SOURCE: Hollywood, Amy. “The Problem of the Text: Marguerite Porete's The Mirror of Simple Souls.” In The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart, pp. 87-119. South Bend, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1995.

[In the following excerpt, Hollywood considers the ambiguous status of Porete's The Mirror of Simple Souls as medieval allegory, tracing its representation of the stages of the soul's union with God and comparing the work with Mechthild of Magdeburg's The Flowering Light of the Godhead.]

THE TEXT AS MIRROR AND AS ALLEGORY

The recurring ambiguities of Marguerite Porete's work, The Mirror of Simple and Annihilated Souls and Those Who Remain Only in Will and Desire of Love¹ are in evidence already in this long title, for it is not immediately clear whether the genitive article is objective or possessive. In other words, does the text promise to give a reflection or representation of the two kinds of souls named in the title (objective genitive), or is it a mirror or representation of some other entity that has been given to these souls (possessive genitive)? The ambiguity is deepened by the use of the term mirouer itself. While arguing that Porete uses the term only in its technically accepted sense, to designate that her work offers ascetical or mystical teachings and hence to mark its pedagogical purpose, Margot Schmidt shows that various other understandings of the term and its Latin equivalent, speculum, were available to medieval audiences.² The most obvious definition is that familiar to modern readers: “a smooth surface that reflects the images of objects.”³ In medieval usage, as in modern, the term is tied to conceptions of self-reflection and self-knowledge. But for the medieval reader the deceptive quality of mirrors plays a notable role in the understanding of the term. Perhaps a result of the poorer quality of mirrors generally available before the Renaissance, always implicit in the image was the idea that the mirror offered only the illusion of reality and that the reflection seen in it was deformed.⁴ The myth of Narcissus, unknowingly in love with his own reflection, popular in both the classical and medieval periods, offers a cogent example of this aspect of the mirror image.⁵ Throughout the Mirror, Porete describes the process by which the soul is clarified, thereby becoming a mirror without blemish or obscurity.

The Latin speculum also refers by extension to all painting or representation, whether reflexive or not. The term is therefore used to designate instructional works that attempt to give complete factual accounts of the divinity or the world, often taking the form of encyclopedias, or exemplary works representing every existing category of person or Christian.⁶ Although Schmidt argues that Porete's Mirror is not a representation of the divinity, this is one meaning of the term suggested by the dialogue's own central interlocuters.

In the Prologue, Love, one of the main personified speakers in the ensuing dialogue, gives an exemplum in which she shows the purpose of the text about to be read. Love relates how a young princess, who lived in a strange land, came to hear of the great courtesy and nobility of Alexander the Great and thus began to love him. Her love caused her pain, however, because of the distance separating her form her beloved, and

when she saw that this far away love, who was so close to her within herself, was so far outside, she thought that she would comfort her unhappiness by imagining some figure of her love, by whom she was often wounded in her heart.⁷

The princess takes this imagining a step further and has a picture painted that portrays the image of the king that has presented itself to her thoughts, so that by means of this image she can in some way make the king present to herself. The peculiarity of this story is only in part undercut by the fact that it appears to have been taken by Marguerite from an Old French romance based on the legends of Alexander, the Roman d'Alexandre by Alexander of Bernay.⁸ The question of how it is possible to portray a person one has never seen is implicitly answered by the assertion that the painter produced a likeness of the image by means of which the princess had come to love the king, the interior picture found in her heart. The princess loves the semblance and reputation of the king, not the king himself. Yet this should not discount the reality of her love, for in the courtly ethos image and reputation are important extensions of the person.⁹

After telling the exemplary story of the princess, Love cedes the floor to the Soul, who applies the exemplum to the book in hand. Through the story, Porete not only shows her knowledge of the contemporary romance traditions, but also clearly situates her own text in relation to them.¹⁰ The Soul's application of the exemplum affects a transposition of the values of the secular world, as found in the romance and courtly tradition, into the sacred realm. Her beloved, she says, is also a king of “great power, who was by courtesy and by very great courtesy of nobility and generosity a noble Alexander.”¹¹ Like Alexander, the Soul's king is very far away from her and she from him; she has only heard his greatness spoken of and has never seen him. But unlike the princess, who must have a painting made according to the image of her beloved that was presented in her heart's imagination, the Soul's king gives her the image of his love:

but he was so far from me and I from him, that I did not know how to comfort myself, and so that I might remember him, he gave me this book, which represents in some manner his love itself.¹²

The use of ambiguous phrases and fluid references, which begins with the title and runs throughout Porete's work, is strikingly in evidence here. While she is pointing to a crucial difference between the portrait made by the princess and the book as images of the beloved, the exact nature of the distinction is difficult to locate. Both are images or representations, less of the beloved himself, who is and remains beyond the reach of the lover, than of the love felt for him or of the image of the beloved found within the heart or soul of the lover. Yet the ambivalence of Porete's French allows l'amour de lui mesmes to designate both the love the Soul feels for God and God's love for the Soul, opening a dimension not found in the Alexander legend.¹³ There is no evidence in the legend of mutual love or that the image of the king internal to the princess's heart is given by him. Although the great courtesy and generosity of the king would make him responsive to all those who love him, his love is not assumed to exist. The Soul, on the other hand, is confident that her subjective experience of love for the great king about whom she has heard is reciprocated and that this king has given to her an image of his love. Furthermore, because in Porete's mystical theology, as in traditional Christian thought, God is identified with love, a representation of his love is a representation of God him/herself.¹⁴

In the passage cited above, the book's authorship is pushed away from the human pen and onto God because he gives the internal image to the Soul that is externalized in the form of the book. The power of God insures that the image interior to the Soul truly portrays God, not just her subjective fantasy. Because of this, any deficiencies in the representation lie not in the artificer (as is implied in the story of the princess, whose representation of the image of her beloved can never be true to the original she has never seen), but in the one for whom the image is necessary, the Soul. The cause of this inadequacy is the same—the distance between the lover and the beloved—but because God is the creator of the internal image in the Soul and hence of the book, he is able to overcome this gap insofar as that is possible. In other words, the Soul is assured that the image of God's love given by the book is not purely subjective (as the princess's may be), yet the distance between God and the Soul is still maintained, thus making an image or representation necessary. The ambiguities of imagination remain. The Soul admits

But although I have this image, it is not that I am not in a strange land and far from the palace where the very noble friends of this lord dwell, who are all pure, refined, and free by the gifts of the king with whom they dwell.¹⁵

The Soul has not fully attained her goal, which is to be with the beloved, for when that goal has been reached there will no longer be any need for the image or mirror. Only an empty and pure mirror can reflect the simplicity of the divine and of the Soul, leading to the difficulty and ambivalence of the text.

The question underlying these varied layers of ambiguity is now brought to the fore, for if God is the author of the book, and the Soul who speaks in the allegorical dialogue is, by her own confession, still in a distant land and far away from the divine king, the relationship between the divine author and the human, generally associated with this Soul, is uncertain. Porete is not claiming that a human author has been miraculously superseded. On the contrary, the following speaker in the dialogue is the Author, who clearly differentiates herself from God, while at the same time pointing to the hand of God or Love in the creation of the work:

And thus we will tell you how Our Lord is not entirely freed from Love, but Love is from him for us, so that the little ones might be able to hear it by means of you: for Love can do everything without any misdeed.¹⁶

The author here speaks of God as another while also suggesting that God's love compels her to speak the liberating words of the dialogue through the human voice or pen.

Moreover, while the passage above clearly distinguishes the author, God, Love, and the projected reader, in the following chapter Love declares that she herself is the author of the work and explains why she has caused the book to be written in slightly different terms than those given previously:

As for you little ones of Holy Church, says Love, for you I have made this book, so that in order to be more worthy you might hear of the perfection of life and the being of peace, to which a creature can come by the virtue of perfect charity, to whom this gift is given from all of the Trinity; which gift you will hear explained in this book by the intellect of Love in response to the questions of Reason.¹⁷

While the obliquity of the language allows this passage to be interpreted along the lines of the exemplum, where the book is seen as a representation of the king's love and the perfection and peace of those who share fully in it, the lines point more directly toward an understanding of the Mirror as a portrait of those souls who dwell with the beloved and carry his image within them. This conception of the work is often repeated. Love thereby returns us to the initial ambiguity caused by the use of the genitive article in the title of the work. Intimately tied to the question of who writes the dialogue is that of who, or what, it describes.

