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In about 34 AD, the Pharisee named Saul furiously thundered on horseback toward Damascus with legal orders to arrest and kill Christians. A great light knocked Paul off of his horse and he heard the words “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” He asked, “Who are you, Lord?” The reply came, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what you are to do” (Acts 9:4–6). After this experience, Saul (his name later changed to Paul) found grace to know and love Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

In France in 1664, the fifteen-year-old Jeanne Guyon was forced into an arranged and unhappy marriage with an older man. In 1668 when pregnant with her second child, Jeanne, tempted by thoughts of suicide and despair, sought spiritual counsel from a monk. He told her that she could find God within her heart and immediately she felt Christ filling her with love. She wrote about this saying, “O my Lord, you were in my heart and you asked from me only a simple turning inward to make me feel your presence. O infinite Goodness, you were so near.”7

These two encounters with the risen Jesus Christ led to this book. Paul discovered the reality of Jesus Christ’s gift of grace. Between 57 and 63 AD, Paul wrote letters to churches in Galatia, Ephesus, and Colossae discussing the life lived with Christ. Centuries later, Guyon discovered the same truth of the risen Christ. In the late 1600s, Guyon studied Paul’s letters and wrote commentaries on his ideas to help readers understand the good news. She described how Paul lived his life in complete trust and dependence on Jesus Christ and how other believers are to do the same. Guyon wrote about these letters with passion, describing this life with hope. Guyon writes, “God is pleased to remake us in his image by his Word by inviting us to live within him. O, adorable grandeur! O, the wonderful marvel that we discover in our interior! We receive this wisdom by dwelling within you!”8

In his lifetime Paul had his faith tested in his many afflictions and incarcerations, as later did Guyon. Yet both testified that the Lord’s presence cared for them in the midst of their suffering, bringing them peace and joy even in the midst of persecutions.

Jeanne Guyon’s biblical commentaries on Paul’s letters of Galatians, Ephesians, and Colossians have never been translated into English. I present these first English translations for scholars who are researching and studying the ideas of Jeanne Guyon, as well as for those seeking a more profound knowledge of Jesus Christ.

Jeanne Guyon’s Life (1648–1717)

Born into an aristocratic family in France, Jeanne de la Mothe grew up in the town of Montargis on the Loire River. Both of her parents had been married before and their blended family experienced constant tensions and arguments. In the midst of this unhappiness, the mother preferred certain of her children and neglected Guyon. As a young teenager, Guyon’s parents forced her into an arranged marriage to Jacques Guyon, a wealthy man twenty-two years older than she. This mismatched couple had many conflicts and she became miserable. By the age of nineteen and pregnant with her second child, Guyon experienced a crisis in which she could not endure her life anymore. She spoke to a Franciscan monk, Father Archange Enguerrand, who counseled her that God’s wisdom was inside of her. He told her, “It is, Madame, because you seek without what you have within. Accustom yourself to seek God in your heart, and you will find God there.”9 Guyon wrote that she felt relief from the sudden presence of God within her heart.

Following this revelation, Guyon committed herself to Christ. Against the wishes of her husband, she chose a small closet in her home and prayed there regularly. She also worked raising her five children, instead of giving this responsibility to their servants. When a smallpox epidemic hit, two of her children died. Yet even in the midst of sorrows, Guyon’s faith grew. She threw herself into ministering in the villages among the poor. She knew some peace with her husband, although the relationship continued to be a difficult one. She also began to write her ideas about the Christian faith. Whenever she had time, Guyon grabbed pen and paper and captured her ideas about God. She wrote about her love for God, “I loved him, and I burned with his fire because I loved him, and I loved him in such a way that I could love only him, but in loving him I had no motive save himself.”10

In 1676 her husband died when she was twenty-eight, leaving her a wealthy widow with two older sons and a small daughter. Guyon said she would never marry again and moved to a small town outside of Geneva. She chose a quiet life living in rural cottages with her young daughter. There Guyon intensified her active ministry with the sick and wrote continually. She frequently spent all night working on her books, saying that the ideas sparked by the Bible flowed quickly on to paper. She spent her time searching the scriptures, praying and looking for answers about Christ’s relationship with her. With the help of a friend, she published her books and they quickly found great popularity throughout Europe. Her better known books include her Autobiography, The Short and Easy Method of Prayer, and Spiritual Torrents.

