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 an...

"Trinity, higher than any being, any divinity, any goodness! Lead us up beyond unknowing and light, up to the farthest, highest peak of mystic scripture, where the mysteries of God's Word lie simple, absolute and unchangeable in the brilliant darkness of a hidden silence." So begins The Mystical Theology , a short treatise written about fifteen hundred years ago by an author who hid behind another man's name. Its few pages shaped the mystical thought of the Eastern and Western churches and still draw readers who seek a way of knowing God that goes through silence rather than argument. A Name Borrowed from Athens The writings are signed "Dionysius the Areopagite." In the Acts of the Apostles, Paul preaches in Athens, and among the few who believe is Dionysius, a member of the council on the hill of the Areopagus (Acts 17:34). The author of the treatises wanted readers to believe that he was that man, a direct disciple of the apostle. For almost a thousan...

The Transfiguration: A visual representation of the uncreated Tabor Light sought by the Hesychast.

Byzantine art is not primitive art that failed to achieve Western Renaissance naturalism. It is a sophisticated theological visual language that deliberately chose its conventions — the frontal gaze, the gold background, the stylized drapery, the elongated proportions — because those conventions best served its purpose: not the representation of the visible world but the manifestation of the invisible one. The icon (from the Greek eikon , image) is a window — a point where the divine reality becomes visible in the material world. The mosaic covering the dome of a Byzantine church is not a picture of heaven but an actual portion of it, the gold tesserae catching and transforming light to create a space in which the boundary between the earthly and the divine has been dissolved. The specific conventions of Byzantine art encode a theology of matter: that matter, properly arranged in obedience to the divine order, can become transparent to the sacred.