Love personified
The book is narrated by Love itself, who serves as a personification for the knowledge of God that is beyond Reason (also a character). Love is an entity whose presence suggests hope, because her arguments are all rooted in God's unfathomable love, so human opinions fall short (even the Church's opinion). In real life, this personification represents Porete's belief that God is defined by love. The Church killed her for this belief and for her belief that God reveals mysteries that the church doesn't reveal through tradition, through Love.
The annihilation of the soul
Another metaphor for divine love is the devastating annihilation of various aspects of the soul. This annihilations make certain parts of human life irrelevant, because nothing would be more important than oneness with God, so that oneness permanently absolves the questions of this living reality. In Porete's work, the annihilation is sevenfold, starting with purification from sin and ending with substantial oneness with God—not unlike Buddhist philosophy.
Reason as a skeptical voice
The voice of Reason anticipates the arguments of Porete's audience, like, why does all of this seem so counterintuitive? Reason represents the desire for God's nature to be made understandable to the mind. Instead, Reason listens to Love's thoughts about thought itself, and Reason must be at peace knowing that Love has understanding that is not available to him. Reason represents the difficulty of understanding reality through human reason alone.
The summon bonum
This book invokes a metaphor from St. Augustine. The idea is simply that the human desire is secretly for the "ultimate good thing," which will bring ultimate happiness to the human soul. This is the summum bonum, which Porete says is the beatific vision (which Augustine also argued), arguing that to become one with God, the human soul would need to be transformed by approaching God and being annihilated in seven stages.
The free thinker motif
Although this book is unimaginably religious, it is also mystic which means that the dogmatic, shame-oriented aspects of religion are stripped away from the writing. In fact, the arguments explain through explicit motif that God wants humans to pursue him for their selves, without respect to their mind or their cultural context. The book is predicated on the idea that God still talks directly to human souls, even though the church literally killed her for suggesting these things so plainly. They suggested it was heretical for her to be imaginative about God, which is the ultimate depiction of being a free thinker, religiously, second only to the crucifixion of Jesus himself. It is clear that Marguerite views Jesus as a symbol for free thought.
