* * *

In 1216 there sprung up in Alsace and Thuringia “a new and shameful heresy. Its partisans were assured that it was permitted and in conformity with nature to eat meat and other foods at any time, and even to give oneself up to any voluptuousness without need for any atonement.”[359]

An unknown person was burned in Troyes in 1220 for claiming that the Holy Spirit was incarnated in him. He shared the conviction of the knight fought by Thomas Aquinas and who declared to him: “If Saint Peter was saved, I will also be, because in him, as in me, the same spirit lives.”

It isn’t useless to recall that, at a time when the comportment of the majority of people did not fall under the mixture of terror and controlled hope that was propagated by the Church of Rome and the ascetic rigor extolled by the Cistercian missionaries, the Cathars and the Vaudois, those of Free-Spirit rallied around the most popular and summary credo: “Enjoy life and mock everything else.”

The Goliards, or wandering clergy, mocked the Church, parodied the evangelical texts and sang the Mass of the God Bacchus: “Introibo ad altarem Bacchi, ad deum qui laetificat cor hominis.”

In the Eleventh Century, Guibert of Nogent (1053–1124) vituperated one of the nobles who was too little concerned with religion. Called the Count Jean de Soissons and a friend of the Jews — Guibert, for his part, had written a work called Against the Jews — this nobleman treated the Passion of the Christ as if it was a lie; he affirmed that he only frequented the church to amuse himself by watching the beautiful women who came there to pass the night. According to him, love committed no sins. On the point of death, he declared to the confessor: “You want, I can see, that I give my goods to parasites, that is to say, to the priests. They can only have a widow’s mite.”[360]

In the Thirteenth Century, speaking of students who were contemporaries of Amaury, Pierre the Wastrel wrote: “In drinking and eating they had no equals. They were devourers at the table, but were not devoted to the Mass. At work they yawned; at a feast they feared no one. They abhorred meditation upon sacred books, but they loved to see wine sparkle in their glasses and they swallowed intrepidly.”[361]

Such testimony, which was applicable to all strata of society, merely ended up authenticating the native weakness of mankind and ratifying the resolution of the Church to take aim at and absolve mankind’s sins in exchange for gratuities and obedience.

The Vaudois and Cathars, who did without the Church’s services, were redoutable competition; but what can one say of the people who pushed insolence as far as proclaiming that each person had the right to follow his or her desires, without bearing in mind anyone else and without experiencing the least guilt?

What did Jean, priest of Ursines, teach to his parishioners? God made everything, evil as well as good. What good was it to be concerned when both evil and good emanate from him?

A certain Garnius de Rochfort summarized the Amaurian doctrine in his Contra amaurianos. In this work he related that, according to the Amaurians, whomever has understood that God accomplished everything by himself can make love without sinning. God being in each person, it suffices to attain inward revelation to behave according to his intentions [desseins] whatever one does. Such is pantheism, which — perceived in its philosophical implications — would cause the condemnation of Scotus Erigena, David of Dinant and Aristotle in 1215.

William the Goldsmith, designated the group’s master thinker, advanced the idea that, “five years from today all men will be Spirituals, and each one will be able to say: ‘I am the Holy Spirit’ and ‘I existed before Abraham,’ just like the Christ when he said, ‘I am the son of God’ and ‘I existed before Abraham was born.’”[362]

For the first time, it seemed, the doctrine of Joachim of Fiore found its subversive utilization.

In his Chronicle, William the Breton indicated the point at which — at the beginning of the Thirteenth Century — the time of the saints announced by Joachim was confounded with the freedom of spirit that was identical to the consciousness that each person can have of the divine presence acting within and tracing out the road of perfection and impeccability (the idea of the Sophia or the divine flash enclosed in each person was, after more than a millennium, still tied to the Gnostic conception):

They thus say that in our epoch the sacraments of the New Testament have ended and that the time of the Holy Spirit has come; there is no longer a place for confession, baptism, the eucharist and the other guarantees of salvation. Hereafter, there will only be salvation through the inward grace of the Holy Spirit, without any outward work. And they understand the virtue of charity in such a wide sense that they are assured that all actions considered to be sinful have ceased to be so if they were accomplished by virtue of charity. This is why, in the name of charity, they deliver themselves up to debauchery, adultery and other pleasures of the body. And they promise impunity (the uselessness of pentitence) to the women with whom they sin and to the simple people they deceive, preaching that God is a being of goodness, not a judge.[363]

A sermon by Johannes Teutonicus, Abbey of Saint-Victor in Paris from 1203 to 1229, insisted on the trait most shocking to Christians and Catholics:

Here there are profane novelties, propagated by people who are disciples of Epicurus, rather than the Christ. With frightening deceitfulness, they secretly devote themselves to making it believed that one can sin with impunity. They are assured that there is no sin and that as a result there is no one who, having faults, must be punished by God. Capable of affecting on their faces and in their remarks an air of piety, they inwardly reject virtue, in their spirits and in their occult works.

