2. Quietism: to be or not to be mystical
Quietism: to be or not to be mystical The third of the internal crises within Roman Catholicism in our period was the movement known as Quietism (from the Latin for "stillness", "absence of activity"). Although not as convulsive in its effects as Gallicanism or Jansenism, it nonetheless catapulted two of France's greatest Catholic thinkers, writers, and preachers—Bossuet and Fénelon—into sensational conflict, resulting in Fénelon's ruin. Quietism was also destined to spread far beyond the boundaries of the Roman Catholic Church through its spiritual impact on the Protestant world.
1. Miguel de Molinos The originator of Quietism was a Spanish priest, Miguel de Molinos (1628–
96).6 Born at Muniesa in Aragon, Molinos studied under the Jesuits, and was ordained to the priesthood in 1652. As a priest in Valencia, he was an admired preacher; his mind glowed with the energy of intense thought, and his services as a spiritual director were much sought after. He moved to Rome in 1663, where he soon became an influential father-confessor, counting cardinals among his spiritual clientele, including the future pope
Innocent XI (then Cardinal Odescalchi). Molinos was also very popular with the religiously minded female aristocracy of Rome. In 1675 he published two important treatises, both in Italian—his Brief Tract on Frequent Communion and his Spiritual Guide. The Guide was the real charter of Quietism. Drawing on the great 16th century Spanish mystics,
Teresa of Avila and John of the Cross, although pressing beyond them, Molinos elaborated a vision of the Christian life which many found enthralling.7
At the heart of Molinos' spirituality lay the rejection of all human effort.
For a human being to act towards God, he taught, was in itself sin. Spiritual perfection required total passivity in God's presence, and the annihilation of the human will. This state of annihilation he termed "mystic death". How did one achieve mystic death? By a process of mental prayer, which discarded all meditation and all distinct acts of will; instead, the soul simply rested passively before God. In this perfect state, a person would no longer care even about his own salvation, heaven or hell. All external acts were now redundant; indeed, sin was now impossible. Satan might force the perfect soul to do things that would be sinful in the imperfect, but they could not truly be sins in one whose will had been annihilated. In fact,
Molinos said, it was positively harmful to resist temptation, since resistance was an act, and human acts were improper in the spiritual sphere.
At this juncture in his career, Molinos and his Quietist teaching were very fashionable; critics of his writings were censured by the Inquisition.
Within a decade, however, the tide of opinion had turned against the Spaniard. This was partly because some confessors alerted their superiors to the fact that a number of Molinos' disciples (especially female ones) were giving an alarming spin to his teachings, using them to justify sexually dubious conduct. Ardent piety and audacious sensuality seemed to be
blending. But how could their actions be wrong, these Quietists asked, when their wills had been annihilated in the perfection of mystic death?
Some too, in their enthusiasm for mental prayer, were abandoning or even denouncing vocal prayer. In some convents, apparently, Quietism had got such a grip that vocal prayer had actually been suppressed. Unsavoury rumours also began circulating about Molinos' personal relations with his female disciples. And Pope Innocent XI's confessor, father Marrachi, was pressing hard for action against Molinos. It has been suggested that Marrachi, a Jesuit, saw Quietism as an anti-authority sect within the Church, akin to Jansenism; having declared war on one such sect, the Jesuits could hardly tolerate the other.
In consequence, Molinos was arrested by the Inquisition in 1686. Many of his disciples were also arrested, some of whom confessed to immoral conduct. In November 1687, in the bull Coelestis Pastor, Innocent XI condemned sixty-eight propositions from the treatises of Molinos. All his writings were placed on the Index of Forbidden Books. The Spanish
Quietist submitted unreservedly, but spent the rest of his life in prison.
Innocent refused, however, to let his one-time confessor be put to death, as some demanded.
2. Madame Guyon The story of Quietism did not end with the condemnation of Molinos. In a modified form, the movement gained a new lease of life in France, through one of Christianity's most famous and controversial feminine mystics,
Jeanne Marie Bouvier de la Mothe Guyon (1648–1717), usually known simply as Madame Guyon. Born at Montargis, she was a strange child and teenager, who even at that early age claimed supernatural visions. In 1664, aged sixteen, she married her cousin Jacques Guyon, an easy-going invalid twenty-two years her senior. The day after the wedding, Madame Guyon decided that marriage was odious to her, and that she should have been a nun! Perhaps unsurprisingly, there followed a lengthy bad experience with her husband and his mother. As though in compensation, the disappointed young wife began having intense spiritual experiences, during one of which Jesus appeared and put an invisible ring of "mystical marriage" on her finger, claiming her for Himself.
