their "obstinacy" than the Anabaptists.
In 1531 Margaret of Austria ceded the regency of theNetherlands to her niece, Maria of Hungary, sister ofCharles V, who determined, as she wrote to her brother,to pursue the heretics "whether or not they show repentance, with enough severity to root out their error in asingle blow, with no other consideration except not todepopulate the provinces completely."
In 1534 the arrest of the French jeweler Christophe
Herault allows the identification of one of Eloi's followers mentioned in the list of those condemned in 1544.
Having fled from Paris, where he was wanted for Lutheranism, Herault fell into the hands of the law in Antwerp
on December 24.270 The justification for his order of imprisonment was that Herault did not possess any certification, either from the ecclesiastical or the lay authorities.
But no charge against him could be proven. He was set freeand, at the trial of 1544, escaped the accusation of relapsed
heresy, which would have sent him to the stake.
The persecution of the Anabaptists may have temporarily freed the Loyists from the menacing eye of the inquisitorial monster. The Loyists scoffed at baptism and rejected
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PRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

both the tyranny and the messianic violence of the supporters of Melchior Hoffmann and John of Battenburg, andtook no part in the Antwerp Anabaptists' attempt to seize
the town hall on May 11, 1535, which ended in the massacre of the Miinsterians.
Although ordinances and proclamations against the heretics were increasing, the siege of Antwerp gave Eloi andhis friends a reprieve. In 1542, the duke of Guelders, siding with the king of France in his war against Charles V,
sent the condottiere Martin van Rossem into the Campine,where he marched on Antwerp. Among the leaders of themilitias defending the city the chronicler Papenbrochius
cites the names of the van Berchems, disciples of David
Joris. And it was through the influence of the Jorists that
repression would fall upon the Loyists.
For several years the civil and ecclesiastical authorities
had tried desperately to crush a particular form of Anabaptism, a sort of individualist Anabaptism, led by the authorof the Wonderboeck. In 1544, at Deventer, a trap set by thepolice resulted in the arrest of Juriaan Ketel, a friend ofDavid Joris. Subjected to extreme torture he denounced
Cornelius van Lier, the lord of Berchem (a locality close
to Antwerp), his two brothers-in-law, Joachim and Regnier
van Berchem, and their mother as members of the sect.
He also named Geerit Kersemaker, the jeweler Christophe
Herault and a "slate roofer."
On July 8 the Deventer magistrate informed the governor, Maria of Hungary, and the Antwerp authorities. The
Protestants also reacted. In 1544 Vallerand Poullain ofStrasbourg wrote to Calvin: "Our brothers from Valenciennes, who recently brought us some writings of the
Quintinists, have returned .... I should be very pleased if
209THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

you could take up arms against the Quintinists .... My
brother Raymond writes that these horrors are spreadingin Lower Germany now, a result of the actions of two individuals called David and Eloi. He has not yet sent me theaccount of their doctrine, which he promised me. As soon
as he does, I will send it on to you." The "account of theirdoctrine" mentioned by Poullain's brother Raymond wasprobably the Summa doctrinae published by I. von Dollinger.
Eloi was arrested on july 15 or the night before and was
immediately tortured. From his first interrogation it waslearned that, nine or ten years earlier, Herault had boughta pamphlet from "Lodewyck Ruystinck, schaellideckere vanzynen ambachte"; that the said Eloi (whose name is given
here as Johannes Denck) had begged the Holy Church tohelp him believe in the resurrection of the body, but that
he had not succeeded, and that he regarded the body as
mortal and souls as eternally saved in God.
The first trial, in 1525, had been conducted by theInquisition. The second was conducted by the civil magistrature, at the urging of the governor, Maria of Hungary,
who demanded quick, merciless justice. On July 14, 15
or 16 the authorities seized Herault; then Jean Davion, arich bourgeois, originally from Lille; jan Dorhout, a poor
huckster; Dominic of Uccle, the scribe or author of thepamphlets; Germain Bousseraille, a poor peasant; Gabrielvan Hove, a rich fish merchant; Henry de Smet, or Smits,a painter and potter; Cornelius vanden Bossche, engraverand carver; Aerden Steenaerts; Adriaan Stevens; and janvan Heer.
In 15 26 Eloi had only a handful of supporters. Now theynumbered in the thousands. Many fled, going into exile
in England (where they probably joined the Familists ofHenry Niclaes27 1), in Germany and in Austria. They avoided
Holland, where repression against the Anabaptists and theJorists was peaking.
At the beginning of September, Davion and Dorhout,
who had been arrested in Antwerp, came face to face with
Eloi and Herault, who had been imprisoned in the castleofVilvorde, near Brussels. Around September 14, Dominicof Uccle, apprehended in Rosendael, was transferred to the
Steen at Antwerp. There, after learning of the tortures that
Eloi had undergone, he hanged himself in his cell while
his warder was absent.
Early in October, de Smet, Steenaerts, Bousseraille,van Hove and Stevens were arrested in Antwerp. Vanden
Bossche and van Heer escaped justice. On October 8,
Herault and Dorhout were sentenced to death. They were
beheaded the following day. About the same time, deSmet managed to escape. Eloi was returned to Antwerp
on October 18 and signed his death sentence on October
24. On October 25 he was burned extra muros. Davion,
Bousseraille and van Hove escaped the executioner's sword
until February 28, 1545. Stevens was set free and paid afine. On December 20, 1561, van Heer, who had sought
refuge in London, received amnesty for good behavior andreturned to Antwerp.
There is no reason to believe that the story of the Loyists
stops there. Leaving aside their influence on the Quintinists, the Familists, Dirk Coornhert's circle and the Ranters,
it would be interesting to look closely at the iconoclast
movement, the popular anticlerical demonstrations andthe "moral affairs" of the period. On October 2, 1555,
for example, a group of men and women practicing sexual freedom was reported in the area around Alost. In

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THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

1561 an attack on a Dominican monastery near Bruges was
attributed to the same group.2 72 The exploits of Jacob
Gherraerts, known as the Dutchman, leader of a "sect ofmurderers and thieves," no doubt call to mind the supporters of Battenburg more than the peaceable Loyists, but
Eloi's doctrine does not suggest that those trying to livein their own way would have let themselves be killed without defending themselves.
In the absence of Dominic of Uccle's books and pamphlets - which an analysis of the Indices librorum prohibitorum and chance research may one day bring to light - theonly evidence for the Loyist doctrine is Luther's letter, afragment by David Joris, the Summa doctrinae and local
chronicles. The theories of Quintin ofToumai and Antoine
Pocques, as summarized by Calvin in his diatribe against thespiritual libertines, reflect those ofEloi to some extent, andseem to derive from them. Finally, the "Apologetic Retortof Philip Mamix of Saint Aldegundis," which appeared inLeiden in 1598, contains, in addition to references to David
Joris, statements that are manifestly Loyist in origin.
The Summa doctrinae, which was almost certainly thework of Raymond Poullain, reflects the Loyist confessions
and, therefore, the least compromising aspects of theiropinions and behavior. (At his first interrogation, Eloi
acknowledged the rejection of the Resurrection, the opposition between justice and mercy, and the paradox ofanimal and spiritual being.)
The account, whose impassive tone was designed tofeed the Calvinist spirit, provides some understandingof the ideas and behavior publicly acknowledged by theaccused and attested to in their pamphlets. But languageof that sort is simultaneously truth and dissimulation.273
This attitude and behavior is undeniably part of the
Socratic tradition of skepticism. Nonetheless, doubt isused here in a way that differs from the rationalist and tolerant ideal of Montaigne, Rabelais and Coomhert, and evenfrom Geoffroy Vallee's Flau de fa joy, Noel Joumet's mockery274 or Thomas Woolston's A Discourse on the Miracles of
Our Saviour, which call to mind allusions to Christ in theSumma doctrinae.
When Eloi affirmed before Luther that "Every man has
the Holy Spirit; the Holy Spirit is nothing else but our reason," he did not speak of a matter of simple rationalist
prejudice, but of the subversion of the dominant language,
coded in accordance with scriptural dogma. Luther regarded the translation of the Bible as an opportunity toremove Rome's monopoly over its imposed meaning and,
consequently, over the whole ordering of Christian life.
But how would it be possible to lay claim to the only possible authorized interpretation, when the texts were now
within everyone's reach? The Protestant prophets' weapon
against the authority of Rome turned against them withthe rapid spread of printing.
Seen in the light of the rationality encouraged by the development of mercantile society, the Church was revealed
as both a web of absurdities and a Spanish inn, where everyone found only what they brought to it. The collapse of
sacred language and its distortions is indicative of the way
in which the Loyists and their competitors lived according
to their desires, hiding the carnal behind the ambiguitiesof the spiritual. Guillaume Farel was correct to consider
the libertines more dangerous than the papists, "because
the papist, admitting that there is a literal and a historical

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meaning, condemns neither of them; whereas the libertine, who says that all Scripture has a dual meaning, spiritual and literal, condemns the literal and accepts only theone he calls spiritual."275

them - "Work was not something they regarded as appropriate" - it is significant that, according to the accounts of
the hearing, none of the accused left any property or possessions. There is every reason to believe that the money
used by the Loyists for the pursuit of pleasure, the printing and diffusion of pamphlets, even for the protection andflight of supporters threatened by repression, came fromwealthy bourgeoisie. Those contributors were moved togive money not out of a sense of asceticism or sacrifice,but out of a sudden need to express their humanity, as if
the passion for pleasure would allow them to break withthe mechanisms of profit. Among the Loyists, therefore,
the poor acceded to a life without financial anxiety, thanks
to a realization on the part of the rich that they could givethemselves up to pleasure without fear of remorse, sin, theanxieties of possession or the resentment of the deprived.
It is necessary to mention here a legend, substantiatedby Norman Cohn and Romana Guarnieri, which originates not in any historical fact but in a novel by Georges
Eekhoud, The Libertines of Antwerp: The Legend and Historyof the Loyists. 277 Eekhoud was, in his way, the Dumas of
Eloi Pruystinck, and he records that the Loyists were in
the habit of dressing in silk clothes, made to look like rags
or workers' clothes, on which Herault used diamonds andgems to depict the plaster stains of a mason or the discarded entrails from a fishmonger's stall. Eekhoud claims
to have taken this information from an oral tradition
that was still alive around 1900 in the neighborhood ofSaint-Andre.

Mamix of Saint Aldegundis put it more crudely: "Theymaintained that the ceremonies and sacraments were only
children's games, and that the word contained in the Scriptures was not the true word of God but only the husk orcovering of it, and that it could be used by heretics as well
as by the orthodox."
Drawing up the bill of indictment against the libertine
to whom he was responding, Marnix wrote: "He mocks
the prayers of the Church, even the prayers addressed to
God for your salvation and prosperity, gentlemen, and forthe good and the peace of all the people. He makes fun ofthe preaching of the word of God, saying that it is deadsyllables, with no efficacity. He slanders ecclesiasticalorder and discipline as the tyranny and inquisition of
Spain. He rejects schools, colleges and universities. He
sneers at the commentaries and interpretations of holyand learned men ...."276
The Summa doctrinae also emphasizes the extent towhich masters and experts were turned into objects ofderision by the Loyists, who, according to David Joris,"say that those who worry about the Lord, who seek to
do good and to respect the most precious wishes of God
as expressed in the Gospel, are fools."
Not only did they repudiate all the forms of the Church its power, rites, sacredness and laws- but they even seemto have broken the boundaries that appropriation of wealthplaced on the freedom of pleasure. Without pretending
to apply Calvin's description of Pocques and Quintin to214

90

Extract from the History of the Netherlands by van Meteren:

215

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRITYet it [the Inquisition] seems without a doubt to have stopped
numerous forms of crudely disguised heresies, which had
blended with the reforms and changes in religion and which,alas, caused numerous disturbances in Germany and the Netherlands, creating many followers in different cities, such as
the Anabaptists of Amsterdam, whose deranged faith caused
them to run naked in the streets, as many stories report. The
same was true of those in Munster, and the supporters ofDavid Joris, etc.

obstinate, nor the leader of a sect, as most of the others had.
The Antwerp magistrates merely sentenced him to wear a tin
sign on his chest, designating him a heretic. The trickster
was so skilled in hypocrisy that he obtained a pardon fromthe priests, on the grounds that his heresy was nothing but
empty words, malignantly interpreted to his disadvantage. He
expressed profound remorse, scrupulously respecting Roman
Catholic doctrine and following the Mass every day with somuch devotion and ostentation that he seemed completely

Around 1540278 a burgher of Antwerp, a slate roofer
named Eloi, began to gain attention and, although he hadno education, succeeded in persuading many people that
there was no resurrection of the body after life on earth;that natural death was resurrection; that the soul (a soulincapable of sin) then returned to God, whence it had come;that the innate torment of the body, human misery and the
decay of the flesh were the true hell; and that there was nothing else to be expected or feared, etc.
This doctrine was pleasing and indulgent to the world,
but it was not the wise and intelligent doctrine which proclaims that man, the most wretched of all creatures, wasnonetheless created in the image of God and thereby sharesin the wisdom, justice, power, grace and love of God, which
renders the sensible man both content and fearful; so thatthe reasonable man finds a pleasure beyond all others inthanking God for his love and in praising his name eternally,
because he thinks he has been created a little better than theother creatures.

in accordance with the Church. Then 279 he traveled throughGermany, propagating his doctrine among the people.
When he defended his teachings in writing, some zealots
encouraged him to argue with the learned Philip Melanchthon in the presence of Martin Luther. There, his heresies
were exposed and his arguments refuted. Luther said openlythat he was possessed by the devil. After that, when he had
set off to return to Antwerp, Luther and Melanchthon ensured
the magistrates of the city that there was a heretic troublemaker among their citizens. They pointed out his arguments
and his heretical statements, and explained where they appeared in his writings and how they were propagated, etc.
This is why the magistrates kept an eye on Eloi, eventhough the warnings coming from heretics were themselves
suspect. Eventually, large numbers of followers gatheredaround him, among them some of the richest and most highly
respected of the bourgeoisie. They lived with each other ina joyous and epicurean manner, believing that they had foundtrue knowledge and peace of conscience, driving all inward

Many defenders of religion resisted the new ideas [ofEloi]. This was why the heretic Eloi, whose followers werecalled "Loyists," became the subject of legal proceedings.
But, in fear, he did not show himself to be perverse, norand spiritual disputes from their hearts.
Eloi distributed pamphlets outlining his heresies. He anda number of rich citizens were arrested as a result of these
Proclamations. Two were beheaded. Then Eloi himself was

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condemned to the stake for having continued to spread his

In the first place, they rely systematically on the terms ofheretical doctrine despite his promise. Although he was

the Scriptures, according to which God, by his laws, threat-

ready to retract, he was burned around 1546,280 praying

ens all men, Christians, Jews and Turks, with torment andGod to grant him a speedy death.

damnation, while also, by his word, promising salvation toJohn Davion and someone named Germain were beheaded

all men.

after him, along with a rich fish merchant who, with other

The threats of the law, like the promises of the Gospels,rich and important citizens, had long tried to win favor fromare thus addressed simply to all men, "for there is no respect

the court of Queen Maria, the Regent. It seems that theyof persons with God."282

declared their penitence, but in vain. Other prisoners fled,
and many escaped to England, Germany and elsewhere.

If someone says, "Only those who believe shall be saved,"
they reply first that faith is a gift of God, and then that it is

Because of the severity of the interdicts, the magistrates

not part of divine goodness to require of anyone that which

made urgent appeals to put an end to the proliferation ofhas not been given, for nothing can be possessed which has

such impious opinions, which were so indulgent to the world

not been given by divine goodness.

and the flesh, which derided both the Roman Catholic andAnd then they ask who would dare to assume the faithreformed religions, and which tried to make theirs muchand to declare that what he believed was true. Since every-

more catholic; that is, more accessible to the vulgar.

one can be misled by faith, it follows that men are not in

As for the atheists, the libertines, the followers of Henry
Niclaes, the "Family of Love," the fanatics (or Illuminati),

any way saved by faith, but only by divine mercy, which God
has promised to grant to all men.

those who did not want to die or be martyred for religion

Further, if prayer and faith could incline God to pity, thisor in defense of their words or deeds - against heresies ofwould mean that God is changeable and inconstant, whichthat sort, which were concealed or hidden by pretense, theis incompatible with his nature.

Proclamations had a reason for being. But as the politicians

Lastly, they argue, to believe that God takes a person's

and the Roman Catholics wanted to retain their supremacy

faith into consideration - by offering him one's faith one canand demonstrate it to the people, they confused the distinc-guarantee one's salvation - is to tum faith into an idolatrous

tions [between Protestantism and the sects28l ].

idea. They ask why God - since everything comes by andthrough him - would give something only to demand it back91

The Essence of the Doctrine of Certain Persons, Today Discovered in Great Numbers in Antwerp, and Here and There in
Brabant and Flanders, and Who Are Sometimes Called Loyists,from the Name of Their lnstiyator, Eloi, an Uneducated Work-

as payment for salvation.

iny Man, and Sometimes Libertines, Because of the Carnal Freedom Which Their TeachinB Seems to Allow:

It therefore follows that all men are condemned. And they

218

They have amassed a great deal of evidence from the Scriptures, according to which all those who transgress God's law
risk judgment and damnation. But all men transgress his law.
cite in evidence: "Cursed is everyone who does not observe219

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

and obey all the things written in the book of the law."283

It is their custom - their method of reasoning - to relate

And "Man will account for all unprofitable intentions"; "Allone part of the Scriptures to another, that is, to set the law

who have sinned apart from the law will also perish apartagainst the promises. Indeed, to simple and inconsistentfrom the law: and all who have sinned under the law will

people, all these things seem different and contradictory;

also be judged by the law. For it is not the hearers of the law

and, when they meet anyone, their main purpose is to sow

who are righteous in God's sight, but the doers of the law

seeds of doubt and uncertainty. And they are quite ready to

who shall be justified."284

believe that the Scriptures are contradictory, since they can-To this they oppose the divine promises by which God

not find agreement between the different passages.

affirmed that he wanted to have pity on all men and ensure

If someone asks them, "How should we understand theall men of the remission of their sins, as is attested in Jere-

Scriptures in a coherent manner?" they reply, "We are notmiah: "The days are surely coming, says the Lord, when I·learned or erudite. What do you think of the Scriptures? For

will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with

our part, we are looking for a master who can set our minds

the house of Judah .... But this is the covenant that I willat rest about these matters."

make .... I will put my law within them, and I will write it

This is what you should most often expect when they

down on their hearts ... for I will forgive them their iniquity,

bring together apparently obscure and contradictory passages

and remember their sin no more."285
They claim that these statements are contradictory, be-of Scripture to present to people. Thus: "Anyone who does
not have the Spirit of Christ does not belong to him," 287 andcause God is simultaneously punishing and pardoning sins.

