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Life and Death by the Book

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DOI: 10.1215/00138282-4337516

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 Life and Death by the Book
A Dramatic Reading of Marguerite Porete’s
Mirror of Simple Souls
.............................................................................................................................................................................
manuela ceballos

Abstract The life and works of the beguine Marguerite Porete were transformed by fire.
In 1310 Marguerite was burned alive in Paris as the first recorded “mystical heretic” of
the French Inquisition. A few years earlier her book, The Mirror of Simple Souls, had also
been burned in Valenciennes, with Marguerite as a witness. Her use of fire as a metaphor
to describe union with God foreshadows her death. Furthermore, The Mirror’s emphasis
on the insufficiency of language to describe the divine echoes Marguerite’s silence dur-
ing her inquisitorial trial. However, these complaints against language in her book and
Marguerite’s own refusal to speak should not be seen as an absolute rejection of text,
body, and oral expression as vehicles of divine and human encounter. Instead, they reveal
a theory of performance in which life and reading cannot be easily separated into differ-
ent realms of experience.
Keywords apophasis, performance, fire, Marguerite Porete

T he life and works of Marguerite Porete were transformed by fire. On June 1,

1310, Marguerite, who belonged to the beguines—the community of religious
laywomen that flourished in the Low Countries during the thirteenth century—was
burned alive at the Place de la Grève in Paris as the first recorded “mystical heretic”
of the French Inquisition. A few years earlier (between 1296 and 1306), her book,
The Mirror of Simple Souls (Le mirouer des simples ames), had also been burned under
the orders of the bishop of Cambrai in the city of Valenciennes, with Marguerite as a
witness.1 Marguerite’s writing of radical union with the divine through self-
annihilation and her use of fire as a metaphor to describe this union eerily fore-
shadow her own sacrifice. Furthermore, The Mirror’s emphasis on the insufficiency
of language to represent union and on its gross limiting of the transcendent also
seems to ask that the reader consider accounts of Marguerite’s inquisitorial trial as
interpretive guides to her book; during her trial, Marguerite refused to speak in her
own defense, to testify, or even to take an oath. How are we then to understand the
relationship between Marguerite and her Mirror, between the body of the author
and the body of her text (both condemned to the flames), when Marguerite’s own
response to this demand was silence?

e n g l is h l a n g u a g e n o t e s
56:1, April 2018 doi 10.1215/00138282-4337516
© 2018 Regents of the University of Colorado

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 18 4 e n gl i s h l a n g u a ge n o t e s 56:1 … April 2018

The Mirror of Simple Souls emerged during the thirteenth-century blossom-

ing of women’s vernacular mystical writing in Europe. In many ways, its tenor was
similar to the vernacular “love mysticism” of fellow women authors of the same
period, especially that of other beguines, such as Beatrice of Nazareth, Mechthild
of Magderburg, and Hadewijch, none of whom suffered inquisitorial persecution.
The Mirror, however, differed in that it did not rely on visionary or somatic experi-
ences of God, both common methods through which women writers claimed
divine authority. For this reason, Marguerite’s mysticism is deemed “intellectual”
in contrast to that of the more “affective” works written by or about medieval Chris-
tian visionary women, who, unlike Marguerite, are not assumed to want to tran-
scend the body but who built authority by producing and interpreting their own cor-
poreal signs of piety.
Instead, Marguerite’s book seemed to move away from the body (and from
Marguerite herself) and into the realm of the symbolic (or at least it would appear
that way, for I posit a different way of reading the text): in The Mirror a variety of
characters that embody particular qualities (the Soul, Lady Love, Reason) engage
in a dialogue about how, through the radical surrender of the will and annihilation
in love, the “simple soul” can reach a state of nothingness (of being no-thing) and
thus be in and with God—since there is no self left to stand in the way of divine
union. This path to God, which goes beyond the sacraments, the ritual practices,
and even the virtues of the church, is intuitively known by a spiritual nobility who
do not need The Mirror as a guide. However, the text is didactic, perhaps also meant
for those who are thirsty for God; Reason reveals its limitations by asking questions
that lack courtoisie, and Love proves itself superior by exposing Reason’s vulgarity.
This symbolic, rather than somatic, description of union with God is more common
in men’s mystical works of the period than in women’s. For these reasons, The Mir-
ror would have been controversial (especially the suggestion that the annihilated
Soul had no need for the virtues or pious activities). However, the existence of
The Mirror in itself would not have been enough to cause Marguerite’s execution
for heresy at the hand of secular authorities. As Barbara Newman explains, “Books
and beliefs could not be heretical in the abstract.” The authors or devotees of these
books could be condemned to death “only if they prove ‘obdurate’ or ‘relapsed,’ that
is, if they either refused to abjure their heretical views or did so under pressure but
later recanted or resumed their prior activities.”2 Instead, as Sean Fields argues, it
was Marguerite’s “obstinate behavior” that caused her death. A fundamental part
of her stubbornness was her adamant silence.3 Even if we cannot make a histori-
cal case for it, I wish to engage in an exercise of the imagination and explore this
silence, as well as other possible enactments of the text, as potential performances
of The Mirror.

