GOD ALONE.—SINCE you wish me to write a life so worthless and so extraordinary as mine, and the omissions I made in the former have appeared to you too considerable to leave it in that state, I wish with all my heart, in order to obey you, to do what you desire of me; although the labour appears to me a little severe in the state I am in, which does not allow me to reflect much. I should extremely wish to make you understand the goodness of God to me, and the excess of my ingratitude; but it would be impossible for me to do it, as well because you do not wish me to write my sins in detail, as because I have lost the memory of many things. I will endeavour to acquit myself as well as I can, trusting to your assurance never to let it appear to the eyes of men, and that you will burn it when God shall have drawn from it the effect that he proposes for your spiritual profit; for which I would sacrifice all things, being persuaded, as I am, of the designs of God for you, both for the sanctification of your own self, and for that of others. But I assure you at the same time, that you will not attain this save by much trouble and labour, and by a road which will appear to you quite contrary to your expectation. You will not, however, be surprised at it if you are convinced that God does not establish his great works except upon “the nothing.” It seems that he destroys in order to build. He does it so in order that this temple he destines for himself, built even with much pomp and majesty, but built none the less by the hand of men, should be previously so destroyed that there remains not one stone upon another. It is these frightful ruins which will be used by the Holy Spirit to construct a temple which will not be built by the hand or men, but by his power alone.
Oh, if you could understand this mystery—so profound it is!—and conceive the secrets of God’s conducting, revealed to the little ones, but concealed from the great and wise of the earth, who imagine themselves to be the councilors of the Lord, and to penetrate the depth of his ways; who persuade themselves that they attain this divine wisdom, unknown to those who still live to themselves and in their “own” operations, “concealed even from the birds of the heaven” —that is to say, from those who by the vivacity of their lights and by the strength of their elevation, approach the heaven, and think to penetrate the height, the depth, the breadth, and the length of God! This divine wisdom is unknown even to those who pass in the world for persons extraordinary in light and in learning. To whom, then, will it be known? and who will be able to tell us news of it ? “Destruction and death.” It is they who “declare to have heard with their ears the sound of its reputation.” It is, then, in dying to all things and in truly losing one’s self as regards them, to pass into God, and to subsist only in him, that one has some intelligence of the true wisdom. Oh, how little one understands her ways, and the course she leads her most chosen servants! Hardly does one discover something of it, than, surprised at the difference of the truth one discovers from the ideas one had formed of the true perfection, one exclaims with St. Paul, “O depth of knowledge and of wisdom of God, how incomprehensible are your judgments, and your ways difficult to know!” You do not judge things as men judge of them, who call good, evil, and evil, good, and who regard as great righteousness things abominable before God, and which according to his prophet he values no more than if they were dirty rags; who will even examine with rigour those selfhood-begotten righteousnesses, which (like those of the Pharisees) will be matters for his indignation and his anger, and not the object of his love and the subject of his recompenses, as he himself assures us when he says: “If your righteousness does not exceed that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter into the kingdom of heaven.” Who of us has a righteousness that approaches that of the Pharisees, and who, while doing much less good than they did, has not a hundred times more ostentation than they had? Who of us is not well content to appear righteous to his own eyes and to the eyes of others, and who does not believe it is enough to be righteous in this way to be so to the eyes of God?
