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Home > Catholic Encyclopedia > G > Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de la Motte-Guyon


JEANNE-MARIE BOUVIER DE LA MOTTE-GUYON

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A celebrated French mystic of the seventeenth century; born at Montargis, in the
Orléanais, 13 April, 1648; died at Blois, 9 June, 1717. Her father was Claude
Bouvier, a procurator of the tribunal of Montargis. Of a sensitive and delicate
constitution, she was sickly in her childhood and her education was much
neglected. Incessantly going and coming between her home and the convent, and
passing from one school to another, she changed her place of abode nine times in
ten years. Her parents, who were very religious people, gave her an especially
pious training; while she received and retained profound impressions from her
reading of the works of St. Francis de Sales, and her intercourse with certain
nuns, her teachers. At one period she desired to become a nun, as one of her
elder sisters had, but this desire did not last long. When scarcely sixteen
years of age, she accepted the hand of a wealthy gentleman of Montargis, Jacques
Guyon, twenty-two years older than herself. After twelve years of a union in
which she gave more devotion than it yielded her happiness, Madame Guyon lost in
succession two of her children and her husband. Thus, at twenty-eight she was
left a widow with three young children.




HER EXPERIENCES AND THEORIES

In the meantime Madame Guyon had been initiated into the secrets of the mystical
life by Père Lacombe, a Barnabite who very soon acquired a great influence over
her. Under his direction she passed through a series of interior experiences
which are described in the "Vie de Madame Guyon" written by herself. First she
attained a lively sentiment of the presence of God, perceived as a tangible
reality. Prayer becomes easy to her; in it she is vouchsafed a savour of God
which detaches her from creatures. This is what she calls "the union of the
powers". She remains in this state for eight years; it is succeeded by another
state in which she loses the sense of God's graces and favours, she has no taste
for anything spiritual, is powerless to act, and afraid of her own baseness.
This was the state of "mystical death" in which she remained for seven years;
from this crisis she passes, as it were re-awakened and transformed, into the
state of resurrection and new life. Whereas in the first of the three states she
possessed God, in this last state she is possessed by Him; then God was united
to the powers of her soul, but now He is united to its substance; it is He who
acts in her; she becomes like an automaton in His hands; she writes remarkable
things without preparation and without reflection. Her own activity disappears,
to be replaced by the action of God which moves her, and she now enters into the
"apostolic state". This apostolate she is to exercise not in preaching the
Gospel, but in spreading the mystical life, the theory of which she presents in
the "Moyen court et facile de faire oraison" (Short and Easy Method of Prayer),
a work inspired mostly by her own experiences. In this work she distinguishes
three kinds of prayer. The first is meditation properly so-called, the second is
"the prayer of simplicity", which consists in keeping oneself in a state of
recollection and silence in the presence of God; in the third, which is active
contemplation, the soul, conscious that God is taking possession of it, leaves
Him to act and remains in repose, abandoning itself to the Divine effluence
which fills it — powerless to ask anything for itself, since it has renounced
all its own interests. This last state is pure love. In the "Torrents
spirituels", and the commentaries on Holy Scripture, the same theory is
presented under very slightly different images and forms.


PROSELYTISM AND TRIALS

Having attained what she called the "apostolic state", Madame Guyon felt herself
drawn to Geneva. She left her children and repaired to Annecy, to Thonon, where
she was to find Père Lacombe (July, 1681) and again place herself under his
direction. She began to disseminate her mystical ideas, but, in consequence of
the effects they produced, the Bishop of Geneva, M. D'Aranthon d'Alex, who had
at first viewed her coming with satisfaction, asked her to leave his diocese,
and at the same time expelled Père Lacombe, who betook himself to the Bishop of
Vercelli. Madame Guyon followed her director to Turin, then returned to France
and stayed at Grenoble, where she published the "Moyen court" (January, 1685)
and spread her doctrine. But here, too, the Bishop of Grenoble, Cardinal Le
Camus, was perturbed by the opposition which she aroused. At his request she
left the city; she rejoined Père Lacombe at Vercelli and a year later they went
back to Paris (July, 1686). Forthwith Madame Guyon set about to gain adherents
for her mystical theories. But the moment was ill-chosen. Louis XIV, who had
recently been exerting himself to have the Quietism of Molinos condemned at
Rome, was by no means pleased to see gaining ground, even in his own capital, a
form of mysticism, which, to him, resembled that of Molinos in many of its
aspects. By his order Père Lacombe was shut up in the Bastille, and afterwards
in the castles of Oloron and of Lourdes. The arrest of Madame Guyon, delayed by
illness, followed shortly (9 January, 1688); brought about, she alleged, by her
own brother, Père de La Motte, a Barnabite.

She was not set at liberty until seven months later, after she had placed in the
hands of the theologians, who had examined her book, a retraction of the
propositions which it contained. Some days later (October, 1688) she met, at
Beyne, in the Duchess de Béthune-Charrost's country house, the Abbé de Fénelon,
who was to be the most famous of her disciples. She won him by her piety and her
understanding of the paths of spirituality. Between them there was established a
union of piety and of friendship into which no element ever insinuated itself
that could possibly be taken to resemble carnal love, even unconscious. Through
Fénelon the influence of Madame Guyon penetrated, or was increased in, religious
circles powerful at court--among the Beauvilliers, the Chevreuses, the
Mortemarts--who were under his spiritual direction. Madame de Maintenon, and
through her, the young ladies of Saint-Cyr, were soon gained over to the new
mysticism. This was the apogee of Madame Guyon's fortune, most of all when
Fénelon was appointed (18 August, 1688) tutor to the Duke of Burgundy, the
king's grandson. Before long, however, the Bishop of Chartres, in whose diocese
Saint-Cyr happened to be, took alarm at the spiritual ideas which were spreading
there. Warned by him, Madame de Maintenon sought the advice of persons whose
piety and prudence recommended them to her, and these advisers were unanimous in
their reprobation of Madame Guyon's ideas. Madame Guyon then asked for an
examination of her conduct and her writings by civil and ecclesiastical judges.
The king consented that her writings should be submitted to the judgment of
Bossuet, of the Bishop of Châlons (afterwards Archbishop of Paris and Cardinal
de Noailles), and of M. Tronson, superior of the Society of Saint-Sulpice.



