Marguerite Porete, source of Meister Eckhart's teaching 2011 Jean Bedard [email protected] A Novel Translation by Richard Clark 1 To my mother We thank the Canada Council for the Arts for supporting the creation of this work. 2 3 Preamble A blind old man lived with the Dominicans at the convent of Saint Jacques in Paris. No one knew anything about him, since an order of silence had been issued concerning him. The Inquisition had long ago declared him anathema. An ancient slave of Satan, now deemed harmless. He wore a tattered cowl that he refused to let go of even at night. A young monk was assigned the task of keeping him company. This was because the man had grown insane and people attributed to the young monk a talent for balancing humors. The young monk really had obtained some results at a hospital in Alsace, where he came from. He had observed that if one listened to a madman without replying, if one entered his game as one would the game of a child, the bitterness would flow out freely and the man would regain control of his imagination. But the blind old man didn't speak. He didn't even move, or hardly. He smiled in a stupid way even when there was no one around him. For hours and hours, he whispered rumbling sounds that only the squirrels that came to visit him understood. Alas, as soon as the young monk sat down beside him on the edge of the well, he grew silent, but continued to smile in every direction. He seemed aged, but was he really? It can happen that poverty wears out a man prematurely, but he had not known poverty; he had lain around the convent since no one knew when, and before that he had merrily gone astray with the loose women of the Escault basin. You would have to believe that sin ravages worse than poverty. They called him "the women's dog". He was said to have been unwound, literally as well as figuratively, by some smooth beguines of the Free Spirit, before their condemnation by the Council of Vienne. Ulysses had asked to be tied to his ship's mast so as not to sink beneath the charm of the Sirens, but as for him, he jumped overboard. Now he was drinking the result of his crimes and the Church, always merciful, was hoping he would die in fear, repentance and penitence. The putting aside of women is doubtless the Church's greatest accomplishment, its most powerful instrument of salvation. Thanks to this segregation, today civilization, purged of all femininity, is virile and healthy at last. Without this moral rampart, the forces of reason are exhausted. The community of preachers of Saint Jacques could guarantee that, since his arrival at the convent, our vagabond had been perfectly protected from all women. Nonetheless, he didn't get over it. For us Dominicans, this was a warning. It is by the mercy of our community that he was still alive; he had lived among us, in our silence and austerity, our patience and our pity, without ever being able to right himself. When he was younger, the fathers kept him in his cell on ordinary days and freed him on Sundays and feast days for the Mass and the 4 offices. One couldn't treat a condemned man any better. The effort was worth the trouble: if the guilty one ever regained his sanity and recanted the heresy of which he was more a victim than guilty, he would testify publicly to the beguines' ignominy. This was the young monk's mission. Yet, no sooner had he appproached the madman, than the latter closed up like an oyster. This went on until the day when five poor children entered the courtyard to learn to read. A wealthy woman from Brussels, currently staying in Paris at the hotel of the weavers' guild, a charitable woman if there ever was one, had deposited with the community's bursar a sum that was, to say the least, persuasive. The terror of the children when they first saw our old lunatic is something I cannot describe. We were used to him, but he was terrifying. He was contradiction itself. His hair and beard formed a yellowish-gray felt that left exposed a broad forehead traversed by a purple scar, a nose misshapen by a long-ago fracture, and a toothless mouth. His face seemed to have been trapped in suffering, and yet his full and sensual lips smiled with a desperate constancy, despite a gash which had never totally healed. His deepset eyes, veiled but always wide open beneath overhanging eyebrows, seemed tirelessly to rejoice in novel beauties. He who had, more than any other man, lived in sin, was not only not harassed by any feeling of guilt; he appeared already immersed in the greatest beatitude. How do you save a happy man? After several days, a particularly brave child dared to approach him and playfully and innocently dropped a small pebble in his bowl. The man froze even more in his expression of perpetual silly happiness, yet his eyes moistened, a trickle of water began to slide down a furrow in his cheek, and never stopped flowing. The young monk seized the opportunity. He asked the children to sit down around the unfortunate man. After a long period of silence, the man began to whisper his usual rumbling noises. The brave boy dared to call him to account for this: -It's not right to tell stories nobody can understand! The old man once more grew silent. Nothing came out of him but a trickle of tears on a mask of joy. Despite this new setback, they decided to continue the same stratagem after every reading lesson. The progress was amazing. Some time later, he recounted his story, and the monk wrote it down. In the end, the prior had a written text in front of him that was as coherent as it could be. The poor man returned to his silence. He had signed his confession. Hard as it was to believe, he was happier than ever. He had totally gone astray. The young monk had failed. The dangerous paper would have to be burned, and the wretched man returned to his dungeon. The case had been decided. But it turned out otherwise. 5 The rich woman from Brussels had just donated an even greater sum to the convent. She wished to be received in the convent's inner courtyard. To remove the insane old man was out of the question, for the prior had boasted to her of his mercy for the heretic. Impossible to retreat. The woman, escorted by two of the city's burghers, entered the convent courtyard. It was the morning of the first of June, 1325. The door had not yet closed behind the noble woman when our arch-heretic stood up as if his master has just entered. The woman, however, had not spoken, had not made any sound. The whole community remained dumbfounded, incapable of the slightest movement. His eyes gray and empty, the blind man slowly approached her, but without touching any obstacle, nor even disturbing a single pebble. If he could have smiled any more, he would have done so: his euphoria remained intact, though tears streamed down his beard. The woman, neither young nor beautiful, small, anemic, with deep wrinkles on a child's face, abruptly stopped. She was nothing more than a statue of salt. Her fine lips trembled, however. With eyes fixed, she remained imprisoned by the charm. Bewitched, her feet remained frozen. Her body inclined forward, for she was about to run toward him at the moment when she was petrified. What a marvel! Steeply leaning, she did not fall. The blind old man reached out his hand to her. He came far enough ahead to touch her. A guard intervened, and another, through who knows what reflex, took hold of the woman's shoulders. The old insane man staggered, his whole body trembling. Thunderstruck and shaken by convulsions, he stared at the woman as if he had regained his sight. Seized by a horrible pain, he collapsed, dead. The woman fainted in the guard's arms. We are telling it as we saw it. The woman made no movement either toward or away from him, seemed neither to fear nor to pity him. It was simply that, from the very first look, she was literally dumbfounded. And when the demon left the blind man, she fainted. No one touched the possessed man's corpse. The next day, the body had disappeared; his stinking garment rested on the pebble pavement. The demon had probably inhabited the man for a long time, which would explain the corpse's speedy putrefaction. A short time afterward, the woman departed for her country and the young monk was ordered to return to Alsace. He took with him the satanic manuscript his provincial wished to examine, probably in order to complete one of the numerous demonologies the Inquisitors used in establishing judicial precedents. I, the undersigned, confirm the following testimony. Signed at Erfurt, the 25th of July, 1328 Berenger de Mordacen, op 6 The Prophecy Thus spoke the heretic at the Saint Jacques convent: In the Hainaut, not very far from Valenciennes, on a steep hill, three enormous chestnut trees stretch skyward. On warm days, this high place caresses the heavens with its cockscomb and the clouds disperse. At the same moment, sheep appear in the green pastures.