MADAME
GUYON (Jeanne Marie Bouvier de la Mothe Guyon 1647-1717)
Madame
Guyon was born at Montargis in 1647 and died at Blois in 1717. she was educated in a convent and
desired to enter a religious order.
However her mother opposed to this, forced her to marry Jacques Guyon,
twenty two years older than her. At
the age of 29 she was a widow and this gave the opportunity to engage into a
spiritual quest. She always had an
inclination to spiritual things and her difficult marriage and widowhood gave
her the ground to deepen her spiritual life.
She found
and read the book The Spiritual
Guide by Miguel de Molinos,
this encouraged her in her spiritual seeking. She took the Barnabite friar François La Combe as her
spiritual director, with whom she visited many places in France, Switzerland
and Italy. They soon became
suspected of spreading heretical teaching by the Roman Catholic Church. Père La Combe was arrested in 1687 and
was imprisoned for life. Madame
Guyon was arrested in 1688 but was released 8 months later through the
intervention of Madame de Maintenon, wife of king Louis XIV, and an sympathiser
of Madame Guyon. I fact Madame
Guyon had some significant influence within the king’s court, friends of hers
included also the Beauvillers, the Chevreuses and the Montemarts.
Madame
Guyon was arrested again in 1695 for teaching heresy and spent 6 years in
prison at Vincennes and was later transferred to the Bastille. She was released in 1703 and lived the
rest of her life in Blois under house arrest.
She was
an able exponent of Quietism, a form of mysticism. Quietism often refers to the state of human inactivity while
in fellowship with God when praying, reading and meditating the Scriptures. It an spiritual exercise so as to “quieten”
the soul in order for God to have His full way with the believer. The quietist sought to abandon himself so
completely to God so as to lose himself in Him. Many refer to passivity in a negative way when speaking of
the mystics or quietists, but nothing could be further from the truth. Madame Guyon, and others like Fenelon, taught very clearly that what
is sought is inactivity on the part of man so as to let God have His full way
within the believer. The
archbishop of Cambrai François Fenelon was a sympathiser of Madame Guyon and
this cost him to be expelled from the capital Paris to his town of Cambrai
which he was not allowed to leave.
Madame
Guyon wrote extensively, her smallest book -A Short and Easy Method of Prayer- is
a classic which has been read and meditated by scores of believers ever since
its first publication in 1685. She
wrote commentaries on all the books of the Bible 18 volumes, Letters 9 volumes,
Poems and Canticles 4 volumes, an autobiography 3 volumes, and many others.
Today her
influence is still quite important among those believers who seek a deeper
relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ.
Didier LEBEAU
T. C.
Upham: The Life of Madame Guyon; (Allenson & Co., London, 1905).
Madame
Guyon: Autobiography; (Moody Press, Chicago, 1986).
Phyllis
Thompson: Madame Guyon – Martyr of the Holy Spirit; (Hodder &
Stoughton, London, 1986).
Dorothy
Gawne Coslet: Madame Jeanne Guyon – Child of Another World; (Christian
Literature Crusade, Fort Washington, 1984).
Françoise Mallet-Joris: Jeanne Guyon ;
(Fammarion, 1978) [The best modern biography, in French].
http://www.ccel.org/g/guyon/auto/htm/i.htm