Men Of Understanding
MEN OF UNDERSTANDING
This title distinguished a denomination which appeared in Flanders and Brussels in the year 1511. they owed their origin to an illiterate man, whose name was Egidius Cantor, and to William of Hildenison, a Carmelite monk. They pretended to be honoured with celestial visions, denied that any could arrive at perfect knowledge of the Holy Scriptures without the extraordinary succours of a divine illumination, and declared the approach of a new revelation from heaven, more perfect than the Gospel of Christ. They said that the resurrection was accomplished in the person of Jesus, and no other was to be expected; that the inward man was not defiled by the outward actions, whatever they were; that the pains of hell were to have an end; and not only all mankind, but even the devils themselves were to return to God, and be made partakers of eternal felicity. They also taught among other things, that Christ alone had merited eternal life and filicity for the human race; and that therefore men could not acquire this inestimable privilege by their own actions alone
that the priests to whom the people confessed their transgressions, had not the power of absolving them, but this authority was vested in Christ alone
that voluntary penance and mortification was not necessary to salvation. This denomination appears to have been a branch of the Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit.
Fuente: Theological Dictionary
Men of Understanding
(HOMINES INTELLIGENTIAE).
Name assumed by a heretical sect which in 1410-11 was cited before the Inquisition at Brussels. Its leaders were Egidius Cantoris, an illiterate layman, and the Carmelite William of Hildernissen, near Bergen-op-Zoom. The sect was doctrinally related with the earlier Brethren of the Free Spirit. It taught the eventual salvation of all human beings and even of the demons, maintained that the soul of man cannot be defiled by bodily sin, and believed in a mystical state of illumination and union with God so perfect that it exempted from all subjection to moral and ecclesiastical laws and was an infallible pledge of salvation. Both leaders gloried in the visions with which they claimed to have been favoured. Cantoris in a moment of religious exaltation went so far as to run nude through the streets of Brussels declaring himself the saviour of mankind. About 1410 Peter d’Ailly, Bishop of Cambrai, seems to have taken the first steps towards the suppression of the heresy. William of Hildernissen consented to a retractation, the sincerity of which appeared doubtful. In 1411, a second investigation resulted in another retractation, but also in a sentence compelling William to return permanently to an extra-diocesan Carmelite monastery after three years’ detention in one of the episcopal castles. No information has reached us respecting the result of the inquisitorial procedure against the other members of the sect.
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FREDERICQ, Corpus documentorum inquisitionis Neerlandicae, I, 267-79 (Ghent, 1889); HAUPT in Realenc. f. prot. Theol., VIII, 311-12; LEA, History of the Inquisition, II, 405-06 (New York, 1888).
N.A. WEBER Transcribed by Kenneth M. Caldwell Dedicated to the memory of Most. Rev. John R. Keating, Bishop of Arlington
The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume XCopyright © 1911 by Robert Appleton CompanyOnline Edition Copyright © 2003 by K. KnightNihil Obstat, October 1, 1911. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., CensorImprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York
Fuente: Catholic Encyclopedia
Men Of Understanding
a religious sect which seems to have been a branch of the Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit, has already been considered under the heading SEE HOMINES INTELLIGENTLE.