antinomianism is no part of true Mysticism; but it is often found in
conjunction with mystical speculation among the half-educated. It is
the vulgar perversion of Plotinus' doctrine that matter is nothing,
and that the highest part of our nature can take no stain.[221] We
find evidence of immorality practised "in nomine caritatis" among the
Gnostics and Manicheans of the first centuries, and these heresies
never really became extinct. The sects of the "Free Spirit," who
flourished later in the thirteenth century, had an even worse
reputation than the Amalricians. They combined with their Pantheism a
Determinism which destroyed all sense of responsibility. On the other
hand, the followers of Ortlieb of Strassburg, about the same period,
advocated an extreme asceticism based on a dualistic or Manichean view
of the world; and they combined with this error an extreme
rationalism, teaching that the historical Christ was a mere man; that
the Gospel history has only a symbolical truth; that the soul only,
without the body, is immortal; and that the Pope and his priests are
servants of Satan.

The problem for the Church was how to encourage the warm love and
faith of the mystics without giving the rein to these mischievous
errors. The twelfth and thirteenth centuries produced several famous
writers, who attempted to combine scholasticism and Mysticism.[222]
The leaders in this attempt were Bernard,[223] Hugo and Richard of St.
Victor, Bonaventura, Albertus Magnus, and (later) Gerson. Their works
are not of great value as contributions to religious philosophy, for
the Schoolmen were too much afraid of their authorities--Catholic
tradition and Aristotle--to probe difficulties to the bottom; and the
mystics, who, by making the renewed life of the soul their
starting-point, were more independent, were debarred, by their
ignorance of Greek, from a first-hand knowledge of their intellectual