Annihilation and Deification in Beguine Theology

Readers of Bernard McGinn's massive multivolume opus on the history of Christian mysticism may have noticed something peculiar. Whenever he describes a mystical doctrine using adjectives such as “strong” or “daring,” either he is referring to a doctrine taught by a woman mystic or, if it is taught by a man, he somehow connects it to one taught by a woman.Footnote ⁸ To mention one example, in the case of Johannes Tauler's radical ideas about divine union, McGinn concludes: “Tauler's rich teaching on the mutual abyss of love … is scarcely conceivable without the profound and daring teaching about union with God first advanced by the women mystics of the thirteenth century.”Footnote ⁹ Tauler was heavily influenced by Meister Eckhart, who, as Amy Hollywood has shown, appropriated ideas from beguines Mechthild of Magdeburg and Marguerite Porete. All three mystics claim that “the soul herself can and must be refigured or reimagined, and as such become united without distinction in and with the divine. The radicalness of this claim … separates the beguines and Eckhart from most of their contemporaries.”Footnote ¹⁰ Proponents of this radical theology—what Lerner calls “extreme mysticism”—include beguines such as Hadewijch, who described mystical visions and authored poems in which, as McGinn tells us, “strong expressions of identity with God occur.”Footnote ¹¹ McGinn discusses Hadewijch's and other beguines’ distinctive expressions in essays on mystical images such as the abyss and the ocean.Footnote ¹² He finds that while these images originated in patristic sources, they reached a peak of profound and daring originality among the beguines. In the latters’ writing they are used as metaphors for both union with God and the immensity of the beguines’ desire for such union.

Porete shares these traditional mystical images, but she is also acknowledged as the creator of a distinctive and original theology of annihilation. Joanne Maguire Robinson, in her study on Marguerite Porete's theology of annihilation, tells us that “the doctrine of annihilation of the soul was never a mainstream theological doctrine before or after Marguerite Porete, yet it reveals profound insights into the possible relationship between God and the soul.”Footnote ¹³ I will show that many of these profound insights about mystical annihilation are indebted to those beguine theological speculations that McGinn charts through the use of abyssal and liquid metaphors. If I am correct, beguine speculations also contributed to the formation of Porete's doctrine of deification, thus supporting Kent Emery's claim against Jean Orcibal that one “need not look towards the ‘glow of the Christian Orient’ to account for basic elements of Margaret's doctrine of deification.”Footnote ¹⁴ Emery, however, differs from Orcibal only in de-emphasizing Eastern influence. Both see the doctrine as borrowed from patristic sources.Footnote ¹⁵ While the terms may indeed have originated in these sources, Orcibal and Emery ignore the fact that beguine mystics were exploring, developing, and radicalizing these ideas on their own.

We can find the first piece of evidence for this last claim in Sean Field's essay, cited above, in which he locates the earliest medieval appearance of the term annihilation in a thirteenth-century sermon by Franciscan Gilbert of Tournai.Footnote ¹⁶ Field speculates about a possible remote and unintended influence of this sermon among beguine communities or even Marguerite Porete specifically.Footnote ¹⁷ Yet he does not consider the possibility of the opposite direction of influence, which is suggested by Gilbert's writing around 1250:

If, as I will suggest, the doctrine of annihilation is one of these novitates, then Gilbert's use of the term annihilation can be read as his sanitizing the concept of beguine theological accretions. Gilbert uses “annihilation as a concept equivalent to [Franciscan] humility, poverty, and perfection.”Footnote ¹⁹ Perhaps he is counteracting new doctrines, such as Porete's call to liberation from the virtues through annihilation, and thus neutralizing the concept's heretical potential. Whether or not this is the case, Gilbert's passage is crucial to our topic because it is in this “vulgar” theology, developed in a communitarian manner by thirteenth-century beguines, that we first find a radical exploration of mystical union.Footnote ²⁰ McGinn has shown how these women explored such union through their metaphorical discourse, exemplified in abyssal and liquid imagery such as that of Hadewijch:

• My soul melts away

• In the madness of Love

• The abyss into which she hurls me

• Is deeper than the sea;

• For love's deep new abyss

• Renews my wound.Footnote ²¹

We should note here, for further elaboration later, that while today we can only work with written texts, the vernacular language of the poem and the sounds of its Dutch rhyming verses can make us aware of the oral theological tradition behind it. I suggest that written texts are only auxiliaries to the oral communication needed for a theology done “in conventicles, in workhouses, in the streets.” We will see how aural elements are crucial for Porete, elements she inherits from traditions of oral beguine theology. For now we can extend McGinn's claim and suggest that while the images exemplified in the poem are used to describe a mystical state of union, we can also read them as describing a mystical experience that goes beyond the stativity implied in “state of union” to encompass a dynamic process of unitive annihilation.