Body of Text
Beyond her silence, Marguerite is “absent” from her text in other ways. In fact, The
Mirror establishes no correlation between any of its allegorical characters and the
historical person of Marguerite, who refused to defend her work, to reveal her own
interpretation of it, or to justify it in terms of doctrine. At least in part because of

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 Ceballos … Life and Death by the Book 18 5

this refusal to reduce the language of The Mirror to mere meaning via rational clari-
fication, Marguerite was burned at the stake. The book she authored was also
burned but survived—linguistically transformed as it was recopied, revised, and
translated—unencumbered by explanations and the author’s own commentary.
Can we posit, then, that the author was annihilated by her performance of the
book? Faced with Marguerite’s silence, what can we say about this wounded object,
this text martyred and mangled by the flames, and the work it performs through
language—which the text itself decries for its insufficiency to describe a God who
is beyond words, a God who is All?
Here I argue that the complaints against the limits of linguistic expression
in The Mirror and its author’s silence during her trial should not lead us to fully
dismiss language, especially embodied speech, as a site of encounter (divine and
human) in Marguerite’s theology. Instead, in addition to advocating spiritual union
through apophasis—an understanding of God through negation—Marguerite’s
text also outlines a theory of textual performance in which language is and trans-
forms matter, and in which being and reading cannot be easily separated into dif-
ferent realms of experience. In The Mirror, the bewilderment through the realiza-
tion that love transcends rational discourse “martyrs” love and the will.4 Thus
language in the text is not merely representational: even when it ceases to signify,
it annihilates and undoes as it is enacted.
If, in the context of everyday life, words “do” things, as J. L. Austin famously
suggested, then the language of The Mirror, which aims at the annihilation of the
Soul, also undoes and unmakes. What kind of reading does a text that aims toward a
state of nonbeing require? Since Marguerite addresses an audience of “hearers” and
“seers” who, like the characters in the book, will (or should) be transformed by the
dialogue, the book may necessitate a different approach to language and to reading.
The Mirror contains a language meant to be seen and heard, a language that ought to
be experienced and sensed and not just understood. The annihilation of the Soul, the
death of Reason, and the destruction of the will are not described by way of a linear
narrative but enacted by the allegorical characters as they come into contact with one
another through language. In this way, The Mirror is like a “groan of prayer” (to bor-
row from Bonaventure), containing multiple voices in one textual body who are con-
stantly working through and against each other, changing by way of language.
If The Mirror were a theatrical work (since, in the theater, the language of
the text is both seen and heard), how would the transmutation of its allegorical
characters—some of whom pass away in divine union (the Soul) or die of bewilder-
ment (Reason)—sound or look like in a performance of the text? Could the dialogue
among these characters be voiced by one or several performers? What kind of apo-
phasis does theatrical performance require as the actor destroys herself to embody
something or someone else (or a multiplicity of someones and somethings)? Even
though the answer to those questions, at least in terms of Marguerite’s own relation-
ship with the text, will likely remain forever out of reach, I propose that we explore
the implications of a dramatic reading of The Mirror, which, conceived as the script
of a sort of Passion play, transforms and ultimately annihilates the actor who gives
it a voice.

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While considering the links between text and corporeality, we also have to
account for Marguerite’s book as an object, whose materiality is inextricably linked
to the body of its author. Even though The Mirror continued to circulate anony-
mously despite efforts to stop its dissemination, it was not attributed to Marguerite.
When in 1946 the Italian scholar Romana Guarnieri established Marguerite’s
authorship of an Old French manuscript titled Le mirouer des simples ames, she had
actually uncovered a later translation of the original treatise; Latin, Italian, and Eng-
lish versions of The Mirror were widely circulated. In fact, as Michael Sells states,
“no other vernacular mystical writing seems to have crossed linguistic boundaries
and proliferated in translation to such an extent.”5 Marguerite even ignored the for-
mal warning issued by Guy de Colmieu, the bishop who ordered the book’s burn-
ing in Valenciennes, against the distribution of her text (which had been deemed
heretical after twenty-one theologians from Paris examined portions extracted by
the Dominican inquisitor William Humbert), for which she ultimately was con-
demned as a relapsed heretic.6 Her case is remarkable in various ways, and, as Fields
states, “in the history of book burning, it is the first instance of an inquisitorial pro-
cedure ending with the burning of both a book and the accused author.”7 Therefore,
although Marguerite’s own copy of The Mirror was burned to ashes, the book would
later become one of the most widely circulated medieval texts, crossing physical and
linguistic borders.
Without any trace of Marguerite’s authorship, The Mirror was disseminated
widely for centuries and became a classic work of Christian mystical literature.8
The 1911 modern English version published by the Downside Benedictines even
had the nihil obstat and imprimatur certifications of doctrinal approval. In the mean-
time, the little that was (and still is) known about Marguerite was mostly drawn
from the Continuer of William of Nangis, and from some of the articles submitted
to the theological panel that condemned The Mirror, which never was referred to
by its title. However, after the book was linked back to Marguerite, its reception
changed: one cannot read a book condemned to the fire, along with its author, in
the same way that one would read any other work. It is no small irony that even
though her text advocates for radical union with the divine, obstacles of various
kinds impeded the recognition of Marguerite as the author of her own book. Or
perhaps traditional notions of authorship are not the best aids to imagine the rela-
tionship between Marguerite and The Mirror, or even to evaluate the impact of the
book’s dramatic performance. As the character Lady Love describes (speaks for) the
Soul who “has taken leave of Reason and of the other Virtues,” it is the Holy Spirit
who writes on the Soul, who then falls silent: “This lesson is not placed in writing by
human hand, but by the Holy Spirit, who writes this lesson in a marvelous way, and
the Soul is the precious parchment.”9 Therefore The Mirror, as it is being written
and read, undoes its author and the characters it represents, and through language
forces them into silence.

