 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, After Virtue, Marguerite Porat. Who is the medieval version of Socrates? Perhaps Albert the Great, a famous philosopher who had an even more famous philosopher for a student. Or actually any number of scholastics, since they all loved a good disputed question. Or how about Peter of Olivey, champion of voluntary poverty? You might also think of Roger Bacon because he was sent to prison for his teachings. But if we're thinking along these lines, then the medieval thinker with the best claim to the title might be Marguerite Porat. Like Socrates, she was executed after courageously refusing to recant her convictions. Rather than being allowed a final chat about the immortality of soul with friends, followed by a bowl of hemlock, Marguerite was burned to death. It didn't come without warning. Years earlier, she had been arrested after a book she had written came to the attention of the local bishop. The book was destroyed before her very eyes, and she was warned never again to disseminate such heresy on pain of execution. Marguerite didn't let this stop her. She was evidently a woman of means and some social standing, since she could afford to have several copies of her book made, keeping one herself, as she admitted, and having her ideas written down and passed to others, including another bishop. In 1308, she was arrested and excommunicated. A protracted period of imprisonment followed. The Inquisitor, William of Paris, couldn't even get this stubborn woman to take an oath on the sacrament so that a trial could begin. Finally, he gave up trying to extract her cooperation. A panel of Parisian theologians was assembled, and they agreed that her book was heretical. She was handed over to the secular authorities and executed in Paris on June 1, 1310. The book, for which she died, fared somewhat better. It is called The Mirror of Simple Souls Who Dwell in Wishing and in Longing. Without Marguerite's name attached, it enjoyed a fairly wide dissemination, being translated into Latin and Middle English, and also reworked into Middle French on the basis of the original Old French version. It may already have influenced Maester Eckhart, a contemporary of Marguerite's, and like her a major philosopher-mystic. Of the thinkers we've covered so far in the series, the obvious comparison is of course not really Socrates, but earlier women mystics, Hildegard of Bingen, Hadevich and Mertil of Magdeburg. Her similarity to the Bingen mystics, Hadevich and Mektild, seems especially strong. Several medieval authors refer to Marguerite as a Bingen, which makes it tempting to connect her persecution to the increasing disquiet caused by the Bingen movement in the early 14th century. This culminated in a condemnation at the Council of Vienne in 1312, so only two years after Marguerite was killed. But several scholars now doubt that she was in fact a Bingen, so we probably shouldn't push this connection too far. Like the Biggens though, Marguerite wrote in a vernacular language, and her central concern is with the possibility and implications of union with God. Some of her favorite metaphors, such as the image of melting away, can also be found in their works. She even uses a central trope, taken from the courtly love literature that inspired the earlier Biggens. Her work is effectively a three-way dialogue between her own soul, love, and reason. Occasionally other characters appear, like temptation and truth. This is a clear echo of the allegorical dialogues we find in such works as The Romance of the Rose, where love and reason are shown debating the merits of romantic entanglements. Yet Marguerite's writing does not display the eroticism we find in Hadevich and Mektild. Even set alongside their works, Marguerite's mirror seems far closer to being something we might call a philosophical treatise. Her central character of love has a clear agenda and sets out the bold philosophical and theological claims that made this book so shocking to the bishop and the inquisitors. It's clear from the book itself that Marguerite knew she was, quite literally, playing with fire. There's nothing quite as blunt as Mektild of Magdeburg's mention of a threat to burn her book. You may remember her retort that it's impossible to burn the truth. But Marguerite alludes frequently to the controversial nature of her ideas. The purpose of the character of reason in the book is in part to express reluctance or outright opposition to the teachings of love. So reason speaks for the reader who has trouble accepting Marguerite's teaching and is allowed to point out apparent contradictions in that teaching or warn that the teaching seems to be straying into dangerous territory. At one point, she anticipates that the church will be astonished by one of her core ideas, namely that soul can free itself of any need to use the virtues. She was right to worry. Precisely this doctrine was among those condemned by her inquisitors and used as proof of her heresy. Well, perhaps, worry is the wrong word. Marguerite seems to have known she was courting controversy and not minded doing so. She provocatively refers to the religious institutions of her day as Holy Church the Lesser, in contrast to the greater church of the souls who have been freed by love for God, and mentions that such souls no longer even need to pray. Clearly, Marguerite was well aware of the daring nature of her book. This is entirely typical of her. Her mirror is a highly self-conscious work, something else it shares in common with the Romance of the Rose. The mirror wears its artifice on its sleeve and several times offers so-called glosses on its own contents. It's a book that includes its own commentary. She makes the point emphatically in a prologue, which also reveals Marguerite's dependence on earlier literary models. Playing on an earlier romance about Alexander the Great by Alexander of Banae, she tells the story of a princess who falls in love with King Alexander