SOURCE: Lichtmann, Maria. “Negative Theology in Marguerite Porete and Jacques Derrida.” Christianity and Literature 47, no. 2 (winter 1998): 213-27.

[In the following essay, Lichtmann maintains that The Mirror of Simple Souls anticipates several postmodern, deconstructionist themes such as “the disappearance of the self,” “the insatiability of desire,” and “the subversion of authority.”]

In his book titled Deconstructing Theology, Mark C. Taylor outlines some themes of a postmodern “theology”:

Deconstruction directs our attention to critical problems which merit serious consideration: the death of God, the disappearance of the self, the erasure of the (A)uthor, the interplay of absence and presence and of silence and speech, the encounter with death, the experience of exile, the insatiability of desire, the inevitability of delay, the burden of totality, the repression of difference, the otherness of the Other, the subversion of authority, the end of the book, the opening of textuality, and the advent of writing.

(xix)

Such a theology, both a/theistic yet profoundly religious, is reminiscent of the theistic tradition of negative theology in the West since Plato. While Taylor's themes clarify much of the postmodern situation, in particular the work of Jacques Derrida as the chief spokes-person of the postmodern movement known as deconstruction, they also inadvertently and retrospectively shed light on the negative theology of a little-known mystic of the fourteenth century, Marguerite Porete. It will not be possible to address all the themes of the postmodern theology outlined by Taylor, but many of these themes—especially “the disappearance of the self,” “the interplay of absence and presence and of silence and speech,” “the insatiability of desire,” “the subversion of authority,” and “the advent of writing”—loom so large in Porete's own premodern version of a negative theology that she almost appears to subvert our periodizing categories of modern, premodern, and postmodern. Porete was burned at the stake by the Paris Inquisition in 1310. Her mystical treatise, The Mirror of Simple Souls, had been condemned and burned earlier; and, since she presumably did not recant, it was burned again along with her. Yet it survived. When we examine Porete's treatise in light of the themes put forth by Taylor, we may be surprised to see how postmodern this premodern person sounds. This essay will examine these themes in Porete, as well as view negative theology through the lens of Derrida's engagement with it.

The postmodern deconstructionist theme of a presence that is an absence in continual dialectical relation finds explicit recognition in Porete's treatise. She begins her discourse by using the literary device of a courtly love narrative or “exemplum” as prologue. Taken from the Roman d'Alexandre by Alexander of Bernay, Porete's version of this favorite medieval tale is narrated by the figure of Love, Amour, who tells of a maiden of “great heart and noble character” who fell in love when she heard of Alexander (the Great) as a lord “faraway” who is yet “so close to her.” Because this lord and his love are so unattainable for the maiden, she resolves to have an image painted of him. While she is creating her image of him, the lord makes her a present of another “image” or memory of him in the form of the book itself, the Mirror, which as she says “makes present in some fashion His love itself” (80). The book, the image, the soul, the love, and the lover are all self-reflecting mirrors. This veritable house of mirrors reflects but one object and that an invisible one, the “annihilated souls who only remain in will and desire of love,” as the subtitle of the work has it. Thus, they reflect nothing. Taylor's meditation on “The Empty Mirror” in Deconstructing Theology bears a curious if contrapuntal resemblance to Porete's play with mirrors, when he says of the postmodern condition: “Not only the artist but we ourselves seem to have disappeared in a play of mirrors. … Sartre's Estelle might well have been looking at ‘The Maids of Honor’ when she reflects, ‘I feel so queer. … When I can't see myself, I begin to wonder if I really and truly exist. … I've six mirrors in my bedroom. They are there. I can see them. But they don't see me. … How empty it is, a glass in which I'm absent!’” (89).

In Porete's text the image of Alexander introduced in the prologue becomes in the dialogue the figure of “FarNear,” LoingPrès, the only male figure in the work. The name “FarNear” already destabilizes the relation of the loved one to the lover. The signifier itself is a contradiction, a presence that is also an absence, an absence that is also a presence, just as the painting and the book represent absences and presences at the same time. Under the constraints of the courtly love ethic employed in the prologue, Alexander and his counterpart “FarNear” remain only a desire for presence that is never fully met, an indefinitely deferred desire, one that could become insatiable were it not for the “apophasis of desire” operating in the work.¹ Porete deliberately introduces this character within the imaginary world of the courtly love narrative, it seems, in order to emphasize the impossibility of attaining desire. The narrative names her desire at the beginning of the treatise, and the dialogue deconstructs it by the end of the work. Porete's apophaticism of desire involves a critique of the courtly love tradition she employs but subverts throughout the treatise. Presence and absence are thus continual “presences” haunting the discourse.

