Almaric, Or Amalric Of Bene, or Amaury of Chartres, a French theologian and philosopher, born at Bene near Chartres, died about 1209. He was one of the most celebrated teachers of dialectics and the arts in the university of Paris, and devoted himself especially to the study of Aristotle, from whose writings he drew the germ of his own philosophical system. He taught that God was an immaterial substance, without form or figure, but with perpetual and necessary movement. All beings were derived from this primitive substance and would finally be absorbed in it. There were three epochs in the religious history of the world: the Mosaic law marked the epoch of God the Father; the gospel period was the epoch of God the Son, in which every man was a member of Jesus Christ, whose body was in everything as well as in the eucharist; the epoch of God the Holy Ghost was then about to begin, in which the sacraments were to cease and men to be saved by the interior infusion of the Spirit without the need of any external act.

The work entitled Physion (now lost), in which Almaric explained this theory, was condemned by Innocent III., and the author was obliged to recant in 1204. His disciples exaggerated his errors, teaching that God the Father was incarnate in Abraham. They denounced the pope as Antichrist, and are accused of gross immorality. One of them, a goldsmith named Guillaume, announced himself as one of the seven personages in whom the Holy Ghost was to become incarnate, and pretended to the gift of prophecy. A synod held at Paris in 1209 sentenced Guillaume and nine others to the flames, and the corpse of Almaric was exhumed and burnt with his books.