Mrs Guyon

See also: Guyon

Jeanne-Marie Bouvier of Mothe-Guyon , usually known as Mrs Guyon , born with Montargis the April 13rd 1648, died with Blois the June 9th 1717 is a French Mystique . It was the girl of Claude Bouvier.

Exit of a noble family and excessively pious woman, her mother, who scorns the girls, the place with the convent of the Ursulines at two years and half. Child, one tells that it receives little care and education because of a morbid constitution, and that it expresses a spiritual heat very early. At five years, it has already visions.

She marries in 1664, at the sixteen years age, Jacques Guyon of Chesnoy which has twenty-two of more of them. She will highly regret not to be made nun. After him to have made three children, Jacques Guyon will die in 1676 by leaving him his fortune. It is widowed in 1676.

The Lacombe Father initiates it with the mystical theories and the interior experiments, which it will describe in the Vie of Mrs Guyon . She enters states extatic during which she pays to communicate with God, before deciding to teach mysticism with the Moyen court and very easy for the speech (1684). The publication of this work where it exposes its manner of being put in direct relationship with God, attracts the first animosities to him.

At the time of its last mystical state in 1681, it goes to Annecy where the Lacombe Father continues to inform it. When the mystical ideas are propagated, the bishop of Alex Mr. D' Aranthon summons Mrs Guyon and the Lacombe Father to leave the territory.

In 1685, Mrs Guyon and the Lacombe Father go to France from where the Cardinal bishop Camus, condemning their doctrines, their request to leave. They there go back in 1686 but are stopped in 1688 by the police force of Louis XIV, always because of their ideas. Mrs Guyon showed her brother, the Father of the Mound, to have caused her arrest. After seven months of enfermement, it is released and goes in her friend the Duchess of Béthune-Charrost which presents it to the abbot Fénelon, him even near to the quietism. Fenelon will help Mrs Guyon to spread her ideas, and influences in this direction Madam de Maintenon and the girls of Saint-Cyr military school. When Madam de Maintenon starts to doubt, she asks for the opinion of Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, of the bishop of Châlons and Mr. Tronson on the writings of Jeanne Guyon. Those Ci reject them violently and in 1694, the archbishop of Paris having thrown the opprobrium on his books, Mrs Guyon flees in Meaux. One presents 34 catholic articles to him which it signs and which it turns over to Bossuet, but that Ci receiving them too late, it is stopped and put at the Bastille as of its return to Paris, or it will remain five years. She is released on March 21st, 1703, and will finish her days in Blois where she will pass ten years before dying out on June 17th, 1717.

Starting from 1688, it will maintain with Fénelon, future archbishop of Cambrai, which will be him also shown Quiétisme, an abundant correspondence which will be completed with dead of the prelate in 1715, two years before its own disappearance.

This business which proceeds in the proximity of the court of Louis XIV, is especially marked by the opposition between Fénelon and Jacques Bénigne Bossuet.

After the publication of his works in 1704 by Poiret, a Dutch preacher, much from French and abroad started to admire it and to visit him. Then, much from Protestants its ideas learned.

After its death Mrs Guyon gained the admiration of much, especially among the Protestants. She said that she had never wanted to leave the Catholic church. Today its works are famous among the majority of the European catholics, but the French forgot them. During its life much of people admired it for his virtuous life, and much of people today admire it for its works.

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