Note 325 — Chapter IX · CHRISTENDOM IN THE MIDDLE AGES

For lack of other culture than Biblical, then, even the popular heresy tended to run into mysticisms which were only so far more rational than the dogmas and rites of the Church that they stood for some actual reflection. A partial exception, indeed, may be made in the case of the Brethren of the Free Spirit, a sect set up in Germany in the early years of the thirteenth century, by one Ortlieb, on the basis of the pantheistic teachings of Amaury of Bène and David of Dinant.325 Their doctrines were set forth in a special treatise or sacred book, called The Nine Rocks. The Fratres liberi spiritus seem to have been identical with the sect of the “Holy Spirit”;326 but their tenets were heretical in a high degree, including as they did a denial of personal immortality, and consequently of the notions of heaven, hell, and purgatory. Even the sect’s doctrine of the Holy Spirit was heretical in another way, inasmuch as it ran, if its opponents can be believed, to the old antinomian assertion that anyone filled with the Spirit was sinless, whatever deeds he might do.327 As always, such antinomianism strengthened the hands of the clergy against the heresy, though the Brethren seem to have been originally very ascetic; and inasmuch as their pantheism involved the idea that Satan also had in him the divine essence, they were duly accused of devil-worship.328 On general principles they were furiously persecuted; but all through the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and even in the fifteenth, they are found in various parts of central and western Europe,329 often in close alliance with the originally orthodox communities known in France and Holland by the names of Turlupins and Beguins or Beguines, and in Germany and Belgium as Beguttæ or Beghards,330 akin to the Lollards.