It is not only that the fluidity of movement involved in liquid imagery avoids the necessity of always restricting a mystical experience to a static state. In the poem above, Hadewijch's mad desire to be hurled into the abyss of love is what leads to her soul being “engulfed” by the abyss and “brought to naught.”Footnote ²² These ideas are not unique to Hadewijch, but characteristic of the beguine spirituality we find in the later compilation of Hadewijch's and other texts, Ruusbroec's Vanden XII Beghinen.Footnote ²³ There we are introduced to beguines who speak about the desire “to be annihilated and melt together in love” (te vernieutene ende te versmeltene in minnen), which drives a soul “to become deiform and transformed into Christ” (godformich werden ende in Cristo ghetransformeert).Footnote ²⁴ While the terms translated as “annihilation” and “deiformity” are rare, they are connected to the more common “melting” imagery. These texts may be reflecting patristic theology, but they can also be read as composed by those beguines who, as Gilbert complains, “interpreted the mysteries of scriptures in the vulgar Gallic tongue.” Connecting abyssal and liquid imagery from nature to the melting and unitive language of Paul's Letter to the Philippians results in passages such as these. This is precisely what Hadewijch's contemporary, Beatrice of Nazareth, did.

We have the option of reading Beatrice of Nazareth, not in light of her beguine heritage, but as an orthodox interpreter of scripture in the tradition of the Cistercian order she later joined. This is how she was read by the author of her Latin biography, probably a male cleric or Cistercian.Footnote ²⁵ He included an earlier Latin translation of her Seven Manieren Minne, where in the last of the Seven Manners of Love the religious woman interprets Paul's Philippians 1:23. Still, the passage could be an example of what McGinn describes as the beguines’ “intense desire” for union, expressed in both abyssal and liquid imagery, a trace of what we will see she inherited from her former beguine community. She expresses this desire as follows:

Beatrice describes this desire for dissolution in Christ in her text's seventh stage, in which “the soul is united to its bridegroom, and is wholly made one spirit in inseparable faithfulness and eternal love.”Footnote ²⁷ The hagiographer would have recognized all this as biblical language, but would have been unsure what to do when he read Beatrice's statement that she was “so deeply immersed and absorbed in the abyss of love that it [the soul] is made wholly into love.”Footnote ²⁸ He decided to add to this distinctive beguine metaphor an orthodox one used by Bernard of Clairvaux, that of the drop of water in wine, yet with a variation crucial for our topic.

In Bernard's On Loving God, we find a predecessor to beguine ideas about annihilation and deification, including liquid imagery, and the elements that they will challenge:

Bernard describes the rare but orthodox understanding of deification using metaphors of two different substances, which seem to become similar yet really maintain their separable natures.Footnote ³⁰ These metaphors can also be read in terms of what will later become the orthodox “traditional qualifications … [insisting, first,] that union does not involve a merging of essences; second, that union removes the consciousness but not the ontological reality of distinction; and third, that the soul becomes God by grace not by nature.”Footnote ³¹ Referring to two different substances ensures that the essences of the human and divine nature are not confused and that the acquisition of divine attributes is understood as something that the solvent “grants” the solute, making it “seem” similar. Just as iron is not igneous by nature, we are not divine by nature but divinized by grace. This divinization does not mean that we become the sun, but that we acquire its clarity. Transfusion is of wills, not of the entire human being. We become aware only of God, just as when blinded by sunlight we can only see light. Everything may seem to disappear, but the sun remains distinct. The hagiographer has to add Bernard's metaphor of the drop of water immediately after Beatrice's abyss because her metaphor does not maintain this schema clearly. He writes: “All the affection of her heart took on, in some way, a celestial nature like a little drop of water running down into the vast expanse of the sea and immersed in the ocean of eternity.”Footnote ³² His qualifier “in some way” (quodammodo) serves the same mitigating role as Bernard's videtur, preserving the distinction of natures. Yet his metaphor of a drop of water in the ocean is the earliest instance I have been able to find of a variant that distinguishes the beguines’ theological speculations from those closer to orthodoxy.Footnote ³³

We will see that Porete uses this same metaphor as a way of challenging the distinction between and separability of human and divine natures. Just as a drop of water is of the same nature as the ocean and once dissolved in it cannot be separated again, so is the annihilated soul of divine nature permanently one with God. If her hagiographer is being faithful to a tradition inspired by Beatrice, then we can ask whether Beatrice's claim that “the heart melts” (hare herte versmeltendene) and “the spirit sinks away down into love” (hare geest altemale in minnen versinkende)Footnote ³⁴ is closer to her Cistercian tradition and Bernard or to her beguine legacy and Porete. Read in light of Bernard there is nothing unorthodox about Beatrice's text. Indeed, her last stage remains true to Pauline language. But if her Dutch words, and her liquid and abyssal imagery, mean what they do in Hadewijch's claim that the spirit “sinks with frenzy in [the abyss] of Love's fruition,”Footnote ³⁵ then we move away from Bernard's doctrine of deification and closer to Porete's doctrines.

