Quietism

The annihilation of the powers: no longer acting

The fundamental note of the system lies in its first condemned proposition: man must annihilate his powers, and that is the interior way^[6]. The very desire to act offends God; one must abandon oneself entirely to him, then remain as a lifeless body^[7]:

"One must abandon oneself entirely to God, and thereafter remain as a lifeless body." — Condemned proposition no. 2 of Molinos^[8]

By doing nothing, the soul annihilates itself, returns to its source which is the essence of God, is transformed in it and deified there: God then dwells in it^[9]. The whole spiritual life comes down to this non-acting: exterior works are not necessary for sanctification, and voluntary mortifications must be rejected as a painful and useless burden^[10].

Neither fear nor desire: indifference erected into perfection

In this interior way, the soul must think neither of reward nor of punishment, neither of heaven nor of hell, neither of death nor of eternity; it concerns itself neither with its state, nor its faults, nor its progress in virtue^[11]. He who has given himself to God must ask him for nothing nor thank him, take no account of temptations nor oppose them with active resistance^[12]:

"And if nature be stirred, one must let its stirring pass, because it is nature." — Condemned proposition no. 15 of Molinos^[13]

Prayer without acts and contempt for the means

In prayer, no image, no discursive thought: one must remain in an "obscure faith", in rest, forgetting every distinct thought of the divine attributes^[14]. Thoughts that arise during prayer, even impure ones or ones contrary to faith, do not harm prayer if they are endured with indifference, neither encouraged nor driven away: on the contrary they heighten its perfection^[15]. No preparation is required before Communion, no thanksgiving after, except to remain in the habitual state of passive resignation; one must arouse in oneself no feeling of devotion, nor produce acts of love toward the Virgin, the saints or the humanity of Christ, because these are sensible objects and the love borne them is sensible too^[16].

The following table groups the sixty-eight propositions condemned by Coelestis Pastor into eight families, with their numbers: it is the exact photograph of the error^[17].

The common point of these eight families is simple: everything the Church proposes as a means — vocal prayer, sacraments, direction, obedience, moral effort — becomes an obstacle as soon as the soul believes itself arrived at the "interior way"^[18].

The Alumbrados, illuminists condemned as early as the 16th century

The Spain of the Golden Age already knew "illuminists", the Alumbrados, who professed an absorption in God dispensing from exterior worship, the sacraments and prayer, obedience being owed to no law since their will was supposedly identical with God's^[19]. Condemned by the Spanish Inquisition, they troubled the peninsula in the 16th and 17th centuries and formed the soil in which Molinos would be born^[20]. It is no accident that Quietism was born in Spain: it is there that the frontier between high contemplation and unchecked illumination was disputed earliest.

Juan Falconi de Bustamante (1596-1638), the Mercedarian forerunner

The doctrinal link between the Alumbrados and Molinos bears a name: Juan Falconi de Bustamante (1596-1638), a religious of the Order of Mercy, who died at Madrid in the odour of spiritual learning but whose writings, published after his death, spread a doctrine of passive contemplation that directly prepared the Guida^[21]. Historians of spirituality see in him the Spanish link by which the Molinosism to come rooted itself in a local tradition already suspect^[22].

François Malaval (1627-1719) and the Easy Practice

In France, it is a blind layman of Marseilles, François Malaval (1627-1719), who popularized "easy" contemplation with his Easy Practice for Raising the Soul to Contemplation, published in 1670^[23]. The work met with immense success and translations, but after the condemnation of Molinos, the Italian translation was placed on the Index in 1688; Malaval himself submitted publicly through letters to the pope, to Louis XIV and to the bishops of France^[24]. Bossuet himself would attack him in the 1690s, in the midst of the struggle against Mme Guyon and Fenelon, treating him as a layman without theology in his Instruction on the States of Prayer of 1697^[25]. Modern scholarship generally distinguishes his theology from the doctrines condemned under the name of Quietism and places him back in the great Catholic apophatic tradition^[26] — which shows that the frontier sometimes passed inside the suspect books themselves, and that the Church struck texts without blindly striking men.