The answer to both of these questions, which becomes apparent as one reads further and comes to see more fully Porete's conception of God, the soul, and their relationship, is that both God and the Soul are the dialogue's subject and author.¹⁸ The dialectic underlying Porete's account of the soul's return to God grounds this conflation, while at the same time allowing her to avoid the theological accusation of pantheism. Only insofar as the soul is and recognizes herself to be absolutely nothing can she begin to participate in the all that is God. The movement is also reversed, for insofar as the soul is something, she cannot be united with the divine no-thing. Porete's theological dialectic, which will be described more fully below, is augmented by the rhetorical and linguistic strategies of referential ambiguity to which I have pointed. This does not completely answer, however, the question of the Mirror's authorship; the position of the effaced narrating “I” or “author” and her relationship to the allegorical dialogue that makes up the text remain obscure, as does the extent to which the Soul who takes part in the discussion, usually understood as representing the authorial voice, is herself simple and free.

Interpreting the text is complicated by an unreflective identification of the allegorical figure of the Soul with Marguerite Porete and an insistence on viewing that Soul as a static figure. Such oversimplifying readings are caused in part by the modern reader's unfamiliarity with the allegorical genre and its conventions. Therefore, a brief digression on medieval allegory and the nature of the Mirror as a personification allegory will be helpful. First it should be said that, even among those familiar with medieval genres, there is a tendency to view medieval women's religious writing as autobiographical.¹⁹ … In the case of Porete and her Mirror, the problem becomes more complicated, for she takes further than does Mechthild the use of certain writing strategies, rooted in personification allegory, which create distance between the text and the writer's own experiences. While, as we have seen, Mechthild undercuts and masks the narrating “I,” Porete eschews the narrative voice through her use of a continuous allegorical dialogue.²⁰ The almost complete effacement of any external narrating voice, however, causes difficulties with her use of the allegorical genre itself, for without a narrating subject to frame the dialogue, dramatic tension and plot are undercut and confused. This, I think, accounts for some of the difficulty involved in interpreting the text and finding a consistent narrative pattern within it.

In his study of medieval allegory, W. T. H. Jackson argues that for a literary work to be truly allegorical, it requires a frame that will control its development and plot. He further argues that in a full and complete allegory, “all characters should be personified abstractions and no human beings should intrude,”²¹ the persona of the author often in practice becoming a character within the allegory itself. But Jackson misses the points of conflict involved in this description, for while plot and development require the possibility of change in at least some of the work's characters, the full personification of all the actors stifles such movement. As Jon Whitman shows in his study of ancient and medieval allegorical techniques, there is in all allegory a central tension between correspondence and convergence:

The more allegory exploits the divergence between corresponding levels of meaning, the less tenable the correspondence becomes. Alternatively, the more it closes ranks and emphasizes the correspondence, the less oblique, and thus the less allegorical, the divergence becomes.²²

In other words, the more fully a character is identified with what it is meant to represent or, conversely, the more literal the personification, the less room there is for movement, both of character and plot. Yet the more scope one allows the characters for development and action, the less tenable the allegorical identification becomes.

Writing of the twelth-century Platonic cosmological allegory of Bernard Silvestris, Whitman demonstrates the importance of the development of certain liminal figures to help cope with the ambivalence of allegory. The Cosmographia, for example, requires a figure who can generate the action of the poem—the creation of the universe—and at the same time be able to judge that action. As Whitman puts it, there is the need for a figure who is both inside the narrative (generating action) and outside it (judging this action).²³ What remains implicit in Whitman's discussion is that the one who begins an action must in some crucial way lie outside the allegory, because of this very capacity to generate change and activity. Nature, who plays the dual role in Bernard's poem, is able to mediate between Silva (uncreated matter) and Noys (the shaping intellect) without dissolving into one or the other, precisely because she is capable of change in a way the other personifications in the poem are not. This very liminality, brought about by her capacity for change and development, allows Nature to function as an external perspective, a judging consciousness in the allegory. Furthermore, it is the combination of all these factors that makes her more “human” and less rigidly allegorical. As Whitman points out, the greater concern for this external perspective in medieval allegory leads increasingly to the presence of vaguely articulated “I's” within them, for example, the Lover in the Romance of the Rose and the figure of Dante in the Divine Comedy. Only when this “I” becomes “the source of narrative action, controlling events under the guise of merely responding to them,” does “medieval allegory finally pass into more diffuse forms.”²⁴ In other words, when the narrating “I” becomes the primary center of interest we leave allegory behind; yet without some intimations of the narrating “I,” whether as the viewer of an allegorical pageant or contest, or the consciousness within which a psychological allegory takes shape, allegory is unable to articulate itself as a full-blown literary genre.

Unlike Jackson, who wishes to differentiate allegory as a genre that has already accomplished its own allegorization and hence almost defies further interpretive activity, I contend that if such a pure genre exists it is solely didactic and lacking in narrative movement.²⁵ For an allegory to be anything other than a gallery of static personifications it requires the possibility of change and development that a narrative frame alone cannot give. The progress of Knight A from point X to point Y cannot give satisfactory plot development without some change being caused within the characters by this movement and without some consciousness within the text able to register that change. The problem from this perspective, of course, becomes how to maintain continuity of allegorical characterization if such change is to occur.

The shift from didactic moral allegory to psychological allegory endowed with plot is traced by Charles Muscatine. He emphasizes the need to look for the antecedents of the allegorical mode of Guillaume of Lorris's Romance of the Rose not only in the didactic forms of classical allegory exemplified by Prudentius' Psychomachia, but also in the love monologues of Old French romance, which use common techniques of personification to dramatize internal conflict.²⁶ More explicitly, internal debates are often represented as arguments between two voices, given names such as Amor and Raison. Of course, Love and Reason are the two central combatants or debators in the Mirror, pointing to the possible influence of Old French romances on Porete's work.²⁷ The question of direct influence, however, is not crucial, for as Muscatine points out, the tendency toward representing psychological indecision as a debate between vying allegorical figures or personifications of psychological traits is part of many common and shared characteristics of the age: the trend toward self-reflection begun with the mystical theologies of the twelfth century; the predilection for debate found throughout the schools and in secular culture; and the general tendency toward personifying or dealing concretely with psychological or moral abstractions. Porete, like Guillaume of Lorris, shares in the general tendencies of her age.

Muscatine's study is helpful, however, in that it supports the reader's intuition that the Soul is not only an interlocuter in the dialogue, but also the arena within which the drama takes place. The Mirror, like the Romance of the Rose, brings the genre of personification allegory in its macrocosmic dimension together with the tradition of psychological personification found in the romances. The Soul is both a character in a larger drama, that of the movement of created beings to the divine, and the arena where that drama takes place. The outcome of the debate between Love and Reason will affect the Soul, who is not only a passive observer of their interaction but also the initiator of the argument and the final judge of its outcome. Like the liminal figure of Nature in Bernard Silvestris' poem, the Soul will ultimately be changed and transformed by the debate given in the Mirror. The other characters, due to the rigidity of their definitions or personifications, must either conquer or be vanquished.

One must avoid any reading of the Mirror that assumes a consistent allegorization in which all of the dialogical figures are static. The obvious point of change in the text is the Soul. Porete underlines this point by giving voice in the text to many human faculties and attributes—Reason, Intellect, the Understanding of Faith and that of Reason, even Love at times is understood as human—only once allowing the will to have its own voice. The will, seat of volition and change within the human being, must be subordinated to the Soul, for its abnegation and self-destruction enact the dialogue's central mystical moment. By making the volitional faculty a part of the Soul, the dialogue exhibits her development through the stages about which she, Love, and Reason speak. The importance of this strategy is shown by the impossibility of adequately representing the death of Reason. Since Reason is a vital interlocuter of the Soul and Love, asking for those explanations and clarifications needed by human souls who have not ascended to the heights of simplicity, the dialogue cannot continue without her input. Love is forced to take over Reason's voice after her demise, and eventually Reason merely reappears.²⁸ The death of the will, however, occurs near the close of the text, for without it further change and development are impossible.

Therefore, while it may be legitimate, given medieval textual conventions, to associate Porete with the voice of the Soul, we must keep in mind the distance she intentionally creates between herself and her text and ask why she creates this distance and how it challenges any easy identification of the Soul's experience with her own.²⁹ Furthermore, we must recognize the way in which this elision allows the authorial voice to pervade all of the interlocuters within the drama. These multiple identifications may be, in part, why all of the main speakers in the text are feminine. While all creative thought and writing may be grounded in personal experience, the current danger in reading women's texts is to deny the highly mediated nature of this relationship and subsequently to denigrate the philosophical, theological, or literary profundity of the writer in favor of claims to spontaneity (certainly not highly in evidence in Porete), naturalness, or subjective force.³⁰ In provisionally identifying the narrating “I” with the Soul, moreover, it is important to remember that the Soul is not a fixed entity, but is endowed with a will and is open to change and development. The Soul lies both inside and outside of the text, a central participant in the drama of ascent and transformation that is being enacted and the primary observer of this drama, which represents her proper relationship with God.³¹ The many ambiguities that still remain are a direct result of the disjunction between Porete's view of the final state of the simple soul and the needs and demands of a changing and ever-fluctuating world.

