Marguerite Porete and the Mirror of Simple Souls
On the first of June, 1310, a woman was burned at the Place de Grève in Paris, beside the Seine. Chroniclers of the time record that she went to the fire without a word, and that the crowd, moved by her calm, wept.
She was Marguerite Porete, a woman from the region of Hainaut, now in Belgium and northern France, and her crime was a book. For several centuries it was thought lost. It was found again, and it is now counted among the most daring works of medieval spirituality: The Mirror of Simple Souls.
A Woman Without a Cloister
Almost nothing is known of Marguerite's early life. She is described as a beguine, a member of the lay communities of women who lived a religious life without joining an official order. Beguines worked, prayed and cared for the sick in their own houses, and they were admired by many and distrusted by others, because they escaped the usual control of the Church over religious women.
Sometime around 1300, Marguerite wrote the Mirouer des simples âmes anienties, "The Mirror of Simple Souls Who Are Annihilated." She wrote it in Old French, in the language of ordinary people and not in Latin, a choice that was bold in itself.
A Dialogue of Love
The book is written as a dramatic conversation. Its characters are personified qualities: Lady Love, who speaks for the divine, the Soul, and Reason, who defends the usual ways of piety, with its rules, works and virtues. Lady Love is the true authority.
She guides the Soul along a path of seven stages, from the obedience of ordinary Christians to a final state in which the soul no longer wills anything of its own.
Marguerite calls this last state annihilation. The soul has emptied itself of will and desire, and so it is wholly open to God. In one famous passage, the free soul takes leave of the virtues, thanking them for their service but saying it no longer needs them, because Love now lives within it.
She also speaks of "Holy Church the Little," the visible hierarchy, and "Holy Church the Great," the community of free souls.
What She Meant, and What Was Feared
Reading this today, it is easy to see both the beauty and the danger. For Marguerite, the soul that has surrendered completely to God does not sin, because it wills only what God wills. This is not a license for immorality, as her enemies charged, but a description of perfect love.
Yet the Church authorities saw a different implication: if the free soul no longer needs the sacraments, the priests or the rules, then the Church itself is unnecessary.
A related movement was soon being condemned. At the Council of Vienne (1311–1312), shortly after her death, the Church attacked the supposed errors of the "Free Spirit" among beguines and their male counterparts, the beghards. Whether Marguerite belonged to such a movement is doubtful. Her writing is a work of devotion and theology, and not a program of rebellion.
Trial and Fire
Around 1306, the bishop of Cambrai had her book burned in public at Valenciennes and forbade her to circulate it. She disregarded the order. She went on sharing the text, and she may have shown it to respected clergy who approved of it. Eventually she was arrested and brought before the inquisitor of France, the Dominican William of Paris, who was also the confessor of King Philip IV.
She spent about eighteen months in prison and refused to take the oath required of her or to answer questions. A panel of theologians from the University of Paris examined her book and extracted propositions they judged heretical. In May 1310 she was declared a relapsed heretic and handed over to the secular authorities. A man who shared her fate, Guiard de Cressonessart, was condemned with her.
A Book That Would Not Die
The ban did not kill the book. It was copied and passed around anonymously, translated into Latin, Italian and Middle English, and read in religious houses for generations by people who did not know the author. It was only in 1946 that the Italian scholar Romana Guarnieri recognized the work in a Latin manuscript as Marguerite's. The Mirror is now available in modern English, in a translation by Ellen Babinsky from 1993.
Some have compared Marguerite's ideas to those of Meister Eckhart, who was in Paris shortly after her execution and was himself accused of heresy in 1326. Whether he knew her book is debated, and the similarities may come from a common mystical tradition.
Closing
Marguerite Porete wrote of a love that goes beyond reasons, rules and even virtues. Whether one reads her as a mystic, a heretic or both, her quiet courage is hard to forget. She is a reminder that the history of spirituality has been written not only by bishops and theologians but also by laywomen with a pen, and that an idea can survive the fire that tries to destroy it.
Related Esoteric Inquiries
- The Book of the Holy Hierotheos: The Ascent and Descension of the Divine Mind
- Pseudo-Dionysius and the Path of Divine Darkness
- The Valley of Annihilation: The Final Dissolution and the Eternal Presence
Lux Esoterica.
2026.
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