Brethren of The Free Spirit - Expression of The Free Spirit

Expression of The Free Spirit

For all the reasons given above it is hard to establish who was representative of the Free Spirit and who was not. Similarly, perceptions of how members of the movement behaved are complex and multifarious. Although sharing similar ideas about how to interpret the Bible — antinomian, egalitarian, believing in a mystical apprehension and union with God in this life — how this happened in practice is hard to determine. For instance, there is no evidence in Porete's work that amorality was justified. Although Porete argues that the Unencumbered or Annihilated Soul is above the Virtues and demands of Holy Church she believes that sin is not possible, because the Soul is now One with God, sin is simply not available to it as an option:

"This Soul has given everything through the freeness of the nobility by the work of the Trinity, in which Trinity this Soul plants her will so nakedly that she cannot sin if she does not uproot herself. She has nothing to sin with, for without a will no one can sin. Now she is kept from sin if she leaves her will there where she is planted, that is, in the One who has given it to her freely from His goodness. And thus, by His beneficence, He wills the return of His beloved nakedly and freely, without a why for her sake, on account of two things: because He wills it, and because He is worthy of it. And before this she had no fertile and restful peace until she was purely stripped of her will." (The Mirror Of Simple Souls. Trans: Ellen Babinsky 1993)

Porete's expression of Free Spirit ideas is highly mystical and predicates the idea of the impossibility of sin on this mystical union with God through Love. This view of the ideas of the Free Spirit suggests that among certain of its members a complete giving over of the individual to a spiritual relationship with God is the goal of the believer. It is echoed in other works and sayings of people accused or suspected of expressing Free Spirit heresies such as Meister Eckhart and the unknown author of the Sister Catherine Treatise. Nowhere in these writings is a belief in unbridled sensuality countenanced, in fact exactly the opposite, the woman speaker in the Sister Catherine Treatise, for instance, expressing her desire never to "diverge from the path of our Lord Jesus Christ" after her personal union with God. Scholar of the movement Ellen Babinsky summarizes this view thus:

"The Free Spirits were committed to poverty and mendicancy as an outgrowth of the vita apostolica movement. The centrepiece of the Free Spirit perspective seems to be that an arduous ascetic practice was necessary to attain the divine life of union with God. In this view, only through extreme purgation could one divest the self of all will and desire in order to achieve perfection. The motivation for the Free Spirit was the search for spiritual perfection, not a revolutionary antipathy to the Church, as some scholars have thought" (The Mirror Of Simple Souls. Introduction: Ellen Babinsky 1993)

On the other hand there are copious records of the use of the Free Spirit interpretation of Scripture to justify non-monogamous sex, violence, robbery and rape. Whether these records are merely anti-heretical propaganda (other heretical movements such as the Cathars were accused of similar crimes) or not is unclear. The sheer volume of evidence suggests that there was abuse of the ideology, particularly by those who professed to follow the heresy who were not living in closed communities such as Beguine and Beghard settlements. The image presented is of roving bands or isolated individuals traveling across Europe spreading havoc with their amoral, millenarian vision of Christianity. Free Spirit heretics were accused of enjoying group sex, of conducting masses naked, claiming that they were God and, in one instance, that there was no God and that blind chance ruled the universe. Historian Barbara Tuchman vividly conjures up this vision of moral and religious anarchy in her seminal book on the Middle Ages, A Distant Mirror, :

"The Brethren of the Free Spirit, who claimed to be in a state of grace without benefit of priest or sacrament, spread not only doctrinal but civil disorder....Because the Free Spirit believed God to be in themselves, not in the Church, and considered themselves in a state of perfection without sin, they felt free to do all things commonly prohibited to ordinary man. Sex and property headed the list. They practiced free love and adultery and were accused of indulging in group sex in their communal residences. They encouraged nudity to demonstrate absence of sin and shame. As 'holy beggars', the Brethren claimed the right to use and take whatever they pleased, whether a market woman's chickens or a meal in a tavern without paying. This included the right, because of God's immanence, to kill anyone who forcibly attempted to interfere" (A Distant Mirror: the Calamitous Fourteenth Century 1979)

Here we find the central paradox in evaluating the Free Spirit. Both extracts speak of the same root belief — that the soul in union with God cannot sin. Where one suggests that to achieve this state is arduous and involves a process of purification, the other sees that once the state of union with God exists, by any means, easy or hard, it justifies what would be seen as immoral acts in the authoritarian churches of that time (or this). The Free Spirit heresy challenged the authority of the Church, which traditionally used accusations of sexual perversion and immorality to attack heretical movements. Individuals who lived exemplary lives were also suspected of Free Spirit leanings (such as Meister Eckhart and even John of Ruysbroek who preached against the movement). The Free Spirit interpretation of the Bible, like any doctrine, was open to interpretation, with some following a more conventional path for the time, and others using the doctrines to provide themselves with a more freedom than was commonly available under Church rule.

This ambiguity inherent within the movement is perhaps well illustrated in the following extract from a Beghard writer who was clearly influenced by the ideas of the Free Spirit:

"Moreover, the godlike man operates and begets the same that God operates and begets. For in God he worked and created heaven and earth. He is also the generator of the eternal word. Nor can God do anything without this man. The god-like man should, therefore, make his will conformable to God's will, so that he should will all that God wills. If, therefore, God wills that I should sin, I ought by no means to will that I may not have sinned. This is true contrition. And if a man have committed a thousand mortal sins, and the man is well regulated and united to God, he ought not to wish that he had not done those sins; and he ought to prefer suffering a thousand deaths rather than to have omitted one of those mortal sins." (quoted from Mosheim, Institutes of Ecclesiastical History, II. v, 11)

The similarities but also the differences with the words of Porete are clear, as is the difficulty of understanding quite what the morality of the extract is, and how easily it could be misconstrued.

This interpretation of the role of sin on the road to an understanding of God is not dissimilar to that put forward by English mystic Julian of Norwich in her work Revelations of Divine Love, in which she says that, although undesirable, 'sin is behovely' as through repentance sin can become part of God's pattern whereby the soul can reach God. Again, Julian, like Porete, is at pains to explain that this is not to justify sin (both argue that sin is something to be avoided) but to understand its place in the universe — that sometimes before one reaches a state of bliss in union with God one cannot avoid sinning but that when it is rightly understood, those sins are forgiven, thus becoming part of God's plan in guiding the Soul to God. It is significant that Julian was not branded a heretic while Porete and other supposed followers of the Free Spirit were. Where Julian differed from Porete perhaps, was in her belief that the union with God and the particular view of the role of sin she spoke were possible within the established structure of the Church and not in opposition to it.