A Soul From Whom Nothing Can be Taken: Marguerite Porete—Mystic and Philosopher

Marguerite Porete said nothing as her life was taken from her. Or so goes the legend. The facts, according to reliable sources, are these: She was declared a heretic by a council of theologians, refused to recant her views, and was turned over to secular authorities by the zealous inquisitor William of Paris. According to one chronicler, on her last day, she stood “noble and devout” in Paris’s Place de Grève, moments before executioners burned her alive. The horror show took place on June 1, 1310, eighteen months after her arrest. Biased trial documents recount her manner while imprisoned, describing an “obstinate and stubborn woman” who stonewalled her interrogators by “contumaciously” refusing to speak the oath required by their investigative protocol. If not literally silent, the “meek leek” (“poret” + “-e”) seems to have met her terrible fate quietly, with resistance through resignation.

Porete’s troubles began around 1306, when Guido of Collemezzo, the Bishop of Cambrai, forbade the circulation of her Mirror of Simple Souls, ordering the book’s public burning in Valenciennes—an omen of the author’s later demise. Porete wasn’t quiet then. She may have cooperated with the Bishop, whose condemnation of her writings didn’t extend to her person. But she defied Guido’s successor, Phillipe of Marigny, by again sharing the Mirror—or possibly a revision of it—seeking its assessment by reputable authorities, the most famous of whom was the renowned theologian from the University of Paris, Godfrey of Fontaines (d. 1306 or 1309). Porete reports that Godfrey said “nothing unfavorable about the book” and that, according to him, “the soul is not able to arrive at divine life or divine practice until she arrives at the practice which this book describes” (MSS, trans. Babinsky, p. 222). Although somewhat muted, Godfrey’s approval was probably sincere and influential. It may even have bought Porete some time. Still, in the wake of Godfrey’s death, the endorsement failed to prevent a verdict of  “relapsed” heresy—a grave offense, with graver consequences.

Execution by fire was unusual in Porete’s time and place. Hers may have been Paris’s first, and it predates by almost two centuries the “acts of faith” (“autos-da-fé”) perpetrated by the convulsively violent Spanish Inquisition. This isn’t to say that the earlier French program wasn’t brutal. Porete’s prison-mate Guiard of Cressonessart, the self-proclaimed “Angel of Philadelphia,” faced similar charges and a lighter sentence. But just a month before, fifty-four members of the Knights Templar had been burned outside the city walls. This was a defining moment in a campaign initiated by King Philip IV, and carried out dutifully by his confessor William, to eradicate the Order as a whole. Grand affairs of state motivated these killings. Porete’s death, framed by the same events, had a different impetus: her thoughts, recorded in ink and parchment.

The Mirror didn’t die in the blaze. Copies were preserved at the Dominican convent at Saint-Jacques, and her work survives today in numerous manuscripts and printed editions, in Middle French, Middle English, and Latin translations derived from the lost original in Old French. The very popular Mirror spoke to many people after its author no longer could, but without Porete’s name attached. Copies circulated anonymously or were attributed to John of Ruusbroec (d. 1381), whose thought was similar. Now available in French, Spanish, German, and English, including two recent English translations by Ellen Babinsky and Edmund Colledge, Jack Marler, and Judith Grant, the Mirror speaks today, too—at least, to those listening. After 1946, when Romana Guarnieri established the book’s correct authorship, scholarship on Porete and her Mirror flourished among medievalists in a variety of disciplines, including history, theological studies, and literature. But only a few philosophers were paying attention.

It’s time to give this text the consideration it has long deserved, not just because of its historical importance and literary value, but also because of its philosophical depth. Porete, it’s true, has rarely been called a philosopher and is often called a mystic. But the “mystic” label is one she wouldn’t have recognized, and it complicates the study of her thought. Some philosophers recoil from the term because it can evoke something dubious, even anti-philosophical. For this reason, philosophers who advocate for the study of medieval mysticism—like Christina Van Dyke, whose work has been pivotal and inspiring—have preferred the less disreputable “contemplative.” Both words are imperfect. As with most markers of tradition or epoch, what matters most is how we use them.

