The Autobiography of Madame Guyon
1880
The Autobiography of Madame Guyon
Jeanne Marie Bouvier de la Motte Guyon
1880
In the winter of her life, a French noblewoman sat down to write the story of her soul. Jeanne Marie Guyon had survived imprisonment in the Bastille, condemnation by the Catholic Church, and decades of suspicion from King Louis XIV himself all because she insisted that God could be found in quiet stillness, not in the grand ceremonies of the powerful. This autobiography is the account of how she arrived at that radical conviction: a sickly child unloved by her mother, a young wife thrust into a world of courtly corruption, and finally a woman who discovered that the deepest spiritual truth required stripping away everything the world valued. Her prose carries the weight of someone who has suffered genuinely for her beliefs and found, in that suffering, a love she calls simply "the Secret of the Cross." The book documents not just her ideas but the actual texture of 17th-century religious oppression, the politics of faith, and one woman's refusal to abandon her conscience. It endures because it offers something rare: a spiritual memoir that does not polished or self-justifying but raw, honest, and ultimately triumphant in its refusal to pretend that faith is easy. Readers who have ever felt crushed by institutional religion, or who seek a model of quiet, unshakeable conviction, will find in Madame Guyon a companion for the difficult road of inner transformation.
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“My earnest wish is to paint in true colors the goodness of God to me, and the depth of my own ingratitude””
— Jeanne Marie Bouvier de la Motte Guyon
“A person truly humbled permits not anything to put him in a rage. As it is pride which dies the last in the soul, so it is passion which is last destroyed in the outward conduct. A soul thoroughly dead to itself, finds nothing of rage left.””
— Jeanne Marie Bouvier de la Motte Guyon
“The devil is outrageous only against prayer, and those that exercise it; because he knows it is the true means of taking his prey from him. He lets us undergo all the austerities we will. He neither persecutes those that enjoy them nor those that practice them. But no sooner does one enter into a spiritual life, a life of prayer, but they must prepare for strange crosses. All manner of persecutions and contempts in this world are reserved for that life.””
— Jeanne Marie Bouvier de la Motte Guyon
“He destroys that he might build; for when He is about to rear His sacred temple in us, He first totally razes that vain and pompous edifice, which human art and power had erected, and from its horrible ruins a new structure is formed, by His power only.””
— Jeanne Marie Bouvier de la Motte Guyon
“Oh, my God, if the value of prayer were but known, the great advantage which accrues to the soul from conversing with Thee, and what consequence it is of to salvation, everyone would be assiduous in it. It is a stronghold into which the enemy cannot enter. He may attack it, besiege it, make a noise about its walls; but while we are faithful and hold our station, he cannot hurt us.””
— Jeanne Marie Bouvier de la Motte Guyon
“This spirit gradually decayed, not being nourished by prayer. I became cold toward God.””
— Jeanne Marie Bouvier de la Motte Guyon
“The only way to Heaven is prayer; a prayer of the heart, which every one is capable of, and not of reasonings which are the fruits of study, or exercise of the imagination, which, in filling the mind with wandering objects, rarely settle it; instead of warming the heart with love to God, they leave it cold and languishing. Let the poor come, let the ignorant and carnal come; let the children without reason or knowledge come, let the dull or hard hearts which can retain nothing come to the practice of prayer and they shall become wise.””
— Jeanne Marie Bouvier de la Motte Guyon
“To have time for it, I left off prayer which was to me the first inlet of evils.””
— Jeanne Marie Bouvier de la Motte Guyon