Undoing Things with Words

Conceptions of authorial identity aside, the survival of Marguerite’s text in a myriad
of linguistic contexts is all the more meaningful considering that she wrote in the
vernacular. In this manner, the continued translation of The Mirror reflects how

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 Ceballos … Life and Death by the Book 18 7

language becomes the vehicle to depict and enact change in her writing, in which
metaphors of fire, matter melting and liquefying, and alchemical transformation
abound.10 The notion that language possesses a certain materiality, as is also pos-
ited in certain theories of translation, makes the very plot of The Mirror possible.
Unlike the common saying “Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can
never hurt me,” which assumes that language is purely symbolic (and thus unable to
harm the body), in Marguerite’s text words transform and destroy the allegorical
characters and the performers who embody them.
Thus, even if asceticism or bodily mortification are not the means by which
union without distinction is attained in The Mirror, Marguerite does not fully ignore
matter, or even the body, in the Soul’s trajectory toward rapturous annihilation in
union. Instead, her writing relies on transmutation (rather than bodily pain) as a
central metaphor to guide the audience’s sensory perception and the work’s seman-
tic and embodied performance. Therefore in The Mirror the process of reaching
divine union alters matter and language, thus molding textual and human bodies
beyond recognition. This transformation is constant, without a beginning or end, for
in The Mirror there is little notion of original form. In fact, the Soul (once described
as a phoenix) wishes to return to who “she was before she was.”11 The Soul seems to
preexist in the deity, whose form is nothingness, and who takes the form of the
annihilated Soul.
These shifts and mutations are especially striking in Marguerite’s depiction of
God. In her book, images of the deity, which are multiple, are both male and (most
frequently) female. Since the deity itself is beyond linguistic and formal constraints,
it is approached in terms of multiplicity and difference. Gender fluidity in the text,
which signals an ethical and aesthetic refusal to limit the divine’s self-expression,
also makes specific demands on the performer and on the audience. As they engage
the text, they must imagine themselves inhabiting—and annihilating—a range of
divine and human selves.
The deity is thus called by various names: it is Dame Amour, but also Loing-
près (FarNear), Pure Courtoisie, and the Trinity. It is also temporarily given a body,
as in the following passage in which the Soul is melted in the divine’s core: “The
Ravishing Most High who overtakes me and joins me to the center of the marrow
of divine Love in whom I am melted.”12 Similarly, the other main participant in the
dialogue, the Soul (also a female character) is called Annihilated, Not Understood,
Illuminated by Understanding, Unencumbered, and, after a list of twelve names in
chapter 10, Oblivion, Forgotten (Oubliance). As well befits allegorical characters, all
of these names are abstract nouns and adjectives, and the characters to whom they
correspond are shifty and unstable, constantly appearing and disappearing in the
dialogue. Yet they are not fully immaterial. They become something other than
themselves through contact, be it through language or through what lies beyond
it. More important, these allegorical names are also ethical and theatrical roles as
well as attributes, and their transformations in the text also signal the transforma-
tion of the actor who voices them.13
In The Mirror various voices in the text converge in the work of transformation
within the Soul; they all act within her, and in turn she speaks (for) them. Marguer-
ite describes this transfiguration of the Soul as hot wax molding into the shape of a

