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The Mirror of Simple Souls
The Mirror of Simple Souls
The Mirror of Simple Souls
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The Mirror of Simple Souls

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When Dr. Romana Guarnieri, in a letter to Osservatore Romano (16 June 1946), announced her discovery that Margaret Porette (d. 1 June 1310) was the author of The Mirror of Simple Souls, certainly a major French document of pre-Reformation spirituality, a sensation was created in the academic world. Although The Mirror is one of the few heretical documents to have survived the Middle Ages in its entirety, both its title and its authorship were among the most persistent and troublesome problems of scholarly research in the field of medieval vernacular languages. The Mirror, in its original French, survives only in the fifteenth-century manuscript which the great Condé (Louis II de Bourbon) had acquired for his palace at Chantilly. And, so far as can be known, all that remains with which to compare the readings of this manuscript text are those translations of The Mirror which, also in manuscript, are to be found in Latin, Italian, and Middle English.

This edition of The Mirror of Simple Souls is a translation from the French original with interpretive essays by Edmund Colledge, O.S.A., Judith Grant, and J.C. Marler, and a foreword by Kent Emery, Jr. The translators of this Modern English version rely primarily on the French, yet take other medieval translations into account. As a result, this edition offers a reading of The Mirror which solves a number of difficulties found in the French, and the introductions contributed by the translators narrate the archival history of the book, for which Margaret Porette was burned alive in Paris in 1310.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateMay 15, 1999
ISBN9780268161514
The Mirror of Simple Souls
Author

Margaret Porette

Margaret Porette (circa 1248/1250–1310) was a French-speaking mystic and the author of The Mirror of Simple Souls, a work of spirituality dealing with Divine Love. She was burned at the stake for heresy in Paris in 1310 after refusing to recant her views.

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    The Mirror of Simple Souls - Margaret Porette

    The Mirror of Simple Souls

    Notre Dame Texts in Medieval Culture, vol. 6

    THE MEDIEVAL INSTITUTE

    University of Notre Dame

    John Van Engen and Edward D. English, Editors

    The Mirror of Simple Souls

    Margaret Porette

    Translated from the French with an Introductory

    Interpretative Essay by Edmund Colledge, O.S.A.,

    J. C. Marler, and Judith Grant

    and a Foreword by

    Kent Emery, Jr.

    UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME PRESS

    Notre Dame, Indiana

    University of Notre Dame Press

    Notre Dame, Indiana 46556 All Rights

    Reserved www.undpress.nd.edu

    Copyright © 1999 by University of Notre Dame

    Published in the United States of America

    Reprinted in 2010

    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Porete, Marguerite, ca. 1250–1310.

    [Miroir des simples âmes. English]

    The mirror of simple souls / Margaret Porette : translated from the French with an introductory interpretive essay by Edmund Colledge, J. C. Marler, and Judith Grant; and a foreword by Kent Emery, Jr.

      p. cm. — (Notre Dame texts in medieval culture ; vol. 6)

    Includes bibliographical references.

    ISBN 13: 978-0-268-01435-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

    ISBN 10: 0-268-01435-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)

    1. Contemplation—Early works to 1800. 2. Spiritual life—Christianity—Early works to 1800. I. Colledge, Edmund. II. Marler, J. C. III. Grant, Judith. IV. Title. V. Series.

    BV5091.C7P6713 1999

    248.2’2—dc21

    98-54869

    ISBN 9780268161514

    ∞ This book is printed on acid-free paper.

    This e-Book was converted from the original source file by a third-party vendor. Readers who notice any formatting, textual, or readability issues are encouraged to contact the publisher at ebooks@nd.edu.

    Contents

    Foreword: Margaret Porette and Her Book

    Kent Emery, Jr.

    Sigla and Abbreviations

    Introductory Interpretative Essay

    The Mirror of Simple Souls

    List of chapters

    Appendix One: The Prologue of M.N.’s English Translation of the Mirror

    Appendix Two: M.N.’s Glosses to His Translation of the Mirror

    Select Bibliography

    Index

    Scripture Index

    Foreword

    Margaret Porette and Her Book

    In terms of current scholarly interests, how stirring are the events and issues involved in the story of Margaret Porette and her book: a countercultural woman thinker and writer; the Inquisition and heresy; a conflict between dogmatic theology and spirituality, which entails the broader theme of the suppression of intellectual liberty by authority; again the question of courtly love; a history of underground textual transmission and reception; a brilliant example of scholarly detective work, resulting in a dramatic discovery among the manuscripts.