As Hadewijch tells us in one of her visionary accounts, Christ appeared to her once and entered into her with the result that both were annihilated. First, she tells us: “And I saw him become nothing … and dissolve” (Ende ich sahene al te niete wertene … ende al smelten). Later she says: “I melted into him and nothing of myself remained” (versmalt in heme ende mi mijns selues niet en bleef).Footnote ³⁶ At first, she uses a qualifier: “To me it was as if at that moment we were one without difference” (Mi was op die vre ochte wi een waren sonder differencie).Footnote ³⁷ Then, the qualifier disappears. In Porete, too, we will find two stages of union. Neither will be satisfied with partial divinization. At the end of her text, Hadewijch reaches the goal she introduced at the beginning, the “highest” goal possible: “to be God with God” (god met god te sine). She is exploring new territory, yet no qualifier is used for safety. Nor is a qualifier used when in a letter she describes being “wholly in the Unity of Love. In this state one is the Father.”Footnote ³⁸ The letter and the vision do not form a coherent theology, but our objective is not to systematize Hadewijch. We are moving instead toward understanding how beguine abyssal and liquid imagery are joined to doctrines of annihilation and deification. These doctrines will not form a systematic beguine theology. Nevertheless, they will be born as conceptual siblings of the beguines’ natural metaphors and share their communitarian foster care.

The metaphor of sinking in the ocean of love helped Hadewijch express her experience of being annihilated and deified in God. Unfortunately, there is not enough evidence to claim that this metaphor expresses a similar experience in Beatrice's writing. “Being wholly one with love” could have meant something different for her. Should we read her in light of her metaphors of sinking and dissolution or of her fish in water simile?Footnote ³⁹ The latter occurs both before and after images of liquefaction. It may serve as an analogy for the closeness yet nonidentity of humanity and divinity. Beatrice's images certainly do not fit a coherent or progressive pattern. Again, the main goal here is not to analyze her theology but to discern her beguine heritage. It is only when the same language arises not only in Beatrice, Hadewijch, and, as we will see later, Porete, but also among other beguines, that we can propose a shared theological pool of ideas. These ideas would then have been developed in each beguine's individual theology. It is among these ideas that we will find the seeds that in some fertile contexts grew to become radical doctrines of annihilation and deification.

A beguine who undergoes a process of annihilation and deification is the main speaker in the treatise known as Schwester Katrei.Footnote ⁴⁰ The dialogue between the beguine and her confessor expresses its own peculiar theology, but does so in language very similar to that of our beguines, especially Porete. Lerner identifies the treatise with the heresy of the free spirit because of its inclusion of this annihilative and deifying process. He summarizes it as follows: “[S]he rids herself of all desire and sinks into nothingness. Thereupon she is drawn into a divine light, ‘heaven and earth become too narrow’ for her, and she finally cries out ‘sir, rejoice with me, I have become God.’ ”Footnote ⁴¹ What Lerner identifies as “free spirit” influence has been interpreted by McGinn and Elvira Borgstadt as a not-necessarily-heretical appropriation of Meister Eckhart's teaching.Footnote ⁴² Given that most manuscripts interpolate Eckhartian sermons into an earlier original, and given that recent work shows that beguines influenced Eckhart, we cannot ignore the possibility that the treatise reflects a spirituality originating in pre-Eckhartian beguinages.Footnote ⁴³

