Translator’s Preface
OFTEN as one sees her name in religious and quasi-religious publications, it has appeared to me, that those, who so freely use it, for the most part have no acquaintance with the Life of Madame Guyon written by herself. For many years the English-speaking family has been content to depend, for any knowledge of her, on Upham’s defective and misleading Life, where her catholic spirit appears bound in the grave clothes of so-called Evangelical dogma. That this should be the case argues ill for the depth of religious life in those communities. Piety, doubtless, there has been, but of a shallow, superficial character, hardly veiling a robust selfhood, which keeps its votaries in perpetual movement and fuss, and sends them running over the world to pluck the motes out of brothers’ eyes, forgetful of this great beam in their own. When doctors and teachers with some knowledge of her writings do seriously mention her name, it is without exception apologetically and in a tone of patronizing superiority, which shows how much they have to learn both about themselves and her.
Putting aside for the moment all consideration of her heavenly exaltation, it may yet be seen, when the secrets of world history are opened up, that her role as forerunner of the moral and spiritual upheaval, which politically presents itself as the French Revolution, was no unimportant one. The spiritual light which shone out from her through the darkness of France was not extinguished by her persecution; and it may well be that to the latent unperceived working of that divine influence of which for a time she was the channel we owe the profound change which distinguishes modern Europe from its preceding ages. Perhaps George Sand’s dying monk was not in error when he hailed the overthrow of the altar at whose foot he was killed by the preachers of Liberte, Egalite, et Fraternite, as the opening of the Spirit’s reign he had so long sighed for.
No complete translation of Madame Guyon’s autobiography has, apparently, ever been published, in English. Of those in the British Museum library the fullest is an abridged translation, published at Bristol, by subscription, in 1772. A couple of years later, in Dublin, appeared an edition which differs from the above much as the Gospel of St. John differs from the Synoptics; but the Bristol translation has remained the foundation of all that has since appeared. For whatever claim to originality Upham in his most unsatisfactory Life puts forward, it is evident, from his reproducing the very mistakes of the Bristol translator, that he depended on him wholly. Quite recently the Bristol translation has been still further abridged, in a small volume published at Philadelphia in 1886.
Now, an autobiography such as that of Madame Guyon cannot be abridged without losing much of what constitutes its peculiar charm and power for those who can appreciate it. As well clip the floating sprays and delicate twigs, with all their tender green leaves, from a beech tree, until it stands up a mere exaggerated broom of dry, stiff branches! So the abridged autobiography becomes a tasteless narrative of events, while the spiritual perfume and unction that breathe from the original phrases, and even apparent repetitions, entirely disappear. It is to breathe and drink in something of her spirit that one seeks the company of such a writer. In the translation which I now offer to the public I know I render her meaning. I hope I have been able to preserve her spirit, so that readers who are compelled to know her only through a translation may not be serious losers. For it has been to me a labour of love. Commenced as an occupation to fill up leisure hours in the Indian hot weather, the attraction of the work grew, and I could realize how far-reaching are the principles of religion enunciated and illustrated in her life. For that which shines forth with such an extraordinary lustre in her life is the same Light of which Eastern sages had caught a fleeting glimpse, and which they sought to bring down to the comprehension of their disciples. But in the East, as in the West, the materializing and externalizing tendencies of human nature rapidly made themselves felt, and the true Nirvana, where only the self-centre is lost that the Divine Spirit may take its place and make man, as originally intended, a form to express the Divine Love and Wisdom, was forgotten, and hidden away from the vulgar in a teaching which, at the present day, seems to point to total individual annihilation. The French traveller Bernier, who had spent several years in India at the Mogul Emperor’s court, shortly before his death in 1688, incited thereto by the noise the affair of Molinos was making in France, produced from his old Indian note-books a memoir on the Quietism of India. This was published in October, 1688, six weeks after his death. He writes: “Among the different fakirs or pagan religieux there are those who are called Jogees—that is to say, saints, illumines, perfect, or perfectly united to the Sovereign Being—to the First and General Principle of all things. They are people who appear to have totally renounced the world, and who ordinarily withdraw into some secluded garden, like hermits, with a few disciples, who, modest and submissive, are only too happy to listen to them and serve them. If food is brought them they receive it; if they are forgotten, it is said, they do without it, and that they live by the grace of heaven in fasts and perpetual austerities, and are sunk in contemplation; I say, sunk (abimes), for they enter so deeply therein, that, it is said, they pass whole hours ravished and in ecstasy. Their external senses appear totally inert, and they maintain that they see the Sovereign Being, as a living and indescribable Light, with a joy and satisfaction inexpressible, which is followed by a contempt and total detachment from the world. Now here is the basis of the sect and the secret and mystery of the Kabala, which I discovered only with great trouble and artifice. Their ancient books teach that the First Principle of things is altogether admirable, and that he is something very pure (these are their own terms), very clear, and very subtle; that he is infinite, and can be neither engendered nor corrupted; that he is the perfection of all things, sovereignly perfect, and (what is to be remarked) in perfect repose, in absolute inaction—in a word, in a perfect Quietism: for they hold that, being the origin and source of all virtue, of all understanding, and all power (these are still their terms), he has not, however, in himself either virtue, understanding, or power; that, on the contrary, the property and sovereign perfection of his essence is to move nothing, to understand nothing, to apprehend nothing (rien agiter, rien entendre, rien apprendre). For this reason, whoever desires to be perfect, and to live happily and well, must by a continual contemplation and victory over himself use all possible efforts to become similar to his Principle, so that, having subdued and entirely extinguished all human passions, he may be troubled or tormented by nothing, and, after the manner of an ecstatic, entirely absorbed in profound contemplation, he may happily enjoy this Divine Repose, or Quietism, the happiest state of life one can wish.”