    The reader, I trust, will allow me a few words about my teacher, Edmund Colledge, O.S.A., a co-author of the study and translation presented here. J. Andriessen of the Ruusbroecgenootschap in Antwerp once told me that Father Colledge’s scholarly work is a wellspring of the strong current of interest in the history of spirituality in England and North America. Indeed, Colledge’s many translations, essays, and editions have done much to establish Middle English spiritual literature in the university curriculum, to introduce modern English readers to the spiritual writings of medieval men and women from Germany and the Low Countries, to show in detail the way in which continental spiritual texts and traditions were received in medieval England, and how vernacular writings related to the authoritative Latin theological tradition. This translation and interpretative study of Margaret Porette’s The Mirror of Simple Souls, which treats one of the most difficult and decisive moments in medieval religious history, manifests abiding concerns in Father Colledge’s scholarly work. Perhaps no scholar of his generation has contributed more to the study and esteem of medieval women spiritual writers. His critical edition, with James Walsh, of The Book of Showings by Julian of Norwich has generated countless studies and elevated Julian to the status of a major literary figure. His and Walsh’s translation and study of Julian’s book launched the series The Classics of Western Spirituality, published by the Paulist Press. Especially pertinent to the present work are his previous studies (concerning Meister Eckhart and Jan van Ruusbroec, among others) that treat the complex interplay in the late Middle Ages among vernacular spiritual writings, ecclesiastical and theological authorities, and medieval notions of orthodoxy and heresy.¹ In this translation and study, Father Colledge benefits from the erudition of his co-authors, Jack Marler, his former student and frequent collaborator, and Judith Grant. Marler lends his knowledge of medieval philosophy and speculative theology to the volume, and Grant contributes her knowledge of medieval French literature. Margaret’s use of romantic topoi of French literature is one of the most remarkable features of her book.

    The trial and execution of Margaret Porette and suppression of her book (1310), the condemnation of her teaching at the Council of Vienne (1311–1312), the implication of Peter John Olivi in heresy at the same Council, the papal attacks against the Franciscan Spirituals that followed, and the condemnation of Meister Eckhart (1329) produced tremors in the spiritual tradition that reverberated for several centuries. In these events, ecclesiastical authorities were clearly concerned with the manifold spiritualisms sweeping through diverse communities in western Christendom. It is worth remarking that the major contribution of the Council of Vienne to theological history is the dogmatic declaration by Clement V that the substance of the rational, intellectual soul is by its own nature and essentially the form of the human body.² This dogma, which in relation to common theological teaching of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries may have seemed novel, circumscribes notions that disembodied or separated spiritual experience is possible for human creatures (see below). Moreover, the outbreak of spiritual movements occurred at a time when the Church was notably asserting its temporal authority and engaging in grand temporal affairs, in the bull Unam Sanctam of Boniface VIII (1302), in the transfer of the papacy to Avignon, in the suppression of the Knights Templar, etc. One is tempted to see in these conditions a kind of Hegelian dialectic between the soul and body of the Church, starkly expressed in The Mirror of Simple Souls, and perhaps meant to be redressed by the Council’s dogmatic declaration concerning the human soul.

    Margaret Porette’s solitary, steadfast, and courageous stand against the mighty engines of cultural authority is bound to evoke the sympathy and enkindle the imagination of every modern reader. There is nothing in the medieval record quite like her story, nor which so much invites modern readers to interpret medieval events according to their deepest convictions about the shape of social reality. The interpretation of the authors of this volume, however, is restrained, as it must be, for the surviving evidence affords little that is certain. As the authors say, the evidence is at once abundant and frustratingly absent. All the surviving documents concerning Margaret were produced by her enemies; singularly lacking are any testimonies by friends, disciples, or Margaret herself. The only document that speaks for Margaret is her abstract and elusive book, and that was meant to be destroyed.

    What we know about Margaret is slight. She lived in Hainaut at the beginning of the fourteenth century; her book was proscribed and burned publically by the Bishop of Cambrai, Guy of Colmieu, probably at Valenciennes (before 1306); she made no concessions, but rather added seventeen chapters to her book, sought its approval from another bishop, John of Châlons-sur-Marne, and continued to circulate it; she was tried by the Inquisition at Paris, condemned, handed over to secular authority and burned at the stake (1 June 1310). Eyewitnesses record that she faced her death with composure, as her doctrine requires. The Parisian inquisitor, William Humbert, O.P., ordered that all copies of the Mirror be confiscated and destroyed.

