AgoraAn open square of thought

Marguerite Porete

c. 1250–1310

A first way ina deliberate simplification – the portrait says more

A soul that has given up its own will entirely lives in God directly and no longer needs rules or virtues to guide it.

Placement

Medieval & Scholastic · Western Europe · Religion, Metaphysics, Existence & Self

Beguine from Hainaut, burned in Paris in 1310 as a heretic for her book: the soul that has annihilated its own will lives in God without intermediary and no longer needs the virtues as masters.

Key ideas

  • Annihilation of the will
  • The soul “without a why”
  • Taking leave of the virtues

Open in the star map

Influence

Influenced 1

  • Meister Eckhart

    influenced disputed

    Eckhart’s teaching on the soul’s nothingness and detachment has close parallels in Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls; he was in Paris in 1311, but direct use is disputed. Marguerite Porete, Le Mirouer des simples ames; B. McGinn (ed.), Meister Eckhart and the Beguine Mystics (1994); SEP “Meister Eckhart”

    Evidence: AI draft

    Meister Eckhart › c. 1260–1328

Works

  • c. 1300The Mirror of Simple Souls

    A dialogue of Love, Reason and the Soul: seven stages lead to the annihilated soul that wills nothing and lives in God.

Position

“The Mirror of Simple Souls”, written in Old French, describes the soul’s ascent through seven states to a condition in which it has annihilated its own will and lives in God “without a why”. In the dialogue, Reason, who speaks for the Church’s teaching, finally dies of astonishment. The annihilated soul, Porete writes, “takes leave of the virtues”: it no longer serves them as masters, because it is beyond the striving in which virtues are needed – a phrase her judges read as a licence to sin. Her theology of the soul’s nothingness has close parallels in Meister Eckhart, who was in Paris in 1311; many scholars think he knew her book.

Life & context

Marguerite Porete (c. 1250–1310) was a beguine – a religious laywoman living outside a convent – from Hainaut in the French-speaking Low Countries. Her book was condemned and burned by the bishop of Cambrai around 1300; she continued to circulate it. Arrested in 1308, she refused to answer the inquisitor and was burned at the stake in Paris on 1 June 1310.

Appears in

Sources: Wikipedia · Wikidata

As of November 2026 · Sources · Improve this page · How Agora is made

Open in the star map