Alumbrados

“Alumbrado, ( Spanish: “Enlightened”, ) Italian Illuminato, plural Illuminati, a follower of a mystical movement in Spain during the 16th and 17th centuries. Its adherents claimed that the human soul, having attained a certain degree of perfection, was permitted a vision of the divine and entered into direct communication with the Holy Spirit. From this state the soul could neither advance nor retrogress. Consequently, participation in the liturgy, good works, and observance of the exterior forms of religious life were unnecessary for those who had received the “light.” The Alumbrados came primarily from among the reformed Franciscans and the Jesuits, but their doctrines seem to have influenced all classes of people. The extravagant claims made for their visions and revelations caused them to be relentlessly persecuted.

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.

“They say that the love of God in man is God. (. . . They) affirm that ecstasy or illumination leads to such perfection that men can no longer sin, neither mortally nor venally; that illumination frees and releases one from all authority; and that they need not render accounts to anyone, not even to God, because they have put their trust in him (from whence comes their refusal of sacraments, prayers, and good works). They call the Host a bit of pastry; the cross a stick; and genuflection idolatry. They believe the annihilation of their own will is the supreme glory (...). They deny [the existence of] Hell (...) Far from weeping over the Passion of the Christ, they rejoice and enjoy all the pleasures during Holy Week. They state that the Father was incarnated like the Son [was] and believe they speak with this God neither more nor less than with the Corregidor of Escalona. So as to remember Our Lady, they contemplate the face of a [real] woman instead of contemplating an image. They call the conjugal act union with God. The sect is centered around Isabel de La Cruz and a certain Father Alcazar.”

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.

Rendered impeccable by orgasmic illumination, they acceded to the state of perfection and, permanently plunged into inward exaltation, were justified in following their desires and rejecting the Church, its authority and its rites.

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