Marguerite Porete

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On 1 June 1310, in the Place de Grève at Paris, the provost burned a woman from Hainaut for a book she had written and would not unwrite. She had been warned once already; years before, a bishop had set the same book alight in front of her and ordered her never to copy it again. She copied it again. When the inquisitor put her under oath, she would not swear. When the masters of theology examined her articles, she would not answer them. She had spent roughly eighteen months in a Paris cell in silence, and she went to the fire in silence — the chronicler of Saint-Denis recorded that her composure moved the crowd to tears. Her name was Marguerite Porete, and the book was Le Mirouer des simples ames anienties et qui seulement demourent en vouloir et desir d’amour — the mirror of simple souls annihilated, who dwell only in willing and desiring love.

First page of the sole surviving Old French witness of the Mirror of Simple Souls (Chantilly, Musée Condé, MS 157, fifteenth century) — Bibliothèque et archives du château de Chantilly, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The book outlived her by six centuries without her name attached to it. That is the central fact of her case, and the strangest. The pyre at the Grève did not destroy the Mirror; it only severed it from its author. The text went on circulating — in Latin, in Middle English, in Tuscan — read and copied and praised by people who had no idea a woman had been killed for it, until an Italian historian, reading in the Vatican Library in 1946, matched the manuscript in front of her to the articles transcribed from the trial. Marguerite Porete is the only medieval woman whose major theological work survived entire despite her execution as a heretic. It survived by going anonymous.

The book before the trial

The Mirror is not a record of visions, and reading it as one misses everything. It is a long allegorical dialogue in vivid Old French, rhymed and unrhymed by turns, in which personified figures debate the soul’s road to God. The three principals are Amour (Love), Raison (Reason), and l’Ame (the Soul), with a chorus of supporting voices — Faith, Hope, Charity, Truth, the Holy Spirit, and Holy Church among them. The form is the first doctrine. Reason asks her questions, and Love answers them, and again and again Reason cannot bear the answers. In the course of the book Reason actually dies of what she hears. Love does not console her; Love lets her die, because the soul who is to be annihilated must lose the very categories Reason runs on. The argument Porete is making is that speculative theology cannot finally be done as disputation, because its object is precisely what disputation cannot survive. She wrote, in other words, against the form of the schools that would later condemn her, and she wrote it in French, for readers who would never sit in those schools.

She called herself a clergesse — a lay learned woman, with no vows, no rule, no abbess. She was a beguine, one of the unenclosed religious women of the Low Countries and the Rhineland who, from the late twelfth century, lived in private houses or small communities, supported themselves by their own work, and answered to no monastic superior. Her beguine-mysticism is the supreme philosophical instance of that movement’s vernacular theology, and her book reaches everywhere a learned laywoman of Hainaut around 1290 could reach: the courtly love-poetry of fin’amors and the Roman de la Rose, the letters of Paul, and the Cistercian theology of love that descends from Bernard of Clairvaux and William of Saint-Thierry. From that last current she took the idea of an image of God set in the soul deeper than any of the soul’s operations — and pushed it past where the Cistercians stopped.

A beguine in the habit of the unenclosed religious women of the Low Countries, woodcut from Des dodes dantz, Lübeck, 1489 — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Adnientement: the doctrine of the annihilated soul

The heart of the Mirror is the doctrine of adnientement, annihilation, and to hear it as humility or self-effacement or ascetic discipline is to hear nothing. Porete is making an ontological claim, and a precise one. The soul has being in God before it has being in itself. Its created selfhood, the contingent self acquired at creation, is not the deepest thing about it; beneath that self lies the soul’s uncreated being in God, the being it had before it was made. Perfection, for Porete, is the soul’s return to that ground — not the destruction of the creature in any literal sense, but the unveiling of a self that is no self as the true subject all along. This is the same order of claim that, in different idioms, runs through the apophatic tradition at large — the ground (Grunt) in Meister Eckhart, and, far outside Latin Christendom, the passing-away of fanāʾ and the not-this of neti neti that recur across mysticism wherever a contemplative reaches the edge of what can be said. The convergence is structural, not a borrowing: at that edge, the formulation the surrounding orthodoxy reads as the negation of the person is the one the contemplative reads as the only true account of what the person always was.

