Jeanne Guyon's Experiencing the Depths of Jesus Christ (originally Moyen court et très facile de faire oraison, 1685) is one of the most influential - and most controversial - guides to contemplative prayer in Christian history. Written during the period before Guyon's imprisonment by royal order, and completed partly within the walls of the Bastille where she would spend years for her mystical teaching, the book represents the distilled experience of a woman who, in the midst of an unhappy marriage, severe illness, and social ostracism, found a path to union with God through what she called 'prayer of simplicity' or 'pure love.'
Guyon's method begins with scripture. She teaches a practice she calls 'beholding' - reading a passage slowly, not to extract information but to allow the words to saturate the soul. The reader takes a short passage, reads it attentively, pauses, and waits in stillness for the living reality behind the words to communicate itself directly. This approach draws on Psalm 46:10 - 'Be still, and know that I am God' - and on Song of Solomon 1:4's image of being drawn into the inner chambers of the Beloved, which Guyon reads as the soul's movement into deeper levels of union with Christ.
The theological center of the book is John 4:14 - 'The water that I will give him will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.' Guyon interprets Christ as a living spring within the soul that will, if the soul ceases to agitate the waters with its own striving and thought, rise naturally to fill the consciousness. This 'prayer of the heart' requires no particular intellectual ability, no theological education, no lengthy preparation: it is available to the illiterate as readily as to the scholar. This radical democratization of contemplative prayer was both the source of the book's enormous appeal and the ground of its condemnation by authorities who saw it as undermining the mediated role of clergy and institutional sacraments.
Romans 8:26 - 'The Spirit himself intercedes for us with groanings too deep for words' - provides Guyon's warrant for the practice of wordless prayer. The deeper stages of the method involve relinquishing even formed prayers and simply resting in God's presence, allowing the Spirit to pray within rather than composing prayers oneself. This is not vacancy or laziness, Guyon insists, but the most active possible state - the activity of pure receptivity.
The book circulated widely despite being officially condemned. Archbishop Fénelon, who became Guyon's spiritual director and ardent defender, transmitted her influence to the French Catholic establishment. More unexpectedly, the book crossed confessional lines with remarkable ease. John Wesley read it and recommended it to his Methodist societies, seeing in its emphasis on entire consecration a parallel to his own doctrine of Christian perfection. The Chinese Christian mystic Watchman Nee based his teaching on the tripartite nature of human beings - body, soul, spirit - partly on Guyon's framework, and his widely read book The Normal Christian Life is in many ways her heir. The Quaker tradition found in her teaching a validation of silent waiting as the heart of worship.
Guyon suffered enormously for her teaching. Imprisoned multiple times, separated from her children, stripped of property, she maintained through it all the inner peace she described in her book, writing some of her most serene poetry from prison cells. Her autobiography alongside this shorter guide forms a compelling witness: the method she describes was tested not in comfort but in extremity.
The book remains in print in numerous translations and continues to be used in contemplative circles across Protestant, Catholic, and charismatic traditions. Its historical importance lies not only in the spiritual practice it teaches but in the ecumenical bridges it inadvertently constructed - a French Catholic woman's mystical theology forming one of the most traveled roads between Roman Catholic contemplative tradition and Protestant evangelical spirituality.
Guyon's influence on the broader Protestant tradition came primarily through the mediation of Fenelon, her spiritual director and defender, and through William Law, who drew on her writing in A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life. John Wesley included excerpts from her work in his Christian Library, and through Wesley, Guyon's understanding of passive prayer and abandonment to God filtered into the Methodist and Holiness movements. The twentieth-century charismatic renewal also drew on her language of total surrender, reading her account of divine love as a precedent for their own experiential spirituality.
The irony of Guyon's legacy is that a woman imprisoned for her theology became one of the most widely read spiritual writers in the Western tradition. Her imprisonment did not silence her but amplified her voice: the spectacle of a mystic confined for the crime of teaching prayer gave her writings an authority that purely academic theology rarely achieves. She is read today not as a curiosity or a historical victim but as a genuine guide to the interior life, whose counsel on surrender, perseverance, and the stripping away of spiritual consolation remains as practical as it was when she wrote it in the shadow of the Bastille.