Full of the most extreme folly and the most impudent lies: they do not fear, they do not blush to affirm that they are God! Infinite extravagance! Abominable presumption! They call God the adulterous man, the companion of the bed of other men, the being soiled by all infamies, the receptacle of all crimes. Here are those who surpass the wanderings [l’egarement] of the gentiles, who lie with more modesty by claiming that the greatest of their princes would, once dead, become gods. Assuredly, he is deranged in his soul who says ‘God doesn’t exist.’ But the individual who claims ‘I am God’ is even more senseless.

Ah! at least such a plague does not pollute this town, the source of all the sciences and the true flowering of wisdom![364]

If pantheism can be summarized by the formula “Deus sive natura” [no God but nature], the Free-Spirit implied the identification “Deus sive homo” [no God but man]. The questions “Which God and all-powerful what?” required a preliminary clarification: “Which behavioral choices should the justified individual obey?”

Does not the thirst for power of the sovereigns and princes authorize a divine will that legitimates it? There was an often attested to tendency in the Free-Spirit to legalize through autodeification a similar power or something claimed to be one. Nevertheless, a radically different tendency was expressed by the doctrines of “pure love” or “refined love.”

Fin Amor

Hadewijch of Antwerp — whose exegetes, more concerned with religion than with history, have been abusively annexed to the pantheon of pious people — mentioned the Beguine Aleydis, who was condemned to the pyre by Robert le Bougre for his “just love” in the List of Perfect Ones. Unlike the Vaudois burned at Cambrai in 1236 by the sinister hunter of heretics, Aleydis was alleged to have professed Amaurian ideas, which were found in the towns along the Rhine (Cologne, Mayence, Strasbourg) and the northern cities (Valencinnes, Amiens, Cambrai, Tournai, Brussels, Antwerp).

The doctrine of pure love — which fifty years later Marguerite Porete would identify with the life force in which human nature liberated itself from its perversion [denaturation] so as to confound itself with the will of the God of goodness — haunted the poems and visions of Hadewijch of Antwerp and several Cistercian Monials in the north, without one being able to decide with certitude if pure love was spiritual exstasy, an amor extaticus, or an exaltation of amorous pleasure, or an alternation of the two, as in the diverse ways of Tantrism.

The bawdiness of the times, from which only a part of the bourgeoisie and several defenders of clerical austerity escaped, was attested to by various fables, literature and chronicles, and it exerted an equal attraction among the thatched cottages, the convents, the chateaux and the churches. It set up as ordinary obstacles for itself feelings of guilt, contrition and remorse, which fed the coffers of penitential redemption and the market in indulgences.

Thus, the union with the Spirit, or with its Christian form, the Christ, alias the pneuma or Sophia, was revealed in the eyes of the adepts of the Free-Spirit as identical to the union of man and woman, the koinos that evoked the Hermetic work by Asclepios, as well as the Gospel attributed to Philippe. Amorous pleasure, identified with the unity finally renewed between the body and the spirit, regenerated the Adamite state, the state of innocence in which there existed neither sin nor guilt. This was why, from the most disinherited people to the aristocracy, the Free-Spirit gained adhesion — an adhesion that was most often above suspicion, to the frustration of the inquisitorial police. Because, little interested in sacrifice, the supporters of the Free-Spirit obeyed prudence and, with rare exceptions, neither preached nor issued propaganda.

The New Spirit Of Souabe

A text entitled Determinatio de novo spiritio and attributed to Albert the Great continued to fill out the inquisitors’ descriptive files about a current that, neither Cathar nor Vaudois, did not (for all that) represent any less of a threat to religion, whether in Rome or elsewhere.

The denunciation of Albert implicated several convents in the Riess, the region neighboring Augsburg, Noahrdlingen, Olmutz and Tuebingen.

In 1245, at the time of the first Council of Lyon, the Bishop of Olmutz deplored the presence in his diocese of wandering agitators of both genders, dressed like religious people but hostile to the ecclesiastical hierarchy and estimating that God availed himself of an absolute freedom.[365]

Such reformers, who were closer to courtly ideas than to Cistercian asceticism, easily won over a number of ecclesiastical communities that had been split between guilty debauchery and puritanical hysteria.

Did not they offer peace to the heart and grace of the spirit to the amorous inclination that carried men and women, naturally passionate, towards each other?

Among the articles on the list of accusation set out by Albert, many left no doubt about the loudly proclaimed innocence of the relations taxed with guiltiness by the Church, the various ascetic heterodoxies and lay morality.

Man can find himself united with God so that he no longer commits sin, no matter what he does.

According to them, there are no other angels than human virtues, no other demons than the vises and sins of men. There is no hell. All creation is God in his plenitude. The angels would not have fallen if they had behaved as they should have in their union with Lucifer.

Men united with God, whom they claimed themselves to be, did not have to render honor or respect to the saints, nor to observe fasts nor similar things on the Lord’s day.