After her husband's death in 1676, Madame Guyon (now twenty-eight) used her new liberty to become a sort of freelance instructor in the true
Christian life. She was extremely eloquent; few could resist her torrent of edifying words. She had already met her ideal soul-mate while still married: a Barnabite priest and disciple of Molinos, named François Lacombe
(1643–1715).
Father Lacombe was born at Thonon, on the south side of the Lake of Geneva. After entering the Barnabite order, he became the head of its community at Thonon. He appears to have been a highly emotional and impulsive personality, lacking in intellectual clarity. On visits to Rome he became a convert to the doctrines of Molinos. Madame Guyon, now free of marriage ties, remembered the fascinating Barnabite priest, sought him out at Thonon, and placed herself under his spiritual direction. The two seemed to become fused into a single soul; Father Lacombe's influence on Madame
Guyon was so profound, he could cure her of headaches simply with a touch. The young widow and the priest were utterly devoted to each other, to the extent that rumours were soon flying around of the impure nature of their relationship. Madame Guyon, under duress, would later confess to exchanging "innocent kisses" with Father Lacombe, but nothing more.
Since Lacombe was a zealous follower of Molinos, the partnership between himself and Madame Guyon became a channel through which
Quietism now began flowing into the most respectable religious circles in France. The two spiritual companions engaged in a five year trek over France to disseminate Molinos' teaching. Madame Guyon made a particular hit in Paris, where the feminine upper classes, hungry for a dimension to their lives that would transcend the glitter of the world, went into a state of collective rapture over this magnetic "high priestess" of Quietism. Madame
Guyon summed up her teaching in a treatise entitled A Short and Easy Method of Prayer (1685), which proved very popular. In essence, the treatise taught a toned-down version of Molinos' Quietism, leaving out his contentious claim that Satan could compel the annihilated will to sin. Even so, Madame Guyon did hold that, by its very detachment from external things, the annihilated will could be led to perform acts which, if committed by imperfect souls, would be sin. (The treatise was placed on the Index of Forbidden Books in 1688.) Madame Guyon's celebrity status in Paris, however, disturbed its archbishop, Harlay de Champvallon, who was far from impressed by the apostle of Quietism or her soul-mate priest (perhaps because his own life lacked either Quietist or any other kind of spirituality—he was a notoriously worldly bishop). Immediately after Molinos' condemnation in Rome in 1686, Harlay took swift and ruthless measures, and had Father
Lacombe arrested. He was to spend the rest of his life in prison, a Quietist saint and martyr; at length, thirty years later, he died insane in an asylum at Charenton.
Madame Guyon was also arrested and confined to a Visitandine convent.
However, she was more fortunate than Father Lacombe in having a powerful champion at court—Madame de Maintenon, the devout former governess of Louis XIV's illegitimate children by his third mistress
Madame de Montespan. Madame de Maintenon had secretly married the king in 1683 or 1684. Through her influence, Madame Guyon regained her freedom. She was then appointed to teach at a girls' school in Saint-Cyr, which Madame de Maintenon had founded to educate the young female upper class as a moral and spiritual elite. It was at Saint-Cyr that Madame
Guyon met her second great spiritual companion—François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon (1651–1715).
3. Archbishop Fénelon Fénelon was by all accounts a remarkable man: of commanding presence, stunningly handsome, personally charming, an eloquent preacher, with a brilliant intellect that found expression in notable works of philosophy and theology. He was also spiritually sensitive and wracked with inner anguish over his sins and doubts. "I cannot explain my inner self", he lamented. "It escapes me, and appears to be for ever changing. I have no idea who I am."
Of all the Roman Catholic figures in our period, Fénelon is perhaps the most complex and captivating personality.
Born at Périgord, of noble family, Fénelon studied at the Saint-Sulpice seminary in Paris, and was ordained to the priesthood in 1675. In 1678, he became the superior of Nouvelles Catholiques, an institution for teaching
Roman Catholic doctrine to converts from Protestantism. He conducted a special mission in the period 1685–6 in the Saintonge region (a surviving stronghold of Huguenots), to evangelize those who had lost their religious liberties through the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (see section 3, below). He was, however, opposed to forced conversions, and secured the withdrawal of royal troops from his mission field. Fénelon preferred to rely on patient, loving instruction, in Bible classes and public preaching, to win
Protestants over. "When hearts are to be moved", he wrote, "force is of no avail. Conviction is the only true conversion."