    William had consulted a group of theologians from the University of Paris about Margaret’s book; among them was the renowned master of the literal interpretation of Scripture, Nicholas of Lyre. (One wonders what Nicholas would have thought of Margaret‘s particular glossing of the hidden meaning of Scripture, and of her contempt for those interpreters who, hiding nothing, have nothing to show either.)³ The theologians extracted fifteen articles from the Mirror for censure. Two of these articles were cited in the judgment pronounced by the inquisitors, and we know a third from another source. At least three of the errors condemned in the constitution of the Council of Vienne, Ad nostrum, refer to Margaret’s teaching.⁴

    In sum, we have no evidence that reveals Margaret’s social status or the context of her life. The Mirror reveals this much: she read vernacular literature of fine amor (refined love); she acquired knowledge of theological concepts and speculations; despite her literary persona as an indifferent, wholly separated one among the many, she was a participant and leader in some textual community,⁵ for otherwise she would not have been so zealous to disseminate her writing and need not have endangered her life by doing so; she had some entrée to important people. On this last point, I refer to the approbations she obtained for her book. The authors indicate how ambiguous are the circumstances of these approbations and the expressions themselves. Yet they must signify something real, and the inquisitors, who surely saw them, could not have neglected to investigate them, especially if, as the authors argue, they were acting carefully.

    The most intriguing name among the approbators is Godfrey of Fontaines. With Henry of Ghent, Giles of Rome, and John Duns Scotus, Godfrey was one of the most illustrious doctors in the theology faculty at Paris at the end of the thirteenth and beginning of the fourteenth centuries. In philosophical matters, he was among the most Aristotelian of the masters. His stringent criticism of any kind of illuminative knowledge and his severe requirements for certitude, which stripped theology of its scientific status and left for it only probable reasonings premised on positive dogmatic tenets and declarations, would seem to make him an unlikely sympathizer with a spiritual teaching like Margaret’s.⁶ In a question disputed in 1292–1293 (Quodlibet VIII q. 7), for example, Godfrey argues that theologians do not partake of any infused cognitive illumination of supernatural mysteries beyond the obscure light of faith common to every Christian. All that theological reasoning can do is to make explicit, by means of analogies with natural things, what simple believers hold implicitly and confusedly. Such explicit reasoning, however, yields no more certitude than simple faith. Yet Godfrey qualifies his conclusion: I am not speaking about special and privileged illustrations which God gives or can give to private persons.⁷ If in fact Godfrey admits the possibility of such illuminations, then, according to his dichotomous understanding, they must needs be wholly detached from, and in mere juxtaposition with, the ordinary workings of reason exercised by school theologians. In this sense he might seem indirectly to confirm Margaret’s invidious comparison between the dim discursive reasoning practiced by clerics (by which she was judged) and the divine clarification of the intelligence bestowed on elect souls. Moreover, since, as Godfrey teaches, there can be no intermediate illumination (lumen medium) between faith and vision, according to an either/or logic Margaret’s teaching would seem to describe a condition closer to that of blessed souls than to the faith of wayfarers. These inferences might cast some light on the words Godfrey purportedly uttered concerning the Mirror: compared with the practice of the Mirror, which alone truly may be called divine, all others are inferior and merely human; indeed, no soul will partake the divine life until it arrives at the practice described in the book; the book was made by a spirit so powerful, burning, and trenchant that there are few others—or none at all—like it; for this reason the book’s teaching should not be exposed to many persons, lest they abandon their calling in this life and be deceived.⁸ Whatever lies behind the association of Godfrey’s name with the Mirror, there is a mystery here that confuses our accustomed intellectual and historiographical categories. Some light on this mystery may be buried in one of the many books that Godfrey bequeathed to the Sorbonne, which now are preserved in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris.⁹

    The constitution Ad nostrum associates the Mirror’s teaching with the religious movement of Beguines. The association is pejorative (faithless women), and, as the authors suggest, the term was probably typological.¹⁰ Otherwise, there is no evidence that Margaret was a Beguine in any strict sense, that she was a member of any known community of Beguines, or that she lived in a Beguinage in Valenciennes or elsewhere. That she knew and conversed with some Beguines, as she knew and conversed with religious people of every kind, is evident. But she herself says that Beguines were no more comprehending of her spiritual doctrine than priests, and clerics, the Preachers, the Austin Friars, the Carmelites, and the Friars Minor (Chapter 122).

