Marguerite Porete

The Mirror of Simple Souls is a dialogue, chiefly between Love, Reason and the Soul, describing seven stages by which a soul is brought to nothing. Its argument is that a soul wholly taken over by divine love has no will of its own left to exercise, and that such a soul has therefore passed beyond the point where the virtues govern it: it does not need them, because it can no longer want anything other than what God wants. Reason, in the dialogue, is repeatedly scandalised, and eventually dies of the shock.

Read one way this is standard apophatic teaching in a vivid form, and the annihilation it describes has close relatives in Eckhart, in the Rhineland preachers, and further off in Sufi accounts of the passing away of the self. Read another way it appears to say that an advanced soul is not bound by the church's discipline or by moral rule, which is precisely the charge later attached to the Free Spirit heresy, and the book's vocabulary was used against people accused of it for two centuries.

The book itself declines to settle the reading. It is written to be difficult, it warns off readers who will take it literally, and it distinguishes carefully between souls that are annihilated and souls that merely say they are. That distinction is easy to lose in summary, and losing it is what the condemnation did.

Marguerite Porete was warned early. A bishop of Cambrai had a copy of her book burned in front of her and forbade her to circulate it again on pain of relapse into heresy. She sent it to other churchmen, obtained approving opinions from three of them, and went on distributing it, including to a bishop. Arrested and brought to Paris, she was examined by the inquisitor of France, William of Paris, and she refused to take the oath or answer any question, maintaining that silence for a year and a half in prison.

A commission of twenty one theologians of the University of Paris was given a set of extracted propositions, without her name and without their context, and judged them heretical. As a relapsed heretic who would not respond, she was handed to the secular authority and burned in the Place de Greve on 1 June 1310. A chronicler present recorded that her composure at the execution moved the crowd to tears. Her case ran in the same months and before the same inquisitor as the proceedings against the Templars.

Her book did not die with her. It circulated anonymously in Old French, Middle English, Latin and Italian, was read in monasteries as an orthodox devotional work, and was even printed in modern times without anybody knowing who had written it. Only in 1946 did the Italian scholar Romana Guarnieri match the surviving text against the propositions condemned in 1310 and restore it to its author, so that a book which had been safely read for six centuries turned out to be the book a woman was burned for.