Chapter 32: Beghards and Beguines

Around the end of the Twelfth Century, associations that were both religious and secular were founded, most often on the initiative of magistrates or rich bourgeois; the members of which, designated by the names “Beghards” and “Beguines,” lived in communitarian houses called “beguinages.”

Founded as a public service to stop the multiplication of poor people in the towns that drained the surplus of manpower from the countrysides, these communities were independent of all monastic orders and placed under the exclusive surveillance of the bishop. The influx of beggars of both genders did not cease to grow in importance, especially in the northern towns such as Liege, where the first establishments date from 1180–1184 (and thus were contemporaneous with the initiatives of Pierre Valdo in Lyon): Tirlemont (1202), Valenciennes (1212), Douai (1219), Ghent (1227) and Antwerp (1230). In 1250, there were more than 1,000 adherents in Paris and Cambrai, and 2,000 in Cologne.

Mixing individual and communitarian interests together, the current of the Free-Spirit awoke a particular echo in the beguinages that Jundt paints in an idyllic tableau:

In France and Germany, the Beguines lived in great numbers in the same house, whereas in Belgium their habitation recalls to us less a cloister than one of our modern workers’ cities: they were composed (and are still composed today) as a series of small houses, each of which didn’t contain more than two or three Beguines; at the center a church and a charity hospital for the aged or sick sisters had been erected; close-by one found a cemetery. The genre of life of these women occupied a space between the monastic life and profane life. They did not renounce the society of men, nor terrestrial affairs and occupations; they made vows of chastity and obedience, but not in an absolute manner like the religious orders; they conserved the freedom of leaving the association when they wished and [then] getting married (...)

They didn’t wait long before finding imitators. Brotherhoods of artisans, most often weavers, formed in their image in the different towns where they had their establishments. Called Beghards by the people, the members of these eminently secular associations enjoyed the same independence as the Beguines; they devoted their lives to manual labor and exercises of piety and thus attracted the favor of the people.

The progress of these two religious societies did not fail to create enemies, especially among the secular clergy, whose jealousy they aroused. The parish priests received a certain sum per year to indemnify them for the loses caused by the presence of a priest specially attached to each of these associations; one even gave them a portion of the price of burials when some rich bourgeois (and the case was not rare) demanded to be buried in the cemetery adjoining the establishment; as far as the religious orders, they could only lose out to the pious foundations that deprived them, not only only of the support of many members, but also important donations.[375]

The spirit of freedom spread like wild fire in the communities of men and women less preoccupied with theological struggles than the two great themes debated in the Thirteenth Century because their reality was tested every day: the meaning of poverty and the practice of love, which aspired to raise itself from brutal satisfaction to the art of pleasure. When had such immediate questions of utility and pleasure better attempted to discover responses than in these places of refuge and encounter, in which Beghards and Beguines learned, through a beneficial idlness and under the pretext of good works, to live according to their preferences?

From 1244 on, the Archbishop of Mayence set himself against the way that the young Beguines were abusing their freedom. It is true that the monastical communities and the parish priests cast a disapproving eye on the impetuous zeal of certain beguinages that, through the gratuity of their aid, deprived them of profitable business. At the beginning, the Pope intervened to defend the Beghard communities against the despoilations and trials of the local clergy, but the local condemnations multiplied very quickly. In 1258, the Synod of Fritzlar condemned the wandering Beguines and Beghards who begged to cries of “Brod durch Gott” [bread by God] and preached in secret and subterranean places.[376]

In 1307, at the Synod of Cologne, Bishop Henri II of Virneburg enumerated the points of accusation among which one could find such collectively welcomed remarks as “To make love is not a sin” and “Those who are led by the Spirit of God are no longer under the law, because the law is not imposed on the just, on those who live without sin.”

In 1311, Pope Clement V was worried by the progress of the Free-Spirit in Italy and everywhere else. At the Council of Vienna, which took place that same year, he launched against those “who call freedom of spirit the freedom to do whatever pleases them” two decrees, Ad nostrum and Cum de quibusdam mulieribus, the ensemble of which formed the Clementines and would serve from then on as an inquisitorial guide for the systematic persecution of the Beghards and Beguines, dragging to the pyre a number of good Catholics devoted to the struggle against pauperization and adepts of the Free-Spirit who adjured, if necessary, for the simple reason that sacrifice or martyrdom did not enter into their aspirations.

The Communities Of Cologne And Schweidnitz

Walter of Holland, the author of De novem rupibus spiritualibus (Of the Nine Spiritual Rocks), a text that is lost today but which Mosheim would consult in the Eighteenth Century, founded in Cologne a group that met in a place baptized “Paradise.” According to the chronicler William of Egmont, a couple represented Jesus and Mary. After a ceremony conducted by the Christ dressed up in precious clothes, a nude preacher would invite the assembly to undress and celebrate their refound Edenic innocence with a banquet, followed by the pleasures of love.