Like the postmodernists and the modernists before them, Porete preached a deliberate program of subverting authority, a program with political implications that more than any other factor contributed to her demise at the hands of the Inquisition. In her treatise Porete sets up a fateful opposition between the “Great Church,” composed of those who are God's true lovers, and the “Little Church” of ecclesiastics and pedants who sit in positions of power and authority. In contrast to the Little Church run by Reason's standards, the Great Church moves and is moved purely by the standards of Love. By setting up an opposition between the way of Reason and that of Love, Porete joins battle in her text with the patriarchal rationality of the hierarchical Church and continually shows it up as stupid. Reason must eventually expire and does so quite dramatically before Love can have Her way with the Soul. Porete overtly condemns the learning of the Little Church when she says, “Neither your greatest philosophers, nor biblical scholars, nor those who pursue love and the virtues, can understand this, but only those who are guided by true love (fine amor). … To be so guided is a gift that can come in an instant.”² She sees the mission of those “simple souls” like herself as the teaching and nurturing of “Sainte Église la petite,” the Little Church ruled by Reason. Porete consequently sets out to overturn, at least on a spiritual plane, the hierarchical domination by clerics and academics over true spiritual adepts. In her treatise but not in reality, “Holy Church” (la petite) itself acknowledges the spiritual superiority of these souls while making a weak bid for its role in teaching the Scriptures: “We wish to say, says Holy Church, that these Souls are of the life above us, for Love dwells in them and Reason dwells in us. But this is not against us, says Holy Church the little, for we teach her and advise her about it according to the glosses on our Scriptures” (122).

The opposition within the text had prophetic consequences for the fate of Porete. In her treatise's allegorical dialogue between Raison and Amour, and implicitly therefore between the Little Church and the Great Church, she anticipates the failure of communication between these language games and theological universes that she herself will fatally undergo in the Inquisition. In response to the questions and demands of Reason's inquisitors, Marguerite will answer only with silence and with her life. Ironically, it was Marguerite's fate to have to submit her book to the very court of Reason that she knew would not understand it.

The “simple souls” of Porete's “Great Church” belonged to a semireligious group called Beguines who took no vows but lived mostly in the world the kind of vita apostolica that had been increasingly prominent since the twelfth century. Beguines took on such tasks as serving the poor, working in hospitals, and weaving, but without much formal ecclesiastical structure or protection. The Beguine movement became an early women's movement, for it enabled women who were unable to enter the established and overcrowded religious houses, such as those of the Cistercians, to find a religious home. Beguines adopted a variety of lifestyles: some lived in private homes, others in more communal arrangements, the most organized of which was the beguinage found particularly in northern France and the Low Countries. There is still debate as to whether these lifestyles evolved from one stage to another.³ Without following a rule, Beguines developed a reputation for their piety with regard to poverty, chastity, fasting, and prayer. Yet, because of their precarious situation outside regular religious orders, they equally developed an ardent opposition. Just before Porete appeared on the scene, Beguines had been called into question at the Second Council of Lyons in 1274 for their use of the vernacular and their visibility in preaching the Scriptures, making Porete especially vulnerable at this time.⁴ At some point before 1306, her writings had been publicly burned in the plaza of her native village of Valenciennes by the local bishop, Guy de Colmieu. Rather than allowing her mystical teaching to be silenced, she sought and won the approval of three theological authorities—a Franciscan, a Cistercian, and a scholastic philosopher.⁵ Yet she had no permanent ecclesiastical protector, no established religious order, no strong advocate in the form of a confessor, in effect no buffer against the Inquisition. Thus she was brought before the authorities whose “grand inquisitor,” William of Paris, assembled a tribunal of twenty-one theologians to judge the orthodoxy of Porete's work. It was judged by that very court of Reason that she herself condemned and found wanting from the standpoint of a higher court.

