[In the following excerpt, Sells analyzes several major themes in The Mirror of Simple Souls, including the nature of divine love, the form of mystical union with God, and the annihilation, or ‘reversion,’ of the soul.]

Marguerite Porete was burned at the stake on the first of June, 1310, at the Place de la Grève in Paris. Porete, from Hainaut in northern France, belonged to that class of women known as beguines, whose status was midway between the laity and clergy. The beguines modeled their rule in part on the rules of the recognized monastic orders, but they were free to leave the cloister and marry. Porete followed in the distinguished line of beguine mystical writers that included Mechthild of Magdeburg (d. ca. 1294) and Hadewijch of Antwerp (fl. 1240).

Marguerite had written a book that was condemned and burned in her presence at Valenciennes by Guy II, bishop of Cambrai, in 1306. She was accused of circulating the book after its condemnation and was brought before Guy's successor, Philippe of Marigny, who turned her over to the inquisitor of Haute Lorraine. Finally, she was handed over to the Dominican inquisitor of Paris, Guillaume Humbert.

Marguerite refused to cooperate with the proceedings, to take the formal oath, or to testify. Lacking her own testimony, Humbert submitted a list of articles from her book, which was never referred to by name, to twenty-one regents of the University of Paris, who declared fifteen articles heretical. A panel of canon lawyers then declared her a relapsed heretic and handed her over to the provost of Paris to be burned along with a converted Jew also charged with relapse.¹ In 1309, Guiard de Cressonessart, a wandering contemplative who had declared himself “the Angel of Philadelphia,”² intervened on behalf of Marguerite. He was seized in turn, his case attached to that of Marguerite, and he was ordered to abjure both his teachings and the distinctive habit worn by his group.³ After his initial resistance, the Angel of Philadelphia, unlike Marguerite, recanted under pressure and was condemned to perpetual imprisonment.⁴

Within a few years, Porete's name was being associated with what was called “the heresy of the free spirit.” A series of suspect propositions was condemned in 1312 by Clement V in the Papal Bull ad nostrum, and in the bull cum de quibusdam mulieribus restrictions were imposed upon the beguines and the beghards (the male counterparts of the beguines), their houses and their habits. In 1317, Clement's successor, John XXII, promulgated the Clementine bulls and a major inquisition was begun in Strassburg by Bishop John of Dürbheim. In 1327, the Dominican friar, theologian, administrator, and preacher, Meister Eckhart, who had preached in Strassburg and whose ideas show strong beguine influence, was condemned in the Papal Bull in agro dominico. For the next several decades, inquisitions were carried out throughout central Europe against alleged followers of the free-spirit heresy.

Much of what is known of the Porete affair comes from the chronicle of Nangis. Its author, an anonymous Benedictine monk of the Abbey of St. Denis, signals his loyalties by referring to Marguerite as a certain “pseudowoman” (quaedam pseudomulier), and to Guiard as “a certain pseudo” (pseudo-quidam).⁵ He gives the following account of Porete's inquisition:

Around the feast of Pentecost it happened that in Paris a certain pseudo-woman from Hainaut, Marguerite by name, called Porete, had composed a certain book, which, by the judgment of all the theologians who had carefully examined it, contained many errors and heresies, among others, that the annihilated soul in love of its founder can and should give to nature whatever it wishes and desires, without blame or remorse of conscience—which sounds manifestly heretical.⁶

In addition to this account, two of the fifteen condemned articles are preserved in the procès-verbal of the theological examination. The first declares that “the annihilated soul sets the virtues free and is no longer in their service, having no further use for them. Rather the virtues obey her will.”⁷ The fifteenth states that “Such a soul has no concern for the consolations of God nor for his gifts, nor should she have such a concern, because she is completely intent on God and her concentrations would be distracted by such concerns.”⁸

For 650 years, these two articles and the account of the Nangis continuateur were all that was known about the teachings of Marguerite Porete. In 1946, Romana Guarnieri identified a French manuscript entitled Le Mirouer des simples ames (The Mirror of the Simple Souls) as a copy of Porete's lost work.⁹ The manuscript published by Guarnieri turned out to be a late fifteenth or early sixteenth century version of the famous and until then anonymous mystical treatise of the same name which had been known for centuries in Latin, Italian, and Middle English translations. No other early vernacular mystical writing seems to have crossed linguistic boundaries and proliferated in translation to such an extent.¹⁰ Thus it was discovered that a classic of Christian piety, which had even been published in 1911 by the Downside Benedictines in a modern English translation with the formal Church approvals of nihil obstat and imprimatur, was identical with the infamous work of the condemned heretic Marguerite Porete, a work burned in her presence in 1306, and burned along with her in 1310.¹¹

The full title of Porete's book is: The Mirror of the Simple Souls Who Are Annihilated and Remain Only in Will and Desire of Love (Le Mirouer des simples ames anienties et qui seulement demourent en vouloir et desire d'amour). The Mirror brings together the apophatic paradoxes of mystical union, the language of courtly love—as it had been transformed by the beguine mystics of the thirteenth century into a mystical language of rapture—and a daring reappropriation of medieval religious themes. The result is an apophasis of desire.

The apophasis of desire results in a radical reconception of selfless love, deity as love, and authenticity as involving acts that are ends in themselves rather than means. Any act done as a means (moyens, intermedium) or as a use (usage, usum) is a “work,” which entails an enslavement to the will. What might seem an unexceptional doctrine of salvation through faith rather than works is then pushed to the extreme: the soul that gives up all will and works is no longer concerned with poverty or riches, honor or dishonor, heaven or hell, with self, other, or deity. Such a state of utter selflessness, of annihilation of the will and reason—both of which are concerned with works—cannot be achieved through works or effort. It occurs when the soul is taken up or ravished (ravie, rapta, ravissee) by its divine lover.

Many of Porete's themes may be difficult to capture in their full force, not because they seem alien, but because they seem familiar. Selfless love, rapture, the fall into love, abandon, freedom as having nothing, passing away of the lover in love, are all interwoven through Western literature and are the subject of innumerable popular songs and romances. The apophatic placement of the extraordinary within the ordinary recurs with Porete as a confluence of mystical apophasis with the most common vocabulary of erotic love. The most extraordinary language of mystical union reflects the perennial and quite popular theme of the loss of self in love. The counterreaction to this philosophy of love, a reaction Porete labels “the fear of love,” may still be found at the heart of conflicts within Western societies today.

The Mirror of the Simple Souls is a book of 122 chapters, most of it a dialogue of courtly love carried out among a group of personified characters. The principal participants are Lady Love (Dame Amour), also called Her Highness Amour, and the Enfranchised Soul (l'ame enfranchie), also called the Annihilated Soul, or simply, the Soul.¹² Through this dialogue, Dame Amour expounds her doctrine of fine amour, courtly love, a love through which the soul becomes “refined” (raffinée) to the point of mystical union with the deity, who is love. Another dialogue takes place between Dame Amour and Reason, as Reason is continually perplexed and confounded by the paradoxes and antinomies, the “double words” that result from the apophatic dialectic. Reason is never explicitly defined, but it becomes clear what the personification represents. Throughout The Mirror, reason is associated with the masters of the schools and the monasteries and with the theological discourse over which they had charge, the very caste of clerical and lay masters that is reflected in the distinguished panel of twenty-one theologians who condemned Porete's book.¹³ Reason's inability to understand the dialectic and paradoxes of love leads her to be called at one point “Reason who only understands gross things and leaves the fine behind.”¹⁴ Other characters, such as Pure Courtoisie, make brief speaking appearances. The major male character is FarNear (Loingprés), the divine lover of the annihilated soul. FarNear, whose name echoes the coming-and-going nature of divine love in both beguine and Sufi writings, is identified with the trinity.¹⁵ He is a central character in the drama, but never speaks; for the most part women speak in this court of mystical love.

The Mirror was composed partially in the form of a play and was probably meant to be read out loud, since it refers to its “hearers” as often as it does to its “readers.”¹⁶ The central event of the drama is the death of Reason who, after continued questioning of Dame Amour over the paradoxes of love, finally dies (chap. 87), “mortally wounded by love.” This theatrically constructed event marks a major transformation in the annihilated soul, who is now freed from reason and able to “reclaim her heritage.”¹⁷

In this [essay], I will discuss Dame Amour's complex teaching on love, its similarity to other expressions of beguine mysticism and to Sufi love mysticism, its inversion and plays upon Christian theology, and its fate at the hands of the Inquisition. Porete's understanding of mystical union will intersect a number of topics, no single one of which is central: the “work” of love; the vocabulary of rapture; the “fall” of the soul into mystical union; the reversion of the soul to a state of preexistence; the soul's living “without a why”; the fire of love-madness that burns up all distinctions.

THE FEAR OF LOVE

Like … other apophatic mystics …, Porete both posits and retracts a hierarchy, in this case a hierarchy of states (estats) or beings (estres) of mystical ascent.¹⁸ The soul rises through seven stages of spiritual ascent, stages that echo one of the most prevalent motifs of medieval mystical thought: the rising through various hierarchical stages of perfection.¹⁹ In Porete's version, the soul first rises through the stages of grace, supererogatory devotion, and good works. The Mirror is relatively unconcerned with these early stages, and passes over the seventh stage, the joy of the afterlife, in silence.²⁰ The fourth stage is the stage of spiritual poverty, comprising fasts, prayers, devotions, sacraments, ascetic practices, and martyrdoms. Dame Amour calls such ascetic piety the “sorrowful life” (vie marrie, vita maesta) and criticizes it as an enslavement to works (i.e., the “works” of the life of poverty and contemplation). Union with the divine is achieved through faith, she states, not works. She raises the stakes on this preference of faith to works by turning it against the very forms of medieval monastic piety that were thought to embody such a life of faith.