So, what is mysticism and, in particular, later-medieval mysticism? Van Dyke’s working definition is a tradition “having as its goal direct and immediate union of the human soul with the divine.” Two species of mysticism are distinguished by how this union is achieved. Affective mysticism locates union in emotional, sensory, and somatic states—pleasures and pains, visions and auditions, and other reports of bodily experience, like the stigmata. Apophatic mysticism, by contrast, emphasizes non-experiential union, through annihilation of sensation, will, intellect, and even self. Porete belongs to this latter, apophatic tradition.

Medieval mysticism is unlike academic philosophy practiced today. But many mystics, in describing divine union and how to achieve it, discuss subjects that are unquestionably philosophical, such as personhood, self-knowledge, morality, love, and the meaning of life and death. This isn’t incidental to the tradition’s spiritual aims. Mystical projects require that these subjects be understood, and in the right way. This sense of understanding—in Porete, “entendre,” overlapping semantically with “hearing” and “listening”—is frequently noetic (direct and intuited), rather than discursive (indirect and derived). But noesis is nonetheless a form of knowing, and one that many titans of philosophy’s past have found a place for in their systems, from Plato (contemplation of forms), to Aristotle (induction), to Ibn Sina (prophecy), to Descartes (clear and distinct perception), and beyond. Construed in this way, medieval mysticism isn’t alien to medieval philosophy, but instead represents a particular methodology and epistemic framework. It’s one way to love or pursue wisdom.

We can call Porete a mystic and a philosopher, even if she wouldn’t recognize the first title and might not claim the second. To be sure, the Mirror’s philosophy is obscured by its difficult style. Works in the tradition of medieval mysticism are challenging to read and interpret, and Porete’s writing is especially demanding. Inspired by the courtly love literary genre, the Mirror presents a free-flowing conversation between three “ladies” (“dames”/ “dominae”): Lady Love, identified with God, Lady Soul, who follows the book’s practice, and Lady Reason, who personifies theological authority. Love and Soul explain to Reason the nature of divine union through self-annihilation, a status that’s somehow jointly elevated and debased. Porete’s writing is beautiful, lofty, and digressive. The confounding narration unfolds like a fever dream or psychedelic trip: frequently strange, occasionally distressing, but consistently resonant.

Genre is a barrier, but one to be breached. If Plato’s dialogues, Aristotle’s lecture notes, Boethius’s verses, Aquinas’s comments, Descartes’s letters, Spinoza’s axioms, Dostoevsky’s novels, Marx’s pamphlets, Russell’s formulas, Wittgenstein’s aphorisms, and Sartre’s plays are all philosophy, why not Porete’s mystical discourse? Like all works in the Mirror subgenre, Porete’s Mirror is a self-help guide for spiritual enlightenment through self-reflection, as are philosophical classics like Augustine’s Confessions, Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations, and—in certain lights—the metaphysical rehabilitation that Descartes also called Meditations. The Socrates of Plato’s Phaedo declares philosophy to be preparation for death, which brings living well with it; Aristotle deemed philosophy necessary for eudaimonia—human flourishing or well-being—and medieval Aristotelians followed him in a thousand-year-old tradition; Lucretius taught everything from the cosmological structure of atoms and void, to the causes of atmospheric phenomena, to the sex-positions best-suited for conception; before them all, Pythagoreans worshipped number and shunned the eating of beans. To deny philosophy’s religious, therapeutic, and practical tendencies is to understand it narrowly and ignore much of its history.

Why wouldn’t the Mirror belong within such a wide-ranging philosophical catalog? Not everyone has a taste for medieval mysticism, nor for medieval philosophy more generally. But in this case, the boundaries may betray something even more pernicious than philosophical parochialism—namely, patriarchy and misogyny. Similar attitudes likely contributed to the condemnation of the Mirror in Porete’s own time. She may have been targeted because of her association with the Beguine community—a loosely organized movement of laywomen devoted, without formal vows, to poverty, charity, celibacy, and the education of women and girls. Maybe even more offensive was her insistence that spiritual glory could only be achieved by “taking leave of the virtues” and abandoning worldly good works. Worse still could have been her invective against “Holy Church the Little”—that is, the ecclesiastical authorities on Earth—and her call for us to follow a more heavenly “Holy Church the Great.” These proclamations—perhaps conflated with the antinomian views of Porete’s vilified “Free Spirit” contemporaries—would have been provocative things for a man to say. Coming from a woman, they were insurrectionary.