Porete's mystical doctrine involves a highly refined version of negative theology. Negative theology, unlike the postmodernist deconstructive project, has existed for a long time within Christian thought, having counterparts within the Jewish and Islamic traditions as well. Negative theology “affirms” that all language for God is at best symbolic and metaphorical, at worst equivocal and meaningless. It assumes that because “God,” being inexpressible and incomprehensible, is beyond naming and knowing, in terms of all the categories of human thought and knowledge, to “know” God we must go beyond knowing to unknowing. As a moment in a dialectical relation to affirmative theology, it negates what can be said and known of God in order to leave the way open for deeper affirmations, perhaps even for the “speech” of God, which is often silence. As Michel Despland puts it, negative theologies “can serve effectively to disengage Christian theologians from the habit of naively authoritative utterance” (147). Also known as “apophatic,” which literally means “away from” speech, the tradition is contrasted with “cataphatic” theology that returns speech to the knowledge of God. Porete subscribes fully to the apophatic way of not-knowing or, as she puts it, “knowing-nothing” (le nient-savoir): “Such creatures [the simple annihilated souls] know no longer how to speak of God, for they know not how to say where God is any more than how to say who God is” (101). Actually Porete sees the soul moving from the knowing of created things (savoir) alone, to the knowing of their meanings (entendre), to the understanding (connaistre) that is reserved for God alone.⁶ Her mysticism therefore belongs to a tradition of intellectual or cognitive apophaticism found in the fifth-century monk called Pseudo-Dionysius. It is not possible to know God, both because God as object has disappeared and because the self who would be knower has vanished as well into the all-consuming mirror of nothingness.

In its apophasis of both the objective and subjective poles of knowing, in the instability of the present-absent One and the inconsequential self or subject, Porete's negative theology bears some haunting resemblances to deconstruction's moves in similar directions. Deconstruction begins with a questioning of the philosophy of the self and of the self's reduction of otherness to self-relation. In Taylor's words, “If theology is to have a future, we must learn to speak of God godlessly and of self selflessly” (Deconstructing 89).⁷ For Western thought previously, the identity of the knower and the relation between knower and known has been obtained at the expense of the irreducible differences of the many. Taylor points out that throughout the history of philosophy the constructive subject is always remaking the world in its own image. Parmenides' presumptuous project of the identity of thought and being has been found, especially after Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's system, to be bankrupt. For the French thinker Emmanuel Levinas, the subject must be subjected to and suffers an other over which it has no control, an other that puts into question all self-affirmation and egoism (see Taylor, Deconstruction in Context 27).

The theme of a disappearance or deconstitution of the self and the primacy of the Other, though differently articulated, is at the center of Porete's theology. She does speak of God godlessly and of self selflessly, to adopt Taylor's formulation. Her God is a feminine Love who dwells in the abyss of nothingness, hardly the constructs of the Church of Reason's God, and her selves are annihilated souls who “know nothing” and “will nothing.” Porete's entire treatise is in the form of a dialogue primarily between Love and the Soul, between Amour and Âme.⁸ Love, the main character of the dialogue with both Reason and the Soul, is always referred to with the feminine pronoun, despite the fact that the noun L'Amour is masculine in French. This feminine Love is identified with God. In naming all the characters in the feminine with the exception of Loingprès (“FarNear”), Porete may be responding to the “burden of totality” and “repression of difference” in classical theology's false universalizing of a masculine God. At any rate, for Porete the response to this Love is an increasing clarification and simplification—the soul's “anéantissement,” its annihilation. Becoming one with such a God involves “unbecoming” or becoming no-one. Porete's Mirror is emphatically apophatic in its insistence on the soul's being brought to nothing in order to “know” the nothingness of God. What shows up in her mirror is the utterly transparent soul (see Lichtman). Porete could say with Taylor that one who has gazed into the empty mirror can never regard God or self as he or she did before (Deconstructing 102-03).