Within this critique of the piety of works is the paradox of will. A work is any act carried out through one's own will. Even the conventional life of piety, the life of the fourth station, is subject to enslavement by the will. Such piety can be only a stage on the road to the loss of self-will. The harder the soul attempts to transcend will, the more she becomes entrapped in it; the more she works to transcend works, the more she is enslaved to works. From such a dilemma, reason can find no way out. The answer can be found only in moving from the fourth stage to the fifth and particularly the sixth stages—the stages of mystical union—that are the central concern of The Mirror.²¹

The notion of grace, which one might expect to mitigate this dilemma, intensifies it instead. Dame Amour conceives of grace as divine love, which is nothing other than deity itself. This love allows the soul to become “disencumbered” of its will and works, and thereby, of its own self. Only when the soul's own being and will are annihilated can the deity work through and in it. When Dame Amour takes these ideas to their extreme, Reason is taken aback and asks her to explain her “double words” (doubles mots, duplicia nomina) and remarkable statements (grans admiracions). Love asks, disingenuously, what the double words could be. In response, Reason cites an earlier chapter of The Mirror:

It says—in the seventh chapter to be precise—that soul is concerned with neither shame nor honor, neither poverty nor riches, neither ease nor dis-ease, neither love nor hate, neither hell nor heaven. In addition, it says that this soul has all and has nothing, knows all and knows nothing, wills all and wills nothing, as is said in the ninth chapter, above. And she desires neither humbleness of station nor poverty nor martyrdom, nor tribulations, nor masses, nor sermons, nor fasts, nor prayers, and she gives to nature all that it demands of her, without remorse of conscience.²²

Elsewhere, Dame Amour adds more items to the catalogue: the annihilated soul no longer wishes to do anything for God, or to refrain from doing anything for God,²³ no longer wishes not to have sinned,²⁴ no longer wishes to do God's will,²⁵ is no longer concerned with herself, with another, or with God.²⁶

Reason, raising objections which despite their subservient tone ring hauntingly alongside the articles of Inquisition, states a religious ideal contradictory at every point to the mystical ideals of Lady Love. Reason's ideal is:

To desire dishonor, poverty, and all manner of tribulations, masses, sermons, fasts, and prayers, and to fear all manners of love, whatever they might be, for the perils they might contain; to desire supremely paradise, to fear hell; to refuse all manners of honor and temporal things, all comforts, refusing nature what it demands, except for that without which it could not live, according to the example of the suffering and passion of our lord Jesus Christ.²⁷

Reason's understanding of the example of Jesus can be interpreted two ways: either Jesus desired dishonor, poverty, and the world to come, or one should desire to imitate what he experienced even if he experienced such things without desiring them—neither of which would likely satisfy Dame Amour's understanding of gratuitous love. For Dame Amour, any will keeps the will enslaved to the objects it seeks and to the works with which it seeks them, even if the works are the staples of monastic piety. The piety of the fourth stage, the stage of spiritual poverty, is rooted in desire. Only the objects of desire have changed: dishonor, poverty, tribulations, and the world to come, instead of honor, wealth, comfort, and temporal things. In a later passage, this life of perfection of works receives further criticism. Those engaged in it must continually be at war with their own sensuality. Their bodies must act always against their will and pleasure, or they will “fall back” into the life of perdition.²⁸ Yet these same people take pleasure (plaisance, complacentia) in mortification of the body, works of virtue, martyrdom. These “good workers” live in a continual state of desire, the desire to continue in their good works. They perish in their good works because of the sufficiency they have in their desire, their will, and their being.²⁹

Dame Amour associates being disencumbered of will and works with the giving up of means or medium (moyens, intermedium). The life of works is a life in which human acts are means to be used to attain blessedness in this life and reward in the next. They are the medium through which the human relates to the divine. Virtues are another aspect of works, means, and usage (usage, usum). Dame Amour suggests that to move beyond the fourth station, the soul takes leave of the virtues (prent congé aux Vertuz, accepit licentiam a virtutibus). When Dame Amour states that giving up the virtues will allow the virtues to remain in the soul even more perfectly than before, Reason objects that giving up and retaining virtues “are two contrary statements; it seems to me I cannot understand them.”³⁰ Dame Amour responds: “I will calm you down, says Love. It is true that this soul takes leave of virtues, as to their usage [usage, usum] and as to the desire for that which they demand, but the virtues never take leave of her, for they are always with her.”³¹ The life of virtue enslaves the soul to the desire for what the virtues demand, and to their usage. Usage, like means, is an impediment to the soul that would act without means, whose activity would be an end in itself. Their continued existence and activity within the soul that has taken leave of them are the work of Love.

Reason states that she has been taught to “fear all manners of love, whatever they might be, because of their possible perils.”³² “License,” a word that occurs in Dame Amour's Latin expression for taking leave of the virtues, accepit licentiam, embodies the fear her doctrine of love would engender. (A historical note: the chapters on Dame Amour's doctrine of love and Reason's fear of love are composed in a distinctive manner that suggests the intriguing possibility they may be Porete's response to earlier inquisitorial criticisms.)³³ In order now to evaluate the theological implications of Dame Amour's doctrine and Reason's fear, we need to examine the precise implications of the “work of love” within the soul.

THE WORK OF LOVE

According to Dame Amour, to disencumber oneself of one's will, works, means, usage, and virtues, is not to negate virtues and works but to remove the agency of those works from the soul. Who then carries out this work? Dame Amour names several agents. At times it is God (dieu, deus): “And that is a work for God, for God works in me. I owe him no work as he himself works in me and if I did something, it would be undoing his work” (emphasis added).³⁴ At times it is FarNear: “This FarNear is the trinity itself … The trinity works in this soul showing her his/her glory. Of this no one can speak, except the deity itself” (emphasis added).³⁵ At times it is the trinity by name: “this soul has given all through the freedom of the work of the trinity” (emphasis added).³⁶ Love also plays this key role. Reason asks how it can be true, as Dame Amour claims, that the annihilated soul has no concern for honor or dishonor, poverty or riches, comfort or discomfort, love or hate, hell or heaven. Dame Amour responds that an understanding of the annihilated soul cannot be found in scripture, that human sense (sensus) cannot apprehend it, nor human work merit it. It is a gift

Given by the most high, in whom this creature is ravished [ravie, perdita] by the fullness [planté] of understanding and becomes nothing in her understanding. And such a soul, who has become nothing, has everything, wills nothing and wills everything, knows nothing and knows everything.

And how can that be, Dame Amour, says Reason, that this soul can will what this book says, which has already said earlier that she has no will.

Reason, says Love, it is not her will that wills it, but the will of God, who wills it in her. For this soul does not remain within love which makes her will it by some desire. Love remains in her who has taken her will, and thus love does her will with her, and love works in her without her. (Emphasis added.)³⁷

This work within the annihilated soul is a nexus for various threads of Porete's thought and it is the point of transformation, the dynamis, of her apophatic discourse. It is also the point of union for her various divine personae: Love, the Trinity, FarNear. Though Love is female and FarNear is male, though Love speaks and FarNear holds his peace, in the work within the annihilated soul they are one. And in this one work, the annihilated soul becomes one with them: “Love dwells in her and transforms her into herself so that this soul herself is Love, and Love has no discretion. In all things one should have discretion, except in love.”³⁸ This transformation of the soul into love and the peace of love, “in which the soul lives and endures and is and was and will be without being [en laquelle elle vit, et dure, et est, et fut, et sera sans estre]” is compared to the transformation of molten iron into fire by the action of fire,³⁹ and—more radically—to a transformation into fire so complete that the fire burns without any matter.⁴⁰

The union between annihilated soul and deity is a union-in-act, the act being love's work within the soul. In the union the soul receives gifts from its divine lover as great as the giver. In one passage, the plural “gifts” suddenly changes, ungrammatically, to the singular. The divine gifts (dons) are as great

As he himself who has given it [cecy], which gift transforms her into him. This is Love and Love can do what she wills. Fear, Discretion, and Reason can say nothing against Love.⁴¹

Although this change from the plural (gifts) to the singular (it, this) could be explained as a scribal error, something more serious may be involved. The gifts are identical to the giver. The divine gift of itself to the soul will become a central theme with Eckhart as well.⁴² Porete cites in evidence of the greatness of this gift John 14:12: “Whoever believed in me will do the works I do and even greater.”⁴³ This union is also spoken of as a union of form; in another passage with a precise analogue in Eckhart, the annihilated soul is imprinted (emprainte, impressa) upon the form of the divine, obtaining this impression from the union of love. The soul obtains the form of its exemplar as wax takes the form of the seal.⁴⁴

The soul's abandonment of discretion reflects a paradox found within courtly love. The rules of courtly love or “courtesy” (cortezia) demand discretion, conforming to the conventions and norms of society, and mezura, avoiding of excesses of feeling and behavior. Yet the courtly lover (fin aman) continually violated these standards of cortezia and mezura and acted in a solitary, excessive manner.⁴⁵ Porete has combined this language of cortezia with an apophatic language of mystical union. The union-with-and-in-love is rapture. Rapture is the act and work of love. The language of rapture includes a complex of interdependent terms and figures of speech (disrobing, nakedness, loss of discretion, loss of shame, abandon) that reinforce the basic sexual metaphor. As Dame Amour said, there is no “discretion” in love. The soul gives up her honor, her shame. She disrobes herself of will.⁴⁶ Her union with the divine lover occurs in nakedness. She gives herself over to abandon. She “falls” (in an expression that will have many levels of meaning) into love.

