Mary, Martha, Lazarus, and Francis: Condemning the heresy of the spiritus libertatis in late medieval Italy

Across cultures, centuries, and religious traditions, people have revered those who have experienced personal encounters with the divine—whether this state has been referred to as self-actualization, enlightenment or mystical experience. Alongside this reverence, however, has also been the expectation that those who have undergone this experience should also exhibit pious behavior. The Franciscan Order in the fourteenth century was no exception. One of the order's core values was poverty and beginning in the late thirteenth century, certain Italian Franciscans had begun to profess a new form of poverty that was more radical than anything their predecessors had asserted—that a person could be not only materially poor, but also poor of their own desires, or will. This absence of a personal will, they insisted, enabled them to possess God's will and join in mystical union with him through the sharing of one will. The Franciscan's other core value, however, was that of carrying out the mixed life of both action and contemplation. Franciscan teachers wanted to assert for their students that being in possession of God's will did not mean that one could justify antinomianism, but rather that one must continue to carry out the active life with pious deeds. This study, then, examines how Franciscans invoked the negative example of the new heresy of the spiritus libertatis, who reportedly claimed that they, like the Franciscans, could be united with God through the sharing of one will. By critiquing and figuratively tearing these heretics down, these Franciscans conversely illustrated for one another the correct path towards spiritual perfection.