Quietism
Quietism
(Latin: quietus, quiet)
A false or exaggerated mysticism, inculcating the view that the soul in all its relations with God should be entirely passive, self-suppressive or annihilating, and wholly absorbed in Him. It is characteristic of the pantheistic religions of India. Historically it appeared among the Gnostics and other early sects, later among the Beguines, Fraticelli, and Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit. Molinos, in the 17th century, attempted to give it a theological basis. In his view, desire on man’s part to do anything active is an offense against God; the soul, by annihilating itself, returns to its source, the essence of God, and becomes divinized; it need not concern itself about its virtues, death or eternity, heaven or hell. This “onward way” has nothing to do with confession; it puts an end to sin, etc. The doctrine infected many eminent men, but it was condemned in 1675. Luther’s faith without works was a reminiscence of it, but his followers strangely enough now stress work without special regard to faith.
Fuente: New Catholic Dictionary
Quietism
Quietism (Lat. quies, quietus, passivity) in the broadest sense is the doctrine which declares that man’s highest perfection consists in a sort of psychical self-annihilation and a consequent absorption of the soul into the Divine Essence even during the present life. In the state of “quietude” the mind is wholly inactive; it no longer thinks or wills on its own account, but remains passive while God acts within it. Quietism is thus generally speaking a sort of false or exaggerated mysticism (q.v.), which under the guise of the loftiest spirituality contains erroneous notions which, if consistently followed, would prove fatal to morality. It is fostered by Pantheism and similar theories, and it involves peculiar notions concerning the Divine cooperation in human acts. In a narrower sense Quietism designates the mystical element in the teaching of various sects which have sprung up within the Church, only to be cast out as heretical. In some of these the Quietistic teaching has been the conspicuous error, in others it has been a mere corollary of more fundamental erroneous doctrine. Quietism finally, in the strictest acceptation of the term, is the doctrine put forth and defended in the seventeenth century by Molinos (q.v.) and Petrucci. Out of their teaching developed the less radical form known as Semiquietism, whose principle advocates were Fénelon (q.v.) and Madame Guyon (q.v.). All these varieties of Quietism insist with more or less emphasis on interior passivity as the essential condition of perfection; and all have been proscribed in very explicit terms by the Church.
In its essential features Quietism is a characteristic of the religions of India. Both Pantheistic Brahmanism and Buddhism aim at a sort of self-annihilation, a state of indifference in which the soul enjoys an imperturbable tranquillity. And the means of bringing this about is the recognition of one’s identity with Brahma, the all-god, or, for the Buddhist, the quenching of desire and the consequent attainment of Nirvana, incompletely in the present life, but completely after death. Among the Greeks the Quietistic tendency is represented by the Stoics. Along with Pantheism, which characterizes their theory of the world, they present in their apatheia an ideal which recalls the indifference aimed at by the Oriental mystics. The wise man is he who has become independent and free from all desire. According to some of the Stoics, the sage may indulge in the lowest kind of sensuality, so far as the body is concerned, without incurring the least defilement of his soul. The Neoplatonists (q.v.) held that the One gives rise to the Nous or Intellect, this to the world-soul, and this again to individual souls. These, in consequence of their union with matter, have forgotten their Divine origin. Hence the fundamental principle of morality is the return of the soul to its source. The supreme destiny of man and his highest happiness consists in rising to the contemplation of the One, not by thought but by ecstasy (ekstasis).
The origin of these Quietistic tendencies is not hard to discover. However strongly the Pantheistic conception of the world may appeal to the philosophic minded, it cannot do away with the obvious data of experience. To say that the soul is part of the Divine being or an emanation from God enhances, apparently, the dignity of man; but there still remains the fact that passion, desire, and moral evil make human life anything but Divine. Hence the craving for deliverance and peace which can be obtained only by some sort of withdrawal from action and from dependence on external things and by a consequent immersion, more or less complete, in the Divine being. These aberrations of Mysticism continued even after the preaching of Christianity had revealed to mankind the truth concerning God, the moral order, and human destiny. Gnosticism, especially the Antinomian School, looked for salvation in a sort of intuitive knowledge of the Divine which emancipated the “spiritual” from the obligation of the moral law. The same Quietistic tendency appears in the teaching of the Euchites or Messalians, who maintained that prayer frees the body from passion and the soul from evil inclination, so that sacraments and penitential works are useless. They were condemned at the Synod of Side in Pamphilia (383) and at Ephesus (431). The Bogomili (q.v.) of the later Middle Ages were probably their lineal descendants.
