By the age of nineteen and pregnant with her second child, Guyon experienced a crisis in which she could not endure her life anymore. She spoke to a Franciscan monk, Father Archange Enguerrand, who counseled her that God’s wisdom was inside of her. He told her, “It is, Madame, because you seek without what you have within. Accustom yourself to seek God in your heart, and you will find God there.”9 Guyon wrote that she felt relief from the sudden presence of God within her heart.
Following this revelation, Guyon committed herself to Christ. Against the wishes of her husband, she chose a small closet in her home and prayed there regularly. She also worked raising her five children, instead of giving this responsibility to their servants. When a smallpox epidemic hit, two of her children died. Yet even in the midst of sorrows, Guyon’s faith grew. She threw herself into ministering in the villages among the poor. She knew some peace with her husband, although the relationship continued to be a difficult one. She also began to write her ideas about the Christian faith. Whenever she had time, Guyon grabbed pen and paper and captured her ideas about God. She wrote about her love for God, “I loved him, and I burned with his fire because I loved him, and I loved him in such a way that I could love only him, but in loving him I had no motive save himself.”10
In 1676 her husband died when she was twenty-eight, leaving her a wealthy widow with two older sons and a small daughter. Guyon said she would never marry again and moved to a small town outside of Geneva. She chose a quiet life living in rural cottages with her young daughter. There Guyon intensified her active ministry with the sick and wrote continually. She frequently spent all night working on her books, saying that the ideas sparked by the Bible flowed quickly on to paper. She spent her time searching the scriptures, praying and looking for answers about Christ’s relationship with her. With the help of a friend, she published her books and they quickly found great popularity throughout Europe. Her better known books include her Autobiography, The Short and Easy Method of Prayer, and Spiritual Torrents.
Then Guyon faced serious persecution about her Christian writing, including accusations from church leaders that a woman should not even write. The tensions in her childhood family surfaced again when her half-brother betrayed her to the Roman Catholic powers of the Inquisition and accused her of immorality. Church and state authorities arrested and incarcerated her.
With Guyon’s aristocratic connections to Louis XIV’s court at Versailles, some leaders spoke out, protesting the treatment of this gentle woman. The tutor for King Louis’s grandson, Archbishop François Fénelon, courageously defended Guyon and declared her innocent. Because of this, King Louis XIV banished Fénelon from his court and in 1697 reported him to Rome as writing heretical books. The king’s actions publicized this controversy throughout Europe and heightened the political conflicts surrounding Guyon’s incarceration. The cardinals in Rome debated the orthodoxy of Fénelon’s book about Guyon’s theology called The Maxims of the Saints. Many in state and church position in Europe watched this situation and it became called “The Great Conflict.” In 1699 Pope Innocent XII censured twenty-three propositions of Fénelon’s book.
While this was happening, Guyon endured many brutal twelve-hour interrogations. Authorities searched for evidence of any type of wrongdoing and would free her only to arrest her again. At the instigation of Bishop Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, preacher to King Louis XIV, she suffered several incarcerations, including an incarceration in the Bastille from 1698–1703. Guyon spent a total of about ten years incarcerated in four different places of imprisonment.
During these years of forced solitude, Guyon continued to pray and wrote that her interior faith carried her through these years of persecutions. Finally, Bishop Bossuet exonerated her of all charges. Following this, Guyon was released from the Bastille and lived for fourteen years in a cottage in Blois near her daughter’s residence. During her final years, she gave spiritual counsel to many Catholics, Quakers and Protestants, both in meetings and letters.
More about Guyon’s life is written in The Pure Love of Madame Guyon: The Great Conflict in King Louis XIV’s Court.11
Jeanne Guyon’s Interior Faith
Jeanne Guyon, a woman despised and hated by many in seventeenth-century France, dedicated herself to Jesus Christ and to living the Christian interior life. She offered her commentaries on the Bible as help in the search for the interior kingdom of God. With a profound clarity of thought, she understood the gospel message of the redemptive work accomplished by the life, passion, and crucifixion of Jesus Christ as the central focus of both the Old and New Testaments.
Guyon’s hidden treasure of thought needs to be seen as the extraordinary accomplishment it is: one woman, persecuted and incarcerated, explained the complete biblical message to readers. Basing her ideas on the words of Jesus, she says that our greatest longing is for the pure love of God. Christ tells us, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, strength and soul” (Luke 10:27). Guyon’s thinking is simple: If Christ commands us to do this, then how can this be an impossibility? Christ commands us and by his rich and generous grace he gives us the ability and power to do this.
Guyon described the beginning of this spiritual life as surrender to Christ. The believer then learns to love Christ with purity and finds fulfillment in participating in Christ. From this interior encounter with Christ, believers learn to live in a way pleasing to God. Using this Scripture of Luke 10:27, she defined the interior life as that of the heart, mind, strength, and soul. Guyon explains to us how a faithful person may answer Christ’s call to love him with all of our heart, mind, strength, and soul, which means, in brief, to love him with our interior life.
Guyon called this encounter with the living Lord the interior life. Christians find the great mystery that Christ lives within us, and in trusting and receiving Christ, live in the midst of the Trinity in the love springing forth among the Father and the Son and Holy Spirit. Truly, divine love surrounds believers and unites them with the Holy Trinity.
Guyon applied this wisdom from the interior life to her defense against the inquisition by the Roman Catholic Church. With no formal education, Guyon came up against the most educated church leaders of the time. Guyon was not allowed to have a lawyer in the interrogations and she said that God within gave her the words to say. In many court interrogations, Guyon told officials that the pure love of God should rule our interior life. Her answers in the interrogations finally led to her judgment of innocent. The many officials that investigated her could find no wrong doing in her life or thinking.
Yet even with all the suffering, Guyon remained peaceful. She says that the Lord calls us to enjoy him. In her Commentary on Ephesians, she writes, “This enjoyment underlies all of our experience, as if we were given a taste for an exquisite thing that was promised to us; to desire this is a great advantage.” Our enjoyment of the Lord grows into a powerful relationship with Jesus Christ. She continues, “In Jesus Christ, human beings become the inheritance of God, as God wants to be the inheritance of human beings.”12
Guyon went on to emphasize the believer’s enjoyment of the whole Trinity. The mystery she sought to explain is that that the Son mediates the immense reality of the Trinity to the faithful person. Guyon describes, “The Son contains the profundity and immensity of the Trinity because Jesus Christ is the breadth and length and height and depth of the Father.” The invitation for the faithful is to live in and unite with the Trinity. The infinite Trinity holds and supports the believer while inviting the person to enjoy the revelation of the glory of Christ and participate in the profound depths of wisdom that God the Father offers the believer. In brief, the love that emanates and flows between each member of the Trinity flows upon and within the believer in a continual expression of love.
The mystery is that Jesus
