Background
Jeanne-Marie de la Motte-Guyon was born on April 13, 1648 in Montargis, Centre, France. She was the daughter of Claude Bouvier, a procurator of the tribunal of Montargis.
Jeanne-Marie de la Motte-Guyon was born on April 13, 1648 in Montargis, Centre, France. She was the daughter of Claude Bouvier, a procurator of the tribunal of Montargis.
Of a sensitive and delicate constitution, Jeanne-Marie de la Motte-Guyon was sickly in her childhood and her education was neglected. Her childhood was spent between the convent, and the home of her well-to-do parents, moving nine times in ten years. Guyon's parents were very religious people, and they gave her an especially pious training. Prior to her marriage she had wanted to become a nun, but this desire did not last long.
After her husband's death, Jeanne-Marie de la Motte-Guyon initially lived quietly as a wealthy widow in Montargis. In 1679, she re-established contact with François La Combe, the superior of the Barnabite house in Thonon in Savoy.
After a third mystical experience in 1680, she felt herself drawn to Geneva. The Bishop of Geneva, Jean d’Arenthon d’Alex, persuaded her to use her money to set up a house for “new Catholics” in Gex, in Savoy, as part of broader plans to convert Protestants in the region. In July 1680, Jeanne-Marie de la Motte-Guyon left Montargis with her young daughter and travelled to Gex.
The project was problematic, however, and Madame Guyon clashed with the sisters who were in charge of the house. At this point, Guyon introduced La Combe to a mysticism of interiority. While her daughter was in an Ursuline convent in Thonon as a pensioner, Madame Guyon continued in Gex, experiencing illness and great difficulties, including opposition from her family. She gave over guardianship of her two sons to her mother-in-law and took leave of her personal possessions, although keeping a sizeable annuity for herself.
Because of her ideas on mysticism, the Bishop of Geneva, who had at first viewed her coming with pleasure, asked her to leave his diocese, and at the same time he expelled Father Lacombe, who was then went to Vercelli.
Madame Guyon followed her director to Turin, then returned to France and stayed at Grenoble, where she spread her religious convictions more widely with the publication of "Moyen court et facile de faire oraison" in January 1685. The Bishop of Grenoble, Cardinal Le Camus, was perturbed by the appeal her ideas aroused and she left the city at his request, rejoining Lacombe at Vercelli. In July the following year the pair returned to Paris, where Madame Guyon set about to gain adherents for her mystical vision. The timing was ill-chosen. 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 on 29 January 1688, brought about, she claimed, by Father de La Motte, her brother and a Barnabite. She was not released 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 she met, at Beyne, in the Duchess de Béthune-Charrost's country house, her cousin, François Fénelon, who was to be the most famous of her supporters. Fénelon was deeply impressed by her piety.
Through Fenelon, the influence of Madame Guyon reached and influenced religious circles powerful at court - the Beauvilliers, the Chevreuses, the Montemarts - who followed his spiritual guidance. Madame de Maintenon and, through her, the young ladies of Saint-Cyr, were soon won over to the new mysticism. This was at the height of Madame Guyon's influence, most of all when Fénelon was appointed on 18 August 1688 to be the tutor to the Duke of Burgundy, the king's grandson. Before long, however, the Bishop of Chartres, in whose diocese Saint-Cyr was located, took alarm at the spiritual ideas which were spreading there. Warned by him, Madame de Maintenon sought the advice of persons whose piety and wisdom she valued, and these advisers were unanimous in their rejection 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, Louis-Antoine, Cardinal de Noailles, and of 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. But on 10 October 1694 François de Harlay de Champvallon, the Archbishop of Paris, who had been excluded from the conferences at Issy, anticipated their results by condemning the published works of Madame Guyon. She, fearing another arrest, took refuge for some months at Meaux, with the permission of Bossuet who was the presiding bishop there. After placing in his hands her signed submission to the thirty-four articles of Issy, she returned secretly to Paris. At Paris, the police, however, arrested her on 24 December 1695 and imprisoned her, first at Vincennes, then in a convent at Vaugirard, and then in the Bastille, where on 23 August 1699 she again signed a retraction of her theories and promised to refrain from spreading them further. From that time on she took no part, personally, in public discussions, but the controversy about her ideas only grew all the more heated between Bossuet and Fénelon.
Madame Guyon remained imprisoned in the Bastille until 21 March 1703, when, after more than seven years of her final captivity, she went to live with her son in a village in the Diocese of Blois. There she passed some fifteen years surrounded by a stream of pilgrims, many from England and Scotland, and spending her time writing volumes of correspondence and poetry. She continued to be revered by the Beauvilliers, the Chevreuses, and Fénelon, who never failed to communicate with her whenever safe and discreet intermediaries were available. Among the pilgrims, Milord Chewinkle stayed in Blois with Guyon for 7 years. One visitor, Pierre Poiret, went on to publish many of Guyon's works.
In 1704, her works were published in the Netherlands, becoming very popular. Many English and Germans visited her at Blois, among them Johann Wettstein and Lord Forbes. Madame Guyon spent the remainder of her life in retirement with her daughter, the Marquise de Bois, at Blois, where she died at the age of 69, believing that she had died submissive to the Catholic Church, from which she had never had any intention of separating herself.
Madame Guyon believed that one should pray at all times, and that one should devote all one's time to God. Prayer is the key of perfection and of sovereign happiness; it is the efficacious means of getting rid of all vices and of acquiring all virtues; for the way to become perfect is to live in the presence of God.
In 1664, when Jeanne-Marie de la Motte-Guyon was 15 years old, after turning down many other proposals, she was forced into an arranged marriage to a wealthy gentleman of Montargis, Jacques Guyon, aged thirty eight. During her twelve years of marriage, Jeanne-Marie de la Motte-Guyon suffered terribly at the hands of her mother-in-law and maidservant. Adding to her misery were the deaths of her half-sister, followed by her mother, and her son. Her daughter and father then died within days of each other in July 1672. She retained belief in God's perfect plan and that she would be blessed in suffering. She bore another son and daughter shortly before her husband's death in 1676. After twelve years of an unhappy marriage (in which she had borne five children, of whom three had survived), Madame Guyon had become a widow at the age of 28.