In the summer of 1681, Madame Guyon, now thirty-four years of age, quitted Paris for Gex, a town lying at the foot of the Jura, about twelve miles from Geneva. It was arranged that she should take some part in the foundation and management of a new religious and charitable institution there. A period of five years was destined to elapse before her return to the capital. During this interval, she resided successively at Gex, Thonon, Turin, and Grenoble. Wherever she went, she was indefatigable in works of charity, and also in the diffusion of her peculiar doctrines concerning self-abandonment and disinterested love. Strong in the persuasion of her mission, she could not rest without endeavouring to influence the minds around her. The singular charm of her conversation won a speedy ascendency over nearly all with whom she came in contact. It is easy to see how a remarkable natural gift in this direction contributed both to the attempt and the success. But the Quietest had buried nature, and to nature she would owe nothing,—these conversational powers could be, in her eyes, only a special gift of utterance from above. This mistake reminds us of the story of certain monks upon whose cloister garden the snow never lay, though all the country round was buried in the rigour of a northern winter. The marvellous exemption, long attributed by superstition to miracle, was discovered to arise simply from certain thermal springs which had their source within the sacred inclosure. It is thus that the warmth and vivacity of natural temperament has been commonly regarded by the mystic, as nothing less than a fiery impartation from the altar of the celestial temple.
At Thonon her apartment was visited by a succession of applicants from every class, who laid bare their hearts before her, and sought from her lips spiritual guidance or consolation. She met them separately and in groups, for conference and for prayer. At Grenoble, she says she was for some time engaged from six o’clock in the morning till eight at evening in speaking of God to all sorts of persons,—‘friars, priests, men of the world, maids, wives, widows, all came, one after another, to hear what I had to say.’[[332]] Her efforts among the members of the House of the Novitiates in that city, were eminently successful, and she appears to have been of real service to many who had sought peace in vain, by the austerities and the routine of monastic seclusion. Meanwhile, she was active, both at Thonon and Grenoble, in the establishment of hospitals. She carried on a large and continually increasing correspondence. In the former place she wrote her Torrents, in the latter, she published her Short Method of Prayer, and commenced her Commentaries on the Bible.[[333]]
But alas! all this earnest, tireless toil is unauthorized. Bigotry takes the alarm, and cries the Church is in danger. Priests who were asleep—priests who were place-hunting—priests who were pleasure-hunting, awoke from their doze, or drew breath in their chase, to observe this woman whose life rebuked them—to observe and to assail her; for rebuke, in their terminology, was scandal. Persecution hemmed her in on every side; no annoyance was too petty, no calumny too gross, for priestly jealousy. The inmates of the religious community she had enriched were taught to insult her—tricks were devised to frighten her by horrible appearances and unearthly noises—her windows were broken—her letters were intercepted. Thus, before a year had elapsed, she was driven from Gex. Some called her a sorceress; others, more malignant yet, stigmatized her as half a Protestant. She had indeed recommended the reading of the Scriptures to all, and spoken slightingly of mere bowing and bead-counting. Monstrous contumacy—said, with one voice, spiritual slaves and spiritual slave-owners—that a woman desired by her bishop to do one thing, should discover an inward call to do another. At Thonon the priests burnt in the public square all the books they could find treating of the inner life, and went home elated with their performance. One thought may have embittered their triumph—had it only been living flesh instead of mere paper! She inhabited a poor cottage that stood by itself in the fields, at some distance from Thonon. Attached to it was a little garden, in the management of which she took pleasure. One night a rabble from the town were incited to terrify her with their drunken riot,—they trampled down and laid waste the garden, hurled stones in at the windows, and shouted their threats, insults, and curses, round the house the whole night. Then came an episcopal order to quit the diocese. When compelled subsequently, by the opposition she encountered, to withdraw secretly from Grenoble, she was advised to take refuge at Marseilles. She arrived in that city at ten o’clock in the morning, but that very afternoon all was in uproar against her, so vigilant and implacable were her enemies.
Note to page 214.