Similar themes are to be found in other beguine mystics of the thirteenth century. The metaphor of nakedness is central to the writings of Mechthild of Magdeburg and Hadewijch.⁴⁷ In Hadewijch's great poem “The Seven Names of Love,” Love is said to “work” in each name. Union is figured through metaphors of physical contact and mingling. However, the language continually pulls against the limits of the physical metaphors. A tension is engendered in which the metaphors are stretched and ultimately shattered under the demand for a union beyond that which the metaphor can convey.⁴⁸ Even those names that seem gentle turn violent. “Dew,” for example, assuages with a kiss the torment of Love's names of Live Coal and Fire. But Hadewijch portrays that kiss as becoming increasingly voracious, until it results in a eucharistic devouring of flesh and blood and final trans-physical union that is the trinity:

When the loved one receives from her beloved
The kisses that truly pertain to love,
When he takes possession of the loved soul in every way,
Love drinks in these kisses and tastes them to the end.
As soon as Love thus touches the soul,
She eats its flesh and drinks its blood.
Love that thus dissolves the loved soul
Sweetly leads them both
To the indivisible kiss—that same kiss which full unites
The three persons in one sole being.(49)

Particularly close to The Mirror in vocabulary of love are some of the poems previously attributed to Hadewijch or to an anonymous “Hadewijch II.” Because of the difficulty in dating these poems, they may well have been composed before Porete's Mirror, or after it and possibly under its influence. Here, the eroticism and lyricism are intertwined with a more abstract vocabulary in a manner reminiscent of The Mirror. Hadewijch II depicts understanding as being “in your mirror / always ready for you. // It is a great thing to see / In nakedness, without intermediary.”⁵⁰ She depicts mystical union as occurring in the “wild and vast simplicity” beyond all form and accident:

Naked Love who spares nothing
In her wild overpassing,
Stripped of all accident
Finds again her simple nature …
For Love strips of all form
Those she receives in her simplicity.
The poor in spirit are then free of all modes,
strangers to all images.”(51)

The erotic tension in Hadewijch's “Seven Names of Love” is in the tension between apophatic union and the physical metaphors of union that are unable to contain it. The tension pulls against spatial paradigms. The erotic tension in Porete is primarily temporal and is located between the fifth and sixth station. From the fifth station of annihilation the soul is rapt (ravie, rapta) into a sixth station of union by FarNear (Loingprés). However, “It lasts but a little time for her. It is an opening like a flash, quickly closing. No one can remain there for long. No one who has a mother can speak of this.”⁵² The instantaneous nature of rapture is evoked again in a passage of great lyrical beauty:

The ravishing opening and expansion of this opening makes the soul, after its closing, of the peace of its work so free and so noble and so disencumbered of all things, as long as the peace which is given in the opening lasts, that she freely remains after this opening in the fifth station, without falling into the fourth, for in the fourth there is will while in the sixth there is no will. Thus in the fifth station of which this book speaks there is no will—there the soul remains after the work of ravishing FarNear which we call a flash because of the suddenness of its opening and loosening. No one can believe, says Love, the peace upon peace of peace that this soul receives, unless he be she.⁵³

In some cases, Porete will evoke the spatial tension as well. Referring to her divine lover, the soul speaks of “The exalting ravisher who takes me and unites me with the middle of the marrow of divine love in which I am melted.”⁵⁴ More often, it is the temporal paradigm that prevails. Like the waqt or eternal moment for Ibn ‘Arabi, the sixth station is the intersection between time and eternity. From the temporal perspective, which is all that can be evoked (the eternal perspective of the seventh station being passed over in silence), eternity is perceived as a flash, both timeless and in time, both permanent and evanescent.

THE FALL OF LOVE

In regard to the fifth and sixth station, Dame Amour had said that once the soul has been rapt into the sixth station (of clarification and rapture), it stays in the fifth station (of annihilation) without “falling” into the fourth. Those in the fourth station cannot have peace unless they act against their own will and pleasure. “Such people do the opposite of the sensual, otherwise they fall back into the perdition of this life if they do not live contrary to their pleasure.”⁵⁵ Up until this point, the spatial metaphor of mystical ascent is consistent. Those in the fifth station are rapt into the sixth. They return to the fifth without danger of “falling” into the fourth. Those in the fourth must continually fight their own will, sensuality, and pleasure lest they “fall back” into the earlier stages. Then in a sudden inversion, the ascent is figured as a fall. In contrast to those in the fourth station, the life of the spirit, who must fight their own will,

Those who are free [frans] do the opposite. For, just as it is proper in the life of the spirit to do the opposite of the will, if one does not wish to lose peace, so—in contrast—the free souls do whatever pleases them, if they do not wish to lose peace, because they have come to the state of freedom [franchise], that is, they who have fallen back [soient cheuz] from the virtues into love and from love into nothing.⁵⁶

This fall back from the virtues into love and from love into annihilation and freedom is related to Dame Amour's statement that freed souls give to nature whatever it demands. The Mirror assures us that the freed soul, though it can do what it wishes, will never wish anything contrary to the laws of the Church (though some of these assurances are later interpolations).⁵⁷ Even if these explicit disclaimers are not interpolations, however, by themselves they cannot resolve the issue. In order to evaluate Dame Amour's claim that the soul is “excused” from everything, it is necessary to examine the view of agency upon which it is based. Those who act contrary to their own will and pleasure act through a kind of counter-will that is just as much tied to human will and works as the natural will. Such action is only another form of enslavement to will. As will be shown below, at the point of mystical union, the soul is free precisely insofar as it is not the soul who is acting. The divine (FarNear, Amour, or the Trinity) is acting in and through her.⁵⁸

The sudden inversion of the metaphor of mystical ascent into one of descent is not unknown in medieval mystical texts. It occurs in the Jewish Hekhalot literature, where the ascent to the Merkevah or divine chariot can be replaced by a language of descent.⁵⁹ Sufis also offer some striking inversions of spatial metaphors.⁶⁰ In Eriugena, redemption was seen as a reversal of the fall in a way that inverted the temporal metaphor. There could be no fall until the redemption, because had humankind actually occupied paradise they could not have fallen from it. There is no paradise from which to fall until they return to it. Porete's reversal is distinct in the particular theological and cultural implications of sudden change in paradigm from ascent to descent. She associates the “fear of love” with the fear of nature. In this inversion of the Christian language of the fall, Porete brings together and affirms woman, love, the fall, and nature, four elements whose combination received a sharply negative light in medieval Christianity.⁶¹

In the mystical hierarchy, the mystic who ascends through the various stations can reach the “station of no-station,” in Ibn Arabi's terms, in which the hierarchy is folded back into itself. Similarly, the soul who ascends through the first five states undergoes a series of deaths and rebirths that end in a folding back into itself of the telescope of hierarchical articulations. Porete speaks of the death of sin and the life of grace, the death of nature and the life of the spirit, and finally of the death of the spirit and the “death of the life of works” as leading to the most genuine form of life.⁶² The apophasis of desire includes the admonition to give to nature all that it desires, but that admonition applies to the annihilated soul in which nature and will and spirit have died. After the death of the will and life of works, the soul no longer needs to work contrary to her will and pleasure. As Dame Amour will suggest, the soul no longer is the worker; the deity works in her.

This self-abandon results in a dialectic of nothing and everything. The soul shrinks to a smallness where she can no longer find herself. She has “fallen” into the certainty of knowing nothing and willing nothing:

Now this soul has rights [droit] to nothing in which she stays. And because she is nothing, she has no care of anything, not of herself nor of her neighbors nor of God himself. For she is so small, that she cannot find herself. Everything created is far from her, so far that she cannot feel it. God is so great that she cannot comprehend. And through such nothing, she is fallen into the certainty of knowing nothing and into the certainty of willing nothing. And this nothing, of which we speak, says Love, gives her all.⁶³

The freed soul is disencumbered of all things and has no care for anything, self, neighbors, or Dieu mesme. The soul is liberated (enfranchie, libera) in complete abandonment of all will and all its “usages.” Love tells her that she is “passed away in love and remains dead” (estes vous pasmee et more demouree; in nihilo syncopyzastis et mortua remansistis),⁶⁴ and thus is able to live truly.

In addition to will, reason also dies. The death of reason had been intimated earlier when the annihilated soul was said to be

dead to all the feelings of within and without, insofar as such a soul engages no further in works, neither for God nor for herself, and has lost her senses [sens, sensus, wits] in the usage, that she knows not how to seek God nor find him nor guide herself.⁶⁵

In this stage, reminiscent of the Sufi perplexity (ḥayra) and love madness, discursive reason passes away. In The Mirror, the death of Reason is acted out theatrically. Love states that this soul is “lady of Virtues, daughter of Deity, sister of Wisdom, and spouse of Love” (dame des Vertuz, fille de Deité, soeur de Sapience, et espouse d'Amour).⁶⁶ Soul predicts that Reason will not be able to bear the paradoxes of these marvels (merveilles), even as she declares herself “nothing but love.” Reason then cries: “O God! how can anyone say such things? I do not dare to hear them. I fail, Lady Soul, in hearing you. My heart has failed. I live no more.”⁶⁷ Lady Soul laments at the death of Reason, but her lament carries a ruthless twist; her lament is that Reason had not died long before. Only now is she able to reclaim her freedom. She formally announces Reason's death, whereupon Love graciously goes on to ask the question that Reason would have asked were she still alive:

“Alas!” says the Soul, “why didn't this death occur before? For as long as I had you, I was not able to claim my heritage in freedom, which was and is mine. But now I claim it freely, because I have mortally wounded you with love.”

“Now Reason is dead,” says the Soul.

“Then I will say,” says Love, “what Reason would say were she alive in you, what she would have asked of you, beloved of ours”—says Love to this soul who is Love itself and nothing other than Love, since Love through her divine bounty has taken her reason and her works of virtue and thrown them under her feet, bringing them to death without return.⁶⁸

Love's takeover of the function of Reason contains an interesting implication, beyond the necessity of someone to take on Reason's role if the dialogue is to proceed. Although Porete does not give a formal exposition of her understanding of “reason,” Dame Amour had identified Reason with the intellectual establishment of natural philosophers, scriptural exegetes, and monastic leaders.⁶⁹ And as was shown above, Reason's questions echo those of Porete's inquisitors, and we can deduce from them Reason's premises and logic. With Love's assumption of the role of Reason, discursive thought (as regulated by the intellectual establishment of Porete's time and personified in Reason) is not so much rejected as it is brought into contact with the apophatic logic of the unlimited and ultimately subsumed into it at the point of mystical union. The questioning according to conventional logic and behavior continues, but the questioning is no longer an obstacle to the union. Reason has been subsumed into that higher knowledge called in The Mirror “entendement d'amour.”⁷⁰

In Plotinus and Eriugena, abandon and absolute trust are figured primarily as ontological, the giving up of being. As was shown above, at the point of mystical union, this nothingness or beyond-beingness cannot be distinguished discursively from mere nothingness. Apophatic mysticism entails a moment of letting go of such distinctions. With Porete's apophasis of desire, figured in terms of rapture, there is a similar moment of risk. Rapture entails complete abandon—abandon of will, of works, of reason, of self-vulnerability. It can occur only in a context of absolute trust. At the moment of abandon, the soul gives up all defenses, control, security. The soul annihilated in love of the divine no longer exists in the formal sense as a subject that wills and acts—the only will and act are the will and act of the deity.

The mystical union occurs at the moment that will is abandoned, but that abandonment of will (the theological implications of which will be examined below) does not entail a lack of consent. In the past two decades, the more sinister aspects of the courtly love tradition have been explored, particularly the way rape has been both exploited and disguised within the romance.⁷¹ In appropriating the language of courtly love, Porete was not merely borrowing conventions and tropes but in many cases was transforming them. A language of “rapture,” which in the courtly tradition could become a code for violation and disenfranchisement, is transfigured in The Mirror. For a closer look at the inversions and transformations within Porete's apophasis of desire, we turn to Dame Amour's distinctive understanding of the soul's reversion to what she was “as she was before she was.”