From Muniesa to Rome: the rise of a sought-after director

Miguel de Molinos was born near Muniesa, in Aragon, and the registers record him baptized on 29 June 1628^[27]. Trained by the Jesuits at Valencia, ordained priest in 1652, doctor soon after, confessor to nuns, he was sent to Rome at the end of 1663 as postulator for the cause of beatification of the venerable Francisco Jerónimo Simón^[28]. He would never leave the Eternal City again.

At Rome, Molinos directed the School of Christ, became the most sought-after spiritual director of the Roman aristocracy, corresponded with Princess Borghese, frequented Queen Christina of Sweden in exile and counted among his admirers Cardinal Benedetto Odescalchi — who became in 1676 Pope Innocent XI^[29]. When his Guida spirituale (Spiritual Guide) appeared in 1675, its success was fulminating: the book was translated into several languages, covered with approbations, and passed for the definitive manual of contemplation^[30].

Segneri versus Molinos: the reversal of 1681

The Jesuit Paolo Segneri (1624-1697), the great preacher of the popular missions, was the first to attack the Quietist maxims, without always naming their authors^[31]. The riposte was scathing: in 1681, the Holy Office judged the Guida perfectly orthodox, censured Segneri and put his book on the Index — that of his ally Bellhuomo followed the same path^[32]. Molinos seemed untouchable: protected by cardinals, admired to the very summit of the Church, he triumphed over his accusers.

But the pressure mounted. The Jesuits, beaten at Rome, acted upon Louis XIV through his confessor, Fr de La Chaize; the French ambassador at Rome, who was a cardinal, made official representations^[33]. Yesterday's protector, Innocent XI, dropped Molinos: on 18 July 1685, the Aragonese priest was arrested by the pontifical guards and shut in Castel Sant'Angelo; in November, the Holy Office forbade the Guida^[34].

The trial, the abjuration, the condemnation

In the spring of 1687, Molinos appeared before the tribunal of the Holy Office: two hundred and sixty-three propositions drawn from his works and from depositions lay on the table; at first resolved to defend himself, he changed his attitude in May, confessed his errors of conduct and doctrine and gave up pleading^[35]. In July, the tribunal isolated sixty-eight propositions with their censures; on 23 August, the file was read to the cardinal inquisitors; on 2 September, the sentence fell: life imprisonment^[36]. On 3 September 1687, Molinos made public profession of his errors in the Dominican church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva^[37]. On 20 November, Innocent XI ratified the condemnation by the constitution Coelestis Pastor, which struck the sixty-eight propositions^[38]. Molinos died in prison in 1696, nine years after his fall^[39].

Depositions also called his personal conduct into question, and the rumour ran through Rome that he had been convicted of grave disorders besides his doctrinal errors^[40]. What must be retained is twofold: on the one hand, the doctrinal condemnation rests on the sixty-eight propositions, with the documents in hand; on the other, the fall of an idolized director recalls that the Church judges doctrines on texts, without ever turning a trial into a spectacle.

Cardinal Petrucci (1636-1701): contagion up to the Sacred College

The error had won ground to the very summits: Pier Matteo Petrucci (1636-1701), an Oratorian, bishop of Jesi in 1681 then cardinal on 2 September 1686, had taken up the defence of Molinos against Segneri^[41]. His mystical works were examined in their turn: fifty-four propositions drawn from eight of his writings were censured in 1688^[42]. Petrucci submitted at once, resigned his bishopric in 1696 and was charged by Innocent XII with an apostolic visitation^[43]. His trajectory shows that the crisis did not target an isolated man but a current that had seduced even princes of the Church — and that submission always remained possible.

Fr Lacombe and Joseph Beccarelli: the obscure relays

The Barnabite François Lacombe, Mme Guyon's director, carried her views into French devout circles and was the direct instrument of the Guyonist contagion^[44]. At Milan, Joseph Beccarelli had to retract before the Inquisition of Venice in 1710^[45]. These secondary figures matter: they prove that Quietism was not a confined Roman school, but a network of directors and penitents covering Italy, France and Spain.