Then Fénelon—fatefully—took up a teaching post at Madame de Maintenon's Saint-Cyr school. Here, in autumn 1688, he made the acquaintance of Madame Guyon, and was deeply impressed both by her piety and her Quietist doctrine. A profoundly emotional but physically chaste relationship swiftly sprang up between the two kindred spirits,
Fénelon filling the void left in Madame Guyon's life by the imprisonment of Father Lacombe. Fénelon came to regard Madame Guyon as his
"spiritual mother", and she at times even referred to him as her "baby"
(although she was only three years his senior). We can gauge something of Fénelon's attitude by these words he wrote to his new mentor: "My confidence in you is complete, because of the brilliance of the light you bring to bear on interior things, and God's designs through you."
However, Fénelon tried to correct some of the more unbalanced dimensions of Madame Guyon's spirituality, which under his influence was refined into something more sane and sensible (it has been called "Semi-
Quietism"). Nevertheless, many pious but traditional-minded French Catholics found distasteful elements even in Fénelon's more restrained version of Quietism, especially its somewhat erotic language about the "spiritual nuptials" enjoyed by Jesus and the perfect soul. When a Quietist priest, a disciple of Fénelon, described these spiritual nuptials to one young lady in the confessional, she is said to have exclaimed in shock, "Fancy talking like that, Father, to a girl of my age!"
The period 1689–94 was a sort of spiritual honeymoon period for Fénelon and Madame Guyon. Under the benevolent eye of Madame de
Maintenon, they enjoyed an intimate soul-friendship and gathered a circle of admiring disciples. They entertained romantic visions of reforming the whole of France through Louis XIV's young grandson, the Duke of Burgundy, to whom Fénelon was appointed tutor in 1689. Fénelon wrote a famous novel, Télémaque, dedicated to the duke and finally published in 1699, in which he set out his ideals of true kingship. Among other things
Fénelon insisted that a good king would engage in no wars of aggression, and would be no self-willed autocrat but subject to God's moral law.
Fénelon and Madame Guyon hoped that the Duke of Burgundy would grow up to be this king; Madame Guyon prophesied that as the new monarch's spiritual advisor, Fénelon would become the light of France, leading other nations to Christ.8
Fénelon and Madame Guyon's honeymoon period, however, ended in 1694, when an extreme form of Quietism began developing at Saint-Cyr.
One of the school's young ladies, Mademoiselle de la Maisonfort, an ardent devotee of Madame Guyon, began teaching that prayer and good works were unnecessary in the true and perfect Christian life. Other students at Saint-Cyr were caught up in this blossoming of radical Quietist spirituality.
When it came to the notice of Madame de Maintenon, it turned her against Madame Guyon, whom she blamed for the extremism. Madame de
Maintenon entrusted a full-scale investigation of the affair to no less a figure than the celebrated Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, Bishop of Meaux and arguably France's greatest preacher.9
Bossuet read Madame Guyon's works carefully, and interviewed her several times. Unfortunately for the feminine apostle of Quietism, the illustrious Bishop of Meaux became convinced that she was mentally disturbed. Madame Guyon, sensing Bossuet's hostility, asked for two more judges to be appointed—these were Bishop Noailles of Châlons-sur-Marne,
and Louis Tronson, director of the illustrious Saint-Sulpice Society, devoted to training priests of high moral and spiritual calibre. The investigation was conducted in the Saint-Sulpice summer house at Issy, near Paris, and it lasted eight months. In February 1695, Fénelon was appointed Archbishop of Cambrai; he used his new position of influence to have himself added to the Issy tribunal. Eventually, 34 articles extracted from Madame Guyon's works were condemned later in 1695. Fénelon tried to defend his "spiritual mother", but succeeded only in toning down the condemnation; the high priestess of Quietism was imprisoned, moved from one convent to another, and finally locked away in the Bastille in 1698.
Madame Guyon remained a prisoner in the Bastille until 1703. By then her ordeal had worn her down, and she submitted unreservedly to the Church's condemnation of her teaching. She spent the rest of her life in Blois in the custody of her son, who kept a close watch on his mother to prevent any relapse into Quietist error. The one-time spiritual celebrity behaved herself and did nothing more to antagonize the religious establishment, although she did write religious poetry which was not entirely free from the taint of her old teachings.