AS SHE WAS BEFORE SHE WAS

The annihilation of the soul (with its reason, will, and works) entails a reversion to a precreative state of being, to what the soul was “when she was not.” The reversion is evoked through puns made upon the word pourquoy (for what; i.e., why) and related terms such as de quoy (of what, concerning what). The annihilated soul has no “why,” and acts “without a why,”⁷² without a “what.”

Dame Amour states that one who truly believes “is said to live and to be” what he believes. “He has no more to do with himself or with another or with God himself, not more than if he were not, though he is [emphasis added].”⁷³ In another passage, the paradigm shifts from the conditional (than if he were not) to the temporal (when she was not). Out of its overflowing good (bonté) the deity gave free will to the soul. But this freedom is only realized when the soul gives up her will and gives back her free will to the divine. There, where she was before she was, the soul has no “of what” (de quoy) for the deity to reprehend. She participates with the deity in many works, but always flows back into the deity where “I was created of him without me.” There the deity and the soul carry out works together as long as the soul continues to reflow (refluss) back into the divine. The deity's act of giving “without a why” (sans nul pourquoy) echoes the soul's acting without a why.⁷⁴ Just as through its bonté the deity gave the soul her free will freely, without a why, and just as the freed soul acts without a why, so the deity takes back the free will from the soul without a why.⁷⁵

Porete combines here the Neoplatonic emanation paradox of procession and return, her own inversion of the language of the fall, and a distinctive notion of “exchange of wills.”⁷⁶ The exchange of wills occurs after the soul has fallen from the virtues into love, from love into nothingness, and from nothingness into divine clarification. At the moment of divine clarification, as the soul returns to its precreated state, the deity dissolves into its three actions of self-seeing, self-loving, and self-knowing. The soul no longers sees, loves, or knows the divine: the actions are now reflexive. At this point the deity, which had given over its freedom to the soul in making her “lady,” receives back its freedom as the soul abandons her own will. In this courtly exchange, the divine “cannot take this free will back from himself without the pleasure of the soul.”

She has fallen from grace into the perfection of the work of the virtues, and from the virtues into love, and from love into nothingness, and from nothingness into the clarification of God who sees himself with the eyes of his majesty, who at this point has clarified her through himself. She is so returned into him that she sees neither herself nor him. He sees himself alone from his divine bonté; he is of himself in such bonté that he knew of himself when she was not, before he entrusted his bonté to her and made her lady of it. This was free will, which he cannot take back by himself without the pleasure of the soul. Now he has it, without a why, at that point that he had it before she was lady. There is no one else. No one else loves but he, for no one is outside of him and he alone loves and sees and praises from his own being.⁷⁷

This freedom is ecstatic; the soul lives and is without itself, outside itself, or beyond itself. The ecstatic freedom occurs simultaneously with two events: (1) a highly erotic version of the mystical union of the lover and beloved (in which the two parties are now only one party), and (2) the courtly exchange whereby the deity entrusts the soul with its goodness and the soul hands back her will to the deity. Dame Amour dramatizes this radical freedom through complex puns on the word pourquoy (why, for what). To the implicit question, “why [pourquoy] should the soul live or act,” Dame Amour states that the soul has no what (quoy) for (pour) which or on account of which it might act.⁷⁸ Dame Amour's colloquial language of living “without a why” contains within it the notion that the annihilated soul lives without means (moyens; or, in the Latin, intermedium). The term moyens can be read two ways: as a living without means or usages, a living without will, in other words, without a why; and as a lack of a medium between the divine and human, a complete immediacy of contact. Ultimately the two meanings are fused in Porete's thought. One aspect of this “why” consists of the rewards of heaven and the punishments of hell, neither of which, Dame Amour insists, are of any concern whatsoever to the freed soul. Similarly, the Virgin Mary lives without her will. She lives the life of the trinity without any entredeux or “go-between.”⁷⁹

The stage of “clarification” of the soul in Porete can be viewed along two vectors of comparison. One vector reaches toward the strikingly similar conception in the Sufism of the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, while the second moves through the courtly and theological context of thirteenth-century Europe, and particularly the beguine tradition. The reversion to the precreative state in which one “was before one was” has a close analogue within the classical Sufi exposition of mystical union. For Junayd (d. 911), the goal of the mystic is to reach that state where he is “as he was when he was before he was.”⁸⁰ Behind Junayd's formula was the theory of the early Sufi, Sahl al-Tustari, in which this precreative state is identified with a Qur'anic passage in which the preexistent souls of humankind pledge their allegiance to their lord.⁸¹ By the twelfth century c.e., Tustari and Junayd's theory of reversion to the precreative state was thoroughly integrated into Sufi understanding of mystical union. Another key element was the shift from vision to self-vision as elaborated in the Sufi mystical union and depicted through the imagery of the polished mirror. Of course, Porete was drawing upon a long European tradition of mirror imagery in her Mirror of the Simple Souls. However, the combination of that imagery with three specific themes dominant in Sufi literature of her time—the annihilation of the soul, the soul's reversion to the precreative state, and the shift from vision to self-vision—raises questions about the relationship of Porete's mysticism with Sufi thought.

The fundamental doctrine of Sufism is the annihilation (fanā') and subsequent abiding (baqā') of the self. These mystical states are compared to a polished mirror. When the heart of the Sufi is “polished” and the ego-self of the Sufi passes away, the divine is said to reveal to it(self) through it(self) its mystery; or to use a different convention, to reveal to Him/him through Him/him His/his mystery. At this point the referential distinction between reflexive and nonreflexive, self and other, human and divine, breaks down. For Porete, a similar dynamic occurs in the annihilation and the clarification that take place in the fifth and sixth stations respectively. However, the ambivalence of referential antecedence in Ibn Arabi is more muted in Porete's Mirror. Although referring to an absolute unity, the gender distinction between the annihilated soul (feminine) and the divine lover (masculine) makes the fusion of pronominal antecedents less likely, even at the point of mystical union. At times, however, we can see signs of stress in this distinction. Thus, the Latin text, which for the most part echoes faithfully the French, diverges from it in the depiction of the “clear” life. One particularly difficult problem here is that the French text is late (fifteenth century) and probably does not reflect the pronouns that Porete may have used in her thirteenth-century dialect. In earlier French, the gender distinction within the dative pronouns was fragile and could be ambiguous.⁸² The composers of the later French text and the Latin may have been trying to interpret an older French in which the gender distinctions, already fragile, are breaking down at the point of mystical union. One example of this frequent breakdown can be found in the following passage. I have marked the discrepancies between the Latin and French versions with a slash:

I call [this life] clear [clere] because she has surmounted the blindness of the life of annihilation. … She does not know who she is, God or humankind. For she is not, but God knows of himself in him/her for her of her/himself. Such a Lady does not seek God. She has no “of what” [de quoy] with which to do that. She need not do that. For what [pourquoy, why] would she seek then?⁸³

In this context, the term “annihilated soul”—which I can find used nowhere else in previous Christian literature—its combination with the reversion to the precreative state, and the reference fusions that take place at the point of mystical union show a multifold affinity to Sufi thought that can hardly be dismissed as pure coincidence. The issue is not whether the beguine “borrowed” the concept from Sufi-influenced writings or developed it out of the courtly love tradition on her own—for the courtly love tradition itself was implicated with Arabic and Islamic culture.⁸⁴ No claim is made here of any particular textual influence; these ideas must have been circulating freely, probably more through oral traditions and conversations than the translations of particular texts. On the one hand, Porete's understanding of mystical union is remarkably close to the formulations of her Sufi contemporaries. On the other hand, it is grounded within the European milieu, particularly within the beguine appropriation (going back at least to Mechthild of Magdeburg) of courtly love, with the themes of the nakedness of the soul, the union of the lover with the divine beloved. Her writing seems situated at the matrix of beguine and Sufi traditions. Her originality and genius are one major testimony to the simultaneous culmination of apophatic traditions in Judaism, Chrisitianity, and Islam. They also suggest that at this particular moment in the history of Western mysticism, Sufism and European Christian mysticism were part of a larger multireligious cultural entity.

DAUGHTER OF DEITY

The distinctiveness of Porete's apophatic language is found not only in the subtle way in which she configures the various themes just discussed, particularly her version of the “fall,” but also in her reinterpretation of biblical and theological themes from the perspective of Dame Amour's court. The moment of annihilation in love of the divine is represented not only by the Virgin Mary but also by Mary Magdalene in the desert. When she began seeking God, Mary Magdalene lost God because the “of which” (her will, her work) interposed itself.⁸⁵ Just as Ibn Arabi had criticized Noah for calling people “to” the divine, as if the divine were not everywhere, so Dame Amour says of Magdalene that she “did not know when she sought him that God was everywhere and that she had, without any intermediary, the divine work within herself.”

But when she was in the desert, love took her and annihilated her and thus love works in her through her without her. She lived, then, the divine life which gave her the life of glory. Thus she found God in her, without seeking him, and also she did not have any “of which” since Love had taken it.⁸⁶

In another pun, Dame Amour contrasts the sorrowful soul (marrie, maesta) with Marie (the Virgin Mary, but perhaps with allusions to Magdalene and Martha's sister—these latter two Marys were identified with one another in Porete's time—who also represent the life of the soul annihilated in love). Those in the fourth stage live the sorrowful life, the life appropriate for a fallen nature and a fallen world. A further aspect of the pun may be the association of this sorrowful life with the married life, but loss of the original French text and the fluidity of accents makes this supposition difficult to demonstrate.⁸⁷

Porete's distinction between the sorrowful life of works and the life of the three Marys can be seen as conventional. She takes up the very popular contrast between Martha, busy about many things and thus representative of the active life, and Mary, who represents the contemplative life. Yet she uses this contrast as she uses the themes of courtly love, with a sudden reversal; in this case a reversal of the contemplative piety that saw itself as embodying the life of Mary, the life of contemplation. For Dame Amour, what others might call a life of contemplation is only a different form of enslavement to will and works. Such a life is caught up in the pleasure of its own mortification of the body, in the “pleasure” it takes in acting contrary to its own pleasure. A similar critique is to be found with Meister Eckhart.⁸⁸

An unconventional twist underlies Porete's conventional use of the Martha and Mary figures. Similarly, beneath what appears to be a conventional understanding of the Christian trinity is a truly radical implication. In several places within The Mirror Porete takes up the issue of the trinity more explicitly and seems to be taking pains to show that her trinitarian position is traditional.⁸⁹ These passages on the trinity from a beguine with no formal theological training, sensitive as they are, were unlikely to have impressed her inquisitors. The bull Cum quibusdam mulieribus shows particular contempt for beguines who would presume to engage in discussions of the trinity.

