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Lee, Bo Karen. Sacrifice and Delight in the Mystical Theologies of Anna Maria van Schurman and Madame Jeanne Guyon . Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014. xiv+250 pp. $29.00 (paper).

2017; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 97; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1086/689020

1549-6538

Robert Glenn Davis,

Reformation and Early Modern Christianity

Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewsLee, Bo Karen. Sacrifice and Delight in the Mystical Theologies of Anna Maria van Schurman and Madame Jeanne Guyon. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014. xiv+250 pp. $29.00 (paper).Robert Glenn DavisRobert Glenn DavisFordham University. Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThis book offers a complex appraisal of the theological legacies of two significant and underappreciated seventeenth-century Christian theologians, Anna Maria van Schurman and Jeanne Guyon. Bo Karen Lee argues that both authors, countering the scholastic tendencies of their day, sought to reorient spiritual life around the Augustinian fruitio Deo, or enjoyment of God, and that, paradoxically, they sought this reorientation by means of a thoroughgoing self-denial. The book’s close, sensitive readings make its case convincingly. At the same time, this book also attempts an evaluation of that theology, wherein Lee foregrounds her own affective responses to van Schurman and Guyon and highlights the ethical dangers of self-denial.The avowed discomfort with which Lee approaches her subject can have the effect of making her theological appraisals of van Schurman and, especially, Guyon read like the proceedings of a heresy trial. Van Schurman, for example, is faulted for failing to “distinguish healthy from unhealthy self-love” as Thomas Aquinas did (44). Similarly, Guyon “may have made the error of devaluing the human will” (107). This spirit of reproof is most evident, ironically, in some of Lee’s most valuable insights. At the heart of Guyon’s “error” is the conviction that mystical annihilation is a “radical hospitality toward God” (108). In Guyon’s commentary on the Song of Songs, the bride is emptied completely of her created will, the “strange result” of which is that, in Lee’s striking and compelling formulation, “the bride emerges from these pages as arguably more divine than Christ himself” (103). That is, the Chalcedonian formula affirms Christ’s two natures, human and divine, whereas the perfected bride becomes only divine; moreover, the gospels depict Jesus’s human will struggling at Gethsemane to conform itself to God’s will, a struggle that Guyon’s bride, by contrast, has put behind her. Lee's fascinating interpretation here highlights the endless diversity of ways that mystical texts and practices have conceived of the lover’s relationship to Christ. But Lee mostly channels this insight into an aspersion on Guyon’s orthodoxy, charging her with an Apollinarian christology (104).Lee is right to acknowledge that van Schurman and Guyon were controversial, to say the least, in their own times, and the final chapter nicely illuminates the historical contexts and receptions of the two theologians’ work. But there is a slippage between the historical scandals van Schurman and Guyon caused and the scandal that their ideas represent in the author’s own appraisal. The book frequently assumes that the line between healthy and pathological self-denial is self-evident. Of van Schurman, Lee writes that “if one brackets her excesses, one uncovers enduring truths in her work” (115), and of Guyon that “one can easily concede that [her] language is erratic and extreme” (79). Consequently, the language of excess and extremity in van Schurman and Guyon is censured, excused, and translated away here more than it is analyzed for the rhetorical and theological work it performs.Yet, if the cautious tenor of the book works to contain and discipline its subjects, it also speaks to the seriousness with which the author approaches them. The effusive language of self-annihilation, death, and erotic union in Christian mystical texts such as Guyon’s commentary on the Song of Songs can have an intoxicating effect even on the scholarly reader, but Lee is a sober guide, always attempting to illuminate and evaluate the experience that the words elicit and the ethical possibilities those experiences enable or foreclose. Indeed, no one could argue with the disarmingly frank admission that opens the book: “self-denial can ruin a person” (xiii). Lee’s wariness toward her subjects is grounded in an awareness of the physical and emotional abuse that theological injunctions to self-sacrifice have frequently authorized. In response to this abuse, Lee is keen to stress that the “self” that is sacrificed in the deepening stages of intimacy with God is returned intact, only purged of its inordinate self-regard. Van Schurman, Lee writes, “argues that even while self-love is the fundamental problem, one must, in the end, return to the love of self—yet with a purified love” (43). Lee connects this to the twelfth-century Cistercian Bernard of Clairvaux, but for Bernard, purified love can be called love of self only in the sense that the self has already been virtually annihilated and dissolved into God. Similarly, Lee deftly evokes Guyon’s macabre take on the bridal mysticism of the Song of Songs but assures the reader that new life follows surely on the heels of death. There is plenty of warrant for emphasizing this spiritual economy in Guyon’s text, and in this way, Guyon’s mystical theology stands in contrast to women religious writers of earlier periods such as Hadewijch of Brabant, Marguerite Porete, and Julian of Norwich, who regarded the desire for resurrection and bliss as a sign of an inferior and selfish devotion. In many medieval mystical texts such as these, the extreme language of self-annihilation emerges paradoxically as a mode of radical self-possession, a declaration of independence from the clerically regulated penitential economy.In comparison, it is not clear that the carefully circumscribed version of van Schurman’s and Guyon’s theologies of sacrifice that Lee finally endorses can avoid their potential for violence, insofar as they hold out all the more clearly the promise of pleasure at the price of pain. Ultimately, Lee seems to recognize this challenge and so concludes by proposing only a limited and generalized retrieval of their critiques of selfish desire, “these core and indispensable themes” (14), to “a church that has resigned itself to a convenient, self-centered faith” (107). Indeed, there is much to inspire and challenge contemporary Christians in the remarkable lives and writings of these two seventeenth-century women. In spite of the book’s ambivalence, its lucid, elegant, and insightful readings of van 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. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Religion Volume 97, Number 1January 2017 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/689020 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.