Amalrician

The Amalrician heresy was a pantheist belief named after Amalric of Bena. The beliefs are thought to have influenced the Brethren of the Free Spirit.

The beginnings of medieval pantheistic Christian theology lie in the early 13th century, with theologians at Paris, such as David of Dinant, Amalric of Bena, and Ortlieb of Strassburg, and was later mixed with the millenarist theories of Gioacchino da Fiore.

Fourteen followers of Amalric began to preach that "all things are One, because whatever is, is God." They believed that after the age of the Father (the Patriarchal Age) and the age of the Son (Christianity), a new age of the Holy Spirit was at hand. Fact|date=January 2008 The Amalricians, who included many priests and clerics, succeeded for some time in propagating their beliefs without being detected by the ecclesiastical authorities. In 1210, Peter, Bishop of Paris, and the Chevalier Guérin, an adviser to the French king Philip II Augustus, obtained secret information from Master Ralph, an undercover agent, laying bare the inner workings of the sect, and the principals and proselytes were arrested. In the year 1210 a council of bishops and doctors of the University of Paris assembled to take measures for the punishment of the offenders. The ignorant converts, including many women, were pardoned. Of the principals, four were condemned to imprisonment for life. Nine members were burned at the stake.Fact|date=January 2008 Five years later (1215) the writings of Aristotle, which had been used by the Brethren in support of their belief, were forbidden to be read either in public or in private.Fact|date=January 2008

Amalric himself, though dead some years, did not escape the persecution. Besides being included in the condemnation of his disciples, in the council of 1210 special sentence of excommunication was pronounced against him, and his bones were exhumed from their resting-place and cast into unconsecrated ground.Fact|date=January 2008 The doctrine was condemned again by Pope Innocent III in the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) "as insanity rather than heresy", and in 1225 Pope Honorius III condemned the work of Johannes Scotus Eriugena, "De Divisione Naturæ", from which Amalric was supposed to have derived the beginnings of his heresy.Fact|date=January 2008

The movement survived however, and later followers went even further, evolving into the Brethren of the Free Spirit