Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 1.djvu/421

AMALFI when, after Samuel's death, Saul consulted his spirit in the cave at Endor, he was told that he was rejected because he had not executed the fierce wrath of God upon Amalec (Newman's sermon, "Wilfulness the Sin of Saul"). It was an Amalecite who claimed, untruthfully, it seems (II K., i, with I K., xxxi), to have given King Saul his death­blow. While still a fugitive from Saul, David was bringing nearer to its climax the extermination of the doomed race. He was in the service of Achis, King of Geth, in the land of the Philistines, near therefore to Amalecite territory. With his own men, and soldiers borrowed from Achis, he raided the Amalecites and inflicted great slaughter, sparing not a soul (I K., xxvii). The Amalecites retaliated, during the absence of David and Achis, by burning Siceleg (Ziklag), a city which Achis had given to David, and carrying off all its inhabitants, including two wives of David. David pursued and overtook the enemy in the midst of feast and revel, recovered all the spoil and captives, and slew all the Amalecites except 400 young men who escaped on camels (xxx). This slaughter broke the power of the Amalecites and drove them back to their desert home; there a miserable remnant of them lingered on till the days of Ezechias, tenth successor of David, when a band of 500 Simeonites sufficed to exterminate, to the last man, Israel's fiercest foe (I Par., iv, 42, 43). Thus on Mount Seir was fulfilled the doom passed on them by Moses and Balaam about six hundred years earlier. Their name occurs no more except in Ps. lxxxii (reputed by many to be of the Machabean period) where the use cannot be taken as an historical datum, but is rather poetical, applied to Israel's traditional enemies. The Egyptian and Assyrian discoveries have as yet disclosed no mention of Amalec. The Bible is our only witness, and its testimony, though sifted and questioned in regard to many details, particularly in the accounts of the battles at Raphidim and Cades, and the marvellous victory of Gedeon, has been accepted in the main as a reliable account.

Author:John Francis Fenlon.

Amalfi,, directly dependent on the Holy See, has its seat at Amalfi, not far from Naples. This was a populous city between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. An independent republic from the seventh century until 1075, it rivalled Pisa and Genoa in its domestic prosperity and maritime importance. A prey to the Normans who encamped in the south of Italy, it became one of their principal posts. The Emperor Lothair, fighting in favour of Pope Innocent II against King Roger of Sicily, who sided with the Antipope Anacletus, took him prisoner in 1133, assisted by forty-six Pisan ships. The city was sacked, and Lothair claimed as part of the booty a copy of the Pandects of Justinian which was found there. But the early beginnings of Amalfi are very obscure; it is not known when it was founded, or when Christianity reached it. That it was early is a reasonable conjecture, considering the facilities for communication with the East which the South of Italy possessed. The first positive indication that Amalfi was a Christian community, however, is supplied by Gregory the Great, who, writing in January, 596, to the Subdeacon Antemius, his legate and administrator in Campania, ordered him to constrain within a monastery Primenus, Bishop of Amalfi, because he did not remain in his diocese, but roamed about (Reg., V, xiv; cf. Jaffé, RR.PP., 1403). Amalfi was founded by Primenus in 596; the regular list of bishops began in 829; it was raised to an archbishopric by John XV in 987. In 1206, after the completion of the cathedral of St. Andrew, the body of the Apostle of that name, patron of Amalfi, was brought there from Constantinople by Pietro, cardinal of Capua, an Amalfian. There are about 36,000 inhabitants, 54 parishes, and 279 secular priests. Amalfi occupied a high position in medieval architecture; its cathedral of Sant' Andrea, of the eleventh century, the campanile, the convent of the Capuccini, founded by Cardinal Capuanor, richly represent the artistic movement prevailing in Southern Italy at the time of the Normans, with its tendency to blend the Byzantine style with the forms and sharp lines of the northern architecture.

In medieval culture Amalfi vindicated a worthy place for herself, especially by flourishing schools of law and mathematics. Flavio Gioia, who made the first mariner's compasses known to Europe, is said to be a native of Amalfi. But Gioia was not the inventor of the compass, which was invented in the East and brought to Europe by the Arabs. In honour of Charles II, a Capetian king then ruling Naples, Gioia put a fleur-de-lis instead of an N, to indicate the north.

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Amalric,. See.

Amalric I–IV,. See.

Amalric of Bena. See.

Amalricians (Lat., Almarici, Amauriani), an heretical sect founded towards the end of the twelfth century, by Amaury de Bène or de Chartres (Lat., Almaricus, Amalricus, Amauricus), a cleric and professor in the University of Paris, who died between 1204 and 1207. The Amalricians, like their founder, professed a species of pantheism, maintaining, as the fundamental principle of their system, that God and the universe are one; that God is everything and everything is God. This led them, naturally, to the denial of Transubstantiation, the confounding of good and evil—since good and sinful acts, so called, are equally of God—and to the consequent rejection of the laws of morality. They held, besides, peculiar views on the Trinity, distinguishing three periods in the Divine economy with regard to man; the reign of the Father, become incarnate in Abraham, which lasted until the coming of Christ; the reign of the Son, become incarnate in Mary, which had endured until their own time; and the reign of the Holy Ghost, which, taking its beginning from the dawn of the twelfth century, was to last until the end of time. Unlike the Father and the Son, the Holy Ghost was to become incarnate, not merely in one individual of mankind, but in every member of the human race. Moreover, as the Old Law had lost its efficacy at the coming of Christ, so, in their day, the law of the Gospel was to be supplanted by the interior guidance of the Holy Ghost, indwelling in each human soul. In consequence of this they rejected the sacraments as obsolete and useless. Those in whom the Holy Spirit had already taken up His abode were called "the spiritualized", and were supposed to be already enjoying the life of the Resurrection. The signs of this interior illumination were the rejection of faith and hope, as tending to keep the soul in darkness, and the acceptance, in their place, of the light of positive knowledge. It followed from this, that in knowledge and the acquisition of new truths consisted their paradise; while ignorance, which meant adherence to the old order of things, was their substitute for hell.

The Amalricians, though including within their ranks many priests and clerics, succeeded for some