Ideas of the Free Spirit: Mirror of Simple Souls

In northern Europe, the Free Spirit of Beghards and Béguines led the war against the established Church. From around 1250, they cited Cathars, Waldenses, and Joachites. Their common beliefs included hatred of the Church, that sacraments are worthless, the spiritual value of poverty, and most important of all, that each of us can become God. Organized in small groups, they faded away when trouble threatened, “migrating from mountain to mountain like strange sparrows”, a good description of the lifestyle the fleeing Cathars were obliged to follow. If they differed, they were merely variations on the Cathar original.

Some Catholics retained the Essene lifestyle while otherwise conforming. Canon 8 of the Nicene Council of 325 concerned “those who call themselves Cathari”. Canon 19 concerns “the Paulianists”. For established Christianity, the Ebionite-like or Nazarene-like Christians were a nuisance, but they persisted to become the earliest declared heretics. “Heresy” was unorthodoxy, and could apply only to whoever had been baptized as Christians. Manichæans were not Christians, and Manichæism could not have been a Christian heresy. Yet, so-called Manichæan sects were labelled as heresies by Catholics, and even the sectaries accepted they were. They must have been a dualistic form of Christianity. The Dead Sea Scrolls show the Essenes were dualistic. Cathars must have been Christians who kept much more of the original Essenism than Catholic Christianity.

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Without doubt the best paper on here. Before Academia started fooling with its servers it had over 1000 readers, now it humiliating Academia lists around 250 readers. This historiography paper takes up where Daniel Walther's 1965 survey of the Cathars left off. It is long but I think a pretty good aid for those seeking an introduction to current scholarly beliefs regarding the Cathars. It looks at the classics in the field such as Lambert and historians with very new ideas like Pegg.

In 1309 ecclesiastical leaders condemned as heresy Marguerite Porete's rejection of moral duty, her doctrine that “the annihilated soul is freed from the virtues.” They also condemned her book, the Mirror of Simple Souls, which includes doctrines associated decades earlier with a “new spirit” heresy spreading “blasphemies” such as that “a person can become God” because “a soul united to God is made divine.” In his study, The Heresy of the Free Spirit, Robert E. Lerner identifies these two doctrines of annihilation and deification as characteristic of the “free spirit” heresy condemned at the 1311 Council of Vienne. The council claimed that this heresy's sympathizers belonged to an “abominable sect of certain evil men known as beghards and some faithless women called beguines.” Lerner found that this group was composed of a disproportionate number of women, including Marguerite Porete. Many of the men were also involved with the group of pious laywomen known as beguines. Lerner shows that among those charged with heresy, many sympathized with a “ ‘free-spirit style’ of affective mysticism particularly congenial to thirteenth century religious women.” He suggests that beguines in particular radicalized affective spirituality into what he calls an “extreme mysticism.” Here I wish to follow Lerner's suggestion that we ought to search for the roots of Porete's doctrines among the beguines. I will argue that distinctive doctrines of annihilation and deification sprouted from a fertile beguine imagination, one that nourished Porete's own distinctive and influential ideas in the Mirror of Simple Souls. It is among the beguines that we find the first instance in Christianity of a women's community creating an original form of theological discourse.

This thesis presents a new assessment of the identity and historical significance of Marguerite Porete, burned for heresy in Paris in 1310, and reconnects her to a vigorous, lay, discourse community that threatened the authority of the later medieval church. The thesis argues that a bilateral annihilation of Porete as an historical subject has been brought about by medieval and modern representations, and that this has served to obscure the presence of a subaltern religious discourse in the period. The historiography of Porete has followed distinctive stages of development that reflect, and are affected by, concurrent advances in the study of medieval female religious participation. This interplay has led to the development of a particularly influential hermeneutics that serves to exclude Porete from her contemporaries. Analysis of documentation issuing from Porete‟s condemnation has similarly been influenced by hermeneutic issues that manipulate the ways in which Porete is perceived as an identity. This thesis challenges dominant representations of Porete in the scholarship and argues that Porete‟s identity and discourse reflect a particularly vigorous, fluid and cross-discoursed lay engagement with religiosity that has roots in the precocious socio-religious environment of the Southern Low Countries. Central to the aims of this thesis is the question “how did Porete „fit‟ the religious landscape of her period?” A seeming obstacle to this pursuit are claims from within the scholarship that Porete did not „fit‟ at all, but was, rather, as an aberration amidst other female mystics of the period. Clear links, however, have suggested a wider discourse community and some have identified her, in conjunction with those that condemned her in Paris, as a beguine. Yet this affiliation is refuted by Porete within her book and the term, as an indicator of identity, is highly problematic. This thesis explores the historiographical issues that cloud Porete‟s case and offers a reassessment of the possibilities her reconnection to the major religious currents of her day presents. It will be argued that her condemnation represents a major historical development wherein the boundaries of institutionally accepted discourse were hardened at the very moment when the possibilities for religious discourse were at their peak. Porete will thus be reassessed as a major figure in an alternative religious discourse that represents the excluded voice of lay engagement in the later Middle Ages.

The article reads Eckhart's sermon 29 against the background of the persecution of so-called heretics of the Free Spirirt as recorded in inquisitorial documents. The article notes in particular physicality of Eckhart's rhetoric, suggesting that by making spiritual habits more concrete, he could counter the tendency to define radical forms of spirituality only negatively by their polemical rejection of convention.

From a sociological point of view, Catharism is perceived as a protest movement, which attacked the established values and habits defended by the Roman Catholic Church and worldly power. In conformity with this approach, it is necessary to pay special attention to the explicit values of Catharism, which are contrary to Roman Catholicism. For instance, the rejection of marriage, the outright prohibition on killing living beings, the rejection of the crucifix and the ecclesiastical hierarchy, the ban on swearing oaths, the Eucharist, baptism by water and the belief in God as creator of the material world.

This study investigates the historical evidence for the widespread pop culture assertion, disseminated through popular histories, novels, and spiritual tourism, that the medieval Cathars of southern France treasured a tradition that Jesus and Mary Magdalene were married and had children, and, as such, the holy couple provides a model for human marriage affirmative of the sacred feminine. The medieval sources indicate that while there are a few testimonies of Cathar belief in a spousal relationship between Christ and the Magdalene, and a notion of female deities married to the good God and his evil counterpart, these doctrines appear to be based on literalistic interpretations of scriptural passages and well-known Catholic metaphors. Although Christianity can benefit from the restoration of Mary Magdalene to her deserved apostolic status, the humanization of Jesus, the recognition of the female divine, and the affirmation of sexuality, medieval Cathar doctrines offer little support for these contemporary concerns.