St. Thomas Aquinas ,whose work was much quoted by witch hunters, taught in the 13th Century at the University of Paris at a time when the Beguine communities of women were at their strongest.

Although he was later honoured by the Vatican as the "Angelic Doctor", he was in fact a fanatic hater of sexuality and a belittler of women. A female Catholic theologian recently listed some examples of his language. She found that Aquinas called sex "filthiness", "staining", disgusting", "shamefulness", "disgrace", "degeneration", sickness", "corruption of integrity" and a reason for "aversion" and "loathing". Aquinas also said with disgust that the lack of chastity resulted in the "feminisation of the human heart" (Summa Theo. Suppl q 53 a3 ad 1) . (Eu 194)

Aquinas and the other scholastics did not go unchallenged by the Beguine despite them being barred like other women from the universities. A leader in this was the Beguine Hadewijch of Antwerp who was forced to leave her small Beguine community around 1260 for fear of the Inquisition. She was a scholar knowledgeable of the Fathers of the Church, of Ptolemaic astronomy and of Latin. She wrote the first prose to be published in the Dutch language - and for this she was the more suspect in the eyes of the Inquisition.Her poems and letters all reflected a strong vibrant mysticism. Her love for God was interwoven with her love for nature in her verse written in the traditional troubadour style and sometimes sung as love songs.

She challenged the exaltation of reason (perhaps a criticism of the dry debating style of Aquinas whose chains of logical deductions were sometimes based on very dubious premises.) She wrote: "Love despises reason and all that lies within. For whatever belongs to reason stands against the blessed state of love. For reason cannot take anything away from love or bring anything to love, for love's true reason is a flood that rises forever and knows no peace." She personified love as female and divine. " Love does not yield to saints or men or angels, heaven or earth, and she enfolds the divine in her nature. To love she calls the hearts who love, in a voice that is loud and untiring. The voice has great power and it tells of things more terrible than thunder."

But the Beguine who became best known as a spiritual teacher and mystic was Marguette Porete. She wrote "The Mirror of Simple Souls" between 1296 and 1306 in the high summer of Aquinas's Scholasticism. It was written in the spirit of the troubadours as a love poem but was also a direct challenge to the Church and its theologians. It spoke of the worldly hierarchical "little church" of Popes and Bishops that must give way before the "greater church" of the Spirit.

She sung:

'Theologians and other clerks, You won't understand this book - however bright your wits - if you do not meet it humbly. Only thus will Love and Faith make you surmount reason, they are the mistresses of Reason's house ...

"Desire, Will and Fear take away from them the understanding, the outflowing and the union of the highest Light of the ardour of Divine Love."

She taught that the soul does not need virtues, or pious works when living in union with God. They are replaced by what we do naturally when living in a state of love. "Virtues, I take leave of you for ever more. I'll have a freer heart for that - more joyful too. Your service is too unremitting - indeed I know . I have quits your tyrannies, now I am at peace" (Lerner trans. 80) Her teaching that we do not need the disciplines of the "little" Church if we love God, was a threat to the Church's hold over the spiritual life of the people. She too wrote in the vernacular while Thomas Aquinas wrote in Latin - making her, like other Beguines, seem all the more dangerous to the authorities.

She was called before the Church Inquisitor of Lorraine but denied his authority over her for she said he only represented the worldly "little church". He condemned her as a heretic, particularly for saying that if one is united to God, one "could and should grant to nature all that it desires". The Inquisitor must have thought "Did she not know that nature is corrupt?" The Church's use of the new universities to reinforce its power is illustrated by how in 1310 twenty one of the masters of Paris University's Faculty of Theology sat in judgement on Porete at the request of the Inquisitor, William of Paris, and found her guilty of heresy. Later in 1429-31 the same Faculty would be consulted during the trial of Joan d'Arc.

Porete's book was burnt publicly in Valenciennes by the Church then some months later she too was burnt at the stake in Paris on June 1st 1310. Her reputation was such and her appearance so dignified and gracious, that the spectators were in tears. After her death her book did not vanish despite being uniquely condemned on three separate occasions by Church authorities. It was secretly copied, translated and smuggled throughout Europe. The men and women who handled her book could be killed as heretics if they were found with it in their possession. One complete copy was found enclosed within the personal writings of Blessed Julian of Norwich, a British mystic. This copy is now in the British Library.