"My spirit shall not always abide in mortals forever, for they

Because if he punishes, how can he pardon, and if he par-are flesh,"288 and "Those who are in the flesh cannot pleasedons, how can he punish?

God."289 Who, then, could assert that he has the spirit ofThey add, if God damned the whole world, what would
become of his mercy and his promises? And if he saved thewhole world by virtue of his universal mercy, what room
would that leave for his justice? And if he damned someaccording to his justice and saved others according to hismercy, then God would be showing [human] favor, some-

Christ and not also admit that he is still in the flesh?
Likewise, it is written, "Those who have been born of
God do not sin, because God's seed abides in them." 290And, by contrast, "If we say that we have no sin, we deceive
ourselves." 291

thing entirely alien to his nature. This is why it is necessaryAnd, likewise, Christ said to the Jews, "Destroy thistemple, and in three days I will raise it up." 292 He thusthat God's justice be shown in respect to all men; and, like-ordered his own death. Why, then, attribute his death towise, that his mercy and promise of salvation be granted to

the Jews? And if God hardened the heart of Pharaoh, what

all men, so that his truth appears in all divine words and can-was his offense?

not vary. For "Heaven and earth will pass away, but my words
shall not pass away."286

They present references like these to incompetent people
and even to experts, who discuss them among themselves in

220

2 21

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

a variety of ways which it would be irksome to repeat. Then,

It follows that all that belongs to outward man is damned,

when they see that these people are unsettled and taken over

and all that belongs to inward man is free and saved. In thisby doubt, they urge them to explain the difficult points ofway, justice and mercy find their explanation. 294

the Scriptures, and undertake to oppose them (which theywould not do if they did not think they had faith).

92

The last confession of Eloi Pruystinck (October 24, 1544 ):They relate the seventh chapter of the Epistle to the
Romans to what they call conciliation, as they believe it toHere follows the statement made by Eloy Pristin in favor ofconform with their ideas. In it, Paul establishes the dual

John Davion. Today, October 24, 1544, Eloi, slate roofer,

nature of the human being: one, an animal being, who is out-

declared, under oath and on the verge of death he was to haveward, carnal, born of flesh and blood, incapable of perceiv-

tomorrow, that John Davion had not given a penny to him,

ing the divine; the other, an inward and spiritual being, hom

Eloi, or to any other man, to have printed (in any place what-of God. Between these two there is an unending struggle: if

soever, whether it be Germany, Austria or any other country)

the flesh covets, etc., and if the spirit, etc.

any of his books, and also does not know of, nor ever has

The animal component of man is unfaithful to the divine

known of, the said printing, the said Eloi declaring that helaw. It is disobedient and pursues sensual pleasure. By con-

had never had any dispute or argument with the said Davion

trast, the inward component created in God's image and hom

relating to the Christian faith, nor had he ever brought any-of God, never approves the deeds of the flesh. It combats

one to the said Eloi for that cause, nor for holding any dis-them relentlessly, suffers from the revolt of the flesh, andpute relating to the Holy Scriptures. He further said anddeplores the wretched enslavement that prevents it from act-

declared that the whole of any confession or argument he

ing as it intends.

had earlier made before Monseigneur the Procurator General

This is why the spirit never commits sin, even if theand Commissioner of the court of Our Lord the Emperor,

flesh sins. And, likewise, as the flesh cannot but sin, so theor before Monseigneur the Margrave, the Schout, the Bur-

spirit cannot sin, since it derives from God. This is why hegomaster and Aldermen of Antwerp was made under torture,

is constrained to cry out, "0 wretched man that I am! Whoand therefore to retain and prolong his life, desiring there-

shall deliver me from the body of death?" 293 They relate

fore that the same should be revoked, so that no manner ofthe preceding passages, and similar ones from elsewhere inprejudice should attach to the said Davion. And the said Eloi,

the Scriptures, to these two components of man, and main-

to purge his conscience, said, by his ,share of paradise andtain that these references can easily be in harmony even in

by his baptism and the bitter death that would be his tomor-

the existence of this duality. Indeed, God,'s justice is mani-row, that the same was true. And this in the presence offest in the outward and animal being of man, since this is

Brother Nicholas Buysscher, Brother Sebastian van Runne

afflicted with various evils, punished and condemned to aand Brother Jacques du Boys, Jacobin friars, and jacques au

pitiful death.

Theaulme, Cornelius au Ancre, Christian de Ridder, Lieven
222

223

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITde Backere, all burghers of the city of Antwerp, and William,

PRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRITBrevin, Pasquier Caudron, stocking maker, and others. 298
All these prisoners were interrogated several different

banker to the queen, etc.
In witness to the truth of the aforesaid, together each ofthem here set their manual signature.
Thus undersigned: Brother Nicholas Buyssere, Jacoptimes about their faith, life, conversation and doctrine in the
council hall of the said city (in the presence of Monseigneur
the Prince d'Espinoy, lord of Anthoing, at that time governor of Tournai, members of the Council of the Bailliaige ofvanden Bossche, I Eloy. 295

Tournesis and the provosts and jurors of the said city). Who,

Quintin of Tournai and the Spiritual Libertines

to the said interrogations conducted individually, responded
variously to the best of their capabilities, so that, after sev-

93

Extracts from the Chronicle of Pasquier de Ia Barre:eral confrontations and evidence of statements made in various places, presented severally and on different days, both

About the month of November in the year 1546, a rumor

singly, and in company with the said Quintin Thierry, Jeanwas spread in Tournai that an old man named Quintin

Leconte, Jean Hugo and Nicholas Scrabe known as Magret,Thierry,296 who had been in the service of the queen of

his disciples were found (even by their own confessions), at-Navarre, had retired to that city and was the leader of thetained and convicted of being of that libertine sect. By reason

sect of those who were named Quintinists, from the nameof which the said Quintin, as chief of the said sect, was con-of the said Quintin, having shortly before been the cause,demned to be burned in the marketplace after having been

by his doctrine, of two persons having been beheaded in thestrangled, and the said Leconte, Hugot and Magret werecity of Valenciennes for belonging to that sect and holding

condemned to be beheaded: which happened soon after.

its opinions, one of them a brewer named Huchon de leA marvelous thing,299 for that the said Quintin was leader

Garde, and the other named Jano.297 After which they ob-of the libertine sect of the Quintinists and had sown his

tained information about the position of the said Quintin,

errors and perverse opinions in many areas and regions - inas a result of which information the magistrate of the said

the kingdom of Navarre, where he had been resident and a

Tournai found the said Quintin to be a member of the per-pensioner of the queen, in Poitou, Limousin, Paris, Antwerp,

nicious libertine sect. And to prevent the said Quintin from

Valenciennes, Tournai and other surrounding towns! Fromsowing the seeds of his perverse and dangerous do__c;trine inwhich regions and cities he had nevertheless always beenthat city, this magistrate had the said Quintin apprehended

forced to absent himself when his wickedness and perverse

and taken prisoner and any others who consorted with him

doctrine became known; otherwise, he would long sinceand conversed with him daily, being thereby suspected ofhave received the punishment he deserved, which would

being likewise tainted and holding the opinion of the liber-

have been better, as he would not have been the cause of thetines, to wit Jean Leconte, weaver, Jean Hugo, cobbler,

seduction and perdition of so many souls. Yet despite this,Nicholas Scrabe known as Magret, Jean Marliere known as

the said Quintin could neither read nor write, and thus forged

224

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THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

his sect and his opinions out of his own head, rejecting allotherwise would be a lack of charity, that man did not intend

the Holy Scriptures and the institutions of the Church, adduc-to sin, that God did everything in man.

ing and declaring, whenever anyone cited passages from the

The said Quintin maintained his opinions in different andHoly Scriptures to confuse and destroy his opinions, that "thecontrary ways, for, sometimes, as is said above, he rejected

letter killeth , but the spirit giveth life." He maintained sev-

the Holy Scriptures entirely, and at other times he used themeral mad, absurd and dishonest opinions against the honorand cited them for his own purpose, as when he maintainedof God, the blessed and glorious Virgin Mary, the holy writ-that Our Lord Jesus Christ died for our sins and that sin diedings and institutions of the Catholic Church, some of whichwith him, meaning to infer from this, as is said above, that

I note here, so that the reader may guard against them in

man could no longer commit sin because Christ could notimes to come.

longer die for us, adducing, in response to some propositions

He maintained first that it was not right to live by the

relating to the Virgin Mary, that Saint Paul said that we are

Gospels, and that it was a bad thing to follow them or like-the temple of God, and that if Our Lord had cohabited inwise any other Holy Scriptures, that God had given men

the Virgin Mary, he did the same in us. The said Quintin

authority and power to do whatever they wished and to live

maintained various other opinions and errors, afl concern-in accordance with their desires and pleasures. They did not

ing the freedom of the flesh, which it would be too verbose
to list.300

sin because God, on his death, had pardoned all and abolished sin. That those who believed otherwise lived according to the devil and not according to God.
That men could sleep with as many women as they wanted
and found that God had not commanded that they should
marry, and that a poor girl of light morals was as valuable in

94

A9ainst the Fantastic and Crazed Sect of the Libertines Who
Called Themselves Spirituals, With an Epistle in the Same Manner A9ainst a Certain Cordelier, Member of the Sect, Who Is a
Prisoner in Rouen, by John Calvin (extract):

the eyes of God as the Virgin Mary.
That there was no Resurrection, that the soul went to

For in sooth a man never needs any other schooling but

God and not the body, which was a clay vessel and, once

his own30t to be able to blaspheme against God, destroying

dead, was like a broken pot which was no longer anything.

the truth with malicious wiles. [It is older people who]

That man could not commit sin and that it was God who

encourage simple people to live a life of dissolution ... socommitted the sin in man, that if someone saw or presumed

that each lives according to his appetites without scruple:that a man was committing sin, the sin fell on the watcher

abusing Christian freedom by removing the restraints on allor presumer.

carnal license .... They disparage everything they do notThat it was not committing a sin to kill a man, that it

understand, finding their happiness in their forbidden pleas-

was comparable to one clay pot breaking another clay pot.

ures .... When they want to transport their listeners above

That they should lend their wives to one another; to do

the heavens, they attract them into carnal delights, and

226

227

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

make them fall back into the concupiscence from which... It is true that they had help from another figure whomthey had withdrawn .... And Saint Jude said ... that "theseI have not yet mentioned; this was a petty priest named Mes-

speak evil of those things which they know not: but whatsire Antoine Pocques, whom I met three years ago. 303

they know naturally, as brute beasts, in those things theycorrupt themselves." ...

What made Quintin and his companion change from tailors to scholars was that they enjoyed being comfortable andFor they have it that man torments himself in vain if hewell-fed, and work was not something that suited them ....

has scruples about anything: but that every man should let... Therefore, they decided to gain their living by chat-himself be led by his spirit. Thus they confound all order,

tering, as priests and monks do by singing ....

mocking both the fear of God of the faithful, and their respect[Calvin regrets having to sully his paper with such char-for his judgment, and all respect for human honesty. And

acters, but:] What else should I do, when I see four rogues,

this is the freedom they promise, that a man should give him-

who have already caused the ruin of more than 4,000 men,self up to whatever his heart desires and covets, and that hestill at large after at least three of them have turned God's

should make no difficulties about obtaining it, as ifhe weretruth upside-down ....

not subject to the law or to reason:302 for they do not liketo hear that servitude spoken of. ...

[Accorqing to him, they are worse than the pope, who
leaves some form of religion, whereas:] The whole purpose

About fifteen years ago, a man named Coppin, a Flemingof these men is to mingle heaven and earth, to annihilate allfrom Lille, began stirring up this filth in his birthplace; hereligion, to wipe out all knowledge ofhuman understanding,

was ignorant, and had no other means of self-advancement

to deaden consciences and to leave no difference between

than his own audacity, bearing out the proverb that a fool

man and beast ....

never doubts anything.

The Quintinists have a wild language in which they cluck

Then another arose, named Quintin, who gained such a

and warble, so that they can no more be understood than the

reputation that it eclipsed the memory of the former .... Hesong of the birds. Not that they do not use the same words

was from the region of Hainaut, or near there. I do not know

as other people, but they disguise their meaning so much

how long he had lived in France, but I saw him there morethat no one can tell what they are talking about, nor what

than ten years ago.

they are trying to affirm or deny.... Now it is true that they

Then he was accompanied by a Bertrand des Moulins,

do it out of malice .... They never reveal the mysteries of

who has since then, as they believe, become God or noth-abomination that are hidden within, except to those who

ing, that is, he is dead to this world ....

have taken the vow....

. . . There was also a third, named Claude Perceval. All of[Calvin boasts about having defeated Quintin in a con-them toiled so hard that they infected much of France: suchtest of eloquence.] They hold that there is only one spiritthat there was hardly a place where they had lived which wasof God, which exists and lives in all creatures .... They takenot to some extent affected by their corruption ....

the devil, the world and sin to be wholly imaginative which

228

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THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS OF THE FREE SPIRIT

is nothing .... [These are] vain thoughts that should be for-whether by cunning or by force, should use them boldly. For

gotten, like dreams .... On the question of sin, they say only

he will be doing nothing of which God does not approve.

that it is a deprivation of the good, but this is a cuider,304

And whatever he may have taken, he should not worry about

which fades away and is abolished when there are no more

retribution. For it is entirely wrong to criticize God .... 306

instances of it ....

... This is, in fact, their primary aim: to dull the con-... They teach that one should no longer spend timescience, so that everyone does whatever comes into his mind

thinking of these things, since sin has been abolished, andand whatever his heart feels like .... After they have removed

it is folly to continue to torment oneself as if it were some-the bridle from everyone, so that they can do whatever seems

thing that existed. Likewise, they say that man is composed

good to them under the pretense of letting themselves beofhis body and a thought [cuider], and that natural man takes

led toward God, they deduce from this same principle that

his souls from the devil and the world, and yet that this is

it is wrong to pass judgment ....

no more than a vapor which passes away and not a permanent thing .... 305... For, in truth, they are sensualists who mock everything and take nothing to heart for fear of dying of melan-

They say that God does everything .... That fat i-diot

choly, except when things are not as they want them .... All

Quintin was once in a street where a man had just been

their pleasure lies in giving themselves a good time and not

killed. There happened to be one of the faithful there whoworrying about anything. They have heard this sentence ofsaid, "Alas, who has done this wicked deed?" Without delay,

Solomon, that a sorrowful spirit dries up the bones. Thus,

he replied in his thick Picardy accent, "Since you want tofor fear of becoming thin, they find means of enjoying them-know, it was me." The other, in amazement, said, "Howselves. By treating everything that ought to afflict the chil-could you be so cowardly?" To which he replied, "I am not.

dren of God as if it were good, they have no occasion to be

God is." "Why," asked the other, "must you impute to God

grieved. That is how, by taking as much pleasure in evil as

crimes which he has commanded should be punished?" At

in good, they turn everything to their profit .... 307

which this filthy man spewed forth his venom even more... Two of these men were executed in Valenciennes forforcefully, saying, "Yes, it is you, it is me, it is God. For

having said that Jesus Christ did not die on the cross, that it

whatever you or I do, it is God who does it, and whatever

was only a lying thought. Is it not a fine beginning to makeGod does, we do it, because he is within us." ...

of Jesus Christ a phantom of which we know nothing? ...

... Has someone behaved in a dissolute way? He should not

They regard all that he did and suffered as a farce or a moral-

be vituperated because of it. For that would be to blaspheme

ity play staged on a scaffold to represent the mystery ofagainst God. Does a man covet his neighbor's wife? He should

our salvation ....

enjoy her if he can. For he can be certain that he is doing

Quintin became incensed when he was asked how henothing but God's will, and whatever he does will be a divine

behaved. How, he asked, can Jesus Christ behave badly? ...

act. As for possessions, anyone who is able to get hold of any,

Since we are Jesus Christ, the only issue is that what is already

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IV

perfect in us should be reiterated .... 308 Regeneration is
the return to the state of innocence in which Adam lived

OuTLINE FOR AN ALCHEMY

before he sinned. They take this state of innocence to mean
not seeing any difference between black and white: because

Of THE SELF

Adam's sin was to eat the fruit of the knowledge of good andevil. Therefore, to mortify the old Adam is not to see withdiscernment, as if one had knowledge of evil, but to let oneself be led by one's natural senses, like a little child)09 They
even support this argument by using those passages in whichchildlike simplicity is recommended to us .... If they see aman who has objections to doing evil, they say, "0 Adam,

The Creation of the Self

you are still there. The old man has not been crucified inyou yet." If they see a man who fears the judgment of God,
they say, "You can still taste the apple. Watch out that a bit
does not get stuck in your throat and choke you." ...
. .. Those who are no longer in a position to sin they call
new creatures, because they are delivered from lying thought(cuider) and thus have no more sin in them .... When thislying thought is abolished, there is no longer a devil, nor aworld, according to their opinion .... 310[They say] that it is only carnal marriage if a man's heart
is not given to a woman, or when the wife no longer has any
pleasure in her husband ....
... These wretches profane marriage, and men mingle withwomen like brute beasts, as their desires lead them. And they
disguise their beastly defilement under the name of spiritual marriage: giving the name of spiritual impulse to the raging impetuosity that inflames a man like a bull and a woman
like a bitch in heat. 311 And to leave no order among men,they create a similar confusion about possessions, saying that
theirs is the communion of saints, in which no one possesses
anything of his own, but everyone takes what he can get. 312