In the critical edition of the Schwester Katrei, the beguine “seczet sich jn ein blosheit.”Footnote ⁴⁴ Lerner translates the original Alemannic as “she sinks into nothingness” and Borgstadt as “she places herself into a state of emptiness.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Borgstadt reads the phrase in light of Eckhart, telling us that she is linking blosheit to Eckhart's detachment (abgescheidenheit) and emptiness (luterkeit).Footnote ⁴⁶ But if we read it in light of beguine imagery and Porete's nothingness and think of it as carrying the dual meaning of “sinking and/or placing herself in nothingness,” we have much more than an echo of Porete's “mectre a nient.”Footnote ⁴⁷ The latter can be translated as “places her in nothingness,” or “reduces her to nothingness,” or “sinks her into nothingness.”Footnote ⁴⁸ We know this because Porete conflates all of these locative, annihilative, and dissolutive connotations in a passage about the soul, in which God “seats her” and “makes her nothing” (la fait nulle) in a space that is both a “resting place” and an “abyss of wretchedness … flood of sin.”Footnote ⁴⁹ I prefer Lerner's Poretian translation because it solves a problem acknowledged in Borgstadt's edition, that is, how to interpret the text's peculiar doctrine of establishment, one described as a permanent union.Footnote ⁵⁰

Borgstadt's edition takes an Eckhartian stance, acknowledged as vague, and links establishment with the possibility that Eckhart's conception of union could be permanent. But, as Ellen Babinsky briefly mentions, the other place where this peculiar doctrine of establishment appears is none other than Porete's Mirror.Footnote ⁵¹ Babinsky is referring to Porete's radical claim that mystical union is permanent or, more likely, that Porete uses it to describe the annihilated soul's authority to teach on her being “so well established” in God.Footnote ⁵² McGinn, in his introduction to Borgstadt's translation, also reads establishment as giving authority to Catherine, yet without mentioning Porete. This authority granted to a woman over a man is, in McGinn's words, “one of the most daring aspects of this provocative text.”Footnote ⁵³ We do not need to claim that one of the authors read the other in order to interpret the doctrine of establishment or the texts’ daring aspects. Both authors do claim that their souls have been established in a place reached through a sinking or dissolving process. Still, I suggest merely that they both borrow from the same conceptual pool, establishment being but one of the concepts they both adapted and integrated into their texts.

Porete's ideas about establishment include what we will later identify as one of the original elements of her doctrine of annihilation, an atypical “reversion to a pre-creative state of being.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Catherine also says that the soul must flow back to the place she reached by being established and/or annihilated: “I am where I was before I was created, there [blos] God and God is.”Footnote ⁵⁵ Since there are important differences between these texts, we should look first for a common heritage rather than direct influence. Catherine's establishment is “jn der blossen Gottheit da nie bild noch forme warrd.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Here she is closer to Eckhart's neoplatonist idea that the Godhead is beyond images and forms, including Trinitarian ones. We will see Porete differing from Catherine in having her own theology wherein the annihilated soul moves beyond images yet retains the image and form of the Trinity. In this respect Porete is closer to the beguine Mechthild of Magdeburg than to Sister Catherine. We can now discuss how ideas about being planted and being given divine form link Mechthild and Porete to a source from which Catherine is more distant. On the other hand, ideas about establishment link Porete and Catherine directly, if not to each other, to a source from which Mechthild is more distant. All are linked together by liquid imagery and ideas about annihilation and deification. Eckhart may have borrowed these ideas too. They would later have been identified by scholars as neoplatonic, but are in fact closer to Eckhart's time.Footnote ⁵⁷ I do not deny that Porete and Catherine are somewhat indebted to Greek or Latin patristic sources. What I propose is that we ought to consider also the possibility of beguine sources less akin to neoplatonism than to Eckhart's learned spirituality.

We can strengthen this last claim if we study Mechthild of Magdeburg's Flowing Light of the Divinity. As mentioned earlier, Hollywood shows that Mechthild differs from her contemporaries when she claims to achieve union without distinction. Mechthild's claims are expressed not in scholastic language but in a cornucopia of liquescent images that merit the entire study that James C. Franklin devoted to them.Footnote ⁵⁸ Whether Catherine's flowing metaphors are indebted to Eckhartian neoplatonism, beguine spirituality, or both is unclear. But there is nothing to indicate that those apophatic elements which Hollywood finds in Mechthild owe much, if anything, to Greek sources. Hollywood introduces some of these elements when she discusses how Mechthild's intense desire for God is so strong that she is willing to be annihilated:

