Christological transformation in The Mirror of Souls, by Marguerite Porete

Theology Today, Apr 2003 by Babinsky, Ellen L

Porete focuses on the process by which the human will, sinfully separated from God, is annihilated, so that only the will of God wills in the soul. In order for the soul to be moved away from alienation and sinful separation from God, Porete tells us that the will must "depart its own will" and "render itself back to God": "Now I cannot be, says Unrighteous Will, what I ought to be until I return to where I was before I departed from Him, where I was as naked as he is who is; to be as naked as I was when I was who was not. And it is necessary that I have this, if I wish to receive what is mine. Otherwise I will not have it."11

Free will, placed in the soul by the goodness of God, enables the soul to remove her will from the will of God. The proper activity of the human will is to will the divine will. By willing independently of the divine will, the soul separates herself from God, her true reality. This is even to steal the will from God, the proper locus of the human will: "For as God is incomprehensible with regard to His power, so also is this Soul indebted by her incomprehensible nothingness by even one hour of time that she had possessed a will contrary to Him. To Him she owes without subtraction the debt which her will owes, as often as she had willed to steal her will from God."12 Removing the will from God does not, therefore, deny human freedom; one remains free either to wander into perdition, or, through grace, to return where one belongs, in God.

The spiritual task, then, is to return the will where it belongs-with God. By annihilation, Porete means giving the will back to God freely, just as it was given.13 The will's annihilation begins when the divine light of the Holy Spirit shows the intellect that its desire must be dissolved into God, so that only the divine will wills in her.14 In a moving soliloquy, the soul ponders three excruciatingly painful possibilities in her desire to please God. The soul's love for God is tested when God presses her to answer how she would fare if it were God's will that: (1) the soul love another better than God, (2) God love another better than the soul, or (3) another love the soul better than God loves the soul:

And I was in distress of thinking how it could happen that I might love another better than Him, that He might love another better than me, that another might love me better than He. And there I fainted. For I could respond nothing to these three things, nor refuse, nor deny. Again and again He assailed me for a response.

Alas, what do I say? Certainly I have never spoken a word about it. The heart alone has this battle. It is the heart who responds in the anguish of death that it would wish to depart from its love, by which it has lived, if it thought that by so doing it could live longer. But in order for this to be so, it could will this only by willing its own will . . . . And thus, Lord, my will has ended in saying this; my will is martyred, and my love is martyred: You have guided these to martyrdom.15