In the manner of the “Homines intelligentiae,” active a century later in Brussels, an initiatory ceremony based on “refined love” expressed the unity of the body and the spirit in the identification of amorous ecstasy and the incarnated Spirit (*) and removed sin and guilt. As among the Barbelites and Messalians, courtesy and refinement of pleasure, so as to accede to good conscience, started down the road of hierogamy, a psychoanalysis before there was such a thing, in which God the Father, the Son, his mother, virgin and wife, traditional factors of castration and repression, suddenly gave their consent without reserve to this essential quest for love.

(*) Here, once more, there was a resurgence of the Gnostic pneuma assimilated with the sperma.

The persecution led by Bishop Henri II of Virneburg sent Walter to the pyre in 1323. William of Egmont counted 50 victims burned or drowned in the Rhine.

Nevertheless, another community existed at that time. It continued up to 1335, which indicates the popular expansion of the movement and the repression’s lack of efficacity.

Indeed, in 1335, a certain John of Brunn (Brno), who lived with his brother Albert in a Beghard community in Cologne for twenty years, adjured and avoided the pyre by rallying to the Dominican order. In a confession to Gallus Neuhaus, the Inquisitor of Prague, he revealed the singular practices of the Free-Spirit in the ecclesiastical lower-orders.

The brotherhood was divided into two classes: the neophytes and the Perfect Ones. The first group, after having given all of their goods and dress suits to the second group, begged and learned to renounce their own wills, so as to be penetrated by divine plenitude. They devoted themselves to work that constrained them and was repugnant to them, so as to better break the body and empower the spirit. Once descended below all conscience, with the result that they stole and killed with impugnity — they called it “sending them back to eternity” — without scruples or remorse, they acceded to the state of perfection and lived in luxury and pleasure. They made love with the Beguines or adepts whom they recognized, as among the Messalians, by the usage of code and signs (tickling the palm of the hand, touching the end of the nose), unless they simply declared “Fac mihi caritatem” (“Give me charity”), because they excelled at giving a more agreeably sensual meaning to ritualized formulas.

For twenty-five years, a community of Beguines or Monials functioned in Schweidnitz, Silesia, on a model identical to that of Cologne. The denunciation of mistreated novices drew the attention of the Inquisitor Johannes Schwenlenfeld, who would die, as many of his species did, under the blows of an anonymous avenger in 1341. Revealed by an inquest in 1332, the facts brought to light practices quite similar to those reported by Diderot in the Eighteenth Century in The Religious and attested to by the cadavers of newborns frequently discovered in the old manasteries. They only took on a certain relief here because of the doctrine of spiritual freedom, which was invoked to justify them. Same annihiliation of will among the novices reduced to slavery and submitted to the caprices of the “Marthas” or mistresses; same state of impeccability and absolute license among the Perfect Ones, dressed in the most beautiful finery and passing their days in luxury and debauchery. Gertrude of Civitatis, superior of the community, affirmed: “If God created everything, then I co-created everything with him. And I am God with God, and I am Christ and I am more.”

The “Marthas” of Schweidnitz often visited other convents or communities. Their presence was attested to in Strasbourg, where their teachings reflected a sermon falsely attributed to Eckhart, Such was Sister Catherine, the Daughter that Master Eckhart had in Strasbourg, which described the diverse degrees of initiation of a novice according to the Free-Spirit and the Adamite innocence of “Everything is permitted.”

Wandering Beghards And Beguines

The trials of the Beghards and Beguines who propagated the doctrine of an absolute freedom or, in the manner of Marguerite Porete, the art of refined love, furnished an indication of the degree of dispersion of the current, the meaning of which the Church could not understand, so it postulated its eradication.

The majority of the condemned had either ceded to the presumption and played the prophet or the Christ in a sensual apostleship or had, by the numbers of their partisans, aroused the suspicions of the inquisitorial functionairies, the monks and priests always ready to make the first move so as to avoid the blame of the religious police.

While the popularity of Bloemardine and her reputation for holiness discouraged the inquisitors in Brussels and chassed away Ruysbroeck, the publication of a post-Eckhartian treatise entitled Meester Eckhart en de onbekende leer (Master Eckhart and the Unknown Teachings) attested to the presence of identical preoccupations in Holland. Soon after, Gerhard Groot and his Modern Devotion would strive to oppose to the Free-Spirit a mystique that was reduced to pure intellectual speculation and strictly billeted within the limits of dogma. In 1380, Geert Groote would denounce Bartholomew, an Augustinian partisan of the Free-Spirit; he exhumed and burned the body of Matthew of Gouda who had affirmed that he knew “more motives than the Christ of the so-called God.”[377]

In 1336 three Beguines “of high spirit,” arrested in Magdeburg, hastened to abjure “their errors and horrible blasphemies” and were set free. The same year, a certain Constantine was burned in Erfurt. In 1339, three Beghards “professing the crudest pantheism” were sent to prison in perpetuity in Constance. Others were arrested in Nuremburg and Ratisbonne (1340), then Wurzburg (1342); Hermann Kuechener suffered the penalty of fire in Nuremburg in 1342 for having professed the return to the innocence of Adam before the fall.

