Wesenmystik - 'mysticism of being'

On June 1, 1310, a woman called Marguerite Porete was burned at the stake in Paris, charged with heresy and refusing to recant her work, 'Le Mirouer des simples ames anientes et qui seulement demourent en vouloir et desir d'amour' (The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls and Those Who Remain in Will and Desire of Love). Somewhere, there is a call, in me, repeated, to her spirituality, to her story.

Her story, simply, will not let me go.

This is the first in a series of posts that reflects my utter absorption with, and in, her work - her explication of nient - nothingness - and of a radical, to me somewhat nondual, path, the path of annihilation of the soul, and the self, in love.

I've found a profound article by Patrick Wright, called 'Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls and the Subject of Annihilation'. I'm enamoured with this article because it attempts to undo Porete via Lacan and Kristeva, and then reverses the speculum. Postmodernism is thoroughly run through, via the lens of a premodern text, which is reflexively & necessarily explicated, in a postmodern frame. This article has given me hours of material to contemplate:

'Porete's inquisitors branded her a pseudo-mulier ('fake woman') which was also later said of Joan of Arc. The precise meaning of this phrase is ambiguous, but it suggests the importance of gender in the trial, for one may assume the label names an anxiety provoked by a woman who is morethan/less than a woman in the traditional medieval sense. Porete's assertions of innate nobility, her erudition in theological matters, the boldness of her mystical assertions...and her widespread sharing of ideas would have been transgressive even fro a man. But Porete's stance is more unruly, as she is a woman writing in the vernacular, her approval [from clergy - TN] complicating her semi-religious role between ecclesiastical and lay communities. And nowhere is this observed better than by Gilbert of Tournai, a Franciscan, who writes, betraying anxiety over the unclassifiable, 'There are among us women whom we have no idea what to call, ordinary women or nuns, for they live neither in the world nor out of it'.

'...Wesenmystik suggests a resistance to identity. She was not a nun, nor cloistered or attached to a specific house; she shared the beguines' liminal status, but was a solitary, a peripatetic without earthly ties. Moreover, though her book imbibed broader influences, such as courtly lyric and Neoplatonism, it calls for annihilation of the self in order to attain total fusion with God: "It is fitting, says Love, that this Soul be similar to the Godhead, for she is transformed into God". This idea is more grandiose than that of the beguines, who, by and large, strove modestly for imitatio Christi, or the identification with the humanity rather than the divinity of Christ.'

Next post: The dialogic of the decentered subject of postmodernism, and how this can be related to Porete's mirror symbolism.

Yum. :)

Ref:
Wright, P. (2009). 'Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls and the Subject of Annihilation'. Mystics Quarterly, 35, 3-4, 63 - 100.