    Although we should heed the warning of Alain de Libera against interpretations of medieval texts based on a priori, conceptual categories, including the category feminine spirituality,¹¹ nevertheless modern studies suggest some broadly shared characteristics and themes in the writings of late medieval religious women. These typical themes are absent or only faintly present in the Mirror. The book expresses no special devotion to the eucharistic sacrament; no fixation on the humanity and Passion of Christ; no special sense of feminine embodiment or cultivation of extravagant mortifications of the flesh;¹² no regret or apology for a want of clerk’s learning. Nor was Margaret favored by unique, phantasmagoric visions that embodied her spiritual insights.¹³ On the contrary, the Mirror contradicts all such expressions or practices that would define her personal or group identity. The sacraments are instruments of Holy Church the Less; complacency in them is an encumbrance to perfection. Likewise, ascetic practices and pious works are for those still captive in the the land of bondage, and are necessary as punishments for our faults. Margaret thinks that devotion to the humanity of Christ can be an obstacle to love of his divinity; the authors point out that she does not consider whether the Hypostatic Union, the joining of the divine and the human in the single person of Christ, according to nature, can serve as the model of what … man might be according to grace. Finally, rather than apologizing for a lack of school learning, Margaret expresses contempt for it. As a foil to the sparkling, paradoxical wit of Margaret’s teacher, divine Love, the Reason that rules Holy Church the Less displays its ordinary dullness.

    The teaching of the Mirror is, in short, systematically impersonal and genderless. The personal consciousness provided by individuated or com munal embodiment is precisely what must be annihilated.¹⁴ The doctrine of the Mirror strives for spiritual anonymity, and almost requires that the annihilated soul have few mates. Moreover, to conceive Margaret as a martyr of spiritual liberty, in any modern sense, is ironic and at least equivocal in respect of her teaching in the Mirror. For the wills of those in Holy Church the Greater are annihilated; precisely, they are not self-motivated or free, but are bound or necessitated so that they cannot do but what they do. The freedom of the perfect is that they need not will at all, because they are submerged in the will of another.

    So, we are left with only these: the text of The Mirror of Simple Souls and the rule of faith, as it was understood, elaborated, and enacted at the time Margaret and her book were condemned and destroyed. This is the line of inquiry that the authors rightly pursue.

    I am persuaded by Peter Dronke that Margaret’s deepest inspiration was poetic, that for her, as for many other people in her time, the literary ideals of fine amor were the raison d’être of her inner life, her hopes and despairs, fears and sorrows, moments of ecstatic fulfillment and aching emptiness, and that romantic metaphors chart the map of a soul in solitude, however intensely that soul may be pervaded by Christian presences.¹⁵ That Margaret read romantic literature is one of the few things about her that is demonstrable. The prologue of the Mirror is a kind of allegorical gloss on the widely popular Romance of Alexander. The authors show that Margaret read and understood well the Romance of the Rose, the meaning of which she redirected to her own ends. (This is a major contribution to our understanding of the Mirror.) The literary form of the Mirror—a prose dialogue spoken by allegorical personifications, interspersed with lyrics—was inspired by the Romance, and perhaps by some French translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy.¹⁶ Margaret was an accomplished lyricist; her verses display some of the finer techniques of the courtly style.¹⁷

    Whether courtly literature invested cultural phenomena with psychological meaning, or whether cultural life imitated art, or whether courtesy and fine amor were always understood as imaginative ideals, will probably never be resolved. The typical images of the courtly ideal, which inspired people who could never hope to enact them in the flesh, depict a deep psychological aspiration: the desire and vision of a way of life free from the necessities that bind the human condition. Artistic expression, in the strict sense, perfects nature, liberates the human spirit from the bare necessities of its animal and cultural existence, and, moreover, shows disdain for them. So delicate table manners, extravagant fashion, unfunctional architecture, contrived landscapes and gardens, conceited, indirect, and musical speech, ritualized battle, and refined love transform and flaunt the need to eat, wear garments, erect shelters, raise crops, communicate, inflict violence, marry and procreate. The allure of such images and the freedom they signify, as well as the contradictions they entail, were perceived more acutely amidst the physical and cultural realities of medieval life than they are in our own time.¹⁸ Perhaps this explains the innate or spontaneous Platonism of so much romance literature, the traces of which Dronke finds so astonishing in Margaret’s Mirror.¹⁹

    In their own terms, the images of the medieval romantic ideal are secular. In retrospect, it seems inevitable that they were transferred to the invisible world of grace and Christian spiritual perfection. In that transvaluation, the ideal they signified became accessible to any reflective soul, and became consubstantial, as it were, with the traditional images and terms of Christian pedagogy. The marriage is consummated in Margaret Porette’s Mirror. With a hauteur proper to the most noble lady, she disdains all that is base and churlish. From a divine distance, she regards the ordinary life of Holy Church the Less and of its villeins, its clerics and theologians, merely pious religious and layfolk, who still labor in the bondage of the moral virtues and material signs of temporal life. She too was once bound, as all human creatures must be, but has now been liberated into a wholly graceful and effortless condition. Her freedom from bondage is so complete that she can express it only by stark contrasts, without mediating terms that accommodate still captive minds. Here lies the source, I believe, of her conviction and of her troubles.