95

There is no eternity save that which lies at the heart ofthe present moment, in the unfettered enjoyment of theself. Although each of us starts along the path as a whole,living being, intending to return just as we were when weleft off, we become completely lost if! a maze of wasted
time, so that what returns is only a corpse of our being,
mummified in its memories.
The striving of humanity after survival is a saga of childhood bartered away for decrepitude. This sacrifice was aninvestment in a social-improvement society which is now
on the vetge of bankruptcy. The sole consolation of theage is that the prospects of this racket are now distinctly
short-term, and that consequently we are all obliged tolook sideways at our wretched existences, so utterly devoidof any real pleasure, set in eloquent juxtaposition to theriches attainable if only we were to embrace the portionof life that has been driven underground.
I know of nothing more odious than the commonly
accepted formula that calls for everyone to renounce hisTHE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

life in order to save it; yet I am delighted that, becauseof the increasing difficulty of subsidizing survival, a newawareness is slowly emerging. It is based not on collective
work or the poverty of selfish ambition, but on their opposite, on the invitation to become oneself, to create oneselfby creating the terms of one's own pleasure.
While contemporary history is writing the last chapter of survival -using all the appropriate platitudes- theend of the twentieth century is preparing to discover theunexplored territory of life that lies right at its feet. In afew decades I am sure that it will be as normal to enter
into the wondrousness of being alive as it is to go pickmushrooms. It is, therefore, all the more astonishing thatthe greatest passion within the heart of man has never had
an official existence.
Paradoxically, the Middle Ages seem closer to us, intheir demand for immediacy, than the period that extended from the Renaissance to the 1960s, when every
generation seemed to delude itself about its future history: well-being was the carrot that it dangled in front of
itself, on the stick of future progress.
The virulence of ecclesiastical propaganda showed thatmany were less interested in heading toward heaven or hell
than in compulsively satisfying their natural desires. Thiswas fortunate except for the fact that hedonism, strainedby the manipulations of the Church and the threat of the
stake, was less concerned with the public emancipation of
conscience than with epicurean pleasures, which are soldoff today at the price of merchandise and devalued labor.
I have tried here to pay homage to the alliance of pleasure and lucidity by rescuing from darkness and silence
those who celebrated true life in a time when lies about
234

OUTLINE FOR AN

ALCHEMY OF THE SELF

its nature proliferat~d along with the violence of the repressed, even though they sometimes were responsible for
their own powerlessness and succumbed to the corroding
effect of contempt, caused by their feelings of obvious
superiority over the Christian herd and its guard-dogs.
The century in which God and Marx have finally diedwhile burying their own dead must give these individuals
the recognition they are due. But we must beware thehounds of heaven who are still yapping at the gates of thisideological debacle. It is no longer possible simply to reiterate Free Spirit ideas, because the dominant language
has changed its vocabulary, and, with the collapse of religious power, God has been eliminated, excreted througha cleansing purgative, only to be replaced by ideas that areeven more constipating, and made of the same fecal matter. More important, because the elitist attitude stems
from alienated thought, all thinking bears the indelible
imprint of survival. The idea that reliance on the lucidityof the few will lead to the freedom of all is so ingrainedin new forms of slavery that the leaders are worn away up
to their k'nees or even higher, revealing their true nature
as truncated men.
There is no other guide to the emancipation of all than
the individual will to live, creating around itself the conditions of its victory over the absolutism of death on the
installment plan.
96

Alchemy is, fundamentally, a process that hastens the purification that nature itself supposedly carries out, transforming base metals into noble metals, symbolized bygold. That it originated in the sacred knowledge of priests
suggests that it derives from older practices. Telling in235

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

this regard is the concern for unity, as exemplified in the
androgyny of alchemical marriage or in the inseparabilityof the transmutation of metal and that of the alchemist
himself.
In the hands of the sacerdotal caste, alchemy expressed
the esoteric will to appropriate the essence of the heavenly economy: the metal-standard of exchange, the symbol of spiritual supremacy and a major advantage for the
conduct of earthly affairs. 1
Just as reli9io is mythic unity substituting for the unity ofhuman development in its natural setting, so the Ars mannaof the priests of exchange usurps the rights of an alchemy
in which man draws on all his component elements - mineral crystals, vegetable sap, animal urges - to create a humanity capable of humanizing the whole of nature.2
True alchemy is the transmutation of elementary formsof life into human life. From it will emerge the civilization that will supplant the barbarous, primitive cultureof work. And I think there is no better indication of thisthan the amount of fervent attention surrounding birthand babies.
We are only just now realizing that bringing a child into
the world is no longer simply a matter of reproducing
intellectual and manual slaves. A new consciousness isdeveloping that sees every birth as the early stages of a creation that needs to be perfected, of a life to be saved before
the closed universe of commodities stifles it in the polluted air of profitability.
What was the source of this idea of supposed ontological suffering, this notion of life-as-difficulty, which herdsof philosophers constantly flock to for inspiration? No
doubt, it came with the stasis, known as the need to sur-OUTLINE FOR AN

ALCHEMY OF THE SELF

vive, that requires the creation, simultaneously, of quotidian routine and self-fulfillment.
A creation that bears the mark of alienation is like abruise to the very soul, leaving a lingering melancholy that
pulsates through the most successful artistic achievements.
Even though art has come to stand for life - after having
usurped the place reserved for genuine creativity- it still
reminds us of gratuitous pleasures; but only when that art
triumphs in the marketplace does it escape the contemptthat the standard of profitability reserves for every missed
chance to make money.
The ultimate disgrace is aptly revealed in the title of"Creator" applied to a God who has created from his own
substance a universe in which his creatures, deprived of
his resources, begin in a state of total deprivation and progress toward nothingness. A desert valley irrigated with tears
is a rather pathetic creation. It is not difficult to understand how the men and women who tried to establish aparadise on earth, here and now, saw themselves as superior to God.

\

The Materia Prima
97

The movement disguising itself under the clerical name of
the Free Spirit traced, beneath the filaments of everyday
life, a path more secret and less tolerable than the alchemical magistracy and its degeneration into the genesis of thework of art.
From the beginning alchemy was based on a fundamental deception. To see this, one need only consider
that the materia prima, the raw material it claimed totransmute, was exclusively mineral: the most inert of the
237

THE

MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

natural elements, and the most easily exploitable.
Such conceptual poverty could have arisen only fromthe alienated thought of the sacerdotal blacksmiths, priests
aping the God they had fathered, the sovereign Spirit thatraised the base products of a denatured nature - stone,
lead, copper, iron - to the dignity of gold. In the sameway, the heavenly spirit allowed the heap of vile, corruptible matter that constituted the body to bask in its auraof everlasting life.
But in the unity of the living there is only human matter; and by human I mean humanized and dehumanized atonce, in the certainty and uncertainty of choice, in appeals
to profitability and their rejection and in the confusion of
darkness and light.
To the extent that one can indeed speak of an enlightenment advanced by the movement of the Free Spirit, itlies in having pointed up the similarities that exist between
the materia prima and the fractured sensual body - thebody held in check by the rule of the mind, condemned
to unpredictable and compulsive moments of release, thevery image of life turned inside-out by the permanent jolts
and turns of death.
This natural chaos is fostered by all societies, whether
civilized or primitive, that are governed by the spirit ofpower and profit, and this chaos is the raw material of analchemy of experience, which anyone could master. It is
the primordial element that needs to be gradually refined
until it becomes the philosopher's stone. When the stageof "perfection" is finally reached, the permanent creationof the self gives life to whatever it touches.
The initial act is to recognize the materia prima, thematerial of one's pleasure, freed from whatever conceals

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it and controls it. All the supporters of the movement of
the Free Spirit insisted that life meant life immediately
present. There was no hell, no resurrection, no Last Judgment, no divine overseer, no secular power. They were notinterested in religious, philosophical or political quarrels;social confrontation interested them only when it opened
the door to absolute emancipation. Realizing that God
had been created in the image of their alienation, theyabandoned the great external, productive subject, whose
spirit signified servitude and tyranny, and made themselves
earthly gods in the ceaseless flux of a universal attraction
they called love. To pass, through love, from the frustrated
nature of desire to the untrammeled freedom of re-creatednature - this was the project they shaped during thosecenturies shut off from the progress of history. It is now
resurfacing as the only alternative to the collapse of theeconomic system and the bankruptcy of the underwritersof survival.
Living matter in the state of sexual exuberance manifests itself among human beings inversely to the amountof power they have in the social and economic organization. The disregard, even contempt, in which women,children and simple people are held by vir economicus issufficient indication of their blithe inadaptibility to thefunctions of government. Woman - except as mother or
as pure object - is lascivious, useless and harmful, andarouses a horror of the feminine affecting even that partof femininity which male worshippers of the patriarchal
and celestial menhir repress so thoroughly.
The anchor of misogyny plunges deep into the watersof the origins, into the primal and sexual dampness soessential to the alchemical project. Floods, swamps and
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MOVEMENT OF THE

FREE SPIRIT

sap stirred by the moon are the natural settings in which
the body is formed, the cosmic womb wherein it is nourished before some natural ebbing oflife drains it dry.
Simple people are the volatile fluid of the social body.
Do they not behave like women and children, needing tobe led with a firm hand and punished for their own good,to save them from their natural tendency to stupidity andbrutishness? When clerics - who are now known as "intellectuals," because they take pride in the alienation of themind rather than in the alienation of the body - treat suchpeople as satyrs, brutes and monsters scarcely emerged
from animality, as a natural chaos destined to be dominated, ordered and purified by the combined intelligenceof God and his clergy, they are making the Church into
the agent of a kind of alchemy. The divine magistracytransmuted the lead of the vulgum pecus into a pontificalaura. The process, both spiritual and material, was invented by the perverse intelligence of Satan and his henchmen - those who refused to pay tithes and adhered toheresy - transforming the gold of Rome back into lead byinvolution. Surely this represents an absolute recognition,in the myopic gaze of orthodoxy and its inseparable twin,
heterodoxy, of the materia prima, the natural matter inwhich the human and the inhuman are intermingled . .
But, contrary to the viewpoint limited to God and thedevil, which reduces the game to a winner and a loser, as
in the horse race or rat race found in market civilization, 3
everyone can enjoy a sensual freedom that slips away fromthe iron grip of priests and all other authority. The ideathat everyone has an irrepressible right to follow his desires
and enjoy to the fullest what little life he is given evades
absolute repression, because those who have been blinded

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to their own bodies by the light of the spirit do not understand that life carries on where it began, beyond goodand evil.
The movement of the Free Spirit emanated from themateria prima of life as much as it escaped the grasp of theecclesiastical and secular authorities. Its consciousness wasrooted there, through an alchemy in which nothing, inthe end, is any different from what it was already in the
beginning, as in the proposition Hyppolytus of Romeattributed to Simon the Gnostic: "All earth is earth, andit does not matter where you sow. The promiscuity of men
and women, that is the true communion." 4

The Athanor
98

For the athanor of the alchemists - the furnace in which
the materia prima was refined - there is one primordial
location, revealed yet secret, tangible yet invisible, nearand distant: the body. The body, enslaved and fragmented
by the spirit it contains, with God's help is little more thanexcrement from on high. The body, without which nothing exists, is reduced to nothing by an existence that has
been reduced to thought. The body, called "the prison of
conscience," in its all too rare raptures of sensual enjoyment, is the very conscience that seizes hold of pleasureand undoes the knots of dissatisfaction, the only conscience in the universe in which we are always present.
For the body is the fire, the crucible and the raw materialof individual and collective alchemy.
The locations of the earth and the body are kept secretlest celestial damnation overtake them. These sites areespecially secret both as sites where the quest for pleasureTHE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

is initiated and where forbidden pleasures are unleashedthrough the desperate rage of its inversions. The fire ofdeath masks the fire of life, the passion for destruction
covers up and replaces the passion for creation and for
self-creation. s
The economy flaunts itself in the full light of day that,
ultimately, reveals nothing but the economy in all its various manifestations. Sensual pleasure, however, as an element that cannot be reduced to the economic, remains
occult, shrouded in night, condemned to the underworlds
of intimacy and interiority.
The economy pretends to cast light on everything thatis obscured by darkness. Yet the tyranny of the market does
not see through to the vitality that negates it, but it does
see the part of life that it negates through repression. The
only secret place it knows and recognizes is the attic where
whatever is useless or harmful to the reproduction of power
and profit is carelessly thrown, including its own outdated
forms and archaic religions. 6 Its loca injesta are haunted byritual orgies over which the hydra of femininity rules; thus,
it assumes that every man has within himself a dark recess
where he sequesters "inadmissible passions."
From the market viewpoint inwardness - necessarily
suspicious, since anything concealed is by definition inadmissible - exists only as inverted exteriority 7 and is theseat of frustrations, desires, satisfied or unsatisfied, thathave been hidden away in the anguish of remorse, penitence and moral decay.
This curse, which is shamelessly accommodated in the
deepest recesses of the heart and mind, is surely identicalto the hell of ignorance described by the Amaurians. The
remark frequently attributed to the movement of the FreeOUTLINE FOR AN

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Spirit - "What the outward man does cannot sully the
inward man"- surely also gives to the athanor its functionof dissolving and transforming the world of mercantile
objectivity, the hostile world outside man, into the subjective and the living.
99

Alchemical language was not essentially motivated by adesire to keep the profane at a distance, any more than themisappropriation of religious terminology was designed
to ward off suspicion, as the inquisitor responsible forrepressing the Men of Intelligence believed. How could
occult meanings be given to key words in common usage,
paralleling and mocking the official meaning - paradise signifying "innocence of pleasure," I be9 charity meaning"make love to me," ecstasy implying orgasm- without
including devotional books whose meanings could be understood quite differently?
Words shifted their center of gravity. They became
guided by a different reality - not the reality shaped by
the economy, but the reality underlying the living being.
Beneath the prevailing stream of words, used by the majority to proclaim that power was the only reference point,
ran a living undercurrent: original sexuality, the cosmic
womb where freedom was gestating, the subjective consciousness where body and spirit came together in theunity of each orgasm. The appropriation of language isboth the labyrinth and the Ariadne's thread that lead tothe heart of life, to the latencies that wait to be born ineach of us, and which economic necessity paralyzes andcorrupts with its universal negativity and its fundamental inhumanity.

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The Neoative and Its Treatment
100

The whole of survival is centered on negativity. It is reality reduced to the perspective of the market, a reality thatruns out the course of its history, from alpha to omega,according to a fundamental imperative- an imperative
that, in its mythic conception, is called "God," and, according to the ideology of industrial societies is called"economic necessity."
Through its denial of the human and its inversion ofhuman growth this negativity creates a dialectic of deathin which every life becomes the nothingness to which it
was doomed initially. This is why history illuminates withthe light of despair, why emancipation gives rise to newforms of slavery: the law is that of decline, gradually brought
to an absolute limit by the boredom of perpetually beginning again. So many philosophical tears have been shedsince a wrong tum sent human evolution from its creative
path toward the necessity of work! So many fools have
wept over the inexorable human condition, over the profitable deception that calls destiny a dead end!
After 10,000 years of lamentation and a few years ofbankruptcy, which are every day confessed and countersigned, it may occur to late twentieth-century consciousness that the true meaning of destiny is to create life andincrease its enjoyment, not to accumulate devalued money,
boast about the impotence of power and produce an evergrowing volume of misery.
The alchemical unconscious, which is inseparable fromthe earliest human experiences of flux and change, inherent in the sense of change heightened by the use of fire
and the pleasures of love, is still dominated by a nostalgia
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ALCHEMY OF THE SELF

for permanent creation. Moist heat allied with dry heatslowly separates base metals from their impurities, clarifying them until an element of pure life appears, which
purifies and vivifies whatever it touches. Although identified with the struggle of each moment from which spring
both the luminous contagion of the philosopher's stone
and the elixir of youth, I do not see the pursuit of pleasure as any different from that which occurs in early childhood. The wish to take possession of one's body and tofeel better and better in it, until even one's every thought
and action is directed to the practice of happiness - thisis a wish that seems all the more precious as we come torealize the worthlessness of so many empty ventures whose
accounts have been tallied by death and wasted existences,brilliant, obscure, stupid, intelligent, royal or slave - one
following another in a repetition of the same motives.
101

The gods are the absolute negation of life. The only gods
are the gods of survival, just as our society has no otheraxiom but the economy. This is why divinity and its offspring claim to see, hear, touch and experience as if they
were pure positivity, the unique reality, the only movement in which each element becomes its contrary, theabsolute cycle where being is reduced to nothingness. In
spite of our best efforts to avoid bathing twice in the same
stream we find that it does not really matter since all waters
flow from the same polluted source. This is the sad mix
of jubilation and dismay to which the whole philosophical discourse of humanity has been reduced. It is hardly
surprising, then, that people merely have to express theirbitterness to appear lucid.
The identification with God demanded by a number
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THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITof the advocates of the movement of the Free Spirit indicates the traps that await anyone who fails to break awayfrom the lure of economized existence in its claim to be
the sole mode of existence.
According to John Hartmann, the author of Sister Katrei,
self-deification made Sister Katrei, Gertrude de Civitas,
even Quintin of Tournai, a into God and devil, good andevil, iibermensch and untermensch, coincidentia oppositorum,
dominant world and dominated world: nothing more andnothing less than the totalitarian universe of survival, reality reduced to universalized exchange.
To proclaim oneself God is fatally to inherit his lie or,if you prefer, his authoritarian truth. To behave as masterof things and creatures (compare with Hartmann and Sister Katrei), dismissing all guilty conscience regardless of
one's actions, is to pledge allegiance to the artificial processes of denatured nature. That sort of behavior- which
Sade and Nietzsche would justify as they did all strategies of revolution - is to the project of the fulfillment oflife what the charlatanism of the gold blowers was to thealchemical magnum opus. The stuff of deified being is
not made of metal but consists merely of power whose
leadened weight has been gilt with the superficial brilliance of freedom.
102

Right now, I can think of nothing as important, yet, at thesame time, more unimportant, than survival.
I hope it ceases to be a priority, as if surviving were necessary first in order to live later. (Experience has shown,however, that allegiance to survival kills life as surely aswork destroys creativity.)
The point is not to neglect survival entirely - how

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could we - but to reverse the perspective so that survival
becomes a consequence of the will to live rather than thecondition for it. The way in which health issues are being
approached now suggests a certain awareness of the claimsof living.
For a long time illness and the fear it inspired governed
health. In the struggle against the torments that endlessly
assailed it health was a matter for witch doctors, healt:;rs
and physicians. Every illness set off a system of panic andalarm that men of science encouraged whenever they intervened to allay its effects. But now it is obvious to mostpeople that the doctor's curative power and his arsenal ofchemicals are often ineffective, even harmful, if patientsare not energetically committed to wanting to live, motivated not by a refusal to suffer but by a will to enjoy themselves to the fullest.
The idea of vitality also makes no sense if the fears
accompanying the preoccupations of survival - finding
enough money or credit to get food, clothing and a place
to live - do not give way to a dialectic of life, to the demands of desires rooted in the heart, to an existence thatreveals its uniqueness. This uniqueness lies in the exuberance in which positive and negative, pleasure and displeasure, harmony and discord throb with the rhythm of life
until, out of breath, they run their course. But it is an end
that has nothing in common with the death that governs
the society of survival, whose withered state is the distinct
sign of both beings and things.
Everyone, without exception, is an alchemist, distilling
his own substance at every moment. But the magnum opus
is inverted and corrupted: the best becomes the worst, creativity becomes work, the richness of being dwindles into
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possession, authenticity turns into appearance, agony begins at birth. The millenarian incitement to produce one's
own unhappiness has so thoroughly impregnated the worldof the imagination that everything from art to daydreaming
consists of negative scenarios, doomed love affairs, inevitable failures, inevitable obsolescence, bitter victories or
bliss in ignorance.
The only way to remedy the lassitude brought on by
survival is through a treatment, focusing on negativity, thatuses alchemy to rid life of the effects of survival, radicallyremaking the human from what is most human: namely thesearch for pleasure. ·The construction of a nature emancipated from themechanisms by which it is denatured can be seen in thelaughter and amused incomprehension with which theyounger generations greet the political masquerade, theblackmail of war and insecurity, the manifestations ofauthority, racist and sexist attitudes, expressions of contempt, and the inflexibility imposed by the worship ofthe militarized commodity market, the foundation of ourwonderful civilization.
As for squandering one's last energies in an attempt toreintegrate oneself into the misery of work, or walking
willingly into the trap of a computerized social world,
these choices must be left to those irretrievably conditioned to poverty. For the rest of us, a good watchword
would be: "The minimum of survival in the service of a
maximum oflife."
The unavoidability of negotiating the meshes of thecommodity system - the necessity of obtaining a modicum of money- should only encourage us to exploit tothe hilt whatever facilities offer themselves that can help

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us get the time to pursue the pleasure of belonging to ourselves and the pleasure of creating.
While it may be temporary, a solution that allows salaried workers to take more leaves of absence, or that lets
unemployment money go toward keeping a garden, seems
a better use of the national debt than investing in a sluggish economy or subsidizing a school for criminals by allocating funds to an army that seems more useless and absurd
than ever.
If life was able to resist the oppression of a sovereign
economy, it can surely triumph, today, over an economy
that is falling into ruin. And if the need to survive threatens modern cities with something as ancient as famine,
why shouldn't the revulsion provoked by a system of profitoriented inhumanity encourage the foundation of its absolute opposite: immediate enjoyment with nothing expected
in return? Abandoned factories will one day be transformed
into creative workshops capable of supplying life's desires
with whatever material support - no matter how luxurious - they might require.

