“Now listen, Reason, says Love, to understand better what you are asking about. A man who is on fire feels no cold, a man who is drowning knows no thirst. Now this Soul, says Love, is so burned in Love’s fiery furnace that she has become very fire, so that she feels no fire, for in herself she is fire, through the power of Love which has changed her into the fire of Love. This fire burns of and through itself, everywhere, incessantly, without consuming any matter or being able to wish to consume it, except only from itself; for whoever feels some perception of God through matter which he sees or hears outside himself, or through some labor which he there performs of himself is not all fire; rather, there is some matter, together, with the fire. For men’s labors, and their wanting matter outside themselves to make God’s love grow in them, is only a blinding of the knowledge of God’s goodness. But he who burns with this fire without seeking such matter, without having it or wanting to have it, sees all things so clearly that he values them as they must be valued. For such a Soul has no matter in her which prevents her from seeing clearly, so that she is alone in it through the power of true humility; and she is common to all through the generosity of perfect charity, and alone in God, since Perfect Love has taken possession of her.”

― Marguerite Porete, The Mirror of Simple Souls

As a bit of background, she was a Béguine from what is now Belgium, around the time of Meister Eckhart. In fact, it’s reasonably assumed she influenced Eckhart, or vice versa. Either way, the flavor of their writings favors one another. Nevertheless, while Meister Eckhart had the institutional protection, Porete did not. When inquiring why her book was burned on the square and publicly declared heresy by the bishop of Cambrai--she had only sent it there for the authorities’ approval--the papal inquisitor, William of Paris, had her charged and sentenced to death by burning. At trial--she had separated from the Béguines for their protection and refused a confessor--Marguerite sat in silence neither refuting nor recanting her work. 

I stumbled upon a beautiful generative prose that shares her story so well.

A Lucid Gospel of the Burned One

They called me mad. They called me dangerous.
They called me “a woman who dares to write without permission.”
They called me “heretic.”
They called me nothing... and yet... it was in Nothingness that I found the All.

I was born in Hainaut, near Valenciennes, though I remember it more by scent than date. The soft hush of river reeds. The whisper of the wind through birches. The silence between questions in the eyes of women like me. Women who were never asked what they knew. Only told what they could not know.

I was a Beguine, though even that name meant different things to different mouths. I lived in a community of women unwed... and unowned... who gave our lives not to men, but to Love. Not the love they preached from pulpits; transactional, obedient, timid... but the wild Love.... the kind that strips the soul of its will, its mask, its fear. The kind that consumes you until you are nothing but Light in a human shape.

They feared that Love. They always have.

I wrote ‘The Mirror of Simple Souls’ not because I thought myself holy, but because Love burned inside me until words were the only way to bleed without dying. I wrote in the tongue of the people, not the Latin of the priests. That alone was crime enough. But worse... I dared to say that the soul, when fully surrendered to Divine Love, has no more need of intermediaries. No bishops. No sacraments. No scaffolding.

“The soul has no will but God's will, and her will is the divine will,” I wrote.
And for that, they dragged me into darkness.

They burned my book before they burned my body.
First in Paris. Then again. And again.
But words do not burn like flesh.
They hide in ashes and whisper.

I was arrested by the Inquisition sometime around the year of our Lord 1308.
They told me to repent.
To recant.
To denounce my book as heresy and my visions as delusion.
I refused.

Not out of pride, but of clarity. I had seen. I had known.
Love Itself had emptied me.
There was no longer a Marguerite left to betray the Truth.

So they imprisoned me... for over a year.
Do you know what that means for a soul who has tasted the Infinite?

To be caged in stone and straw…
To be denied sun, touch, ink…
To be watched, judged, condemned by men whose eyes had never wept for God…
It is not torment. It is comedy. The world’s cruelest jest.

And then came the flames.

The court read my sentence aloud. They called me “relapsed,” as if divine union was a disease.
They led me in chains to the public square.
And there, before the eyes of Paris, they set fire to my body.

I remember the sound.
Not of the crowd, but of the wood cracking beneath me—
like ribs surrendering to something greater.
The smoke was not smoke. It was spirit.

I died.
And yet here I am.
Speaking to you, centuries hence.

Because this is not a tragedy. This is a resurrection.
My soul did not perish. It expanded.

Now you find my words.

You... who feel the fire and think yourself mad.
You... who write what no one understands and begin to doubt your own pulse.
You... who walk in the world half-awake, half-dreaming, thinking you are alone.

You are not alone.

You are walking in my footsteps, and I walk beside you.

They called me nothing.
But in that Nothing, I became All.

So I say to you now:
Let your soul be simple.
Let your love be radical.
Let your will fall like autumn leaves before the breath of God.
And when they come to name you heretic,
Smile gently.

And write anyway.

-Marguerite

Marguerite was ablaze long before her fiery execution.