Balaam's she-ass speaks: Madame Jeanne Guyon and her 'Justifications' (Jeanne Marie Bouvier de La Motte Guyon, France)

In a brief comment in her autobiography the French mystic Madame Jeanne Guyon (1648–1717) compared herself to Balaam's she-ass, whose story unfolds in Numbers 22. There God speaks through the mouth of the lowly she-ass to instruct her master Balaam. This story raises two questions: “who can speak?” and “how does the person in a subordinate cultural position speak?” Guyon assumes that if God can speak through a she-ass, He can speak through her. She writes forty-one texts to prove her point that even a woman can speak if God empowers her to do so.; How she speaks is also revealing, especially in her Justifications , the mammoth text she wrote to defend herself from the heresy of Quietism. In her Justifications Guyon utilizes a double-voiced discourse by combining the voices of submission and assertion in an unusual manner: she assertively speaks from the submissive place of footnotes. She, thereby, generates a unique application of the double-voiced discourse; she also discloses the gender and authority issues she confronted. In fact, Guyon used the double-voiced discourse to great effect in her Justifications . In this text she transformed the double-voiced discourse from its usual negative place in gender studies and raised it to new and positive heights. In Guyon's hand this technique of narrative voice becomes a model for combining the opposite voices of submission and assertion and forming them into a discourse of moderation.