but lives far away from him. The princess gains solace by commissioning a painting of the king. In the same way, Marguerite says that her own book is a representation of her soul's love for God. A character named Soul then appears throughout the text in discussion with reason and love. This device is much like the character of the lover in the Romance of the Rose. Like Jean de Meun, Marguerite takes on the dual roles of author and character. Paradoxically, the character's point of view is more limited than that of the book as a whole. In the mirror, Marguerite as author depicts the growing understanding of Marguerite's soul. What is it then that the soul and the reader too must come to understand? Ultimately something that cannot be put into words. The piece of divine life cannot be thought or written. The comparison of the book to a painting is an apt one. Famously, a picture is a thousand words, but no number of words can fully express the nature of God or the soul's condition once it is united to God. Like the painting of the beloved king that would be discarded if the king himself were present, Marguerite's book points beyond itself towards an unmediated encounter between the soul and God. I said before that the mirror reads somewhat more like a philosophical treatise than do the writings of Harivitch and Mactild. Though that is true, it's also rather ironic, since Marguerite is far more forthright than they were in her critique of human reason. I've mentioned already that she includes reason as a character and depicts her as having a decidedly limited perspective. Harivitch in particular was full of praise for reason and depicts reason as being guided by love. For Marguerite, reason instead needs to be transcended. In part this is a critique of book learning, the sort of expertise taught at the universities, and the sort of expertise boasted by the theologians who will have Marguerite put to death. So it's almost a bit of anticipatory revenge when Marguerite announces the death of reason part way through her book. Already in her prologue, she has said, Later, she adds that the soul Reason herself is called one-eyed, and in what looks like a rather frank insult aimed at the experts of book learning, Marguerite says, It is plainly seen from Reason's disciples that an ass would achieve nothing which was willing to give them ear. But we shouldn't exaggerate her anti-rationalism. After all, being one-eyed is not the same as having no eyes at all, and the character of reason does come to accept something of the teachings of love, even if haltingly, imperfectly, and reluctantly. Eventually, reason pledges her allegiance to the soul, now apparently converted to seeing things more or less in Marguerite's way. On the other hand, it's remarked that the book could have been much shorter if reason wasn't so slow on the uptake. Again, the idea seems to be that reason can make some slow progress, but the full truth is beyond her. This interpretation of Marguerite's critique of human reason is confirmed by her notorious remarks on the subject of virtue. In one of the poems scattered through the work, Marguerite writes, Like the inquisitors at Paris, the character of reason is appalled by these remarks and tries to poke logical holes in them. No surprise here, since for Marguerite, living in accordance with reason goes hand in hand with living virtuously. Hildegard and Hadavich would have agreed with that, but they do not dare to suggest that virtue is something the soul needs to transcend. Marguerite dares to do more than suggest it, she states it clearly and repeatedly, as when she writes that the soul experiences no grace, she feels no longings of the spirit, since she has taken leave of the virtues, a passage later quoted by her inquisitors as proof of heresy. With chilling prescience, Marguerite at one point allows the virtues to speak for themselves and to complain that anyone who holds them in such little regard is a heretic and a bad Christian. In a typical reversal, she however argues that having left the virtues behind, this pure soul is the most virtuous of all. As one scholar has put it, this looks more like piling a paradox upon a scandal than like diffusing the explosive implications of what she said, but lets appoint ourselves as an interpretive bomb squad and see whether we can contain the philosophical damage. For starters, Marguerite is certainly not recommending that we all immediately give up on virtue. This is not a triumph of mysticism over morality. She makes it clear that the virtues have an important preparatory role in bringing us closer to God. They are like messengers sent by love to call us away from our own limited concerns so as to free us from the burden of ourselves, as Marguerite nicely phrases it. As with her treatment of reason, her attitude towards virtue is that it has a real value and use, but a value and use that are limited. So she has harsh words for those who content themselves with living virtuously. They too are one-eyed and like a mother owl who thinks no birds are finer than her own brood. Here she has in mind people who immerse themselves in heroic asceticism and charitable deeds, as if such acts of self-abnegation were the highest possible goal we might have. Ascetics are doomed to remain lost, because they have an unfulfilled desire to reach God, something that cannot be attained through worldly virtue. Here we might detect an echo of critiques against the voluntary poverty of the mendicant orders. Marguerite has tried this path herself and found it inadequate. Even those who live in virtue, while realizing there could be something higher, are for Marguerite slaves and merchants because of their lowly point of view, a good example of her tendency to apply the class distinctions of medieval society to grades of enlightenment. To transcend this forlorn state, the soul should not of course engage in sin or vice, but neither should she concern herself with the virtues of asceticism. She takes leave