A Mirror for Simple Souls. - book reviews

Christian Century, Feb 3, 1993 by Margaret R. Miles

MARGUERITE PORETES'S devotional book A Mirror for Simple Souls provides an example of the fruitfulness of paying attention to a book deemed heretical by ecclesiastical authorities in its own time. On June 1, 1310, Porete was burned as a heretic at the Place de Greve in Paris. A decade before, her book had been condemned as containing 15 erroneous theological beliefs. Porete was fully aware that her book might be misunderstood. Before its publication she had sent it to three theologians for their approval--a Franciscan friar, a Cistercian monk and a lay theologian. None of them found fault with the manuscript, though the theologian advised that its readership be limited to those advanced in the spiritual life. Its powerful advocacy for mysticism might, he felt, make that path seem the only viable spiritual life. At her trial Porete, confident of the legitimacy of her writings, refused either to negotiate with authorities or further e lain her teaching.

Despite the condemnation by what Porete called the "Little Church," the book had a life of its own. Circulating as an anonymous devotional text in the centuries following her death, it was widely recognised and treasured by adepts of Christian spirituality. Five medieval translations--two in Latin two in Italian and one in English--of the original Middle French attest to its popularity. The book was not reconnected with its author until 1946 when the Italian scholar Romana Guarnieri identified it as Porete's work.

Historian Peter Dronke has called Porete "the most neglected of the great writers of the 13th century." Her social and religious context was the passionate and volatile lay religiosity of late medieval northern Europe. Though suspect to church leaders, vernacular treatises on Christian devotion and mysticism were fascinating to a broad popular audience--they were the best sellers of their time. Porete's particular ambiance was the groups of laywomen known as "beguines" who banded together to live lives of poverty, chastity, manual labor, charitable service and worship. These groups were active in northern Europe, France, the low countries, the Rhinelan and Switzerland. Without vows, organization, officials, wealthy founders or leaders, beguine associations were a "new and attractive alternative" to the cloistered life, notes historian Caroline Walker Bynum. Beguines were drawn largely from the new bourgeoisie and lower nobility of late medieval towns.

The line between heresy and orthodox religious intensity had never been less clearly defined than in these groups of laywomen and men. On the radical edge of the spectrum were the so-called "Free Spirits" whose claims to immediate and permanent union with God supported their assertions of freedom from both ecclesiastical and civic laws. At one time or another, most mystics of this period were forced to defend themselves against accusations of association with Free Spirit teachings, among them Jan van Ruysbroeck, Heinrich Suso and Meister Eckhart. For some mystics, priesthood or affiliation with a monastery often--though not invariably--supplied authorization and legitimation. Porete had neither ecclesiastical office nor monastic affiliation to protect her, and some of her claims for divinization and for freedom from liturgical duties and devotional practices seemed to her accusers and judges identical to those of the Free Spirits.

The late medieval interest in A Mirror for Simple Souls was based neither on the recognized authority of its author nor on the book's validation by the Catholic Church. Rather, its powerful attraction was founded on its spiritual insights and on the strength and beauty of its vivid language. An example:

[The simple soul swims in the sea of joy--that is in the sea of delights flowing and streaming down from the godhead. She feels no joy, for she herself is joy, and swims and floats in joy without feeling any joy, for she inhabits joy and joy inhabits her.

The text testifies to a mystical ecstasy that was difficult to attain. It also reconceptualizes theological knowledge itself, placing at its center the overwhelming, mind-boggling experience of God as love; her purpose in the work, Porete writes, was "to show the way love works." The experience of God as love, she asserts, is foundational to theological understanding.

The book's theology is systematic; it is both comprehensive and graded or mapped. Though not founded on discursive reason, it employs the tools of reason to demonstrate the route to God. Repeatedly, however, Porete cautions against attempting to understand her theology with the head alone, without a corresponding change of life.

I beg you, those who read these

words, try to understand them inwardly,

in the innermost depths of

your understanding, with all the

subtle powers at your command,

or else you run the risk of failing to

understand them at all.

ALTHOUGH they are peppered throughout the book, these admonitions fell largely on deaf ears in Porete's own time, as did her caution that "the same word can have different meanings." Her doctrine of mystical annihilation, expressed so vividly in water metaphors--especially the metaphor of drowning--emphasizes that absorption in God can replace an intentional practice of virtue. She contrasts the "slavery" that results from founding one's spiritual life on "reason and fear" with the effortless spontaneity that comes from acting out of love.