But Porete's theology insists not only on “knowing nothing” but also on “willing nothing” in order to annihilate any form of self-will that stands in the way of being one with God. In this respect she seems to go beyond Pseudo-Dionysian apophaticism. Only self-will is outside of God. For Porete as for Augustine, the will is the central problem. She is, however, far more radical than Augustine, whose path of salvation called for the turning of the will toward God. For Porete no form of willing can remain, even the willing of good works. In a chapter of the treatise called “How Such Souls No Longer Possess Will,” she states:

Whoever would ask such free Souls, sure and peaceful, if they would want to be in purgatory, they would say no; or if they would want to be certain of their salvation in this life, they would say no; or if they would want to be in paradise, they would say no. But then with what would they will it? They no longer possess any will, and if they would desire anything, they would separate themselves from Love.

(86)

Even willing the will of God separates one from God and makes one a servant of oneself, according to Porete. Willing-Nothing, le nient vouloir, becomes a positive act whose ultimate effect is transformation into the nothingness of God. The soul becomes more and more free of projects and fantasies as it comes to know nothing and to will nothing. Such a soul, says Porete, is “unencumbered and content. She does not need hell, or paradise, or any created thing. She neither wills nor not-wills anything which might be named here.” This complete absence of the willing rooted in fear or desire should be compared with the “holy indifference” of the greatest of the mystics. At this point in the dialogue “Holy Church the Little,” unwilling to accept the soul's freedom from “works” that involve its own ministrations, steps in to cry out impatiently, “But what [does she will], for God's sake?” In response to this outcry, Love insists more firmly that even if they willed to work miracles, to accept martyrdom daily, or be ravished into heaven and visions of the Trinity, as was St. Paul (128), these souls' willing nothing in God would be more worthy.⁹ Porete therefore is proposing to free her annihilated souls from projects of the will and projections of the mind, making room for the work of Love in the soul.

Derrida has encountered, one might almost say tussled with, the notion of a negative theology and, in so doing, has brought himself into relation with the work of Pseudo-Dionysius and Meister Eckhart, mystics whose work either affected or was affected by the work of Porete (see McGinn). Curiously, Derrida's essay on negative theology, “Dénégations” or “How to Avoid Speaking: Denials,” reveals something about Porete even as it reveals, unwittingly perhaps, something about Derrida himself.¹⁰ Derrida finds the “ontological wager” of a hyperessentiality, a God beyond being, to be a constant feature of negative theology, at least in its manifestations in Pseudo-Dionysius and Eckhart. Attempting to remove God from all categories of thought, it was after all Pseudo-Dionysius who spoke of God as hyperousios, beyond or even without being, in his Mystical Theology. Derrida, in a nearly confessional statement of self-“denial,” admits: “I thought I had to forbid myself to write in the register of ‘negative theology,’ because I was aware of this movement toward hyperessentiality, beyond Being” (79). In this hyperessential God there is perhaps too much presence, too much God, and too much elevation, ascent, and rarefaction of the human for Derrida. The too rarefied human being and the overly present God are hardly what he seeks.

Although Porete follows the apophatic tradition of Pseudo-Dionysius, she does not use the language of hyperessentiality. God is not so much for her “beyond” being or thought, placing God in yet another unattainable realm. Even the language of “beyond” would retain metaphorical reminiscences. Derrida would perhaps feel no need to “forbid [him]self” her negative theology. Even in his revulsion from rarefaction and ascent, Porete would agree with Derrida, for in her treatise ascent reverses itself and becomes descent: her elevation of stages becomes a fall. These seven stages are actually an elaboration of a broader three-stage movement from grace through spirit to the life of unity in God. They begin with keeping the commandments, then imitating Christ in the counsels of perfection, and doing the works of goodness in the first three stages, but they move to a martyring and annihilating of the will that is attached to doing these works. Realizing her attachment to works of the will, she abstains even from these works that bring delight but keep the will alive. The soul then passes into the embrace of union in the fourth state, but in her pride over her own abundance of love she is in fact greatly deceived. Porete exploits the language of “pleasure” and “drunken ecstasy of Love,” the language of excess of the courtly love lyric and even of Beguine love mysticism, only in order to subvert it. The soul passes beyond this state, thereby offering a subtle critique of its affective mysticism. Delivered from her own will, she stands in the light of Love, seeing “what God is, that God IS.” Here language must fail to convey the absence of boundaries in this state. The soul's will is replaced by the will given her by the God who is overflowing Goodness, and her own resplendence disappears in the flood of Divine Light poured into the soul. The soul then finds herself in a profundity so great that there is no beginning or measure or end, only an abyss without foundation: “Now this Soul has fallen from love into nothingness, and without such nothingness she cannot be All. The fall is so deep, she is so rightly fallen, that the soul cannot lift herself from such an abyss” (196). At this point the terms of the dialectic disappear into a nothingness that has become All, an All that has become Nothingness (see Guarnieri 1257-59):

But this soul, thus pure and clarified, sees neither God nor herself, but God sees Himself of Himself in her, for her without her. God shows to her that there is nothing except Him. And thus this Soul understands nothing except Him, and so loves nothing except Him, praises nothing except Him, for there is nothing except Him.