    The Beguine writers Mechthild of Magdeburg (ca. 1207–ca. 1294) and Hadewijch of Antwerp (fl. ca. 1225–1250) employ some of the same romantic and spiritual metaphors that Margaret develops in the Mirror. The authors of this volume assess the resemblances in detail. Jean Orcibal likewise finds similarities between texts in the Mirror and The Seven Manners of Love, written in Dutch by the Cistercian nun Beatrice of Nazareth (1200–1268). There is no evidence that Margaret read German or Dutch, although, as the authors suggest, it is not wholly implausible to imagine that French- and Dutch-speaking women living in the same communities shared the tropes of their spiritual understanding. Nevertheless, the similarities among these women writers do not suffice to place them in the same school of spirituality.²⁰ Moreover, what distinguishes Margaret from these writers is her audacious teaching about the highest states of union with God. In general, it was not what Margaret shared in common with other writers, but her uniquely expressed doctrines of spiritual annihilation, apathy, and indifference that attracted or shocked her readers.

    Despite its scorn of (discursive) Reason, the teaching of the Mirror is highly conceptual and cerebral, rather than affective. It bespeaks, I think, that intellectuality which, Alain de Libera argues, at the turn of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries burst through the walls of universities and other elite institutions and penetrated the discourse of more remote spiritual communities, religious and lay.²¹ This intellectuality was constituted by a philosophical ethical ideal, the desire for an ennobling realization of the soul’s inner life, which was not uncommonly expressed in terms of its divinization.

    The chronicler John of Outremeuse aptly said of Margaret that she was en clergerie mult suffisant.²² How she learned common ideas and terms of Scholastic and mystical theology we do not yet know.²³ Orcibal highlights her paraphrase of the Nicene Creed, which exhibits her knowledge of terms and distinctions used by school theologians to discuss the divine nature and attributes, the relations among the divine persons, the Incarnation of the Son, and the divine image in the soul. Passages of the Mirror echo broad conceptions from the writings of pseudo-Dionysius concerning the unknowability of God, the negative way, the self-diffusiveness of the Good, hierarchical spiritual communication, the motion of Seraphic love, etc. Orcibal also discovers resemblances between some of Margaret’s sayings about spiritual love and spiritual liberty and formulae in the Golden Epistle written by William of Saint-Thierry to the Carthusian brothers of Mont-Dieu. He finds resonances no less striking with passages in the more rare Ladder of Paradise by John Climacus.²⁴ This work was especially popular among religious communities in northern Europe, notably the Carthusians.²⁵ The authors of the present volume point out that Margaret’s use of the French word erre, in conjunction with the theme of the play of love, shows that she somehow knew a motif deriving from Hugh of Saint-Victor’s Soliloquium de arrha animae. By Margaret’s time, however, all of these terms and concepts were common currency in the literature and discourse of spiritual perfection; she doubtless would have encountered them in her conversations with spiritual persons, which we may presume were many. As I have suggested, what stands out in the Mirror is Margaret’s singular interpretation, arrangement, and application of theological concepts, which otherwise can be reduced to standard fare.

    Indeed, in the Mirror one discerns vestigia of speculative notions, concerning the divine essence and attributes and the mirror of God in the soul, that were commonplace in the schools and among teachers of mystical theology. The divine attributes are identical with each other and with the divine substance. They are impressed variously in all creatures. Thus, the divine will that calls all beings into existence and preserves them at every moment is identical with God himself. The divine will is omnipresent, closer to each created essence than it is to itself. In a special way, the divine substance is present to, and reflected by, the soul. According to a common interpretation of Augustine, the soul’s powers are likewise essentially identical with its substance. The intimate presence of God to the soul, the latter’s total dependence on its source, its exemplary likeness, at once bespeak its essential nothingness and show the way to an inseparable union with the cause of its existence. As far as the operations of the faculties are concerned, it was a common dictum among both Scholastic and mystical theologians that whereas the intellect receives its object according to its own measure, love dilates to the measure of its object. As a corollary, some taught that affection leaves understanding wholly behind in mystical union with God, others that the will draws understanding after it into divine union, or that love itself is knowledge.²⁶

    Understood simply without attendant qualifications, these ideas imply a rather reified, impersonal conception of the human will and its conformity with the will of God. What is required is a removal (or annihilation) of all that separates the creature from its Creator. Since it was the will that brought about sin and separation in the first place, its complete suspension in the will of God is the surest instrument of divine perfection. In this way, not willing is conceived as yielding union with the will of God, and therefore, because of the identity of the divine will with the divine essence, union with the very being of God. Moreover, because the faculties are identical in the substance of the soul, the will draws the intellect after it into a simplified (or clarified) intelligence, which, from its higher perspective, discloses the inadequacy of the machinery of human reason and confounds it with paradoxes.

