Jeanne Guyon

Life

Her birth name was Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de La Motte; after her marriage she took her husband's surname and became known as "Madame Guyon." She was born on April 13, 1648, in Montargis, France, the daughter of Claude Bouvier, a legal procurator. Some sources give her year of birth as 1647. As a child she was educated in convents, where she read devotional works by Francis de Sales, Thomas à Kempis, and others.

Around 1664, in keeping with her parents' wishes, she married Jacques Guyon, a wealthy man twenty-two years her senior. Her marriage was difficult, marked by conflict with her mother-in-law and the deaths of some of her children, and during this period she devoted herself to interior prayer. Her husband died in 1676. After moving to Gex, near Geneva, in 1681, she took the Barnabite priest François Lacombe as her spiritual director. She then traveled with him through France, Switzerland, and Italy, teaching prayer.

Lacombe was arrested in 1687, and in 1688 Guyon was confined in a convent on suspicion of heresy. She was released that same year through the intervention of Madame de Maintenon, the wife of Louis XIV, and went on to win the confidence of nobles at court and of François Fénelon. However, Bossuet, the bishop of Meaux, objected to her writings. At the conferences held at Issy in 1694–1695, her teachings were condemned, and Guyon and Fénelon signed the thirty-four articles drawn up there. Guyon was arrested again in December 1695 and held at the prison of Vincennes and then at Vaugirard; from 1698 she was imprisoned in the Bastille. After her release in 1703, she lived in the vicinity of Blois until her death on June 9, 1717.

Ministry and Work

Her best-known work is A Short and Very Easy Method of Prayer, published in Grenoble in 1685. In it Guyon taught that laypeople, and not only clergy and members of religious orders, could practice interior prayer, resting quietly before God without multiplying words. She also wrote Spiritual Torrents, a commentary on the Song of Songs, and an autobiography that she began in 1687 and continued writing into her later years.

Guyon emphasized that the soul must lay aside human effort and surrender itself to the will of God in a state of complete passivity. For this reason her thought is called "Quietism" (the view that quiet abandonment to God is the way to perfection). Fénelon's Explanation of the Maxims of the Saints, which included a defense of Guyon, was condemned by Pope Innocent XII in 1699. After her release, Guyon corresponded with mystics in England, Scotland, the Netherlands, and Germany, and she is regarded as having influenced German Pietism. Her writings are also known to have been widely read by Protestants and Quakers.

Influence on the Korean Church

In Korea she is generally introduced under the name "Jeanne Guyon" (잔느 귀용). A Short and Very Easy Method of Prayer has been translated under such titles as Jeanne Guyon's Intimate Prayer (Duranno, 2011) and The Secret of Prayer (Pyeongdan), and books such as The Prayer of Communion and The Song of Songs have also appeared. Christian media outlets have presented these books as Christian classics, describing them as works through which believers who find prayer difficult can learn a form of prayer in which they experience the presence of God.

Assessment

Opinions of Guyon are divided. The Roman Catholic authorities of her day condemned her writings, and Catholic encyclopedias today likewise hold that her autobiography contains many contradictions and exaggerations and cannot be taken at face value. Her admirers, by contrast, portray Guyon as a woman who was persecuted for teaching prayer that approaches God directly and who kept a pure faith in the midst of suffering. Introductions by Korean publishers largely reflect this view. Meanwhile, some writers in Reformed circles within Korean Presbyterianism criticize Quietism as distorting the relationship between God and humanity and identify Guyon as a leading figure in its spread. The debate within the Korean church over mystical spirituality is also connected to the controversy over contemplative prayer.