Two thousand years before Bernier, the Greeks of Alexander’s army had much the same to tell of the Gymnosophists of India—whence doubtless the hermits of Egypt imported their ideas and practices. The Mussul-man mystics of Persia, of whom some account is to be found in Henry Martyn’s Life, but the fullest information in a recent book, Browne’s “Year Among the Persians,” have evidently been fluttering round the same principle. This latest traveller has the rare merit of trying to study his subject as a disciple from within, rather than as a critic from outside; and we have to thank him for a translation from the Babi poetess, Karrat-ul-Ayn, in which occur the following lines: —
“The country of ‘I’ and ‘We’ forsake;
Thy home in Annihilation make:
Since, fearing not this step to take,
Thou shalt gain the highest felicity.”
In no dim or uncertain way, though superficially, the mystic of India and of Persia has seen that the “Selfhood,” that which makes each man regard himself as the centre of the universe, and look out upon this universe solely in relation to, and as supplying nourishment for, the self-centre—what Goethe calls das verdamnte Ich,—is the source of all human troubles, so that true happiness can be reached only by the annihilation of this “Selfhood.” Then, centred on and animated by the Divine Spirit, man shall resume his original and proper place, as a finite expression of Divine Love and Wisdom.
It is the same truth essentially, but with the clearer light thereon shed by Christ’s life and sacrifice with its consequence, the help of the indwelling Paraclete, that this autobiography sets forth and illustrates; and thus we see how true are Law’s words, “There is but one salvation for all mankind, and that is the Life of God in the Soul. God has but one design or intent towards all mankind, and that is to introduce or generate his own Life, Light, and Spirit in them, that all may be so many Images, Temples, and Habitations of the Holy Trinity. This is God’s good will to all Christians, Jews, and Heathens. They are all equally the desire of his heart; his Light continually waits for an entrance into all of them; his Wisdom crieth, she putteth forth her voice, not here or there, but everywhere, in all the streets of all the parts of the World. There is but one possible way for man to attain this Salvation or Life of God in the Soul. …and that is, the Desire of the Soul turned to God. …
“Suppose this desire to be awakened, and fixed upon God, though in souls that never heard either of the Law or Gospel, and then the divine Life, or operation of God, enters into them, and the New Birth in Christ is formed in those that never heard of His name. And these are they that shall come from the East and from the West and sit down with Abraham and Isaac in the Kingdom of God.”
In the narrative of Madame Guyon’s life are many abnormal incidents which were omitted or softened down by the translator of 1772, doubtless through regard for Protestant prejudices; yet in John Wesley’s Journals may be found several not very dissimilar. It is to be hoped that readers of the present day will, thanks to the study of the occult and the recognition of psychical phenomena by large numbers, bring a more open intelligence to the perusal. Numbers, no doubt, will dismiss all such as pure hallucinations, that convenient word which, with hysterics, covers so much pretentious medical and philosophical ignorance; but each one will attribute to them just so much credit as his previous education has prepared him to afford. I do not feel called upon to endeavour to extend that education, but on two matters I venture to suggest some explanations which may perhaps lessen bona fide difficulties for candid readers. I mean the terrible seven years of darkness, and the strange suffering she experienced from Father La Combe’s infidelities and waverings.