Porete’s gender helps explain her unjust treatment, both then and now. But focusing on the Mirror as a woman’s book would only multiply injustices. Gender is a theme that can be lifted from Porete’s pages, but it isn’t central to her philosophy. In fact, she frequently eschews medieval norms of women’s spirituality upheld by other female mystics. For example, she doesn’t leverage gendered humility formulas to gain authority, and she emphasizes internal, psychic pains over external, bodily ones, transforming the trope of feminine devotional suffering by turning it inward. We should take heed of these subtleties while also avoiding clumsy anachronisms: the Mirror is no more a feminist manifesto than a manual of tradwifery. We should also be on guard against malicious, bad-faith capture, especially because voluntary subjugation to righteous authority is Porete’s primary counsel to her readers. This woman’s advice isn’t advice specifically for women. Her proposals for ascension through spiritual reform apply to all who are worthy.

Worth or “nobility” (“noblesse” / “nobilitas”) matters to Porete. Only a select few can even begin the path to glorification. I’m not one of them and, probably, neither are you. As Porete repeatedly declares, those who revere reason are especially unsuited to the task. And even the chosen face an arduous path: a seven-stage climb through (1) grace and dedication to God’s commandments, (2) supererogatory devotions like poverty and charity, (3) commitment to, and then abandonment of, the active life, (4) commitment to, and then abandonment of, the contemplative life, (5) annihilation of will, (6) union with God, and, finally, (7) unspeakable glory. Along the way, the soul endures three deaths: the “death of sin” in the first stage, the “death of nature” in the second, and the “death of spirit” in the third through fifth. The possibility of ascent to glory through death involves a number of theological, metaphysical, and psychological views with considerable philosophical import.

Porete’s philosophy is difficult to summarize. Her presentation is non-linear, and the book brims with disparate imagery, asides, misdirection, and paradox. But throughout all the tumult, central themes provide helpful handrails, including nobility, the feebleness of reason, the need to “take leave of the virtues,” and the seven-stage path to glory. These appear everywhere all at once, giving the work a fractal quality, with each part displaying the whole. Anchoring this structure is the annihilated soul, which Love describes in part as one “from whom one can take nothing away,” “to whom one can give nothing,” and “who has no will at all” (MSS, ch. 5, trans. Colledge, Marler, and Grant, p. 14).

Love unpacks these perplexing descriptions in response to Reason’s puzzled complaints. About the first of these—that the annihilated soul is one from whom nothing can be taken—Love says:

[¼]. What could one take away from her? If anyone was to take away from this Soul honors, riches and friends, heart and body and life, still he would take nothing away from her, if God remains with her; and by this it is plainly seen that no-one can take anything away from her, however powerful he may be. (MSS, ch. 11, trans. Colledge, Marler, and Grant, p. 25.)

Nothing temporal and fleeting can be taken from the annihilated soul since she possesses something of incomparable value: God’s presence. If one were to “take” something from her, even her own life, the “taking” would be of no concern to her, as long as God is with her. And God is with her, in a union stronger than mere presence. The same can be said for anything “given,” the “giving” of which would be vacuous for a soul dissolved into the All.

Divine union becomes clearer in Love’s explanation of how the annihilated soul “has no will,” something Reason finds baffling:

Ah, for the love of the God of love, says Reason, what are you saying? Are you saying that this Soul has no will at all? (MSS, ch. 11, trans. Colledge, Marler, and Grant, p. 27.)

Reason’s befuddlement comes from metaphysical and ethical worries, not made explicit, about a soul without a will. In the Aristotelian tradition, dominant at the time, the human soul is intellectual, and its faculty of understanding, both theoretical and practical, guides the will’s volitions. These volitions bring about actions that are subject to moral assessment. On this picture, a soul without a will would be no soul at all, metaphysically speaking, and would be beyond praise or blame, ethically speaking. Emphasizing morality over ontology, Porete’s Love clarifies that she does not envision a soul neutralized ethically by metaphysics:

Ah, truly, no. For everything which she wills by her consent is that which God wills that she should will, and this she wills so that the will of God may be accomplished, not at all her own will; and she cannot will this of herself, but it is the will of God which wills it in her; and so it is clear that this Soul has no will at all that she has to will. (MSS, ch. 11, trans. Colledge, Marler, and Grant, p. 27.)

