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127 4 Writing Annihilation with Marguerite Porete Near the end of Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls,1 the character Soul begins to sing. This song of love was found by the Soul; she calls it love’s song, both in praise of and given by love.2 The Soul fears that others may misunderstand her song because they are blinded by reason, but reason is surpassed by perfect love. Love sets the Soul free from imprisonment; love exalts, transforms, and unites her in being with divine love, and so she will love him, the lover finally named as the Holy Spirit. As the Soul nears the end of her song, she reflects: I have said that I shall love him. I lie, it is not I at all, But it is he alone who loves me: He is, and I am not . . . He is fullness, And from this I am full. This is the divine essence And love loyal.3 1 All references are to the critical edition of Marguerite Porete, Le mirouer des simples âmes / Speculum simplicium animarum, ed. Romana Guarnieri and Paul Verdeyen; Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 69 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1986), hereafter referred to as Mirouer, cited by chapter and page number. English translations are from The Mirror of Simple Souls, translated by Colledge et al., with modifications where noted. 2 Mirouer, chap. 122, 342. “Amour m’a fait par noblece / Ces vers de chançon trouver.” “Love caused me in her nobility to find the verses of this song.” Translation modified. 3 J’ay dit que je l’aymeray. 128 FLESH MADE WORD The Soul did not compose her song but merely found it.4 She tells us she lies when she proclaims her love. And the “I” who sings, sings that she is not “I.” Who is this singer? The content of the Soul’s song belies the sound of her singing. The “I” is not “I”: there is no songwriter, no lover, and no one to sing, simply a voice that paradoxically proclaims her own nonexistence. By the last lines of the verse, the “I” dissolves completely into the fullness of God.5 This final song in Porete’s text encapsulates her doctrine of the soul’s annihilation in love and the paradox it creates for writing and speech. Through annihilation of the will, the soul becomes nothing, but by becoming nothing, the soul returns to her origin in God, and so becomes everything . The annihilated soul does not compose songs, but love helps her find them. She no longer knows how to speak of God, for all telling, and even prayer, has been taken from her. Nor does she write books, and yet Porete produced a beautiful and complex work of mystical theology in her Mirror. Recognizable features of the self such as identity, authorial intent, and agency or will all dissipate in the annihilation of the soul. And yet through writing we hear a distinctive voice, singing the song of love. 0 Marguerite Porete was born in the middle of the thirteenth century and burned at the stake in Paris on June 1, 1310. Called a pseudo-mulier or “phony-woman” and a “beguine,”6 but not associated with an institutional Je mens, ce ne suis je mie. C’est il seul qui ayme moy: Il est, et je ne suis mie . . . Il est plain, Et de ce suis plaine C’est le divin noyaulx Et amour loyaulx. (Mirouer, ch. 122, 346; translation modified) 4 “Finding” (trouver) songs was a common topos among the trouvères, meaning both “to find” and “to sing.” Porete’s writing is influenced by both trouvère lyrics and medieval French romance; see Barbara Newman, From Virile Woman to WomanChrist: Studies in Medieval Religion and Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 137–67; and S. [Zan] Kocher, Allegories of Love in Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls (Turnhout: Brepols, 2008), 60–69. 5 Around 1300, the subject pronoun “je” was still grammatically optional (see Kocher, Allegories of Love, 186). Porete’s choice of whether to write “je” in the context of union with God was surely deliberate. 6 In light of the three possible denotations of “beguine” as “heretic,” “devout Christian layperson,” or “a member of a beguinage or beguine community,” Kocher argues that inquisitors were using “beguine,” circularly, in the first sense, and that Porete could be accurately described as a beguine in the second sense, but there is no documentary evidence for...

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