Heresy of the Free Spirit

The Heresy of the Free Spirit was originally the name given from the late thirteenth to fifteenth centuries to a set of heretical beliefs believed to be held by some Christians, especially in the Low Countries, Germany, France, Bohemia and northern Italy, which caused great unease among Church leaders at the time. The set of errors condemned in the bull Ad nostrum at the Council of Vienne (1311-2) has often been used by historians to typify the core beliefs, though there was great variation during the period over how the heresy was defined, and there is great debate over how far the individuals and groups accused of holding the beliefs (including Marguerite Porete, beguines, beghards, and Meister Eckhart) actually held the views attributed to them.

The meaning of the term has in more recent times been extended to apply to the beliefs of other Christian individuals and groups, active both before and after the core period of the late Middle Ages.

The set of beliefs ascribed to the Free Spirits is first to be found in a text called the Compilatio de novo spiritu put together by Albert the Great in the 1270s, concerning a group of persons investigated in the Swabian Ries area of Germany. The themes which occur in these documents, and which would emerge again in subsequent investigations, included:

During the late thirteenth century, such concerns increasingly became applied to the various unregulated religious groups such as beguines and beghards, who had greatly increased in number in the preceding decades. Concerns over such sentiments then began to occur elsewhere, especially during the 1300s, and especially in Italy. Partly motivated by such concerns, in 1308 Pope Clement V summoned a general council, which met at Vienne from October 1311 to May 1312. In particular, it had to engage with the report from the Paris inquisition (1308–10) into the beguine Marguerite Porete’s The Mirror of Simple Souls (Porete’s writing, which had become well read through France, had been condemned in 1310 as heresy, and Porete had been burned at the stake) . It was the Council of Vienne which first associated these various beliefs with the idea of the ‘Free Spirit’.

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