He who is united with God can with impugnity satisfy his carnal desires in any fashion, with one or the other gender, and even by inverting the roles.

It isn’t necessary to believe in the resurrection.

[...] They affirmed that, during the ascension of the Christ [the Host], they find themselves elevated; that, standing upright or sitting, it is to themselves that they address these gestures of reverence, but they make them in a way that does not scandalize the others.

People prevent or delay their own perfection and qualities when they give themselves up to fasting, flagellation, discipline, old and other things of the same type.

It is fitting not to apply to oneself to work, but to take the leisure to taste how sweet the Lord is. Prayers have no value when they are [made] under the yoke of manual labor.

[...] Those among them who want to become perfect need not think of the Passion of the Christ.

It is not necessary to be concerned, either in sadness or bitterness, with the faults committed and the days lost. Such suffering delays access to a more complete grace.

They believe that the blood of good men — like themselvese — or their plenitude must be venerated in the same way as the body and blood of the Christ on the altar. They are assured that corporeal freedom, evil, rest and well-being create in mankind a place and habitation for the Holy Spirit.

They say that the Christ knew them carnally, that a woman can become God, that a mother of five children can be a virgin, that one of them suckled the baby Jesus with his mother until exhaustion and fainting.[366]

Love was at the center of the debate that agitated the most evolved minds of the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries. The privileged place recognized for the first time in history by women posed the question of the refinement of morals, an approach to sexuality other than that confined to the ordinary rule of repression [refoulement], with its morbid and mortifying visions, and relief [defoulement], with its parade of rape and cruelty. The dolce stil nuovo and the erotics of the troubadours, so uncertain in their daily practices, suggest a preoccupation that the end of the Twentieth Century has barely begun to rediscover and that was mythologically sketched out by Dante’s road of initiation to Beatrice. Thus it is fitting to strip away the theological hodgepodge and falsifications that encumber the works of Hadewijch of Antwerp and Marguerite Porete, which the religious prejudices of the erudite have remained content to bury under the moth-eaten cover of mysticism.

Marguerite Porete

Originally from Hainaut, Marguerite Porete probably belonged to a comfortable and cultivated milieu, perhaps the court of Bourgogne, a resident of Mons, where the Countess Philippa de Hainaut — the daughter of Guillaume d’Avesnes — was considered to be a refined spirit, attached to courtly ideas.

Perhaps Marguerite was a Beguine before breaking with the entirety of the clergy (“Beguines say I am in error, as do priests, clerics and preachers, Augustines and Carmes and the minor brothers”).[367]

At the end of the 1290s, her work on “the being of refined love” was burned at Valenciennes on the orders of Gui II of Colmieu, Bishop of Cambrai from 1296 to 1306, who prohibited the author from diffusing other books or doctrines.

Nevertheless, she relapsed and — provocation or innocence? — communicated a book entitled The Mirror of Simple Souls to the bishop of Chalons-sur-Marne. Denounced by the Inquisition, she appeared in 1307 before Guillaume Humbert, the Inquisitor General of France, the confessor of Philippe the Beautiful and the future accomplice of Philippe de Marigny in the extermination proceedings against the Templars.

Marguerite refused to sermonize, not in the manner of the Vaudois or the Cathars, but because the “free soul does not respond to anyone if it does not want to.”[368]

On 11 April 1310, she was judged to be a heretic and relapser. Fifteen extracts from the condemned book would serve in the production of the Ad nostrum that listed — at the time of the Council of Vienna of 1311 — the principal makers of accusations against the Beghards and Beguines who were blemished by the Free-Spirit. She was delivered to the flames in Paris on 1 June 1310. Her companion or lover, Guion de Cressonaert, cleric of the Cambrian diocese who called himself the angel of Philadelphia, (*) was apprehended and condemned to prison in perpetuity for having tried to save her.

(*) Perhaps one should see in this appelation a reference to the Church of Philadelphia, one of the Bogomile churches, still active in the Balkans.

The text of The Mirror of Simple Souls, which is preserved in the library of the Conde Museum of Chantilly and published by Romana Guarnieri,[369] reveals interpolations of a great stylistic flatness. Their orthodoxy has the advantage over the original (lost) by facilitating its diffusion through the centuries; the mystical speculations of Ruysbroeck and Gerhard Groot neutralized the subversive character of Marguerite’s speculations.

On the other hand, it is undeniable that the most audacious theses of The Mirror reflected a common [populaire] mindset that existed in Germany and even in the region of Langres, where the Franciscan Inquisitor Nicolas de Liva, one of Porete’s accusers, fulminated against the heretics who, supporting the idea that one need not listen to the prophets but to live freely according to the flesh, “maintained their dirtiness under the mantle of devotion.”[370]

Marguerite identified God not with nature such as it reigns in the wild state among mankind and the animals, but with a refinement of human nature that, purified of its dross [gangue], accedes to the state of perfection or purity comparable to the philosopher’s stone.