Charity
As if usually the case with Medieval works, the text is highly dependent upon allegorical figures rather than any actual individualized characterization in the modern sense. As a result, much of the imagery in the text is intensely directed toward defining these allegorical personifications of abstract concepts:
“Charity is obedient to no created thing, but only to Love. Charity has nothing of her own, and even if she had anything, she does not say that it is hers at all. Charity abandons her own task and goes off and does that of others. Charity asks no return from any creature, whatever good or happiness she may give. Charity knows no shame or fear or anxiety: she is so upright and true that she cannot bend, whatever happens to her.”
The Far-Near
The entire book is constructed as series of seven-stage passage of the soul toward an intensifying sense of perfection. “The Far-Near” is one of the author’s creative conceits which situate the topographical foundation of upon which this passage takes place. The imagery utilized for conveying its reality within her constructed philosophical reality is one of the most accessible examples:
“This Far-Near, whom we call lightning from its manner of opening and rapid closing, takes the Soul from the fifth state and places her in the sixth, for so long as its work lasts and remains, and so her state is changed; but the life of this sixth state does not last long in her, for she is set back, down into the fifth. And this is no wonder, says Love, for the work of the lightning, so long as it lasts, is nothing else than the manifestation of the Soul’s glory.”
The Just Man
One of the author’s other metaphorical conceptions is that “the just man falls seven times a day” and therefore “he must be raised up seven times, or else he could not fall again seven times.” The text is composed in the form of a dialogue framed as a discourse in which questions are asked and then answered. The meaning of the idea of the just man falling poses a question of meaning which is answered by the allegorical figure of Truth, focusing on imagery which once again situates the predominance of Adam within the author’s philosophical structuring:
“the just man falls seven times a day. It means that when the will of the just man is wholly given, without any other impediment, to the contemplation of the divine goodness, his body, nourished by the sin of Adam, is weak and tends to fault, and so often he stoops to give his attention to things which are less than the goodness of God, and Scripture calls this a fall, as indeed it is.”
The Church
The author, Porete, was destined to be burned at the stake as a consequence of not recanting charges of heresy levied against her. One of the most egregious offenses she supposedly committed was proposing a concept that a couple of centuries later would become the foundation for Protestantism: that one did not necessarily need priests to attain communion with God:
“And why should Holy Church, says Love, know these queens, these king’s daughters,⁷ king’s sisters, king’s brides? Holy Church could not know them truly, unless Holy Church were within their souls. And no created thing enters into their souls but God alone, who created the Souls. So that no-one knows such Souls except God, who is within them.”