of the virtues, in other words, in the sense that she no longer makes any use of them. Up to this point, Marguerite's ethical teaching is strikingly reminiscent of late ancient Platonism. Plotinus, especially, is noted for his idea that what he calls civic virtue, which means acting virtuously in the world of the senses, is a mere preparatory stage, a step along the ladder towards purification and intellectual understanding. The parallel is close enough to suggest that Marguerite is yet another medieval figure to be influenced by Neoplatonism, however indirectly. But of course, parallel lines never meet, and she develops the idea of transcending virtue in a way that is, whatever her accusers may have thought, distinctively Christian. For Marguerite, what comes after virtue is nothing other than a higher, more important virtue, namely humility, which she styles mother of the virtues. Monility does not consist in obsessive attention to our own desires or actions, however well intentioned. It consists in giving up on our desires, on acting to achieve some purpose. It consists, in fact, in giving up one's self and identity completely, by letting one's will dissolve completely into the will of God. And when I say dissolve, I mean it. We have here come to the core of Marguerite's thought, which is the idea of the soul's annihilation. It is the annihilated soul that love praises throughout the book and that no longer devotes itself to action, virtuous or otherwise. This is also the soul that has transcended reason, yet it's in describing this soul that Marguerite makes her most significant contributions to philosophy. She is making a novel claim about the workings of the human will, that the soul's highest attainment is to cease willing entirely, and even cease willing to have a will. Or as contemporary philosophers might put it, the annihilated soul has neither first nor second order desires. It wants nothing and wants to want nothing. So intimate is the relationship between soul and will that this can be achieved only through the soul's being humbled to the point that it is extinguished, something Marguerite describes as a kind of death. Or as soon as the soul expresses itself as a being distinct from God, it must exercise its will, so that even willing things for God's sake prevents the soul from achieving complete union between its own will and God's. To which you might say, what's so great about that? Of course, a medieval reader might be happy to take it for granted that we should strive to eliminate any distance between our own wills and the divine will. Even a few readers would be happy to pursue the line of thought as far as Marguerite does. But Marguerite can offer a further rationale, which is that the extinction of will guarantees the extinction of unsatisfied desire. After all, you can't be unhappy about lacking things you don't want. Or as Marguerite puts it, the annihilated soul lacks nothing since she wishes for nothing. Furthermore, in accepting her own annihilation, the soul is actually coming to understand her metaphysical situation more accurately. For, according to Marguerite, the soul's infinite inferiority to God means that it has really always been nothing. So her recommendation is not so much that the soul should steadily work to eliminate her own reality, but that she should see through the illusion that she was ever anything, and thus come to know her own nothingness. Marguerite sums it up better than I can when she writes, God is so great that the soul can comprehend nothing of Him, and on account of this nothingness, she has reached the certainty of knowing nothing and of wishing for nothing. Characteristically, Marguerite still has a few more paradoxes to add on to this scandalous teaching. She makes the point that God cannot force the soul to give up on her will. The gift of a free will was inalienable because the whole nature of a free will is to be independent of any constraint. Therefore, just as the soul and no one else can be responsible for her own sin, only the soul can choose to submit her will to that of God. To bring out the paradox more clearly, we might say that the soul must use will to abandon her will. And here's another paradox, though the soul is nothing, she is a recipient of God's love. Even better, God has loved her eternally, which means that the soul has always existed, to the extent that we can say she exists at all. This idea of an eternally pre-existing soul is rather outrageous, something Marguerite acknowledges by having reason protest when it is first proposed. But she refuses to back away from it, insisting that in the soul's original state with God, she was simple. Thus, the mirror of simple souls ends by reflecting upon the fact that in returning to God, this simple soul returns to itself. It's undeniable that Marguerite Poet was a remarkable figure, but she was not utterly unique. We have met mystically inclined women thinkers before, and we'll be meeting more of them as we move on through the 14th century, like Catherine of Siena and Julian of Norwich. But of course not all philosopher-mystics were women. Much later in this series on the 14th century, we'll be meeting the aforementioned Meister Eckhart, another figure who was condemned for heresy, though in a stroke of good luck, he had already died by the time the condemnation was issued. Of course, with good luck like that, who needs bad luck? For now though, we'll be staying with a different theme raised by Marguerite, the use of the vernacular. Our next author even wrote in defense of using vernacular language, in his case Italian. In a typically ironic gesture, he composed that defense in Latin, but he did compose some works in Italian too. You might have heard of at least one of them, The Divine Comedy, a poem that proves that the Italian language is no laughing matter. Don't miss what's bound to be one hell of an episode as we turn to Dante Alighieri, next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Caps.