Streams Beyond the Walls

Wherein I suffer trouble, as an evil doer, even unto bonds; but the word of God is not bound. 2 TIMOTHY 2:9

When Madame Guyon was taken to the Bastille, her enemies might reasonably have supposed that her influence was finished. Her teaching had been examined and censured, her great defender had been disgraced, and her books were suspect throughout Catholic France. Three centuries later, A Short and Easy Method of Prayer is still in print in many languages, and her name is known in places she could not have imagined. The story of how that happened is a strange one, and it has lessons of its own.

But I would ye should understand, brethren, that the things which happened unto me have fallen out rather unto the furtherance of the gospel. PHILIPPIANS 1:12

Fénelon

The first stream ran through her friend. François Fénelon, Archbishop of Cambrai, submitted to the Pope’s censure of his Maxims of the Saints in 1699 and never again defended the book in public. But he spent the rest of his life as a spiritual director, and his letters of counsel, full of the themes he had learned in part from her — the simple turning of the heart to God, the quieting of self-will, love for God rather than for His gifts — were collected and published after his death. They have been read ever since, by Catholics and Protestants alike, and many who have never opened a book by Madame Guyon have met her teaching, softened and steadied, through him.

The Protestants

The second stream is the most surprising. Her books were preserved and spread above all by Protestants. Pierre Poiret, a French Protestant minister living in Holland, published her works in many volumes in the years around her death, including her Life. Through his editions her writings reached the Pietist circles of Germany and the Low Countries. Gerhard Tersteegen, the Reformed hymn writer and spiritual guide of the Rhineland, translated some of her writings into German and was deeply shaped by them. The Moravian movement around Count Zinzendorf grew in the same Pietist soil, and is commonly counted among those in her debt.

In England, John Wesley published an abridgement of her Life in 1776 for his Methodist people. He admired her devotion greatly, and he also warned plainly against what he judged her errors, above all her readiness to be guided by inward impressions. That double verdict — deep respect and frank correction — is probably the wisest ever given on her, and this book has tried to follow it. The poet William Cowper translated a selection of her poems into English verse; they were published after his death and have been loved by readers who knew nothing of the controversies behind them.

Quakers, too, found in her something close to their own practice of silent waiting upon God, and her books circulated among Friends on both sides of the Atlantic. In America, Thomas Upham’s long Life of Madame Guyon, published in 1847, brought her to a wide evangelical audience, and she became a favourite of the holiness and deeper-life movements. The Victorian English translation of her little book in the Ochorus library carries a preface frankly explaining why a Protestant would bring a Catholic author before Protestant readers: because the doctrine and experience she described seemed to its writer essentially Protestant — though, as he noted, her own church had persecuted her for them.

Beyond the West

The streams did not stop at the edge of Europe and America. In the twentieth century, Watchman Nee counted her among the older writers who shaped him most, and her little book on prayer was among those he worked to put into the hands of Chinese believers. Through Nee and others, a French Catholic woman of the seventeenth century became a teacher of prayer to Christians in China, many of whom would, like her, know prison for their faith.

He that believeth on me, as the scripture hath said, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water. JOHN 7:38

What the streams carried

It is worth asking what, exactly, all these readers took from her. For the most part, it was not her mystical theology of union, or her doctrine of pure love at its most extreme, or the account of her own purifications. It was the plain core of the little book on prayer: that prayer is the heart turned to God; that every believer, however simple, can pray; that Scripture should be read slowly until it feeds the heart; that distractions are best met by turning to God rather than fighting them; that the soul should be given wholly to God and not taken back. These are not Catholic or Protestant teachings. They belong to the whole church.

There is one body, and one Spirit, even as ye are called in one hope of your calling; One Lord, one faith, one baptism, One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all. EPHESIANS 4:4–6

Reading her across the divide

That raises a question Protestant readers should face honestly. Is it fair to take a devout Catholic, condemned by her own church, and adopt her as a kind of honorary Protestant? The answer is: only with care. She was not a Protestant. She never questioned the Mass, the sacraments of her church, the authority of its bishops in principle, or the devotion to the saints that appears in her writings. She submitted, as far as she believed she could, to the judgements made against her, and she died in communion with Rome. Those who love her should not remake her in their own image.

Equally, Catholic readers should remember that her church’s verdict on Quietism, while it addressed real dangers, was also bound up with court politics, personal rivalries and the power of a few men. Modern scholars of every tradition have been kinder to her than Bossuet was. Neither side owns her, and neither side is obliged to accept everything she wrote.

The wisest course is Wesley’s: honour what is true, correct what is mistaken, and receive gratefully the grace of God wherever it appears.

I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase. 1 CORINTHIANS 3:6–7

A word that was not bound

There is a final lesson. The powers of her day tried hard to stop her teaching. They failed, not because her books were flawless, but because the heart of what she said was true, and truth has a way of escaping prisons. A little book written for a few friends in Grenoble has been read by millions. God does not need the approval of the powerful to carry a word where He wills.

So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please, and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it. ISAIAH 55:11

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Consider which Christian writers from other traditions have helped you. Thank God for them by name.

2. Practise Wesley’s double verdict on one teacher you admire: name one thing to honour and one to correct.

3. If you are a Protestant, ask whether you have ever adopted a Catholic writer without respecting who they really were; if you are a Catholic, ask the same about Protestant writers.

4. Pray for Christians in China and elsewhere who are learning to pray under pressure, as she did.

5. Give a copy of a good book on prayer to someone who might never find it otherwise.

A PRAYER

Lord, You carried the words of a prisoner far beyond her prison walls.

Thank You for every teacher, in every tradition, through whom You have taught me to pray.

Give me grace to honour what is true in them and to correct what is mistaken, without pride.

And let Your word, which is not bound, run freely in my heart and through my life to others. Amen.