I realised when reading Jeanne Guyon that she claimed to have entered a state of perfection, even though I do not recall her using that term. She spoke of having no inclination or the least motion to sin within, and that after forty years of struggle she finally rested in that state for the last decades of her life. That is she never sinned from then on.
Of course many of the Catholic mystics, if not all, believed in the possibility of perfection even if no one believes in it today and we have bibles rewritten to carefully erase the word 'perfection' from many verses and replace it with 'completeness' or similar - under the fiction that this is justified in the Greek - which it isn't.
In fact I'd say modern Christianity is a new invention as I'm sure nobody from a few hundred years ago would recognise it as their religion, there have been so many changes. I thought that Jeanne Guyon was sent by God at a critical period to give to the Catholics an example of the spirituality He wanted after the Reformation, and that this deep and pure love to God was more or less rejected in the Counter - Reformation in favour of religious formalism.
As you are in the USA where some Evangelicals and others have pre packaged Christianity like Coca Cola and sell it over TV; representing I think the combination of Protestantism and Capitalism; I was wondering what resistance do you get to a spirituality that takes decades to grow and is not instant like instant coffee?
I think you are right about the difficulty about presenting the difficulties of Guyon's spirituality which does not come quickly.
ReplyDeleteThank you, Andrew, for writing.