We are here on familiar beguine ground. Mechthild is developing on her own a theology that will later integrate elements originating in the two most famous mystical female communities, the beguines and the monastery at Helfta.Footnote ⁶⁰ What Hans and Heimbach above found is a link to the spirituality of Mechthild's beguine caretakers that she extends and elaborates in the book that will inaugurate a different mysticism at Helfta.Footnote ⁶¹ Annihilating oneself, sinking into an abyss of nothingness in order to achieve divine union without distinction, is a beguine theme behind the images of flow that permeate Mechthild's book and give it its title. Frank Tobin compares these images to those of Eckhart, assuming that the text's flowing images of light are indebted to a neoplatonism that Mechthild would not have recognized.Footnote ⁶² This may be true, but all the images he discusses seem more at home in the liquid imagery of beguines. This is certainly the case for the image Tobin identifies as the one most frequently used to describe the Trinity. When he cites Mechthild's description of her mystically experiencing the “heavenly flood of the spring of the flowing Trinity,” we are closer to abyssal beguine language than to neoplatonic emanation. Ideas from a “liquid theology” are among those that, as Tobin tells us but quickly forgets, Herbert Grundmann claims were present in women's religious communities that then influenced Eckhart.Footnote ⁶³ He attributes Eckhart's liquid vocabulary to his drawing on theologian Abelard with “astonishing poetic intensity” and coming up with terms such as “pouring forth,” “spilling over,” “overflowing,” and so on.Footnote ⁶⁴ His excellent comparison of Mechthild and Eckhart supports his claim that they shared a tradition; but the astonishing imagery moves Eckhart closer, not to patristic theology, but to the beguine heritage of which we find evidence in Mechthild, Hadewijch, and even Beatrice.Footnote ⁶⁵

Annihilation and Deification in Marguerite Porete's Mirror of Simple Souls

We now understand better the legacy from which Porete extracted those elements that would form her theology of annihilation and deification. These inherited elements, together with original ones, appear in the following passage, where she challenges the orthodox account of the soul's relation to God:

Here the soul already has followed Bernard and given her will to God, becoming transformed into his goodness. Her desire is still too intense, thus she is still encumbered. Not satisfied with being united only in will by being transformed into a divine aspect, she is still to move higher. Dissolution is to be completed, a mutual melting where nothing remains of the human nature, not even its name. Annihilation leads to total deification. Porete foreshadows here what she later challenges explicitly. No metaphorical drop of wine will serve. By stretching Bernard's metaphor to the point that it breaks down, changing it into one substance divided only in terms of magnitude, she sets the stage for her claim that it is the chasm between humanity and divinity that seems real. While in Bernard human consciousness of distinction is lost, in Porete divine consciousness of indistinction is regained.

We can better understand this last annihilation into deification by focusing on one of the several uniquely Poretian concepts in which it inheres.Footnote ⁶⁷ I choose as an illustration Porete's idea of “conformity” because it is so suggestive. She introduces this concept as follows:

This passage reveals the paradoxical process whereby the annihilated soul loses her form and acquires a new one while, simultaneously, she recognizes that she never lost her true form and is only regaining what she always had. We can best unpack this abstruse claim if we view it as the converging point of speculations already seminally present in both Mechthild and Hadewijch.

The former I briefly mentioned in the beguine context of the Schwester Catherine. Mechthild reveals that God has taken the soul and

Mechthild's soul being flooded by the divine nature reiterates metaphorically what Christ said to her earlier: “You are so strongly en-natured in me, that nothing can come between you and me.”Footnote ⁷⁰ Her understanding of the divine nature of the soul is so radical that she has to defend it from attack: “I said in one passage of this book that the Godhead is my Father by nature. You do not understand this, and say, ‘Everything that God has done with us is completely a matter of grace and not of nature.’ You are right, but I am right too.”Footnote ⁷¹ McGinn sees in this conformity, and in Mechthild's doctrine of the “preexistence of all things in the divine enclosure before creation” the extreme language of nature that later in “Marguerite Porete, even more than [in] Hadewijch and Mechthild, shows that the germs of the new mysticism of unitas indistinctionis were present, especially among female mystics, prior to Meister Eckhart.”Footnote ⁷² According to McGinn, Eckhart will reach a peak of radicalism which all his successors will mitigate without abandoning his radical language. Tauler comes close to the beguines’ language of union, but “he sought to qualify the more daring ways in which the Meister had expressed the union of indistinction.”Footnote ⁷³ Suso wrote about annihilation, continues McGinn “but must be interpreted in the light of the three traditional qualifications Suso always insisted upon.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Ruusbroec wrote about union without distinction but “insists on the infinite distinction that must always accompany and succeed the experience of union.”Footnote ⁷⁵ This new mysticism, made famous by these northern European theologians, can be found in seminal form in the complex composed of gestating beguine ideas such as conformity, enclosure, and the preexistence of the soul in God.