Yet we see the indignation Jesus Christ has exhibited, as well as his forerunner, against these sorts of persons—he whose gentleness was so infinite that it was the perfect model of all gentleness, but of a gentleness radical and coming from the heart, not of that affected gentleness, which under the appearance of the dove preserves the heart of a hawk. Jesus Christ, I say, has had only severity for these self-righteous persons, and seemed to dishonour them before men. The picture he made of them was strange, while he regards the sinners with mercy, compassion, and love, and protests he is only come for them, that it is these sick ones who have need of a physician; that while the Saviour of Israel, he is yet come to save only the lost sheep of the House of Israel. O Love! it appears you are so jealous of the salvation you yourself give, that you prefer the sinner to the righteous. It is true, this poor sinner, seeing in himself only wretchedness, is, as it were, constrained to hate himself; finding himself an object of horror, he casts himself headlong into the arms of his Saviour. He plunges with 1ove and confidence into the sacred bath of his blood, whence he comes forth white as wool. It is then that, all confused at his disorders, and all full of love for him who, having alone been able to remedy his evils, has had the charity to do it, he loves him so much the more as his crimes have been more enormous, and his gratitude is so much the greater as the debts which have been forgiven him are more abundant; while the righteous, supported by the great number of works of righteousness he presumes to have done, seems to hold his salvation in his own hands, and regards heaven as the recompense due to his merits. He damns all sinners in the bitterness of his zeal. He makes them see the entrance of heaven shut for them. He persuades them they ought not to regard it but as a place to which they have no right, while he believes its opening so much the more assured to him as he flatters himself to deserve it more. His Saviour is for him almost useless. He goes away so loaded with merits that he is overwhelmed with their weight. Oh, but he will remain a long time weighed down under that vain-glorious burden, while his sinners, stripped of everything, are carried swiftly by the wings of love and confidence into the arms of their Saviour, who gives them gratuitously what he has infinitely merited for them.
Oh, how the former have love of themselves, and little love of God! They love themselves, and admire themselves in their works of righteousness, which they esteem as the cause of their happiness. They are, however, no sooner exposed to the rays of the Divine Sun of Righteousness, than it discovers all their iniquity, and makes them appear so filthy that they make one sick; while he pardons the Magdalen, devoid of all righteousness, “because she loves much,” and her love and her faith take for her the place of righteousness. Whence comes it that the divine Paul, who so well understood these great truths, and has so admirably described them for us, assures us “the faith of Abraham was imputed to him for righteousness”? This is perfectly fair, for it is certain this holy patriarch performed all his actions in a very great righteousness. Oh, it is that he did not see them as such, and being entirely disengaged from all of the self and devoid of its love, his faith was founded only on the future salvation his Saviour should bring him. He hoped in him even against hope, and this faith was imputed to him as righteousness—that is to say, righteousness, pure, simple, and clean; righteousness merited by Jesus Christ, and not a righteousness of his own, performed by him, and regarded as from himself. This, which will appear extremely remote from the object I proposed to myself at first in writing, will nevertheless conduct you to it insensibly, and make you see that God chooses for carrying out his works either converted sinners whose past iniquity serves as counterpoise to the exaltation, or else persons in whom he destroys and overthrows that “own” righteousness, and that temple built by the hand of men, so that there remains not a stone that is not destroyed, because all those works are built only upon the quicksand, which is the resting on the created, and in these same works, in place of being founded on the living stone, Jesus Christ. All that he has come to establish, by entering the world, is effected by the overthrow and destruction of the same things he wished to build. He established his Church in a manner that seemed to destroy it. What manner of establishing a new law, and accrediting it when the legislator is condemned as a criminal by the doctors and powerful of the earth, and at last dies upon a gibbet! Oh, if men knew how opposed is the “own” righteousness to the designs of God, we should have an eternal subject of humiliation and ofdistrust of what at present constitutes our sole support!
This granted, you will have no trouble to conceive the design of God in the graces he has bestowed on the most worthless of creatures. You will even believe them without difficulty. They are all graces—that is to say, gifts—which I have never merited; on the contrary, of which I have made myself very unworthy. But God, through an extreme love of his power, and a righteous jealousy of the way in which men attribute to other men the good that God puts in them, has willed to take the most unworthy subject that ever was, to show that his bounties are effects of his will, and not fruits of our merits; that it is the peculiarity of his wisdom to destroy what is proudly built, and to build what is destroyed, to make “use of weak things to confound the strong.” But if he makes use of things vile and contemptible, he does it in a manner so astonishing that he renders them the object of contempt to all creatures. It is not in procuring for them the approbation of men that he makes use of them for the salvation of those same men, but in rendering them the mark for their insults and an object of execration. This is what you will see in the life you ordered me to write.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MADAME GUYON 