The Mirror's primary program appears early in the dialogue. Although a portrait of God, it is also a portrait of the simple soul who has attained an almost transparent unity with God. The first description of the soul takes the form of nine points:³²

[Love]. For there is another life, which we call the peace of charity in the annihilated life. Of this life, says Love, we wish to speak, in asking where one could find

1. a soul
2. who is saved by faith without works
3. who is only in love
4. who does nothing for God
5. who leaves nothing for God to do
6. to whom nothing can be taught
7. from whom nothing can be taken
8. or given
9. and who has no will.(33)

In a sense, the entire work can be taken as Love and the Soul's extended commentary on and explanation of this initial description, for each of its statements represents a deliberate provocation of Reason and the church's traditional understanding of the way of salvation. The teachings of what Porete calls Holy Church the Little³⁴ can be superseded only by these kind of shock tactics. Reason, jolted into attention, is driven to demand from Love and the Soul explanations of their seemingly paradoxical account of the simple soul. Throughout the text, Love or the Soul add new analogies and images meant to elucidate the absolute purity and simplicity of the soul unified with God. Through such shocks and ensuing dialectical explanations, Reason is led to renounce herself.

The Mirror, then, cannot be understood as static and descriptive. There is movement in the dialogue, not only in its account of the soul's transformations through the stages of being to the perfection of divine life, but also in its enactment of this transformation through the dramatic interaction of the personifications themselves. The difficulties involved in this dramatization result in many of the peculiarities of the text, for the change involved in the stages of being and the goal of absolute changelessness are in conflict. Before analyzing this tension, however, I will offer an account of the developmental scheme laid out in the dialogue, together with the understanding of the nature of the union between God and the soul that is its goal. …

Mechthild struggles with the problem of how to reconcile love of and care for the body with the demands of the soul. She was able to overcome this dilemma by shifting the burden of sinfulness onto the will and emphasizing the centrality of human love and createdness as intrinsic to the path of return to the divine. Porete begins with a much more radical negation of human creatureliness, including the will itself. Given this rejection, we will need to uncover the place of the human body in her thought and of the works of the human being while on earth. The central problem for Porete becomes how to reconcile the simple soul's static peace with the continued movement and change of the world in which she lives, a difficulty that endangers the work of the text itself.

THE SEVEN STAGES OF THE SOUL

In Chapter 118, the Soul gives her most detailed and orderly description of the stages through which she must pass before attaining simplicity and freedom. These include the ascetic, churchly, and contemplative practices advocated by the majority of thirteenth-century religious and semireligious. In her description of these lower stages, the Soul indicates with great specificity the degree to which she rejects those forms of ascetic, ecstatic, and mystical piety particularly associated with women. She argues that the soul must move through seven stages, marked, as we are told earlier, by three deaths; those of sin, nature, and the spirit.³⁵ Subsequent to each death are two stages, one characterized by a certain complacency and the other by a sense of dissatisfaction that leads to the next death.

After the initial death, the soul is given divine grace and freed of mortal sin. She follows the twofold command to love God and her neighbor.³⁶ When this minimal Christian life seems inadequate, she moves to the second stage, in which she abandons all riches and honors in order to follow the evangelical counsel of which Jesus Christ is the example.³⁷ This precipitates her death to nature, leading to the third stage. Here she possesses an abundance of love and desires to do good works. This leads, paradoxically, to her attempt to give up all external works in order to be capable of greater love for God; this is the life of contemplation and ascetic piety, marked by spiritual poverty, fasts, prayers, devotions, ascetic practices, and martyrdoms.³⁸

The fourth state occurs when the Soul is drawn up by the height of love into the delight of thought through meditation and relinquishes all labors of the outside and of obedience to another through the height of contemplation. … So the Soul holds that there is no higher life than to have this over which she has lordship. For Love has so greatly satisfied her with delights that she does not believe that God has a greater gift to give to this Soul here below than such a love as Love has poured out within her through love.³⁹

The soul is so inebriated and blinded by love that she falsely believes no higher fate is possible.

Mirroring the hagiographical accounts of many holy women in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Porete suggests that many of her contemporaries are stuck on this level.⁴⁰ Such “lost souls” are incapable of attaining freedom because of their refusal to see that asceticism, contemplation, and spiritual delight do not represent the soul's highest perfection.⁴¹ Rather than taking the divine absence as an intrinsic part of union with the divine, they attempt to elicit experiences of divine sweetness through suffering, asceticism, and internal works. They are “merchants” who believe that one can barter with Love, and as such are unable to merit her courtesy.⁴²

Freedom is attained only through the death of the spirit, which requires the rejection of both internal and external works. The first step toward simplicity is to become “bewildered”; although still “merchants” and “servants” possessed of will and works, these souls are no longer lost, for they recognize that there is a better being than nothing.⁴³ Recognition of their previous deceptions leads to the renunciation of the will in the fifth stage, engendering fleeting experiences of the complete transparency of the soul in her union with God in the sixth.⁴⁴ This marks the death of the spirit, which is twofold, involving both the death of reason and of the will. The relationship between these two deaths, represented dramatically in the text as separate moments yet described in the accounts of the stages as simultaneous, is unclear. According to Love's and the Soul's accounts, both reason and the will must die in order for the death of the spirit to occur and for the soul to move from the fourth to the fifth level of being. This may help account for Reason's inability to die completely, for as long as the soul clings to the will, the transition to complete union and simplicity is not possible. The seventh stage, finally, is that which awaits the soul on her departure from the body.⁴⁵

The difference between the levels of being in the first two ways of life is between those souls who are satisfied with their present state and those who are striving to surpass their present level despite the fact that they are not yet sure how this is to be done; that between the fifth and sixth stages lies less in the attitude of the soul than in the way in which God is actively present to her. The Soul strains language to its utmost in her attempt to describe the “opening of the aperture” or the infusion of divine radiance into the soul that occurs at the sixth stage as a foretaste of the continual glory after death that is the seventh.⁴⁶ Although in the fifth stage the soul is freed of all things and transformed into divine Love, still there is no comparison between the simplicity and perfection of that stage and the radiance of the sixth. As Christ, the soul's spouse, explains to her:

This does not hold in her [the free soul], says the spouse of this soul; I have sent you the betrothal gifts by my Farnearness, but no one may ask me who this Farnearness is, nor his works that he does and works when he shows the glory of the soul, for nothing can be said of this except: The Farnearness is the Trinity herself and shows this manifestness to her that we call “movement,” not because the Soul moves herself, nor the Trinity, but because the Trinity works in this Soul the showing of her [the soul's/the Trinity's] glory.⁴⁷

Rather than representing a movement of the soul, the shift from the fifth to the sixth stages marks the (non)movement of the unified Trinity into her, by which she is shown her eternal glory, that of the Godhead itself.

Ellen Babinsky argues that the shift from the fifth to the sixth stages is a movement from union with the differentiated Trinity, manifest as Love (who is feminine), to that with the Father as the undifferentiated ground of the Trinity.⁴⁸ In places, however, Porete's language and its gender implications work in the opposite direction. Paralleling the distinction between the ground of the divine and the Trinity in Eckhart, the Mirror is more traditional and yet also more daring with regard to gender. Porete moves beyond the distinctly Trinitarian nature of Mechthild's understanding of union, yet does not postulate a distinctly non-Trinitarian ground as Eckhart does. While the persistence of Trinitarian language in Porete's formulation of the nature of the union between God and the soul in the sixth stage should be noted, furthermore, it must not be overemphasized. Like Eckhart, Porete stresses the oneness of the Deity over the persons, in keeping with her desire for an absolute unity between the soul and the divine. Unlike Eckhart, however, her language remains traditional, with little suggestion of a “God beyond God” such as is found in his work. Her emphasis is on the absolute unity of the Trinity in its source.⁴⁹ When this union is achieved the soul is not made masculine, but rather the divine is feminized.