A mystical widow at the court of France

Jeanne-Marie Bouvier de la Motte-Guyon was born at Montargis in 1648, married at sixteen in 1664, widowed in 1676 and devoted herself from then on to the interior life under the direction of Fr Lacombe^[46]. A woman of ardent piety and tireless proselytism, she preached a prayer "without method" in the dioceses of the South-East, drawing the thunderbolts of several bishops before going up to Paris^[47].

The Short Method and the Torrents

Her little book, the Short and Very Easy Method of Prayer, published in 1685, teaches how to "turn the heart toward God" without preparation, without book, without effort: every Christian would be admitted to it in a few lessons^[48]. Her Spiritual Torrents, which circulated in manuscript — with copies sometimes altered, which she would partly disavow — describe the successive states of the annihilated soul up to union^[49]. The success was immense in devout salons: the apparent simplicity of the method seduced souls weary of regulated exercises, and that is precisely what worried pastors.

Saint-Cyr: the friendship of Mme de Maintenon

Introduced at Saint-Cyr, the house of education founded by Mme de Maintenon, Mme Guyon won over the morganatic wife of Louis XIV and part of the court^[50]. For a few years, French Quietism had its salon, its protectors and its future: Fenelon, then tutor to the Duke of Burgundy, became her disciple and defender^[51]. But the Archbishop of Paris, Harlay de Champvallon, kept out of the coming examinations, took the lead and condemned Mme Guyon's works as early as 10 October 1694^[52]: the ecclesiastical machine was set in motion.

The commission of three bishops

To examine the incriminated doctrine, a commission met at Issy in 1694-1695: Bossuet, bishop of Meaux, Noailles, bishop of Châlons, and Tronson, superior of Saint-Sulpice — Fenelon, already named to Cambrai, was associated with their work^[53]. The stakes were considerable: to fix, by common agreement, the bounds of disinterested love and passive prayer, and to obtain Mme Guyon's signature.

The thirty-four articles of 10 March 1695

After months of deliberations came the thirty-four articles of Issy, signed on 10 March 1695 by the commissioners and by Fenelon: they defined pure love, holy indifference and the states of prayer in an orthodox sense^[54]. Mme Guyon handed in her signed submission and Bossuet issued her certificates of catholicity, on 15 April and 1 July 1695^[55]. All seemed settled: a nascent heresy had just been reabsorbed by the concerted action of pastors, without clamour or prison.

The rupture: Vincennes, the Bastille, Blois

Mme Guyon, secretly returned to Paris, nevertheless refused to sign the condemnation of her errors drafted by Bossuet, and the rupture became public^[56]. The police arrested her on 24 December 1695: Vincennes first, then a convent at Vaugirard, then the Bastille, where she remained until 21 March 1703 — more than seven years of captivity^[57]. Freed, assigned to residence at Blois, she died there on 9 June 1717, surrounded by a small circle of the faithful who would spread her writings throughout Protestant Europe^[58]. The Issy of concord had produced a prisoner of state: the affair was no longer merely spiritual, it had become an affair of court, party and power.

The Explanation of the Maxims of the Saints (January 1697)

To explain his own reading of the articles of Issy, Fenelon published in January 1697 his Explanation of the Maxims of the Saints on the Interior Life, an arid treatise in forty-five articles which claimed to show that the boldest expressions of Mme Guyon are found in the recognized saints^[59]. A month later, Bossuet published his Instruction on the States of Prayer, a commentary on the thirty-four articles, which he submitted to Fenelon — who refused to sign it, saying his honour forbade him to condemn a woman already condemned: the war of pamphlets was declared^[60]. Louis XIV, who reproached Bossuet for not having warned him that the tutor of his grandsons professed such opinions, took sides: Mme de Maintenon abandoned Fenelon, the king relegated him to Cambrai as early as 1697 and officially withdrew the tutorship from him in January 1699^[61].

