Surrender · “Let Go to Receive”
Annihilation of the Will
To let the self-will fall away entirely — to become a soul that ‘wills nothing,’ neither grasping for spiritual rewards nor steering by its own desires, so that (Porete says) only Love acts in it. A radical via-negativa surrender.
In 5 lines: See that your own self-will — even your pious wanting — is what stands between you and God. Let go of grasping for spiritual rewards, and stop clutching your virtues as yours. Sink into willing nothing of your own: want nothing for the self, steer at nothing, demand no outcome. In that emptiness, let Love move you. Rest in the “nothing” as freedom — not licence, not self-erasure, but peace.
What it is
Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls describes a soul that has been “annihilated” — not destroyed, but emptied of its own will.
The “simple” (free, unencumbered) soul has surrendered self-will so completely that it “wills nothing” of its own: it no longer grasps after consolations, spiritual achievements, or its own preferred outcomes, and so becomes pure capacity for divine Love to act through it.
Porete frames this as the climax of a journey through seven stages of love, in which the soul progressively lets go — of sin, of its own works, even of its own “virtues” as things it clings to and takes credit for — until nothing of the self-directed will remains to obstruct God.
This is the via negativa applied to the will: a stripping-away rather than an achievement. The annihilated soul, she says, is moved by Love alone; it has “taken leave” of its own willing. (The Inner Creates the Outer read in the most radical negative: attention and will are released so completely that the self stops directing at all.)
The Method
Porete writes as a visionary dialogue, not a manual; the following distills the movement of “annihilation” her Mirror describes (faithfully summarized, not reproduced):
- Recognize that your own will is the obstacle. The barrier to union is not chiefly outward sin but the self-directed will — the soul wanting things its own way, even good and pious things. Annihilation aims precisely there.
- Let go of grasping for spiritual rewards. Release the desire for consolations, experiences, merit, or assurance. The soul that still seeks its own spiritual profit has not yet “willed nothing.”
- Surrender even your virtues as possessions. Porete’s most startling move: stop clinging to your own virtues and good works as yours, stop being ruled by them as a self-improvement project. (She does not counsel vice — see Refinements — but the taking leave of virtues as ego-property.)
- Will nothing of your own. Sink into a state of not-willing: neither demanding this nor refusing that out of self-interest, neither steering by your own desire nor grasping at outcomes. Want nothing for the self.
- Let Love act. In that emptiness, Porete says, the soul is moved by divine Love rather than by ego; it does freely and without strain what Love does, because there is no contrary self-will left to obstruct.
- Rest in nothingness as freedom. The “nothing” is not despair but liberty — the simple soul is at peace, lacking nothing, because it wants nothing of its own.
Source & Lineage
Marguerite Porete (d. 1310) was a French Beguine (a laywoman in a semi-monastic movement) and the author of The Mirror of Simple Souls, a daring work of apophatic love-mysticism in Old French.
Church authorities detected echoes of the antinomian “Free Spirit” movement and the doctrine that “the annihilated soul is freed from the virtues”; the book was condemned and burned, and Porete was burned at the stake in Paris in 1310 for refusing to recant.
The Mirror nonetheless circulated (often anonymously) and is now recognized as a landmark of medieval mysticism, kin to Eckhart’s “ground of the soul” and the whole stripping-away tradition.
Common refinements
Reading “freed from the virtues” as licence. The historically condemned misreading: that the annihilated soul may do as it pleases. Porete’s point is the releasing of ego-ownership of virtue, not permission for vice; love does more good, not less.
- Self-erasure / collapse. “Willing nothing” is meant as freedom and peace, not the obliteration of personality, agency, or healthy boundaries. If it feels like depersonalization or worthlessness, that is a warning sign, not progress.
- Passivity toward harm. Like all surrender practices, this is not resignation to injustice or abuse; it is the release of self-centered willing, not of moral action.
- Grasping at non-grasping. Striving to “achieve” annihilation reinstates the very self-will it releases. The move is to stop grasping, gently, again and again.