It’s not that the annihilated soul has no will; it’s that she has no will that’s hers. Her will is God’s will, which God wills through her. This conception of a God-driven will—mirroring the God-driven active intellect of Ibn Sina’s and Ibn Rushd’s psychological theories—illuminates Porete’s treatment of the virtues: to “take leave” of them is not to abandon ethical practice, but rather to act ethically through a will undefiled by human desire. To be in divine union is to be a conduit for God’s will, and achieving this requires annihilating—or bringing to nothing—one’s own will by traveling the seven-stage path.

Philosophers moved by Porete’s passionate piety will see vexing problems of their own. How is it possible for a will to subjugate itself to another will voluntarily—that is, willfully? Scholastic philosophers of the later thirteenth century asked the same question, taking it from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, which Robert Grosseteste (d. 1253) translated into Latin in the 1240s. Aristotle asked whether “one should love oneself most, or someone else,” answering that the good person should be a lover of self who’s nonetheless willing to perform great—even fatal—acts of self-sacrifice (NE, bk. IX, ch. 8, trans. Ross and Urmson, p. 1846). Medieval interpreters focused on the self-sacrificer’s motives: whether they’re self-directed, as proposed by individualists like Henry of Ghent (d. 1293), or other-directed, as maintained by collectivists like Godfrey of Fontaines—the same Godfrey who assessed Porete’s Mirror. In the background, there was a broader debate about the relationship between intellect and will. Intellectualists like Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) maintained that the will was constrained by the intellect, so that it was compelled to choose what reason presented. Voluntarists like Peter John Olivi (d. 1298) and John Duns Scotus (d. 1308) denied that reason must govern decision-making, emphasizing that the will was free to choose against the presentations of reason or even in the absence of reason altogether. The individualist Henry and the collectivist Godfrey registered opposition here as well, holding attenuated forms of voluntarism and intellectualism respectively.

It’s possible—more than you might think—for Porete to have known these scholastic debates, despite her exclusion from the universities where they happened. If she did associate with Beguines, she would have heard speeches and sermons delivered by visiting theologians, who ministered at the Beguinages where the women lived and congregated. And if her family was upper-class—plausible, since she was literate and had the means to get her book copied and distributed—she may have met any number of educated men. Although direct evidence of Porete’s literacy comes only from her vernacular writing, she could have known Latin. Beguines saw education as a mission, sometimes offering instruction in Latin and even establishing schools, like Saint Elisabeth’s in Valenciennes, whose curriculum in the fifteenth century included Latin grammar. Porete may not have had access to the whole Vulgate Bible, but she probably read the Gospels, either in a vernacular translation or, maybe, in Latin. And while God is the only authority cited in the Mirror, the text relies on Latin theologians, including patristic authorities like Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, and Boethius, as well as early medieval sages like Bonaventure, Bernard of Clairvaux, William of St. Thierry, Hugh of St. Victor, and Richard of St. Victor. Porete very well could have read, corresponded, and conversed in the scholastic idiom of her day.

The Mirror itself can be construed as a conversational dialogue between mysticism (Love and Soul) and scholastic theology (Reason), manifesting Porete’s acquaintance with scholasticism and her efforts to engage it. Some read the work in just this way, as shown by the warning to “Men of theology” (“theologiens”) that appears in an introductory poem appended by a scribe in the Chantilly edition dated between 1450 and 1530. Here is a stylish rendering of the verse into English:

Men of theology and scholars such as they

Will never understand this writing properly.

True comprehension of it only may

Those have who progress in humility.

(MSS, trans.Colledge, Marler, and Grant, p. 9.)

Porete’s ties to Godfrey give further evidence of exchange. If Porete knew nothing about scholastic philosophical and theological disputes, why would she seek out Godfrey in particular to assess her book? She must have thought he would be sympathetic, and so she must have known at least a little about his views. Godfrey’s attitude was probably similar. Something about Porete’s persona made reading her book worthwhile for him, and something about her ideas garnered his approval. Porete’s notion of annihilation, requiring volition without reason, fits Godfrey’s attenuated intellectualism, whereby divine intervention can detach will from intellect. And there’s no reason to assume the channels of influence were one-directional, going only from men of theology to the female mystic. The Mirror’s influence on Meister Eckhart (d. c. 1328)—a “schoolman” at Paris, whose theology was mystical in many dimensions—is well documented. Currents of medieval devotion ran both ways.