The book maps the return as a sevenfold ascent, set out most fully in its final chapters. The first state is the soul who keeps God’s commandments. The second goes beyond them to the evangelical counsels — poverty, chastity, obedience. The third performs works of perfection and, harder, mortifies its own will, surrendering it to another’s. The fourth is drawn by the height of love into interior contemplation and rests there in sweetness — and here Porete plants a warning, because many take this resting-place for the summit, and it is not. The fifth is the turn: the soul sees, in a spreading flood of divine light, that of itself it is nothing and that God is all in it; its will is lifted out of it and set wholly in God, and it begins to act not by its own agency but by God’s. The sixth is a flash, an estincelle, in which the soul sees nothing but God in itself and itself in God — an instant too bright to hold in this life, that falls back into the fifth. The seventh is glory, kept for the soul beyond death, of which, she says, we will understand nothing until the soul has left the body.

The proposition that scandalized her judges falls inside this scheme and is exact rather than lawless: the annihilated soul, she wrote, takes leave of the Virtues — gives them their leave, prent congié des Vertuz — and is no longer in their service. Read in the architecture of the seven states, this denies the virtues nothing. It makes a claim about who exercises them and how. The virtues are external to a soul that still acts by its own will and must be commanded to their works; but in the fifth and sixth states the soul has become Love, and Love does not need to be commanded to its own nature. What is duty for Reason has become nature for the annihilated soul. This is Pauline freedom from the law transposed into a mystical key — as the law is fulfilled in the love that exceeds it, so the virtues are fulfilled in the soul that has turned into what they were laboring to produce. The companion claim — that such a soul neither desires nor disdains poverty or tribulation, neither Mass nor sermon, neither fast nor prayer — belongs to the same register: this is a soul for which desiring and disdaining no longer apply, because it has passed beyond the will whose whole office is to desire. Vouloir nient, to will nothing: the phrase is the doctrine in three words, and it is annihilation read as meaning, never as a method anyone is being taught to perform.

Porete drives the ontology home with a distinction that her inquisitor found more dangerous than any single article. She separates Saincte Eglise la Petite, Holy Church the Little, from Saincte Eglise la Grant, Holy Church the Great. The Little Church is the visible institution governed by Reason — its prelates, sacraments, theologians, its disputed articles, the very Church that will hand her to the fire. The Great Church is the hidden body of annihilated souls, governed by Divine Love directly, of which the Little Church is the partial and outward expression. This is not contempt for the institution; the Little Church is genuine, and to be honored. But its authority ends where Reason’s knowledge ends, and the souls of the fifth and sixth states stand under no ecclesial mediator at all. That, from the inquisitor’s chair, was the unanswerable provocation — not rebellion, which can be tried, but a religion the tribunal could not encompass. Her doctrine is, in the strict sense, an apophatic theology, heir to the negative way that descends through Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite into the whole of Latin Christian mysticism: God known by the unsaying of every name, and the soul known, at last, by the unsaying of itself.

The two burnings and the silence

Almost nothing of Porete’s life survives outside the trial dossier; she was probably born around 1250 in the County of Hainaut, in the Picard-Walloon country between French and Flemish speech. The first time the Mirror burned, she was watching. Sometime between 1296 and 1306 the Bishop of Cambrai, Guy II of Colmieu, condemned the book and had it burned publicly at Valenciennes in her presence, warning her that to circulate it again would make her a relapsed heretic. She circulated it again — and did not merely circulate it; she sent a copy to a new bishop for theological approval, and gathered endorsements from learned readers, including a Franciscan and a Cistercian, who found nothing in it against the faith. She was rearrested, and by 1308 her case had passed to Paris and to the Dominican inquisitor of France, William Humbert, confessor to King Philip IV — the same inquisitor then prosecuting the Knights Templar. She refused the oath. She refused to answer. She accepted excommunication rather than cooperate, and held to the silence for the better part of two years.

On 11 April 1310 — recorded in the dossier under the Easter style as 1309, which converts to 1310 — twenty-one regent masters of theology at the University of Paris met at Saint-Mathurin and judged a set of fifteen articles extracted from the book. They declared it heretical without ever examining its author. Only fragments of the fifteen survive; two are quoted verbatim in the inquisitorial record — the soul’s taking leave of the Virtues, and its indifference to the consolations and gifts of God — and a third is paraphrased in the continuation of the chronicle of Guillaume de Nangis: that the annihilated soul can grant to nature whatever it asks, without remorse. On 31 May, in the field of the Grève, Humbert declared her a relapsed heretic and handed her to the secular arm; the provost burned her the next day. She was burned beside a man tried in the same dossier but for a different thing — Guiard of Cressonessart, a beghard who had presented himself as her defender and styled himself the Angel of Philadelphia from the Book of Revelation, charged with guarding the elect in the last days. Guiard, after refusing and then confessing, was not killed but walled up for life in close imprisonment. Only Porete went to the fire, and only Porete had written a book.