It is in the relationship of the trinity to the personae of Dame Amour's court of love that Porete achieves one of her most important breakthroughs. Porete identifies FarNear with the trinity both implicitly (when she uses the trinity and FarNear interchangeably as the agent that works in the freed soul) and explicitly. Her use of triadic formulations for the divine work in the soul (self-seeing, self-knowing, self-loving) could also be interpreted in trinitarian terms. Despite Porete's care to repeat the traditional credal formulations of trinity, another trinity appears within The Mirror, though it is never named as such, that of Dame Amour, FarNear, and the Freed Soul, the three prime actors in the court of love. Dame Amour and FarNear are by nature divine and, as mentioned above, are identified with one another. The Freed Soul that is born of the death of the spirit is divine within them, or within their work within her. Heralding the death of Reason, Lady Love announces that the Freed Soul is nothing less than the “daughter of divinity” (fille de deité). It is through these three persons (who are yet one) that Porete's reconception of deity within Christianity unfolds, a deity who is gendered male and female and who speaks through the female voice. This voice speaks on the margins of institutional theology and its categories of reason, which Dame Amour refers to as “Holy Church the little.”

The triad of Dame Amour, FarNear, and Freed Soul is not a trinity in the formal sense; the soul is not divine by nature. As Love declares: “I am God, for love is God and God is love, and this Soul is God by condition of Love; I am God by divine nature and this Soul is so by right of love, so that this precious friend of mine is taught and led by me without herself for she is transformed into me.”⁹⁰ Even so, the three persons are placed in a suggestively analogous position to the trinity of the Church fathers. They each have a particular personality and yet are identical with one another as the agent of divine movement and work. The result is a daring vision of a gender balance in the deity. This was a period in which gender dynamics within the deity were being explored; the extraordinary symbolism of gender within the Zoharic sefirot (the ten divine emanations or manifestations) is a case in point. But in constructing a parallel to the trinity, in making the female voice the voice of divine speech, and in its difference from the Gnostic and Kabbalistic paradigms in which the female elements—however important and powerful—are particularly prone to sin and exile, Porete's vision may be unique within the classical and medieval Western world.

Notes

1. As Robert Lerner, The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), points out (pp. 71-72) the charge of “relapse” was based upon “the questionable assumption that she had already abjured her errors at Valenciennes.”

2. See Revelation 3:7.

3. The habit was similar to that worn by the lay contemplatives, the beghards and beguines. See Robert Lerner, “An ‘Angel of Philadelphia’ in the Reign of Philip the Fair: The Case of Guiard of Cressonessart,” in Order and Innovation in the Middle Ages: Essays in Honor of Joseph R. Strayer, ed. W. Jordan, B. McNab, and T. Ruiz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 343-64. Cf. Paul Verdeyen, “Le procès d'inquisition contre Marguerite Porete et Guiard de Cressonessart (1309-1310),” Revue d'histoire ecclésiastique 81 (1986).

4. The texts relating to both Porete and Guiard's inquisition are published in Verdeyen, “Le procès.” Guiard gave Marguerite's ideas a millenarian interpretation that is not to be found in The Mirror.

5. Verdeyen, “Le procès,” p. 89. This monk's inquisitorial enthusiasm shows as well in his reference to the Jew who was burned alongside Marguerite as having returned to Judaism as a dog returns to eat its own vomit (sicut canis ad vomitum reversus).

6. Ibid., p. 88: Circa festum Pentecostes accidit Parisiis quod quaedam pseudo-mulier de Hannonia, nomine Margaretha, dicta Porrette, quemdam librum ediderat, in quo, omnium theologorum iudicio qui ipsum diligenter examinaverunt, multi continebantur errores et haereses, et inter ceteras, quod anima annihilata in amore conditoris sine reprehensione conscientiae vel remorsu potest et debet naturae quidquid appetit et desiderat (concedere) quod manifeste sonat in heresim.

7. Archives Nationales, layette J.428, 15a, in Verdeyen, “Le procès,” p. 51: Quorum articulorum primus talis est: “Quod anima adnichilata dat licentiam virtutibus nec est amplius in earum servitute, quia non habet eas quoad usum, sed virtutes obediunt ad nutum.”

8. Ibid.: Item decimus quintus articulus est: “Quod talis anima non curat de consolationibus Dei nec de donis eius, nec debet curare nec potest, quia tota intenta est circa Deum, et sic impediretur eius intentio circa Deum.”

9. Announced in Osservatore Romano, June 16, 1946. The French text was published by Guarnieri in a major study of the heresy of the free spirit. See Guarneiri, Archivio Italiano per la storia della pietà 4 (1965): 351-708. For a discussion of the various manuscripts, the likely date of the composition of the surviving French manuscript, the mysterious possibilities that other versions of the French text may still exist in hiding, and the three Latin manuscripts that pre-date the surviving French and probably date from the late fourteenth century, see pp. 502-12. The French manuscript was published again, alongside the Latin text, in 1986. See Marguerite Porete, Le Mirouer des simples ames (Speculum simplicium animarum), Old French version, ed. Romana Guarnieri, Latin version, ed. Paul Verdeyen, S.J. (Turnholt, Corpus Christianorum 69 [1986]). All subsequent citations will be to Mirouer, with chapter, line number, and page number. One of the first serious studies of Porete in English can be found in Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua to Marguerite Porete (Cambridge University Press, 1984), pp. 202-78.

10. The point is made by Kurt Ruh, “‘Le Miroir des simples âmes’ de Marguerite Porete,” in Verbum et Signum, essays presented to Friedrich Ohly, vol. 2 (Munich, 1975), pp. 365-87. For the middle English version, see M. Doiron, Archivio Italiano per la storia della pietà (1968): 244-355.

11. The Mirror of Simple Souls, by an unknown French mystic of the thirteenth century, translated in English by M.N, now first edited from the MSS. by Clare Kirchberger (London: Burns Oates and Washbourne, Publishers to the Holy See, 1927); Nihil Obstat: Georgius D. Smith S.T.d., Censor deputatus; Imprimatur: Edm. Can. Surmont, Vicarius generalis.

12. This kind of courtly dialogue had been in use among beguines at least since Mechthild of Magdeburg (ca. 1207-ca. 1294), who also made Lady Love the central figure. See Emilie Zum Brunn and Georgette Epiney-Burgard, Women Mystics in Medieval Europe (New York: Paragon House, 1989), pp. 54-57. Ellen Babinsky has explored the relationship of The Mirror to the courtly-love tradition and has demonstrated how the courtly rules were adopted into the practical rules governing the beguine houses or beguinages. See E. Babinsky, “A Beguine in the Court of the King: The Relation of Love and Knowledge in The Mirror of the Simple Souls by Marguerite Porete” (University of Chicago, Ph.D. diss., 1991), chap. 2. The focus of the discussion here will be upon the concept of the annihilated soul and the mystical language that results from Porete's attempt to speak of such a state of annihilation in love. A sensitive treatment of the relationship of The Mirror to the courtly tradition can also be found in the introduction and notes to Max Huot de Longchamp's translation, Marguerite Porete, Le Miroir des âmes simples et anéanties (Paris: Albin Michel, 1984). Song of Songs exegesis is less of a force in Marguerite's Mirror. Marguerite seldom places the erotic dialogue between the soul and the deity into a bridal framework and seldom offers any specific allusions to the Song. For Song of Songs tradition, see E. Ann Matter, The Voice of My Beloved: The Song of Songs in Western Medieval Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press), 1990.

13. For the names of the theologians, see Verdeyen, “Le procès,” pp. 53-54.

14. Mirouer 8:3, pp. 28-29: Raison qui n'entend que le gros et laisse la subtilité.

15. The divine lover in Porete is referred to as FarNear (Loingprés). In some commentaries on the Middle English translation and in the 1911 English translation, the character has changed to FarNight, a change evidently caused by a mistake in copying the term FarNigh. FarNight naturally led to glosses comparing union with FarNight to the Dark Night of the Soul of John of the Cross. In Hadewijch, Love is described in similar terms: “sometimes far and sometimes near.” See Zum Brunn and Epiney-Burgard, Women Mystics, p. 114 and n. 7, who also find it in the mengeldichten (mixed poems) sometimes attributed to an anonymous figure known as Hadewijch II, MD XVII.

    In the Sufi dialogue between the divine and human parties, mystical union is surrounded by extremes of psychological and semantic tension. There are oscillations between states of peace and ecstasy on the one hand and states of terror and dissolution on the other. The oscillation is related to the paradox that, at the moment before union, the nearest is the most far. One also thinks of Hallaj and ‘Ayn al-Qudat, Sufi writers who emphasized the coming together of the opposites nearness and farness in experience of divine love, and Niffari, in whom nearness is often suddenly inverted to farness.

16. See the discussion in Longchamp, Le Miroir, p. 15.

17. In response to those who have criticized the literary quality of the work as confused, Amy Hollywood has defended its unity and coherence. Hollywood sees the dynamic tension of the work as that between those characters that retain their allegorical role and resist character transformation (Lady Love, Reason), and the Annihilated Soul, which is transformed within the work, a transformation that pulls against the static nature of the allegorical personifications. See Amy Hollywood, “The Soul as Virgin Wife: Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics, Mechthild of Magdeburg and Marguerite Porete” (University of Chicago, Ph.D. diss., 1991), chap. 2.

18. As will be shown below, Porete's discourse is imbued with the apophatic perspective. Too little is known about Marguerite's early life and education to specify the textual sources of her grounding in Dionysian spirituality, although The Mirror reflects the apophatic perspective as strongly, though in its own distinctive fashion, as the near contemporary The Cloud of Unknowing. Two key differences between the two great apophatic works are genre and purpose. The Cloud is concerned with a pedagogy of contemplation, while The Mirror uses the its highly literary frame to develop an original mystical theology. Cf. Robert K. Forman, “Mystical Experience in the Cloud-Literature, in Marion Glasscoe, ed., The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England, Exeter Symposium IV (Cambridge: Brewer, 1987), pp. 177-95.