103

The most radical element of the movement of the Free
Spirit had to do with an alchemy of individual fulfillment,
in which the creation of a superior state of existence (theall-important "perfection") was achieved by a gradual relinquishment of the economy's hold over individuals.
There is ambiguity in the meaning of relinquishment,
as there is in the meaning of perfection, sometimes understood as a state of fulfillment, sometimes as permanent
self-creation. In communities where the Cathar perfects
exploited the masochism of the novices (like Cologne or
Schweidnitz}, relinquishment implied ascetic trial. But theTHE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

idea that a happy life had to be deserved, had to be earned
by submission to restraint, makes happiness a sort of compensation, a release that is its own negation. This much isevident: one of the surest laws of the corruption of pleasure is the law that claims to satisfy sensual desires by initially discouraging them. All too often, the will to rid
oneself of the old world only led to the inevitable reproduction of the mechanisms of the market society and its
divisions of power, to the point that a genuine emancipation was not possible. But even if their actions were questionable, followers of the movement of the Free Spirit
identified, with remarkable lucidity, all that is negative:
work, constraint, guilt, fear, money and possession, keeping up appearances, exchange and the striving for power.
If the healthy rejection of work did not explicitly derivefrom a wish to create the self and to create the conditions
for self-enjoyment, the task of ensuring the minimum needsof survival involved questionable means. These included
the financial support of parishioners (probably used by theAmaurians ), mendicancy (Margaret Po rete, the Beguinesand Beghards ), theft, embezzlement, improper solicitationof legacies (the friends of John of Brunn, the communityof Schweidnitz), personal support of rich members (theMen of Intelligence, the Loyists, the Alumbrados ), various forms of opportunism (Quintin of Tournai), the exploitation of women (John Hartmann) - all strategies thatmodern revolutionaries, whether contemptuous of workor not, have sometimes deigned to use despite the emancipation they extolled.
Similarly, the rejection of all constraints, although constantly reiterated in Free Spirit discourse, aroused somemistrust when it was accompanied by the elitism that har-OUTLINE FOR AN

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bored the old separation of the spirit, the alleged superiority of intellectualism. Fortunately the disappearance offeelings of constraint, guilt and fear usually sprang from asort of irrepressible exuberance of life. 9
In its radical conception- when it does not demandhumiliation - the practice of voluntary poverty challenges
haviny, as impeding the freedom of beiny. The money thatwas solicited, panhandled, found or stolen by the community in Cologne was neither saved nor used as capital: it
was used to binge on food and drink, "sent into eternity,"
accompanied, if necessary, by its previous owner if heargued that it was still his.
Beneath their cowls and rags, the Beguines of Schweidnitz wore delicate underclothes (confiscated from the novices). Concerned that their indulgence in luxury might befound offensive, the Loyists wore garments of rich silk
made to look like work clothes (those of plasterers, roofers, fishmongers ... ). The vagrancy for which the clerics
criticized them was, in fact, an endless amorous quest, amove from one place of pleasure to another.
Their search for an authentic experience of life was thebasis for a critique of outward appearance, what would
now be called "role" and "spectacle." In the name of thefreedom of nature, refined through amorous relations or"spiritual marriage," Quintin of Tournai and his friends
rejected the cuider, the mythical representation in which
all people are bound, in spite of themselves, to act as economic beings rather than as beings of desire. Similarly,
nudity, when not used as an expression of Christ's obstinate miserableness, as in Francis of Assisi or Jacopo ofTodi,
expressed contempt for the social representation attached
to clothing. The nudity of Giles of Canter was a renewal

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THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITof the innocence of childhood, so that the world could
once again be ordered along the lines of satisfaction, notthe parameters of duty.
Unlike the self-hatred in which the mystics abased
themselves to the greater glory of God, the conception of"poverty of spirit" propagated by the movement of the Free
Spirit implied a relinquishment of the economy's hold,with its congested and self-destructive pleasures, its imperatives to power and profit, its overall pollution of the market. To free oneself of socially inculcated ignorance, of
a whole science based on individual unhappiness, is tostart down the path closed off by the economy: that of nai
sa voir, of understanding through the pleasure principle.
The movement of the Free Spirit espoused an amor
jati, not to be confused with fatalism, which made it incumbent upon everyone to embrace the will - mistakenly
described as "divine"- which lay within them. God andthe denatured nature that he had wrought would thus betranscended by a subjectivity which by transforming itself
would come to be the meaning of a universe restored toan ever-expanding life.
The true lesson of the indijjerentia, or apatheia, which
so offended Ubertino of Casale is simply the need to lose
all fear and all respect for the society of survival in orderto pursue one's own fulfillment as a microcosm with every
chance of living life to the fullest. tO
What seems to have militated against the Free Spirit
movement, judging by the testimony we have, was its
tendency to intellectualize. This pitfall awaits whenevermystified consciousness is delivered up to the scalpel oftheoretical criticism without likewise suffering the devastating critique of a life lived without restraint.

ALCHEMY OF THE SELF

Today we may legitimately assume that the only proper
way to deal with the negative (apart from residing in athought which, no matter how acute, remains alienated,
and therefore equally negative), will be found instead in--avitality capable of dissolving the negative drop by drop. II
In fact it is not the battle against the negative that has tobe won, but the triumph of life over a dying society.
Only those things that strengthen life can defeat everything that corrupts it. The laughter that destroys the seriousness of all authority and the gift that sweeps away thefundamental value of exchange both participate in an alchemy of the self whose crowning glory is love, the philosopher's stone in which existence comes back to life andgenuinely creates itself.

Refined Love as the Basis for theCreation of a New World104

The totality oflove is contained in the love of life; the corruption of one entails the corruption of the other. Sincenothing is more incompatible with economy as love andlife, their shared fate condemns them to unfulfillment, andmillenarian opinion regards them as ephemeral. In theorder of things - which is the inhuman fate of a humanity composed of producers and buyers- life and love donot, and cannot, exist.
Yet the world seems to be changing course. Not because it is fearful, or hopeful, of the Last Days. Nor is it
due to revolutionary upheavals, which - even to those who
thought they were leading them - were never more thanthe permutations of a changing market. The collapse of ourcivilization and the denaturation of the earth are suddenly

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THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT"elsewhere" and "once upon a time" for all who refuse torot in the decrepitude of profitability and competitive
power. If life is welling up and is threatening the laboriously programmed routines of the thousand daily dead, it isbecause survival can no longer contain it under the weightof its deception.
The pleasure of living, as we should know from children, no longer has to assert itself by paying tribute to therhetoric of its failure. Despite all the old oppressions, loveof the self- as revealed in childhood and in the renewed
awareness of lovers- radiates a power for which industrial
power, gathered into nuclear radiation, would be its fatal
antithesis. For this reason I take the demands of love toconstitute entirely, at all times and in all places, the solealternative to market society.
Either the economy will succeed in submerging the living, or society will rely on the predominance of desires
emancipated from their inversion in the market. Either wewill all perish in the increasingly debilitating quest for
profit and prestige, or the primacy of pleasure will destroy
work through creativity, exchange through the gift, guilt
through innocence, the will to power through the will to
live, anguished satisfaction through the natural rhythm ofpleasure and displeasure.
A wager is set. At stake, on the one hand, is the tendency to abandon the best for the worst; on the other is thehope held out for the transmutation of the individual id.
On the one hand: self-contempt, the virtue that the slave
takes pride in, and that lets him give himself over to someone else - politicians, priests, doctors, psychoanalysts,
thinkers, institutions, governments. On the other: the artof pleasure, patiently loosened from the grip of death.
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The movement of the Free Spirit asked the question at
the historical moment when the market process was justbeginning to accelerate. The end of the twentieth century
will hear the answer in the final implosion of the machinethat removes what is living from the individual. But in thewords perilously wrung from the language of God, and in
the words derived today by a life that has no recognized
meaning, there is the same cyclone of pleasure that sweeps
through history with timeless violence. The quest for alove discovered in the pure material of humanity is thebasis for the universal measure of a radically new society.
105

The world has merely changed in accordance with the lawsof economics. The time has come to create a world inaccordance with the harmony of pleasures. In its most original form, the movement of the Free Spirit uses the protoplasmic energy of life 12 as the basis for its magnum opus.
This consists of the transmutation of the materia prima the id - which is led through successive purifications, toa fusion in which pleasure, unable to tolerate anything but
itself, has absolute power to trace from the heart the only
worthwhile path of destiny.
This oneiric project, in which everyone will take part,is the only reality that can authorize humanity to turn theworld upside-down before it is crushed by its absurdity.
There seems to be only one way to break down the stubborn resignation with which so many people continue todesire and venerate that which kills them. Communication must be established between the seeds of life present everywhere and nourished - as plants are nourishedby green thumbs - by the intensity of attention each individual gives to the refinement of his own pleasures.

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITThe philosopher's stone is at the heart of the experience of love, recalling humanity to the life from which it
has been separated by the economy. It is there that the
body learns to abolish guilt and discover innocence. It isthere that the fragmentation into mental and physicalprinciples is overcome, for the hand devoted to sensuality and the intellect devoted to the sensitive consciousnessof pleasure 13 share in the alchemy that Gustav Meyrinck
describes as inverting understanding: introducing that of
the body into the mind and that of the mind into the body.
There, finally, in outline, is the universe of the gift. It is
not the sacrifice implied by the law of exchange, but loveof the self emancipated from individualistic selfishness andits exclusive appropriations; self-love that is enriched bywhat it offers.
Yet the trials of survival - the negative - are so numerous that it takes an absolute love of life, if not an irrationaland mad conviction, to reach the heart of love. To arrive
at oneself one must begin with oneself. And this can happen only by leaving behind the senseless struggle of contending day after day with the constraints of work andmoney, by escaping the age-old snares of fear and criticism, and by freeing ourselves of the various trappings thatanchor us to the old world.
Each individual is his own fate. It is impossible to premeditate or predestine my fate apart from the surges andthe undertows of my will to live. This, at least, is what I
intend to bet all my chips on. But who cannot claim to
harbor some of those shadowy black figures that lead one
to the stake? Bewitching elements of survival control eventhe gestures that exorcise them. The space and time allowed for life is very limited.

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Yet nothing can stop me from searching out that strange
crowd of people who inhabit the shadows of the scaffolds,
the darkness of prisons and factories, the secret placesof the city, or the forests from which the Papagenos andPapagenas have yet to emerge. It is they who have lived
and are still trying to live by forsaking the imperatives ofsurvival. That crowd is a part of us, and lives within us.
To hear their voices we need only listen below the vain
cawing of death.

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NoTESPART ONE: FROM THE TWILIGHT OF THE BUREAUCRATS
To THE DAwN OF DIVINE EcoNOMics

1. Hunting weapons were transformed into commodities and into
the defense of commodities, and gave rise to the most dehumanizedof all social groups: soldiers, cops, executioners, the people who do
the dirty jobs. It may be that in the Mesolithic era the first exclusive
appropriation of hunting grounds following changes in climate, which
disturbed the natural profusion of berries and fruits, encouraged thetransition to an economy of exchange.
2. The third element, the soul, or double, is the mythic consciousness of life projected onto another existence.
3. It is significant that the religious deformation of the totality oflife- the MaBna Mater and its patriarchal form, the great god Pan- is
manifested through the unleashing of terror, through a storm of panic.
4. Thus Neanderthal man, not to mention the producers of the economic era (from 8000 B.c. to the present day) who prepare to die of
hunger and boredom- which represent them- in front of the television.
5. This is why there is no radical language. At best there is only alanguage that, by emphasizing the line that separates it from life, byasserting itself everywhere, gives life the job of erasing it.
6. Christianity has never practiced the virtue of tolerance (except

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NOTES

today, in its collapse) because, unlike ancient Rome, it has put a mar-

8. The bishop of Lyons very quickly opposed Peter Waldo's reforms.

ket value on its spiritual product. The missionary rides on the coattails

9. The trial instituted by Nicholas V to exterminate the Fraticelliof the colonist so that he can hang the deadly sign of Christ everywhere,

gave new currency, with the authority of the holy inquisitor Giovannias an absolute mark of the imposed price.

da Capestrano, to legends of the sexual promiscuity rites ( barilotto) and7. The only major thought produced by Christianity is that which
has been extricated from it using the weapons of Greek dialectic: John
Scotus Erigena, Johannes Eckhart, Nicholas ofCusa and Jacob Boehme.

the murder of children born as a consequence.
10. Angelo Clareno, Historia septem tribulationum ordinis minorum(Rome, 1908).
11. Joseph de Guibert, Documenta ecclesiastica christianae perfectionis

PART Two: THE CHURCH STRUGGLES TO EvoLvE

1. Whence the name chosen by Giles of Canter's group in Brussels: Homines lntelliaentiae (the Men of Intelligence).
2. Joachim of Fiore, Concordia novi ac veteris testamenti (1200),
IP.5.21a, and IIP.7.28c.

(Rome, 1931).
12. Eugenio Anagnine, Fra Dolcino e il movimento ereticale all'inizio
del Trecento (Florence: La Nuove Italia, 1964 ). For all the desacralized

intentions of the Bolsheviks' proletarian collectivism and the nationalist collectivism of fascism, both continue to obey the religious form

3. Even though, during internal bureaucratic struggles, perfectly

characteristic of the structure of the agrarian mode of production. The

indoctrinated and sincerely Christian clerics were reproached for feign-

dominance of agriculture in Russia, and industrialized Germany's dreaming faith, the accusation was made often enough to show that the Churchof a return to the land, meet in the bureaucratic uniformity of the State.

did not believe in a faith spontaneously practiced as a result of some

13. Auguste Jundt, Histoire du panthiisme populaire au Moyen Ane

natural virtue.

et au XV/e siecle (Paris: Sandoz and Fischbacher, 1875 ), pp. 45-46.

4. The Church has no meaning if the world ceases to be identified with a religious form. Even the State and its various manifestations

14. Romana Guarnieri, Il Movimento del Libera Spirito: Testi e Documenti (Rome: Edizioni de Storia e Letteratura, 1965 ), p. 4 27.

ofhierarchized power survive at the cost of a reality tirelessly reduced

15. Ibid., p. 459.

to the economy and its social contract.

16. The sublime function of the spirit still survives. Intellectuality,

5. Jean Bordenave and Michel Vialelle, Aux racines du mouvement

its desacralized form, continues to lead the flock of simple people -cathare: La mentalite reli9ieuse des paysans de l'Albineois medieval (Tou-citizens, proletarians, electors - from left to right and from right tolouse: Privat, 197 3 ).

left, treating them as completely feeble-minded; it follows that those

6. The human grandeur produced by the Romans is still impres-who govern them have, at best, the intelligence of imbeciles.

sive in the twentieth century. It continues to exorcise its fundamental
baseness by perpetuating the cult of the military will - that stiffness

PART THREE: THE PRINCIPAL MANIFESTATIONS

of the mechanized body that judges, oppresses and condemns adher-

OF THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT FROM THE

ents to social contempt or incarceration.

THIRTEENTH TO THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY

7. Here is a model of pure abstraction from the world and the self,
perpetuated in the suicidal behavior of the priests of radicalism.

260

1. Auguste Jundt, Histoire du pantheisme populaire au Moyen Ane et
au XV/e siecle (Paris: Sandoz et Fischbacher, 1875), pp. 20-21.

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

2. Germaine Catherine Capelle, Amaury de Bene: Etude sur son
pantheisme forme} (Paris: J. Vrin, 1932).

3. Born around 1180 Caesarius ofHeisterbach entered the Cistercianmonastery at Heisterbach in 1198 or 1199. Interested in both visible
and invisible phenomena Caesarius was obsessed with the devil, whom

NOTES

to draw on anything that contains traces of life and the passionate usethat can be made of it today.
10. Peter of Corbeil.

11. Rudolph was later awarded, for his denunciation of them, theposition of cantor in the church of Cambrai.

he was continually trying to expel, two centuries before the witch-

12. Les Champeaux was just beyond the Porte Saint-Honore, where

hunters created a host of panic lurking in fields, towns and the sub-Les Hailes now stands (d'Alverny, "Un fragment," vol. 18, p. 328, n.4).

conscious. Caesarius was responsible for the education of novices, andIn fact, ten of the accused went to the stake on November 19, 1209:

he left a number of pedagogic treatises.

