| Author Quoted | Marguerite Porete |
| Title Quoted | Mirror of Simple Souls |
| Date (Year/Month/Day) | 1963/05/07 |
| Imprint | |
| Quotation | Recently I have read The Mirror of Simple Souls, which Etta Gullick lent me. It is a marvelous book, and has some magnificent and original things in it. And is so splendidly written. I understand it is by Marguerite Porete, who was burned at the stake. Dom Porion, translator of Hadewijch of Antwerp, says this. There is no question that the mystics are the ones who have kept Christianity going, if anyone has. The Fenelon-Bossuet business, as an official and in some ways almost definitive victory for officialdom over mysticism, is a critical point in history. That is why it is interesting to see that Fenelon, before he got into mysticism, was already also criticizing the autocratic and unjust war politic of Louis XIV. It all hangs together. |
| Quotation Source | The Hidden Ground of Love: The Letters of Thomas Merton on Religious Experience and Social Concerns.; Selected and edited by William H. Shannon. / New York : Farrar Straus Giroux. 1985, p. 583 |
| Letter to | E.I. Watkin |
| Notes | |
| Link to Merton's Copy |
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