ONE night our Lord made me see in a dream that he wished also to purify the maid he had given me, and to make her truly enter upon the death of Self, but that it was necessary this also should be done through me, and by means of suffering. I, therefore, had to make up my mind to suffer for her what I suffered for Father La Combe, although in a different manner. She has made me suffer inconceivable torments. As she resisted God much more than he, and the selfhood was far stronger in her, she had more to purify; so that I had to suffer martyrdoms that I could not make conceivable should I tell them: but it is impossible for me. What augmented my trouble was that Father La Combe never understood this as long as it lasted, always attributing it to defect and imperfection on my part. I bore this torment for that girl three entire years. When the resistances were strongest, and the Father approved her, without my knowing it, I entered into torments I cannot tell. I fell sick from it, so I was almost continually ill. Sometimes I passed whole days upon the ground, supported against the bedstead, without being able to stir, and suffering torments so excessive that had I been upon the rack I think I should not have felt it, so terrible was the internal pain. When that girl resisted God more strongly, and came near me, she burned me; and when she touched me I felt so strange a pain that material fire would have been only its shadow. Ordinarily I allowed myself to burn with inconceivable violence; at other times I asked her to withdraw, because I could not any longer support the pain. She sometimes took this for aversion, and told Father La Combe, who was angry at it, and reproved me. However, when herself, she could not judge altogether in that manner, for our Lord made me constantly perform miracles for her. I had absolute power over her soul and her body. However ill she was, as soon as I told her to be cured, she was so; and as to the interior, as soon as I said to her, “Be at peace,” she was so; and when I had a movement to deliver her to pain, and I delivered her to it, she entered into an inconceivable pain; but almost all her pain it was I bore, with inexpressible violence.
O my God, it seems to me you have made me understand by my own experience something of what you have suffered for men; and it seemed to me, by what I suffered, that a part of what you have suffered for men would have consumed ten thousand worlds. It needed no less than the strength of a God to bear that torment without being annihilated. Once, when I was ill, and this girl was in her resistances and her selfhood, she approached me. I felt so violent a fire that I could not, it seemed to me, bear it without dying. This fire, it appears to me, is the same as that of purgatory. I told her to withdraw, owing to what I suffered. As she thought it was only opposition to her, she persisted, out of friendliness, in remaining. She took me by the arms. The violence of the pain was so excessive, that without paying any attention to what I did, being altogether beside myself from the excess of pain, I bit my arm with such force that I almost took out the piece. She saw the blood and the wound I had caused myself before perceiving the manner. This made her understand that there was something extraordinary in it. She informed the Father, as he was then at Turin, and for sometime he had not come to see me, because he was in division and in trouble. He was much surprised at the hurt I had caused myself: he could not understand what caused me to suffer; and I had difficulty to explain myself to him, and make him know it. In the evening she wished to approach me. I commanded the pain which I suffered for her to seize upon her. At once she entered into so strange a pain that she believed she was about to die, and I was delivered from it for the moment; but as she could not bear it, I took it back away from her, leaving her in peace.
Our Lord made me see in a dream the resistances she would make to me under the figure of numerous animals which issued from her body, and he made me feel the pain of that purification, as if when the animals were drawn out I was burned with a red hot iron on the right shoulder. Those animals appeared to me transparent, so that the outside looked pure and clear as a glass, and the inside full of unclean animals; and I was given to know that she had passed through the first purification, which is that of the exterior, and for this reason she had been held a saint in the world; but she had not yet been purified radically, and so far from it, the exterior purification had, as it were, fortified her self-love, and rendered the selfhood more dominant in the central depth of her being. I saw that in proportion as I suffered, those animals destroyed one another; so that at last only one remained, who devoured all the others. He appeared to have in himself all the malice of the others, and he struggled against me in a surprising manner.
It should be known that as soon as this was shown me, and it was given me to suffer for her, she exteriorly entered into a state which might have passed for madness. She was no longer fit to render me any service; in continual anger, everything offended her without rhyme or reason—jealousy of everybody, and a thousand other defects. Although she exercised me enough for the exterior, all this gave me no trouble; it was only that extreme pain which made me suffer. She became frightfully awkward, breaking and destroying everything, not being able to endure anyone. All who saw me served in this way, pitied me, for she had the disgrace that, whatever eagerness she had to do well, she did everything ill; our Lord so permitting it. If I was ill in a sweat or a shivering fit, she, without thinking, threw pots of water over me; if anyone, or she herself, had prepared anything, hoping to give me an appetite, she threw it in the cinders; if I had anything useful, she broke or lost it; and I never said anything to her, although things went so far that there was reason to think my income would not suffice for the half year. She was greatly distressed because I never said anything to her about what concerned me; for her affection for me was such that she was more grieved at this than at other faults which did not affect me, while for me it was the contrary. I had not the shadow of trouble from this. What I could not suffer in her was the self-love and the selfhood. I strongly reproved her for it, and I said to her, “All which concerns me gives me no trouble, but I feel such a terrible opposition for your self-love and selfhood, I could not have greater for the Devil.” I saw clearly that the Devil could not hurt us, but for our self-love and selfhood; and I had more aversion and more horror for that self-love and that selfhood than for all the devils. At the beginning I was pained at the opposition I had for this girl, whom I otherwise so loved, that it seemed to me I would rather have sent away my own children than get rid of her. Father La Combe, not understanding this, reproved me, and made me suffer much. However, it was not in me from myself, but from God; and when the Father supported her, it made me suffer doubly, for I suffered from the infidelity of the one and the selfhood of the other. Our Lord made me understand that this was not a defect in me, as I persuaded myself; that it was because he gave me the discernment of spirits, and my central depth would reject, or accept, that which was of him, or was not.
