
The alumbrados held that the human soul can reach such a degree of perfection that it can even in the present life contemplate the essence of God and comprehend the mystery of the Trinity. All external worship, they declared, is superfluous, the reception of the sacraments useless, and sin impossible in this state of complete union with God. Persons in this state of impeccability could indulge their sexual desires and commit other sinful acts freely without staining their souls.

In many regions of Spain, the Alumbrados represented such a force that the Church did not dare to attack them directly and preferred to identify them as Protestants, the condemnation of whom aroused fewer hesitations. They were so numerous in Seville that the Inquisition did not intervene. The major part of the town is infected, reported a letter of the times. There is no Duchess or Marquise, no woman of high or low condition, whom one cannot reproach for some error of this heresy. In the second half of the Sixteenth Century, a group of Alumbrados pushed imprudence as far as publicly contesting the Church’s teachings. In 1578, a Dominican, Alonso de La Fuente who denounced the Alumbrados from his pulpit at Llerena, in Extremadura was interrupted by a woman who said: ‘Padre, the life they lead is better than yours, and their doctrine is better, too.’ Her audacity, supported (in all probability) by a favorable opinion, one commonly accepted in the region, aroused the immediate reaction of the Inquisition. Arrested and subjected to torture, she confessed the names of her companions.
Eight members of the secular clergy expounded their doctrine. Fernando Alvarez and Father Chamizo recommended that novices meditated on the wounds of the crucified Christ with such ardor that they became red in face, broke out into a sweat, felt sorrow in their hearts, became nauseated and ended up feeling an ecstasy in which, according to their expression, they become liquefied in the love of God. Porete had spoken of the annihilated soul that announced the identification with the God that Simon of Samaria called megale dynamis, while the Beghard John of Brann evoked the identity of the pneuma and the sperma in the fusion that left him totaliter liquefactus.

Ignatius of Loyola returned to Barcelona to prepare himself for entrance to a university. There he encountered some women who had been called before the Inquisition. These women were considered alumbrados (Illuminated, Illuminati, or Enlightened Ones) - a group that was linked in their zeal and spirituality to Franciscan reforms, but had incurred mounting suspicion on the part of the administrators of the Inquisition. At one point, Ignatius was preaching on the street when three of these devout women began to experience ecstatic states. "One fell senseless, another sometimes rolled about on the ground, another had been seen in the grip of convulsions or shuddering and sweating in anguish."
~ Wikipedia & Britannica.com
Images ~ Alumbrados vision
~ Inquisition Scene by Francisco Goya
~ Inquisition Scene by Francisco Goya
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