Medieval Quietism is further represented in the vagaries of Hesychasm (q.v.), according to which the supreme aim of life on earth is the contemplation of the uncreated light whereby man is intimately united with God. The means for attaining to such contemplation are prayer, complete repose of body and will, and a process of auto-suggestion. Among the errors of the Beguines (q.v.) and Beghards condemned by the Council of Vienne (1311-12) are the propositions: that man in the present life can attain such a degree of perfection as to become utterly impeccable; that the “perfect” have no need to fast or pray, but may freely grant the body whatsoever it craves; that they are not subject to any human authority or bound by the precepts of the Church (see Denzinger-Bannwart, 471 sqq.). Similar exaggerations on the part of the Fraticelli (q.v.) led to their condemnation by John XXII in 1317 (Denzinger-Bannwart, 484 sqq.). The same pope in 1329 proscribed among the errors of Meister Eckhart (q.v.) the assertions that (prop. 10) we are totally transformed into God just as in the sacrament the bread is changed into the Body of Christ; that (14) since God wills that I should have sinned I do not wish that I had not sinned; that (18) we should bring forth the fruit, not of external actions, which do not make us good, but of internal actions which are wrought by the Father abiding within us (Denzinger-Bannwart, 501, sqq).
Quite in accord with their Pantheistic principles, the Brethren and Sisters of the Free Spirit (thirteenth to fifteenth century) held that they who have reached perfection, i.e. complete absorption in God, have no need of external worship, of sacraments, or of prayer; they owe no obedience to any law, since their will is identical with God’s will; and they may indulge their carnal desires to any extent without staining the soul. This is also substantially the teaching of the Illuminati (Alumbrados), a sect that disturbed Spain during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
It was the Spaniard Michael de Molinos who developed Quietism in the strictest sense of the term. From his writings, especially from his “Dux spiritualis” (Rome, 1675), sixty-eight propositions were extracted and condemned by Innocent XI in 1687 (Denzinger-Bannwart, 1221 sqq.). The key-note of the system is contained in the first proposition: man must annihilate his powers and this is the inward way (via interna); in fact, the desire to do anything actively is offensive to God and hence one must abandon oneself entirely to God and thereafter remain as a lifeless body (prop. 2). By doing nothing the soul annihilates itself and returns to its source, the essence of God, in which it is transformed and divinized, and then God abides in it (5). In this inward way, the soul has not to think either of reward or of punishment, of heaven or hell, of death or eternity. It must not concern itself about its own state, its defects, or its progress in virtue; having once resigned its will to God it must let Him work out His will without any action of the soul itself (7-13). He who has thus committed himself entirely to God must not ask anything of God, or render thanks to Him; must take no account of temptations nor offer any active resistance; “and if nature be stirred one must permit its stirring because it is nature” (14-17). In prayer one must not use images or discursive thought, but must remain in “obscure faith” and in quiet, forgetting every distinct thought of the Divine attributes, abiding in God’s presence to adore, love and serve Him, but without producing any acts because with these God is not pleased. Whatever thoughts arise during prayer, even though they be impure or against faith, if they are not voluntarily encouraged nor voluntarily expelled but are suffered with indifference and resignation, do not hinder the prayer of faith but rather enhance its perfection. He who desires sensible devotion is seeking not God but himself; indeed every sensible effect experienced in the spiritual life is abominable, filthy, unclean (18-20).
No preparation is required before Communion nor thanksgiving after other than that the soul remain in its usual state of passive resignation; and the soul must not endeavour to arouse in itself feelings of devotion. Interior souls resign themselves, in silence, to God; and the more thorough their resignation the more do they realize that they are unable to recite even the “Pater Noster”. They should elicit no acts of love for the Blessed Virgin or the saints or the Humanity of Christ, because, as these are all sensible objects, love for them is also sensible. External works are not necessary to sanctification, and penitential works, i.e. voluntary mortification should be cast off as a grievous and useless burden (32-40). God permits the demon to use “violence” with certain perfect souls even to the point of making them perform carnal actions either alone or with other persons. When these onsets occur, one must make no effort but let the demon have his way. Scruples and doubts must be set aside. In particular, these things are not to be mentioned in confession, because by not confessing them the soul overcomes the demon, acquires a “treasure of peace”, and attains to closer union with God (41-52). The “inward way” has nothing to do with confession, confessors, cases of conscience, theology, or philosophy. Indeed, God sometimes makes it impossible for souls who are advanced in perfection to go to confession, and supplies them with as much grace as they would receive in the Sacrament of Penance. The inward way leads on to a state in which passion is extinguished, sin is no more, sense is deadened, and the soul, willing only what God wills, enjoys an imperturbable peace: this is the mystic death. They who pursue this path must obey their superiors outwardly; even the vow of obedience taken by religious extends only to outward actions, only God and the director enter into the soul’s interior. To say that the soul in its interior life should be governed by the bishop is a new and very ridiculous doctrine; for on the hidden things the Church passes no judgment (55-68).
