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A Mirror for Simple Souls. - book reviews

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

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For 20th-century Christians, familiarity with a history that includes the diversity of Christian identities can help us acknowledge and support our own diversity. Historical theologians have often contributed to a narrow sense of Christian identity by presenting a past that consists solely of the orthodox and the heretics rather than multiple--and continuously contested--interpretations of Christian ideas and practices. Martin Luther, John Calvin, Huldreich Zwingli and other reformers criticized the beliefs and practices of Catholic Christianity far more drastically than did Porete. Yet we recognize the religious genius of authors whose insights are subsequently institutionalized; the "heretics" of the 16th century were the founders of alternative Christianities.

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PORETE'S BOOK helps us reconstruct a more inclusive history of Christianity a history that includes individuals and groups that have insistently identified themselves as Christians even when they were condemned by the church. Heterodox views represent not merely alternative interpretations of faith and practice but correlations of mainstream or orthodox views.

In their strongest moments, Christian churches have been attentive to internal criticism, recognizing critique as crucial to the process of responsiveness and self-correction that maintains the church,s life. The church of Porete's time--the "lesser church"--revealed its weakness by its use of force to exterminate threatening criticisms.

Finally, it is Porete's passionate spirituality that argues most strongly for including her volume among Christian classics. The book evokes a profound religious experience that perennially eludes the church's best efforts to reproduce it through teaching, worship or piety. She describes union with God as more like relaxing than intensified labor, more like floating than determined effort. She taught that the experience of God's love, does not supersede but simultaneously incorporates and transcends virtues and practices. If the soul, at the "highest stage of her perfection," is "beyond noticing the rules of the church," "beyond the works of virtue," and immune to feelings, it is because "she has assimilated [each of these] to the point where they are part of her and obey her intrinsically."

Instead of a spirituality that elects either the path of intellect or the path of feeling, Porete advocates a spirituality that incorporates all human functions and attributes. The resulting religious identity is not simply the sum of its human parts. Nor is it predicated upon the idiosyncrasies of a person's historical and social location. Rather, it is rooted in "what she was before God made her, in union with him." God alone guarantees the existence and identity of the Christian and "she swims in the sea of God's love."

Margaret R. Miles, Bussey Professor of Historical Theology at Harvard University Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, recently wrote Desire and Delight: A New Reading of Augustine's Confessions. This article is the second in a series on "rethinking religious classics."

A Mirror for Simple Souls. - book reviews

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

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