20d • General discussion
I want to honor whom I just today discovered.
In 1310, a woman named Marguerite Porete was taken to a stake in the center of Paris. A crowd watched as she was condemned as a heretic. She was burned after she refused to submit or take back her words.
Her crime was writing a book.
Marguerite Porete came from the County of Hainaut, in what is now Belgium. No one knows her exact birth year, but it is usually placed in the mid 1200s. Very little about her early life is certain.
She joined the Beguines. They were women who chose a spiritual life without the usual monastic vows. They often lived in small communities and supported themselves through work.
The Beguines lived with a level of independence. Many served the poor, prayed together, and tried to draw closer to God outside strict church structures. To some church leaders, women doing this without direct clerical control could feel threatening.
Marguerite took that freedom further than most.
Sometime in the late 1200s, she wrote a mystical book called The Mirror of Simple Souls. It is written as a conversation between allegorical figures, Love, Reason, and the Soul. It describes seven stages of spiritual change.
At the center of the book is a bold idea. A soul, she says, can become so united with divine love that it no longer needs the Church’s rituals, rules, or intermediaries in the same way. In the highest union, the soul gives up its own will to God completely, and in that surrender, it finds perfect freedom.
"Love is God," she wrote, "and God is Love."
She did not write in Latin, the language of the clergy and scholars. She wrote in Old French, the language ordinary people could understand. That meant her ideas could travel beyond monasteries and beyond the usual channels of control.
And they did.
Between 1296 and 1306, the Bishop of Cambrai condemned her book as heretical. He ordered it burned publicly in the marketplace of Valenciennes. He also ordered Marguerite never to share it again.
She refused.
Marguerite believed her book carried divine truth. She said she had consulted respected theologians before sharing it, including the Master of Theology Godfrey of Fontaines. Whatever support she believed she had, she would not let one bishop silence her.
She kept sharing her book. She kept insisting that the soul’s bond with God did not belong to any earthly institution.
In 1308, she was arrested. She was handed to the Inquisitor of France, a Dominican friar named William of Paris. He was also confessor to King Philip IV, the same king who was moving against the Knights Templar at the time.
Marguerite was imprisoned in Paris for eighteen months. During that time, she refused to speak to her inquisitors. She would not take the oath required to proceed with the trial, and she would not answer questions.
Her silence was not passive. It was an act of defiance, and it enraged the authorities.
A commission of twenty-one theologians from the University of Paris examined her book. They pulled out fifteen statements they judged to be heretical. One of the most alarming was the claim that a soul fully united with God could give nature what it desires without sin, because such a soul was no longer capable of sin.
To the Church, that sounded like a moral disorder. To Marguerite, it described the freedom that comes from perfect surrender.
She was offered many chances to recant. Others saved their lives by admitting error. A man arrested alongside her, Guiard de Cressonessart, first claimed he was her defender, then later recanted and was sentenced to life imprisonment.
Marguerite did not bend.
On May 31, 1310, William of Paris declared her a heretic again after she had already been warned. He turned her over to secular authorities. The next day, June 1, she was led to the Place de Grève, the square used for public executions.
The Inquisitor denounced her as a "pseudo mulier," a fake woman, as if no real woman could defy the Church that way. Then they burned her alive
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I want to honor whom I just today discovered.
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