William of Poitiers; Bernard, the only one to have been arrested in

4. Caesarius emphasizes age, knowledge and theological responsi-

Paris; William the Goldsmith; Stephen the deacon; Stephen, Deaconbility, qualities that make the accusation of using the intellect for pur-of Vieux-Corbeil; Stephen, priest of La Celle-Saint-Cloud; John, priest

poses hostile to the Church much more sensitive.

of Occines; Dudon, the priest and private clerk to Amaury; Elmange

5. William Aurifex (that is, Goldsmith). This may be a pseudo-

the acolyte; and Odo the deacon. They died without showing any signs

nym or, perhaps, an allusion to alchemical activity. According to theof repentance. According to the Chartularium Universitatis Parisiensis

chronicler William the Breton his untimely zeal aroused the suspicions(Heinrich Seuce Denifle and Aemilio Chatelain, Chartularium Universi-of the Church. That he is called a "prophet" seems to indicate that hetatis Parisiensis [Paris, 1889], vol. 8, pp. 70-71 ), "Bernard dared to assert

propagated the ideas of Joachim of Fiore in a radical form, almost fiftythat he could not be consumed by the fire nor tortured by any punish-

years before Gerard of Borgo San Donnino.

ment insofar as he was a being possessing existence, as he was God by

6. Ursines, near Saint-Cloud (Marie-Therese d'Alverny, "Un frag-virtue of the very fact that he existed [literally: "he said that he wasment du proces des amauriciens," in Archives d 'histoire doctrinale et

God insofar as he was an existent being, because what he was was inlitteraire du Moyen Aae [Paris: J. Vrin, 1950-51], vol. 18, p. 332).

God"]." Four were condemned to life imprisonment: Ulric, Peter of

7. He was one of the first to express (at the stake) the idea of therealization of God in man.

Saint-Cloud, Master Guerin and Stephen ofVieux-Corbeil.
13. Women and simple people were treated like mindless animals,

8. Lorris, according to Barthelemy Haureau, Histoire de la philosophie scolastique (Paris: Durand et Pedone-Lauriel, 1872-80).

a flock that had been led away from the paths of the Church by bad
shepherds inspired by the devil and insurgent nature. Once back in. the9. Caesarius of Heisterbach, in Josephus Strange ( ed. ), Dialoaus

bosom of the Church, under the control of new secular priests, mostmiraculorum (Cologne: H. Lempertz, 1851), vol. 1, ch. 22. The docu-of the accused were plunged, through a mixture of terror and clem-

ments translated constitute only a fraction of what is still to be dis-ency, into a state of submission in which it was easy to persuade themcovered and published. But they are enough to correct the opinion thatto confess and inform. Caesarius tells of one of these "truths" propa-

several centuries of religious addiction have been imposed on minds

gated by the Church in order to end the lies that had gained widespreadalways ready to forget life, which they claim to control. Readers are

currency among the people: "As they [the condemned] were being led

free to interpret them however they wish. I, for my part, am quite happy

to punishment such a furious storm arose that nobody doubted that the262

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

NOTES

air was being stirred up by the beings who had seduced these men, now

were judged to be dishonorable. The passion for discovering unpub-

about to die, into their great error. That night the man who had been

lished material and for compilation (as in the cases of Baluze and Bou-

their chief knocked at the door of a certain woman recluse. Too latequet) should also be noted.

he confessed his error and declared that he was now an important guest

23. The articles of the accusation were read to the accused at theirin hell and condemned to eternal fires" (Norman Cohn, The Pursuit offirst appearance before the court. The Capitulia lnquisitionis summed

the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of theup, point by point, the facts that had been the subject of the diffamatio.

Middle Anes, rev. and enl. ed. [New York: Oxford University Press,

24. d'Alverny, "Un fragment," pp. 331-32.

1970], pp. 152-53).

25. The first point pushes the specious logic of the theologians to

14. William the Breton, "Gesta Philippi Augusti," in H. Franc;:oisthe point of parody. This is not an exposition, it is the notes of an inter-

Delaborde (ed.), Oeuvres de Rinord et de Guillaume le Breton (Paris:

rogation, perhaps put into order by Gamier. The questions are not reca-

Renouard, 1882-85 ), vol. 1.

pitulated by the notary of the officiality but develop in the succession

15. M. Bouquet (ed. ), Recueil des historiens des Gaules et de Ia France(Paris, 1738-1876), vol. 16, p. 175.

and repetition of the arguments and quotations. The uneven rhythmmarks a process of flight, deviation and then attack by the accused when

16. Today, the dominant meaning still condemns as unreal anything

he is cornered, as the council's hunt forces its quarry to give himselfthat does not belong to the mechanisms of orthodoxy, and all scien-away in a final confusion. The beginning, which bases the omnipresencetific, political, social and economic heterodoxies.

of God on everyone's fear of its denial, gives the tone of this corrupt

17. Johannes Nauclerus, Chronica (Cologne, 1544), p. 912.

irony, and the proto-atheism avant Ia lettre of its pantheistic philoso-

18. This is where Johannes Eckhart was born in 1260.

phy: if God is everywhere, he is also nowhere. Like God and the devil,

19. Livarius Oliger, "De Secta Spiritus Libertatis, in Umbria Saeculo

good and evil have no meaning in comparison with living things. Every-

XIV: Disquisitio et Documenta," in Storia e Letteratura Reccolta di Studi

thing here fades away before the importance the Amaurians attributeet Testi (Rome, 1943), vol. 3, p. 101.

to their own existence.

20. Petrus Comestor, Scholastica historia Manistri Petri Comestoris

26. Having only a rather poor knowledge of biblical texts, and notsacre Scripture seriem breuem nimis et expositam exponentis (Paris: Iehan

having been able to overcome a sense of repugnance toward a coQlpi-

Frellon, 1513-19).

lation of all the most ignoble opponents of the entitlement to life,

21. Philip the Chancellor, In psalterium davidicum CCXXX sermones(Paris, 1523), vol. 2.

I cannot guarantee that the quotations will conform to the version,
which is falsified, of the ecclesiastical agents.

22. The first studies and publications of the supporters of the

27. Scholastic jargon, of course, but scarcely more ridiculous thanmovement of the Free Spirit were the works of Protestants: Gottfried

the sententious nonsense of Heidegger, Sartre and other jargonmongers.

Arnold, Mosheim, Bayle and Beausobre in the eighteenth century;

28. Apart from the intellectual verbosity in the first point, section

Preger, Jundt, and Dollinger in the nineteenth. They were seen as

two explains, in the language of simple people, the practical truth that

antisacramental mystics, hostile to Rome and slandered by the Church.

"whatever you do, there is no sin." Thus the priests of La Celle-Saint-

Hartmann, Eloi (hostile to Luther) and Quintin (hostile to Calvin) alone

Cioud, Vieux-Corbeil and Ursines should be in agreement with theirTHE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITNOTESparishioners, as the interrogation of John confirms. The same John said

eating or drinking, nor to any other vain elation" (Angela of Foligno,

that he had not completely understood some other points of the sched-in Michele Faloci Pulignani ( ed. ), L'AutobioB'afia e 9/i scritti della beataule, probably the first section.

An9ela da Foli9no. Cited in Romana Guarnieri, ll Movimento del libero

29. The term, tinged with contempt, designates the simple search
for amorous pleasure. For Gratian husbands who wanted pleasure in their

spirito [Rome: Edizioni de Storia e Letteratura, 1965], p. 411 ). "Uncon-

trolled" and "vain elevation" mean: pleasure rather than necessity.

sexual relationships without concerning themselves with procreation

36. Notably, the theologians trying the case.

were fornicators. It sometimes happened that the "sin against nature,"

37. There is no resurrection, for Christ or anyone else; all life isa term reserved for sodomy and bestiality, was used to designate the use

here, and to create yourself free of all restraint and blame is to actuallyof"poisons of sterility," which remove all fear from sexual pleasure.

exist better than God.

30. Knowledge here gives the freedom of nature a good conscience.

38. He was aware only that he was God.

It permits animality to be transcended by freeing it from fear and blame.

39. Amaury of Bene's thesis, the weakness of which is in marked

31. God here seems to be rather like George Groddeck's id. The

contrast to the other propositions, is adequate proof that it is part of

key to what they call "truth" is, in fact, in the lived authenticity ofan enterprise designed to discredit him as a thinker. Thus, John Gerson"Become what you are." The same idea appears in Quintin ofTournai.

accused poor Jan van Ruysbroeck of belonging to the movement of the

32. The parish priest philosopher succeeds the theologian here to

Free Spirit, when, in fact, the latter ceaselessly denounced the "false

guide simple people toward knowledge. The strikes against rationality

mystics."by Christian mythology cast doubt on the notion that it was not until

40. Paragraphs nine and ten concern the doctrine of Master Godin,

Meslier or the libertines of the seventeenth century that any atheism isa philosopher whose ideas are similar to those of David of Dinant andfound in ancien regime mentalities. Beneath the claim of the Amaurians

to pantheism, which, in its reduction of divinity to nature, is the athe-to be the enlightened intellectual guides of simple people can be seen

ism of the Middle Ages. Admittedly what is meant by nature here is

the popular feeling that there is no heaven or hell, just a life to lead in

not the object-nature of science, the inert material from which capi-

the best way possible, while warding off the bad.

talist exploitation profits. It is a living natur~, a process of energies that

33. Whoever becomes aware that he is by nature divine and cannot sin learns to remove the obstacles to sexual pleasure until he attains"paradisiacal serenity."

are nothing if not absolutely materialized, by which I mean they operate concretely.
41. According to Godin, God would therefore not escape natural

34. The diversity of belief is abolished in the consciousness that
God fulfills himself in man. Similarly rites, sacraments, sin and penance lose their currency.

destruction.
42. The idea of a god who is not the cause of evil belongs to theCathar theology of the good god and the bad god (the Demiurge ).

35 . The laughter of the living, as opposed to religious morosity andits macabre excitements, justifies the reproach of Angela of Foligno.

43. The sovereignty Godin believed he incarnated as an individual is here expressed in Christian jargon.

Denouncing those who demanded the spirit of freedom, the blessed

44. The philosopher's rationalism rejects the Trinity and argues

Angela stated: "True love does not incite to laughter, nor to uncontrolledthat if God - as Father and Spirit - became man in Christ, he did the266THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITNOTES

same thing for every human being. The Spirituals have the advantage

the pope, founded their tyrannical power on a religion that was theirover the common man, blinded by the Church, of having become aware

own property (Tanchelm, Nicholas of Basel, Conrad Schmidt, Martinof such a presence. This is a radical version of Joachism.

of Mainz, John of Leiden, David Joris, among others). The process of

45. Point eleven amalgamates several conceptions so they can betranscending a God who rules over the survival of men in a denatured

condemned as a whole under the name "Amaurian": thinkers clos~ tonature is radically incomprehensible - beyond understanding - for aDavid of Dinant; philosophers who make reference to the "natural

henchman of religion.

books" of Aristotle, which the Church had condemned; even Cathars

53. Joseph de Guibert, Documenta.

like the Ortliebians of Strasbourg, a little-known group who practiced

54. This is probably the period of Eckhart's first visit to Paris.

ascetism and who, according to the Determinatio of Albertus Magnus,

55. Hence, the pointlessness of theology and its bitter quarrels.

made a distinction between internal and external bodies (Albertus

56. This is what the very Christian Menendez y Pelayo calls "giv-Magnus, Determinatio de novo spiritu; see Herman Haupt, "Beitrage zur

ing the soul to God and the body to the devil" (Marcelino Menendez

Geschichte der Sekte vom freien Geiste und des Beghartentums," iny Pelayo, Historia de los heterodoxos espaiioles [Madrid: V. Suarez, 1929],

Zeitschrift fur Kirchenaeschichte [Gotha, 1885], vol. 7). The development

p. 526).

that follows stems from the Inquisitors' concern to understand the possible directions of the interrogation.

46. Garnius von Rochefort, in Clemens Baeumker ( ed. ), "Contra
amaurianos," Beitraae zur Geschichte zur Philosophie und Theolo9ie desMittelalters (Munster: Aschendorff, 1926), vol. 24.

47. William the Breton, "Gesta Philippi Augusti."
48. Caesarius of Heisterbach, Dialoaus miraculorum, ed. Josephus
Strange (Cologne: H. Lempertz, 1851).

49. Denifle and Chatelain, Chartularium, vol. 8, pp. 70-71.

57. This proposition implies not only the rejection of a hereafter
to be feared, but also a critique of fear, that inheritance from the animal kingdom that both spiritual and temporal power perpetuate in theirsocialized form.

58. Jundt, Histoire, p. 35.
59. Jules Frederichs, Robert le Bouare, premier inquisiteur 9eneral en
France (Jere moitii du XIW siecle ), University of Ghent, collection ofworks published by the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters (Ghent,1892 ), fasc. 6.

50. Abbot of Saint-Victor in Paris from 1203 until his death in 1229.

60. If the latter was a Beguine, her condemnation marked the

51. The criticism of hypocrisy relates to ordinary anticlericalism,

beginning of the repression of the movement of the Free Spirit, which

which could not tolerate priests using their sacred mission as a coverfor their debauchery (acknowledg~d, admittedly, as sins). The Church
cleverly turned this against the heretics - the "foxes," as Bernard of

was spreading in the beguinages.
61. Hadewijch, Vision 13, in Hadewych: Visioenen, ed. Jozef vanMierlo (Louvain: Vlaamsche Boekenhalle, 1924-25), p. 179.

Clairvaux called them, who had no alternatives beyond dissimulation

62. Thomas ofCantimpre, Bonum universale de apibus (Douai, 1627).

or the stake.

63. The prevalence of subversive ideas among weavers, frequently

52. The identification with God, as the Abbot of Saint-Victor understands it, implies the pretense of assuming in oneself the perfectionof survival. This is what a good number of heresiarchs did, who, like268

noted by historians, is further confirmed by the doctrine of John Hartmann, called "the Weaver."64. Aleydis was burned in Cambrai around 1235. In 1239 Guyard

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

presided over the execution of the Cathars of Mont-Saint-Wimer.

NOTES

not reduce their wealth. Another proposition declared that "no one

65. A letter of 1257 published by Fn!dericq indicates that the dio-

who has two coats of the same sort can be saved." The Church, ofcese was in debt as a result of the costs involved in the pursuit of here-

course, rebelled against a theory in which scorn for possessions was atics. This was not an isolated case: in 124 7, Pope Innocent III madeguarantee of spiritual wealth, and the acquisition of possessions entailed

the Dominicans of Besan~on responsible for suppressing heresy in Bur-the impoverishment of human status. "At the University of Paris, ingundy and Lorraine. In 1255 they asked Alexander IV if they might be

1256, the regent defended the traditional theory of the secular Church

released from their mission, as they were experiencing financial diffi-

against an adept of voluntary poverty, Master T.... With examples drawn

culties and other obstacles, the nature of which was not stated (Paulfrom the lives of Saint Thomas and Saint Ambrose, he reminded his

Fredericq, Corpus documentorum lnquisitionis haereticae pravitatis Neer-

audience that the sharing of goods with the poor was an act of mercy

landicae [Ghent: J. Vuylsteke, 1889-1900], vol. 1, pp. 128-29).

rather than a total renunciation of worldly possessions" (ibid.).

66. Fredericq, Corpus, vol. 1, p. 144.
67. Like most voluntary poverty movements, William's was op-

69. Unlike the Church, which draws a distinction between the permitted possession of wealth and the mortal sin of avarice.

posed to the sale of indulgences. "Before death," writes Colette Braeck-70. Stealing from the rich is not theft, as long as it provides theman, "man had four means of redeeming his soul from hell. Gratian's

poor with subsistence they are otherwise denied. The same defense of

decree cites prayers for the dead, masses celebrated by priests, alms andtheft turns up frequently among the Beguines and Beghards.

legacies to ecclesiastical institutions. In the course of the thirteenth

71. The idea of damnation seems to imply, as the Amaurians be-

century there were great changes in the services surrounding the dead.

lieved, that hell exists only here on earth. It is reserved for those who

Cumulative and anniversary masses were said for the soul of the deadremain ignorant of the possibility of paradise, an ignorance which,person. They were no longer provided by the Church, but financed byaccording to Cornelius, stems from private ownership.

a sum the dying man left for that purpose. This means of salvation was,

72. This proposition, like the ones that follow, bears the mark offrom then on, for the rich only. In remission of his sins, the sick man

the movement of the Free Spirit. The end of the world of possession

would distribute alms. If he did not, the living would do so after his

implies the end of sin.

death, a practice that brought with it abuses that were condemned by

73. It must be remembered that fornication is the clerical transla-

the councils from the thirteenth century on .... At Lateran IV, Inno-tion of "t~e art ofloving," the refinement of which seems to have beencent III was worried by the extension of commercial activities, anda fundamental preoccupation of the thirteenth century. The songs of

took measures to limit the duration of indulgences .... The Council ofthe troubadours and trouveres were later eclipsed by the songs of death,

Beziers, in 1246, condemned money collectors who promised libera-

which gradually proclaimed the triumph of Christianity on the eve oftion from hell at bargain prices" (Colette Braeckman, "Guillaumeits desacralization by the Renaissance.

Cornelisz," in Bulletin de Ia societe d'histoire du protestantisme belae 9.4[1982], pp. 76-91 ).

74. The critique of money is already beginning to give way to oneof power, social representation and spectacle.

68. Almsgiving was criticized as being the least costly way of ensur-

75. The prohibition against making love to a pregnant wife, aparting the rich a clear conscience. When it came from their surplus it didfrom offering women a reason for refusing, takes on a further meaning

270

271

THE

MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITNOTES

in relation to the proposition denying sins against nature, which, to1262 ("Les Freres du Libre-Esprit," in Religions et societes [Paris: F.

the clerical mind of the thirteenth century signified not only homo-

Alcan, 1905]).

sexual or bestial relations, but any erotic relation not involved in

81. In his Formicarius the Dominican John Nider ( 1380-1438)

procreation: mutual masturbation, coitus interruptus or reservatus, sod-claims, around 1435, that he possesses a Manual by Albertus designed

omy and so on. Here a politics of abortion is indirectly encouraged byfor use against "a plague that seeks to adopt the guise of liberty." These

William Cornelius, who must have been able to see the disastrous con-people teach doctrines so blasphemous and so contrary to the Church

sequences of pregnancy for workers in the weaving trade and for theand the social order that the chronicler does not dare to relate them.

very poor.