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seal. “This Soul is Engraved in God [emprainte en Dieu], and has her true imprint
maintained [vraye emprainture detenue] through the union of Love. And in the man-
ner that wax takes [prent] the form of the seal, so has this Soul taken the imprint
[prise l’emprainte] of this true exemplar.”14 In this metaphor it is assumed that prior
to union, the Soul has no shape and no matter, or at least not a “real” one, before she
is molded into her true form (vray exemplaire) through the heat of an external body,
that of the seal. The transformations of everyday matter become the models for
complex moral and spiritual processes in transmutation of the self into the divine,
and vice versa.
The metaphor of melting wax in relation to the seal resonates with that of the
mirror, where the Soul is also formless until it is reflected, and where there seems
to be an intrinsically and explicitly reciprocal relationship between the instrument
and its purpose (form and content) in the production of meaning. Marguerite’s text
claims to be a mirror of simple souls, which it then burns, melts, annihilates, and
forgets in the dialogue. These constant transformations are somewhat stable on the
pages of the book, but not in its performance. There is no way of reproducing the
embodied experience of a text in the same way twice, and in the case of The Mirror
this impossibility is a reminder of the tension inherent in a text that emphasizes
annihilation: in its reading and performance, the script undoes itself and those
who embody it. The Mirror also revels in its unreliability as a guide to annihilation:
at its core Marguerite’s book, as stated by its author, is understood only by those
annihilated souls who do not really need it in the first place.
In The Mirror, however, confrontation with paradoxes such as these pushes the
allegorical characters (and the attributes and roles that Marguerite ascribes to them)
to lose or change shape, to become something or someone else, or to come undone.
These shifts are themselves expressed in a language that is transforming even as it
describes transformation. These linguistic and character transmutations are often
indicated by the verbs mouer (mouee en luy) and fonder, which draw on the sensorial
experience of the text’s audience and its potential performers as well as from a theo-
logical and poetic tradition rich in these metaphors. In one instance, Marguerite
describes the Soul as “dissolved, melted [ fondue], and drawn, joined and united to
the most High Trinity.”15 Following this union through the dissolution or transfor-
mation of its essence, the Soul chastises Reason and her followers (“beasts and don-
keys”) for their vulgarity and announces that, in her new state, she will “be silent
and hide her language,” which she has acquired “in the secrets from the secret court
of the sweet country, in which courtesy is law, and Love moderates, and Goodness is
the nourishment.”16
Here Marguerite references the courtly love tradition and obliquely associates
malleability with courtly honor through the concept of discretion. Marguerite makes
the Soul out to be the courtly lover who, following the norms of the genre, must
maintain discretion. However, as Dame Amour states, discretion is a category that
falls under the purview of lowly Reason. Thus “Fear, Discretion, and Reason can
say nothing against Love.” What is more, “discrete” may be read in its usual sense
(i.e., cautious), but it may also refer to a thing discernible, distinct, and complete

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 Ceballos … Life and Death by the Book 18 9

within itself. In union, in love, there is no discretion: no separate identities, no dif-

ference between them, and no distinction.
Also violently transformative is Marguerite’s language of fire, which acts as
both the mirror and the mirroring, except in a much more radical fashion. In one
metaphor of transformative union, iron, one of the more resilient metals, melts in a
fire so fierce that the metal itself becomes fire: “All this, says Love, is like iron
invested with fire which has lost its own semblance because the fire is stronger
and thus transforms the iron into itself.”17 In another, matter becomes endlessly
burning fire:

This such a Soul, says Love, is so enflamed [si arse] in the furnace of the fire of
Love that she has become properly fire, which is why she feels no fire. For she is
fire in herself through the power of Love who transforms her into the fire of
Love [qui l’a muee ou feu d’amour]. This fire burns of itself [art de luy] in all
places and in all moments of an hour without consuming any matter [sans
prendre nulle matere], nor is it able to will to consume beyond itself. For whoever
feels something of God through matter [sent de Dieu par matere] which he sees
or hears outside himself . . . this is not the total fire. Instead there is matter
along with such fire . . . one who burns with this fire, without seeking matter
and without having it and without willing to possess it, sees clearly in all things
that he consumes things according to the way one ought to consume them.18

In both of these instances, the initial “substances” (iron and Soul) are transformed
from within by a fire that is internally ignited and burns without any external mat-
ter. As they burn, they become the fire, the mirror, the transformative agent capable
of its own unmaking, in a union so absolute and radical that the fire burns through
the distinct substances they no longer possess. Iron no longer resembles itself, for it
has become fire, and the Soul feels no fire, because she is herself fire: “For she is fire
in herself through the power of Love who transforms her into the fire of Love [qui l’a
muee ou feu d’amour].”
This outpouring of one body into the emptied body of another and the erotic
relationship between them is typically Neoplatonic, but in The Mirror there is inten-
sified focus on the process of matter, of substance, melting from within, and push-
ing against its own boundaries, while being molded by contact with what surrounds
it. In a performance of the text, this would be accomplished through a body without
a will, even if, according to The Mirror, a more complete form of union does occur
after death. However, we can also consider that these descriptions of the annihila-
tion of the Soul suggest another way of being within one’s boundaries, whether
through the intensification of a constant force of change from within, the outpour-
ing of the self to allow divine possession, or the surrender of agency such that the
body moves, speaks, and acts by way of a foreign (divine) occupier, doing “all things
without herself.”19 Marguerite describes the annihilated Soul as being “‘without
herself’ when she has no feeling of nature, no work, nor any interior work, neither
shame nor honor, nor any fear of anything which might happen, nor any affection

