GUYON, JEANNE-MARIE. - French Quietist, b. at Montargis on 13 Apr. 1648, d. at Blois on 9 June 1717. Widowed in 1679, she devoted herself to a life of charity, though in a disordered and fanciful manner. Her unstable psychology was definitively oriented toward Quietist theory by the Barnabite Fr. François La Combe, who was her spiritual director from 1681 to 1688.
La Combe’s Quietism was inspired by Molinism (he had been in Rome in 1673–74), but in Mme Guyon the sensualistic excesses of Molinos were not accepted; instead, the motifs of pure love of God—self-annihilation, immersion in God—were developed and stylistically refined. She strongly reaffirmed the theory of the non-obligation of explicit acts of charity and indifference to salvation in the contemplative stage.
Among her most important writings are the *Moyen court et très facile pour l'oraison* (Grenoble 1685) and the *Explication de l'Apocalypse*, published in 1686 at Vercelli, where Guyon had followed La Combe as a casuist in the diocese of Vercelli and confessor to the Quietist bishop Vittorio Agostino Ripa. Thus, through Guyon’s mediation, Molinist and Italian Quietism passed into the religious thought of Fénelon, who became a staunch defender of Guyon’s person and theory. Fénelon knew her only in 1689, 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 Guyon who guided him toward a conscious Quietist theory. Fénelon, however, did not go to certain extremes: he remained opposed to repressing virtuous acts within himself and affirmed the necessity, in “quiet,” of opposing evil.
Of extraordinary importance—far greater than might at first appear—was Guyon’s mystical-literary influence. Read, indeed plundered, in the 18th and 19th centuries, her work—especially in its refusal to be humbled by sin, its recognition of an innate goodness in man, and its conception of a divinity without hells or heavens—passed directly into Masonic humanitarianism and then into Romantic mysticism.