A Mirror for Simple Souls. - book reviews

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.

The "perfect soul" experiences herself as "less than nothing" and simultaneously sees "not herself in God, but God in herself." The freedom of the perfect soul depends entirely on a state of nonwilling or "deadness to the world" in which God's will replaces human will and "you bathe in the flood waters of God's love." In this state "she needs no masses or sermons or fastings or prayers," and all desires, "even holy desires," are suspended: "Everything she has is from God, and she is what God is, and was, and what she was before God made her, in union with him."

Porete's description of the experience of God's love suggests the inadequacy of religious training based on book learning." Destabilizing habits and dissolving securities is, she argues, fundamental to "knowing nothing, being able to do nothing by herself, and willing nothing"--requirements for experiencing "the nothingness [that] brings her everything." She testifies to a quality of life that cannot be described in the language of reason. The language of love is allusive and easily misinterpreted: mat Love says can only be said in condensed images":

Being completely free, and in

command on her sea of peace, the

soul is nonetheless drowned and

loses herself through God, and

with him and in him. She loses her

identity, as does the water from a

river ... when it flows into the sea.

it has done its work and can relax

in the arms of the sea, and the

same is true of the soul. Her work

is over and she can lose herself in

what she has become: Love. Love

is the bridegroom of her happiness

enveloping her wholly in his

love and making her part of that

which is. This is a wonder to her

and she has become a wonder.

Love is her only delight and

pleasure.

In addition to its positive agenda--a theology of love--Porete's book presents two critiques, at least one of which proved fatal to her. She questions the validity of relying on reason alone for theological knowledge, and she criticizes the institutionalization and routinization of religion in the church. Reason, she writes, is "stupid and blind"; it has ears and cannot hear. Reason looks for God "in creatures and in nature, striving to find him with [the] senses." What is inadequate is the method, not the visible objects.

People who look for God in hills

and woods and valleys see him

as bound by his sacraments and

works, and are silent and miserable

for not finding him. But

those who find him everywhere,

not just in forests and mountaintops,

through uniting their

will to his, have a happy and enjoyable

life.

The problem with reason is twofold: it is too laborious--too deliberate and complex"--to provide a fluent vehicle for the Spirit, and its self-conscious operation actually stands in the way of the "inner impulse to love." People "become so wrapped up in conscious reasoning that they cannot hear the spirit when it prompts them." In short, those whose religion is based on reason try to "do everything by [their] own efforts."

Porete accused the church of following the "law" of reason rather than that of love. She contrasted the "lesser Church," ruled by reason and populated by reason's "insect-brained followers," with the "greater Church," populated by perfect souls ruled by love. The interrelatedness of Porete's two critiques is evident in her description of the shortsightedness of the lesser church, reliant on book learning and the hard work of practicing the virtues.

Porete's claims are dramatic. They are stated, moreover, in language that seems designed to shock and provoke. They must, however, be "carefully" understood. For example, although the perfect soul bids "good-bye to the virtues," because of her attunement with God's will, she nevertheless "has more virtues than anybody else." Porete's language must also be understood as a reaction to and compensation for her lack of social and institutional power. The same words, as she pointed out, can have different meanings; triumphal language means different things depending on whether it is uttered by the spokesmen of powerful institutions or by the politically and socially powerless. Moreover, Porete's language of mystical experience was particularly threatening to church leaders, who recognized the Free Spirit movement's subversive potential.

WHY SHOULD we consider Porete's book a Christian classic? What can a book with such countercultural concepts as the annihilation of the self offer to Christians in the final decade of the 20th century? Consider first several of the book's more obvious contributions.

As the product of a particular historical situation, the book has conspicuous value: Dronke has called it a text of fundamental importance in relation to the movement . . . known as the "Free Spirit.' " It is also valuable as a literary document; its lyrical poetry, occurring at climactic moments of prose narration, make it, according to Kurt Ruh, "a religious testimony of incomparable originality." Moreover, its theological insights elevate it to classic status: Porete's systematic critique of reason as the primary access to knowledge of God challenges academic theology of her time and of ours. Her understanding of a via negativa in which "all knowing leads to loss of understanding" is consonant with Eastern Orthodox theology. She also anticipates by two centuries Martin Luther's emphasis on salvation by faith alone. And her insistence on personal appropriation of Christ's death on the cross ("You have undergone all your sufferings just for me alone! All this, just for me!") anticipates the devotional passion of 18th-century Pietism.

There are, however, other reasons to consider the book a classic. Porete should be heard in the 20th century because, while she represented in her own time a marginalized and alternative form of Christianity, she may also have been, despite the judgment of her contemporaries, a profound orthodox thinker. Porete's orthodoxy could be argued either by demonstrating the similarity of her spirituality to that of orthodox contemporaries, or--anachronistically--by comparing her theology to that of later Protestant theologians. On the other hand, her teachings do contain the claims to divinization of which she was accused, and her insistence on the freedom of the "perfect soul" certainly could suggest to a careless reader that virtues and pious practices were expendable. However, Porete's orthodoxy--or heresy, for that matter--are not the most significant aspect of her work for us.

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.

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."

COPYRIGHT 1993 The Christian Century Foundation
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