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in the divine goodness; nor does she know any longer any indwelling [habergement]
of will, but instead she is without will at all moment.”20 Marguerite uses inhabiting
or dwelling to describe the Soul and the deity’s relationship to each other, and she
insists on the transformation of the abode [haberge] into its divine guest.21 The
Soul’s own unmaking produces divine presence out of its own human absence:
through a renewed relationship between its own form and function, the Soul becomes
something other than itself.
The absolute relinquishment of the will is a major theme in Marguerite’s text
and is incorporated in this metaphor, in which the fire is not capable of devouring
itself beyond itself because it cannot will at all. In the same way that Marguerite
says that the Soul exists “without a why” (an expression she uses throughout the
book), the fire burns without itself. There is no feeling of fire because there is no
sense of matter, which consumes and is consumed, transforms and is transformed.
It is not that the “matter” or the body disappears completely; it just mutates and
“burns” constantly, undoing the solidity of materiality and replacing it not with
another static view of divinity but with movement through transformation, with a
mirror, which, as we remember, is the “burning text” she has produced. This burn-
ing text is the script through which magnificent transmutations can take place, a
mirror that unmakes itself and its actors as it is polished. The text does not rely on
the spectacular body to describe divine union, yet the performance of it would
require that through the body’s expressiveness it communicated its own undoing.
Thus regardless of the apparent dismissal of the body and the bodily in Mar-
guerite’s text, there is a tangible quality to language and to the seemingly immate-
rial, which allows for its transformation and malleability through fire and heat.
As Amy Hollywood notes, even the name of the text, The Mirror of Simple Souls,
expresses the possibility of a different presence: “mirror” here can be understood
as a reflection of simple souls, or as a mirror or representation given to simple
souls.22 In either case, the book is the embodiment of an abstraction, whether it
presents itself as a reflection of the Soul’s desire for God or, as the book suggests,
as God’s proof of his love for the Soul and thus as a reflection of himself. In all of
these cases “the book’s authorship is pushed away from the human pen and onto
God because he gives the internal image to the Soul that is externalized in the
form of the book.”23 What is ethereal becomes matter, and what is material dissolves
to make room for something (someone) else. The author and the Soul are (and must
be) “pushed away,” as Hollywood puts it, to portray something other than them-
selves, as the performer of The Mirror would (and must) be also.

Reflecting the Divine Other

In the prologue Marguerite tells a story (partly inspired by Alexander of Bernay’s
Roman d’Alexandre) of a noble maiden who fell in love with Alexander the Great,
without ever having met him, after hearing of his adventures. Knowing that she
never would meet him, the noble maiden “had an image painted which would rep-
resent the semblance of the king she loved, an image as close as possible to that
which presented itself to her in her love for him and in the affection of the love

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 Ceballos … Life and Death by the Book 191

which captured her. And by means of this image with her other habits she dreamed
of the king.”24 In “truly similar fashion [semblablement vrayement]” The Mirror is
such an “image” for the Soul desiring a distant God, and a “habit,” an embodiment
of said image, an action, a way to dream.25 As Hollywood points out, “Both are
images or representations, less of the beloved himself, who is and remains beyond
the reach of the lover, than of the love felt for him or the image of the beloved found
within the heart or soul of the lover.”26 There is a crucial difference, however:
Alexander never gifts his image to the maiden, whereas the book is given to the
Soul by God, and it “makes present in some fashion His love itself.”27 The book
thus reflects the absent beloved by making his image, imprinted in the Soul’s heart,
into a script that promises to reproduce the beloved’s presence in those simple souls
who understand and desire it.
There is more. It would be possible to approach this relationship between the
mirror and what is mirrored under the assumption that the reflection is inferior to
the ultimate truth that projects it, that one can tell mirror, object, and reflection
apart. However, considering Marguerite’s unabashed expression of unitas indistinc-
tionis, this (Platonic) hierarchy is undermined and perhaps not even assumed as a
ruling principle in the text. Ultimately, the troubling of distinctions between mir-
ror and reflection, between the thing represented and its representation, leads to a
broader point about language as a creative, and not merely symbolic, force.
This process gives way to the Soul becoming not just a parchment for the Holy
Spirit to write on, or “engraved in God like wax from a seal,” but also a reflection of
the divine, similar to and a semblance of the Godhead.28 In The Mirror, Love says, “it
is fitting . . . that this Soul be similar [semblable] to the Godhead, for she is trans-
formed [muee] into God . . . which is why she has retained her true form, which is
granted and given to her without beginning from One alone, who has always loved
her by His goodness.”29 The Soul, in turn, responds: “Ah, Love . . . the meaning of
what is said makes me nothing [m’a fait nulle].”30 In this difficult passage, the Soul
assumes the semblance of the divine. She takes on the deity’s shape through knowl-
edge and self-erasure. No shape is, in fact, her real shape, for it is by means of anni-
hilation “through which she regains her true form [par quoy elle a sa vraye forme dete-
nue].”31 As the Soul engages in self-recognition, she is made nothing: she is undone,
fait nulle. Thus the process of reflecting and taking on the divine image, which is no-
image, through unbecoming begins anew.
To those who are familiar with the Islamic mystical tradition, the striking
resemblance of Marguerite’s mirror imagery to the metaphor of the “polished mir-
ror” in the thought of Muslim theologian Ibn al-ʿArabī of Murcia (d. 1240) will be
apparent. Because of this similarity—and despite the lack of concrete historical evi-
dence directly linking Ibn ʿArabī and Marguerite—Michael Sells has drawn a com-
parison between these two authors’ use of the mirror as a metaphor to best explain
the fusion of divine and human identities in Marguerite’s text.32 I bring this juxta-
position of mirror metaphors to this discussion of transmutation and performance
in Marguerite’s text because the comparison helps elucidate some of its difficult pas-
sages, but also because Sells’s method of reading The Mirror through Ibn ʿArabī’s

