The Mirror of Simple Souls

"Yes, I wanted to choose this for a number of reasons. Firstly, the history of philosophy is taught as a history of blokes, largely, and that’s a problem. There’s a problem in the way in which the term ‘continental philosophy’ has been constructed around certain key male figures. I’ve been teaching a course over the last five/six years on mysticism. I’ve just had an interest in what’s going on in mystical experience, in the same way that William James was fascinated with mysticism in The Varieties of Religious Experience . And the philosophical tradition, certainly from Kant onwards but arguably earlier than that, is premised on the refusal of religious enthusiasm – mysticism, fanaticism and all the rest. I’m interested in pressing that a little bit. Also, if you look at the mysticism tradition so-called – the mystics didn’t call themselves mystics, they were just interested in spiritual experience, let’s say – they were largely women. They were women writing in a culture that didn’t allow them to write, therefore writing in the vernacular language. Many of the earliest vernacular texts we have in the European languages are written by women mystics like Julian of Norwich who wrote the first book in English by an English woman, which should be studied in every canon of English literature in my view and isn’t. “Many of the earliest vernacular texts we have in the European languages are written by women mystics” Marguerite Porete is this fairly obscure medieval French mystic who was burnt as a heretic in 1307. She wrote this book called The Mirror of Simple Annihilated Souls which is an extraordinary book. What she’s trying to describe in this book is her relationship to God as she understands it, but the core of the book really is an understanding of love. That’s why I wanted to mention her in connection to continental philosophy. First, it’s a book by a woman; philosophy is meant to be the love of wisdom but actually it’s a love of wisdom which would appear to be a uniquely male preserve. Going back to the Republic , there are eleven people present in the discussion, six of them speak, and they’re all men. What is going on? What kind of love is that, where one half of the human race is dropped out of the picture? Marguerite Porete, like Julian of Norwich and many other spirituals in that tradition, is concerned with this question of love and that’s what I found powerful in this book. She talks about love as a process of what Simone Weill will call in the mid-20th century ‘decreation’: a process of ‘decreating’ or undoing the self. This is the way Porete puts it ‘one must hew and hack away at oneself in order to make a space large enough for love to enter in.’ Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It’s that idea of love that I find really interesting, that kind of profound existential sense of love as something which requires an annihilation or stripping away of the self. That contrasts very strongly with the way people often talk about love where love is something that one individual has for another individual when they say ‘I love you.’ Love becomes a sort of mutual exchange of favours, you do this and I do that, and eventually we move in together and buy some furniture from IKEA. So, love risks this kind of flat, tepid experience, whereas in someone like Porete it’s this much deeper and more dramatic unsettling experience and that really interests me. That’s why I wanted to focus on her. It’s a very strange disturbing book to read, written by someone who was burnt as a heretic who didn’t think of herself as a heretic, she thought she was just asserting the truth of how she understood Christianity. She sees love is a transformative act which transfigures the self, rather than something more minimal and neutral and cognitive. Without having a faith in God, which I don’t have, I want to hang on to that dramatic idea of love as a key idea of what it means to be a self in relationship to other selves."