Marguerite Porete was a Beguine from Hainault in northern France, writing in Old French at the end of the thirteenth century. Her single surviving book, The Mirror of Simple Souls Annihilated and Who Only Remain in Will and Desire of Love, is a sustained allegorical dialogue between Soul, Reason, Love, and several other personifications, mapping the soul’s progressive freedom from every constraint until it reaches what she calls the seventh state of annihilation.
The book was condemned and publicly burned in 1306 by the Bishop of Cambrai. Marguerite continued to circulate it. She was arrested in 1308, held in Paris by the Inquisition for eighteen months, and refused to recant or to take the oath that would have ended the proceedings. On 1 June 1310 she was burned at the stake in the Place de Grève. Witnesses described her bearing as so serene that bystanders wept.
Her book did not die with her. Stripped of her name, it circulated anonymously through the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and was read by Eckhart and the wider Rhineland circle. Eckhart’s most radical formulations on the Seelengrund and the soul’s freedom from creaturely will echo Marguerite’s vocabulary directly. She was identified as the author only in the 1940s by the scholar Romana Guarnieri, working from inquisitorial records.
The teaching
The Mirror maps seven states of grace, and the drama of the book is the passage through the fifth and sixth, where the soul is annihilated. Annihilation here does not mean destruction. It means that the soul’s own will, the small separate engine of wanting and refusing, has dissolved into the divine will so completely that nothing remains to act as an owner of the spiritual life. Such a soul, Love declares in the dialogue, takes leave of the virtues. The phrase became a charge against her, but its meaning is careful: the annihilated soul no longer labours to produce virtue under Reason’s supervision, because virtue now flows through it without resistance. The virtues remain in the life; the effort of manufacturing them ends.
Marguerite stages this as the long defeat of Reason, the character who interrupts Love’s teaching with alarmed objections until, midway through the book, Reason dies. Readers of Eckhart will recognise the territory, the soul’s freedom from will and from possession, including spiritual possession, taught here a generation before him and paid for at a higher price.
Where to start
- The Mirror of Simple Souls: Clare Kirchberger’s 1927 edition of the medieval English translation, published while the book was still credited to an unknown French mystic, free at the Internet Archive.
- The Mirror of Simple Souls, 1993: Ellen Babinsky’s Classics of Western Spirituality translation, borrowable at the Internet Archive.
- Marguerite Porete at Wikipedia: a careful account of her life, her trial, and the book’s anonymous afterlife.