When Madame Guyon died in 1717, her influence through her writings passed out of the Roman Catholic Church and into the Protestant world, where her brand of Quietist mysticism attracted many new admirers. The chief propagator of Madame Guyon's spirituality among Protestants was the Huguenot preacher Pierre Poiret (1646–1719). Based in Rijnsburg in Holland, Poiret edited the complete works of Madame Guyon, which appeared in 39 volumes between 1712 and 1722 (the last volumes were edited by Poiret's disciples). Poiret's labours enabled Madame Guyon's
Quietism to find its way into German Pietism, especially through Gerhard Tersteegen (a disciple of Poiret—he translated many French Quietist writings into German).10 Madame Guyon's literary mentor, Molinos, also found an appreciative response among Pietists; the great Pietist leader
August Hermann Francke reprinted Molinos' Spiritual Guide.11
Madame Guyon's influence flowed into English Evangelicalism too, especially through two great admirers, John Wesley (who published an edited version of Madame Guyon's autobiography), and the Calvinist poet
William Cowper (who translated many of Madame Guyon's religious poems into English). Wesley also printed an edited English translation of Molinos' Spiritual Guide.
4. Clash of giants: Fénelon and Bossuet Madame Guyon's condemnation and imprisonment, however, did not end the Quietist controversy in France. It continued in the shape of pungent conflict between Fénelon and Bossuet—the greatest clash of spiritual titans in the Roman Catholic Church in our period. The quarrel began in 1696, when Bossuet wrote his Pastoral Instruction on the States of Prayer. This was an exposition of what Bossuet believed to be the true Catholic teaching on prayer, based on the articles of Issy. Bossuet sent a copy to Fénelon, as a member of the Issy tribunal, asking him to approve it. Fénelon, however, refused, detecting in Bossuet's treatise a condemnation of aspects of Madame Guyon's Quietism which Fénelon believed were spiritually sound.
Fénelon wrote in 1697 his own Explication of the Maxims of the Saints concerning the Interior Life, often considered his masterwork, in which he defended the Quietist doctrine of disinterested love (love for God in which the soul rises above concern about its salvation or damnation), and quoted extensively from reputable Roman Catholic spiritual sources to demonstrate the orthodoxy of the doctrine. Provocatively, Fénelon's treatise was published a month in advance of Bossuet's.
Bossuet was incensed; he launched an all-out attack on Fénelon's Explication, which sparked off two years of vitriolic pamphlet warfare between the two bishops. History has harshly judged the conduct of both men in this prolonged and acrimonious controversy, as utterly unworthy of their talents or characters. Bossuet accused Fénelon of destroying the virtue of true Christian hope, by replacing it with an easy-going sentimental assurance; Fénelon accused Bossuet of destroying the virtue of true
Christian love by his opposition to the Quietist doctrine of "disinterested love" for God. Meanwhile, those in France who cared little for Christianity of any sort laughed heartily at the sight of their country's two foremost bishops tearing each other to pieces in print. Bossuet's and Fénelon's quarrel over hope and love seemed, by its public bitterness, to be undermining faith. The satirists of Paris turned this unedifying spectacle into a popular song: Two bishops of France fiercely wrangled In quest of the Truth so entangled.
"Hope's lost in your scheme!"
"Love's gone, it would seem!"
Alas, it was Faith that got mangled.
Bossuet managed to get King Louis on his side in the quarrel, which prompted Fénelon to appeal over the head of the French monarchy to Pope
Innocent XII. This completely alienated Louis, who banished Fénelon from court in the summer of 1697, confining him to his diocese of Cambrai. The royal disgrace lasted for the rest of Fénelon's life.
With Fénelon's appeal to Rome, factions within the Church and the papal court began to line up and take sides. Supporting Fénelon were the Jesuits, who suspected Bossuet of Jansenist sympathies, plus a considerable body of bishops and cardinals who feared that Fénelon's condemnation would discredit true mysticism along with false. On Bossuet's side were the formidable powers of King Louis and the French court, including Madame de Maintenon and the quasi-Jansenist Archbishop Noailles of Paris, and in Rome all the enemies of Molinos, the Spanish father-figure of Quietism, who had only just died in prison for his errors. In March 1699, under extreme pressure from Louis XIV, a reluctant pope Innocent finally gave his decision: he condemned 23 propositions from Fénelon's Explication.
Bossuet had won the battle of the titans. Fénelon submitted unreservedly.
The Quietist controversy was over. Fénelon devoted the rest of his life to the spiritual welfare of his Cambrai diocese, only emerging again into public controversy to lend his efforts to defeating Jansenism (see previous section); there were many Jansenists in Cambrai, and Fénelon disliked their austere anti-mystical spirituality.
Fénelon's influence, like Madame Guyon's, was to live on rather in the Protestant than the Roman Catholic world. His Explication of the Maxims of the Saints concerning the Interior Life was translated into English as early as 1698; his later classic, Treatise on the Existence of God, published in full in 1718, was translated in 1720. Fénelon's life was published in English by A.M.Ramsay in 1723. His main English disciple was John Wesley.