Sacrifice and Delight in the Mystical Theologies of Anna Maria van Schurman and Madame Jeanne Guyon by Bo Karen Lee (review)

“Self-denial can ruin a person,” writes Bo Karen Lee at the start of Sacrifice and Delight, her illuminating study of the theologies of seventeenth-century mystics Jeanne Guyon and Anna Maria van Schurman. And yet, Lee wonders, how is it that self-abnegation played such an important role in the religious thinking of two such undeniably powerful women?

Madame Jeanne Guyon is a figure whose reputation has, in the past twenty years or so, recovered a great deal from both the lows to which it had fallen during her own lifetime (marked by imprisonment and disgrace) as well as subsequent critical disregard. At the height of her influence, Guyon had been in the orbit of Madame de Maintenon, the second (and “secret”) wife of Louis XIV. When the coterie of duchesses who had come to admire Guyon’s teaching arranged for her to meet the up-and-coming François de Fénelon, a spiritual match was made. Fénelon was profoundly influenced by the pious widow; she became, in effect, his spiritual director, and he would be her champion in the course of the so-called Quietist controversy. This episode in French religious history centered on a pitched battle between two bishops, Fénelon and Bossuet, over some fairly subtle theological points—the limits of self-denial among them. But Bossuet made it personal, as we would say, winning the argument by condemning Guyon’s character along with her theology. Seven years in the Bastille did not dampen Guyon’s ardor for teaching, and, as Lee notes, she emerged to become influential in Protestant circles (11).

While Guyon’s life and thought have received recent critical attention, Anna Maria van Schurman remains practically unknown, her theology “inaccessible to those who have no working knowledge of Latin, German and Dutch” (7). Lee’s sensitive reading, along with a 40-page Appendix of translated letters and fragments, should do much to inaugurate a resurgence of interest in van Schurman’s work, especially, as Lee notes, as van Schurman was considered in her lifetime the “‘brightest star’ among the educated women of Europe” (7). A prodigy, the young Anna Maria was the first woman to be admitted to the University of Utrecht; she “exercised an uncanny command of Hebrew, Greek, Arabic, Aramaic, and Syriac”; and, as Lee sums up “to ‘have been in Utrecht without having seen Mademoiselle de Schurman was like having been to Paris without having seen the king’” (8).

Nevertheless, like Guyon, van Schurman fell from favor upon embracing a spirituality that placed self-denial before any other spiritual effort: rather than an advanced mystical attainment appropriate only for an exceptional few, denial of self, in van Schurman’s understanding, was the very basis for Christian life.

Lee begins by considering van Schurman’s Eukleria—a spiritual autobiography published in 1673 when the “star of Utrecht” had become a disciple of Jean Labadie and thus, by the lights of society, fallen into a kind of madness. Lee’s reading of the contrast between this work and a defense of women’s education (written some thirty years earlier) is intriguing; she shows us how van Schurman’s repudiation of her own earlier thinking figures in her new understanding, how she determines that scientia, “a lower form of knowledge” is not enough to catalyze the radical overthrow of self (34). In the following chapter, Lee deftly analyzes portions of van Schurman’s letters to the German Pietist Johann Jakob Schütz in which the theologian describes her own difficulties in trying to overcome the self, as a matter of spiritual practice—but then does relate an experience of mystical union. In Lee’s reading, self-denial becomes, for van Schurman, not so much an act of violence toward the self as a kind of surrender to divine grace, an...