Michael Sells suggests there is an alternative Trinity in Marguerite's text: Love (who is feminine), the Farnear (who is male and does not speak), and the soul (who is again feminine). In this way, Marguerite offers the possibility of a more gender-balanced Trinity alongside the traditional Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. While maintaining the language of erotic desire, with its stress on a male deity, she subverts this language through the relative silence of that male God and the prevalence of female-gendered voices throughout the dialogue.⁵⁰ Only when a state of complete passivity has been attained, however, do the soul and God become so united that no distinction can be made between her glory and that of the Trinity. As in many other places in the Mirror, Porete's use of referential ambiguity reflects the undifferentiated union of the simple soul and God. Where the masculine Farnearness represents the divine in its separateness from the soul, God in union with the soul is called Trinité, thereby effectively feminizing the divine and highlighting the soul's divinization.⁵¹

The soul paradoxically moves from striving and seeking after salvation and virtue to complete passivity with regard to these final goods and all other things. Central to Porete's text lies the dilemma already posed by Mechthild. In light of the counsel of perfection preached by the religious movements of the thirteenth century, the question was how much virtue, how many good works, and how pure an imitation of Christ was necessary to achieve salvation.⁵² This becomes particularly pressing when extraordinary mystical and visionary experiences are understood to be marks of sanctity. In the absence of such experiences, the soul is desolate, as the writings of Hadewijch and Mechthild demonstrate. For Mechthild, the dialectic of God's presence and absence becomes a controlling theological principle; the absent and sought-after lover of the Song of Songs and courtly love traditions is used to express the interplay of ecstasy and desolation that marks her life. Porete's understanding of God as Farnearness derives from these same traditions.

As in Mechthild's Flowing Light, an ever greater awareness of sinfulness and of the inadequacy of human effort comes with increasing age. The inability ever to do all the good one is capable of becomes itself a block to God. Where Mechthild ultimately comforts herself with the belief that the will to do good is sufficient and that the Christian is not held accountable for the weakness of his or her body, Porete reaches for a more radical solution with her claim that the will must be completely annihilated, creating an even greater certainty for the soul. Evidence that these concerns lie behind Porete's mystical theology can be found in Love's advice against feeling anxiety over sinfulness, the persistent tirades against those “merchants” who think that they can achieve perfection and salvation through their own works, and the insistence that the soul must pass beyond the virtues and their dominion under reason.⁵³

Porete argues against the “peasants” of the life of grace and the “merchants” of the spirit, the former being those who are satisfied with external works and mere salvation and the latter those who believe that a rigorous adherence to the virtues, internal works, and the laws of Christianity will make them perfect. She uses courtly motifs and ideals in a religious context and thereby suggests the need for suffering and works as well as the necessity of surpassing them. The use of courtly images is far-reaching, providing a model for the universe based on hierarchical social structures. They are also the source or the means of expression of much of the apparent elitism and esotericism of Marguerite's worldview. All medieval views of heaven were essentially hierarchical, but the exclusionary nature of this conception is not generally stressed. For Porete, on the other hand, hierarchy is all that will appease the Soul when she learns that even the “merchant” or “peasant-minded” soul will share in the kingdom of heaven:

But I will tell you, says this Soul, what appeases me concerning such people. I am appeased in this, lady Love, that they are kept outside the court of your secrets, just as a peasant is from the court of a gentleman in the judgment of his peers, where no one can be, if he is not of the lineage—at least not in the court of the king.⁵⁴

Those who forget or refuse to imitate the works of Jesus Christ's courtesy, “the rejection and the poverty and the insufferable torments”⁵⁵ that he suffered for humanity, are deemed unworthy of a place in the inner court, although orthodoxy insists they have a place in heaven. Although necessary, these works represent a trial that must be gone through and ultimately transcended.

At one point, then, the Soul expresses surprise and sorrow that those souls who are unable to understand the secrets of God and the simple souls, because reason and works still govern them, are allowed into heaven at all. Although according to Porete's conception of the stages of the soul these types of people should be higher than those who are satisfied only with salvation, her distaste for their striving after works leads to extreme statements.

[The Holy Trinity].—I pray you, dear daughter,
My sister and my love,
For love, if you will,
That you would speak no more of these secrets,
Which you know:
The others would damn themselves with them,
There where you save yourself
Since Reason and Desire govern them
And Fear and Will.
Know, however, my chosen daughter
That paradise is given to them.

The Chosen Soul.—Paradise? says this chosen one, would you not accord to them something other? Thus also murderers will have it, if they would cry mercy. But I will keep silent in spite of this, since you wish it.⁵⁶

We seem to be in a different world than that of Mechthild, whose concern for the honor of God does not lessen her mercy for sinners, but rather increases it. For Mechthild, any sin against God is an affront to the right order that she seeks to redress, hoping by her tears and repentance to bring souls to paradise. For Porete, the social elitism of the age, whereby only those who through arduous testing exhibit the correct and worthy lineage, makes such vicarious atonement appear meaningless. Her perfectionist stance increases the anxiety caused by any failure to imitate perfectly the life of Christ and to live according to the virtues. Yet it is this unbearable anxiety that the soul wishes to transcend, together with her enslavement to reason and the virtues. Paradoxically, Porete subverts the traditional hierarchy of Christian and noble perfection, that very hierarchy her own talk of the soul's seven stages seems to accentuate, for those who learn not to strive after virtue are the “highest” and closest to God.

THE PLACE OF THE VIRTUES, THE SACRAMENTS, AND CHRIST

The theme of taking leave of the virtues is found in the early parts of Porete's text and is one to which she often returns. It is also one of the sources of her condemnation, excerpts from the work dealing with this issue appearing in at least two of the passages chosen for censure.⁵⁷ The earliest discussions appear in commentaries on the nine points quoted earlier. In the chapter following that description of the simple soul, such a soul who is saved by faith without works is shown taking leave of the virtues:

Virtues, I take leave of you forever,
I will have a heart most open and gay;
Your service is too constant, you know well.
One time I placed my heart in you, without any disservice,
You know that I was entirely abandoned to you;
I was thus a slave to you; now I am freed.(58)

As the Soul goes on to explain, she is now no longer subservient to the virtues, but rather they freely serve her. She has left the dominion of reason and the virtues, the life of the law, for that of Love. Only then, according to Love, are such souls free.

Here Love elucidates her purpose—to free souls from their suffering servitude to works, asceticism, and the cycle of ecstasy and alienation.

Love.—When Love dwells in them [and] the Virtues serve them without any contradiction and without the work of such souls. Oh, without doubt, Reason, … such souls who have become free, have known for many days what Dominion usually does. And to the one who would ask them what was the greatest torment that a creature could suffer, they would say that it would be to dwell in Love and to be in obedience to the Virtues. For it is necessary to give to the Virtues all that they ask, whatever the cost to Nature. For it is thus that the Virtues demand honor and goods, heart and body and life. It is to be expected that such souls leave all things, and still the Virtues say to this Soul who has given all to them, retaining nothing in order to comfort Nature, that the just one is saved by great pain. And thus this exhausted Soul who still serves the Virtues says that she would be assaulted by Fear, and torn in hell until the judgment day, and after that she would be saved.⁵⁹

Such souls, who live according to the demands of Love rather than of reason, cannot bear to live in subjugation to the virtues, for the demands of Love are too great. The relationship between suffering and the way of the virtues is stressed; Porete's theology has its impetus in her desire to surpass such torment in order to attain freedom. Suffering is also the source of the dilemma faced by Mechthild, for the greater her love for God, the more glaring her faults and omissions seem to her; the greater her ecstasy in the divine embrace, the more unbearable his absence. Against these agonies, Porete teaches that the will must be annihilated. To save “heart and body and life” and free the soul from the “great pain” demanded by the virtues, Love must free the soul from Love. In annihilating the will, paradoxically, the soul is restored to her nature.

As we saw earlier … [I]n Mechthild, the soul's pain both in the embrace of love and in its absence is understood as the result of human embodiment and of human sinfulness; a central difficulty in her work is the relationship between these two sources of suffering and distance from God. For Mechthild, suffering, although it can be mitigated through the attainment of a “well-ordered” soul, is inevitable as long as one dwells on earth. While early in the Flowing Light she conflates human sinfulness with embodiment, thus jettisoning all weakness and inadequacy from the soul, her work is marked by an increasing awareness of the spiritual nature of sin and the dignity of the human body as intrinsic to one's humanity. Yet the body's weakness—together with the dangers of the soul's inconstancy—endanger the peace of even the well-ordered soul. Unwilling to accept the orthodox Christian teaching about the inevitability of human sin, Mechthild is also pessimistic (one might, depending on one's view, say realistic) about the actual conditions of human beings in the world.