He is probably talking about a fuller version (now lost) of the notes

76. The freedom of nature practiced in the lower class not only

implies equal rights between the sexes, it also requires - in Cornelius's
conception - a real respect for women far removed from the misogyny of the bourgeoisie and the writers of fabliaux. It does not base itself

outlined in the Determinatio (John Nider, Formicarius [Strasbourg, 1517],
vol. 3, ch. 5, p. 45).
82. Herbert Grundmann, Religiose Bewegungen in Mittelalter (Ber-lin: Verlag Dr. Emil Ebering, 1935; repr. Hildesheim, 1961), p. 400.

on the worship of the object of seduction, but on a practical code of

83. Ibid., p. 388.

courtesy in which the woman - whether she comes from a poor back-

84. Martin Crusius, Annales suevici (Frankfurt, 1595 ), vol. 3, ch. 2,

ground or whether she has embraced poverty voluntarily - has the rightp. 14.

to give herself to, or refuse, whomever she likes. (There were many

85. Martin Crusius cites the case of the convent at Kircheim unter

women workers exhausted by their jobs for whom the solicitations ofTeck in Swabia, where, in 1214, eighty-six women were living without

exigent males were an additional burden.) Hence the restriction "threeobserving any precise rule. They asked the bishop of Constance several

times a week."

times to institute the Augustinian rule for them, but he did not accede

77. Fredericq, Corpus, vol. 1, pp. 119-20.

to their request until 1247.

78. Lust (luxure) is the term Thomas of Cantimpre used to desig-

86. "New spirit," "spirit of freedom," "freedom through thenate freedom of love. The attempt to refine the promiscuity thatspirit," "free spirit" all designate, in the wake of Albertus's Determinatio

reigned among the poor was senseless to Thomas, who, under the in-

and with the ecclesiastical desire to catalog them as specific heresies,

fluence of his frigid God, could not conceive of anything except the

movements that, from the starting point of the freedom of nature,

deathly rigidity of chastity and its obscene release (ibid., p. 120).

wanted either to demand it for its own sake- as the permitted release

79. By allusion to the Summa de catharis et pauperibus Lugduno,of repressed desires - or to refine it into a system of socialized love-

attributed to the Dominican inquisitor Rainurius Sacconi, a Cathar frommaking, experienced as permanent creation. (Examples of these can be

the North of Italy who converted to Catholicism in 1245 and started

seen in their desacralized and mechanistic form, first in the projects

to persecute his former comrades with evangelical zeal.

ofSade, and second in Charles Fourier.) The Church, which recognized

80. Felix Vernet dates the text between 1262 and 1280 ("Les Freres

only t~e existence of the spirit, saw perversion in Saint Paul's state-

du Libre-Esprit," in Dictionnaire de theologie catholique [Paris: Letouzey,

ment: "Where the spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." In his biogra-

1920], vol. 6, cols. 800-809): Raoul Allier puts it between 1259 andphy of Thomas Aquinas, William of Tocco gives one chapter the title:

2]2

273

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITNOTES"On the Error of the Free Spirit and the Third State of the World."

himself to the cult of Mary, this mother purified to the point of vir-

There he condemns the new spirit examined by Albertus, the spirit ofginity by divine adultery.

freedom of the Spirituals and the Fraticelli, and the third age of Joachimof Fiore.

That devotion to Mary was ridiculed from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century is confirmed by the constant repression that occurred

87. The response indicates a desire on the part of the inquisitor

during that period. Two cases, out of many, will illustrate this: on April

to bring the accused back into the framework of Christian mythology.

1, 1275, Mathilde Billarde "for the villeness she uttered and the words

Belief in angels, devils, hell and the Fall is current only among thoseagainst the Mother God ... was banished and placed into exile and pil-who do not recognize God in man.

loried at Tournai" (Fredericq, Corpus, vol. 1, p. 140); and Jacob Acarin,

88. This proposition belongs to Catharism, not to the movementof the Free Spirit.

from Chause-Notre-Dame in Hainaut was sentenced to three years inprison in 1451 for saying: "Why be ashamed? Our Lady had no shame.

89. The idea of God as a God of justice and fear is rejected andrealized instead as a principle of bounty and natural gratuity. This is

She had feelings just like other people, for she was married as we are.
Do you think she was a virgin? Nay" (ibid., vol. 1, p. 231).

the sentiment that Francis of Assisi tried to disseminate within the

An attempt at a feminine Church appeared after the death of Wil-

Church, and which his dissolute followers, the Fraticelli, attributed

helmina of Bohemia (1282), venerated as an incarnation of the Holyto nature.

Spirit, and founder of the group known as the Family of Love. The

90. Compare with the refusal of work in the group William ofSaint-Amour describes.

Church put an end to that competing enterprise, with its female hierarchy and its own rites, by burning the Wilhelminites.

91. Compare with the confession of John of Brunn.

97. Cited in Haupt, "Beitrage." The statements of the nuns and lay

92. A Cathar, Wa'Idensian or Apostolic proposition.

members of the New Spirit in Swabia - and perhaps in those convents

93. The prosecutor continues to use the notion of sin, although"that enjoyed the freedom of the Fraticelli" - is adequate demonstra-

it is rejected by the accused. The fatalist argument, as in Quintin oftion of the source of those "effusions of divine love" praised by devout

Tournai, justifies the incitement to "follow nature."commentators. Even if the intellectualism of figures such as Beatrice

94. Freedom from guilt, and self-love, creating a feeling of plenitude in the individual, are expressed in the grace of incarnating God.
95. It is in the body as the site of pleasure and displeasure that theHoly Spirit, that is, God, is incarnate.

of Nazareth and Mechtild of Magdeburg (Mechtild of Magdeburg,
Offenbanunnen der Schwester Mechtild von Mandeburn oder das fliessende
Licht der Gottheit, ed. Gall Morel [Regensburg: G.J >Manz, 1869]) tran-

scends a vague sensual experience, there were, nonetheless, compan-

96. The Church tried to use the cult of the Virgin Mary to pre-ions around them whom the movement of the Free Spirit had made God

vent the renewal of life expressed in the thirteenth century by the nas-or Christ and who "knew carnally" their female companions, simul-cent (and temporary) supremacy of women. The patriarchal contempttaneously virgins and mothers, offering the milk of their ardor until

for feminine existence was responsible for this. It is revealing that one

they fainted.

of the most enthusiastic devotees of the Virgin, Jacopo ofTodi, wrote
fiercely misogynistic poems and, after the death of his wife, devoted

274

98. Stephanus Axters, Geschiedenis van de vroomheid in de Nederlanden (Antwerp: De Sikkel, 1953), p. 27.

275

NOTES

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

99. Beatrice ofNazareth, Seven manieren van minnen, ed. Ruypens
and van Mierlo (Louvain: Vlaamsche Boekenhalle, 1926).

100. Van Mierlo, "Hadewijch," Revue d'ascetique et de mystique 5

their behavior, is less in accord with the movement of the Free Spirit
than with the mentality of its detractors.

110. Compare with Margaret Porete: "The soul has no discomfort
about its past sins, nor about the sufferings God suffered for it, nor for(1924), p. 269.
101. Hadewijch, Vision 3, trans. Columba Hart, in Hadewijch: The
Complete Works (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), p. 272.

the sins and discomforts in which those close to them remain."

111. Ubertino of Casale, Arbor vitae crucifixae Jesu (Venice, 1485 ).

102. Hadewijch, Vision 7, in ibid., p. 281.

112. Fredericq, Corpus, vol. I, p. 166 and vol. II, p. 37.

103. This is an old tradition, since the first ecclesiastical exegetes

113. Probably Philippa of Hainaut.

competed pathologically with each other to transform the epithala-

114. Margaret, in Guarnieri, Il Movimento, p. 617.

mium of the Song of Songs into a cerebral flirtation between divine

115. Master of theology at the University of Paris from 1265, andHusband and the virginal Church.

104. Similarly the English translation of Margaret's The Mirror of
Simple Souls (Archivio italiano per Ia storia della pi eta, 1968) goesstraight from verse 2 to chapter 126.

105. Dit sijn die volmaete 9heeleedt 9helijc minnen die Hadewych sachCanon of Paris, Tournai and then Liege, where he died in 1306.

116. Margaret, in Guarnieri, Jl Movimento, p. 586.
117. William of Nangis, in H. Geraud (ed. ), Chronique La tine (Paris:
J. Renouard, 1843).

118. The order to hasten death was accorded only in return for an
attitude of contrition. Stephen Dolet, who had unconvincingly dem-elc met sinen seraphinen.

106. Minor friars, or Franciscans.

onstrated his repentance at the stake, was invited by the executioner

107. In 1304 the Franciscan Jacopo of Bevagna was denounced toto hold forth more loudly; otherwise, he would not be strangled, but

the Inquisition by Clare of Montefalco. Oliger has published the Latinwould perish in the flames.

119. "The fact that Christ is blessed will not render me blessed,

text of their exchange.
- "Clare, for four years I enjoyed the greatest peace and rest, foras long as I myself do not become Christ, as long as I am not myself

in no situation did I experience trouble or change, and I attained

hom the Son of God" or "Why was God made man? So that I could besuch a level, found such perfection, that I seemed to recognize God

hom God, in his likeness." Eckhart must have heard of Margaret dur-

in all things, and I was ceaselessly under his spell.

ing one of his stays in Paris.

- Take care, my brother! You think you are in an exalted position?

120. Margaret, in Guarnieri, Jl Movimento.

Take care how you come down, watch ~ut for your fall!

121. Ibid., p. 561.

- Let God ascend, for I care neither for what he raises up nor for122. Ibid., pp. 590-91.

what he gives [Oliger, De Secta ].

123. Ibid., pp. 630-35 .

108. Ibid., pp. 115-16.

124. Van Mierlo, "Bloemardinne," in Dictionnaire d'histoire et de109. Ignoring the killing of the pope, which is within the logic

Bt08faphie ecclesiastique (Paris: Letouzey, 1926).

of the victim (even for Ubertino of Casale), raping women and girls,

125. H. van den Bogaert (Henricus Pomericus), in deSmet (ed.),included on the agenda of soldiers of all periods and of those who ape

De ori9ine Viridisvallis una cum vita B. Joann. Rusbrockii, in Annalecta

276

277

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

bollandiana (Paris and Brussels, 1885), vol. 4.

NOTES

Emperor, against the Dominicans, who were loyal to the pope.

126. The throne of silver recalls the magnificence of Walter, and138. That is, depending on the context: God is subject to the cor-the silk garments that the nuns of Schweidnitz wore under their hair-ruption of nature (Godin, the New Spirit in Swabia); God has been

shirts. In the Book of Two Men, Rulmann Merswin also speaks of Beguines

betrayed by the Church, its dissolute morals and its lust for profit (thewho "before accomplishing the praise of God through the mediationargument of the advocates of spiritual poverty and the Spirituals, suchof the senses, dressed themselves in wonderful clothes." He describes,

as Michael of Cesena and Ubertino of Casale); God is abolished for thoseelsewhere, the alchemical magisterium in which the union of the kingawakened to the divine spirit within them.

and the queen forms the androgynous egg, the site of sexual pleasure

139. Moral perfection as understood by Pelagius, or the conscious-in which separations are abolished under the double symbol of the elixir

ness of being God and no longer being able to sin, whatever one does.

of youth and the universal stone of transmutation.

140. A propo~ition ofheresiarchs like Segarelli or Nicholas of Basel.

127. Fredericq, Corpus, p. 186.

141. A proposition implying the right to sexual pleasure.

128. Similarly, around 1529, the Spanish Inquisition did not dare

142. The Church praises this sort of detachment whenever it con-proceed against the Alumbrados of Seville because of the number of
influential families belonging to the movement.

129. Jan van Ruysbroeck, The Spiritual Espousals (London: Faber& Faber, 1952).

130. Article 16 of the Bull of Condemnation of Eckhart: "God does

not himself order any outward act."

cerns membership of a recognized monastic order.

143. A Cathar proposition, or at any rate one deriving from anascetic movement (Jundt, Histoire, p. 48).

144. Ibid., p. 49.
145. In the same year the Council of Mainz mentions secret meetings in secluded locations or in caves.

131. Franz Pfeiffer (ed. ), "Swester Katrei, Meister Ekchartes Tohter

146. C. Baronius and 0. Raynaldus, Annales ecclesiastici una cum

von Strasburc," in Deutsche mystiker des vierzehnten ]ahrhunderts (Leipzig:

critica historico-chronologica (Lucca, 173 8-5 9 ), in Annales ad annum

G.J. Goschen, 1845-1857), vol. 2.

1311 66.

132. Johann Lorenz von Mosheim, De Beghardis et Beguinabus commentarius (Leipzig, 1790), p. 147.

14 7. The pope decided on the total suppression of the institutionof the Beguines, a decree too severe, since it included the innocent as

133. Ibid., p. 140.

well as the guilty. He rescinded this decision himself, in a document

134. Giovanni Domenico Mansi, Sacrorum conciliorum novas et

published shortly afterward, in which he grants permission to ortho-

amplissima collection (1759), vol. 23, p. 997.

135. By "illiterate" they meant simple people, but also anyone who

was not a cleric or who did not know Latin.

dox Beguines of irreproachable morals to "serve God according to theinspiration of the Lord."

148. These propositions do not appear to have been published

136. Grundmann, ReliBiose, p. 401.

immediately. It was only under John XXII that the edicts of the Coun-

137. In other words, for competing materially and spiritually withcil of Vienne came to the attention of the bishops, who thereafter vied

the mendicant orders. The archbishop of Cologne, who later prosecutedwith each other in the zeal of their repressiveness (Jundt, Histoire,the Dominican Eckhart, supported the Franciscans, who supported thepp. 50-51).

279

NOTES

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

149. Robert E. Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the later
Middle A9es (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), pp. 209-10.

150. Johannes Heidenberg, known as Johannes Trithemius (1462-

contempt for him, the initiate can yield, unreservedly, but not without some cunning, to the violence of release.

161. The individual claim postulates that everything belongs to us,
because we have been dispossessed of everything. It is interesting to1516), Abbot ofSponheim.
151. A term used to designate the Beghards.
152. Membership in the Dominican order protected John against
any other actions by the Inquisition, and made any potential revenge

find this justified here in theological terms. As soon as man has become
God by renouncing money he hastens the realization of God in society
each time he deprives an owner of his goods and annihilates them byspending them. The opinion of William Cornelius that the poor haveby the Beghards more difficult.

153. The Moravian city ofBrno.
154. John hereby lends credence to the clerical attitude toward
simple people, who put their trust in priests but are misled by a false

the right to steal from the rich is echoed in the idea that becoming
God entails the end of havin9, which hinders the realization of bein9.

162. Money "sent into eternity" by being spent counterposes a consumer ethic to the rules of capitalism, six centuries before consump-friend.

155. The decision is, therefore, collective, not magisterial.
156. This initiation period (which lasted twelve years, according
to John) is no different externally from the apostolic behavior of theWaldensians, but its meaning is quite different. After having experienced the Passion of Christ as a deprivation of the old world, the initiate gradually accedes to the divinity of the masters, to whom everythingtion inscribed itself into economic necessity.

163. The Trinity is resolved in the unity of man become God.
According to the Beghards of Cologne the Father was incarnate in theSon, who, by being stripped of his earthly goods, was united with theHoly Spirit to become God on earth. Quintin ofToumai's idea that thedeath on the cross was purely a symbol suggests that Christ continued
to live in accordance with the free life of men who have become God.

is due.

157. These ruses and compromises with discipline are characteristic of the second stage of initiation.

158. The recourse to asceticism in order to purge oneself of thesolicitations of dominant society and to encourage the incarnation of
God in the body was practiced primarily by Beghards and Beguines.
Giles of Canter, Francisca Hernandez, Eloi Pruystinck and Quintin ofTournai start from the freedom of nature and refine that by means of164. Lived experience is superior to all forms of dogma and to theimpostures of reality reduced to an object.

165. He is no longer a creature of God, but God himself.
166. If "freedom of nature" is indeed the basis of the movementof the Free Spirit, there are different and divergent options dependingon the individual's choice either to indulge in the release of oppressed
nature or to transcend God and denatured nature by creating a humannature based on the free gift and on sensual pleasure.

more complete pleasure.

159. That is, to the mendicant orders.
160. By conforming to apostolic doctrine, the novitiate stage offers
three advantages: the Inquisition cannot obtain any admission otherthan the testimony of orthodox devotion from a novice; mendicancy
supports the idleness and luxury of the masters; and, inured to society's

280

167. This passage refers explicitly to the alchemical path. But, for
the Beghards, God is not transcended. He is incarnate in the individual as the supreme release of the nature he oppresses. This is Sade's allpowerful tiger of nature.

168. An abortive method used in all the orthodox religious com-

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

munities. The only difference here is the rejection of guilt.

169. Because a priest, not living in freedom of spirit, believesin sin.

NOTES

aged people to break, is what Christianity calls "free will."
181. In himself, who is its unity. The lived experience of subjectivity is opposed to the cleric's abstraction.

170. Or "until she is completely satisfied (perficiet)." As in Cornelius, and in courtly love, it is the woman who takes the initiative.
The three signs reinstate the Trinity in the unity of sexual enjoyment.
The sign of the cross is undone in a sign of life that aligns the nose (thatis, the sex), the head and the heart.

171. The detail about Communion is probably a response to a question from Gallus, the inquisitor. The sentences that follow, indeed,show how little importance was accorded confession and Communion.

172. That is, when he ceases to be a created being and becomes
the Creator.

182. Wilhem Wattenbach, "Uber die Sekte der Bruder vom freien
Geiste," in Sitzunesberichte der konielechen preussischen Akademie derWissenschaften (Berlin, 1887), vol. 29, pp. 529-37.

183. Chemnitz, in Silesia. Today, temporarily, known as KarlMarx-Stadt.
184. Probably after the name of its foundress.

185. The first witness. The mistresses, also called Marthas, wereusually particularly careful to keep a distance between themselves andthe novices. The novices' reports of their secret activities derive mostly
from imprudence or indiscretion.

173. Compare with Dolcino, as well as the Anabaptist tendencyof the Miinsterians and the supporters of Batten burg.
174. The perfection of the poor here takes an elitist turn. The
asceticism of the initiation has paid for the right to enter a community that identifies with the tyrannical God of survival.
175. Potlach, or the consumption of goods, is an accelerated formof mercantile destruction. The annihilation of the earthly economy
refers to the eternity of the celestial economy. The mentality of theBeghards of Cologne finds modern expression in suicidal hedonism,encouraged today by the pressure to consume, among those condemned
to survival.

186. Literally, "in a tunic that left her legs bare." Compare withthe ragged tunic described by John ofBriinn.
187. Hedwig is here repeating one of the articles of the Clemen tines.
There is no doubt, though, that, like Margaret Porete, Heilwige Bloemardine and Sister Katrei, the nuns of Schweidnitz behaved as thoughperfect.

