The Mystics

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The Recovery
of the Experience of the Inner Life

During this period, the Lord also recovered the experience of the inner life with the mystics, who reacted against the deadness of the reformed church. Regarding this group, Brother Nee says in What are We?,

At the same time there was a new discovery within the Catholic Church. A group of spiritual people were raised up by the Lord. The most spiritual one among them was Miguel de Molinos, who was born in 1640 and died in 1697. He wrote a book called Spiritual Guide which taught men the way to deny themselves and die with the Lord. This book affected many people at that time. One of his contemporaries was Madame Guyon. She was born in 1648 and died in 1717. She was even more knowledgeable in the matters of the union with God’s will and the denial of the self. Her autobiography is a very good spiritual book.

In addition there was Father Fenelon who was a bishop at that time. He was very willing to suffer for the Lord, and he worked together with Madame Guyon. Through these men and women, God released many spiritual messages. At that time men and women with the deepest experience of spiritual life were found in the Catholic Church. Protestantism was only paying attention to the doctrine of justification by faith. (Collected Works of Watchman Nee, vol. 11, pp. 847-848)

Portrait of Madame Guyon | SourceMadame Guyon. Illustration in: Elbert Hubbard, Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 13, Memorial Edition, New York, 1916. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg, Release date, November 12, 2007. Accessed September 11, 2017, from www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23458. License: this eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org.

Portrait of Father Fenelon | SourceFather Fenelon. Illustration from: Elbert Hubbard, Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 13, Memorial Edition, New York, 1916. Urbana, Illinois: Project Gutenberg, Release date, November 12, 2007. Accessed September 11, 2017, from www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/23458. License: this eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org.

Brother Nee also mentioned that around the same time, Gottfried Arnold (1666-1714), a Lutheran theologian in Germany, “wrote many books concerning questions of the church. He considered that the church at that time had deviated from the truth and that it must return to the proper ground as revealed in the New Testament before it could be built up” (Collected Works of Watchman Nee, vol. 11, p. 848).

 

Brother Nee saw that there were “two flows. One came from believers like Molinos, Madame Guyon, and Fenelon. The other flow came from men represented by Arnold…Through [Madame Guyon’s] writings, one can see that she was indeed a very spiritual person. Concerning Arnold, he recovered mostly the outward matters. He proposed that Christians return to the scriptural ground of the New Testament. These two flows eventually merged into one” (Collected Works of Watchman Nee, vol. 11, p. 848).