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207 o Epilogue in speaking of the readers of the works of Madame Guyon and of Fénelon, i have featured both individuals and the broad faith communities that set the boundaries of their interpretative practices. However, many of these individuals saw themselves as part of one vast community of readers through the centuries because all were part of a continuum through time of those who had embarked on the interior way and had come to experience union with God or perfect love. The striking quality of these persons of “eminent piety” was their dynamism—their lively faith, their sense of purpose and calling, their awareness of being a part of a religious movement. Whether they were the Quietists themselves in the later seventeenth century, eighteenth-century Pietists, Quakers, or Methodists, or nineteenth-century perfectionists, they organized themselves into small groups or associations in order to facilitate renewal, spread the news that a spirituality of the heart was available to all, reach out to one another, and educate one another. The article “Points in Holiness Theology” (1903) cited in chapter 1 takes on a richness of texture if examined in retrospect from the viewpoint of an entire tradition of piety. For the author, “holiness theology” was certain because of the proof of experience: “We know because of testing over centuries every promise.” The dynamism of a religious movement was evident in the organic imagery used by the writer. Holiness theology was “a growth that reach[ed] across centuries” and developed from “studies of the holiest men and women this world has ever seen.” The 208 Experimental Theology in America Baconian proof of experience was coupled with a high view of the authority of the Bible “as understood by plain people [ . . . ] filled and guided by the Holy spirit, [ . . . ] the author of the book.” And the tradition was “non-sectarian,” including Bernard of Clairvaux, Thomas à Kempis, Madame Guyon, and Fénelon, as well as Wesley, Fletcher, and Asbury.1 indeed, reading was a part of the road to piety, a means by which spirituality became accessible to the common people. Madame Guyon’s claim in her Short and Easy Method of Prayer that all, yes, all were called to inner prayer was an attempt to open to the laity the way to contemplative prayer and interior spirituality. she was sensitive to those who could not read in giving her instructions for the short route to God, attainable apart from a religious vocation and outside a convent or monastery. yet, her handbook on prayer was read and passed around in both manuscript and print form in the seventeenth century; in small Quietist circles, it was also transmitted orally, along with the teaching of others who were “democratizing” spirituality. in the movements promoting renewal and inner spirituality that followed, efforts to promote the reading of devotional literature went hand in hand with the reading of the Bible and of instructional works such as Plutarch’s Lives and Fénelon’s Telemachus. Protestants drew upon Catholic devotional methods and writers, adapting meditation and contemplation to their own needs, so that an informal canon of devotional literature emerged. Thomas à Kempis was the most prominent author in this shared devotional tradition , but Jeanne Guyon and François de Fénelon were the most dramatic examples of Protestant claims to Catholic authors because of their place within the politics of religious persecution under louis Xiv. in the late twentieth century, American readers were still turning to the spiritual writings of Madame Guyon and Fénelon, but a look at how their works were disseminated says much about the devotional tradition. Protestant Evangelicalism of the post-World War ii era was succeeded by the dynamism of the charismatic renewal movement that crossed traditional church boundaries.2 Personal piety, new forms of community and of worship, and an emphasis on the laity were part of this renewal. Even as the older holiness and Pentecostal associations that emerged from nineteenth-century revivalism became institutionalized as churches, the spirituality practiced by various intentional ecumenical communities broadened the conception of the Christian spiritual tradition. “The very term ‘spirituality’ [came] to reflect both the earlier roman Catholic focus on prayer and the interior life with God, and an emerging, more comprehensive sense of the whole of life lived in the concrete world in relation to God and neighbor.”3 Thus, seed sowers, cited previously, produced modernized and simplified translations of many of the works of Madame Guyon that had [18.188.61.223] Project...

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