Religions and mystics

Madame Guyon lived in the kingdom of France during the period commonly known as the 'Great century'. In the reign of Louis XIV the Catholic religion established mastery and, with the revocation of the Edict of Nantes^[2] in 1685 , soon crushed what remained of the Protestantism Richelieu^[3] had left in place.

From the minor nobility (she was born Bouvier de la Motte) living in Montargis, the women who was to become Madame Guyon was married at sixteen to a rich member of the bourgeoisie much older than herself. There were four children from the marriage, but it was not a happy one: her husband was a boor and her mother-in-law was autocratic. It was a classic story which is described in The Autobiography of Madame Guyon. But what interests us here is how Madame Guyon found an escape from this desperate situation. She first turned to traditional piety. She took part assiduously in religious services, she prayed. But this was not enough for her. More precisely, she realised, without exactly saying so, that the kind of piety available to her was becalmed in a sort of dry conformism, constrained by insipid formal ritual, gravitating around the mediating figure implied by the Sun King. Madame Guyon realised that her faith, while sincere, was empty: everywhere she turned, she found only a feeling of interior desolation and a desperate silence. She wanted to live her faith, feel the living word of God and to better be able to bear her more than painful position in the family, but she found nothing. She was still a beautiful young girl who sometimes attended salons and found herself vulnerable to various attempts at seduction. In short, she was in danger.

A meeting arranged by her father was to change the course of her existence. She opened up about her difficulties to a Franciscan called Archange Enguerrand (1620-1699) who made this simple response:

She was overwhelmed by these words inspired by Augustine. Instead of searching for God in services, churches, processions, or in pictures of the saints, she turned inside, she moved towards interiority. No more long recitations, no more tense formal ceremonies trying to make sure that she had made the correct responses: certainly, Madame Guyon did not cease to attend church, but what she discovered was the presence of God in her heart, not in the recitation of exhaustive prayers, even turning from jaculatory oration^[4] . Words, which all too often affirm the self to the detriment of praising God, were gradually fading. Eventually silent prayer or the 'simple presence' took their place. And instead of finding or rediscovering emptiness in this, as one might have expected, Madame Guyon discovered in it a gentle faith in which she felt God's presence. The mystic life had begun.

The mystical life, by definition, is the feeling of making concrete the experience of a presence of God in the soul, or, if one prefers to speak of it in philosophical terms, the presence of the principle which is at the root of all things. All mystics in the Christian tradition agree in saying that this feeling of presence is more real in their eyes than the reality of the perception when we are in contact with another person. The insistence on this feeling of reality is striking and implies, whatever interpretation it is given, the recognition that mystical experience as such is truly a specific state and sui generis. It is about a principle in which God is given, transcending at least natural human experience and perhaps the whole of nature. Thus, taken seriously, mysticism is affirmation of the realisation of a mystery: an infinite principle makes itself present as such to a finite being. Madame Guyon names such an experience “delicious faith”. It is in effect the source of a feeling which fills a person; a feeling of opening, of “vastitude” - to use Catherine Millot's term – and simultaneously of plenitude. One does not seize, one allows oneself to be seized. One does not drive, one allows oneself to be driven. And far from being a cruel test of empty time, one does not see the hours pass. For Madame Guyon, this did not in particular order the climate of domestic life, but all was transfigured. Furthermore she evokes the change she felt in herself even in the way she addressed people, in social relations. The mystical life has ethical consequences.

This being so, she was also in the process of testing herself in ways which we cannot describe in detail here. “The delicious faith” was short-lived and was the first moment of an experience that gave way progressively to what one calls the “experience of night”, All spiritual people as they advance – and it is even a kind of testimonial a posteriori of those who are not enlightened – will know the feeling of being abandoned, left, of the 'dark night of faith' which can take a desperate and frightening form. Madame Guyon describes this experience in detail and finds the words to describe her dereliction in a gripping way. A posteriori, this test is understood by mystics as a purification that must be undergone: no longer to love God for what he gives but more for what he is. When one loves God for what he gives, one continues to love oneself in first place. But the mystical life is a progressive alienation of the 'proprietary self'. In an old text that has become a classic (Études d'Histoire et de Psychologie du mysticisme, Paris, Alcan 1908), Henri Delacroix analysed this notion with precision. On the detachment and annihilation of the self, it would also be helpful to read Jad Hatem's short work of, Amour pur et vitesse chez Madame Guyon et Kleist, Paris, Ed. Du Cygne, 2010. The process is essentially accomplished at the point where there is a radical detachment of the self. Madame Guyon believes that she has achieved this, and she calls the state which characterises this detachment “the God peace”. From that moment on, all the blows that she is given fall only on an empty envelope: the me attached to myself, which feels the blows bitterly and is profoundly moved by them, is defeated. She can no longer be reached in the sense that the blows fall sharply only on the self that is seen, not on the self that has already been renounced in favour of the Other which lives through it. The blows continue, but they do not have the same power. As for the presence of God, from that moment it is constant, but it has ceased to be speculative, and even ceased to be perceptible. God is present without making it known that he is there.