Throughout, Madame Guyon regards man, as the Latin Church generally does, as composed of soul and body; but in St. Paul we find man described as body, soul (psyche), and spirit (pneuma) —a threefold being. Yet she constantly speaks of her “fond” —a word which I have translated as “the central depth.” This doubtless represents the inmost essence and centre of the pneuma. Now, while we exist on this physical plane, the operations of the spirit (pneuma) are concealed from us by the limitations the psyche and body impose, and it is only the result of those operations, having come to birth as a fait accompli, which rises into consciousness. Thus we are spared much suffering, and, in fact, are like children who are trusted only with blunted tools while learning their use. The pain and stress of our struggles on this stage are therefore less than they must be for those who, having laid aside the body, enter upon the psychic stage of existence with the selfhood in full sway. But for Madame Guyon, even while existing still in the body, the operations of the pneuma were, I conceive, fully perceptible, not merely as results accomplished, but as struggles and tortures in progress towards results. Thus in her years of darkness she experienced the continued process of destruction and gradual mortification of that selfhood, which, drawn away from every earthly object by the raptures of the Divine Love already poured into her, was yet nourishing itself from this food as a new form of spiritual selfhood. This danger and the necessary course of remedy are largely discussed by St. John of the Cross in “The Obscure Night of the Soul.”
In the same way, after the intimate spiritual union with Father La Combe, all the movements of his spirit (pneuma) were perceptible to her as movements of her own pneuma; but that pneuma of hers was now identical with the Spirit of the Saviour living in her; thus, by the infidelity of Father La Combe, resisting and, as it were, pulling against the Saviour’s attraction, her spirit was torn in different directions. Much that might otherwise seem difficult and obscure in what she tells will perhaps thus become intelligible, by recognizing that, after her consummation in Unity with the Saviour, she enjoyed a distinct and full perception of the operations of her spirit while actually in progress. The tremendous vivacity of these we ordinary persons, in our present state, can form no conception of. To this contrast it is probable our Saviour alludes when he says, “If ye have not been faithful in that which is least, who will commit to your charge true riches?” How can you be trusted with your full-edged tools, while you show yourselves so maladroit or mischievous with the blunt ones lent you for practice? For it is never to be forgotten that man is essentially pneuma, temporarily compelled to manifest its life and activity through the limitations of psyche and body. Those who, on the death of the body, continue an existence under the limitations of the psyche, in a universe related thereto, as our physical universe is related to our physical organs, must yet, after a time, part with that also, and enter, as pure pneuma, upon the eternal inheritance they have chosen for themselves—either a life of ravishing and triumphant joy with bliss indescribable, in a society where, Self extinguished, each one continually realizes and manifests forth with an infinite variety some ever new phase and aspect of the Divine Nature, with its endless perfections, in a harmony so perfect that the happiness of each is the joy of all, and the happiness of all is the joy of each one; with capacities ever expanding and deepening to receive more, and to sink down further into the bottomless depths of the Saviour’s Heart; at the Source to drink more fully of the Light which lives there as all-attracting Love, incessantly breaking forth in streams of blessing, peace, and joy, while he imparts himself to all who will receive: —or a life in the coldness, darkness, and isolation of an all-devouring Selfhood, which no ray of heavenly Light can penetrate, or of Love warm; where the Creature, having entirely and permanently separated himself from God, is shut up in the poverty of his own covetousness, envy, pride, and wrath, raging in fury and madness, to experience the contradictory workings and self-torturings of mere Desire, unsatisfied and insatiable—an Extremity of Want.
Wide indeed of the truth has the Protestant world wandered, when it can accept with such eagerness, as a solution of difficulties, “Natural Law in the Spiritual World.” Pseudo-science, having, as it fancies, dethroned God from all control of the Physical Universe, and set up in his place two fetishes, has, it seems, gotten itself baptized and adopted into the Christian system, and crude generalizations of imperfectly observed and half-understood physical sequences are accepted as capable of explaining the mysteries of spiritual existence. More hopeful it would be to try to explain the vital activities and living tissues of an oyster from a microscopic examination of the lime particles in its shell. Swedenborg, a true man of science, one of the most eminent of his time, endeavoured to show how spiritual law underlies and rules the phenomena of the physical world, and a still profounder insight into the mystery of the origin of matter may be found in Law’s “Spirit of Love.” Illumined and guided by the light of Boehme, he shows how matter and its laws are the outward manifestation, on the physical plane, of the essential contrarieties of working in spiritual desire—the torment of spiritual nature, left to itself and working on and in itself (as was never intended), divorced from God; to manifest forth whose glories alone, as their vehicle, it had come into existence with the one qualification thereto of being in itself an extremity of want.