(193)

What Derrida prescribes—that “in principle, the apophatic movement of discourse would have to negatively retraverse all the stages of symbolic theology and positive predication” (81)—actually occurs in Porete's negative traversal through seven stages of grace and works and their dismissal by the fall into love and nothingness.

In “Dénégations,” after a series of deferrals about promises, secrets, and denials, Derrida tells us that “we are still at the threshold”; that is, he is still desisting in his promise to speak about negative theology. At this point he confesses that, once the question has been raised, it is already too late: “Even if one speaks and says nothing, even if apophatic discourse deprives itself of meaning or of an object, it takes place” (97). Porete's apophatic discourse does deprive itself of the object-God, but that is deliberately so because God can never be an object thrown out against her simple souls. At last Derrida finds three stages or places where he can continue to avoid speaking of a question that he is unable to treat. That is, he will go on denying it, perhaps now in the fully Freudian sense of bad faith. Here he reveals, in what is his most self-disclosing, confessional gesture, “a certain void, the place of an internal desert,” especially when he alights briefly on the Jewish and Islamic “phantoms” of Greek and Christian thought, thus touching his personal and inner space. This allusion to an internal desert, paradoxically and probably deliberately the language of the mystics, is at the heart of Derrida's inability to speak of negative theology and thus to speak or not to speak about God. His footnote to this uncharacteristic personal admission is revealing:

Despite this silence, or in fact because of it, one will perhaps permit me to interpret this lecture as the most “autobiographical” speech I have ever risked. One will attach to this word as many quotation marks as possible. It is necessary to surround with precautions the hypothesis of a self-presentation passing through a speech on the negative theology of others. But if one day I had to tell my story, nothing in this narrative would start to speak of the thing itself if I did not come up against this fact; for lack of capacity, competence, or self-authorization, I have never yet been able to speak of what my birth, as one says, should have made closest to me: the Jew, the Arab. … In brief, how not to speak of oneself? But also: how to do it without allowing oneself to be invented by the other? Or without inventing the other?

(135-36)

Derrida's inability to speak of God is linked then to his “internal desert,” his inability or unwillingness to speak of himself. The absence of the “I” that is willing to risk itself and to risk being invented by the other, whether that other is God or another person, prevents his telling his own story. (Yet, one would think that it is precisely telling one's own story authentically that precludes the invention of oneself by others.) This linkage suggests that the autobiographical move is an inherently spiritual one, a move in the direction of the I-Thou language necessary for prayer. In the second part of his essay Derrida finds in fact that prayer is the key element necessary for negative theological discourse to take place.

Having deferred and demurred through these strategies of desistance, Derrida is ready to speak of Western negative theological orientations (what he calls the “tropics of negativity”). From the Greeks he takes not only Plato's hyperessentiality (the Good that is beyond Being or essence) but also the khora, which is that place, spacing, or receptacle that is so formless and virginal that it “receives all.” As Derrida puts it, the khora's “neither/nor easily becomes both … and,” allowing and making room for everything. Given Derrida's reflections on the khora, it is interesting to point out that the Soul of Porete's text becomes so completely khora that its formlessness predominates and the receptacle entirely disappears. The Soul becomes so annihilated that she is no longer a place to have God: “For all that this soul has of God in herself by gift of divine grace seems to her nothing from the standpoint of what she loves, which is in God” (Guarnieri and Verdeyen 60). When it is no longer possible to “have” God by way of ownership, possession, or place, then one has entered into the deepest poverty of spirit, into anéantissement. The khora bears an uncanny resemblance to Porete's le nient, the primal ground of nothingness that is yet the seedbed of all possibilities.