Then Guyon faced serious persecution about her Christian writing, including accusations from church leaders that a woman should not even write. The tensions in her childhood family surfaced again when her half-brother betrayed her to the Roman Catholic powers of the Inquisition and accused her of immorality. Church and state authorities arrested and incarcerated her.

With Guyon’s aristocratic connections to Louis XIV’s court at Versailles, some leaders spoke out, protesting the treatment of this gentle woman. The tutor for King Louis’s grandson, Archbishop François Fénelon, courageously defended Guyon and declared her innocent. Because of this, King Louis XIV banished Fénelon from his court and in 1697 reported him to Rome as writing heretical books. The king’s actions publicized this controversy throughout Europe and heightened the political conflicts surrounding Guyon’s incarceration. The cardinals in Rome debated the orthodoxy of Fénelon’s book about Guyon’s theology called The Maxims of the Saints. Many in state and church position in Europe watched this situation and it became called “The Great Conflict.” In 1699 Pope Innocent XII censured twenty-three propositions of Fénelon’s book.

While this was happening, Guyon endured many brutal twelve-hour interrogations. Authorities searched for evidence of any type of wrongdoing and would free her only to arrest her again. At the instigation of Bishop Jacques Bénigne Bossuet, preacher to King Louis XIV, she suffered several incarcerations, including an incarceration in the Bastille from 1698–1703. Guyon spent a total of about ten years incarcerated in four different places of imprisonment.

During these years of forced solitude, Guyon continued to pray and wrote that her interior faith carried her through these years of persecutions. Finally, Bishop Bossuet exonerated her of all charges. Following this, Guyon was released from the Bastille and lived for fourteen years in a cottage in Blois near her daughter’s residence. During her final years, she gave spiritual counsel to many Catholics, Quakers and Protestants, both in meetings and letters.

More about Guyon’s life is written in The Pure Love of Madame Guyon: The Great Conflict in King Louis XIV’s Court.11

Jeanne Guyon’s Interior Faith

Jeanne Guyon, a woman despised and hated by many in seventeenth-century France, dedicated herself to Jesus Christ and to living the Christian interior life. She offered her commentaries on the Bible as help in the search for the interior kingdom of God. With a profound clarity of thought, she understood the gospel message of the redemptive work accomplished by the life, passion, and crucifixion of Jesus Christ as the central focus of both the Old and New Testaments.

Guyon’s hidden treasure of thought needs to be seen as the extraordinary accomplishment it is: one woman, persecuted and incarcerated, explained the complete biblical message to readers. Basing her ideas on the words of Jesus, she says that our greatest longing is for the pure love of God. Christ tells us, “Love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, strength and soul” (Luke 10:27). Guyon’s thinking is simple: If Christ commands us to do this, then how can this be an impossibility? Christ commands us and by his rich and generous grace he gives us the ability and power to do this.

Guyon described the beginning of this spiritual life as surrender to Christ. The believer then learns to love Christ with purity and finds fulfillment in participating in Christ. From this interior encounter with Christ, believers learn to live in a way pleasing to God. Using this Scripture of Luke 10:27, she defined the interior life as that of the heart, mind, strength, and soul. Guyon explains to us how a faithful person may answer Christ’s call to love him with all of our heart, mind, strength, and soul, which means, in brief, to love him with our interior life.

Guyon called this encounter with the living Lord the interior life. Christians find the great mystery that Christ lives within us, and in trusting and receiving Christ, live in the midst of the Trinity in the love springing forth among the Father and the Son and Holy Spirit. Truly, divine love surrounds believers and unites them with the Holy Trinity.

Guyon applied this wisdom from the interior life to her defense against the inquisition by the Roman Catholic Church. With no formal education, Guyon came up against the most educated church leaders of the time. Guyon was not allowed to have a lawyer in the interrogations and she said that God within gave her the words to say. In many court interrogations, Guyon told officials that the pure love of God should rule our interior life. Her answers in the interrogations finally led to her judgment of innocent. The many officials that investigated her could find no wrong doing in her life or thinking.

Yet even with all the suffering, Guyon remained peaceful. She says that the Lord calls us to enjoy him. In her Commentary on Ephesians, she writes, “This enjoyment underlies all of our experience, as if we were given a taste for an exquisite thing that was promised to us; to desire this is a great advantage.” Our enjoyment of the Lord grows into a powerful relationship with Jesus Christ. She continues, “In Jesus Christ, human beings become the inheritance of God, as God wants to be the inheritance of human beings.”12

Guyon went on to emphasize the believer’s enjoyment of the whole Trinity. The mystery she sought to explain is that that the Son mediates the immense reality of the Trinity to the faithful person. Guyon describes, “The Son contains the profundity and immensity of the Trinity because Jesus Christ is the breadth and length and height and depth of the Father.” The invitation for the faithful is to live in and unite with the Trinity. The infinite Trinity holds and supports the believer while inviting the person to enjoy the revelation of the glory of Christ and participate in the profound depths of wisdom that God the Father offers the believer. In brief, the love that emanates and flows between each member of the Trinity flows upon and within the believer in a continual expression of love.