Since that time, although I have not borne the purification of other souls, as in her case, I nevertheless recognize them not by any light, nor by what they tell me, but by the central depth. It is well to say here that one must not mistake; and souls which are still in themselves, whatever degree of light and ardour they may have arrived at, should not apply this to themselves. They often think they have this discernment, and it is nothing but the antipathy of nature. It has been seen that our Lord (as I have told) had previously destroyed in me all sorts of natural antipathy. It is necessary that the central depth be annihilated—that it depend on God alone, and that the soul no longer possess herself, for these things to be from God. This lasted three years.
In proportion as this soul was purified the pain diminished, until our Lord made me know that her state was about to change, and that he would have the goodness to harmonize her to me. So it suddenly changed. Although I suffered such strange torments for the persons our Lord desired to purify, I did not feel all the persecutions from without; and yet they were very violent. The Bishop of Geneva wrote to different kinds of persons: to those who he thought would show his letters to me he spoke well of me, and in the letters which he thought I should not see he wrote much evil. Our Lord permitted that those persons, having mutually shown each other the letters, were indignant at a procedure so contrary to good faith. They sent them to me, that I might be on my guard. I kept them for more than two years; then I burned them, in order not to do harm to that prelate. The strongest battery was that he opened through one of the Ministers, co-Secretary of State, with the brother of the Marquise de Prunai. Moreover, he took all the trouble imaginable to render me an object of suspicion, and to decry me. For this he used certain Abbes; and although I did not go out, and did not show myself, I was well-known from the unflattering portrait the Bishop made of me. It did not make as much impression as it would have done had he stood better with the Court; but certain letters, which Madame Royale found after the death of the Prince, which he had written him against her, made her for her part attach no weight to what the Bishop of Geneva wrote; on the contrary, she sent me friendly messages, and invited me to go and see her. I went to pay my respects; she assured me of her protection, and that she was very glad I was in her State.
Our Lord made me know in a dream that he called me to aid my neighbour. Of all the mysterious dreams I have had, there is none made more impression than this, or the unction of which has lasted longer. It seemed to me that, being with one of my friends, we were ascending a great mountain, at the bottom of which was a stormy sea, full of rocks, which had to be crossed before coming to the mountain. This mountain was quite covered with cypresses. When we had ascended it, we found at its top another mountain, surrounded with hedges, that had a locked door. We knocked at it; but my companion went down again, or remained at the door, for she did not enter with me. The Master came to open the door, which was immediately again shut. The Master was no other than the Bridegroom, who, having taken me by the hand, led me into the wood of cedars. This mountain was called Mount Lebanon. In the wood was a room where the Bridegroom led me, and in the room two beds. I asked him for whom were those two beds. He answered me, There is one for my mother, and the other for you, my Bride. In this room there were animals fierce by nature, and hostile, who lived together in a wonderful manner—the cat played with the bird, and there were pheasants that came to caress me; the wolf and the lamb lived together. I remembered that prophecy of Isaiah, and the room that is spoken of in Canticles. Innocence and candour breathed from the whole place. I perceived in this room a boy of about twelve years of age. The Bridegroom said to him to go and see if there were any persons coming home from the shipwreck. His only duty was to go to the bottom of the mountain to discover if he could see anyone. The Bridegroom, turning to me, said, “I have chosen you, my Bride, to bring here to you all who shall have courage enough to pass this terrible sea, and to be there shipwrecked.” The boy came to say he did not see anyone yet returned from the shipwreck. On that I woke up so penetrated by this dream that its unction remained with me many days.
My interior state was continually more firm and immovable, and my mind so clear, that neither distraction nor thought entered it, save those it pleased our Lord to put there. My prayer, still the same—not a prayer which is in me, but in God—very simple, very pure, and very unalloyed. It is a state, not a prayer, of which I can tell nothing, owing to its great purity. I do not think there is anything in the world more simple and more single. It is a state of which nothing can be said, because it passes all expression—a state where the creature is so lost and submerged, that though it be free as to the exterior, for the interior it has absolutely nothing. Therefore its happiness is unalterable. All is God, and the soul no longer perceives anything but God. She has no longer any pretence to perfection, any tendency, any partition, any union; all is perfected in unity, but in a manner so free, so easy, so natural, that the soul lives in God and from God, as easily as the body lives from the air it breathes. This state is known of God alone, for the exterior of these souls is very common, and these same souls, which are the delight of God, and the object of his kindness, are often the mark for the scorn of creatures.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MADAME GUYON 