188. The mistresses made the novice work every day, including
Sundays and religious festivals.

189. Literally, "if any impurity befell her."
190. Gertrude of Civitatis later admitted to having spent twentyfour years in the community. "Interrogated by the inquisitor, she

176. Compare with the Amaurian notion of charity.
177. The confession stops here. Gallus adds annotations taken at
random from commentaries not indexed by the official notary.
178. John's brother did not join the Dominican Order.
179. An argument taken up later by atheists.

180. When he rids himself of the preoccupations dictated by society and identifies his will with that of God, which he bears withinhim. This false will, which the movement of the Free Spirit encour-282

answered in a tortuous, almost cryptic manner." The novices considered her the principal spiritual authority ofSchweidnitz.

191. The second witness.
192. The pseudo-Eckhartian lampoon This Was Sister Katrei was circulating there at this time.
193. The third witness.

194. Perhaps Gleiwitz, in Silesia.
195. The meaning given to the word charity by the movement of theNOTES

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITFree Spirit refers to sexual pleasure (Fac mihi caritatem, conjaceas mihi).
196. Painter, novice and fourth witness.
197. Either to attain the indifference of libertinism, or to reachthat the richness of life is superior to money.
208. The inquisitor is being ironic about the effects of prison.
However, torture does not seem to have been used.

a stage at which desire would be irrepressible and, to a certain ex-

209. Wattenbach, "Uber die Sekte," pp. 538-43.

tent, pure.

210. L.W. Az, "De ketter Willem van Hildernissem," in Fred.e ricq,

198. Compare with Francisca Hernandez.
199. Ernest W. McDonnell, The Beauines and Beyhards in Medieval
Cujture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1954 ).

200. Menendez y Pelayo, Historia, p. 530.
201. John Hartmann shares with John of Brunn the idea that identification with God is identification with denatured nature, with thecruelty of release deceptively presented as liberation.

Melanyes, p. 259.

211. J. Latomus, Corsendonca (Antwerp, 1664 ).
212. Fredericq, Corpus, pp. 266-67.
213. Lerner notes another version of the trial. He claims that William was once again a reader in the Carmelite monastery at Tirlemontin 1422 (Lerner, Heresy, p. 158 n ,82).
214. Giles is presented here as a. heresiarch and a seducer. He is

202. The consciousness in which God is perceived as a permanent

more likely to have been the originator of a method of self-realization

flux of the being identified with the being of God, and released fromaccording to which God is achieved in the individual by means of an

all imperatives not proceeding from such an incarnation. Contrary toinspiration that Giles calls the Holy Spirit, and Groddeck calls the id.

the refinement of love, which achieves transcendence of God and dena-

215. This thesis was already to be found among the Amaurians.

tured nature, Hartmann chooses to identify with the God of inverted,

Everyone ensures his own salvation by acceding, through conscience,

economized life.

to the quality ofbeing.

203. The detail of the altar, first mentioned by Kerling, reflects
the fantasies of the ecclesiastical libido.

216. The state of chiklhood was the sign of Adamic innocence as
manifested in Joachim's third age. It also expressed the stripping off of204. This misogynistic vulgarity, and the scholastic exploitation

the shell of survival from which emanated the being of pleasure, repre-

that follows reveal that a tacit agreement exists between the executioner

sented by the child, before society became locked into the economic

and his victim about the God of patriarchy.

mold. Re-created innocence was identified with amorous relations, as

205. To "lose his way" means to conform to the demands of survival

the foundation of a new society. It is the emanation of life, as opposed(appropriation, power, submission, guilt ... ), in contrast to strength-

to the God of justice, exchange and sacrifice, the basis of states andening subjectivity, which is meant to render him indifferent to thereligions. In his retraction, William had to repudiate the following

external world.

proposition: "Those who judge sinners or criticize them sin more than

206. To take pleasure in each thing and opportunity - even in thebread and wine of Christian mythology - clears a path to the God one
bears within oneself. With the possibility of all divinity ruled out today,
it may be wise to consider such an option.
207. Walter Kerling, however, was not in a position to understandthose whom they judge and criticize."
217. God ceases to exist as an external object. He is denied andtranscended in the impulse oflife.
218. Compare with the Beghards.
219. This is a proposition of the Amaurians. The imposition of sur-THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

NOTES

vival constitutes a penance in itself, of which it is more appropriate

of love may be performed according to nature and with an intention

to dispose.

such that it is just as valid as a prayer addressed to God" (Fredericq,

220. Questioned about this, William declared, "I have never heard

Corpus, p. 277).

of her." Why should a young woman remain in a group where she is an224. William's defense was that he claimed to be unaware of theobject of scorn? It seems more likely that this was an initiation, a novi-

sexual initiation practiced by Giles. (He also abjured a proposition remi-

tiate phase members go through before attaining the revelation of theniscent of the theses of William Cornelius of Antwerp: "A depraved

mystery oflove. Articles 8, 11 and 12 emphasize the different forms of

woman who has neither husband nor means of subsistence is as worthy(possibly hierarchized) behavior: chastity, libertinism, and a consecra-

as a virgin.") His role seems to have been to teach the novices the distor-

tion of love as natural as eating or drinking. At the highest level istion of the Scriptures so that each ofthem, washed of her sins throughBloemardine's conception of seraphic love, in which the divine is anni-

Giles's erotic initiation, could justify her choice and persuade others

hilated in sexual pleasure.

of it. Paragraph 20 suggests that, unlike in some Gnostic sects, the221. As innocence implies the end of fear and guilt, Giles must

recruitment of new members was left to the women.

have practiced either the tantric technique of using orgasm to achieve

225. Although William initially allowed some doubt to remain

illumination, or coitus reservatus so that the woman could come with-

about the sincerity of his repudiation, he was later forced to state thatout fear of pregnancy. Sexual pleasure, assimilated to God's penetra-

he repudiated each of the articles without reservation. But it is clear

tion into the self (or what john of Brunn called "melting into eternity"),that the followers of the movement of the Free Spirit did not regard

abolishes the sense of wrongdoing. Neophytes thus pass from the inno-

abjuring and lying to an inquisitor as a lie in itself. Abjuring was not acence of chastity to the innocence of guiltless pleasure.

commitment to anything, but corresponded only to the anxiety to222. This is the "seventh heaven" of popular speech. It is an ex-

escape punishment. (Compare with Hartmann.)

ample not only of a secret language, as used by some nuns, but also of

226. William declared that he had been to the tower once, three

an appropriation of theological language dissolved into its carnal real-

years before, but only to try to discover the source of the rumors cir-ity, as God is abolished in the absolute pleasure oflove.

culating in Brussels about Giles of Canter. He would not have gone

223. Seraphine is reminiscent of Bloemardine, who identified

there, he stated, if he had realized that he would find himself in a gath-

seraphic love with carnal love. The old woman may have known someering of women. The tower seems to have been a sort of semisecretof Bloemardine's disciples. The popular sentiment that lovemaking waslodge, where both ordinary and notable people with a common desire

as natural as eating and drinking should be to seen here not as an effectto "return to innocence" could meet. The same phenomenon of social

but as a beginning, as raw material subject to a process of refinement,

mixing is evidenced among the Loyists of Antwerp. In "paradise" mem-as crude pleasure clarified and purified until it becomes seraphic love,bers of the upper classes, dissatisfied with the pleasures that moneyin which each individual being perceives itself in the becoming of thebrings, joined with the deprived and underprivileged, who discovered

amorous flux - in the sense that physicists speak about the flux ofthat their absence of possessions gave them a right to free enjoyment

uncreated matter - in the attraction of universal sexual pleasure. Thereof pleasure.

is an echo of this in one of the articles abjured by William: "The act

286

227. The Joachist element, still current, is also seen among theTHE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

Picards and Adamites of Bohemia, and later among the Anabaptistsof Munster.

NOTES

242. Whereas a supporter of the movement of the Free Spirit believed that, being God, he was part of the eternity of life (God dissolved

228. In addition to the resolution to obey his impulses the Adami-

in the attractive power of lov*" ), a supporter of atheism disposed with

cal nakedness is here mingled with a comic parody of Christ offering

God by placing his eternity within the world. This is the objective, sci-

his flesh to men.

ent.fic expression of the pantheist philosophy of the Middle Ages.

229. It is difficult to say whether the relation between the agapetae

243. The elitism of the better life demanded by the movement

and some of the Gnostics is a question of resurgence or influence (theof the Free Spirit here becomes the superiority of the lucid mind.

latter implying the transmission of a secret doctrine). If this were theHerman's case must be paralleled with that ofThomas Scoto (Fredericq,

case, the one they called wisdom, who was a virgin, would be the

Corpus, p. 452).

Sophia. But this may merely be a malicious way of referring to the only
virgin in the group, mentioned in paragraph 8.

244. Marcel Bataillon, Erasme et I'Espagne: Recherches sur l'histoire
spirituelle du XVIe siecle (Paris: E. Droz, 1937), p. 73.

230. See also the Amaurians.

24 5. The phrasing is attributed to Father Alcazar, a friend of Isabel.

231. Fredericq, Corpus, pp. 266-67.

246. Whence their rejection of sacraments, prayers and good works.

232. Lawrence of Bfezova, "De gestis et variis accidentibus regni

247. Compare with Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra: "Will of

Boemiae," in Fontes rerum bohemicarum (Prague, 1893), p. 431.
233. Some have argued that the word pikarti is a translation of

my soul, whom I call destiny ... , preserve me from all petty victories,
keep me and save me for a great destiny."

begardi. However, Aeneas Silvius talks about a "Picard who came248. Menendez y Pelayo, Historia, p. 526ff.

originally from Belgian Gaul" (Aeneas Silvius, "De hortu et historia

249. Bataillon, Erasme, p. 190.

Bohemorum," in Omnia opera (Basel, 1551]).

250. Dictionnaire d'histoire et de geographie ecclesiastique (Paris:234. Latomus, Corsendonca.

Letouzey, 1930), vol. 2.

235. Karl Adolph Constantin Hofler, "Geschichtesschreiber derhusitichen Bewegung in Boehmen," in Fontes rerum austriacarum (Vienna,
1856-66), sec. 1, vols. 2, 5 and 7.

251. Compare with the "annihilated soul" of Margaret Porete andthe totaliter liquefactus of John of Briinn.
252. Connections have been made between the Alumbrados and236. Lawrence ofBfezova, "De gestis," p. 475.

the Guerinites, Illuminati, supporters of the Abbot Guerin, priest of

237. I. de Beausobre, "Dissertation sur les adamites de Boheme",

Roye, who were subject to persecution in Picardy and Flanders in 1634.

in J. Lenfant, Histoire de Ia guerre des hussites (Amsterdam, 1731), vol. 1.

253. Emanuel van Meteren, Historien der Nederlanden (Amsterdam:

238. Lawrence ofBfezova, "De gestis," p. 475.

J .J. Schipper, 1623 ).

239. Ibid., p. 495.

254. Papebrochius, Anhales Antwerpienses (Antwerp, 1845).

240. Ibid., p. 517.

255. Roland Herbert Bainton, David ]oris Wiedertiiufer und Kampfer241. At the other extreme of social alienation the same attitude

fur Toleranz in XVI Jh (Leipzig: Heinsius, 1937).

feeds the arrogance of the rulers, who recognize no limits to their will

256. Matthew, 5:3.

to power.

25 7. Jul es Fr derichs, De Secte der Lofsten (Ghent, 1891).

288

NOTES

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

25 8. Disregarding, for the moment, questions of State, it is interesting to compare the ilttitude of Henry VIII with that of the heresi-in their literal than their cryptic meanings, which readers could discover at their will.

arch Nicholas Frey, who wrote to his mistress, "I have seen in the269. Within the group, the rich found a kind of innocence of plea-

Trinity that I must break the head of my first wife, so that the prophe-sure that all the gold in the world could not bring them while theycies of the Old and New Testaments may be fulfilled" (Jundt, Histoire,remained under the control of the Church, paying for the redemption

p. 198).

of their sins with remorse and expiatory masses

259. Two years after his death, his body, identified as a result of adenunciation, was exhumed and burned.
260. Kolde, "Zum Prozess des Johann Denck und der drei glot-

270. J. Frederichs, "Un Lutherien fran<;:ais devenu libertin spirituel," Bulletin d'histoire du protestanti$me fran~ais 41 (Paris, 1882),
pp. 250-69.

tosen Maler von Niirnberg," in Theodore Brieger and August Reuter

271. The ideas of Niclaes's Family of Love resurfaced among the( eds. ), Kirchen geschichtliche Studien Herman Reuter Gewidmet (Leipzig:

English Ranters who, around 1650, were propagating the movement

J .C. Hinrich, 1890).

of the Free Spirit by proclaiming the innocence of desires. "No one"

261. Jundt, Histoire, pp. 122-23.

said Lawrence Clarkson, "can be freed from sin until having commit-

262. The notary Bertrijn seems to be describing a different letter,ted it in complete purity, as not being a sin."for he ascribes to Luther a phrase that appears nowhere in the epistle
to the Protestant reformers. In it Pruystinck is described as a "snake

272. Louis Prosper Gachard, Correspondance de Philippe II (Brussels: Librairie Ancienne and Moderne, 1848-1960).

hiding among the eels" (Geeraard Bertrijn, Chronijck der Stadt Antwerpen

273. See Summa doctrinae, p. 210.

[Antwerp: P. Kockx, 1879]).

274. Croyants et sceptiques au XV/e siecle: Le Dossier des epicuriens,

263. Martin Luther, Werke ( Kritische Gesamtausgabe) (Weimar:
H. Bohlan, 1883-1908), vol. 18, p. 99.
264. Dunin-Borkowski, "Quellen zur Vorgeschichte der Unitarierdes 16 Jh.," in 7 5 Jahre Stella matutina (Feldkirch, 1931 ).
265. In 1530 Melanchthon refused to have anything to do withCampanus and ordered his arrest. He was imprisoned for twenty years,
and then burned by Calvin after the Michel Servet ilffair.
266. The trial was conducted, however, by Ruward Tapper, future

Proceedings of the Strasbourg Conference (Strasbourg: Librairie Istra,1981).
275. Jundt, Histoire, p. 147.
276. Marnix van Saint Aldegonde, in Lacroix and Will em ( eds. ),Correspondance et melanges (Brussels, 1860; reprinted Brussels: Univer-sity Press, 1990).
277. Georges Eekhoud, Les Libertins d'Anvers: Legende et histoire desloistes (Paris: Mercure, 1912).

purveyor of stakes, whom Erasmus's friend Nesen, in his diatribe against

278. Eloi's activities, in fact, date from 1525.

the teachers at the University of Louvain, called "the wicked est of men,

279. An error on Emanuel van Meteren's part.

despite the lispings of his viperous tongue."

280. Actually, in 1544.

267. Van Meteren, Historien der Nederlanden.

281. Frederichs, De Secte.

268. None of these has ever been found. It is probable that, like

282. Romans 2:11; Ephesians 6:9.

the spiritual treatises denounced by Calvin, their subversiveness was less283. Galatians 3:10.

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

284. Romans 2:12-13.
285. Jeremiah 31:31, 33-34.

NOTES[Paris: Les belles lettres, 1962 ], p. 285 ).

299. From here on, Pasquier is summarizing Calvin's treatise against

286. Mark 13:31; also, Matthew 24:25 and Luke 21:23.

the libertines. From Calvin we learn that Quintin of Tournai was "con-287. Romans 8:9.

victed" by his book, "by which justice ... was served."

288. Genesis 6:3.
289. Romans 8:8.
290. 1 John 3:9.
291. 1 John 1:8.

300. Gerard Moreau, Le Journal d'un bourgeois de Tournai ( Pasquierdele Barre) (Brussels, 1975).

301. In effect, the movement of the Free Spirit teaches nothing
except to listen to and learn from the self.

292. John 2:19.

302. For the Church, divine law and human reason are inseparable.

293. Romans 7:24.

303. Antoine Pocques of Lille tried to obtain Calvin's testimo'ny,

294. I. von Dollinger, Beitriige zur Sektengeschichte (Munich, 1890),

so that he could claim to be working with a degree of consent. Calvinvol. 2, no. 62, pp. 664-68. The Latin text can be found in Frederichs,

claims that he had taken advantage of Bucer in this way, but the author

De Sekte.

of The Institutes of the Christian Religion, forewarned by his spies, did295. Frederichs, "Un Lutherien."296. Also called Quintin ofToumai, Quintin of Picardie, Quintin
Thierry, Quentin Tieffry and Quentin Couturier.

297. On September 13, 1542, at Valenciennes "Hughes Lescantelier,

not let himself get caught.

304. From the Latin cogitare "to think." The cuider, for Quintin,
is the representation of the world as falsely imposed by myth. He calls
for it to be rejected in the name of nature.

brewer, native of Maire les Tournai and Caso Hocq, native of this city,"305. Similarly, Margaret Porete describes the soul detaching itself

were sentenced to have "their heads severed" for having supported

from the world and being annihilated in God as accomplishing thea "new sect called libertine." Hugues Lescantelier in particular had

divine will in the freedom of nature.

affirmed that "after men are washed ... of their sins, they sin no more,"

306. Compare with the Beghards of Cologne.

while his companion had denied the Resurrection of Christ and de-307. This is to turn everything that denies life into its opposite.

clared "that Jesus Christ was not hung on the cross, but the Devil in a308. The same idea occurs among the Amaurians.

fantastic body" (Bibliotheque municipale de Valenciennes, ms. 699,

309. Compare with Giles of Canter.

Registre des Choses communes, folio 44 ).

310. The end of the mystified conscience, with its concept of evil,

298. Jean Leconte, originally from Arras, was a sayette-weaver;sin and penance, gives innocence to the freedom of nature.

Jean Hugo, also from Arras, was a cobbler; Nicholas Scrabe, known as

311. This is the Calvinist translation of amorous passion, in which

Magret, from Tournai, was a carpenter; nothing is known about Jeanlovers, like children, dream of creating a world of innocence, without

Marliere, called Brevin, neither his trade, nor his origins. These four

wrong or restraint.

libertines can be identified from archival sources. The stocking maker
Pasquier Caudron, however, is not mentioned anywhere except by

312. John Calvin, Contre le secte phantastique et furieuse des Libertinsqui se nomment Spirituels (Geneva, 154 7).

Pasquier de laBarre (Gerard Moreau, Histoire du protestantism d Tournai

293

NOTES

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITPART FouR: OuTLINE FOR AN ALCHEMY OF THE SELF

by survival that many believe they will lose everything if the means of

1. Several popes and Church dignitaries have been interested insurvival are threatened. They forget that there is a happy way of rid-

alchemy: John XXI, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, the Franciscan

ding themselves of the "necessity" of survival, which is to dissolve it

Jean de Roquetaillade ....

in life.