    In passing, Peter Dronke remarks similar narrative techniques in the Mirror and in the spiritual romances of Ramon Llull.²⁷ There are more significant resemblances between the two. It is interesting to note that at the exact time (1309–1310) of Margaret’s ordeal, Llull was expounding his spiritual logic in Paris against the earthbound, Averroistic reason of the doctors in the schools.²⁸ In contrast to the doctors’ logic, Llull’s proceeds from the top down, from the unity of the divine attributes in God through their active presence and reflection in created properties. Llull’s is a logic of divine love; he personified himself as a fool in the service of Perfect Love. He expressed his doctrine not only in Latin philosophic treatises, but in spiritual romances in the (Catalan) vernacular. The blending of abstract conceptions and romantic metaphors, which characterizes Margaret’s Mirror, is also characteristic of Llull’s spiritual romances. The following sayings from The Book of the Lover and the Beloved (in Book 5 of Blaquerna), for example, like Margaret express the union between the soul and her divine lover in terms of the near and far and the paradigm lover, beloved, love:²⁹

    Whether Lover and Beloved are near or far is all the same, for their love mingles as water mingles with wine. They are joined as heat is with light. They agree and are as closely united as Essence and Being.

    Love and loving, Lover and Beloved, are so closely united in the Beloved that they are one reality in Essence. And Lover and Beloved are distinct beings, which agree, without any contrary element or diversity in Essence. Therefore the Beloved is to be loved above all other objects of affection.³⁰

    In a treatise on contemplation, Llull establishes a conceptual foundation for a union with God’s substance by means of abandoning the will. All created things exist in the divine will, identical with the being of God, before they have creaturely existence, for otherwise they could not be brought from non-being into being. Because the divine will, like the divine being, is infinite, it is the origin and end of every creature, and comprehends and preserves them all. Human perfection consists in having no will but the will of God:

    You created will in us so that we might love those things that you love, and so that we might completely follow your will, because there ought not to be in our will anything except what is in yours. Before our will was in us, your will was already in you, Lord, and therefore our will is obliged and subjected to willing your will, and your will, because it precedes ours, is not obliged to will any will of our own.³¹

    By no means do I suggest that Llull’s writings were a source of Margaret’s teaching, or that she knew anything about him at all. I wish only to observe an affinity in the particular configuration of their ideas, images, narrative devices, and ideals—and audacity in pursuing them—that invites further investigation. Llull attended the Council of Vienne, where his ideas fared better than Margaret’s. Later, however, theological authorities also judged his spiritual writings to be heretical. Jean Gerson, for example, criticized his teaching no less than he did the teaching of Jan van Ruusbroec and the subtle book of Mary of Valenciennes. Gerson was not the only one to see a connection, favorably or unfavorably. A fifteenth-century codex, perhaps copied and compiled at the Charterhouse in Strasbourg, bound a copy of a Latin translation of the Mirror with a copy of questions that Llull disputed in Paris in 1298. Subsequently, someone ripped out the gatherings that contained Margaret’s text.³²

    However convinced we may be that the guardians of the rule of faith masked their will-to-power in dogmatic guise, or however much, from our distant vantage, we may see that they were actors in huge social dramas beyond their consciousness, we must acknowledge that their explicit criteria for judging Margaret Porette were theological.

    At the time of Margaret’s trial ecclesiastical authorities were contending with the prophetic denunciations of the official Church by Franciscan Spirituals and others. In their polemics such critics adapted apocalyptic ideas and images from the writings of Joachim of Fiore. To the theological examiners, Margaret’s invidious comparison between Holy Church the Greater and Holy Church the Less must have seemed cut from the same cloth as the Spirituals’ diatribes. The impression surely was reinforced by Guiard de Cressonessart’s expressions of support for Margaret. In her pressing circumstances, a public vote of confidence from the Angel of Philadelphia was about the last thing she needed. Moreover, her conception of the dialectic between the greater and lesser Churches is fundamentally different from the comparison made by Joachim and his descendents between the corrupt contemporary Church and the purified Church, the advent of which was imminent. Joachimite visions were based on a typological reading of the Scriptures that projected the economy of salvation into a new age, in which the Church would be wholly purified in the grace of the Spirit. Margaret’s anagogy, in contrast, is ahistorical and philosophical. She speaks of a company of noble souls elevated into a transcendent ontological condition, abstracted utterly beyond the Church of any here and now. One wonders whether Margaret’s judges, diverted by the prophecies and denunciations of the Spirituals, were able to perceive that her idea was far more radical than theirs.