Mechthild appropriates the pool of ideas from which Porete will drink later in a distinct manner. Mechthild is the only thinker to radicalize Bernard's metaphor of fire while following him in insisting on the preservation of the two substances. In this passage we find her saying that she cannot go against her nature just as “gold cannot be destroyed in fire,” while insisting that “God is her Father by nature.” This is an insight revealed to Mechthild, not a union that is to be attained. For her, unitas indistinctionis does not involve losing consciousness of distinction but becoming conscious of indistinction. In this indistinction, Mechthild seems to equate implicitly the divine form given in an original state and the divine nature of the soul. Porete will explicitly equate the two.

Recasting Aristotelian ideas, our beguines’ theologies revolve around a thematic kernel in which God's form is nothingness, and his form is inseparable from his nature or essence. Since it is uncreated, divine nature will not need to acquire a form. Its form is that of formlessness. Conformity in human beings will involve being given God's formless form; annihilative conformity will involve either being given or recognizing our divine form, that of formless nothingness. Since God's nature is also nothingness, it is not only in form but in nature that we are divine. We already saw in Mechthild that conformity occurs in the pre-created state; for her, annihilation involves awareness of this fact. Although she borrows from the same ideas we first found in Hadewijch, the latter emphasis in her understanding of conformity is even more radical.

Mechthild drinks from the same source as Hadewijch, but in the latter the emphasis is not on consciousness of indistinction regained. For Hadewijch, the goal is annihilation as attainment of the form and nature of nothingness. We saw her surpassing Mechthild's daring in her extreme claim not only of being daughter of the Father by nature but of identity with him. She comes closer to Mechthild in her use of the fire metaphor to propose the conforming of natures, even when not using Mechthild's traditional language of two substances:

• O sublime nature, true Love,

• When will you make my nature so fair

• That it will be wholly conformed to your nature?

• For I wish to be wholly conformed

• If all that is other in me were yours

• Everything that is yours would be altogether mine

• I should burn to ashes in your fire!Footnote ⁷⁶

Is Hadewijch implying here that something remains in the ashes, like Mechthild, or that everything is annihilated, like Porete? I suggested that Hadewijch wants to become nothing because God is nothing. While we can only speculate as to what might be behind Mechthild or Hadewijch, their language of conformity points toward an appropriation by Porete, in whose work the theologies of both beguines will converge.

Our beguines converge in Porete not through their specific texts, but in the oral theology we can recapture through them, the theology beguines preached “in conventicles, in workhouses, in the streets.” Part of my claim relies on showing that Porete's doctrines, exemplified here by the idea of conformity that leads to annihilation and deification, are expressed in a series of inextricable metaphors, connected not only by their shared concepts but also by their form. Content consists not only of what is said, its nature or essence, but how it is said, in a spoken form scarcely captured in script. I want to recapture the Mirror's aural structure by proposing its origin in an oral beguine theology, one unfortunately lost in translation.

We can begin exploring this aural structure with the semantic aspects of the paragraph preceding the doctrine of conformity above. These semantics will help us unveil the original aural quality of the text. In it we find Love declaiming:

A problem arises when the English translators inconsistently use “held,” “retained,” “preserved,” or “maintained” for both detenue and retenue. Although Porete is not consistent either, she does use detenue as the key that opens the listener's mind to a complex of puns and metaphors we can capture if we translate detenue as “detained.”

Edmund Colledge's edition of the Mirror translates detenue as “preserved,” claiming that it appears in the French critical edition but not in the Latin one. Yet the Latin critical edition does, in fact, cite manuscripts in which in tenore appears. The fact that some manuscripts omit it may indicate that the medieval scribes had a translation problem as well. The version that translates detenue as in tenore offers the best solution by preserving Porete's metaphorical structure. Of the multiple meanings Porete invokes, this scribe chose one that evokes Porete's courtly imagery. This Latin translation presents detenue, correctly, as a French verbal form of the noun tenore, which it keeps in its original French. The Latin gives the French word tenore an ablative ending rather than translating detenue as an ablative of Latin tenura. The scribe read Porete as saying that she holds her true form as tenura, which unlocks the complex system of puns and metaphors of which only an audience of Porete's original oral discourse would have been aware.

Ellen Babinsky's edition misses much of Porete's system, especially in those passages that the edition acknowledges as problematic. Babinsky judges these passages as of “little weight,” because they seem to claim there is no real unitas indistinctionis of the soul and God, Porete apparently “maintaining that they remain two separate natures even while possessing one will.”Footnote ⁷⁸ An example is found when Porete presents her doctrine of conformity leading into deification in a dialogue between Reason and Love:

• Reason—To whom does she [the soul] belong then?

• Love—To my will, which transformed (muee) her into me.

• Reason—But who are you, Love? Are you not one of the virtues with us? How is it that you are above us?