The mystery is that Jesus Christ forms himself in the believer’s interior life. In her Commentary on Colossians, Guyon writes, “This Gospel tells us the truth of the wonderful mystery, that is, Christ came to live within us . . . We need to comprehend the truth of his living within us and to be assured by this.”13

The Christian Worldview of Jeanne Guyon

The essence of the Christian worldview is this revelation and manifestation of Jesus Christ as the Son of God within the heart, mind, and soul of the believer. In Guyon’s Christian worldview, the heart of Jesus Christ graciously offers salvation, as he accomplishes the mystery of the redemption of humanity. Jesus Christ lives within the believer’s interior life.

Guyon sought to understand the Christian worldview in her prayerful study of the Bible. In her biblical commentaries, Guyon structured her writing by writing out a few verses from Paul’s letters and then writing some paragraphs about the meaning of these verses. She looked to the Apostle Paul for wisdom about the interior life because he too sought a living relationship with Jesus Christ. In these letters, Paul describes both the richness of this life and the temptations that happen on the way. He lists the actions that flow naturally out of the Christian interior life.

Throughout her writings, Guyon summarizes her ideas about the believer’s Christian worldview. Guyon described her ideas about the spiritual life and wrote about this from her personal perspective (writing with the pronouns “I” and “we”) based on Paul’s witness in these epistles. According to Guyon, we can find a path to God, our Beloved.

Guyon describes this relationship with God in simplicity. The interior life begins with surrender to the living Lord. People see no path to God the Father and realize the truth that there is no path without Jesus Christ. God has sent us his only Son so by the great mystery of revelation, Jesus Christ becomes real to us. All of our powers, heart, and mind become strengthened when we see the Lord with eyes of faith. Jesus Christ calls to us and asks us to give him everything. In a wave of faith, we answer Christ, saying, “Yes!” to him and accepting our completion in him. We hear his wisdom, experience his healing, and feel his gracious kindness. We cling to him in utter dependency. We look to him to meet all of our needs.

As we do this, Guyon says we find a new and growing interior life within our heart, mind, strength, and soul that opens up a living place of encounter with Christ. In prayer we welcome Christ’s wisdom and salvation inside. We see that he offers to us a large and gracious interior kingdom where we revel in the Word of God. We accept the Scriptures and let them soak into our soul. We learn to love the Lord our God with our heart, mind, strength, and soul.

Following this, our lives become a place of Christ’s work. We learn to look eagerly for Christ’s presence. Surrendering and yielding to Christ’s power, he pours new virtues within us: love, faith, and hope are some of the first to open our interior life. As a believer loves Christ and develops an interior relationship, she begins to transform into becoming more like Christ and brings Christ more into the world. The believer lives Christ within her heart, mind, and soul and then bears the marks of Jesus Christ in the exterior life.

The revelation of this mystery of Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is the point of Paul’s letters to the Galatians, Ephesians, and Colossians. Our interior relationship with Jesus Christ is the great mystery revealed to each of us. Guyon writes at the end of her Commentary on Ephesians, “Paul wrote this epistle that God gave him in prison, so that through all the centuries we would be instructed by it . . . The person, who has faith and love, also has peace. Paul desires that grace be unto all who have an undying love for Jesus Christ. This grace of graces and the source of all graces is pure love: without it all the other graces are not graces. God gives purity and he gives us pure love.”14

These commentaries on Galatians, Ephesians, and Colossians describe Jeanne Guyon’s Christian worldview. Even in the midst of extreme suffering, she enjoyed the presence of Christ and invites all to this rich and fulfilling life.

The Rev. Nancy Carol James, PhD

January 1, 2017

7. James, Pure Love, 27.

8. Guyon, Commentaries, 70.

9. Guyon, Complete Madame Guyon, 8.

10. James, Pure Love, 18.

11. Ibid.

12. Guyon, Commentaries, 79–80.

13 Ibid., 81–82.

14. Ibid., 135.