Madame Guyon

French mystic and writer

• Born: April 13, 1648
• Birthplace: Montargis, France
• Died: June 9, 1717
• Place of death: Blois, France

Guyon’s advocacy of a religious doctrine known as quietism, the absolute reliance upon God’s will and belief in the perfection of the passivity of the soul, made her both a prominent and a scorned mystic of the seventeenth century. Her convictions sparked a major theological debate in France.

Early Life

Madame Guyon (mah-dahm gwee-ohn) was born Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de La Motte in Montargis, France. After an unhappy childhood, at age sixteen, she married Jacques Guyon du Chesnoy, who was twenty-two years her senior. He died in 1676, leaving her with a son and daughter.

Her troubled domestic life encouraged her love of prayer, which was often accompanied by mystical experiences. During this period she befriended the duchesse de Béthune and was introduced to François de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon (1651-1715), archbishop of Cambrai beginning in 1695, at the duchesse’s home. After her husband’s death, she met François Lacombe (1643-1715), a Barnabite priest with whom she began to travel throughout France, Switzerland, and Italy, espousing her quietistic concepts of prayer and spirituality. Her doctrines aroused opposition from Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627-1704), bishop of Meaux, but she gained support from Fénelon. Upon their return to Paris in 1686, she and Lacombe were imprisoned on suspicion of heresy, and Guyon’s years of controversy began. The next year Lacombe was sentenced to prison for life, and she was held in a Parisian convent until released through the intervention of Madame de Maintenon (1635-1719), who regarded her mystical events as genuine.

In 1695, at the Conference of Issy, her works were condemned despite Fénelon’s defense. His argument, published two years later as Explication des maximes des saints sur la vie intérieure (The Maxims of the Saints Explained, Concerning the Interiour Life , 1698), contended that her religious practices were valid. For this, he was ejected from the royal court by King Louis XIV at the urging of Bossuet, who felt that Guyon’s ideas advocated a kind of antinomianism, an originally Gnostic belief that Christians by grace were not obligated by any moral law, including those of the Old Testament. Guyon, and Fénelon’s book, were censured by Pope Innocent XII in 1699, and Guyon was imprisoned in Vincennes (1695-1696), Vaugirard (1696-1698), and the Bastille (1698-1703), ending her days at the home of her son-in-law in Blois, where she died on June 9, 1717.

Life’s Work

Madame Guyon must be understood within the context of mysticism, the form of religious experience in which a believer seeks for a direct, personal realization of the existence of God. There is a mystical strain in all of the great religions; in Christianity, mysticism’s goal might be summarized in Saint Augustine’s famous statement, “Our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.” Mystical practices such as prayer, fasting, meditation, and a retired life of solitude and self-abnegation have historically been held to prepare the soul for a vision or experience of the divine, which is believed to be God’s own gift of himself.

Guyon is remembered for having helped foster a mystical current in early modern French Catholicism. She was certainly aware of the great Spanish mystics of the sixteenth century—Saint Teresa of Ávila (1515-1582) and Saint John of the Cross (1542-1591)—but she went beyond them in the stringency of her extreme reliance upon God’s will alone, negating the operation of personal volition or rationality.

A prolific but not distinguished author, Guyon’s collected works (pb. 1767-1791) filled forty volumes. She is one of the foremost proponents of what came to be known as quietism, a mystical doctrine first advanced by the Spanish priest Miguel de Molinos (1628-1696), whose followers had been derisively termed “quietists.” Molinos taught that Christian perfection is achieved only when the soul is utterly passive or quiet before God, completely expectant and dependent upon nothing other than the desire to do his will. Activity of any kind, even mental or emotional, is eschewed on the grounds that it might interfere with or obscure God’s action within the soul. While quietists encouraged prayer, they believed that the highest form of prayer is a complete mental silence and obedience before God. As Guyon said in one of her poems, “I am as nothing, and rejoice to be/ Emptied and lost and swallowed up in thee.” The Church’s opposition to quietism and its adherents stemmed from the following:

• • Quietism’s apparent underemphasis on the doing of good works;
• • The belief that such a complete passivity could lead to a moral laxity in which sin is not sufficiently resisted (both Molinos and later Guyon were accused of immorality, she especially as a result of her extensive travels with La Combe); and
• • That the self-sufficiency aroused in the believer by the quietistic attitude in the believer renders irrelevant the function and authority of the Church and its hierarchy.

Guyon’s own efforts to advance this doctrine were further complicated by the Church’s criticism of her being a woman.