• Love—I am God, for Love is God and God is Love, and this soul is God by the condition of Love. I am God by divine nature and this soul is God by droicture d'amour.Footnote ⁷⁹

We will see this problem dissolve when we re-translate several passages under the hypothesis that Porete's detenue has “held in tenure” among the many meanings it attributes to being “detained.” Already a hint is given above, in the passage on the wax and seal, where detenue is given this meaning through the synonym that immediately follows: héritière. Babinsky correctly translates droicture as righteousness, an orthodox use found in William of St. Thierry.Footnote ⁸⁰ However, I prefer Colledge's translation, “right of law,” because it preserves the structural complex of detenue, even though Colledge interprets it incorrectly, claiming that for Porete divine nature is received as a gift of grace.Footnote ⁸¹ Already in Mechthild's defense of her divine nature we find a clue that can make sense of Porete's apparent confusion.

Porete does not receive divine nature as a gift of grace. She attains consciousness of indistinction when she learns that she holds divine nature in tenore, the way a feudal lady holds her land, by droicture, as a birthright. As she tells us at the beginning of the text, her first love is for the faraway king, whom she loves as the king's daughter. In the Mirror, Love praises the soul: “O very high born one, says love to this precious Pearl, it is well that you have [taken the path of Love and] entered the only noble manor.”Footnote ⁸² When Love praises the soul who enters the manor she is not praising the fairytale peasant who marries the prince and becomes queen. Porete's recurrent use of bridal imagery can obscure the soul's status. When Porete enters the manor she is reclaiming her inheritance held in tenore. Medieval tenura consisted of property being held in absentia while the lord was at war. Italian vulgarizations of the Mirror, all based on the Latin, are aware of the connotation of what in modern Italian is having rights or duties a tenore, by law.Footnote ⁸³ We can understand this in terms of modern English “tenance.” A tenant holds a property in tenore for a period of time, after which it returns to its rightful owner. It can be said that both parties hold the property, for the landlord owns it and it is leased to the tenant. Porete holds the nature as its landlady. God, as king, holds it as a tenant and returns it, but not as a gift of grace.

It is not that a wise man is not astounded, as Babinsky suggests, because “a truly courtly and gentle heart recognizes the largesse of a gift given.”Footnote ⁸⁵ No matter how generous a king is known to be, a servant who not only is released from expected servitude but also becomes eternally rich will certainly be astounded at such an unexpected gift. What “is fitting” is better understood by the Latin translator who renders l'appartient as ad se spectat seu pertinet.Footnote ⁸⁶ The king is only doing what is expected of him, what pertains to his duty as a tenant returning something held in trust. Love is divine by nature, and so is Porete, through droicture d'amour, the bloodline that the king now reveals to be engraved in Love's charter.

We are now better able to understand why “it is fitting that the soul be conformable” in our opening passage and why her true form has been “granted and given to her without beginning.”Footnote ⁸⁷ If it has been granted to her without beginning, it is because it has always been hers; she never lost it. She does regain her true form in the sense for which Porete generally uses semblance rather than forme. She has to lose her semblable, as the iron or the river, in the sense of name or consciousness of distinction. In this way she will be conformable (semblable) and able to regain her true name or consciousness of indistinction. “Now this soul has her right name from the nothingness in which she rests” (son droit non du nient en que elle demoure).Footnote ⁸⁸

In this context, we can see how Porete puns on the word detenue. Not only does she now have her name, but she is imprisoned and “held (detenu) in the country of peace.”Footnote ⁸⁹ She is “detained” in a peaceful land because the king has “detained”—held in tenure—her name. Before, she was “detained” in the sense of being enclosed, as we saw preserved in the pool of ideas from which Mechthild appropriated the concept of enclosure. What was for Mechthild “enclosed” is present, but in an ironical sense. Porete says:

• I used to be enclosed

• In the servitude of captivity

• When desire imprisoned me

• In the will of affection.Footnote ⁹⁰

She used to be imprisoned like souls who serve the virtues are still imprisoned, captive of the desire for a virtuous life she once mistakenly assumed to be the equivalent of desire for God. Now she is imprisoned and/or dwells in a peaceful land (en paiz suis demouree), freer than “those still imprisoned (demouree) by virtue.”Footnote ⁹¹ She urges the reader to annihilate the virtues along with everything else since they are an encumbrance that takes away peace of mind. If we could state with certainty that Porete knew of Mechthild, specifically her concern about sin, we could read her here as subverting Mechthild's claim that one should ignite God's fire and “fuel it with the wood of virtues.”Footnote ⁹² In a few places in Mechthild's text, saints burn happily and shine fueled by their virtuous life.Footnote ⁹³ Porete will happily annihilate in fire the wood or iron of virtue, but as a way of getting rid of them forever.