19. Parallels can be found in the Sufi mi'raj and the Jewish Hekhalot texts. The seven stations of spiritual attainment were a part of most Sufi schools, while the Persian mystic Farid ad-Din ‘Attar writes of seven valleys. ‘Attar's valleys in their general outline and in some of their specific depictions offer some tantalizing similarities to Porete's seven stages. ‘Attar's valleys are the quest, love, knowledge, independence, unity, amazement, and annihilation. See Farid ad-Din '‘Attar, The Conference of the Birds, trans. Afkham Darbandi and Dick Davis (London: Penguin, 1984). The beguine Beatrice of Nazareth speaks of seven manners of love, while her sister-beguine, Hadewijch, writes of seven names of love. See Zum Brunn and Epiney-Burgard, Women Mystics in Medieval Europe, pp. 70-94, and Hadewijch: The Complete Works, trans. Mother Columba Hart, O.S.B. (New York: Paulist Press, 1980), p. 254. On Hadewijch, see S. M. Murk-Jansen, “The Mystic Theology of the Thirteenth-Century Mystic, Hadewijch, and its Literary Expression,” The Medieval Mystical Tradition in England 5 (1992): 117-28.

20. The stages are outlined in chap. 118, pp. 316-33.

21. Guiard, the Angel of Philadelphia, who impulsively came to Porete's defense and thus, in his own words, “exposed himself” to the Inquisition, saw the seven stages as seven periods of the Church leading toward the seventh or apocalyptic stage, and saw himself as heralding the sixth stage. At the sixth station, we have a conjunction of a spatial metaphor, with Porete's annihilated and clarified soul representing the sixth stage of ascent, and a temporal or historical metaphor, with Guiard as the Angel of Philadelphia heralding the sixth stage of Church. See Lerner, “An ‘Angel of Philadelphia’,” cited above, n. 3.

22. Mirouer 13: 21-30, pp. 54-55: Qui dit—c'est assavoir ou septiesme chaptire—que ceste Ame n'a compte, n'a honte ne a honneur, n'a pouvreté ne a richisse, ne a aise ne a mesaise, ne a amour ne a hayne, ne a enfer ne a paradis.

    Reason goes on immediately to say:

    Et avec ce dit que ceste Ame a tout et n'a nient, elle scet tout et ne scet nient, elle veult tout et ne veult nient, comme it dit devant ou neufviesme chapitre. Et si ne desire, dit Raison, ne despit ne pouvreté, ne martire ne tribulacions, ne mesme ne sermons, ne jeunes ne oraisons, et si donne a nature tout ce qu'elle luy demande sans remors de conscience.

    “In addition to that, it says that this Soul has all and has nothing, knows all and knows nothing, wishes all and wishes nothing, as it says above in chapter nine, so that she is concerned neither with scorn nor poverty, martyrdom nor tribulations, masses nor sermons, fasts nor prayers. She gives to nature whatever it demands of her without remorse of conscience.”

    There are a number of important cognate passages concerning the state of the soul that has given up its will entirely, including the two mentioned above by Reason (chaps. 7 and 9).

    Mirouer 7: 3-5, pp. 24-25: Ceste Ame, dit Amour, ne fit compte ne de honte ne de honneur, de pouvreté ne de richesse, d'aise ne de mesaise, d'amour ne hayne, d'enfer ne de paradis.

    “This Soul, says Love, is concerned neither with shame nor honor, poverty nor wealth, comfort nor discomfort, love nor hate, hell nor paradise.”

    Mirouer 9:19-25, pp. 32-33: laquelle Ame ne desire ne ne desprise pourvreté ne tribulation, ne messe ne sermon, ne jeune ne oraison, et donne a Nature ce qu'il luy fault, sans remors de conscience; mais telle nature est si bien ordonnee par transformacion de unité d'Amour, a laquelle la voulenté de ceste Ame est conjoincte, que la nature ne demande chose qui soit deffendue.

    “This Soul neither desires nor despises poverty or tribulation, mass or sermon, fast or prayer. She gives to nature what it needs, without remorse of conscience. However, such a nature is so ordered through the transformation of the unity of Love, to which the will of this Soul is joined, that the nature does not ask anything that is forbidden.”

    Cf. Mirouer 16:20-24, pp. 66-67. After a long disquisition by Amour on the abolition of the will, Amour declares:

    Ceste fille de Syon ne desire ne messes ne sermons, ne jeunes ne oraisons.

    “This daughter of Zion desires neither mass nor sermons, fasts nor prayers.”

23. Mirouer 5: 9-10, pp. 18-21: qui ne face rien pour Dieu; qui ne laisse rien a faire pour Dieu.

24. Mirouer 41:3-10, pp. 128-29: Pource n'a telle Ame nulle mesaise de peché que elle fist oncques.

    “Such a soul has no worry about any sin she might have committed before.”

25. Mirouer 48:1-2, pp. 144-45: Comment l'Ame n'est mie franche, qui desire que la voulenté de Dieu soit faicte en elle a son honnour.

26. Mirouer 81: 1-5, pp. 230-31.

27. Mirouer 13: 33-43, pp. 56-57: Car mon entendement et mon sens et tout mon conseil est pour le mieulx que je sçay conseiller, que on desire despiz, pouvreté, et toutes manieres de tribulacions, et messes, et sermons, et jeunes, et oraisons, et que on ait paour de toutes manieres d'amour, quelles qu'elles soient, pour les perilz qui y pevent estre, et que on desire souverainement paradis, et que on ait paour d'enfer, et que on refuse toutes manieres de honneurs, et les choses temporelles, et toutes aises, en ostant a nature ce que elle demande, fors sans plus ce sans quoy elle ne pouroit vivre, a l'exemple de la souffrance et passion de nostre seigneur Jhesuchrist.

28. Mirouer 90: 28-30.

29. Mirouer 55: 1-30, pp. 158-61.

30. Mirouer 21:3-8, pp. 78-79. Ores, Amours, dit Raison, encore vous fais je une demande, car ce livre dit que ceste Ame prent congé aux Vertuz en tous faiz, et vous dictes que les Vertuz son tousjours avec telle Ames plus parfaictement que avec nul aultre. Ce sont deux paroles contraires, ce me semble, dit Raison; je ne les sçay entendre.

    The Latin uses the expression accepit licentiam for the French prent congé aux Vertuz: O Amor, ait Ratio, adhuc rogo vos de una petitione. Quia este liber dicit quod ista anima accepit licentiam a virtutibus omnino, et vos dicitis quod omnes virtutes sunt continue cum talibus animabus perfectius quam cum aliis quibuscumque. Ista sunt duo contraria, ut mihi videtur, ait Ratio, nescio bene intelligere.

    The language of “taking leave of virtues” appears in almost identical form in books 6 and 8.

31. Mirouer 21: 9-12, pp. 78-81: Je t'en appaiseray, dit Amour. C'est vérité que ceste Ame a prins congé aux Vertuz, quant a l'usage d'elles et quant au desir de ce que elles demandent, mais les vertuz n'ont mie prins congié a elles, car elles sont tousjours avec elles.

    See also 6:3-11, pp. 24-25, where the soul announces that she had long been a slave to the virtues, but is now liberated. Addressing herself directly to the virtues, she declares: but now “I take leave of of you forever [je prens congé de vous a tousjours]. My heart will be more free [plus franc] and more gay [plus gay].”

32. At this point of annihilation, the soul wills nothing and seeks nothing. The soul's disencumbering of itself of all will and all works reaches an extreme in the repeated assertions that the annihilated soul does not will to do anything for God and does not will to refrain from anything for God. For a critique of those who accuse Porete of quietism, see below, chap. 7.

33. The annihilated soul no longer wills the works of spiritual poverty or religious consolations in this life or in the afterlife. She takes leave of the virtues (finding no further “use” for them). She gives to nature all that nature desires without remorse of conscience. These claims make up the basic content of the surviving articles condemned at Porete's inquisition. The precise location within The Mirror of the articles that were condemned has been the object of controversy. The more controversial statements are repeated several times throughout The Mirror. After decades of persecution going back to Robert le Bougre, the Beguines had incorporated the persecution process itself into their mystical path and viewed the various procedures as stages along that path. Could it be that some sections of The Mirror were composed during the inquisitorial process and in reference to it? In chapters 13-21, mentioned above, Reason cites chapter and verse of what she calls “this book” (iste liber), along with the exact points found in the extant articles of condemnation. Reason's character and literary role require her to repeat the same questions; she must tire herself out by repetitive questioning before the soul is freed of her. Even so, one cannot help but wonder if this particular section, beyond such literary rationale and beyond the patience with repetition common in medieval texts, might reflect a response-in-progress to repeated inquisitorial objections and the inability of the “reason” of the inquisitors to understand the “double words” of Lady Love—or even if some passages may have been added by Porete's followers after her death as a direct response to the articles of inquisition.

    Article 15 of the condemnation suggests that of all the aspects of the soul's abandonment of the will, it was the nonwilling of the sacraments that seems to have touched off the strongest reaction from the Inquisition. While Colledge finds in chapter 15 of The Mirror (a dense discussion of the Eucharist) the text that prompted article 15, Verdeyen, “Le procès,” p. 52, argues that it was the more explicit statement in chapter 16:20: Ceste fille de Syon ne desire ne messes ne sermons, ne jeunes ne oraisons (“This daughter of Zion desires neither masses nor sermons, fasts nor prayers”). As cited above (n. 22), the formula in 16:20 is echoed in almost identical terms in chapters 9 and 13.

34. Mirouer 84:44-47, pp. 240-41: A Dieu en est de ceste oeuvre, qui fait en moy ses oeuvres. Je ne luy doy point de oeuvre, puisque luy mesmes oeuvre en moy; et se je y mectoye le mien, je defferoye son oeuvre.

    See also Mirouer 41: 11-16, pp. 128-29: “This soul, says Love, is not with herself, and she is therefore excused by everyone. And he in whom she is, performs his work through her, for which she is well acquitted, with the witness of God himself, says Love, who is the worker of this work on behalf of this soul, a soul who has no work whatsoever within her.”

    Ceste Ame, dit Amour, n'est mie avec elle, par quoi elle doit estre de tous excusee; et celluy en qui elle est fait son oeuvre par elle, pour laquelle chose elle en est bien acquictee, a tesmoing de Dieu mesmes, dit Amour, qui est ouvrier de ceste oeuvre ou prouffit de ceste Ame, laquelle n'a en elle point de oeuvre.