In considering the second stage of the tropics of negative theology, Derrida asks what comes between the Greek philosophical tradition and the Christian via negativa. In answer he finds one experience, prayer:

An experience must yet guide the apophasis toward excellence, not allow it to say just anything, and prevent it from manipulating its negations like empty and purely mechanical phrases. This experience is that of prayer. Here prayer is not a preamble, an accessory mode of access. It constitutes an essential moment, it adjusts discursive asceticism, the passage through the desert of discourse, the apparent referential vacuity which will only avoid empty deliria and prattling, by addressing itself from the start to the other, to you.

(110)

Leaving aside the echoes here of another Jewish philosopher, Martin Buber, it is tempting to turn Derrida's words back on himself in what might be a self-mocking of his own vacuous internal desert and of deconstruction's “empty deliria and prattling.” But we can say that he has located the essential (crucial) element of prayer, of an “I” able to say “You,” in the discourse of Christian apophaticism, which prevents its vacuity from being the last word. Pseudo-Dionysius' texts begin in prayer, as Derrida notes.¹¹ Although Porete's text does not often say prayers in the formal, technical sense, she is continually dramatizing the I-Thou relationship of prayer through the dialogue between Love and the Soul. Prayer has two traits, says Derrida: first, “an address to the other as other”; and, second, an encomium or celebration (hymnein). For Derrida the encomium's attributions belong not to ordinary truth but rather to a hypertruth. Prayer orients “the incapacity of reading in the authentic ‘book’ that we are, as creatures, and the adverbial quality that we must hence be” (116). Derrida quotes Eckhart: “The soul is thus like an ‘adverb,’ working together with God and finding its beautification in the same self-knowledge that exalts him. That for all time, may the Father, the Verbum, and the Holy Spirit help us to remain adverbs of this Verbum. Amen.” Ironically, Eckhart's text is itself a prayer. In all the extensive quotations Derrida gives from Eckhart, it is difficult to know whether he speaks for Eckhart, to Eckhart, or even as Eckhart. Eckhart, in place of God, almost seems to be that other toward which he orients his own speech. Perhaps Eckhart's prayer is the only one that Derrida can surreptitiously pray.

Porete's text, celebratory and ecstatic in places, yet exceeds its own ecstasy. Such passages as the following demonstrate this trait well:

Such a Soul, says Love, swims in the sea of joy, that is in the sea of delights, flowing and running out of the Divinity. And so she feels no joy, for she is joy itself. She swims and flows in joy, without feeling any joy, for she dwells in Joy and Joy dwells in her. She is Joy itself by the virtue of Joy which transforms her into Joy itself.

(109)

Porete goes beyond Derrida's “prayer” into becoming the khora itself by totally laying herself out for the entrance of the divine. As the two become one, the soul becomes entirely the site of Amour and Jouissance. Prayer is then no longer necessary. Even the khora, leaving behind a trace of otherness, is annihilated.

The final moment or stage of the tradition of negative theology discussed by Derrida comes from Martin Heidegger. He prefaces this discussion with another revealing personal comment: “I thus decided not to speak of negativity or of apophatic movements in, for example, the Jewish or Islamic traditions. To leave this immense place empty, and above all that which can connect such a name of God with the name of the Place, to remain thus on the threshold—was this not the most consistent possible apophasis?” (122) This comment becomes personal when we consider Derrida's previous reference to the Jewish and Islamic “phantoms” of the Greek and Christian traditions, to what his own birth has made closest to him—“the Jew, the Arab”—and his own “internal desert.” In making this subtle personal reference, I believe that Derrida interweaves his own story or really no-story (apophasis of story) into Heidegger's. Certainly what he says of Heidegger, and the critique he makes of him, could be applied to Derrida himself.