The year after Marguette Porete's death, the Catholic Church attacked the Beguine movement at the 1311 Council of Vienna. It tried to limit the influence of the Beguines by forbidding its members from leaving the walls of their communities. They were put under the authority of Bishops and Church authorities tried with limited success to transform them into enclosed "religious communities" by decreeing that no Beguine could leave her community without the church's permission.. Civil authorities tried to destroy the Beguine communities by heavily taxing them. (The word "beg" may well come from them since many communities were plunged into poverty through Church opposition.)

The church had to deal with Beguines in Germany, Switzerland, France, Belgium and Holland. Also in Southern France and Catalonia there were communities called Beguine by the church but which were better known as the Waldensians. All these communities faced investigation and possible death at the hands of the Inquisition. Although many communities were suppressed or transformed, a few Beguine communities survived. Some Beguine communities still exist in Belgium but in a very different form.

Porete was not the only "mystic" targeted by the Inquisition. Another was Mechtild of Magdeburg 1207 -1282, who came under attack for her mystical work written in Low German. Dante probably borrowed from her writing for his rendition of Bernard's Prayer to the Virgin which Chaucer later translated to use in his Second Nun's Tale. She boldly attacked the corrupt members of the clergy as "goats" and "Pharisees" and was fiercely critical of the hatred of the body shown by the ascetics of the Church: "Do not disdain your body, for the soul is just as safe in its body as in the kingdom of heaven'. She had also a lesson for me for I was long afraid of being open about the gift I had been given at birth of walking between the genders. She wrote:

Another Beguine mystic, Hadeqich from Brabant, only escaped being tried as a heretic by leaving her community and living in isolation from where she advised people by post.. Her writings are also the first works published in Low German. She died around 1260. Her letters were for long lost and only rediscovered in 1983. She like Porete wrote in the style of the troubadours, called minnesingers in Germany. One of her letters tells of the loving union between God and human:

She wrote of deity in the female gender, calling the deity her "Love". For example: "I showed my pain to Love and begged her pity". She was also very happy with her nature. She "sinks deep in herself utterly satisfied with her nature, she fully rejoices in herself" - an attitude very different to that of Aquinas.. For her the ecstasy of divine love cannot be understood "save by those who have been thrown, into the abyss of love's mighty nature, and those who belong there, and they believe in love more than they understand her."

Aquinas' successor in the Chair of Theology at the University of Paris was Meister Ekhardt. 1260-1328 He was a very different man from Aquinas, more influenced by Plato than by Aristotle and very much in the mystical and gnostic tradition. He saw us all as "birthing" God within us as we grow spiritually. His love for nature was evident.: " Here all blades of grass, wood and stone, all things are One. This is the deepest depth." - Miscellanies. He declared, in very courageous opposition to the Inquisition's demonising of women; "Evil is opposed to being, therefore the devil does not exist." Some of his students quoted early gnostic works that were later lost and not rediscovered until the 20th century. He died while his works were under investigation by the Inquisition - the one mercy showed him was that he was allowed to die rather than be executed.

The women living in convents also embraced the mystic marriage tradition. They saw themselves as wedded to God and this became the basis of their own initiation rituals. In the 14th Century a major influence was exerted by Blessed Julian of Norwich, a hermit living in a room attached to church in Norwich, then the second largest city in England (who also possessed a secret copy of the Church-condemned Porete's work as I have mentioned). . She did not write like Porete of a "little" church but said she was writing for the 'even-Christians", meaning those not influenced by rank. She wrote about the presence of God in nature and how Divine Love is present in and maintains Creation.

"And after this I saw God in a point. That is to say in my understanding. By which sight I saw that he is in all things... He showed me a little thing, the size of a hazel nut lying in my palm or so it seemed to me and it was as round as a ball.... it is all that is made ... it lasts and ever shall be for God loves it and so have all things being by the love of God..., the maker, the keeper, the lover."

She acknowledged both male and female aspects of the Divinity in much the same way as the Gnostics who saw Sophia as Divine Wisdom. "The almighty truth of the Trinity is our Father, for he makes us and keeps us in him. And the deep wisdom of the Trinity is our Mother in whom we are all enclosed" She also had no time for the anti-sensuality of the Fathers but taught: "Our sensuality is grounded in nature...In our sensuality, God is.' For her the spirit's search for God should lead it to the mystic marriage of human and divinity. Her conclusion was thus the same as the Greek and Egyptian pagan mystery cults - and, as we will see, as in some of the practices of the twentieth century "Wicca" or witchcraft.