Porete repeats the claim that final perfection cannot occur until the body and the world have been left behind, but she still suggests that sinlessness or absolute innocence (and hence the end of suffering) can be attained by the soul on earth.⁶⁰ Sin is spiritualized and not identified with embodiment, although the body is accorded no greater stature by this admission of its innocence. On the contrary, it could be argued that Porete's position is predicated on a rejection of the body and its place as an intrinsic part of the human being, evidenced in her attitude toward the historical figure of Jesus Christ, his sacraments, and the visible church. Some commentators attribute the hostility toward Porete among her contemporaries to this aspect of the Mirror.⁶¹ Not the claim, bordering on what later authorities termed antinomianism, that the free soul “gives to Nature all that is necessary to it without any remorse,”⁶² a claim that seems to give too much to bodily human nature, but the preceding assertion that such a soul “neither desires nor despises poverty or tribulation, masses or sermons, fasting or prayers,”⁶³ leads to her condemnation. The positions, however, are linked, for insofar as attachment to createdness and the need for mediation is overcome, nature is freed from its servitude. Sin and the mediation it necessitates are, implicitly, “unnatural.” Only by renouncing the will and its works (including sacramental and contemplative practices) is the soul's true nature restored. This requires a rejection of all mediation, including the humanity of Christ.

As modern defenders have been quick to point out, the condemned clause implying antinomianism and an apparent subservience to the desires of nature and the body is followed by the qualifying claim that in such souls nature is “so well-ordered” that “it demands nothing that is prohibited.”⁶⁴ Because the soul's will has become God's will, she is incapable of willing to do or of doing anything that is prohibited by the law and virtue. In her reading of Proverbs 23:16 where Truth says that one can fall seven times and still be forgiven, the Soul reiterates the assertion that the will controls sinfulness. She contradicts traditional interpretations of this scriptural passage, which read it as an assertion of the unavoidability of sin; rather, according to the Mirror, the text describes the will's ability to stand firm and unmoved by the lower impulses of the flesh.⁶⁵ What is implied here is a disjunction between the soul and the body, whereby the impulses of the latter have little or no effect on the will once it has annihilated itself and been taken over by God's will. In renouncing the reason and the will, the soul overcomes her only ties to the fleshly or bodily aspect of human nature and is no longer touched by their demands (except, the soul cautions, as they are necessary to maintain life).

Mechthild moves from placing the locus of human sinfulness on the body to placing it on the will, thus pointing to the necessity of correctly ordering the will and subordinating it to that of God; Porete goes even further. By calling not only for the unification of the human will with the divine, but also for its annihilation, she asserts the possibility of complete innocence while on earth. In other words, one passes beyond the stage of attachment to things of the body because one has destroyed the will that would wish to turn to these things. The body itself, since it has no agency, cannot reassert itself once the will is gone and replaced by that of God. The Mirror implies that those bodily aids to religion found in this world and instituted by Jesus Christ are also no longer necessary, for the annihilated soul does not need bodily support for her union with the divine.

The Soul and Love give an important role to the sacraments of the church, the works of the faithful, and the humanity of Christ in the lower stages of ascent to divine life. Yet the Mirror continually insists that the truly disencumbered, free, and innocent soul has passed beyond the need for such intermediaries between herself and God. In this regard, Porete's attitude toward the body and the humanity of Christ becomes particularly interesting, for in deemphasizing the body as a locus of sinfulness, she also deemphasizes it as the locus of salvific work. Christ's cross is curiously absent in the Mirror, and with it the idea of necessary suffering this image carried to late medieval audiences.⁶⁶ Suffering is transcended and the soul transfigured into the divine. This claim is implicit in Porete's insistence, expressed by both Love and Reason, on the doubleness and ambivalence of language, particularly when used to refer to the simple soul or to God. These “double” words cause trouble for Reason, who is able to understand them only in their literal sense and is thereby led into error.⁶⁷ Yet the simple soul not only must pass behind the corporeal, literal level of language, but even beyond language itself, both to describe God and to describe herself. Not only is all that can be said of God nothing and inadequate to him, but so also is everything said of the innocent and transparent soul.⁶⁸ Porete points to the necessity of an apophatic use of language for both the soul and the divine.⁶⁹

UNION THROUGH THE ANNIHILATION OF THE WILL

The identity between God and the soul is purely spiritual. The likeness of her humanity to that of Christ, which plays so central a role for Mechthild, is unimportant to Porete. For Porete, the traditional Christian understanding of the human being as formed in the image of God is not a positive expression of similarity but rather of a radical dissimilarity that paradoxically leads to the identity of the soul with God. Central to Porete's understanding of the path of return is this dialectic of “the all” and “the nothing.”⁷⁰ In a move followed by Eckhart, she takes the traditional image of the soul as wax, which receives the imprint of the seal who is God, to its logical extreme, emphasizing the passivity and negativity of the soul before she has been shaped by the divine image.⁷¹ Rather than gradually re-shaping and re-forming the initial imprint, lost through sin and the fall, Porete demands that the soul return to this primal state of negativity in order to receive the divine imprint anew and perfectly. Only when the soul achieves full humility, recognizing her own nothingness in the face of the divine, can she be united with him and receive “the all.”

Love.—It is fitting, says Love, that this Soul should be conformable to the deity, for she is transformed into God, says Love, through whom she has retained her true form, which is confirmed and given to her without beginning from one alone who has always loved her by his goodness.

The Soul.—Oh, Love, says this Soul, the meaning of what is said makes me nothing, and the nothingness of this alone has placed me in an abyss, below less than nothing without measure. And the knowledge of my nothingness, says the Soul, has given me the all, and the nothingness of this all, says the Soul, has taken litany and prayer from me, so that I pray nothing.⁷²

Love and the Soul, then, continually undercut any positive statements made about either God or the simple soul. Both are without essence and hence unnameable. The language of the all and the nothing, furthermore, while grammatically masculine, may represent an attempt to move beyond gender differences. Porete moves to a realm of abstraction in which the apparent conformability of the soul to God becomes paradoxically the source of her absolute humiliation, which, in turn, is the grounds for her true conformity with the divine and her possession of “the all.” The central implication for the corporeal life, however, is made apparent even in this passage, for when the soul has reached the stage of absolute negativity and passivity, prayer, spiritual exercises, and the use of words themselves become impossible.

Porete uses a variety of other traditional metaphors and analogies to express the unity of the soul and God at the fifth and sixth stages of being. She often takes the traditional image to its extreme in order to express her belief in the union without distinction of God and the soul.⁷³ For example, Love insists that fire consumes the entire substance of wood, which thereby becomes fully united with it, there being nothing left that is not fire.⁷⁴ In the same way, the soul is compared to a stream that on entering the sea is entirely lost in the larger body of water. Here again the smallness of the soul, her nothingness in comparison to the divinity, leads to her annihilation and absorption into the all. The tie to language is made explicit by Porete, for when the stream enters the sea it loses its name; its individuality and its designation are seen as reflections of each other.⁷⁵ Similarly, the soul loses her name and individuality when she becomes one with the divine.⁷⁶

Porete occasionally uses more traditional formulas to describe the union of the soul and God, apparently maintaining that they remain two separate natures even while possessing one will.⁷⁷ She makes the traditional distinction between the human being who becomes God through grace and God who is divine by nature and emphasizes love as that which makes one out of two.

[Love] This soul has within her the mistress of the virtues, who is called divine Love, who has transformed her completely into herself and united her to herself, which is why this soul belongs neither to herself or to the virtues.

Reason—To whom then does she belong?

Love—To my will that transformed her into me.

Reason—But who are you, Love? Are you not one of the virtues with us? How can you be above us?

Love—I am God, for Love is God and God is Love, and this soul is God by the condition of Love. I am God by divine nature and this soul is God by righteousness of Love.⁷⁸

As with Mechthild, however, the traditional language carries the seeds of new teachings, for union through love leads to the discovery of the union of the ground of the soul or the virtual existence of the soul within the divine source. But where Mechthild combines her discussion of the ground and preexistence of the soul with use of the language of union of wills and the well-ordered soul, Porete eschews the latter with her insistence on the annihilation of the will. For Porete, union is not a unitas spiritus grounded in the will, but a transformation of the soul into the divine through its annihilation. By transcending the will, substance, and essence, Porete frees herself from the limitations of gender and created being.

Notes

1. “Le Mirouer des simples ames anienties et qui seulement demourent en vouloir et desir d'amour.” Mirouer, p. 1.

2. Margot Schmidt, “Miroir,” Dictionnaire de spiritualité, ascétique et mystique, doctrine et histoire, ed. M. Viller et al. (Paris: Beauchesne, 1937-), vol. 10, col. 1297.