Burning of heretics in the presence of the King of France, an illumination of an earlier Paris execution from the Grandes Chroniques de France (c. 1255–1260) — Bibliothèque nationale de France, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The trial documents survive chiefly in the Paris chronicle manuscripts and were first transcribed by Paul Fredericq in his Corpus documentorum inquisitionis haereticae pravitatis Neerlandicae at the end of the nineteenth century — the recovery, from the archive, of a case that had become anonymous along with its text.

The condemnation that became a heresy

Sixteen months after Porete died, the Council of Vienne convened under Clement V. Out of it came two decrees that turned her case into a category. Cum de quibusdam mulieribus declared the beguine status itself perpetually prohibited and wholly abolished, moving against irregular religious women who lived without an approved rule. And Ad nostrum listed eight errors of what it called an abominable sect of the spirit of liberty — that the perfected become impeccable and can grow no further in grace; that they need not fast or pray; that they are subject to no human obedience or precept; that they can reach final beatitude in this life; that virtuous acts belong only to the imperfect, and the perfect soul dismisses the virtues; that they need show no reverence at the elevation of the Host. The sixth and eighth articles are nearly verbatim transcriptions of Porete’s condemned propositions. The historian Robert Lerner called Ad nostrum the birth certificate of the so-called heresy of the free spirit — and the phrase carries a sharp irony, because a birth certificate records something that did not exist before the document. There may have been no organized sect of free spirits at all; what there demonstrably was, was a book, and a council that built a heresy partly out of its sentences. The same canon law that abolished the beguines drew its definition of their error from the most rigorous beguine ever to write.

Six anonymous centuries

By name, the Mirror was burned twice and buried in the trial record. As a text, it slipped its name and traveled. No medieval reader of any surviving manuscript knew Porete had written it. It passed through the fifteenth century as an anonymous spiritual classic, sometimes credited in the margins to Ruusbroec or to a nameless ancient holy woman. A Latin translation, the Speculum simplicium animarum, was made within a few decades of the original — perhaps within Porete’s lifetime — and ran through Carthusian and Cistercian networks; its fullest digitized witness is the Vatican manuscript Vat. lat. 4355. A late-fourteenth-century Middle English translator who signed himself only with the initials M.N. rendered it into English and added fifteen glosses defending its orthodoxy, anxiously, at the places he feared a reader might stumble. One of his manuscripts — British Library Additional MS 37790, the Amherst codex — is the same book that preserves the only copy of the short text of Julian of Norwich: two English women’s mystical works, one named and one not, bound by accident into a single Carthusian florilegium. A Tuscan and Ligurian translation entered Italian devotional circles. In 1491 the Carthusian Richard Methley translated M.N.’s English back into Latin for monks who could no longer read it. In 1911 Evelyn Underhill ranked the anonymous Mirror among the great masterpieces of Christian mysticism — still not knowing whose it was.

Facing pages of the Mirror of Simple Souls in a fifteenth-century copy that circulated without its author’s name (Valenciennes, Bibliothèque municipale, MS 239) — via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The author came back into her book in 1946. Romana Guarnieri, working in the Vatican Library, recognized that a Latin manuscript cataloged under a Chigi shelfmark carried the same articles Fredericq had printed from the Paris trial half a century earlier — and so identified the anonymous Speculum as Porete’s condemned Mirror. She announced it in a single column of L’Osservatore Romano on 16 June 1946. Nineteen years later, in 1965, she edited the Old French text from its sole surviving witness, the Chantilly manuscript (Musée Condé MS 157), and in 1986, with Paul Verdeyen, set the Latin and the French in parallel in the Corpus Christianorum series. The attribution has since been re-examined and reinforced on independent documentary grounds, most fully by Sylvain Piron in 2017. The recovery reframed the whole history of late-medieval vernacular mysticism — and reopened, above all, the question of where Meister Eckhart got some of his German.