From this summary it is readily seen why the Church condemned Quietism. Nevertheless, these doctrines had found adherents even in the higher ranks of the clergy, such as the Oratorian, Pietro Matteo Petrucci (1636-1701), who was made Bishop of Jesi (1681), and raised to the cardinalate (1686). His works on Mysticism and the spiritual life were criticized by the Jesuit Paolo Segneri, and a controversy ensued which resulted in an examination of the whole question by the Inquisition, and the proscription of fifty-four propositions taken from eight of Petrucci’s writings (1688). He submitted at once, resigned his bishopric in 1696, and was appointed by Innocent XII Apostolic visitor. Other leaders of the Quietist movement were: Joseph Beccarelli of Milan, who retracted before the Inquisition at Venice in 1710; Francois Malaval, a blind layman of Marseilles (1627-1719); and especially the Barnabite Francois Lacombe, the director of Mme. Guyon, whose views were embraced by Fénelon.
The doctrine contained in Fénelon’s “Explication de Maximes des Saints” was suggested by the teachings of Molinos, but was less extreme in its principles and less dangerous in its application; it is usually designated as Semiquietism. The controversy between Bossuet and Fénelon has already been noticed. The latter submitted his book to the Holy See for examination, with the result that twenty-three propositions extracted from it were condemned by Innocent XII in 1699 (Denzinger-Bannwart, 1327 sqq.). According to Fénelon, there is an habitual state of the love of God which is wholly pure and disinterested, without fear of punishment or desire of reward. In this state the soul loves God for His own sake — not to gain merit, perfection, or happiness by loving Him; this is the contemplative or unitive life (props. 1, 2). In the state of holy indifference, the soul has no longer any voluntary deliberate desire in its own behalf except on those occasions in which it does not faithfully cooperate with all the grace vouchsafed to it. In that state we seek nothing for ourselves, all for God; we desire salvation, not as our deliverance or reward or supreme interest, but simply as something that God is pleased to will and that He would have us desire for His sake (4-6). The self-abandonment which Christ in the Gospel requires of us is simply the renunciation of our own interest, and the extreme trials that demand the exercise of this renunciation are temptations whereby God would purify our love, without holding out to us any hope even in regard to our eternal welfare. In such trials the soul, by a reflex conviction that does not reach its innermost depths, may have the invincible persuasion that it is justly reprobated by God. In this involuntary despair it accomplishes the absolute sacrifice of its own interest in regard to eternity and loses all interested hope; but in its higher and most inward acts it never loses perfect hope which is the disinterested desire of obtaining the Divine promises (7-12). While meditation consists in discursive acts, there is a state of contemplation so sublime and perfect that it becomes habitual, i.e. whenever the soul prays, its prayer is contemplative, not discursive, and it needs not to return to methodical meditation (15-16). In the passive state the soul exercises all the virtues without adverting to the fact that they are virtues; its only thought is to do what God wills; it desires even love, not as its own perfection and happiness, but simply in so far as love is what God asks of us (18-19). In confession the transformed soul should detest its sins and seek forgiveness not as its own purification and deliverance but as something that God wills and that He would have us will for His glory (20). Though this doctrine of pure love is the evangelical perfection recognized in the whole course of tradition, the earlier directors of souls exhorted the multitude of the just only to practices of interested love proportioned to the graces bestowed on them. Pure love alone constitutes the whole interior life and is the one principle and motive of all actions that are deliberate and meritorious (22-23).