3. Webster's New World Dictionary of the American Language (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1980). The dictionary also defines mirror as (1) a true representation or description; (2) something to be emulated; (3) a crystal used by fortune-tellers.

4. See Herbert Grabes, The Mutable Glass: Mirror-Imagery in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and English Renaissance (Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press, 1982), p. 73, on the switch from metal to glass for mirrors in the Renaissance. Although the use of glass was known in antiquity, it did not come into general use until the sixteenth century.

5. See Frederick Goldin, The Mirror of Narcissus in the Courtly Love Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967). For an interesting discussion of the Narcissus myth in Plotinus, see Julia Kristeva, Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987).

6. See Grabes, Mutable Glass, Part 1.

7. “quant elle vit que ceste amour loingtaigne, qui luy estoit si prouchaine ou dedans d'elle, estoit si loing dehors, elle se pensa que elle conforteroit sa masaise par ymaginacion d'aucune figure de son amy dont elle estoit souvent au cueur navree.” Mirouer, Ch. 1, p. 12.

8. Emilie zum Brunn and Georgette Epiney-Burgard, Women Mystics in Medieval Europe, trans. Sheila Hughes (New York: Paragon House, 1989), p. 153. Zum Brunn argues that Marguerite uses Alexander as a symbol of the gratuitous nature of Divine Love.

9. See Goldin, Mirror of Narcissus, pp. 67, 79, 196-97, 241. As Goldin shows, public reputation is seen as intrinsic to identity in the courtly poetic tradition.

10. Kurt Ruh argues that there is no need to suppose Marguerite had firsthand knowledge of the secular courtly literature. He points to the existence within the beguine context of texts that take up the courtly language and claims that they are sufficient as sources for Marguerite's images and language. See “‘Le Miroir des simples ames’ der Marguerite Porete,” Verbum et Signum. Festschrift für Friedrich Ohly, ed. H. Fromm, W. Harms and U. Ruberg (Munich: W. Fink, 1975), pp. 365-87 and also the beguine rule to which Ruh alludes, “‘La regle des fins amans.’ Eine Beginenregal aus dem Ende des XIII Jahrhunderts,” in K. Christ, ed., Festschrift für K. Voretzsch (Halle: n.p., 1927): 173-213, text 192-206. Peter Dronke, on the other hand, argues that Marguerite shows evidence of a knowledge of secular poetry that cannot be explained by this beguine context, for example, her use of lyric poetic forms, the Prologue to the text being a canzone and the Song of the Soul in Chapter 122 a rondeau. See Dronke, Women Writers, p. 318, note 48. For further claims about Marguerite's influence by courtly poetry, see Babinsky, “A Beguine at the Court,” Ch. 2.

11. “d'ung roy de grant puissance, qui estoit par courtoisie et par tres grant courtoisie de noblece et largesse ung noble Alixandre.” Mirouer, Ch. 1, p. 12.

12. “mais si loing estoit de moy et moy de luy, que je ne savoie prandre confort de moy mesmes, et pour moy souvenir de lui il me donna ce livre qui represente en aucuns usages l'amour de lui mesmes.” Ibid.

13. See Dronke, Women Writers, p. 219.

14. On the identification of God and love, see Mirouer, Ch. 112, p. 304, where it is first made explicit.

15. “Mais non obstant que j'aye son ymage, n'est il pas que je ne soie en estrange païs et loing du palais ouquel les tres nobles amis de ce seigneur demourent, qui sont tous purs, affinés et franchix par les dons de ce roy, avec lequel ilz demourent.” Mirouer, Ch. 1, pp. 12-14. Babinsky reads the lines to mean precisely the opposite, indicating that the soul is at the palace despite having an image or mediator. In either case, the soul indicates the tension between the book as mediator and the desire for union without mediation. See Marguerite Porete, The Mirror of Simple Souls, trans. Ellen Babinsky (New York: Paulist Press, 1993), pp. 80-81.

16. “Et pource nous vous dirons comment Nostre Seigneur n'est mie du tout enfranchi d'Amour, mais Amour l'est de Lui pour nous, affin que les petis le puissent oïr a l'occasion de vous: /car Amour peut tout faire sans a nully meffaire.” Ibid., p. 14.

17. “Entre vous enfans de Saincte Eglise, dit Amour, pour vous ay je fait ce livre, affin que vous oyez pour mieulx valoir la parfection de vie et l'estre de paix, ouquel creature peut venir par la vertu de parfaicte charité, a qui ce don est donné de toute la Trinité; lequel don vous orrez diviser en ce livre par l'Entendement d'Amour aux demandes des de Raison.” Ibid.

18. The central passages dealing with the authorship of the work are those discussed above, ibid., Ch. 37, pp. 118-20; Ch. 97, pp. 268-70; and Ch. 119, pp. 332-34. See also Ch. 75, pp. 208-10; and Ch. 121, pp. 336-40. While the authorial soul writes the book, Love or God causes it to be written.

19. This tendency is seen most clearly in Dronke, Women Writers; and Elizabeth Alvida Petroff, “Introduction,” pp. 3-59. See also Chapter 7.

20. On the distinctions between continuous and discontinuous use of allegory, see Michael Murrin, The Allegorical Epic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980).

21. W. T. H. Jackson, “Allegory and Allegorization,” in The Challenge of the Medieval Text (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. 170.

22. Whitman, Allegory, p. 2. See the discussion of this issue with regard to Mechthild of Magdeburg, Chapter 3.

23. Whitman, Allegory, pp. 247-48.

24. Ibid., p. 249.

25. Robert Lamberton argues that the personification allegory represented most clearly by the Psychomachia is only one strand of constructive allegory, although the most clearly defined. See Robert Lamberton, Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), Chaps. 4 and 6, particularly pp. 282-97.

26. Charles Muscatine, “The Emergence of Psychological Allegory in Old French Romance,” Proceedings of the Modern Language Association 68 (September-December, 1953): 1160-72.

27. See [above], n. 10, for references to the scholarly debate on this topic.

28. There is a higher understanding or higher intellect in Porete's scheme, putting her in the Gregorian tradition of those who argue that love itself is a species of understanding. On this tradition and Marguerite's place within it, see McGinn, “Unio mystica” and further in this chapter. I do not think that this idea is adequate to explain the fact that Reason, by which Marguerite clearly means the lower Reason, does not die in the text. This Reason is differentiated from the higher Intellect precisely by the fact that it must ask questions and receive discursive explanations of the nature of the simple souls and their union with the divine. Reason and the explanations it requires must die in order for Love to become Understanding.

29. For an interesting argument about why The Romance of the Rose, an allegorical text somewhat similar to the Mirror, should be read as autobiographical, see Evelyn Birge Vitz, Medieval Narrative and Modern Narratology: Subjects and Objects of Desire (New York: New York University Press, 1989), Ch. 2.

30. See Dronke, Women Writers, pp. x-xi, and more recently Frances Beer, Women and Mystical Experience in the Middle Ages [Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 1992].

31. Michael Sells suggests that the text may have been intended as a drama, hence references to its “hearers.” This may refer to practices of reading aloud in beguine and other religious communities. See Sells, Languages of Unsaying, p. 119.

32. This is possibly a mnemonic device, which would point to its being intended for the devotional use of beguines and others.

33. “[Amour]. Or y a il une autre vie, que nous appellons paix de charité en vie adnientie. De ceste vie, dit Amour, voulons nous parler, en demandant que l'en puisse trouve i. une ame, ii. qui se saulve de foy sans oevres, iii. qui soit seulement en amour, iv. qui ne face rien pour Dieu, v. qui ne laisse rien a faire pour Dieu, vi. a qui l'en ne puisse rien aprandre, vii. a qui l'en ne puisse rien toullir, viii. ne donner, ix. et qui n'ait point de voulenté.” Mirouer, Ch. 5, pp. 18-20.

34. For the distinction between Holy Church the Little and Holy Church the Great, the visible church and the invisible fellowship of simple souls, see ibid., Ch. 19, pp. 74-76; and Ch. 43, pp. 132-36.

35. I would argue against Edmund Colledge and J. C. Marler, who imply that these two developmental schemes are not in agreement with each other. See their “‘Poverty of the Will’,” pp. 25-27. For a full treatment of the interlocking nature of these two schemes, see Max Huot de Longchamp's introduction to his modern French translation of the Mirror, Marguerite Porete: Le Miroir des âmes simples et anéanties (Paris: Albin Michel, 1984); and Babinsky, “A Beguine at the Court,” Ch. 4.

