Brethren of the Free Spirit
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The Brothers, or Brethren of the Free Spirit (Brüder und Schwestern des Freien Geistes), was a lay Christian movement which flourished in northern Europe in the 13th and 14th Centuries. Antinomian and individualist in outlook, it came into conflict with the Church and was declared heretical by Pope Clement V at the Council of Vienne (1311-12). They are often considered similar to the Amalricans. They flourished at a time of great trauma in Western Europe during the conflict between the decadent Avignon Papacy and the Holy Roman Emperor, the Hundred Years' War, the Black Death, the rise of the Cathar heresy and the subsequent Crusade against them, the beginnings of the Inquisition, the fall of the Templars and the internal strife of the Church - all of which helped fuel the appeal of their individualistic and millenarian approach to Christianity and Scripture.
Analysing and assessing the Brethren of the Free Spirit, their history and beliefs is extremely difficult owing to the disparate and often anarchistic nature of their movement, the lack of statements setting out their beliefs by actual members of the Free Spirit and the absence of historical records other than those written by the Church and Inquisition which were openly hostile to them. In the Church's view they preached a dangerous form of spiritual amorality which argued that when purified, filled with the Holy Spirit, no man could sin, thus justifying all sorts of decadent behaviour. For sympathisers with the movement it argued for a direct approach to the experience of God in this life and did not countenance decadence at all. The truth is probably some way between the two with some followers of the movement using it to indulge themselves and others following a more austere approach towards God.
There is considerable confusion as to the relationship between the Brethren and other lay Christian movements of the time: the Beguines and the 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.
Central Beliefs:
1. That God is incarnate/immanent in everything.
2. That history was divided into three periods, each corresponding to a different aspect of the Trinity.
3. That through a direct experience of God in which the Holy Spirit flourishes in the individual soul Man could achieve a union with God which meant that he could no longer sin.
It is hard to categorize what the Free Spirit actually was, owing to the diversity of its expression and the subjective nature of historical records. However it can perhaps be characterised in its transcendental form as a type of ascetic, independent Christian mysticism and in its Immanent mode as a form of chaotic, supposedly Christian amorality. Figures such as Eckhart, Porete and others express a vision of Man's relationship with God which is essentially psychological and mystical, practical and ecstatic, an all-embracing approach in which God works through being and love, is present in man and creation eternally, can be experienced in this life and can be born in the human soul, and the origin - to which the ultimate aim is to return - is God (again, an idea common to all mystical traditions: Kabbalah, Gnosticism, Sufism, Vedanta, Daoism). Some forms of this mysticism developed doctrine was used to express a kind of quasi-Nietzschean 'everything is permitted' system of morality which caused a perceived anarchy in northern Europe.
Another factor is how, as a doctrine, it appealed so much to women as well as men. Indeed, some commentators (cf Lerner link below) argue that there were more women than men associated with the movement, another factor which alarmed the authorities of the time. Again, this is something which the movement had in common with the Cathars. As with the earlier sect, Mary Magdelene is a significant figure in its writings and ideas, appearing in major passages in both The Mirror Of Simple Souls and the Sister Catherine Treatise as well as in sermons by Eckhart, as an exemplar of the feminine creative aspect of the spiritual "way" to Christ. In its egalitarian approach to spiritual experience the Free Spirit heresy clearly gave access to a spirituality which women were not finding through more orthodox routes.
The Free Spirit Heresy rocked Europe in a time of great upheaval. So soon after the Cathar movement it caused the Church to react quickly and effectively to try and halt the spread of antinomian Christianity. In this it was only partially effective, as it could be argued that ideas inherent in both heresies, and the spectacle of their suppression helped lead eventually to the rise of the Protestant movements of the Reformation as well as the development of underground esoteric Christian movements such as Alchemy and Rosicrucianism which grew in part out of a synthesis of Gnostic Christian and Kabbalistic ideas transmitted through these heretical sects. In his book, The Rosicrucians: the History, Mythology and Rituals of an Esoteric Order, for instance, Christopher McIntosh cites Meister Eckhart and Joachim of Fiore, along with the Cathars, as a major source of Rosicrucian ideology and rite.
Adapted from Wikipedia