While these condemnations showed the determined attitude of the Church against Quietism both in its extreme and in its moderate form, Protestantism contained certain elements which the Quietist might have consistently adopted. The doctrine of justification by faith alone, i.e. without good works, accorded very well with Quietistic passivity. In the “visible Church” as proposed by the Reformers, the Quietist would have found a congenial refuge from the control of ecclesiastical authority. And the attempt to make the religous life an affair of the individual soul in its direct dealings with God was no less Protestant than it was Quietistic. In particular, the rejection, in part or in whole, of the sacramental system, would lead the devout Protestant to a Quietist attitude. As a matter of fact, traces of Quietism are found in early Methodism and Quakerism (the “inward light”). But in its later developments Protestantism has come to lay emphasis on the active, rather than the inert, contemplative life. Whereas Luther maintained that faith without work suffices for salvation, his successors at the present day attach little importance to dogmatic belief, but insist much on “religion as a life”, i.e. as action. The Catholic teaching avoids such extremes. The soul indeed, assisted by Divine grace can reach a high degree of contemplation, of detachment from created things and of spiritual union with God. But such perfection, far from leading to Quietistic passivity and Subjectivism, implies rather a more earnest endeavour to labour for God’s glory, a more thorough obedience to lawful authority and above all a more complete subjugation of sensuous impulse and tendency.
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E.A. PACE Transcribed by Paul T. Crowley Dedicated to Our Lady of Fatima and Fr. Clarence F. Galli
The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume XIICopyright © 1911 by Robert Appleton CompanyOnline Edition Copyright © 2003 by K. KnightNihil Obstat, June 1, 1911. Remy Lafort, S.T.D., CensorImprimatur. +John Cardinal Farley, Archbishop of New York
Fuente: Catholic Encyclopedia
Quietism
is the doctrine that the highest character of virtue consists in the perpetual contemplation and love of supreme excellence. It recognises this excellence only in God, and maintains that perfect union with God must be effected, and that it is best attainable by a state of passive rest or quiet, more or less absolute. The quietude aimed at, begiinning with an act of so-called resignation of self, is a state of mental inactivity, without thought, reflection, hope, or wish. In this state it is supposed that the soul is brought so immediately into the divine presence as to be merged in it by an essential union. Quietism, accordingly, is not peculiar, for it requires no basis of Christology. It results from every philosophical system by an excess or perversion of contemplation, when the ethical tendency of the mind is too weak to preserve a just balance with the contemplative. Vaughan (Hours with the Mystics, vol. 1, ch. 2, p. 43) observes that the same round of notions, occurring to minds of similar make under similar circumstances, is common to mystics in ancient India and in modern Christendom. He gives a summary of Hindf mysticism, that it
(1) lays claim to disinterested love, as opposed to a mercenary religion;
(2) reacts against the ceremonial, prescriptive, and pedantic literalism of the Vedas;
(3) identifies in its pantheism subject and object, worshipper and worshipped;
(4) aims at ultimate absorption into the Infinite;
(5) inculcates, as the way to this dissolution, absolute passivity, withdrawal into the inmost self, cessation of all the powers giving recipes for procuring this beatific torpor or trance;
(6) believes that eternity may thus be realized in time;
(7) has its mythical, miraculous pretensions, i.e. its theurgic department;
(8) and, finally, advises the learner in this kind of religion to submit himself implicitly to a spiritual guide his yaru.
Of these articles, the third, fourth, fifth, and sixth give quietism, properly so called; and it is a question whether the manifestation of this doctrine in Christianity adds anything essential to the definition of article five, so as to save Christian quietism from the pantheistic conclusions of articles three and four.
In the Christian Church this mystical theology is defined by its professors to be that doctrine which reveals to man the hidden essence of God’s Being. The way to this wisdom is in three stages, the purgative, the illuminative, the unitive; the first purging the will from low affections, the second communicating to the intellect the knowledge of God, and the third leading the soul thus prepared to union and deification.
It is evident that this. scheme, if at all carried out to its legitimate consequences, leads directly to the error of those enthusiasts who supposed the kingdom of Christ to be an earlier and inferior dispensation, the reign of the Spirit the later and perfect dispensation. Men aretaught by it, not the superiority of love to knowledgein St. Paul’s sense, but that they may become more perfect by disregarding the knowledge of an earlier state, by becoming again children in understanding. To that earlier state are referred the power of Christ’sresurrection and the sacrament of the holy eucharist. What the higher sacrament of unction is does not appear. In working out this scheme, Molinos taught as follows:
1. The perfection of men, even in this life, consists in an uninterrupted act of contemplation and love, which contains virtually all righteousness; that this act once effected lasts always, even during sleep, provided that it be not expressly recalled; whence it follows that the perfect have no need to repeat it.
2. In this state of perfection the soul ought not to reflect either on God or on itself, but its powers ought to be annihilated, in order to abandon itself wholly and passively to God.
3. Perfect prayer is this state of quietude, in which there should be absolutely no thought or wish or hope. Vocal prayer, confession, all external things, are but hindrances.