36. Mirouer, Ch. 118, p. 318, lines 8-25.

37. Ibid., pp. 318-20, lines 27-37.

38. Ibid., pp. 320-22, lines 39-64.

39. “Le quart estat est que l'Ame est tiree par haultesse d'amour en delit de pensee par meditacion, et relenquie de tous labours de dehors et de obedience d'aultruy par haultesse de contemplacion; … Adonc tient l'Ame que il n'est point de plus haulte vie, que de ce avoir, dont elle a seigneurie; car Amour l'a de ses delices si grandement resasié, que elle ne croit point que Dieu ait plus grant don a donner a ame ycy bas, qu'est telle amour que Amour a par amour dedans elle espandue.” Ibid., p. 322.

40. Ibid., pp. 322-24, lines 66-92.

41. Ibid., Ch. 55, pp. 158-60.

42. Ibid., Ch. 63, p. 184.

43. Ibid., Ch. 57, pp. 164-66.

44. Ibid., Ch. 118, pp. 324-32, lines 94-203.

45. Ibid., p. 332, lines 204-6.

46. The use of this phrase—“opening of the aperture”—points again to the importance of gender and sexual imagery in her work, despite their ultimate apophasis. See ibid., Ch. 61, p. 178.

47. “Il ne tient pas a elle, dit l'Espoux de ceste Ame mesmes; je vous ay par mon Loingprés les erres envoiees, mais nul me demande qui est ce Loingprés, ne ses oeuvres qu'i‹l› fait et oeuvre quant il monstre la gloire de l'Ame, car l'en peut rien dire, sinon: Le Loingprés est la Trinité mesmes, et luy monstre sa demonstrance, que nous nommons “mouvement,” non mye pource que l'Ame se meuve ne la Trinité, mais la Trinité oeuvre a ceste Ame la monstre de sa gloire.” Ibid.

48. Babinsky, “A Beguine at the Court,” Ch. 5.

49. In this, Marguerite's language more closely resembles the more traditional language of Bonaventure. See Ewert Cousins, Bonaventure and the Coincidence of Opposites (Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1978), Ch. 4. For further discussion of Marguerite's Trinitarian language, see Babinsky, “A Beguine at the Court,” Ch. 5.

50. See Sells, Languages of Unsaying, p. 136.

51. See Wiethaus, “Sexuality, Gender, and the Body.”

52. See Lerner, Free Spirit, Chaps. 2, 4-6, for accounts of the apparent rigorism of many beguinages.

53. Also important in supporting this thesis is the advice given by the Soul and Love against feeling anxiety over sinfulness. They argue that the simple soul need have no shame or anxiety over sin, using figures in scripture as models. See Mirouer, Ch. 41, pp. 128-30; and Ch. 76, pp. 210-12.

54. “Mais je vous diray, dit ceste Ame, en quoy je me appaseray de telz gens. En ce, dame Amour, que ilz sont hors mis de la court de voz secrez, ainsi comme seroit ung villain de la court d'ung gentil homme en jugement de pers, ou il n'en peut nul avoir, se il n'est de lignage,—au moins en court de roy.” Mirouer, Ch. 63, pp. 183-84.

55. “les despiz et les pouvretez et les tourmens non suffrables.” Ibid., p. 184.

56. “[La Saincte Trinité] Je vous prie, chere fille, / Ma seur et la moye amye, / Par amour, se vous voulez, / Que vous ne vueillez plus dire les secrez, / Que vous savez: / Les aultres s'en dampneroient, / La ou vous / vous sauverez, / Puisque Raison et Desir les gouvernent, / Et Crainte et Voulenté. / Sachez pourtant mon eslite fille, / Que paradis leur est donné.

    “L'Ame Esleue.—Paradis? dit ceste eslite, ne leur octroiez vous aultrement. Aussi bien l'auront les murtriers, se ilz veulent mercy crier. Mais non pour tant je m'en vueil taire, puisque vous le voulez.” Ibid., Ch. 121, p. 340.

57. See Verdeyen, “Procès,” p. 51. Also this work, Chapter 2.

58. “Vertuz, je prens congé de vous / a tousjours,

    Je en auray le cueur plus franc/ et plus gay;

    Voustre service est troup coustant, / bien la sçay.

    Je mis ung temps mon cueur en vous, / sans nulle dessevree;

    Vous savez que je estoie a vous trestoute / habandonnee;

    Je estoie adonc serve de vous, / on en suis delivree.” Mirouer, Ch. 6, p. 24.

59. “Amour.—Quant Amour demoure en elles, et que les Vertuz servent a elles sans nul contredit et sans travail de telles Ames. … Hee, sans faille, Raison … telles Ames qui sont si franches devenues, ont sceu mainte journee ce que Danger seult faire; et qui leur demenderoit le plus grant tourment que creature puisse souffrir, elles diroient que ce seroit demourer en Amour et estre en l'obedience des Vertuz. Car il convient donner aux Vertuz tout ce qu'elles demandent, que qu'il couste a Nature. Or est il ainsi que les Vertuz demandent honneur et avoir, cueur et corps et vie; c'est a entendre que telles Ames laissent toutes chouses, et encoures dient les Vertuz a ceste Ame qui tout ce leur a donné ne n'a rien retenu pour conforter Nature, que a grant paine est le just saulvé. Et pource dit telle lasse Ame qui encores sert aux Vertuz, que elle vouldroit estre demenee par Crainte, et en enfer tourmentee jusques au jugement, et aprés qu'elle deust estre saulvee.” Ibid., Ch. 8, pp. 28-30.

60. See Romana Guarnieri, who argues that a central tenet of the supposed heresy of the free spirits is the desire to return to an Adamic state of innocence. Although many of her arguments about the supposed heretical sect have been convincingly challenged, particularly by Lerner, I believe that this characterization is true to Marguerite's text, taken by Guarnieri as a central source for the heresy. See her “Frères du Libre Esprit,” Dictionnaire de spiritualité, ascétique et mystique, doctrine et histoire, ed. M. Viller et al. (Paris: Beauchesne, 1937-), vol. 5, col. 1263. See Mirouer, Ch. 29, pp. 96-98, for a discussion of the soul's absolute innocence.

61. See Ruh, “Le Miroir,” p. 378, who argues that it is this aspect of Porete's work rather than the nature of union that led to her condemnation. The surpassing of the physical world and the physical church and the nature of union in Porete are intimately related.

62. “donne a Nature tout ce qu'il luy fault, sans remors de conscience.” Mirouer, Ch. 9, p. 32.

63. “ne desire ne ne desprise pouvr[e]té ne tribulation, ne messe ne sermon, ne jeune ne oraison.” Ibid.

64. “nature est si bien ordonnee … que la nature ne demande chose qui soit deffendue.” Ibid. See Jean Orcibal, “Le ‘Miroir des simples âmes’ et la ‘secte’ du Libre Esprit,” Revue de l'histoire des religions 175 (1969): 35-60; E. C. McLaughlin, “The Heresy of the Free Spirit and Late Medieval Mysticism,” Medievalia et Humanistica 4 (1973): 37-54; and Lerner, Heresy, p. 204. Some of these statements may be later interpellations. They accord, however, with the theological implications of the text.

65. Mirouer, Ch. 103-5, pp. 280-88.

66. The place of such works and the necessity of surpassing them is succintly expressed in ibid., Ch. 113, pp. 304-6. Marguerite does occasionally refer to Christ's suffering, although always as a stage on the path to freedom. Just as Christ's divinity does not feel what the humanity suffers, so stand simple souls in relation to those at stages three and four. See Mirouer, Ch. 34, p. 112; Ch. 39, p. 124; Ch. 63, pp. 182-84; Ch. 79, p. 224; Chaps. 126-27, pp. 362-68.

67. Ibid., Ch. 13, pp. 52-60.

68. Ibid., Ch. 19-20, pp. 74-78.

69. Other passages pointing to the necessity of apophatic language to refer to God and the soul are in Mirouer, Ch. 11, p. 42; Ch. 20, pp. 76-78; Ch. 30, pp. 98-100; and Ch. 95, pp. 264-66. We see a similar teaching in Hadewijch, and of course, in Eckhart.

70. This dialectic parallels and intensifies the play of ascension and descension in Mechthild of Magdeburg. In both, the fall is given a new, positive valuation. For this in Porete, see Sells, Languages of Unsaying, pp. 127-31.

71. Mirouer, Ch. 51, pp. 150-52.

72. “[Amour].—Il convient, dit Amour, que ceste Ame soit semblable a la Deité car elle est muee en Dieu, dit Amour, par quoy elle a sa vraye forme detenue; laquelle luy est sans commancement octroiee et donnee de ung seul, qui l'a tousjours de sa bonté amee.