Semi-Quietism: pure love without hope

The doctrine of the Maxims, which tradition calls semi-Quietism — suggested by Molinos, less extreme in its principles and less dangerous in its applications^[62] — holds in a few theses. First, there would exist a habitual state of love of God wholly pure and disinterested, without fear of punishment or desire of reward: the soul loves God for himself, seeking therein neither merit, nor perfection, nor happiness — that is the contemplative and unitive life^[63]:

"There is an habitual state of the love of God which is wholly pure and disinterested, without fear of punishment or desire of reward." — Summary of propositions 1 and 2 of the Maxims of the Saints^[64]

Next, in this state of "holy indifference", the soul would have no more voluntary and deliberate desire for itself; it would seek its salvation only as a thing God wills and commands it to will — down to the most famous of the condemned theses, supposed acquiescence in its own damnation if God willed it, with subtle distinctions about the involuntary trouble that would subsist^[65]. It is this extreme point that would make the Roman censors say that Fenelonian pure love, by dint of disinterestedness, ends by contradicting theological hope itself.

Rome seised: the examination and the pressures (1697-1699)

Fenelon, who had submitted his book to the Holy See, himself demanded Rome's judgment; Bossuet, installed at Rome through his nephew, multiplied memoranda and refutations while Louis XIV insisted, in 1698, on a swift condemnation — threatening, failing that, to have the Maxims censured by the theologians of Paris^[66]. The Roman examination lasted nearly two years: commissioners and consultors weighed each article, confronted the Maxims with the articles of Issy that Fenelon had signed, and finally isolated twenty-three propositions^[67].

Cum alias (12 March 1699): the twenty-three propositions

On 12 March 1699, the brief Cum alias of Innocent XII condemned the twenty-three propositions drawn from the Maxims of the Saints^[68]. The following table gives their structure, as the theological tradition has summarized it for three centuries.

The submission of Fenelon: the exemplary archbishop

As soon as he received the brief, Fenelon bowed without reserve: he declared that he laid down his own sentiment, accepted Rome's judgment, published the condemnation himself in his diocese of Cambrai and conformed to it publicly^[69]. Bossuet triumphed in the controversy, but it is the vanquished who grew: the obedience of the Archbishop of Cambrai, which contrasts with the obstinate resistance of the Jansenists of the same period, won the admiration of Catholic Europe^[70]. For the contemporary Jansenist case, which likewise mixes grace, obedience and appeal against Rome, see Jansenism; for the Gallican political soil of these conflicts under Louis XIV, see Gallicanism (15th-19th century).

The prayer of quiet exists: St Teresa described it

The Church never denied that there is a prayer of quiet: St Teresa of Avila describes it as the first degree of supernatural prayer, in which the will finds itself captive to God in a recollection full of sweetness^[71]. But in Teresa, this quiet is a received gift, not a manufactured technique; it coexists with effort, works, obedience and the sacraments, and it is verified by its fruits: humility, charity, true detachment^[72]. Quietism took the vocabulary of Teresian quiet to make of it a universal method and a permanent state: it is this diversion, not contemplation itself, that Rome struck.

"Mary has chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her." — Gospel according to St Luke, 10, 42^[73]

The portion of Mary is not inaction: it is listening. And listening, in the Gospel, always issues in work:

"Not every one who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven." — Gospel according to St Matthew, 7, 21^[74]

Pure love according to St Francis de Sales: loving without ceasing to hope

Long before Fenelon, St Francis de Sales (1567-1622) had explored pure love in his Treatise on the Love of God: to love God for himself, without interest, is the summit of charity^[75]. But in the Savoyard, this summit never abolishes hope: desiring heaven and fearing to lose it remain good acts, and the most disinterested love does not forbid the soul to will its salvation as the good God wills for it^[76]. That is exactly the bound the Maxims crossed: Fenelon wanted a pure love without hope, where tradition held a pure love that crowns hope without destroying it.