The third moment is, then, Heidegger's avoidance of the speaking of Being. Derrida finds that Heidegger's problem is not just how to avoid speaking but, more precisely, how to avoid speaking of Being. When Derrida asks if Heidegger's avoidance of the speaking of Being belongs to the category of denial (Verneinung) in the Freudian sense, could he not be asking that question as aptly about himself? At the end of Derrida's discussion of Heidegger's avoidance of speaking of Being, for whom Being is sometimes written under erasure (under the cross), Derrida adds a revealing “P.S.” where he once again interweaves, almost by way of an anxiety of influence, his work with Heidegger's. Derrida says of Heidegger, “There is never a prayer, not even an apostrophe, in Heidegger's rhetoric. Unlike Dionysius, he never says ‘you’: neither to God nor to a disciple or reader” (129-30). Yet Derrida's own text, like the text of Heidegger to which he refers, demonstrates the absence of prayer. This absence is lack, void, what he calls in a footnote the “internal desert” without (yet) becoming khora. Their internal desert is the absence of the kind of “I” which can participate in the I-Thou language of prayer, the essence of the Jewish (and Islamic) mode of communication with God as shown throughout the biblical tradition, in the Koran, and in Buber.

The questions that Derrida raises concerning the expression of prayer within the text could be raised concerning the texts of Pseudo-Dionysius and Eckhart from whom he quotes and, by implication, of Porete. He asks, “Does one have the right to think that, as a pure address, on the edge of silence, alien to every code and to every rite, hence to every repetition, prayer should never be turned away from its part by a notation or by the movement of an apostrophe, by a multiplication of addresses?” (130). Such a question is particularly appropriate with regard to Porete's text, where there are great tensions between the multiplicity of allegorical figures and biblical exempla which vivify the dialogue and the apophatic message it conveys.¹² It would seem that Porete's own project of demythologization and deallegorization is a deconstructive one. What Derrida suggests at this point, the concluding point of his essay, offer the merest hint, a trace, of a promise for his own work:

Perhaps there would be no prayer, no pure possibility of prayer, without what we glimpse as a menace or as a contamination: writing, the code, repetition, analogy or the—at least apparent—multiplicity of addresses, initiation. If there were a purely pure experience of prayer, would one need religion and affirmative or negative theologies? … But if there were no supplement, if quotation did not bend prayer, if prayer did not bend, if it did not submit to writing, would a theiology be possible? Would a theology be possible?

(131)

For Derrida, writing makes prayer possible. Porete's text, with its continual address to a “You,” exploits the prayerful potential of written discourse. Like the texts of other negative theologians, her text “bends” her prayer, her living relationship, to God so that we readers can bend and be bent to hear the Voice speaking within it. For Derrida, these questions remain only questions, deferrals, promises.

In conclusion, Derrida has confronted the negative theology of these three moments as a kind of surd that cannot be absorbed, dismissed, or finally ignored. In his “fascination” with Pseudo-Dionysius and Eckhart there is very nearly a kind of awe or at least respect. One wonders in fact if here he has found work that is undeconstructable, or if he has come to realize that the deconstructions of negative theology are at least as rigorous, relentless, and insightful as his own. With regard to the texts that Derrida reads from the tradition of negative theology, it may be that what he and by extension the postmodern mind has experienced there is “holy envy,” the experience of profound respect and regret toward another's tradition. If it is holy envy rather than ressentiment, then perhaps Derrida's “fascination” with this tradition can turn into the mysterium fascinans. Although Derrida is judged and “bent” by the writings of Pseudo-Dionysius and Eckhart, and by implication of Porete, his very “internal desert” can be the ground of the wüste Gotheit, the nakedness that is at the same time the khora. If this is so, then the deconstructionist turn to the empty play of words and interpretations of interpretations may yet turn out to be the way to God.

Porete's mysticism offers us a negation of negation, an apophasis of apophasis, without incurring a hyperessentiality that would only rarefy and elevate the human into the hyperessential “beyond.” Hers is a fall into a deeper form of humanity, a humanity lived by Love. In the end it is Love that negates all negation and transforms her annihilated soul into Herself. Porete's deeper, more immanent humanity, her feminized Love into which it is transformed, would speak to many women and men today in search of this deeper spirituality keyed to the ontology of Love at the center of all reality and would even speak, I believe, if he could hear, to the “internal desert” of Derrida.

Notes

1. The term is Sells' in chapter five, “Apophasis of Desire and the Burning of Marguerite Porete,” of his elegant study titled The Mystical Languages of Unsaying.