    L'Ame.—Hee, Amour, dit ceste Ame, le sens de ce qui est dit m'a fait nulle, et le nient de ce seul m'a mis en abysme / dessoubs moins que nient sans mesure. Et la cognoissance de mon nient, dit ceste Ame, m'a donné le tout, et le nient de ce tout, dit ceste Ame, m'a tollu oraison et priere, et ne prie nient.” Ibid., Ch. 51, p. 150.

73. For the fire metaphor, see ibid., Ch. 25, pp. 90-92; Ch. 52, p. 152; Ch. 83, p. 236; and Ch. 85, p. 242. The sea metaphor is found in Ch. 28, p. 96; and Ch. 82, pp. 234-36. For the distinction between essential union and the union of wills in Marguerite and others, see McGinn, “Unio mystica,” pp. 71-81. For a critique of the use of the terms “substantial” or “essential” to describe this radical union, see the response by Michael Sells in Mystical Union [Mystical Union and Monotheistic Faith: An Ecumenical Dialogue, ed. Moshe Idel and Bernard McGinn. New York: Macmillan, 1989], pp. 169-73. As Sells argues, Porete and Eckhart both claim to pass beyond substance or essence, making the use of these terms to describe the union problematic. For this reason the phrase “union without distinction” is used here.

74. Mirouer, Ch. 25, p. 92.

75. Ibid., Ch. 83, p. 236.

76. Babinsky sees the fire analogy as descriptive of the fifth stage of union with the Holy Spirit as Love, which in turn is union with the entire Trinity, whereas the water images describe the union of the sixth stage, in which the soul is united with its virtual existence in the Father, who is the source of the Trinity. See Babinsky, “A Beguine at the Court,” Ch. 5.

77. See Mirouer, Ch. 52, pp. 152-54, and Babinsky, “A Beguine at the Court,” Chaps. 4-5. She argues that Porete wants to show that the simple soul retains its created faculties although it abandons the human use of them. Babinsky goes on to point out that, despite Porete's affirmation of the difference in nature between the soul and God, the difference carries little weight in her theology.

78. “Car ceste Ame a en elle la maitresse des Vertuz, que l'en nomme Divine Amour, laquelle l'a muee du tout en elle, et unie a elle, par quoy ceste Ame n'est mie a elle ne aux Vertuz.

    Raison.—A qui donc? dit Raison.

    Amour.—A la voulenté de moy, dit Amour, qui l'ay muee en moy.

    Raison.—Et qui estes vous, Amour? dit Raison. N'estes vous pas une des Vertuz avec nous, pouse que vous soiez dessus nous?

    Amour.—Je suis Dieu, dit Amour, car Amour est Dieu, et Dieu est amour, et ceste Ame est Dieu par condicion d'amour, et je suis Dieu par nature divine, et ceste Ame l'est par droicture d'amour.”

    Mirouer, Ch. 21, pp. 80-82. Also see Ch. 77, p. 218.

Works Cited

Editions

Guarnieri, Romana and Paul Verdeyen, eds. Le Mirouer des simples ames anienties et qui seulement demourent en vouloir et desir d'amour. In Corpus Christianorum: Continuatio Mediaevalis. Vol. 69. Turnhout: Brepols, 1986.

Modern Translations

Babinsky, Ellen, trans. Marguerite Porete: The Mirror of Simple Souls. New York: Paulist Press, 1993.

Longchamp, Max Huot de, trans. Marguerite Porete. Le Miroir des âmes simples et anéanties. Paris: Albin Michel, 1984.

Secondary Literature

Babinsky, Ellen. “A Beguine at the Court of the King: The Relation of Love and Knowledge in the Mirror of Simple Souls by Marguerite Porete.” Ph. D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 1991.

Colledge, Edmund. “Liberty of Spirit: ‘The Mirror of Simple Souls.’” In Theology of Renewal. Ed. L. K. Shook. 2 vols. Montreal: Palm Publishers, 1968. 2: 100-17.

Colledge, Edmund and Romana Guarnieri. “The Glosses by ‘M.N.’ and Richard Methley to ‘The Mirror of Simple Souls.’” Archivio Italiano per la storia della pietà 5 (1968): 357-82.

Guarnieri, Romana. “Frères du Libre Esprit.” Dictionnaire de spiritualité, ascétique et mystique, doctrine et histoire. Ed. M. Viller et al. Paris: Beauchesne, 1937-. Vol. 5: cols. 1241-1268.

Guarnieri, Romana, ed. “Il movimento del Libero Spirito.” Archivio Italiano per la storia della pietà 4 (1965): 351-708. The text of the Mirouer is given in pp. 513-635.

Lerner, Robert. The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972.

McLaughlin, E. C. “The Heresy of the Free Spirit and Late Medieval Mysticism.” Medievalia et Humanistica 4 (1973): 37-54.

Mommaers, P. “La transformation d'amour selon Marguerite Porete.” Ons Geestelijk Erf 65 (1991): 89-107.

Orcibal, Jean. “‘Le Miroir des simples ames’ et la ‘secte’ du Libre Esprit.” Revue de l'histoire des religions 175 (1969): 35-60.

Ruh, Kurt. “‘Le Miroir des Simples Ames’ der Marguerite Porete.” In Verbum et Signum: Festschrift für Friedrich Ohly. Ed. H. Fromm, W. Harms, and U. Ruberg. Munich: W. Fink, 1975. Pp. 365-87.

Schweitzer, Franz-Josef. “Von Marguerite von Porete (d. 1310) bis Mme. Guyon (d. 1717): Frauenmystik im Konflikt mit der Kirche.” In Frauenmystik im Mittelalter. Ed. Peter Dinzelbacher and Dieter R. Bauer. Ostfildern: Schwabenverlag, 1985. Pp. 256-74.

Sells, Michael. Mystical Languages of Unsaying. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.

Verdeyen, Paul. “Le Procès d'Inquisition contre Marguerite Porete et Guiard de Cressonessart (1309-1310).” Revue d' Histoire Ecclésiastique 81 (1986): 47-94.

Other Secondary Sources

Colledge, Edmund and J. C. Marler. “‘Poverty of the Will’: Ruusbroec, Eckhart and The Mirror of Simple Souls.” In Jan van Ruusbroec: The Sources, Content, and Sequels of His Mysticism. Ed. P. Mommaers and N. de Paepe. Leuven: Leuven University Press, 1984. Pp. 14-57.

Cousins, Ewert. Bonaventure and the Coincidence of Opposites. Chicago: Franciscan Herald Press, 1978.

Dronke, Peter. Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua (d. 203) to Marguerite Porete (d. 1310). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984.

Goldin, Frederick. The Mirror of Narcissus in the Courtly Love Lyric. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967.

Grabes, Herbert. The Mutable Glass: Mirror-Imagery in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and English Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982.

Jackson, W. T. H. The Challenge of the Medieval Text. New York: Columbia University Press, 1985.

Kristeva, Julia. Tales of Love. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press, 1987.

Lamberton, Robert. Homer the Theologian: Neoplatonist Allegorical Reading and the Growth of the Epic Tradition. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986.

McGinn, Bernard. “Love, Knowledge and Unio mystica in the Western Christian Tradition.” In Mystical Union and Monotheistic Faith: An Ecumenical Dialogue. Ed. Moshe Idel and Bernard McGinn. New York: Macmillan, 1989. Pp. 59-86.

Murrin, Michael. The Allegorical Epic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980.

Muscatine, Charles. “The Emergence of Psychological Allegory in Old French Romance.” PMLA 68 (Sept.-Dec., 1953): 1160-72.

Petroff, Elizabeth. “Introduction. The Visionary Tradition in Women's Writing: Dialogue and Autobiography.” In Medieval Women's Visionary Literature. Ed. Elizabeth Petroff. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986. Pp. 3-59.

Ruh, Kurt, ed. Altdeutsche Mystik. Bern: Francke, 1950.

Schmidt, Margot. “Miroir.” Dictionnaire de spiritualité, ascétique et mystique, doctrine et histoire. Ed. M. Viller et al. Paris: Beauchesne, 1937-. Vol. 10: cols. 1290-1303.

Vitz, Evelyn Birge, Medieval Narrative and Modern Narratology: Subjects and Objects of Desire. New York: New York University Press, 1989.

Whitman, Jon. Allegory: The Dynamics of an Ancient and Medieval Technique. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987.

Wiethans, Ulrike. “Sexuality, Gender, and the Body in Late Medieval Women's Spirituality: Cases from Germany and the Netherlands.” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 7 (1991): 35-52.