Marguerite

Marguerite Porete lived between 1250/1260 and 1310, when she was burned at the stake in Paris. She was the author of a single book, whose abbreviated title reads in English The Mirror of Simple Souls, and she was persecuted for it, to the point that the memory of her authorship was lost for centuries and only finally recovered in 1944. The Mirror is mostly a dialogue, where reality is asserted to be oneness, indeed to be nothing other than God. So the soul who speaks for Marguerite is also God, the way water flows into the sea and becomes one with the sea; and God wills and acts in it; by itself, it is nothing and does nothing. This is already dangerously close to heresy, but there is worse, as that soul claims that she, being one with God, is also as eternal as God is. Clearly, the logic of this identification is oceanic, and the force that realizes the relevant fluidity of being is Love, a main character in the dialogue: the Love that overcomes and transcends all separation. Another major interlocutor is Reason, which is to be thought of as Aristotelian, analytic reason: the reason that demarcates being by genera and differentiae, and which is appropriately struck dead at the end. The soul speaking for Marguerite repeatedly expresses frustration at communicating with Reason, and regards her own statements as so many obvious truths: a clear indication that what is at issue in the dialogue is the confrontation between different logics. Those who reason with logic A will find their logical truths obvious and those of a different logic B absurd, and will think that no communication is possible between the two.