GUYON, JEANNE-MARIE. – French Quietist, born at Montargis on 13 April 1648, died at Blois on 9 June 1717. Widowed in 1679, she devoted herself to a life of charity, though directed in a disordered and fanciful manner. Her changeable psychology was definitively oriented toward Quietist theory by the Barnabite Father Francesco La Combe, who was her spiritual director from 1681 to 1688.
La Combe’s Quietism was of Molinist inspiration (he was in Rome in the years 1673–74), but in Mme G. Molinos’s sensualist excesses were not accepted; rather, the motifs of the pure love of God were developed and stylistically refined: self-annihilation and immersion in God were intensely reaffirmed by G., together with the related theory of the non-obligatory nature of explicit acts of charity and of indifference to salvation in the contemplative state.
Among G.’s most important writings are the Moyen court et très facile pour l'oraison (Grenoble 1685) and the Explicitation de l'Apocalypse, published in 1686 at Vercelli, where G. had followed La Combe, a lecturer in cases of conscience in the bishopric of Vercelli and confessor to the Quietist bishop Vittorio Agostino Ripa. Molinist and Italian Quietism thus passed, through G., into the religious thought of Fénelon, who was a staunch defender of G.’s person and theory, whom he came to know only in 1689, that is, after his Italian experiences (Correspondance de Fénelon, IX, Paris 1828, p. 186); naturally, a pre-Quietism already existed in Fénelon (cf. F. Fénelon, Pages nouvelles pour servir à l'étude des origines du quiétisme avant 1694, published by M. Langlois, ibid. 1934), but it was G. who guided him toward a conscious Quietist theory. Fénelon, however, did not reach certain extremes: he remained opposed to repressing virtuous acts within oneself and affirmed the necessity, in «quiete», of resisting evil.
Of extraordinary importance, and much more extensive than one would suppose at first sight, was G.’s mystical-literary influence. Read, indeed plundered, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, her work—especially in its refusal to feel humiliated by sin, its recognition of an innate goodness in man, and its conception of a divinity without hells and paradises—passed directly into Masonic humanitarianism and then into Romantic mysticism.