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thought shows the former’s potential as a script through which voices other than
Marguerite’s can interpret her characters, transform them, be transformed by them,
or even come undone through them.
In his interpretation of the creation story in the Fusūs al-Hikam, Ibn ʿArabī
_ _ _
tells of the Reality (al-haqq) in its unmanifested state wanting to know itself
_
through its divine names: “The Reality wanted to see the essences of His Most
Beautiful Names or, to put it another way, to see His own Essence, in an all-inclusive
object encompassing the whole [divine] Command, which, qualified by existence,
would reveal to Him His own mystery.”33 This reading is based on the h adīth that
_
states, “God created Adam in his image [inna llāha ʿazza wa-jalla halaqa ādama ʿalā
_
sūratihi].” It also alludes to a hadīth qudsī in which God describes a creative desire for
_ _
self-knowledge: “I was a hidden treasure that longed / loved to be known, therefore I
created creation so that I would be known [kuntu kanzan makhfīyan fa-ahbabtu an
_
uʾrafa fa-khalaqtu al-khalq likay uʾrafa].”34 The concept of “unrealized names” points
to a world that exists only in its uncreated potential. Only through the act of crea-
tion, through the fleshing out of its names, can the Divine Reality know itself in its
manifested state.35
However, divine self-awareness does not automatically result from the act of
creation, for the created world is like a tarnished mirror in which the Reality cannot
yet see itself. For this reason, Adam, the archetypal human being, is needed as both
the polished mirror and the act of polishing the mirror. As Sells states: “The real
creates the world as its mirror and thus reveals to itself through the polished mirror
its mystery. The mythic aspect of the dilemma is that in order to reflect, the mirror
must in some sense become invisible.”36 The passing away of the lower soul (nafs) of
Adam allows for the polishing of the mirror, and for the Reality to see its own reflec-
tion. Thus despite the lack of philological connection between The Bezels of Wisdom
and The Mirror of Simple Souls, Marguerite’s annihilation of the self as a way to
become a mirror for the divine, to mirror the divine, and to give one’s body to
what is beyond form can be re-presented by means of Sufi terminology.

Representation, Agency, and Apophasis

To mirror the image of another and to assume another’s name is a way to empty the
self of the self, opening up the possibility for that other to occupy the space of era-
sure. As Maria Lichtmann notes, “Annihilation is necessary to expand the place
where Love will be.”37 How (or whether) to leave the self to make room for the pres-
ence of another is also an ethical and technical question for actors in the theater.
Can theatrical representation be a form of apophasis? Can the actor who voices the
text re-present the absent others that speak through it and make them appear?
What would a performance of The Mirror have entailed for Marguerite and her audi-
ence? How would Marguerite herself have performed The Mirror? Would she have
called on others to act it out with her? In her text, the moment of self-recognition
(anagnorisis) leads directly to catharsis, a purging of the self through excessive
desire and knowledge. Thus, as the Soul understands its ethical role, it becomes
annihilated, and Reason, realizing the limits of her understanding, dies. As the dia-
logue progresses and multiple processes of unmaking are under way, The Mirror