35. Mirouer 61: 27-31, pp. 178-79: 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. De ce ne scet nul parler, sinon la Deité mesmes.

36. Mirouer 89: 3-4, pp. 252-53: Cest Ame a tout donné par franchise de noblesse de l'ouevre de la Trinité.

37. Mirouer 7:11-25, pp. 26-27: Ainsoys est ce don donné du Treshault, en qui ceste creature est ravie par planté de congnoissance, et demeure rien en son entendement. Et telle ame, qui est devenue rien, a adonc tout et si n'a nyent, elle vieult tout et ne vieult nient, elle sçait tout et ne sçait nient.

    Et que peut ce estre, dame Amour, dit Raison, que ceste Ame peut vouloir ce que ce livre dit, qui desja a dit devant qu'elle n'a point de voulenté?

    Raison, dit Amour, ce n'est mie sa voulenté qui le vieult, mais ainçoys est la voulenté de Dieu, qui le vieult en elle; car ceste Ame ne demoure mie en Amour qui ce luy face vouloir par nul desirer. Ainçoys demoure Amour en elle, qui a prinse sa voulenté, et pource fait Amour sa voulenté d'elle, et adonc oeuvre Amour en elle sans elle.

38. Mirouer 39:26-29, pp. 124-25: Car Amour demoure en elle, qui l'muee en luy. Si que ceste ame mesme est Amour, et Amour n'a en luy point de discrection; mais en toutes choses convient avoir discrection, excepté en amour.

    Quia amor in ea manet qui eam in se mutavit. Ita quod talis anima adnichilata est amor, et amor not habet in se aliquam discretionem, licet in omnibus sit necessaria discretio praeterquam in amore.

39. Mirouer 52: 6-21, pp. 152-55.

40. Mirouer 25:10-19, pp. 90-93.

41. Mirouer 95: 14-18, pp. 266-67: Ses dons son aussi grans, comme est luy mesme qui a donné cecy, lequel don le meut de luy en luy mesmes. C'est mesmes Amour, et Amour peut quanqu'elle veult; a pource ne peut Crainte, ne Discrecion, ne Raison contre Amour rien dire.

42. This theme in Eckhart is discussed in detail in chap. 6, [Sells, Michael A., Mystical Languages of Unsaying. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994].

43. Mirouer 94:13-15.

44. Mirouer 50:3-6, pp. 148-149: Ceste Ame est emprainte en Dieu, et a sa vraye emprainture detenue par l'union d'amour; et a la maniere que la cire prent la forme du seel, en telle maniere a ceste Ame prinse l'emprainte de cest vray exemplaire.

45. See D. R. Sutherland, “The Love Meditation in Courtly Literature,” in Studies in Medieval French Presented to Alfred Ewert (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961, pp.165-93, especially p. 165.

46. Mirouer 88: 53-58, pp. 250-53.

47. See Zum Brunn and Epiney-Burgard, Women Mystics, p. 60.

48. Hadewijch: The Complete Works, p. 254.

49. Ibid, p. 255. I have changed the capitalization convention of the translation to be coherent with the conventions used throughout this study.

50. Ibid, p. 136, from poem XIX. For a recent examination of the literary character and controversial authorship of the mengeldichten, from which the Hadewijch passages in this study are taken, see S. M. Murk-Jansen, The Measure of Mystic Thought: A Study of Hadewijch's Mengeldichten (Göppingen: Kümmerle Verlag, 1991).

51. From Zum Brunn and Epiney-Burgard, Women Mystics, pp. 138-39, from Poem XXVI. See also Hadewijch d'Anvers Poèmes des béguines traduits du moyen-neérlandais, ed. J. B. Porion (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1954).

52. Mirouer 58: 8-11, pp. 168-69: Mais pou ce luy dure. Ca c'est une ouverture a maniere de esclar et de hastive closure, ou l'en ne peut longuement demourer, ne elle n'eust oncques mere, qui de ce sceust parler.

53. Mirouer 58:12-23, pp. 168-69: L'ouverture ravissable de l'espandement de celle ouverture fait l'Ame, après sa closure, de la paix de son ouevre si franche et si noble et si descombree de toutes choses (tant comme la paix dure, que est donnee en ceste ouverture), que qui se garderoit aprés telle avanture franchement, ou cinquiesme estat, san cheoir ou quart, se trouveroit, car ou quart a voulonté et ou cinquiesme n'en a point. Et pource que ou cinquiesme estat, dont ce livre parle, n'a point de voulenté—ou l'Ame demoure après l'oeuvre de Loingprés Ravissable que nous appellons esclar a maniere de ouverture et de hastive closure,—nul ne pouroit croire, dit Amour, la paix sur paix de paix que telle Ame reçoit, se ce n'estoit il mesmes.

54. Mirouer 80:35-37, pp. 228-29: Le sourhaulcement ravissable qui me sourprent et joinct au millieu de la mouelle de Divine Amour en quoy je suis fondue, dit ceste Ame.

    The Soul answers Reason's question as to who is her closest neighbor. She goes on to say that one should remain silent about this being, since it is impossible to say anything of it.

55. Mirouer 90: 28-30, pp. 256-57: Telles gens font le contraire de la sensualiuté, ou aultrement ilz rencherroiennt en perdicion de telle vie, se ilz ne vivoient au contraire de leur plaisance.

56. Mirouer 90: 31-37, pp. 256-57: Et ceulx qui sont frans, font tout le contraire. Car, tout ainsi comme il leur convient faire en vie d'esperit tout le contraire de leur voulenté, se ilz ne veulent perdre paix, ainsi, par le contraire, font les frans tout ce qu'il leur plaist, se ilz ne veulent perdre paix, puisque ilz sont venuz en l'estat de franchise, c'est a dire, qu'ilz soient cheuz des Vertuz en Amour, et d'Amour en nient.

57. See Edmund Colledge and Romana Guarnieri, “The Glosses by ‘M.N’. and Richard Methley to The Mirror of Simple Souls,” Archivio italiano per la storia della pietá 5 (1968): 357-81.

58. This argument entails an intricate set of apophatic transformations difficult to explain during an inquistorial process bent on judging articles as single propositions taken out of context. Cf. the last section of chap. 6 [Sells, Michael A., Mystical Languages].

59. In The Greater Hekhalot; see G. Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1941), pp. 46-47.

60. See the examples from Hallaj and Niffari, M. Sells, “Bewildered Tongue: The Semantics of Mystical Union in Islam,” in M. Idel and B. McGinn, eds., Mystical Union and Monotheistic Faith (New York: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 101-15.

61. See R. Ruether, “Misogyny and Virginal Feminism in the Fathers of the Church,” in idem, ed., Images of Women in the Jewish and Christian Traditions (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), pp. 150-83. The following passages cited by Ruether are particularly germane to Porete's view of nature, love, and the “fall of love”: the first, on p. 161, from Jerome to the virgin Demetrias, Ep., 130.10: “You must act against nature or rather above nature if you are to forswear your natural functions, to cut off your own root, to cull no fruit but that of virginity, to abjure the marriage bed, to shun intercourse with men and, while in the body, to live as though out of it”; and the second, on p. 176, from Augustine's De Sermone Dom. in Monte, 41: “A good Christian is one who in the same woman loves the creature of God whom he desires to be transformed and renewed, but hates in her the corruptible and mortal conjugal connection, sexual intercourse and all that pertains to her as a wife” (translation reworded to clarify grammar). For such views as they were reflected in twelfth-century Christianity, see Marie-Thérèse d'Alverny, “Comment les théologiens et les philosophes voient la femme,” Cahiers de civilisations médiévale 20 (1977): 105-26. Cf. Augustine, Ad Imperfectum Contra Julianum 6,25: “Nature, which the first human being harmed, is miserable. … What passed to women was not the burden of Eve's fertility, but of her transgression. Now fertility operates under this burden, having fallen away from God's blessing.” Trans. Elaine Pagels in Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (New York: Random House, 1988), p. 133. For a comparison of Porete and Eckhart on the specific issue of fertility, see chap. 7 [Sells, Michael A., Mystical Languages].

62. Colledge has suggested that Marguerite was confused in the way the stages were presented and that the seven-stage schema contradicts another schema in The Mirror: that of the three deaths. Hollywood shows, however, that the three deaths and seven stages fit together well. The first two stages correspond to the life of grace born of the death of sin. The second two stages correspond to the life of the spirit born of the death of nature. The final stages correspond to the death of the spirit and the death of the life of works. Stages one and three are stages of contentment with one's position. Stages two and four are stages of struggle to move beyond it. A. Hollywood, “The Soul as Virgin Wife,” chap. 2 (cited above, n. 17).

63. Mirouer 81: 3-11, pp. 230-31: Or a ceste Ame, dit Amour, son droit non du nient en quoy elle demoure. Et puisque elle est nient, il ne luy chault de nient, ne d'elle ne de se proesmes ne de Dieu mesmes. Car elle est si petite, que elle ne se peut trouver; et toute chose creee luy est si loing, qu'elle ne le peut sentire; et Dieu est si grant, que elle n'en peut rien comprendre; et pour tel nient est elle cheue en certaineté de nient savoir et en certaineté de nient vouloir. Et ce nient, dont nous parlons, dit Amour, luy donne le tout.

64. Mirouer 51:28 (Latin, 51:24). The full passage, 51:17-30, pp. 150-53, reads: This is the end of my work, says this soul, to will nothing always. For just as I will nothing, says this soul, I am alone in him without myself, and completely freed, and when I will anything, she says, I am with myself and I lose my freedom. But when I wish nothing and have lost everything out of my will, then I lack nothing. Free being maintains me. I will nothing in anything.

    O very precious Hester, says Love, who has lost all your usages, and through this loss have the usage of doing nothing, you are truly precious. For in truth this usage and this loss is made in the nothingness of your love, and in this nothingness, says Love, you are passed out and remain dead. But you live, beloved, says Love, in his will in all. That is his chamber and it pleases him for you to stay there.

65. Mirouer 41:7-10, pp. 128-29.

66. Mirouer 87:3-4, pp. 246-47.

67. Mirouer 87: 11-13, pp. 246-47: Hay, Dieux, dit Raison, comment ose l'en ce dire? Je ne l'ose escouter. Je deffaulx vrayement, dame Ame, en vous oïr: le cueur m'est failly. Je n'ay point de vie.

