GUYON, JEANNE-MARIE. - French Quietist, b. at Montargis on 13 April 1648, d. at Blois on 9 June 1717. Widowed in 1679, she gave herself to a life of charity, though directed in a disordered and fanciful manner. Her unstable psychology was definitively oriented toward Quietist theory by the Barnabite Father François La Combe, who was her spiritual director from 1681 to 1688.
La Combe's Quietism was Molinosist in inspiration (he was in Rome in the years 1673-74), but in Mme Guyon the sensualist excesses of Molinos were not accepted; rather, the themes of the pure love of God were developed and stylistically refined: the annihilation of self and the drowning in God are intensely reaffirmed by Guyon, 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 Guyon'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 Guyon had followed La Combe, a reader of cases of conscience in the diocese of Vercelli and confessor of the Quietist bishop Vittorio Agostino Ripa. Molinosist and Italian Quietism thus passed, through the intermediary of Guyon, into the religious thought of Fénelon, who was a strenuous defender of the person and the theory of Guyon, whom he came to know only in 1689, that is, after her 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; moreover Fénelon did not go to certain excesses: he remained opposed to suppressing virtuous acts within oneself and affirmed the necessity, in "quiet," of opposing evil.
Of extraordinary importance, much broader than one would suppose at first glance, was the mystical-literary fortune of Guyon. Read, indeed plundered, in the 18th and 19th centuries, her work — especially in that not feeling humiliated by sin, in recognizing an innate goodness in man, in conceiving a divinity without hells and paradises — could lead directly into Masonic humanitarianism and then into Romantic mysticism.