2. As Charles Fourier's intuitive genius suggested.
3. Experiments on harmony between reputedly hostile animals andman indicate that animals have, much of the time, been stimulated by
the aggression ofhuman predators.

10. Margaret Porete: "And desire neither resentment, nor poverty,
nor martyrdom, nor tribulation, nor masses, nor sermons, nor fasting,nor prayers."
11. It is in this sense that the statements of the Amaurians and the

4. In Hyppolytus of Rome's clerical mentality, the term promiscu-

Men of Intelligence should be understood: that the devil himself, theousness carries the pejorative meaning of more ferarum, "undifferentiatednegative image of God, would be saved. The dominant negativity (thatcoupling." But what it in fact means is sexual union freed of guilt andof God and the devil) gives way to a radically different movement.

its counterpart, payment, as the alchemy of the living claims to achieve
purification through the reconciliation of man, woman and nature.
Likewise, the word communion is the Christian caricature of harmony,
the universal attraction that Margaret Porete calls "Love."
5. Contrary to Mikhail Bakunin's proposition, that the passion for

12. The "nahmlose Wilde" of which Suso speaks, and which thedominant world corrupts into the will to power.
13. This is evident in the absolute power of caresses but also inthe signs used by the Beguines of Cologne, or in the popular gestureof inserting two phallic fingers into the vaginal folds of the other hand.

destruction is a creative passion, it is only the passion to create, and tocreate oneself, that breaks the chains without forging new ones.
6. For orthodoxy the refuges of insubordination are cathedrals of
infamy, rededicated to forbidden cults: paradises of Cologne, skolae,
Busskeller, Heidenlocher, Erdstolle down to escrennes or weavers' graves,sites of evening gatherings where, amid all the sprightly and irreverent
gossip, amorous adventures were begun.
7. Likewise the underground is the inverse of the excrescences thatmake up the supporting pillars of heavenly power: tumuli, standingstones, pyramids, temples, crosses and cathedrals.
8. Also Nicholas of Basel, who granted sanctity and impeccability
to those who swore obedience to him, among other heresiarchs whodrew the elements of their power from the movement of the Free Spirit.
9. Today, the importance of doing away with fear is not sufficiently
emphasized. Fear is worse than danger, which it both attracts and arouses.
Survival is just socialized fear. Life has been so thoroughly consumed

294

295

INDEX OF NAMESABRAHAM, 108-109.
Adam, 65, 67, 86, 132, 232.
Adamites, 180, 188, 192-93, 288
n.227. See also Picards.
Adelheide, 17 5-77.
Aeneas Silvius, 288 n.233.
Albert of Brunn, 159, 171-77.
Albertus Magnus, 116-17, 268
n.45, 273 nn.81, 86, 294

Apostolics, 80-82, 86, 110, 124,274 n.92.
Aristotle, 48, 99, 108, 180, 196,
268 n.45.
Arnaud ofVilleneuve, 127.
Augustine, saint, 49, 68, 105106, 124, 180.
Augustinians, 92, 273 n.85.
Averroes, 196.

n.l.

Albigensians, 97, 120.
Alexander IV, 270 n.65.
Aleydis, 112-13, 124, 269 n.64.
Alfonso de Santa Cruz, 198.
Alumbrados, 197-98, 200-201,
250, 278 n.128, 289 n.252.
Alvaro Pelayo, 178-79.
Amaurians, 94, 95-97, 99-102,
110-11, 113,242,265 n.25,
266 n.32, 268 n.45, 271 n.71,
282 n.176, 285 nn.215, 219,
293 n. 308,295 n.11.
Amaury of Bene, 95-97,99, 267
n.39.
Anabaptists, 208, 211, 216, 282
n.173.
Angela ofFoligno, 266 n.35.
Angelo Clareno, 81, 261 n.10.
Antonio of Medrano, 199.

BAKUNIN, MIKHAIL, 294 n.5.
Beatrice of Nazareth, 121, 131,
275 n.97.
Beausobre, I. de, 193, 264 n.22.
Beghards, 82-84, 117, 118, 130,131, 153-58, 159, 171-73, 160,
172, 177-79, 180-81, 201,
250, 270 n.70, 278 n.126,
280 nn.152, 158, 281 nn.163,
167.
Beghards of Cologne, 160, 282
n.175, 295 n. 213. See also
John of Briinn.
Beguines, 82-84, 113, 117, 118,
121, 124, 129, 130, 131, 138,
143, 145, 153-58, 160, 172,
177, 180, 250, 251, 270 n.70,
278 n.126, 279 n.147, 280
n.158.

297

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

Benedict, saint, 65.
Bentivenga of Gubbio, 124-28.
Berengarius of San Africano, 125.
Bernard, 97, 103, 262 n.7, 263
n.12.
Bernard ofClairvaux, 180, 268
n.51.
Bernardino Tovar, 199, 200.
Bloemardine, Heilwige, 91, 114,
121, 123, 143-49, 179, 188-89,
283 n.187, 286 n.223.
Bonaparte, Napoleon, 90.
CAESARIUS OF HEISTERBACH, 97,
110, 262 nn.3, 4, 9, 263 n.13.
Calvin, John, 200, 204, 209, 212,
214, 227, 264 n.22.
Calvinism, 10, 212, 290 nn.265,
268, 293 nn.299-300, 311.
Campanus, Johannes, 206, 290
n.265.
Carmelites, 188, 285 n.213.
Cathars, 68,70-72,75-78,
85-86, 110, 115, 267 n.42, 268
n.45, 272 n.79, 274 n.92.
Chamizo, 200-201.
Christine the Admirable, 120.
Cistercians, 99, 121, 129.
Clare of Montefalcd, 125-26, 276
n.107.
Clarkson, Lawrence, 291 n.271.
Clement V, pope, 156.
Cohn, Norman, 215.
Coornhert, Dick, 211, 213.
Cornelius, William, 81, 113-16,
124, 270 n.67, 271 n.71, 272
nn.75, 76, 281 n.l61, 282
n.170, 287 n.224.
DAVID OF DINANT, 63, 100, 267
n.40, 268 n.45.
David Joris, 202, 209-12, 214,
216, 269 n.52.
Davion, Jean, 210-11, 218, 223.
Denk, Hans, 204, 210.

DeSmet, Henry, 210-11.
Dolcinism, 193.
Dolcino ofNovara, 80-82, 127,282 n.173.
Dollinger, I. von, 210, 264 n.22.
Dominic, saint, 76.
Dominic of Uccle, 207, 210-11.
Dominicans, 67, 114, 150, 154,
156, 172-73, 200, 212, 270
n.65.
ECKHART, jOHANNES, 91, 97,
130, 149-50, 179, 260 n.7,
264 n.98, 269 n.54, 277 n.l19,
278 nn.130, 137.
Eekhoud, Georges, 215.
Eloi Pruystinck, 94, 202-13,
215-18, 223-34, 264 n.22, 280
n.158, 290 n.262.
Epicurus, 110.
Eve, 86.
FAMIUSTS, see Family of Love.
Family of Love, 210-11, 218, 271,
275 n.96, 291 n.271.
Fare], Guillaume, 213.
Felix Faber, 117.
Fernando Alvarez, 200-201.
Flagellants, 88, 125.
Fourier, Charles, 273 n.86, 294
n.2.
Francis of Assisi, 77-78,85,251,274 n.89.
Francisca Hernandez, 199, 280
n.158.
Franciscans, 67, 78-81, 84-85,
124, 154, 156, 278 n.137.
Francisco Ortiz, 199.
Francisco de Soto, 201.
Fraticelli, 77, 80, 88, 118, 155,
159, 261 n.9, 274 nn.86, 89,
275 n.97.
Frederick of Hohenstaufen, 63,
74.
Fredericq, Paul, 121, 270 n.65.

INDEX OF NAMES

Freud, Sigmund, 34.
Frey, Nicholas, 2'90 n.258.
GALEN, 43.
Galileo, 43.
Gallus of Novo Castro, 159-60,
172, 282 nn.171, 177.
Garnius of Rochefort, 99, 103,
265 n.22.
Gerard of Borgo San Donnino,79, 81, 88, 262 n.5.
Gerard of Mainz, 154.
Gerson, John, 145, 189, 267 n.39.
Gertrude of Civitatis, 150, 175,
177, 283 n.190.
Gherraerts, Jacob, 212.
Ghibellines, 88, 112.
Gil Lopez, 199.
Giles of Canter, 188-90, 251, 260
n.1, 280 n.158, 285 n.214, 287
nn.224, 226.
Giovanni di Capestrano, 261 n.9.
Godin of Amiens, 99, 107, 112,
267 nn.40, 41, 43, 279 n.138.
Gratian, 266 n.29, 270 n.67.
Gregory, saint, 104.
Gregory X, 84.
Groddeck, George, 266 n.31, 285
n.214.
Groote, Gerhard, 91-92.
Guelfs, 74, 88, 112.
Guerin, 263 n.12, 289 n.252.
Guerinites, 289 n.252.
Guion of Cressonaert, 130.
Guy II ofColmieu, 129.
Guyard de Laon, 114.
HADEWIJCH, 113-14, 121-23, 150.
Hartmann, John, 180-87, 246,
250, 264 n.22, 269 n.63, 284
nn.201, 202.
Hedwig of Bratislava, 174-76.
Heidegger, Martin, 265 n.27.
Henry II ofVirnebourg, 155, 159.
Henry VIII, 290 n.258.

Henry of Lausanne, 69.
Henry Pomerius, 144.
Henry ofSelles, 188-89.
Herault, Christophe, 208-11, 215.
Herman ofRijswick, 179, 195-97.
Herod, 51.
Honorius IV, 80.
Huska, Martin, 193-95.
Hussites, 192-93, 195.
Hyppolytus of Rome, 294 n.4.
IDA OF NIVELLES, 120.
Innocent Ill, 77, 270 nn.65, 67.
Innocent IV, 84.
Innocent X, 85.
Isabel de La Cruz, 197-98.
Isaiah, 106, 179.
jACOB, 105.
Jacob Acarin, 275 n.96.
Jacob van Hoogstraten, 197.
Jacopo ofBevagna, 125, 276 n.107.
Jacopo ofTodi, 251, 274 n.96.
jesus Christ, 52, 61, 63, 65, 67,
74,86,88,90-92,95,107-10,
119-20, 123, 128, 148, 151,
153, 157-59, 162-66, 169-72,
175-77, 179-81, 185-86, 19698, 201, 213, 221, 227, 231,
251, 260 n.6, 267 n.37, 267
n.44, 277 n.119, 280 n.156,
281 n.163, 288 n.228, 292
n.297.
Jews, 106, 115, 179, 219, 221.
Joan of Flanders, 84, 154.
Joachim ofFiore, 64-65, 67-68,
79, 260 n.2, 262 n.5, 274
n.86, 285 n.216.
Joachites, 64-70,79, 80, 88, 109,
127, 155.
Johannes Schwenkenfeld, 173.
Johannes Teutonicus, 110-11.
John, priest of Occines, 97, 104,
263 n.12, 266 n.28.
John XXI, 294 n.l.

299

THE

MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRITJohn XXII, 80, 279 n.148.
John the Baptist, saint, 124.
John ofBriinn, 117, 159-73, 179,
250, 274 n.91, 283 n.186, 284
n.201, 286 n.221, 289 n.251.
John of the Cross, 200.
John of Durbheim, 159.
John Nider, 273 n.81.
John of Ronco, 115.
John ofSchoonhaven, 144.
John Scotus Erigena, 63, 100,
260 n.7.
Jorists, 209, 211.
Journet, Noel, 213.
Jude, saint, 228.
Juliana of Montcornillon, 120.
Jundt, Auguste, 82, 95, 100, 155,264 n.22.
KANIS, PETER, 194.
Katrei, 149-52, 246, 283 n.l87.
Kerling, Walter, 180-81, 284
nn.203, 207.
LAWRENCE OF BREZOVA, 193.
Lescantelier, Hugues, 224, 292
n.297.
Lollards, 159. See also Beghards
and Beguines.
Loyists, 202, 207-18, 250-51,
287 n.226.
Lutgarde ofTongres, 120.
Luther, Martin, 200, 204-207,
212-13, 217.
Lutherans, 198, 200, 207-208.
MANICHAEANISM, 52-53.
Manrique, 198.
Margaret, 178, 284 n.196.
Margaret of Austria, 206.
MargaretPorete, 113,117,12324, 128-43, 150, 198, 250,
277 nn.110, 119, 283 n.187,
293 n.305, 294 n.4, 295 n.10.
Margaret ofValenciennes, 112.

Marie of Hungary, 208-10, 218.
Marie ofOignies, 120.
Marnix of Saint Aldegundis,
Philip, 212, 214.
Martin Crucius, 117-18.
Marx, Karl, 23, 34, 62, 235.
Mary, 124, 159, 179-80, 183,226-27, 274-75 n.96.
Mary Magdalene, 124, 185.
Mathilde Billarde, 275 n.96.
Matthew, saint, 49, 75.
Matthew of Gouda, 92.
Mecco Sacconi, 88.
Mechtild of Magdeburg, 275 n.97.
Me~-hon, Philip, 205, 217,
290 n.265.
Melchior Cano, 199.
Men of Intelligence, 124, 18893, 199, 243, 250, 260 n.1,
295 n.ll.
Meslier, Jean, 266 n.32.
Meyrinck, Gustav, 256.
Michael of Cesena, 279 n.138.
Minorites, 124, 127, 129, 138.
Mithraism, 52-53.
Montaigne, Michel de, 213.
Moses, 63, 179-80, 196.
Mosheim, Johann Lorenz von,159, 264 n.22.
Muhammad, 63, 179.
Miinsterians, 216, 282 n.173, 288
n.227. See also Anabaptists.
NESEN, 290 n.266.
Nicholas V, 261 n.9.
Nicholas of Basel, 269 n.52, 279
n.140, 294 n.8.
Nicholas of Cusa, 260 n. 7.
Nicholas ofFountains, 114.
Nicholas of Lira, 131.
Nicholas ofPehlrimov, 194.
Niclaes, Henry, 210-11, 218, 291
n.271.
Nietzche, Friedrich, 246.
Nuwen, 114, 124.
300

INDEX OF NAMES

0RIGEN, 49.
PAPENBROCHIUS, 209.
Pasquier de Ia Barre, 224-27, 292
n.298, 293 n.299.
Paul, saint, 68, 222, 227, 273
n. 86.
Pauperes catholici, 77.
Pelagius, 49, 87, 116, 279 n.138.
Peter, saint, 101, 180, 183.
Peter III of Levis, 131.
Peter of Bruys, 69.
Peter of Corbeil, 98, 99, 263
n.10.
Peter John Olivi, 79.
Petrus Comestor, 102.
Philip III of Marigny, 130, 131.
Philip Augustus, 98, 99.
Philip the Chancellor, 102-103.
Picards, 192-95, 288 n.227, 288
n.233. See also Adamites.
Plato, 48, 103.
Plotinus, 48.
Pocques ofLille, Antoine, 112,
212, 214, 229, 293 n.303.
Poor Men ofLyon, 75-77. See
also Waldensians.
Poullain, Vallerand, 209-10.
Prometheus, 39, 61, 62.
Protestants, 202, 209, 213, 218.
Pythia, 54.
QUINTIN OF TOURNAI, 94, 112,
212,214,224-32,246,264
n.22, 266 n.31, 274 n.93, 280
n. 158, 281 n. 163, 292 n.296,
293 nn.299, 304.
Quintinists, 209-12, 224-32,
250-51.
RABELAIS, FRANc;:ois, 213.
Rainurius Sacconi, 272 n.79.
Ranters, 211.
Ratherius of Verona, 65.
R inbotto, 154.

Rhamirdus, 74.
Robert le Bougre, 113, 124.
Robert ofCourc;:on, 99, 102.
Rulmann Merswin, 278 n.126.
Ruysbroeck, Jan van, 91, 121, 123,
143, 145, 188-89, 267 n.39.
SADE, CoMTE DoNATIENALPHONSE-FRANc;:Ois DE, 246,
273 n.86, 281 n.167.
Sartre, Jean-Paul, 265 n.27.
Schweidnitz, nuns of, 117, 150,
159,173-78,249-50,278
n.126, 283 n.l87.
Scoto, Thomas, 63, 178-80, 196,
289 n.243.
Segarelli, Gerard, 80, 81, 124,
155.
Siegfried Ill, 154.
Sigmund of Repan, 193.
Simon the Gnostic, 241.
Socrates, 196.
Spartacus, 4 7.
Spiritual Libertines, 218,
224-232.
Spirituals, 79, 127, 227, 268 n.44,
274 n.86, 279 n.138.
Stephen Tempier, 111, 150.
Suso, Henry, 91, 294 n.12.
Sufis, 197.
TABORITES, 192-93.
Tapper, Ruward, 290 n.266.
Tauler, John, 91.
Templars, 130.
Teresa of Avila, saint, 200.
Thomas Aquinas, saint, 100, 270
n.68, 273 n.86, 294 n.l.
Thomas of Cantimpre, 113, 115,272 n.78.
Trithemius, johannes, 159, 280
n.150.
UBERTINO OF CASALE, 79-80,
128, 252, 276 n.109, 279 n.l38.
301

THE MOVEMENT OF THE FREE SPIRIT

Udillynde, Daughters of, 174,
176.
Urban IV, 84, 154.
Urban V, 180-81.
VALLEE, GEOFFROY, 63, 213.
Van Meteren, Emanuel, 207, 215.
Van Mierlo, jozef, 121, 124.
Vincent Ferrer, saint, 88.
WALDENSIANS, 67, 75-78, 85-86,
100, 110, 112-13, 115, 153,
192, 274 n.92, 280 n.156. See
also Poor Men of Lyon.
Waldo, Peter, 75-78, 80, 82, 261
n.8.
Walter of Holland, 158-59, 278
n.126.
Wilhelmina of Bohemia, 27 5
n.96.
William the Breton, 98-99, 109,262 n.5.
William Egmont, 159.
William the Goldsmith, 97, 103,
262 n.5, 263 n.12.
William ofHildemissem, 188-91,
285 nn.213, 216, 286 nn.220,
223, 287 nn.224, 225, 226.
William ofPoitiers, 97, 103, 263
n.12.
William ofSaint-Amour, 116,274 n.90.
Woolston, Thomas, 213.
ZIZKA, jOHN, 194-95.

302

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