Relationship To Other Christian Lay Movements
There is considerable confusion as to the relationship between the Brethren and other lay Christian movements of the time: the Beguines and Beghards with whom they were often confused. Indeed some have argued that the Brethren didn’t exist at all in the commonly held idea of a movement. It had no central leader, hierarchy or organisation and was very difficult to define. Such a view holds that rather than speaking of a Brethren of the Free Spirit in the same way as we speak of the Cathars, the Lollards or the Waldensians, we should talk about a Doctrine or Heresy of the Free Spirit or even little more than a loose set of ideas grouped together under a single title, i.e. "a state of mind as much as a settled body of doctrine", as British scholar Gordon Leff states it.
Not everyone accused of being a member of the Free Spirit or of disseminating their doctrines was part of the movement. Even at the Council of Vienne the Church authorities struggled to bring together documentation of what the Free Spirit stood for, using texts such as Marguerite Porete's The Mirror of Simple Souls as evidence of what the Brethren said. The very fact that no one spiritual thinker can be identified as the movement's founder (names linked to the movement include Amaury de Bene, Giochinno de Fiori and Meister Eckhart, all of whom, at different times, were cited by individuals proclaiming their adherence to the Heresy as the originators of their beliefs), or claimed to be so, indicate how disparate a movement it was.
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