Her most notable works are the Moyen court et très facile de faire oraison (1685; The Worship of God in Spirit and in Truth: Or, A Short and Easy Method of Prayer , 1789), Le Cantique des cantiques de Salomon (1688; The Song of Songs of Solomon , 1879), and her autobiography, Les Torrents spirituels (1682; Spiritual Torrents , 1853). She also composed a commentary on the Bible. Her volume on prayer proved quite popular among mystically inclined Protestants, such as Quakers, for whom it offered a personal guidebook for seeking a direct apprehension of the divine. This was achieved through study, silence, and what Guyon called the “prayer of simplicity,” a wordless state in which one focuses deeply upon the reality of God and seeks only to do his will. Like Teresa of Ávila and John of the Cross before her, she counseled patience in dealing with temptations, distractions, and in those periods of spiritual aridity in which it seemed one was making no spiritual progress at all. These are forms of suffering to be patiently borne as part of religious growth. Guyon’s ideas were strongly attacked by Bishop Bossuet, most notably in his Relation sur le quiétisme (1698; Quakerism A-la-mode: Or, A History of Quietism , 1698), which satirizes her by portraying her work as the defiant outpouring of an unruly woman, resistant to proper religious authority. By the time of her death, she had spent seven years in prison and been interrogated by Church authorities on some eighty separate occasions.

Significance

Madame Guyon is the greatest French mystic of her era and perhaps of any era. She asserted the importance of apophatic, or “negative,” theology, which stressed God’s unknowability through rational means, at a time when the French Catholic hierarchy favored a theology that stressed reasonable propositions about the faith that could be apprehended logically rather than emotionally.

In her defiance of male Church authority, she looks toward such later Enlightenment concerns as the rejection of political absolutism, the assertion of the validity of individual religious experience, and the advocacy of women’s religious views. Her protofeminist stance, challenging patriarchy in both church and state, has drawn attention from modern feminist historians.

Her struggles with the antimystical and promonarchical church hierarchy of her time made her an attractive figure to pietistic Scottish, German, and Dutch Protestant groups, for whom her doctrines of personal prayer offered a fresh avenue for personal devotions and a private experience of God, without a necessary reliance upon clergy. Evidence of her impact is seen in the fact that she initially sought Archbishop Fénelon as an adviser, yet he came to regard her as one of his most important spiritual models.

Bibliography

Bruneau, Marie-Florine. Women Mystics Confront the Modern World: Marie de l’Incarnation (1599-1672) and Madame Guyon (1648-1717). Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998. Pages 135-219 examine Guyon’s life and work within the context of female mysticism, feminism, and the intellectual emergence of modern Europe. Pays special attention to the methods used by Bossuet to discredit her.

De La Bedoyere, Michael. The Archbishop and the Lady: The Story of Fénelon and Madame Guyon. New York: Pantheon, 1956. A popular account of the friendship between Guyon and Archbishop Fénelon. Contains a bibliography, mostly of French sources.

Goldsmith, E. “Mothering Mysticism: Mme. Guyon and Her Public.” In Women Writers in Pre-Revolutionary France: Strategies of Emancipation, edited by Collette H. Winn and Donna Kuizenga. New York: Garland, 1997. Discusses Guyon’s efforts to gain a reading public and the methods she used to retain a community of adherents to her doctrines despite official opposition to her ideas.

Guenin-Lelle, Dianne. “Jeanne Guyon’s Influence on Quaker Practice: A Guiding Voice in Silence.” La Spiritualité/L’Epistolaire/Le Merveilleux au grand siécle, edited by David Wetsel and F. Canovas. Tübingen, Germany: Narr, 2003. Contends that Guyon’s influence upon A Guide to True Peace, an important work of Quaker spirituality published in the early nineteenth century, is greater than that of Fénelon or Molinos.

Randall, Catherine. “’Loosening the Stays’: Madame Guyon’s Quietist Opposition to Absolutism.” Mystics Quarterly 26, no. 1 (March, 2000): 8-30. Reviews the major events and controversies of Guyon’s life, emphasizing her challenge to the divine-right monarchy of Louis XIV and the antimystical Church policies of Bishop Bossuet.

Ward, Patricia A. “Madame Guyon and the Democratization of Spirituality.” Papers on French Seventeenth Century Literature 23, no. 45 (1996): 501-508. Defends Guyon’s merit as a significant nonconformist thinker of her time, worthy to be called “modern” in outlook. Written in English, with quotations from Guyon’s works in French.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Madame Guyon in America: An Annotated Bibliography.” Bulletin of Bibliography 52, no. 2 (June, 1995): 107-112. A list of fifty-nine works by and about Guyon, all published in the United States from the early eighteenth century until the present. Many entries are annotated.