Free spirits: alumbradismo and Michael Servetus

Abstract

In sixteenth-century Spain, the symbolism of light, so closely associated to the concepts of knowledge and spiritual elevation, was embodied in a so-called new heresy of ambiguous nature. Known as alumbradismo, or illuminism, it was condemned and persecuted without the ideology espoused by its alleged adepts ever being clearly defined. Michael Servetus, himself a radical spiritualist, shared with the so-called alumbrados a kind of religious sensibility centred on the cultivation of interiority. While Servertus’s thinking was more complex than that attributed to the alumbrados, the two strands also had in common a sense of boundless theological optimism. Safeguarding inner freedom was, for both, key to a religiosity based on the trust inspired by a God conceived of as pure love. The many similarities between Servetus and the alumbrados can be set in the European context of widespread religious reform, but are not accounted for by this alone. Servetus’s life story points to a far more direct, and, in many ways, revealing explanation.