    Historians agree that it was Margaret’s statements about the virtues and the sacramental practices of the Church that most incriminated her.³³ These are the subject of the three propositions that we know were condemned. Since Lateran Council IV (1215), the Church had officially prescribed the topics of the vices and the virtues, the sacraments, and of heaven and hell (the goads of fear and desire, and the incentives of reward and punishment) as the most suitable subjects for preaching to the laity. The massive medieval literature of preaching manuals, moral summae, model sermon sequences, etc., is organized according to these topics and dominated by them.³⁴ Margaret’s statements concerning the annihilated soul’s disregard for the practice of the virtues and for the notions of heaven and hell (Chapter 97),³⁵ however they may be explained, were an open challenge to what authorities wished to be taught. The Mirror of Simple Souls is the first known text of mystical theology written in the French vernacular.³⁶ Margaret’s judges surely recoiled at the thought of her book falling into the hands of enthusiastic, unschooled layfolk, and serving to undermine the Church’s established popular pedagogy.

    In his monumental study of disputes concerning the beatific vision in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Christian Trottmann relates another proposition condemned in the constitution Ad nostrum to Margaret’s teaching: "Fifth, that an intellectual nature is naturally blessed (beata) in itself, and that the soul does not require the light of glory (lumen gloriae) to elevate it to the vision of God (ad Deum videndum), and to enjoy him in bliss (eo beate fruendum)."³⁷ The theological topic of the beatific vision had long served as a paradigm for determining the possibilities and limits of spiritual life. In the 1270s and afterwards, theologians confronted philosophic doctrines, originating in the faculty of Arts in the University of Paris and based on Aristotle’s Ethics, that proposed the possibility of a natural beatitude, without means of grace and glory, which was attainable even in this life.³⁸ In part, Thomas Aquinas’s teaching on the necessity of the light of glory in the beatific vision was meant to refute the philosophic doctrine; his teaching, however, gave rise to heated disputes about the absolute necessity and causality of the lumen gloriae, whether or not the soul is wholly passive in the beatific vision, whether or not there need be any medium between the beatified soul and God, etc.³⁹

    There is evidence that the notion of a natural beatitude circulated among communities of Beguines and Beghards, however they came by it, and the theologians at Vienne, as we have seen, perceived this teaching to be among their errors. Trottmann points out that in the highest state of perfection as Margaret explains it, the soul surpasses all of the gifts and lights of the Holy Spirit; its vision is permanent and definitive. The soul knows that it is already impeccable; incapable of willing, it can no longer sin. After its confirmation in this state, the soul is wholly satisfied, and in its union with the deity, it transcends the duality that it believes to be intrinsic to all knowledge, between a God possessed subjectively and the soul who contemplates him. Trottmann concludes:

    Au-delà des enjeux ecclésiologiques évidents que représentent ces mystiques mal contrôlés en des pays sous domination de l’empereur, pour une papauté qui se trouve en conflit avec lui, la condemnation des béguines nous semble reposer sur une confusion théologique dont nous voudrions proposer une explicitation. A supposer que ces demoiselles n’aient pas été aussi folles que le stipulait leur condemnation Viennoise, à supposer même que leur expérience mystique n’ait pas été la simple dolence d’un quiétisme débilitant, l’erreur semble avoir été de l’appeler béatitude.… A supposer même que les mystiques rhénans, par la voie de l’anéatissement parviennent à une grâce d’union, cela reste une erreur théologique de la confondre avec la béatitude éternelle dont l’essence n’est autre que la vision face à face.⁴⁰