The theologian Jordan von Quedlinburg composed a work of refutation of the Beghards of Free-Spirit, from which Romana Guarnieri selected important extracts.[378]

The Inquisitor Schadelant sent Berthold von Rohrbach, accused of having preached the theses of the Free-Spirit in Franconia, to the pyre in Spire in 1356.

Hidden by the Spanish Inquisition, which often confused itself with a gigantic pogrom, the German Inquisition exercised its bureaucratic ferocity. It kindled the largest number of pyres and cranked the procedural machinery with the greatest efficacity. It was also in Germany, when the flames of heresy were extinguished, that women, men and children accused of sorcery would take up the slack for the Beghards and wandering prophets. In this domain, the Frenchmen Boguet and De Lance, pursuing the demons of their morbid fantasms, would, it is true, give their German colleagues a run for their money.

The execution of the Beguine Metza von Westenhove in 1366 presented a particularly odious character. Condemned 50 years earlier for having propagated the freedom of acting according to one’s desires, she was judged to have relapsed at an advanced age and was offered as a sacrifice at the time of a welcoming festival for a prince organized by the city.

The case of Johannes Hartmann, called the Spinner (the Weaver), arrested and burned in Erfurt in 1367, illustrated the behavior of certain adepts of the Free-Spirit, which foreshadowed the conceptions of Donatien Alfonse Francois de Sade.

The state of perfect and autodeification to which Johannes acceded, through the preliminaries of asceticism and revelation, prescribed that he unreservedly follow the caprices, desires and passions that God, that is to say, he himself and nature, had inspired in him. Did he desire a woman? He would seduce or rape her. A valuable item? He appropriated it. The owner objected? He expedited him [back] “into eternity,” where he could garner the money spent and the pleasures that were offered to him. And Johannes had this peremptory formula: “It would be better to want the entire earth to perish than to renounce an act incited by nature.”[379]

That same year [1367], Walter Korling, Hartmann’s accuser, sent seven other Beghards to the pyre in Nordhausen, Thuringia.

In France, the troubles of the great peasant revolt and the war with England left the wandering preachers a greater leisure to escape the nets of the heretic-hunters. It seems that the numerical importance of the Beghards and Beguines known under the name “Turlupins” (in the Netherlands and England they were called “Lollards”) had drawn down upon them the repression of 1372 in Paris. Mosheim supposes that many came from Germany, fleeing the persecutions.[380] The Inquisitor of Ile-de-France, Jacques de More, killed them along with Jeanne Dabenton, their prophetess. His pyre would also consume the body of his friend, who died shortly before in prison. Certain people gained la Savoie, where the Pope would engage Count Amedee to serve against them, then in Switzerland. An adept of the Free-Spirit was burned at Bremgarten, near Berne.

Following [Jean Charlier de] Gerson, the sect still had representatives when he was still alive; but they fled the populous localities and hid themselves in overlooked and deserted places.

Gerson preserved the fundamental points of their doctrine for us. They taught that a man, after he had achieved peace and tranquility of the spirit, would be relieved of the requirement to observe the divine laws; that it was not necessary to rage at anything that was given by nature; and that it was through nudity that we return to the state of innocence of the first men [and women] and that we attain from here-below the supreme degree of happiness. “The Epicureans, dressed in the tunic of Christ, insinuated themselves among the women by simulating a profound devotion; little by little they won over their confidence and did not delay in making them the playthings of their passions.” Abolishing all modesty, not only in their language, but also in their relations with each other, they conducted secret meetings in which they tried to represent the innocence of Paradise in the manner of the heretics of Cologne. In several passages Gerson sets them into relation with Joachim of Fiore. It is probable that they based their principle of spiritual freedom on the theory of the three ages and it is without doubt that one of the five prophetesses charged with announcing the beginning of the era of the Holy Spirit was seized in Lyon in 1423.[381]

While Gerhard Groot launched the mystical and orthodox movement of the New Devotion in Holland, Germany intensified its persecution of the Beghards. On 26 January 1381, Conrad Kannler, brought before the inquisitorial tribunal of Eichstadt, expounded upon his conception of the Free-Spirit: “It is achieved when all remorse of conscience ceases and man can no longer sin (...). I am one with God and God is one with me.” He insisted on the legitimacy of satisfying his passions, whatever they were, on the condition that the desire assumed an irresistible character.[382] Thus the Fraticelles and, much later, the Allumbrados of Spain would recommend to men and women that they sleep nude, side by side, and remain chaste as long as possible, so as to lead passion to the point at which it could not restrain itself any further.