The Movement of the Free Spirit

By Raoul Vanigiem

Zone Books 1996

Vanigiem is a critic and theorist who has since the early 1960’s been working outside the mainstream in a hybrid zone between poetry and polemics, anarchism and art. Almost unknown but immensely influential it’s unlikely that many in the political mainstream will have heard his name although some of his pithily pungent aphorisms are etched into the cultural consciousness ever since they were graffitied onto the walls of Paris in 1968. As a key member of the ‘Situationist International’ he helped to galvanise disparate voices of dissent, most famously uniting striking Renault workers with rioting students in a week in May which very nearly collapsed the DeGaulle government. When this movement was wooed by a more orthodox communist ideology he defined his position with the warning:

“Anyone who speaks of revolution without direct reference to everyday life is speaking with his mouth full of corpses”.

In his most famous work, “The Revolution of Everyday Life”, Vanegiem mounted a corruscating attack on the totalising system of global capitalism; a society of alienation and duplicity in which, he contends, our real lives are replaced by mere survival and genuine experiences reduced to mere spectacle. From this philosophical and economic conviction Vanegiem remains unswerving to this day.

Most remarkable about Vanigiem is that behind the rhetorical ferocity lies a vividly human vision of life lived to its full capacity, his is a determinedly moral stance, far from orthodox but devoted to orthopraxis; the knowledge that abundant life depends on Love is knowledge central to this iconoclast’s vision, and although I’m not sure I ‘d want him to hear me say so; his is a morally serious and a spiritually resonant body of work.

I was delighted to find my intuitions about his work substantiated by Vanigiem’s book, The Movement of the Free Spirit, which sets out to illuminate the obscure lives and writings of those mystics whose spirituality propelled them into [usually fatal] conflict with the forces of doctrinal authority in the middle ages, and by that illumination to shed some light on our own age.

This is a recent find for me but not a new book; it was first published in French in 1986, translated and published in America and reissued here with a new preface by Zone Books in 1996.

For anyone involved in the religious life, however marginally, it is not an easy read; Vanegiem directs his considerable invective fire-power at the ecclesial, but for anyone serious about it, and especially for Unitarians with our roots in heresy, it’s an important book. To allow it its full title:

“The Movement of the Free Spirit; General Considerations and First-hand Testimony Concerning some Brief Flowerings of Life in the Middle ages, the Renaissance and, Incidentally, Our Own Time” may give you a fairly clear picture of what Vanigiem is about.

That Vanegiem considers the writings and activities of the mystic and heretical tendencies at the margins of an authoritarian regime to be amongst the finest flowers of that astonishingly fecund age is clear. Regardless that his vituperative scorn for orthodox notions of God would make Richard Dawkins blush, it is an indication of the generosity of spirit of this complex thinker that he organised the translation and transcription of the works of these deeply Godly people and rescues many of their heartfelt testimonies from obscurity. For me the most important document among the many here is ‘The Mirror of Souls’ by Marguerite Porete [translated by Ian Patterson and Dr James Simpson]. Porete was a mystic who surely should be as celebrated as her near contemporary [but rather more canny and doctrinally aware] Meister Ekhardt.

This excerpt is taken almost at random from this incredibly rich and rewarding work:

Love by nobility has made me

Compose the lines of this Song.

It is about the pure Deity,

Of which Reason cannot speak,

And about a beloved friend I have,

Who has no mother,

Who was born

Of God the Father

And about God the Son also.

His name is the Holy Spirit,

For whom I have such a meeting place in my heart,

That it gives me joy to be lead there.

It is the land of green pastures

That the beloved gives in love.

I do not want to ask anything of him,

Too much would be a great misfortune to me.

Therefore I must entrust myself completely

To the loving of such a lover.

Porete was executed on June 1^st 1310 and her book, found heretical in almost every detail, was burned with her.

 Earlier in his book Vanegiem casually remarks that “The Middle Ages were no more Christian than the late Eastern bloc was communist.” An observation that reverberates today with an unexpected harmonic. Vanegiem is always perplexing, bewildering, contradictory and never more rewarding than in this book.

Jo James