    It seems to me unlikely that only those articles extracted from the Mirror for direct censure would have startled contemporary theologians at Paris.⁴¹ Surveying the issues and disputes that preoccupied ecclesiastical and theological authorities of Margaret’s time, we can see in nearly all of them a concern to emphasize the distance between human creatures and the Creator and the irrefrangible individuality of human souls. These concerns are manifest on all sides in the disputes over the soul’s union with God in the beatific condition. Moreover, university theologians became increasingly skeptical about theories of divinely illumined cognition, which could yield knowledge of purely spiritual realities without phantasms, no matter how ancient such theories were, no matter how much they were a feature of the theologia communis through most of the thirteenth century, no matter how much they had been employed to support the teachings of mystical theology.⁴² Likewise, theologians stressed the incommensurability between divine and human willing; union with the will of God was conceived in oblique terms, and in terms of the coincidence of inscrutable divine and limited human intentions.⁴³ In its cognition and willing, the human soul remained firmly grounded in its bodily, individual experience. Talk of wholly detached spiritual experience, absorption of the soul’s faculties in the divine being, a union with God unmediated by virtues and gifts, could but seem fantastic, at best. By all of these contemporary theological standards, Margaret Porette’s teaching was highly suspect, at least.

    The emphasis of the late-medieval Church on the sacrament of the Eucharist, as the focus of religious piety as well as the touchstone of orthodoxy, would seem to be another sign of the increasing bodiliness of its rule of faith.⁴⁴ One may safely presume that Margaret’s early spiritual pedagogy centered on devotion to the Eucharist. In the Mirror, not surprisingly, she reshapes the lineaments of this doctrine to those of her vision. As the authors suggest, the sacrament seems to be her model of the spiritual transubstantiation of the human into the divine, leaving behind only accidents of sensible existence. Margaret’s analogy is ill-sounding by any lawful, contemporary understanding; nor do we have any reason to believe that she would relinquish any one of her metaphors. Margaret’s subtlety was of a different kind than the distinction-making subtlety of Scholastic theologians or the clerical authors of guidebooks of spiritual discernment.

    In my judgment, all of the spiritual issues addressed at the Council of Vienne can be related to Clement V’s dogmatic declaration (Fidei catholicae) that the intellectual soul is by its own nature the form of the body. Clement’s decree pertains to the order of being, which determines what is possible in the orders of acting and knowing; in effect, the decree cuts down at the root all of the errant spiritual conceptions confronted by the Council, including Margaret’s. Although the decree does not confirm any particular philosophic formulation, it nevertheless reflects a significant development of doctrine. Such developments always produce casualties, in this instance, among those who thought they were speaking on behalf of the soul. The idea that the intellective human soul in composition with the body somehow exists as an essentially separate form, entity, or hoc aliquid, thereby assuring the possibility of its independent operation in this life and its separate subsistence in the next, was common among Latin theologians of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, before and after Thomas Aquinas argued the unicity of substantial form in the human composite.⁴⁵ By the beginning of the fourteenth century, however, Thomas’s Aristotelian doctrine had become the official teaching of the Dominican Order and had gained considerable ground among thinkers beyond it. Consistent with his position that the rational soul is the single form of the human composite, Thomas maintained that the soul needs its body in order to know and that every act of knowledge must have recourse to phantasms from sensible experience. Not surprisingly, other theologians did not find his philosophical arguments for the soul’s survival after death compelling. According to John Duns Scotus, logical inferences from the soul’s various acts require that we conceive the intellective soul as an immaterial form separate from the form of the body; even so, reason cannot demonstrate that the soul survives the death of the body (this would be even more the case were the intellect the only form of the human composite); the immortality of the soul is an article of faith.⁴⁶ The impetus of clerical reasoning ad corporeitatem reached its radical conclusion in the thought of William of Ockham. Faith (as it had been recently defined at the Council of Vienne) teaches us that the intellective soul is the form of the body; reason suggests otherwise:

    One who follows natural reason would allow that we experience in ourselves acts of understanding and willing that are acts of a corporeal and corruptible form; and he would consequently maintain that such acts are received in an extended form. However, we do not experience an act of understanding of the sort that is an operation proper to an immaterial substance. And, therefore, we do not, by appealing to acts of understanding, establish that an incorruptible substance exists in us as a form. It may even be that if we did experience this sort of act of understanding to exist within ourselves, we would be able to establish only that the subject of this act exists in us as a mover—and not as a form.⁴⁷

    The soul, in short, cannot verify any purely spiritual experience of knowing and willing, and if it could, the explanation would be heretical according to Clement V’s decree; no wonder ecclesiastical authorities thought that claims to such experience were fantasies. The increasing bodiliness of clerical reasoning, one should note, tended to reinforce the Church’s authority over its subjects.⁴⁸ Ironically, William of Ockham himself, like Margaret, soon learned the truth of this corollary, which is wholly consistent with his thought.

    In his decree, though he does not name him, Clement V had in mind the Franciscan Spiritual Peter John Olivi, who had died in 1298. Olivi’s theory of the soul had already been censured by a

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