Speroni, Ugo

SPERONI, UGO. - Twelfth-century jurist and heretic from Piacenza. He studied Roman law at Bologna before 1145; he was a teacher and legal expert there and exercised the office of judge.

There is no difficulty in identifying him with the namesake consul of Piacenza in the years 1164, 1165, 1171, described in 1161 as a judge in the Imperial Court, who in the long legal dispute over the rights to the Piacenza bridge over the Po against the Brescian monastery of St. Giulia upheld the Commune, with the support of the Emperor, in opposition to the ecclesiastical authorities both local and of the Roman Curia. It is likely that these anti-ecclesiastical animosities and the Ghibelline spirit also influenced his heretical evolution. Before 1177 he wrote a very violent book: Adversus antichristum, against the priestly Order and the prevailing religion. Its content is known only through the refutation by the celebrated master Vacarius (v.), his former university companion, to whom S. sent it for examination.

S. attacks the priesthood and the Catholic hierarchy, declaring them deprived of authority because of the bad conduct with which he gratuitously asserts all their representatives to be defamed; they are therefore unable to sanctify others through the Sacraments and liturgical rites. S. then proceeds to eliminate with various arguments Baptism (not admitting, moreover, original sin), the Eucharist as communion, as sacrifice and as worship, considering it an idolatrous materialization; oral confession, the Order as priesthood and as hierarchy with the consequent division of the Church into clerics and laity; he rejects the doctrine of justification declaring useless works and external observances of any kind, reduces religion to an entirely interior spiritualism, based on so-called intrinsic justice. He holds holiness to be necessary in order to be true Christians and just before God and to be saved, but he makes it consist in an interior and permanent justification, in which those who are predestined according to an immutable decree of God are fixed in a stable and passive manner, God considering them in the presentiality of His knowledge as just, clean, holy even when externally they commit sins and persevere in guilt. In the predestined person, even one who is actually a sinner, the desire for purity, the mental, that is interior, sorrow for sins, faith in Jesus Christ, loving communion with him, etc., are sufficient; but even these acts are regarded by God as always existing and active in His elect. It does not clearly emerge what place S. reserves, in his salvific economy, for the redemption of Jesus Christ; the Speronists hold that the good ascended to heavenly glory even before the advent of Jesus.

THE SPERONISTS

From about 1185 they began forming a heretical sect, which remained distinct during the first half of the 13th century. The wholly interior and uncontrollable spiritualism of S. should not have favored an association with external features such as existed in other groups with an ascetic basis; in fact, as a controversialist remains [to be found], the Speronists own property and live in the married state. However, their founder admitted the commemorative banquet of Jesus' Last Supper. [He admitted] the necessity, though only formalistic, of water Baptism, [and] certain other external actions such as preaching, psalm-singing and collective prayer, although he considered them without merit and without sanctifying efficacy.

Ilarino da Milano