For her we are "oned" with divinity and know ourselves as ultimately divine. "till I am substantially oned to him, I may never have full rest, nor full bliss...God is nearer to us than our own soul" for he is the ground in which our soul stands." "God does not love us any less than He loves Christ". She has God say: "I am the ground of your seeking. First it is my will that you have it and I make you will it" (Also see the poem quoted in the previous chapter) She was a great scholar. She translated the Bible texts from the early Greek and Hebrew versions unlike the contemporary translator John Wycliffe who translated the Bible from Jerome's later and less accurate Latin Vulgate version.

Julian's very female imagery was dangerous in the eyes of the Church. She opened her account of a vision by saying that she was pregnant with God's Word just as Mary was pregnant with Jesus. Her close advisor and protector Cardinal Adam Easton had her delete this, knowing that Marguette Porete had been burned at the stake partly for using that same image. Birgitta, a contemporary Swedish mystic and mother of 8, also used the same image, saying that her book was moving within her like a child in the womb. After Easton died, Julian reinserted in her manuscript her pregnant imagery.

There was a pan-European weaving of powerful mystics in the 14th Century. Catherine of Sienna, the namesake of our daughters and critic of the Pope, used words from the "1368" version of Julian's work as the opening of her 1378 book "Dialogo". Julian in her turn quoted from William Flete, Catherine of Siena's disciple and executor. Adam Easton was a friend not just to Julian but also to Catherine of Sienna and Birgitta of Sweden. Birgitta was influenced by the Beguine mystics, Mechtild of Magdebourg as well as by Marguerite Porete as was Julian. They also organised the secret Europe-wide "Friends of God" movement that included as members Meister Eckhart and two other mystics quoted by Julian, Henry Suso and Jan Van Fuusbroec. An unsuccessful "Friends of God" mission was sent to the Pope to plead for peace. This mission also accurately prophesied that the Pope would die the following year. It continued underground throughout the 17th Century and involved the descendants in exile of Thomas More, an executed English Chancellor who also reportedly had a copy of the condemned mystical book of the Maid of Kent.

But the participants in this movement knew their danger. Some of the Friends of God died at the hands of the authorities. Julian under pressure took some of her biblical translations out of the later versions of her work and protested that she never intended to teach theology. If she had been condemned for disobedience to the Church, she could have been hung, drawn and quartered. After Julian's death in 1373 the crack down intensified at the hands of churchmen who feared being challenged by women and by laymen. In 1407 Archbishop Arundel forbade women and laymen from teaching theology, seized vernacular bibles, burnt John Wycliffe's books before St Paul's Cathedral and, in the Arundel Constitution, decreed that a licence from a bishop was needed to quote the bible.

It was a highly dangerous time to write of spiritual experiences not sanctioned by authority. The Holy Maid of Kent, Elizabeth Barton, was executed at Tyburn because she was critical of the monarch in her mystical book, "Revelations". Several people died simply because they owned a copy of her book. St Birgitta of Sweden was also critical of her monarch. She had to go into exile to Italy. These were not inconsequential mystics but women of great influence feared by kings. Their manuscripts were hidden in Antwerp, in Lisbon and in Paris. In Spain the great mystical writer St John of the Cross was also imprisoned by the Inquisition. Another mystic, St Teresa of Avila, who worked within the Church and did not think so highly of nature, complained about her own treatment by Church authorities: "it is not right to repel minds that are virtuous and brave even though they be the minds of women" 134

Most of the women and some of the men that the Church Inquistion targetted were in great danger of being labelled 'witches" as well as 'heretics". Under the heading of "witches" went the village wisewoman, healers, herbalists and spiritual guides and many others named in hysterical or malevolent accusations. The efficacy of their work was ascribed to the imagined supernatural opponent of the Church, the Devil, -as was the work of the condemned Beguines. It was rumoured that the witches were part of a pan-European heretical cult.

So the Papacy was in great trouble from the 13th to the 14th Centuries. It believed it had conspiring against it pagans, witches, Beguines, Waldensians, Cathars, male and female mystics and some major theologians - a great league of people. These were by no means all illiterates or of people without political connections.