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 Ceballos … Life and Death by the Book 19 3

oscillates between being a scripted performance without an actor and an actor play-
ing one or various roles without a script.
It is interesting to imagine the possible incarnations of the characters in The
Mirror (whether they were intended to be performed by one person or by various
people), and of the gender dynamics between them. Embodying both Reason (male)
and the Soul (female) would have certainly earned Marguerite her title of pseudo
mulier, as she was referred to in the Continuer of William of Nangis.38 Speaking
for a female incarnation of the divine (Dame Amour), performing the silence of a
male God (FarNear), and embodying The Mirror’s version of the Trinity would have
perhaps been even more daring. Did Marguerite gesture the shift in characters
through a change in tone, movement, “stage blocking,” or a formal announcement?
How does she signal the more subtle transformations that also occur through-
out The Mirror? For instance, in chapter 80, “How the Soul Sings and Chants,” the
French “Comment l’Ame chante et deschante” or “how the Soul sings and changes
note”/“how the Soul chants and disenchants” emphasizes the multiple possibilities
contained in a single act—the Soul opens the dialogue by stating, “I sing” (does the
actor?). Further along, the Soul also asks a question to which, Marguerite indicates,
“the Soul herself responds.”39 In this brief passage, as in others, there are internal as
well as external dialogues. These exchanges between (and within) allegorical char-
acters in The Mirror and the transmutations that result from them (from Reason
to nothing, from Soul to Annihilated Soul) would demand that the performer,
through her body, take the audience to a conceptual world in which other forms of
being are possible.
Imagining, then, that The Mirror could have been, to Marguerite, a theatrical
script in addition to a Gospel (which is how she describes her text), and imagining
the particularities of a performance in which multiple characters (including the
deity) speak, transform, disappear, and reemerge, can open up different interpretive
possibilities, especially in regard to the Soul’s annihilation in divine union. Impor-
tant studies of Marguerite, including those by Hollywood, Bernard McGinn, and
Sells, discuss the transcendence of the body and of gender as a feature of Marguer-
ite’s apophaticism. The surrender of the will and of agency was a way of bypassing
the restrictions of the temporal and the contextual, a way of fusing with a divine that
resides beyond the corporeal, the tangible, beyond what can be restricted by its own
material constitution.
Through the annihilation of the Soul in love, Marguerite posits that the Anni-
hilated Soul, as she gives up her will, is no longer an autonomous agent but a repre-
sentative of the divine. Agency and representation are intrinsically related concepts,
since, as Talal Asad reminds us, an agent is someone who represents a group or an
individual who is absent, and who acts on their behalf.40 What this representation
entails, ethically and aesthetically, is at the center of theatrical performance. For
Asad, “the idea of representation underlying agency is rooted in a paradox: that who
or what is represented is both absent and present at the same time (re-presented).
Theatrical representation—where the actor’s body makes present someone who is
absent—exemplifies, in a different way, the same paradox.”41 In this view, the actor’s
task to re-present, to simultaneously embody absence and presence, replicates the

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 194 e n gl i s h l a n g u a ge n o t e s 56:1 … April 2018

inner workings of Marguerite’s text and, further, may speak to her own role as a
performer of The Mirror. It is even possible to view her silence in her trial as
an intentional performance of her own apophatic script before an audience: a pro-
phetic fulfillment of her own Passion. Those present at her trial, reportedly, were
moved to tears.42
The contemporary historian charged with reconstructing Marguerite’s life
and the attentive reader of The Mirror would be faced with a similar challenge as
the actor seeking to play the multiple roles accounted for in her script. As Michel
de Certeau mentions, regarding the simultaneous presence and absence of the mys-
tic in the archive: “Historiography is a contemporary form of mourning. Its writing
is based on an absence and produces nothing but simulacra. . . . It offers represen-
tation in place of bereavement.”43 However, whereas the secular historian, limited
by a language that is purely symbolic, can offer nothing but the representation of
the mystic’s absence in the form of rational narrative, an actor committed to an apo-
phatic technique can perform (re-present) the absence scripted by the mystic. The
emptying of the actor’s self, the absence of the actor, allows for the mystic’s momen-
tary presence.
Let us then turn away from the historiographer and toward the actor who
must, to embody absence or even the presence of another, reconceive her own agency
in relation to the script to be represented. For Asad, this ethical reframing of agency
relates directly to the way that notions of agency have shifted between the early mod-
ern period and modern and postmodern contexts. Elizabethan techniques of act-
ing, for instance, sought to “disempower one self for the sake of another,” since an
actor would attempt to “become an instrument of the text, to fuse himself directly
with it.”44 This method of acting thus resembles a discipline in which willing obe-
dience is a moral end developed through a set of sensibilities and practices of the
body in order to move, persuade, and teach others—much like the mystical tradi-
tions in Christianity and Islam that are the focus of this essay—or even to surrender
one’s ego and individuality for the force of another to guide the performance.