4. In prayer the first act of faith, the first intention of resignation, prevails to constitute the whole an act of worship. One may persevere in prayer though the imagination be carried about with various and involuntary thoughts. These are not to be actively resisted, but merely neglected.
5. The violent and painful suggestions of impatience, pride, gluttony, luxury, rage, blasphemy, cursing, despair, and an infinite number of others, are God’s means for purifying those whom he calls. The soul ought not to be disquieted on account of them.
An example of pure quietism may be quoted in illustration of these principles: Gregory Lopez having for the space of three years continued that ejaculation, Thy will be done in time and in eternity, repeating it as often as he breathed, God Almighty discovered to him that infinite treasure of the pure and continued act of faith and love, with silence and resignation; so that he came to say that, during the thirty-six years he lived afterwards, he always continued in his inward man that pure act of love, without ever uttering the least petition, ejaculation, or anything that was sensible or sprung from nature (Spiritual Guide [transl. 1699], p. 75).
Molinos is charged by Romanist writers with teaching antinomianism. The charge does not appear to be well founded, but that his teaching regarding evil thoughts is most dangerous there can be no doubt. At the same time, the truth of which it is a perversion is very discernible.
Molinos proceeds to his doctrine of self-annihilation through what he calls infused contemplation. The means whereby the soul ascends to infused contemplation are two the pleasure and the desire of it. The steps of it are three-satiety when the soul is filled with God; intoxication, an excess of mind and elevation of soul arising from satiety of divine love: security, when the soul is so drenched with love that it loses all fear, and would willingly go to hell if it knew such to be the will of God. Six other steps there are fire, union, elevation, illumination, pleasure, and repose. But there are many other steps besides, as ecstasies, raptures, meltings, deliquiums, glee, kisses, embraces, exaltation, union, transformation, espousing, and matrimony; which, Molinos says, I omit to explain, to give no occasion to speculation. Madame Guyon, however, does explain: The essential union is the spiritual marriage, where there is a communication of substance, when God takes the soul for his spouse, unites it to himself, not personally, nor by any act or means, but immediately reducing all to a unity. The soul ought not, nor can, any more make any distinction between God and itself. God is the soul, and the soul is God (Explicat. du Cant. des Cant.).
Molinos passes through annihilation to the same result of deification. The soul that would be perfect passes, with the divine aid, into the state of nothingness: from the spiritual death the true and perfect annihilation derives its original; insomuch that when the soul is once dead to its will and understanding, it is properly said to have arrived at the perfect and happy state of annihilation, which is the last disposition for transformation and union. The soul no longer lives in itself, because God lives in it. The soul being in that manner the nothing, the Lord will be the whole in the soul.
Quietism aims at an entire abstraction from all externals, and seeks to put the spirit of man into direct and immediate union with the very nature of the Godhead. From this there inevitably results, instead of the Christian doctrine of the communion of saints, the doctrine of a pantheistic identification of the creature with the Creator, and an ultimate absorption of the soul into the substance of God. The Quietists call it indeed a vulgar error to say that in the prayer of rest the faculties operate not, and the soul is idle and inactive; but they assert at the same time that the soul operates neither by means of the memory nor by the intellect, nor by ratiocination, but by simple apprehension (Molinos, Spiritual Guide, 1, 12). What an active apprehension is when none of the powers of the mind are exerted is not explained. The Quietists think to attain that repose of the mind which is the result of exertion, and that quiet rest in God which follows from the earnestness of meditative prayer, by altogether surceasing from the exertion and superseding the earnestness. Consequently, the mind being reduced to inactivity, the body has sway; and the state of perfect quietude, supposed to be a waiting for the divine access, becomes that state (which may be produced by mesmeric process) in which the body suffers or simulates catalepsy, and the mind apes a divine trance. Quietism becomes mental sleep.
