Christological transformation in The Mirror of Souls, by Marguerite Porete

Theology Today, Apr 2003 by Babinsky, Ellen L

Because love is God, love joins humanity to the Trinity through the Second Person.27 The eternal loving is also the divine knowing, which is the soul's eternal preexistence in God: "She retains nothing more of herself in nothingness, because He is sufficient of Himself, that is, because He is and she is not. Thus she is stripped of all things because she is without existence, where she was before she was. Thus she has from God what He has, and she is what God is through the transformation of love, in that point in which she was, before she flowed from the Goodness of God."28

The soul's eternal preexistence in God prior to creation may indeed be the soul's perfect existence in the Logos, the Second Person of the Trinity. The perfection given to the soul by the work and power of the Holy Spirit is the perfection of the fullness of the Trinity. This being so, the soul's return to her preexistent state is expressed by the phrase "she has from God what He has, and she is what God is through the transformation of love," an echo of the western Nicene formula of the procession of the Persons of the Trinity. Again, we see that, by grace, she has become what her exemplar Jesus Christ is by nature-truly human and truly divine.

I have characterized the christological dimension as a dynamic energy behind or beneath the text. Earlier in this discussion of transformation, I noted a portion of the Mirror in which Porete refers to Jesus Christ as the exemplar according to whom "we will be sons of God the Father." The exemplar's function is crucial in making possible the soul's christological transformation. The image of an exemplar participates in its reality by virtue of the exemplar itself. For instance, rubbing crayon over a piece of paper creates a pattern of a leaf only because of the actual leaf beneath the paper. In this case, the leaf is the exemplar for the design; it is what it is by virtue of the leaf itself. For Porete, then, the soul's christological transformation is possible only insofar as Christ is its exemplar. The divine energy of the transforming power of Christ the exemplar reveals what has always been true: Humanity belongs with divinity. We are now in a position to explore the implications of the christological transforming power of this text for the reader.

TRANSFORMATION OF THE READER

Bernard McGinn has written that the experience of the consciousness of the presence of God "defies conceptualization and verbalization, in part or in whole. Hence, it can only be presented indirectly, partially, by a series of verbal strategies in which language is used not so much informationally as transformationally . . . to assist the hearer or reader to hope for or to achieve the same consciousness."29 In this section, I wish to consider the transforming function of Porete's Mirror by asking about the text's audience or readers. Clearly, a particular kind of reader is being addressed in the opening lines of the text: "You who would read this book . . . think about what you say, for it is very difficult to comprehend."30 What kinds of readers or hearers are most likely to experience transformation of some sort from their encounters with the text? What readers or hearers will not be transformed by the text?