Conclusion: Apophasis as Technique

Evidently, the performance of apophasis is a question not simply of spontaneous
desire and individual talent or gift but also of technique. Even though technical
command does not guarantee an inspired performance, and even though a perfor-
mance can always fail—and the same can be said about disciplinary practices that
seek to prepare or produce an experience of God—discussions of technique and
stage directions are premised on a horizon of self and communal transformation, in
which selves and bodies could be otherwise. How should the actor signal, through
her body, that she has become someone else or that she is inhabiting nothingness?
How does the actor’s self “fit” into an external script? Should the actor as an agent
overpower the script, or should the script annihilate the self of its performer(s)?
Contemporary approaches to acting (particularly Lee Strasberg’s “method acting,”
made famous by his students at the Actors Studio in New York City) privilege the
character over the script and encourage the actor to “construct his own text.”45 This
has the effect of subsuming ideas, formal rhetoric, and plot to individual “character

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 Ceballos … Life and Death by the Book 19 5

portraits.”46 Modern methods thus resemble contemporary views of agency, in

which the self imposes itself against structures and seeks to write itself onto history.
In the early modern period, however, a skilled actor would gain power and pres-
ence on the stage precisely through surrendering himself or herself to the script,
privileging grammar and structure over a personal quest for meaning. Even though
Marguerite is not an early modern figure or properly an actress, she wrote her book
as one would an ethical script, which, if performed correctly, could lead to the very
annihilation that her characters (Reason and the Soul, most notably) experienced in
the journey toward union.

......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................
manuela ceballos is assistant professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the
University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Acknowledgments Colloquium, University of the South, Sewanee,

I would like to thank Michael Sells, Fiona Somerset, TN, March 11, 2017.
María Mercedes Carrión, Linde Brocato, and Luis 14 Babinsky, TMSS, 128. In French, “Ceste Ame
Menéndez Antuña for their generous comments est emprainte en Dieu, et sa vraye emprainture
on earlier versions of this article. All mistakes are detenue par l’union d’amour; et a la maniere
mine alone. que la cire prent la forme du seel, en telle
maniere a cese Ame prinse l’emprainte de cest
vray exemplaire” (Mirouer, 148).
Notes
15 Babinsky, TMSS, 143.
1 I will refer to Ellen Babinsky’s translation,
16 Babinsky, TMSS, 143.
Marguerite Porete: The Mirror of Simple Souls,
17 Babinsky, TMSS, 130. In Old French, “Car tout
hereafter cited as TMSS, and to Romana
ainsy, dit Amour, comme le fer est vestu du feu
Guarnieri and Paul Verdeyen’s edition of the
et a la semblance perdue de luy, pource que le
Middle French/Latin text: Marguerite Porete:
feu est le plus fort qui l’a mue<e> en luy”
Le mirouer des simples ames, which will be
(Mirouer, 152).
abbreviated as Mirouer. For further discussions
18 Babinsky, TMSS, 107; Mirouer, 90, 92.
on the title, see Lerner, “New Light”; and Fields,
19 Babinsky, 185; Mirouer, 306.
Beguine.
20 Babinsky, 185; Mirouer, 306.
2 Newman, God and the Goddesses, 305–6.
21 Mirouer, 310.
3 Fields, Beguine.
22 Hollywood, Soul as Virgin Wife, 87.
4 Babinsky, TMSS, 214.
23 Hollywood, Soul as Virgin Wife, 89.
5 Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying, 118.
24 Babinsky, TMSS, 80; Mirouer, 12.
6 Lerner, “New Light,” 93–94.
25 Babinsky, TMSS, 80; Mirouer, 12.
7 Fields, Beguine, 3.
26 Hollywood, Soul as Virgin Wife, 89.
8 Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying, 118.
27 Babinsky, TMSS, 80.
9 Babinsky, TMSS, 142.
28 Babinsky, TMSS, 128.
10 For more on the language of liquidity in
29 Babinsky, TMSS, 128; Mirouer, 150.
beguine theology, see Marin, “Annihilation
30 Babinsky, TMSS, 128; Mirouer, 150.
and Deification.
31 Mirouer, 150.
11 Babinsky, TMSS, 89.
32 Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying.
12 Babinsky, TMSS, 155–56. In French, “Le
33 Austin, Ibn al-ʿArabi, 50.
sourhaulcement ravissable qui me sourprent en
34 A h adīth is a report of the sayings and deeds of
joinct au milieu de la mouelle de Divine Amour _
the Prophet Muhammad. A h adīth qudsī is a
en quoy je suis fondue, dit ceste Ame” (Mirouer, _
type of report in which it is believed that the
228).
Prophet Muhammad is expressing the words of
13 Here I am paraphrasing Fiona Somerset’s
God in his own speech.
unpublished response to a shorter version of
35 A causal argument should not be made here
this essay, delivered at the Sewanee Medieval
(the divinity could know itself only through

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 19 6 e n gl i s h l a n g u a ge n o t e s 56:1 … April 2018
creation), since suggesting that God needs
creation in any way would be blasphemous;
however, the text clearly suggests reciprocity
between the divine and creation.
36 Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying, 89.
37 Lichtmann, “Marguerite Porete and Meister
Eckhart,” 78.
38 Fields, Beguine, 234.
39 Babinksy, TMSS, 226; Mirouer, 226.
40 Asad, Formations of the Secular.
41 Asad, Formations of the Secular, 75.
42 Fields, Beguine, 162.
43 Certeau, Mystic Fable, 10.
44 Asad, Formations of the Secular, 75.
45 Asad, Formations of the Secular, 75.
46 Asad, Formations of the Secular, 76.
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