The recovered text and its scholars

The standard edition is the parallel Latin-and-Old-French Speculum simplicium animarum / Le mirouer des simples ames, edited by Paul Verdeyen and Romana Guarnieri as volume 69 of the Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis (Brepols, 1986); it builds on Guarnieri’s own 1965 edition of the Chantilly French. The Latin tradition is mapped — manuscripts, witnesses, and editions — in the Arlima record for the Speculum, and the most complete digitized Latin witness, Vat. lat. 4355, is freely viewable on the Vatican Library’s portal. The trial sources themselves were edited by Paul Fredericq in the Corpus documentorum inquisitionis haereticae pravitatis Neerlandicae (1889–1906), and the chronicle paraphrase of the burning survives in the continuation of Guillaume de Nangis, edited by Hercule Géraud for the Société de l’Histoire de France in 1843 and digitized on Gallica.

The modern scholarship is dense and contested in tone, and the disagreement is worth naming as disagreement rather than resolving. The definitive reconstruction of the trial is Sean L. Field’s The Beguine, the Angel, and the Inquisitor: The Trials of Marguerite Porete and Guiard of Cressonessart (Notre Dame, 2012), which prints the documents in translation and joins her case to Guiard’s. Robert E. Lerner’s The Heresy of the Free Spirit in the Later Middle Ages (1972) is the work that dissolved the “free spirit” into a largely inquisitorial construct and read Ad nostrum as its founding text. Bernard McGinn, in The Flowering of Mysticism (1998), gives the Mirror its place in the new mysticism of 1200–1350; Amy Hollywood, in The Soul as Virgin Wife (1995), reads Porete alongside Mechthild of Magdeburg and Eckhart on gender and the apophatic; Joanne Maguire Robinson, in Nobility and Annihilation in Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls (2001), treats adnientement as the technical doctrine it is. Where these scholars divide — over whether the Mirror is heterodox in substance or only in the categories the Sorbonne brought to it, over how far the trial was theology and how far it was politics in the year of the Templars — the division is the live state of the field, and it is not a question a reader settles by preferring one verdict.

The afterlife of a doctrine

The strongest reason to take adnientement as a doctrine on the plane of Eckhart’s Grunt, and not as a pious turn of phrase, is the chronology that ties the two together. Meister Eckhart held his second Paris regency in 1311–1313, beginning months after Porete’s execution, and lived during it in the Dominican house of Saint-Jacques — the house from which William Humbert had run the prosecution. The masters who condemned her articles in 1310 were his colleagues. His German vocabulary — detachment, releasement, the ground of the soul, the little spark, the niht — converges on Porete’s annihilation and her willing-nothing to a degree that has persuaded a line of scholars the influence runs from her to him. His Sermon 52, on the poor in spirit who want nothing, know nothing, and have nothing, reproduces almost word for word a passage from the forty-second chapter of the Mirror. When the bull In agro dominico condemned Eckhart’s propositions in 1329, it answered, in Latin and from inside the order that had burned her, the same speculative tradition Ad nostrum had condemned in the vernacular twelve years before.

Sculpture of Meister Eckhart, whose German vocabulary of detachment and the ground of the soul converges on Porete’s annihilation, at Bad Wörishofen — Lothar Spurzem, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0 DE)

Downstream, the structure of self-naughting recurs wherever the soul’s nothing-before-God is pressed hard — in the Rhineland preaching of Johannes Tauler, in the learned ignorance of Nicholas of Cusa, in the rose that blooms without why of Angelus Silesius, and, centuries on, in the pure passive love of the soul that wills nothing for itself that the seventeenth century would condemn as quietism. None of these is a transmission from Porete; the connection is structural, the same problem solved the same way at the apophatic edge. The Mirror itself never needed the lineage. It had already done the rarest thing a condemned book can do: it had survived its own author by six anonymous centuries, copied out by hands that did not know whose words they were saving, and read as holy by readers who would have been told, had they known, that the woman who wrote it had been burned for every line.

→ In the library: Foundational apophatic source — The Works of Dionysius the Areopagite (Parker, 1899)

→ Related: Beguine Mysticism · Christian Mysticism · Apophatic Theology · Pseudo Dionysius The Areopagite · Heresy Of The Free Spirit · Meister Eckhart · Johannes Tauler · Nicholas Of Cusa · Angelus Silesius · Quietism · Julian Of Norwich · Mysticism · Bernard Of Clairvaux