Madame Guyon (1648-1717) ***
French mystic and quietist. Born Jeanne Marie Bouvier de la Mothe, at Montargis, France, she was educated in a convent and desired to enter a religious order. But in 1664, at the age of fifteen, she was compelled by her father to marry Jacques Guyon, an invalid twenty-two years her senior. This unhappy marriage ended with Guyon's death in 1676. After being widowed, Madame Guyon entered more deeply into a life of religious devotion. Influenced by the writings of the Spanish quietist Miguel de Molinos (1640-96), she took as her spiritual director a Barnabite friar, Francois La Combe, with whom she toured parts of France, Switzerland, and Italy for five years (1681-86) propagating her beliefs. The pair being suspected of heresy, La Combe was arrested in 1687 and imprisoned for life; Madame Guyon was arrested in 1688, but after eight months she was released from prison through the intervention of Madame de Maintenon, King Louis XIV's wife. In 1695 Madame Guyon was again arrested for alleged heresy and spent six years in prison at Vincennes and later in the Bastille. She was eventually released in 1703 and spent the final fourteen years of her life at Blois, at the estate of her son-in-law.
Madame Guyon was an exponent
of mystic quietism. She maintained that a true Christian must pray and strive
for spiritual perfection, a state of inner blessedness that consists of a
wholly disinterested love of God, submits implicitly to his will, and is
indifferent to all outward things, even to the Catholic church and its
sacraments. Her major writings were A Short and Easy Method of Prayer,
Autobiography, and The Song of Songs.
See also Quietism.