However much there may be in this autobiography to startle the narrow rationalism of Protestant sects, those of her own Communion, who have made themselves acquainted with the writings of St. John of the Cross, and the life and letters of St. Catharine of Sienna, must be well aware that these canonized saints more than bear out all which Madame Guyon relates and expounds, and, were it not for her own explanation and the further evidence of political intrigue, which is brought out in Cardinal Bausset’s Life of Fenelon, and St. Simon’s Memoirs, it might well be wondered why such obloquy was piled upon a person so perfectly saintly, according to the accepted standards. But all spiritual independence had left the Gallican Church. Domineered by the King, himself controlled by Madame de Maintenon, a mere tool in the hands of her director, it lent itself to the suppression of truth, and not only countenanced, but assisted in the scandalous political pressure which the French King brought to bear on the Pope and his Court, to force a condemnation of Molinos, and later of Fenelon, which otherwise could never have been procured. It would seem as if, for the second time, being offered the choice between darkness and light, this Church deliberately, and with the approval of the mass of the French people, chose darkness. The Nemesis was not long delayed. The Revolution of 1789 swept away at one stroke the faithless Church, whose candlestick had been previously removed, and the French people are still expiating their fathers’ indifference to truth, by which was rendered possible, the massacres of Huguenots, revocation of the Edict of Nantes, suppression of Port Royalists, and persecution of Fenelon and Madame Guyon. In her writings spiritual religion offered itself to their consideration in no strange garb, but within the recognized forms of the Roman Communion, and every element clothed in the approved and sanctioned doctrines of long canonized saints.
From that catastrophe an Europe is now profiting; for the Apocalyptic beast of Ecclesiastical Domination received thereby his death stroke, and though we are still under the seducing influences of the three unclean spirits who had their birth in it,—Democracy, which says boldly, Authority comes from below, not from above; Materialism, declaring the lusts of the flesh the only source of happiness; Analysis, falsely called Science, which seeks the solution of the mysteries of Life by going further and further from the Centre and Source of Life;—yet none of these can operate save by deceiving: the cruel coercive tyranny of Ecclesiasticism is at an end for ever. Without the support and ignorant bigotry of the laity it never could have prevailed.
The anonymous writer of a discourse prefixed to some copies of her Life, thus introduces Madame Guyon to his readers: —
“I had read many spiritual books of undoubted value, and I had collected one hundred and thirty folio volumes of the most esteemed Fathers of the Church. God forbid I should refuse them the tribute of veneration which is their due, but I nowhere found Madame Guyon or her writings. How happy should I esteem myself, dear reader, if my example could serve you as a compass! It is forty years since I had the happiness, decisive for me, of becoming acquainted with her divine writings. That epoch of my life shall be for ever blessed. What was not my astonishment to see an order of verities so new for me! At first I understood very little, for want of that poverty of spirit so necessary to receive the kingdom of God and his eternal truth. On the contrary, my brain was furnished with those opinions which amuse the children of men, with those academic doctrines with which grave Divines fill their nurselings, and which they are not ashamed to call true knowledge. However, in spite of the blindness to which I had been brought by those common principles, barren for the mind and puffing up the heart, which I took for indubitable, the sweet and penetrating unction shed forth from all the holy writings of Madame Guyon, that character of truth which is its own proof, that chain of connected doctrine, that sublime truth always tinctured and tempered in the love of God, which is its end, —that divine magic attracted me and seized hold of me; rays of light pierced the denseness of my soul; a secret fire warmed, softened the hardness of my heart. Gradually my horizon grew clearer; my heart, I say, took fire, and the Light of Life melted insensibly its ice. Then I saw clearly that I had understood nothing in our holy books, but the little which is accessible to reason, which in divine things is for man only an additional source of blindness. Then the contradictions it finds there were completely removed, and a new, pure light of day raised me to the idea of that Christianity of which most men have scarcely the most elementary notion, far from conceiving its spirit.”
The present translator did not derive his conception of Christianity from Madame Guyon, but drew directly from the Source, yet would he add his tribute of veneration to all that has been said of her by the writer quoted; for who can approach this divinely fed fountain with a genuine thirst, and fail to receive refreshment as from a draught of living water? The Spirit of the Saviour, who alone lived in her, and for over thirty years, after having so perfected her that her natural and proper dwelling-place was among those dazzling white-robed ones of the highest heaven, that had come out of great tribulation, seen by the Apostle John, yet retained her on earth; not for any further purification, but that He might give to men, in these modern days, an example and illustration of a life truly hid with Christ in God;—the self-same Spirit still breathes forth from her record, and penetrates the heart of the reader who will cultivate that simplicity of mind, that docility of the little child, which is the first essential to being taught of God. For the superior person, the self-satisfied critic, it must prove a stone of stumbling. Such a one may need some centuries of providential education, with its many crushing experiences, before Pride shall be so broken as to let fall the barrier of the Will—that only obstacle throughout all the Universe which can permanently resist the Will of God: but unless he be a most perverse; obstinate son of perdition, the time will come; for it is difficult to baffle the resources of Divine Wisdom animated by Divine Love. Then he will have a right understanding of what Madame Guyon was.
