Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon, Madame du Chesnoy, (born April 13, 1648, Montargis, France—died June 9, 1717, Blois), French Roman Catholic mystic and writer, a central figure in the theological debates of 17th-century France through her advocacy of quietism, an extreme passivity and indifference of the soul, even to eternal salvation, wherein she believed that one became an agent of God.
At age 15 she married Jacques Guyon, lord du Chesnoy, and began to raise a family, but, at the death of her husband in 1676, she turned completely toward the mystical experiences she had long felt. Led through a long cycle of personal religious developments by Barnabite Friar François Lacombe, she left her children and began travels with Lacombe to Geneva, Turin, and Grenoble (1681–86). In these cities she began to write on the suppression of individual desire and self-awareness. She also began to offer informal spiritual instruction to visitors in her home. Moreover, she claimed personal apostolic authority, an assertion that frequently aroused the suspicions of local bishops, forcing her to move on. During this period she published the most important of her many writings, Moyen court et très facile de faire oraison (1685; “Short and Very Easy Method of Prayer”), and began to write her autobiography and an extensive biblical commentary.
In 1687 Guyon moved to Paris. There her teachings faced even stronger criticism after the issuance by Pope Innocent XI of Coelestis pastor, a bull rejecting as heretical the quietism associated with the Spanish priest Miguel de Molinos. Guyon’s detractors claimed that her writings exhibited several of the positions condemned in this bull; however, she denied any familiarity with de Molinos’s teachings. Meanwhile, Lacombe was imprisoned. Guyon was arrested in 1688 but was released after a few months at the intervention of Madame de Maintenon, second wife of King Louis XIV. Maintenon also secured a teaching position for her at Saint-Cyr, a prestigious school for young noblewomen. There she began to teach her methods of silent contemplative prayer and of passive acceptance of God’s initiative in one’s moral transformation, which was in stark contrast to the traditional emphasis on the active cultivation of piety and morals.
About the same time, Guyon attracted her greatest disciple, the influential writer (and later archbishop) Franƈois de Salignac de La Mothe-Fénelon (1651–1715). Fénelon, having found in her teachings the answers to some of his own spiritual dilemmas, became her regular correspondent. In 1693, however, Guyon lost both her position at Saint-Cyr and the favour of Maintenon after some of her students claimed that they had acquired exalted spiritual states and declared a preference for their own moral judgment, shaped by God in prayer, over obedience to conventional rules. By 1694 Fénelon’s writings, coloured by quietism, had generated a great alarm. In the midst of complicated political and religious maneuvers, a conference met at Issy the following year, at which Fénelon defended Guyon’s teachings. Her leading critic at Issy was the prominent bishop of Meaux, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, who preferred a more intellectual approach to theology. Bossuet also emphasized the monastic ideal of enduring hardship en route to spiritual perfection over the noncloistered, universally available mysticism that Guyon championed. Whereas Guyon’s characterization of the highest spiritual states emphasized the annihilation of the individual’s will in an act of sustained submission to the will of God, Bossuet argued that such exalted states as Guyon had taught were only rarely achievable, and he doubted that Guyon herself had experienced them. The Articles of Issy (1695) that resulted from the conference did not formally condemn Guyon’s views but rather expressed a conservative position on mystical theology that Bossuet took to be incompatible with her published writings.
Seeking to distance herself from Guyon’s teachings, Maintenon lobbied the king to issue a warrant for Guyon’s arrest. Guyon was accordingly arrested and imprisoned again in December 1695 on the authority of the king. She remained confined in various prisons, including the Bastille, until 1703. The final part of her autobiography (which was discovered in an archive in the 1980s and published for the first time in 1992) describes her ordeals during this period, which included verbal and physical abuse, poor living conditions, denial of the sacraments, and attempted poisonings. Fénelon continued to defend her against Bossuet’s attacks but was himself officially condemned by the Roman Catholic Church in 1699.
After she was released from prison, Guyon lived and wrote quietly at Blois. She began to correspond with an international following of like-minded mystics, especially in England, Scotland, the Netherlands, and Germany. Although she continued to correspond with Catholics, many of whom were friends and supporters (including Fénelon, with whom she communicated in secret), she also gained a following among Protestants. Her biblical commentary influenced German Pietism, and her mystical writings were widely translated and anthologized by other Protestant groups, particularly the Society of Friends (Quakers). Her writings were originally published from 1712 to 1720 (45 vol., reprinted 1767–90).