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In this compelling study of two seventeenth-century female mystics, Bo Karen Lee examines the writings of Anna Maria van Schurman and Madame Jeanne Guyon, who, despite different religious formations, came to similar conclusions about the experience of God in contemplative prayer. Van Schurman was born into a Dutch Calvinist family and became a superb scriptural commentator before undergoing a dramatic religious conversion and joining the Labadist community, a Pietistic movement. Guyon was a French layperson whose thought would be identified with Quietism—a spiritual path that was looked upon with suspicion both by the French Catholic Church and by Rome.
Lee analyzes and compares the themes of self-denial and self-annihilation in the writings of these two mystics. In van Schurman's case, the focus is on the distinction between scholastic knowledge of God and the intima notitia Dei accessible only by radical self-denial. In Guyon's case, it is on the union with God that is accessible only through a painful self-annihilation. For both authors, Lee demonstrates that the desire for enjoyment of God plays an important role as the engine of the soul's progress away from self-centeredness. The appendices offer facing Latin and English translations of two letters by van Schurman and a selection from her Eukleria.
“Indeed, there is much to inspire and challenge contemporary Christians in the remarkable lives and writings of these two women. . . . [Lee’s] lucid, elegant, and insightful readings of Schurman and Guyon, along with the valuable excerpts of van Schurman’s writing translated in three appendices to the book, will prompt a deeper appreciation of their work.” —Journal of Religion
Bo Karen Lee is associate professor of spirituality and historical theology at Princeton Theological Seminary.
Acknowledgments
Preface
1. Reclaiming the Enjoyment of God: Desiderium and Sacrifice
2. “I Wish to be Nothing”: Self-Denial in Anna Maria van Schurman’s Eukleria
3. The Impossibility and the Delights of Self-Denial in van Schurman’s Theology
4. “Oh, Happy Dying”: Self-Annihilation in Madame Jeanne Guyon’s Commentaire au Cantique des cantiques de Salomon
5. The Impossiblity and the Delights of Self-Annihilation in Guyon’s Theology
6. The Challenges and Promise of Retrieval
Appendix A: Letter 2 from Anna Maria van Schurman to Johann Jakob Schütz, Altonae, 12/22 August 1674
Appendix B: Letter 4 from Anna Maria van Schurman to Johann Jakob Schütz, Altonae, 22 December 1674
Appendix C: Eukleria, by Anna Maria van Schurman, Chapter 9, Sections XIX–XXIV
Notes
Bibliography
Index