Quietism and Quietism in France

Quietism

   

• This doctrine began with the publication in 1675 of the Spiritual Guide of the Spaniard Miguel de Molinos.
• He wrote Spiritual Guide and "Treatise on Daily communion" (1675)
• Worship is mysticism.
• Molinos advocated total passivity before God.
• A believer is simply to disappear, to die and be lost in God.
• Any activism, be it of the body or of the souls, Must be set aside.
• Contemplation must be purely spiritual, having nothing to do with any physical or visible means - including the humanity of Christ.
• Condemned by the Catholic Church. 
• Some argued that it was more akin to Moslem mysticism than to the doctrines of the great Christian teachers.
• Others pointed out that Molinism led to privatism.
• Many confessors protested that this teaching was leading to moral laxity among the faithful.

 

 

 

Quietism in France

 

• It was taken up by the widowed Madame Guyon and by her confessor, Father Lacombe.

• When Madame Guyon published a treatise, A Short and Simple Means of Prayer, her fame extended throughout the nation.
• She and her confessor moved to Paris, where their admirers included several women of the highest aristocracy.
• She carried the teaching of Molinos in a more radical direction.
• She declared that there may be times when, in order to offer God a true sacrifice, one must commit sins one truly despises.

     

  Madame Guyon met the young Bishop Francois Fenelon.

• He was won over to her teachings, although he never carried them to her extremes
• Eventually, the issue of Quietism degenerated into a bitter controversy between Fenelon and one of the greatest French theologians of the time, Jacques Benigne Bossuet.
• Fenelon was a man of admirable piety.
• Pope Innocent XII agreed to reject some of Fenelon's theses.
• Fenelon withdrew to his pastoral duties as Archbishop of Cambray.
• He distributed all his possessions among the poor and led such an admirable life that he was the probable model for Victor Hugo's saintly.