2. I am quoting here from the Corpus Christianorum edition (Guarnieri and Verdeyen 246).

3. See Babinsky's introduction to The Mirror of Simple Souls for an updated discussion of these questions.

4. Gilbert of Tournai had said, “Sunt apud nos mulieres, quae Beghinae vocantur, et quaedam earum subtilitatibus vigent et novitatibus gaudent. Habent interpretata scripturarum mysteria et in communi idiomate gallicata, quae tamen in sacra Scriptura exercitatis vix sunt pervia. Legunt ea communiter, irreverenter, audacter, in conventiculis, in ergastulis, in plateis” (qtd. in Verdeyen 91): “There are some women among us who are called ‘Beguines,’ and some of them thrive on subtleties and rejoice in novelities. They have interpreted the mysteries of the Scriptures and translated them into the common Gallic language, which nevertheless are scarcely accessible to those working in sacred Scripture. They read these mysteries commonly, irreverently, audaciously, in meeting places, workhouses, and public squares.”

5. These authorities are cited in the prologue to Doiron's “‘Pe Mirrour of Simple Soules’: A Middle English Translation” (249-50).

6. See Babinsky's introduction to The Mirror of Simple Souls (36).

7. Taylor continues, “Viewed speculatively, absolute negativity is not only the ground of difference but also establishes infinite unity. … Essence realizes itself through active self-negation in which it posits itself as other, that is as determinate being, and returns to itself from this otherness by negating its own negation. … In theological language God reveals himself through the incarnate Word. … This Son, of course, is not merely a particular historical figure, but is universal human selfhood” (101).

8. In this it resembles another Beguine's, Mechtild of Magdeburg's, treatise titled The Flowing Light of the Godhead, yet Mechtild clearly rejects the apophatic way advocated by Porete: “Thou must overcome … annihilation of self-will which drags so many souls back that they never come to real love” (218).

9. Cf. Porete's statement that “This soul knows only one thing, which is to know that she knows nothing, and wills only one thing, which is that she wills nothing. And this nothing-knowing (nient savoir) and this nothing-willing (nient vouloir) give her everything” (Guarnieri and Verdeyen 130).

10. Although Derrida subtitled his essay in the French “Dénégations,” a complex double negation that could be an affirmation, the English subtitle is “denials,” which may with its Freudian connotations apply just as appropriately to the essay's evasions.

11. I am paraphrasing Derrida here: “At the opening and from the first words of the Mystical Theology, Dionysius addresses himself directly to You, to God, from now on determined as ‘hyperessential Trinity’ in the prayer that prepares the theologemes of the via negativa” (116). (But whose “You” is this? Pseudo-Dionysius' or Derrida's.

12. For a discussion of this tension, see Hollywood.

Works Cited

Derrida, Jacques. “Dénégations.” Derrida and Negative Theology. Ed. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay. Albany: State U of New York P, 1992. 73-142.

Despland, Michel. “On Not Solving Riddles Alone.” Derrida and Negative Theology. Ed. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay. Albany: State U of New York P, 1992. 143-66.

Guarnieri, Romana. “Frères du libre esprit.” Dictionnaire de spiritualité 5 (1964): 1241-68.

———, and Paul Verdeyen, eds. The Mirror of Simple Souls. Vol. 69 of Corpus Christianorum: Continuation Mediavalis. Turnhout, Belg.: Brepols, 1986.

Hollywood, Amy. The Soul as Virgin Wife: Mechthild of Magdeburg, Marguerite Porete, and Meister Eckhart. Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1996.

Lichtman, Maria. “Marguerite Porete's Mirror for Simple Souls: Inverted Reflections of Self, Society, and God.” Studia Mystica 16.1 (1995): 4-30.

McGinn, Bernard, ed. Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics. New York: Continuum, 1994.

Mechthild of Magdeburg. The Flowing Light of the Godhead. Trans. Lucy Menzies. Medieval Women's Visionary Literature. Ed. Elizabeth Petroff. New York: Oxford UP, 1986. 212-21.

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

———. “‘Pe Mirrour of Simple Soules’: A Middle English Translation.” Ed. Marilyn Doiron. Achivio italiano per la storia della pieta 5 (1968): 242-355.

Sells, Michael. The Mystical Languages of Unsaying. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1994.

Taylor, Mark C. Deconstructing Theology. Chicago: Scholars, 1982.

———. Deconstruction in Context: Literature and Philosophy. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1986.

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