The writer of the discourse alluded to above, himself apparently a Roman Catholic, does not hesitate to call Madame Guyon the Apostle of our times, and to claim for her a place next to the Virgin Mary, above all canonized saints. It is a subject for wonder as well as regret that Protestantism should have regarded her with such coldness, and should have preferred, above that spiritual life from God and in God, a self-complacent intellectualism fast losing itself in rationalism, agnosticism, and atheistic pessimism. For Madame Guyon belongs to no Church, or sect, or nationality. Stripped of the purely accidental, due to her education and surroundings, her life illustrates the catholic, universal doctrine proclaimed by Christ, and true for Christian, Jew, and Heathen, that “God is a Spirit, and they who worship him must worship in spirit and in truth” —thus further defined and emphasized by St. Paul, “I live, yet not I, Christ lives in me” —the creature, NOTHING: Christ, ALL.
The work here translated was published at Cologne in 1720, less than three years after Madame Guyon’s decease, which took place on June 9, 1717,under the title of “La Vie de Madame J. M. B. de la Mothe Guion, ecrite par ellememe.” According to “La Nouvelle Biographie,” the correct spelling is Guyon. Her husband, very wealthy, was son to the engineer who had constructed the canal of Briare, for which work apparently he had been ennobled, while her family name of Bouvieres de la Mothe shows her to have been noble by birth.
This narrative, commenced under the orders of her spiritual director, and meant originally only for his eye, was written before and during her first imprisonment, in the year 1688, but subsequently continued, and finally revised in 1709. The remarkable words in chap. viii., part iii., however, show that she early foresaw that it would eventually be made public. How this publication came about is explained by the original editor in his Preface.
Attention having been attracted, both in Germany and England, to the violent proceedings against Fenelon, whose position as Archbishop of Cambrai had doubtless made him well known to numerous officers in the allied armies, curiosity was aroused to learn all particulars of the controversy, and, going to the root of the matter, certain English and German noblemen, not content, our editor tells us, with a mere perusal of such of Madame Guyon’s writings as they had been able to procure, took the opportunity, after her release from prison in 1703, to visit her in person. “She confided to them the history of her life, written and revised by herself, and her intention that it should be published when God had withdrawn her from the world. The manuscript she entrusted to an English Lord, who took it back with him into Eng1and, and who has it in his possession at this moment. Seeing that God sometime ago withdrew its author, in order that there may be no further delay in giving effect to her will, I here offer to the public that same Life, from a copy carefully compared with her original manuscript.”
This positive assertion of the editor (said to be M. Poiret) ought to leave no room for doubt as to authenticity; while there is the undoubted fact that an autobiography had been written by her, and, under the secrecy of confession, shown to and carefully read by Bossuet in 1694. Subsequently, in the attack on Quietism which Madame de Maintenon employed him to undertake, he drew weapons from this autobiography, which in his eagerness for a controversial victory, he garbled and caricatured, betraying thus the confidence placed in him; as, indeed, he did also with regard to Fenelon and Rance, the reformer of La Trappe.
The writer, however, of the article in “La Nouvelle Biographie” has thought fit to repeat Bayle’s gratuitous doubts, and suggests that in its present form the autobiography is a compilation, based on that which he says she had made over to the Official of the Archbishop of Paris in 1688, and other documents. Now, a reference to the work itself will show that this suggestion is baseless: she made over no autobiographical papers to the Official, and it was subsequent to the surrender of the copies of her other writings that much of this autobiography was written.
But the reader whose spiritual taste has been cultivated and developed will make light of such cavils, and as to the genuineness of this autobiography, he will use M. Tronson’s phrase, “Je le sens bien.” He can discern between the didactic style of a M. Poiret—whose ideas, originating in and moulded by intellect, appeal to intellect —and the spontaneous outflow from the heart, not tied together by a logical sequence, or woven into ratiocinative cohesion, which offers itself direct to the intuition of the spirit. None but a person with Madame Guyon’s experiences could have written Madame Guyon’s Autobiography.
AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MADAME GUYON 