Brethren of the Free Spirit: Encyclopedia - Brethren of the Free Spirit

Brethren of the Free Spirit

The Brethren of the Free Spirit (Brüder und Schwestern des Freien Geistes) was a medieval heretical pantheistic movement. The movement was condemned by Pope Clement V at the Council of Vienne (1311).

The beginnings of medieval pantheistic Christian theology lie in the early 13th century, with theologians at Paris such as David of Dinant and Amalric of Bena (died 1207), as well as Ortlieb of Strassburg and was later mixed with the millenarist theories of Gioacchino da Fiore.

Fourteen followers of Amalric began to preach that "all things are One, because whatever is, is God." They believed that after an age of the Father (the Patriarchal Age) and an age of the Son (Christianity), a new age of the Holy Spirit was at hand. In 1210, the Amalricians were betrayed by one Master Ralph, an undercover agent of the bishop of Paris. Nine members were burned at the stake.

The movement survived, however, and later followers went even further. They rejected the Christian concepts of creation and redemption, saying that since all was God, there could be no sin, and any action whatsoever was permitted. They taught the "Freedom of the Spirit" in the sense that the human soul, like God, was considered beyond and above the concepts of Good and Evil, an argument similar to teachings of Tantric Buddhism. They also referred to themselves as illuminati.

During the 14th century, the heresy spread widely across the Champagne, Thüringen and Bavaria. The Beghards of Cologne celebrated masses naked. It was a time of great social unrest, and there were other movements such as Catharism and flagellantism. Meister Eckhart's teachings were precariously close to those of the Brethren, but he escaped excommunication by retracting 28 incriminated theses in 1327. Other Christian mystics, such as Jordan von Quedlinburg openly preached against the teachings of the Free Spirit as unchristian.

The beliefs of some members of the movement may have bordered on positive atheism. A man called Löffler, who was burned in Bern in 1375 for confessing adherence to the movement, is reported to have taunted his executioners that they would not have enough wood to burn "Chance, which rules the world".

By the end of the 14th century, the movement was effectively suppressed, and the medieval heretic movements were gradually replaced with early Protestant sects such as the Hussites, leading up to the Reformation.

Brethren of the Free Spirit - Literature

• Norman Cohn The Pursuit of the Millennium, Secker and Warburg, London, 1957
• Walter Wakefield and Austin Evans, Heresies of the High Middle Ages, Columbia University Press, New York, 1991.

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