68. Mirouer 87: 14-25: pp. 248-49: Helas! pourquoy n'est pieça, dit ceste Ame, ceste morte! Car tant comme je vous ay eue, dame Raison, je n'ay peu tenir franchement mon heritage, et ce qui estoit et est mien; mais maintenant je le puis tenir franchement, puisque je vous ay d'amour a mort navree.

    Or est morte Raison, dit ceste Ame.

    Donc diray je, dit Amour, ce que Raison diroit, se elle estoit en vous en vie. Elle demanderoit a vous, amye de nous, dit Amour a ceste Ame qui est mesmes Amour et nulle aultre chose que Amour, depuis que Amour eut / de / sa divine bonté Raison et les oeuvres des Vertuz dessoubz ses piez gictee et a mort menee, sans nul retour.

69. For one of several references, see Mirouer 9:29-39, pp. 34-35, where Dame Amour places this entendement beyond the reach of maistres de sens de nature, maistres d'escripture, and ceulx qui demourent en amour de l'obedience des vertuz. In the prelude, even the beguines are included in the list (122: 96-101, p. 344):

    Beguines dient que je erre,
              prestres clers et prescheurs,
    Augustin et carmes,
              et les freres mineurs.

70. See chap. 12 of The Mirror where the important concept of the “understanding of love” is figured as a character in the court of love, as La Haultesse d'Entendement d'Amour, pp. 49-52.

71. The literature in this area is large. For one important study, see Kathryn Gravdal, Ravishing Maidens: Writing Rape in Medieval French Literature and Law (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991. Of particular interest (pp. 1-12) is Gravdal's excursus on the semantic field and legal definitions of raptus.

72. This expression occurs earlier in Beatrice of Nazareth, where love for deity is spoken of as “without a why,” sonder enich waeromme: Seven manieren, II, p. 7, ll. 4-6. See Zum Brunn and Epiney-Burgard, Women Mystics, p. 81, and n. 24, p. 198.

73. Mirouer 100:22-25, pp. 276-77: Il n'a nient plus a faire de luy ne d'aultruy ne de Dieu mesmes, nient plus que se il ne fust mie; si que il est.

74. Mirouer 111: 10-21, pp. 302-3:

    Love: But he who has peace, stays willing nothing there where he was before he had a will. Divine has nothing “for which” it might reprehend him.

    O God, how well said! says the freed soul. But it is appropriate for him to do this without me, just as he created me without me of his divine bonté. Now I am, says this soul, a soul created of him without me, to work between him and me many works of virtue, him for me and me for him, as long as I flow back into him. I cannot be in him until he places me with him without me, just as he placed me without me of himself. It is the uncreated bonté that loves the bonté which she has created. Now the uncreated bonté has her own free will. She gives us our own free will of her bonté, outside of her power, without a why, except for ourselves and the very being of bonté.

    Hee, Dieux, comme c'est bien dit! Dit l'Ame Enfranchie; mais il convient qu'il face ce sans moy, ainsi comme il me creat sans moy de sa bonté divine. Or suis je, dit ceste Ame, ame cree / e / de luy sans moy, pour o /e /uvrer entre luy et moy fortes oeuvres de vertuz, luy pour moy et moy pour luy, tant que je reflusse en luy; et si ne puis estre en luy, se il ne m'y mect sans moy de luy, aisi comme it me fist san moy de lui mesme. C'est la Bonté increee qui ayme la bonté qu'elle a creee. Or a Bonté increee, de son propre, franche voulenté; que nous donne de sa bonté aussi franche voulenté, hors de sa puissance, sans nul pourquoy, sinon que pour nous mesmes, et pour estre de sa bonté.

75. Mirouer 89:1-11, pp. 252-53. See [Sells, Michael A., Mysical Languages], chap. 7 for the French text and more detailed discussion.

76. See [Sells, Michael A., Mysical Languages], chap. 7, for further discussion of this “exchange of wills” in Porete and in consonant texts from Meister Eckhart.

77. Mirouer 91: 7-23, pp. 256-59: C'est droit, dit Amour, sa voulenté est nostre: elle a passé la Rouge Mer, ses ennemis son dedans demourez. Son plaisir est nostre voulenté, par la purté de l'unité du vouloir de la Deité, ou nous l'avons enclose. Sa voulenté est nostre, car elle est cheue de grace en parfection de l'oeuvre des Vertuz, et des Vertuz en Amour, de d'Amour en Nient, et de Nient en Clarifiement de Dieu, qui se voit des yeulx de sa majesté, que en ce point l'a de luy clarifiee. Et si est se remise en luy, que elle ne voit ne elle ne luy; et pource il se voit tout seul, de sa bonté divine. Il sera de luy en telle bonté ce qu'il savoit de luy ains que elle ne fust mie, quant il luy donna sa bonté, dont il la fist dame. Ce fut Franche Voulenté, qu'il ne peut de luy ravoir sans le plaisir de l'Ame. Or l'a maintenant, sans nul pourquoy, en tel point comme il l'avoit, ains que telle en fust dame. Ce n'est nul fors qu'il; nul n'ayme fors qu'il, car nul n'est fors que luy, et pource ayme tout seul, et se voit tout seul, et loe tout seul de son estre mesme.

    The Latin offers an interesting and clearer alternative to the difficult passage (91: 13-17) beginning with Et si est si remise (“And she is so returned)”:

    Et est ita in ipsum resoluta quod non videt nec se nec ipsum. Et ideo ipse Deus videt se solum sua divina bonitate. Ipse ita se rehabet de ipsa in tali bonitate, sicut se habebat de se, antequam esset, quando dedit ei suam bonitatem de qua fecit eam dominam.

78. Mirouer 89:1-11, pp. 252-53. This text and the issues of exchange of will and living without a why are examined in more detail [Sells, Michael A., Mysical Languages], chap. 7.

79. The Latin gives intermedium for entredeux. The French entredeux provides a more personal play—“go-between” or “interloper”—upon the giving up of all mediums (moyens, intermedium). Mirouer 93: 23-24, pp. 262-63: Et pource eut elle, sans nul entredeux en l'ame d'elle, en ung corps mortel de la Trinité glorieuse vie.

80. An yakūn kamā kāna idh kāna qabla an yakūna. See Abdel Kader, The Life, Personality and Writings of Al-Junayd (London: Luzac, 1962), Arabic text, pp. 56-57.

81. Sahl ibn ‘Abdallah at-Tustarī, Tafsīr al-Qur'ān al-‘Azīm (Cairo: Dār al-Kutub al-Gharbiyya al-Kubrā, 1329/1911). pp. 40-41. For a translation of the relevant passages and a discussion of this important theory in Tustari, see Gerhard Böwering, The Mystical Vision of Existence in Classical Islam: The Qur'ānic Hermeneutics of the Sūfī Sahl at-Tustarī, d. 283/896 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1980), pp. 153-57.

82. See M. K. Pope, From Latin to Modern French with Especial Consideration of Anglo-Norman (New York: Barnes and Noble, 1934, 1961), pp. 322-24, especially on the confusion of lui with li (#840:1), p. 324.

83. Mirouer 100: 27-32, pp. 276-77: Pource l'appelle je clere, que elle surmonte l'aveugle vie adnientie; l'aveugle soustient a ceste cy ses piez; la clere est la plus noble et la plus gentile. Elle ne scet qui soit, ne Dieu ne homme; car elle n'est mie; mais Dieu le scet de luy, en luy, pour elle, d'elle mesmes [Latin: Sed Deus scit hoc de se in ipsa, pro seipsa de seipso]. Telle dame ne quiert mais Dieu; elle n'a de quoy, elle n'a de luy que faire. It ne lui fault mie; pourquoy le querroit elle donc?

    See Mirouer 81: 21-22, pp. 230-31: If God works his work in her, it is of him in her without her for him/her: Se Dieu fait son oeuvre en elle, c'est de luy en elle, sans elle, pour elle. // Si Deus facit in ea opus suum, hoc est de se in ipsa propter se sine ipsa.

    The ambiguity recurs in verses 24-27 of the same passage. A similar ambiguity occurs in Mirouer 95: 14-16: (translated and discussed above, 124: Ses dons son aussi grans comme est luy mesmes qui a donné cecy, lequel don le meut de luy en luy mesmes // Ista enim dona sunt ita magna, sicut est ipsemet, cuius sunt quae donat isti animae. Quae etiam dona mutant eam in illummet propter ipsam.

84. The historical point was made by Denis de Rougement, Love in the Western World, trans. Montgomery Belgion (New York, 1956), though Rougement's theoretical points are flawed by a substantive understanding of deity and of union. For a recent discussion of the issue, see Maria Rosa Menocal, The Arabic Role in Medieval Literary History: A Forgotten Heritage (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1987).

85. Mirouer 93:13-20, pp. 260-63: especially 16-17: Elle ne savoit mie, quant elle le queroit, que Dieu fust partout.

86. Mirouer 93: 8-13, pp. 260-61: Mais quant elle fut ou desert, Amour l'emprint, qui l'adnientit, et pource oeuvra adonc Amour en elle pour elle sans elle, et vesquit adonc de divine vie, qui luy fist avoir glorieuse vie. Adonc trouva elle Dieu en elle, sans le querir, et aussi elle n'ot de quoy, puisque Amour l'ot emprinse.

87. See Ioan Culianu's discussion of the medieval understanding of life as maesta, in Eros and Magic in the Renaissance, trans. M. Cook (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), originally published as Eros et magie à la Renaissance, 1984.

88. Chap. 7, [Sells, Michael A., Mysical Languages], will take up in detail the remarkable consonances and contrasts between the writings of Porete and Eckhart. Special attention will be given to Eckhart's inversion of the standard Martha and Mary hierarchy, his equation of courtly nobility with the common and equal, and his account of the “work” that takes place within the soul, and to how these Eckhartian positions play upon Porete's treatment of the same issues.

89. See chap. 15 of The Mirror, for example, where memory, understanding, and love in the annihilated soul are associated with the father, the son, and the spirit. De Longchamp (Le Miroir, p. 242, n. to 9:1) sees in this trilogy the reflection of Augustinian trinitarian anthropology. De Longchamp points to chapters 9, 10, 57, 80, 92, 95 in particular as reflecting the “Augustinian climate” that permeates The Mirror.

90. Mirouer 21:44-47, pp. 82-83: 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. Si que ceste precieuse amye de moy est aprinse et menee de moy sans elle, car elle est muee en moy.