St John of the Cross: infused passivity is not acquired laziness

St John of the Cross (1542-1591) also teaches a passivity: in the dark night, God acts in the soul which can no longer meditate or reason^[77]. But this passivity is infused and transitory, granted by God to the soul he purifies; it dispenses neither from works, nor direction, nor the sacraments, and is accompanied by a painful vigilance, not a beatific indifference^[78]. The criterion is clear: the passivity of the saints is suffered (God withdraws the soul's holds), that of the Quietists is decided (the soul refuses to act).

The following table summarizes the discernment, as theologians have formulated it since the Roman condemnations.

"Pray constantly." — St Paul, First Epistle to the Thessalonians, 5, 17^[79]

The Pauline injunction settles the debate by itself: if perfection consisted in no longer producing acts, the Apostle would not command a permanent act^[80].

Why the Church struck so hard

The Roman severity sometimes surprises: two solemn condemnations in twelve years, imprisonments, a humiliated archbishop. But what was at stake was not a nuance of mystical vocabulary: it was confession (the gravest faults concealed in the name of peace), the sacraments (declared useless), obedience (reduced to a facade) and conjugal and religious morals (the assaults of the devil endured without resistance)^[81]. A doctrine that subtracts the "perfect" from all control, while covering disorders under the cloak of passivity, is a machine for abuse: the history of the illuminated sects, from the Beghards to the Alumbrados, had demonstrated it before Molinos, and the Roman file confirmed it^[82]. In striking Quietism, the Church did not humiliate mysticism: she protected it against its counterfeits — as she protects, in the same century, the true doctrine of grace against Jansenism, its exact rigorist opposite.

Pure love after Fenelon: an underground influence

Molinosism did not survive its founder: without a leader, without a school, without an authorized book after 1687, it died out as an organized doctrine^[83]. But the Fenelonian cause met another fortune: the writings of the Archbishop of Cambrai, read with the Roman correctives, nourished for two centuries the spirituality of pure love, and Mme Guyon, translated and re-edited in the Protestant world, paradoxically became a classic of Anglo-Saxon evangelical piety^[84]. The historiography of the 20th century, notably the school of Henri Bremond and his Literary History of Religious Feeling, reopened the case with sympathy for the vanquished — without ever calling the well-foundedness of the Roman censures into question^[85].

The Catholic criterion for today

Quietism will not return under its name: no school claims Molinos. But its temptations return under other names, and the Roman criterion remains fully relevant: any spirituality that lastingly distances souls from the sacraments, confession, authorized direction and obedience in the name of a superior interiority reproduces, in one form or another, the interior way condemned in 1687 and 1699^[86]. Conversely, any prayer that leads to the sacraments, to concrete charity and to filial trust walks in the way of Teresa, of Sales and of John of the Cross — the way the Church never ceased to recommend. Lutheranism and Calvinism had broken with Rome over justification; Jansenism over grace; Quietism broke over prayer: three faces of one same modern temptation, which is to simplify Christianity by cutting away one of its dimensions^[87].

• Read Jansenism for the other great French crisis of the age of Louis XIV — rigorism on grace facing laxity on prayer — and Gallicanism (15th-19th century) for the political soil of these conflicts under the Sun King.
• Read Lutheranism and Calvinism for the 16th-century ruptures over justification, of which Quietism forms the mystical counterpart in the 17th century.
• Miguel de Molinos, Guida spirituale (Rome, 1675); critical edition J. I. Tellechea Idígoras (Madrid, 1976)^[88]; the sixty-eight condemned propositions in Denzinger, no. 1221 ff.^[89]
• Bossuet, Instruction on the States of Prayer (1697)^[90]; Fenelon, Explanation of the Maxims of the Saints (January 1697)^[91]; the twenty-three censured propositions in Denzinger, no. 1327 ff.^[92]
• Henri Bremond, Literary History of Religious Feeling in France (1916-1936)^[93]: the sympathetic reopening of the case of the vanquished, without calling the Roman censures into question.