Heine

In 1310, the Catholic Church burned a woman alive for writing a book about love. More than 600 years later, scholars discovered that the book had survived. Her name was Marguerite Porete. She came from Hainaut, a region that today extends across Belgium and northern France. Almost nothing is known about her childhood, her family or her personal life. What we do know is that she wrote one of the most extraordinary works of medieval Christian mysticism. The Mirror of Simple Souls. Written in the late thirteenth century, the book explores what happens when a human soul becomes so completely united with divine love that individual desire and self-interest disappear. Marguerite imagined conversations between Love, Reason and the Soul. She argued that a soul that had reached the highest state of divine union no longer needed the ordinary religious practices and obligations that guided other believers. For the medieval Church, this was an extremely dangerous idea. Religious authorities claimed the power to determine how human beings should approach God. Here was a woman proposing that the deepest spiritual experience could transcend those rules altogether. Her book was condemned. Sometime before 1306, the Bishop of Cambrai ordered a copy publicly burned in Valenciennes, in Marguerite's presence. She was forbidden to continue circulating its teachings. But Marguerite did not abandon her work. She sought the judgment of other religious scholars. One distinguished theologian, Godfrey of Fontaines, did not condemn the book, although he warned that its teachings could be misunderstood. Other authorities were considerably less sympathetic. Marguerite eventually found herself imprisoned and brought before the Inquisition in Paris. Twenty-one theologians examined extracts from her book and declared them heretical. Throughout much of the proceedings, she refused to answer her interrogators. The judges interpreted her silence and her continued association with the condemned work as evidence of her refusal to submit. On May 31, 1310, she was sentenced to death. The following day, June 1, Marguerite Porete was burned alive in Paris. A contemporary chronicler recorded that witnesses were deeply moved by her death. The authorities also sought to eliminate her writings. But something remarkable happened. The book survived. Copies circulated through Europe. It was translated into Latin, Italian and English. For centuries, readers encountered its ideas without knowing the identity of the woman who had written them. Sometimes it was attributed to men. Sometimes it was treated as an anonymous work of spiritual wisdom. And then, in 1946, Italian scholar Romana Guarnieri established the connection between surviving manuscripts and the woman condemned in Paris six centuries earlier. The author had finally been reunited with her book. There is a terrible irony here. A woman was executed for writing about a love that transcended human institutions. Those institutions condemned her ideas, destroyed copies of her work and helped erase her name. Yet generations of readers, including members of religious communities, preserved the very words that had led to her death. Marguerite Porete had no printing press, no powerful political allies and no means of protecting herself against the authorities who judged her. She possessed a manuscript and the conviction that its contents mattered. They burned her alive. Six centuries later, her book was still being read. Her judges are remembered largely because they condemned her.