Madame Guyon: An Autobiography

Plot

"In addition to achieving a profound intimacy with God, her life fulfilled an apostolic vocation that provoked a showdown between the French King (Louis XIV) and the Papacy, between Catholic orthodoxy and its own mystical traditions, between the Church and the protestant mystical movements that were born in that era. She did all this quite accidentally, in profound subjection to her sense of the will of God in her. By her accidental bumbling ... she exposed the banality and hypocrisy of religion in her time and the hollowness of the French Court, while at the same time demonstrating what it might mean to live one's life in total accord with God, in a state of what she called "l'amour pur"--A love of God untainted by any hope or expectation of what we may want God to do for us. The historical scope and significance of Madame Guyon's life is not apparent in her Autobiography. The reader will need to wade into the formidable and acerbic body of scholarly commentary to go further. But the publishers ... correctly sense that the freshness and sincerity of Madame Guyon's story and worldview, told in her own words, needs little in the way of historical context. This book will challenge you to surrender to the divine inside of you ..."--Amazon.com.