Autobiography, chapp. viii. and x. In describing her state of mind at this time, she says,—‘This immersion in God immerged all things. I could no more see the saints, nor even the blessed Virgin, out of God; but I beheld them all in Him. And though I tenderly loved certain saints, as St. Peter, St. Paul, St. Mary Magdalen, St. Theresa, with all those who were spiritual, yet I could not form to myself images of them, nor invoke any of them out of God.’ Here a genuine religious fervour, described in the language of mystical theology, has overcome superstition, and placed her, unconsciously, in a position similar to that of Molinos with regard to these professedly subordinate objects of Romanist worship. It may be observed, in passing, that while Rome pretends to subordinate saint-worship, she denounces those of her children who really do so, as heretical, i.e., reformatory, in their tendency.
Madame Guyon was enabled at this period to enjoy a habitual inward prayer,—‘a prayer of rejoicing and possession, wherein the taste of God was so great, so pure, unblended, and uninterrupted, that it drew and absorbed the powers of the soul into a profound recollection, without act or discourse. For I had now no sight but of Jesus Christ alone. All else was excluded, in order to love with the greater extent, without any selfish motives or reasons for loving.’ With much good sense, she declares this continual and immediate sense of the Divine presence far safer and higher than the sensible relish of ecstasies and ravishments,—than distinct interior words or revelations of things to come,—so often imaginary, so apt to divert our desires from the Giver to the gifts;—this is the revelation of Jesus Christ, which makes us new creatures, the manifestation of the Word within us, who cannot deceive,—the life of true and naked faith, which darkens all self-pleasing lights, and reveals the minutest faults, that pure love may reign in the centre of the soul. Thus, while inheriting the phraseology of the mystics (and we discern in these accounts of her early experience the influence of her later readings in mystical theology), she is less sensuous than Theresa, less artificial than John. Like the latter, she assigns to love the office of annihilating the will, to faith that of absorbing the understanding, ‘so as to make it decline all reasonings, all particular brightnesses and illustrations.’ The Annihilation of the Will, or the Union in the Will of God, consists, with her, simply in a state of complete docility, the soul yielding itself up to be emptied of all which is its own, till it finds itself by little and little detached from every self-originated motion, and placed ‘in a holy indifference for willing;—wishing nothing but what God does and wills.’—P. 70.
Note to page 218.
She describes herself, when at Thonon, as causing sundry devils to withdraw with a word. But the said devils, like some other sights and sounds which terrified her there, were probably the contrivance of the monks who persecuted her, with whom expertness in such tricks was doubtless reckoned among the accomplishments of sanctity. When at the same place (she was then a little past thirty), Madame Guyon believed that a certain virtue was vouchsafed her—a gift of spiritual and sometimes of bodily healing, dependent, however, for its successful operation, on the degree of susceptibility in the recipients.—Autobiography, part II. c. xii.
There also she underwent some of her most painful and mysterious experiences with regard to Father La Combe. She says,—‘Our Lord gave me, with the weaknesses of a child, such a power over souls, that with a word I put them in pain or in peace, as was necessary for their good. I saw that God made Himself to be obeyed, in and through me, like an absolute Sovereign. I neither resisted Him nor took part in anything.... Our Lord had given us both (herself and La Combe) to understand that He would unite us by faith and by the cross. Ours, then, has been a union of the cross in every respect, as well as by what I have made him suffer, as by what I have suffered for him.... The sufferings which I have had on his account were such as to reduce me sometimes to extremity, which continued for several years. For though I have been much more of my time far from him than near him, that did not relieve my suffering, which continued till he was perfectly emptied of himself, and to the very point of submission which God required of him.... He hath occasioned me cruel pains when I was near a hundred leagues from him. I felt his disposition. If he was faithful in letting Self be destroyed, I was in a state of peace and enlargement. If he was unfaithful in reflection or hesitation, I suffered till that was passed over. He had no need to write me an account of his condition, for I knew it; but when he did write, it proved to be such as I had felt it.’—Ibid. p. 51.
She says that frequently, when Father La Combe came to confess her, she could not speak a word to him; she felt take place within her the same silence toward him, which she had experienced in regard to God. I understood, she adds, that God wished to teach me that the language of angels might be learnt by men on earth,—that is, converse without words. She was gradually reduced to this wordless communication alone, in her interviews with La Combe; and they imagined that they understood each other, ‘in a manner ineffable and divine.’ She regarded the use of speech, or of the pen, as a kind of accommodation on her part to the weakness of souls not sufficiently advanced for these internal communications.