There is a remarkable similarity between the mysticism of the Quietists and of the Plotinian school of philosophy. The aim of Plotinus was to enter into the immediate vision of Deity. Unconditioned Being, or the Godhead, cannot be grasped by thinking or science, only by intuition. In this pure intuition, the good, or the absolute being, gazes upon itself through the medium of our own spirits. To close the eve against all things transient and variable, to raise ourselves to this simple essence, to take refuge in the absolute, this must be regarded as the highest aim of all our spiritual efforts (Prof. C. A. Brandis, in Smith’s Biog. Dict. art. Plotinus, p. 427). Plotinian contemplation may find a place in the system of John Smith and Henry More, but it may also pass as readily into the reveries of Molinos. It is to be considered whether the tendency of such contemplation is not to reduce the Father manifested in the Son to the cold abstraction of the Plotinian Deity. In the Church there have been two kinds of mysticisml, one a churchly mysticism, which allies itself with the ordinances and rites of the Gospel; the other subjective or inward, which gradually rejects more and more all that is external, and even at last passes beyond the contemplation of the humanity of our Lord, and the sacraments which make men partakers of his body, to seek a resting-place beyond all that is created in the Logos as he existed prior to the incarnation and creation (Dorner, On the Person of Christ, II, i, 233).
This unchristianizing of Christianity, this presentation of the great drama without its central figure, this removal of God Incarnate from the mystery of godliness, as the result of a perverted or depraved mysticism; is exhibited more than once in the history of the Church. The words quoted from Dorner on the subject were used regarding Maximus Confessor. We may resume and continue them. True love and knowledge unite to seek a resting-point beyond all that is created, beyond even the humanity of Christ: their final goal is the pure and bare () Logos, as he existed prior to the incarnation and the creation. It is clear that in the last instance Christ is hereby reduced to the position of a mere theophany, and that the historical significance of his person is destroyed. The same thing appears also from his application to the professedly highest stage of the words. Even though we have known Christ after the flesh, yet now know we him no longer. So far was Maximus Confessor from attributing eternal significance to the God-man that he regarded the humanity of Christ rather in the light of a hindrance to the full knowledge and love of the pure God a hindrance which must be surmounted by those who aim to reach the highest stage (Dorner, l.c., and see note 48 there referred to). So in Italy, Marsilius Ficinus and John Pico of Mirandola turned Christianity in many respects into a Neo-Platonic theosophy.
In the article Mysticism (q.v.) this subject is more opened, and the schools of mysticism of the Greek and Latin churches classified. In the article Hesychasts (q.v.) is related the quietism of the Greek Church. The directions of the abbot Simon for producing the visions of quietism (supposed to have been written in the 11th century) are still in existence: Alone in thy cell, shut thy door, and seat thyself in a corner; raise thy mind above all things vain and transitory; recline thy beard and chin on thy breast; turn thy eyes and thy thoughts towards the middle of thy belly, the region of the navel; and search the place of the heart, the seat of the soul. At first all will be dark and comfortless; but if you persevere day and night, you will feel an ineffable joy; and no sooner has the soul discovered the place of the heart than it is involved in a mystic and ethereal light. At present it is only necessary to point out that these Hesychasts had the same rule as the Hindlt Quietists, viz. that to produce the state of abstraction the eves must be steadily fixed on some particular object. The Hindus presented the tip of the nose, the Hesychasts the navel.
In German mediaeval mysticism a quietistic element is met with. It, however, borders on pantheism, very much as the pantheism of Dionysius the Areopagite borders on quietism.
The real founder of quietism in the Church is thus reputed to be Molinos (q.v.), a Spanish priest, whose opinions, published at Rome towards the end of the 17th century, called forth violent opposition from the authorities of the Church, but met with many supporters in Italy, Spain, France, and the Netherlands. He seems to have held that religion consists in the perfect tranquillity of a mind removed from all external and finite things, and centred in God, and in such a pure love of the Supreme Being as is independent of all prospect of interest or reward. In more modern times Fenelon and Madame Guyon have taught quietism. They are, however, usually called Semi-Quietists. The two following propositions from Fenelon’s Maxims of the Saints were condemned bv Innocent XII in 1699:
1. There is attainable in this life a state of perfection in which the expectation of reward and the fear of punishment have no place.
2. Souls may be so inflamed with love to God, and so resigned to his will, that if they believed that God had condemned them to eternal pain, they would absolutely sacrifice their salvation. Madame Guyon thought she had learned a method by which souls might be carried to such a state of perfection that a continual act of contemplation and love might be substituted for all other acts of religion. She came forward as one of the chief promoters of quietism in France, and hence arose a celebrated controversy between Bossuet and Fenelon the former of whom attacked and the latter defended several of that pious lady’s opinions. See the dissertation by M. Bonnel, De la Controverse dle Bossuet et Fenelon sur le Quietisme (Nevers, 1850, 8vo); Dr. Burnet, Tracts (1689, 12mo), vol. i; Recueil des Diverses Pieces concernant le Quietisme et les Quietistes (1688); Weisman, Hist. Ecclesiastes xvii.