What Actually Happens In The Mirror Of Simple Souls
I picked up an older Catholic University of America edition of The Mirror Of Simple Souls a few years ago, mostly because I'd heard it referenced in discussions about contemplative prayer and wanted to see whether the hype held up. The book itself is a translation of writings by Luigia de Laet, a Belgian tertiary Carmelite who died in 1913. A Dominican priest named Thomas Green collected and edited her spiritual journal, and it went through numerous printings after that. It is not a self-help book, it is not structured as a method, and it will frustrate you if you are looking for numbered steps. The central claim, and what gives the title its meaning, is that a soul stripped of self-will and personal agenda becomes a mirror. Not a decorative one. A functional optical surface that reflects divine reality without distortion. The language is theological, yes, but the operational idea is surprisingly concrete: remove the interference, observe the reflection.
The Mirror Of Simple Souls
Getting past the first fifty pages requires accepting that nothing happens in the conventional sense. You do not have visions. You do not feel warmth or special devotion. De Laet describes a series of passive states where the soul is essentially held still while something she calls "annihilation" proceeds. This is not self-destruction. It is the gradual cessation of the soul's own projects, preferences, and spiritual performance. I found myself marking passages that seemed contradictory on the surface. One paragraph describes profound peace, the next describes something closer to spiritual suffocation. Reading it straight through like a narrative will make you question whether you are even reading the same book. That is the point. The text mirrors the actual progression, which is non-linear and deeply individual. Here is the part most summaries skip. The "simple" in the title does not mean uneducated or naive. It refers to a specific technical state in contemplative theology where the soul's faculties are no longer divided between acting and reflecting. Action and reception collapse into the same gesture. Beginners usually miss this and either try to manufacture simplicity through effort, which defeats the purpose, or dismiss the whole thing as passivity, which is also wrong.
I spent roughly three weeks working through the early sections before realizing I was approaching it like a manual. I switched tactics and started reading one passage at a time, setting the book down, and sitting in silence for twenty minutes to see what actually stirred in my own attention. That changed everything. The text stopped being a description of someone else's experience and became a kind of reference map for whatever was already happening beneath the noise. The stages de Laet outlines move from what she calls the pathway of purification through illumination toward union. Each stage has recognizable markers if you know what to look for. The purification phase, which takes up most of the early pages, is characterized by a mounting intolerance for distraction and a growing inability to find satisfaction in ordinary devotional practices. This is not depression, though it can look like it from the outside. It is the soul losing its appetite for anything that is not direct presence. One thing worth noting that almost nobody mentions upfront: the book assumes a confessional framework. De Laet operated within a Catholic contemplative tradition and consulted her spiritual director throughout. The states she describes are not meant to be navigated in isolation. I tried reading it without any form of guidance and found that certain passages became almost unreadable in a vacuum. Not because they were obscure, but because the language assumes a shared vocabulary that most modern readers do not possess.
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The illumination phase is where the mirror metaphor actually starts to work in practice. You begin noticing patterns in your reactions that were previously invisible. Not in a psychological self-help sense, but in a structural sense. The mind reveals its own architecture when it stops running. This is useful information, but it is not inherently pleasant. The book does not sugarcoat this section at all. There is a practical workaround I discovered that might help if you are reading this solo without a director. Keep a separate notebook and record only what you observe, not what you think you should observe. Write one sentence per sitting. Over a month or two, the entries start showing you something the daily noise conceals. This is not a substitute for guidance. It is a way to maintain some visibility while you are figuring out whether the path is even meant for you. The final stages, union and spiritual marriage, are the most contested portion of the text. Some readers find them coherent and transformative. Others find them incoherent and alarming. I fall closer to the first group but with an important caveat: the language becomes so compressed that distinguishing between genuine experience and literary convention is nearly impossible. De Laet was writing within a tradition that had its own shorthand, and modern readers sometimes mistake shorthand for nonsense.
Let me be direct about the limitations. This book will not help you if you are dealing with active mental health issues. The language of annihilation and passive suffering can resonate dangerously with people who are already in crisis. I have seen this happen. It is not a spiritual exercise in those contexts, it is a compounding factor. If you are in therapy or managing a clinical condition, this is not the place to start. The book also assumes a baseline of patience that most people do not realistically have. The progression de Laet describes spans years, not weekends. Anyone trying to rush through it to "achieve" something will leave feeling defeated and confused. That is not a failure on your part, it is a mismatch between the text's actual scope and the typical reader's expectations. For what it is worth, I have found that the most useful approach is to treat it as documentation rather than instruction. Read it slowly. Mark passages that resonate or irritate you. Return to them weeks apart. Notice what changes in your response. The book itself is doing the work, not you. Your job is mainly to stay present long enough to notice whether something is actually happening or whether you are just reading words that sound meaningful.
If you want a copy, the Catholic University of America Press edition is widely available through standard booksellers and in PDF form through archive.org. The Green translation is the standard one, though some readers find it slightly stiff compared to later attempts. I have only used the CUA Press version and cannot speak to alternatives. The text runs about two hundred pages in most editions. The first hundred are the heaviest. The second hundred either open up or close off, depending on what you bring to it. Either outcome is normal.