Historical studies of awareness and influence are important. So are philosophical investigations. We can, of course, simply explore Porete’s philosophy in its own right.  Or we can compare it to the philosophies of her scholastic contemporaries without settling whether similarities are accidental or not. The subject of self-sacrifice—a theme that pervades the Mirror and guided its author’s life—provides an especially clear vantage point for surveys of this sort. The medieval faithful, men and women alike, contemplated sacrifice in order to clarify Gospel stories about the crucified Christ. Godfrey and Henry made the dying God’s suffering technical and remote. For Porete, the loss became a personal narrative. Philosophers of the present who look back on these philosophers of the past will give their own reports about what they find, encapsulating their discoveries in more familiar modes of expression. For my part, I read Porete’s view of self-sacrifice as contextualist, where each movement in the seven-stage path exhibits different motives and modes of execution, classifiable in the scholastic terminology outlined above. The details are complicated, but the picture shows a progression from individualist to collectivist motives and from intellectualist to voluntarist executions.

Or so I recently argued at the International Medieval Congress, hosted by the University of Leeds, in a panel on “The Philosophy of Marguerite Porete,” in a series of sessions devoted to “Medieval Female Mystics as Philosophers,” organized by John Arblaster (University of Antwerp) and Tatiana Barkovskiy (University of Cambridge) and sponsored by the Mystical Theology Network. Other commentators on Porete were:

Bárbara Arango Serrano (Universidad Complutense de Madrid), on Porete’s Mirror as a treatise on negative ontology that subverts the metaphysical tradition preceding it.

Geneviève Barrette (Collège Ahuntsic, Montréal), on a secular reading of Porete’s mystical philosophy, where annihilation results from an intellectual grasping that can be achieved without divine revelation.

Olena Danylovych (University of Lausanne), on “understanding” in the Middle English Mirror as a species of “hearing.”

Elodie Pinel (Université Paris-Nanterre), on identifying Porete as a Beguine by providing a philosophical reading of relevant texts.

Speakers also explored philosophical insights of medieval and early modern female mystics besides Porete, including Hildegard of Bingen (d. 1179), Hadewijch of Brabant (fl. 13th c.), Catherine of Siena (d. 1380), Catherine of Genoa (d. 1510), A’isha al-Ba’uniyya (d. 1517), and Teresa of Ávila (d. 1582).

The full program is available here, and several of the papers will be published in a collected volume, to be edited by the organizers.

The whole event culminated in a lively roundtable discussion on “Why and How We Should Approach Medieval Female Mystics  as Philosophers.” I offered a simple take on the “why” question and a practical one on the “how.” Why? Because medieval female mystics were philosophers. It’s obvious, to anyone who reads them, that they loved wisdom. And if we love wisdom too, we should treat them now as colleagues then. How? By organizing more events like this, and not just at medievalist conferences but also at philosophical ones, including the APA. Our scholarly discussions should then be distilled, taught in classrooms, and publicized by reputable voices on online platforms (as Peter Adamson has done here and here). This is urgent, since we’re already drowning in AI slop, vomited from the maws of large language models. It will take human conversations and the distribution of real research for medieval mysticism to find its place in our shared history of philosophy.

I’ll end with some questions for further reflection. It’s good that we’re learning more about Porete. But would she have cared to learn about us and our work, far in the future and with purposes strange to her, even repugnant? Would someone whose canons were formed by papal decree be impressed by our debates about a secular “canon of philosophy”? Or would Porete view these projects, important as they are to us, as distractions from a higher calling? After all, how can we grant canonical status, or anything else, to a soul to whom nothing can be given? How can we withhold it, or anything else, from a soul from whom nothing can be taken? If our give-and-take about giving and taking is hollow, we should ask ourselves this instead: What are we—to whom this soul can give so much—able to receive?

The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on those excluded in the history of philosophy on the basis of gender injustice, issues of gender injustice in the field of philosophy, and issues of gender injustice in the wider world that philosophy can be useful in addressing. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Elisabeth Paquette or the Associate Editor Shadi “Soph” Heidarifar.