It is not only the sense of the terms used but also their sound that indicates that a complex of metaphors is being activated. We will return to the alliteration of the phoneme /pr/, which occurs in all the passages cited and connects, among other terms, the soul emprisonee to the emprainture of the doctrine of conformity above. This aural mechanism is barely discernible in the written prose, which conceals an original poetical or semi-poetical counterpart combining alliteration with rhyme. In one example of rhyme in prose we find, if we rewrite it as verse: “les Vertuz / ont bien cegneau et aparceu / oians tous ceulx / qui l'ont voulu.”Footnote ⁹⁴ We can also rewrite as verse another passage combining rhyme and alliteration:

• Et porce peaut l'en bien dire

• Que cil est petit o pouvre

• qui souvent demande

• voire encore qui rien demande.

• Car tout estre quel qu'il soit

• N'est que ung jeu de pelote et jeu d'enfant

• envers le souverain

• estre de nient voulouir

• ouquel estre les francs

• demourent sans remouvoir

• car celui qui est franc

• en son droit estre

• ne pourroit ne refuser

• ne vouloir, ne rien promectre. Footnote ⁹⁵

The linguistic acrobatics of passages such as this would have kept the audience enraptured. Alliteration of sounds such as /p/ and /r/ here and /pr/ in the passage on the imprint of the soul help recall what was said in an earlier passage. In this way the audience is led to understand the multivocality of a later use of the sound, such as when it reappears in a context centered on the character of Mary Magdalene. The audience learns more about what receiving the imprint of the seal means when they listen to the story of Magdalene in the desert, where “Love overtook her, which annihilated her (Amour l'imprint qui l'adnientint).”Footnote ⁹⁶ The English translation obscures the original context, where the true form, that of nothingness, is conveyed by “overtaking,” “imprinting,” “embracing,” “enclosing,” “detaining”—all of these meanings at the same time. The teaching is then imprinted in the audience's mind by a final alliterative mnemonic: Love works in the soul “in her, through her, without her (en elle par elle sans elle).”Footnote ⁹⁷

The alliteration is extended when the soul is praised as well taught (aprinse), recalling the alliteration in the passage from which our first example of rhyme was extracted. There annihilation is required of those who want to understand and learn/teach (entendre et aprendre), something those still enslaved to Virtue cannot do.Footnote ⁹⁸ Virtues lack what is needed, so the soul asks: “[H]ow will they teach their pupils (comment aprendront les Vertuz a leur subgez)?” The pun here is that the virtues will forever imprison (aprendront) those under their control (subgez) unless they are freed by Porete's message. This freedom will be described later when the soul exclaims how she is enprinse in God, in contrast to how she used to be enclosed under the control of the Virtues.Footnote ⁹⁹ There the soul was embraced (emprinse), held (detenue) by Love in a freeing way that delivered her from being imprisoned (enclose), held (detenue). Here the way to be freed is through entendre et aprendre, understanding (entendre) Porete's teaching and, through learning (aprendre), seizing (aprendre) what has always been held (detenue) in possession. This understanding allows us to conclude, with Bernard, by observing that the annihilated soul does not lose consciousness of distinction but rather attains consciousness of indistinction.

The transition or imprint received in annihilation involves this consciousness of indistinction that in the following passage is to be acquired by the understanding of the intellect (entendement):

Since the soul is divine by nature, we cannot claim that the annihilated soul receives anything by grace. Except, that is, the one thing she lacks, which is beyond her intellect. This last element is the consciousness of indistinction that she acquires now but will fully understand only in heaven. This knowledge is about something that is hers, not something that belongs to God. This is why the meaning of what is said, the awareness of what it implies, annihilates her and gives her the form (semblable) of nothingness. It transforms her into the Deity and makes her share his form (semblable) or understanding. What is revealed is that she has always retained her true divine form (forme). She must seize what she has always possessed, “detained” in tenore as owner, through the one who, “loving her,” held it for her. He “detained” it in tenore as tenant until the lady reclaimed what had always been under her dominion. This is why this possession is more valuable than anything else she has or will have. Annihilation is thus a process originating at that moment when a gift of consciousness is granted. The imprint of nothingness occurs in time, yet it also occurs in a pre-created state without beginning; she always possessed its form. The deification involved in annihilation shares annihilation's temporality when both are seen as dynamic processes. Yet deification simultaneously escapes temporality when the soul discovers that it is an atemporal process, one that has never begun and shall never end.