Brethren of the Free Spirit

The Brethren of the Free Spirit, a lay Christian movement, flourished in northern Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries. Antinomian and individualist in their outlook, the Brethren came into conflict with the Catholic Church and Pope Clement V declared them heretical at the Council of Vienne (1311–1312). They were consequently persecuted by the temporal and spiritual authorities of the time.

The Brethren flourished at a time of great trauma in Western Europe. This was the time of the conflict between the Avignon Papacy and the Holy Roman Emperor, the Hundred Years' War, the Black Death, the rise of the Cathars and subsequent Crusade against them, the beginnings of the Inquisition, the fall of the Knights Templar, and strife within the Catholic Church. All these elements lent to the appeal of the Brethren's individualistic and millenarian approach to Christianity and the Bible.

In this time of crisis within the Church and society as a whole, there was a strong sense that the end of the world was coming and thus Man's spirituality and salvation became more and more important. Wherever people ceased to find in the traditional Church the spiritual answers they sought, dissident movements such as the Brethren sprang up.

From the very beginning of what would become the Free Spirit heresy its followers ran into trouble with the secular and religious authorities. Both Amaury de Bene and Gioacchino de Fiori, whose ideas could be said to be at the fountainhead of the movement, underwent examination and persecution at the hands of the Church. Amaury's writings were condemned in 1204, Amaury himself dying in 1207 having been forced to recant his views. In 1209 ten of his followers were burnt at the stake in Paris, and Amaury's body was exhumed, also burnt and the ashes scattered. By 1215 his work and followers were formally condemned by the Fourth Lateran Council and denounced as officially heretical.

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