After a certain number of secret conferences held at Issy, where Tronson was
detained by a sickness, the commissioners presented in thirty-four articles the
principles of Catholic teaching as to spirituality and the interior life (four
of these articles were suggested by Fénelon, who in February had been nominated
to the Archbishopric of Cambrai). But the Archbishop of Paris, who had been
excluded from the conferences at Issy, anticipated their results by condemning
the published works of Madame Guyon (10 October, 1694). She, fearing another
arrest, took refuge for some months at Meaux, with the permission of Bossuet,
then bishop of that see. After placing in his hands her signed submission to the
thrity-four articles of Issy, she returned secretly to Paris, where the police,
however, arrested her (24 December, 1695) and imprisoned her, first at
Vincennes, then in a convent at Vaugirard, and then in the Bastille, where she
again signed (23 August, 1696) a retraction of her theories and an undertaking
to refrain from further spreading them. From that time she took no part,
personally, in public discussions, but the controversy about her ideas only grew
all the more heated between Bossuet and Fénelon. The course of that controversy
we have traced elsewhere (see FÉNELON). Madame Guyon remained imprisoned in the
Bastille until 21 March, 1703, when she went, after more than seven years of
captivity, to live with her son in a village in the Diocese of Blois. There she
passed some fifteen years in silence and isolation, spending her time in the
composition of religious verses, which she wrote with much facility. She was
still venerated by the Beauvilliers, the Chevreuses, and Fénelon, who never
failed to communicate with her whenever safe and discreet intermediaries were to
be found.


POSTHUMOUS SUCCESS

Her writings began to be published in Holland in 1704, and brought her new
admirers. Englishmen and Germans--among them Wettstein and Lord Forbes--visited
her at Blois. Through them Madame Guyon's doctrines became known among
Protestants and in that soil took vigorous root. But she did not live to see
this unlooked-for diffusion of her writings. She passed away at Blois, at the
age of sixty-eight, protesting in her will that she died submissive to the
Catholic Church, from which she had never had any intention of separating
herself. Her doctrines, like her life, have nevertheless given rise to the
widest divergences of opinion. Her published works (the "Moyen court" and the
"Règles des assocées à l'Enfance de Jésus") having been placed on the Index in
1688, and Fénelon's "Maximes des saints" branded with the condemnation of both
the pope and the bishops of France, the Church has thus plainly reprobated
Madame Guyon's doctrines, a reprobation which the extravagance of her language
would in itself sufficiently justify. Her strange conduct brought upon her
severe censures, in which she could see only manifestations of spite. Evidently,
she too often fell short of due reserve and prudence; but after all that can be
said in this sense, it must be acknowledged that her morality appears to have
given no grounds for serious reproach. Bossuet, who was never indulgent in her
regard, could say before the full assembly of the French clergy: "As to the
abominations which have been held to be the result of her principles, there was
never any question of the horror she testified for them." It is remarkable, too,
that her disciples at the Court of Louis XIV were always persons of great piety
and of exemplary life.

On the other hand, Madame Guyon's warmest partisans after her death were to be
found among the Protestants. It was a Dutch Protestant, the pastor Poiret, who
began the publication of her works; a Vaudois pietist pastor, Duthoit-Mambrini,
continued it. Her "Life" was translated into English and German, and her ideas,
long since forgotten in France, have for generations been in favour in Germany,
Switzerland, England, and among Methodists in America.




SOURCES

Œuvres complètes de Madame Guyon (Paris, 1790), this work was really published
at Lausanne; COOPER, Poems translated from French of Madame de la Motte Guyon
(Newport, 1801); FÉNELON, Œuvres (Versailles, 1820), IV, iv; IDEM,
Correspondance (Paris, 1828), VII-XI; BOSSUET, Œuvres (Paris, 1885);
PHILIPPEAUX, Relation de l'origine, du progrhs, et de la condamnation du
Quiitisme (s. l., 1732); IRONSON, Correspondance (Paris, 1904), III; Vie de
Madame Guyon, written by herself (Cologne, 1720); Ger. tr., Frankfort, 1727; tr.
BROOKE, London, 1806; UPHAM, Life and religious opinions and experience of
Madame de la Motte-Guyone (New York, 1848); GUILLON, Histoire ginirale de
l'Église pendant le XVIIIe sihcle (Besancon, 1823); GUERRIER, Madame Guyon, sa
vie, sa doctrine, et son influence (Orléans, 1881); CROUSLÉ, Fénelon et Madame
Guyon (Paris, 1895); MASSON, Fénelon et Madame Guyon (Paris, 1907); DELACROIX,
Etudes d'histoire et de psychologic du mysticisme (Paris, 1908).


ABOUT THIS PAGE

APA citation. Dégert, A. (1910). Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de la Motte-Guyon. In The
Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company.
http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07092b.htm

MLA citation. Dégert, Antoine. "Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de la Motte-Guyon." The
Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 7. New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1910.
<http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07092b.htm>.

Transcription. This article was transcribed for New Advent by Paul T. Crowley.
Dedicated to the Sacred Heart.

Ecclesiastical approbation. Nihil Obstat. June 1, 1910. Remy Lafort, S.T.D.,
Censor. Imprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York.

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