Sunday, November 5, 2017

Marguerite Porete - Beguines say I err...



O my Lover, what will Beguines say
and religious types,
When they hear the excellence
of your divine song?
Beguines say I err,
priests, clerics, and Preachers,
Augustinians, Carmelites,
and the Friars Minor,
Because I wrote about the being
of the one purified by Love.
I do not make Reason safe for them,
who makes them say this to me....

I have said that I will love Him.
I lie, for I am not.
It is He alone who loves me:
He is, and I am not;
And nothing more is necessary to me
Than what He wills,
And that He is worthy.
He is fullness,
And by this I am impregnated,
This is the divine seed and Loyal Love.



 
Marguerite of Porete b. ca. 1250; d. Paris, 1310.

French mystic. Described as a beguine, she was living around Valencienne (Belgium) in the early 1300s, when her book, Le mirouer des simples ames aneanties [ca. 1300] (ed. Guarnieri 1986; tr. Colledge et al. 1999) was condemned and publicly burnt. Written in Old French, and extant in Latin translation as well, the book characterizes the final goal of human life as a single, simple unitive act of will with God. It was subsequently enlarged, clarified, and eventually approved by a commission of theologians, but her repeated refusal to submit to ecclesiastical authority led her to be condemned as an unrepentant heretic, and she was burned at the stake.

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