Quietism

Quietism, a name given to a tendency shown at various periods in the history of the church by many classes of mystical religious enthusiasts, of widely different beliefs, to make perfection on earth consist in a condition of uninterrupted contemplation. In this state of quiet the soul ceases to reason, to reflect either on itself or God, or to form any of the ordinary acts of faith, its sole function being passively to receive the infused heavenly light which accompanies this state of inactive contemplation. The first of modern Quietists was the Spanish priest Molinos; its most famous devotee, Madame Guyon, whose gentle but powerful influence led into the same mode of thought the saintly Fénelon. Quietism has been called the Spanish analogue of Quakerism in England, of Jansenism in France, of Pietism in Germany; but these several systems, though they had common tendencies, were also sharply distinguished. It may be said that Quietism involves but little of practical consequence, whether for good or for evil. This may and does hold true in the case of noble and lofty souls like Fénelon; but what moved Bossuet and the church generally to strong opposition was the belief that, carried to its logical conclusion, Quietism led to Antinomianism, and would inevitably prove pernicious in its effects upon the vulgar crowd of followers. From the belief of the lofty and perfect nature of the purely passive state of contemplation there is, it was held, but a single step to the fatal principle in morals, that in this sublime state of contemplation all external things become indifferent to the soul, which is thus absorbed in God; that good works, the sacraments, prayer, are not necessary, and hardly even compatible with the repose of the soul; that so complete is the self-absorption, so independent is the soul of corporeal sense, that even criminal representations and movements of the sensitive part of the soul, and even the external actions of the body, fail to affect the contemplating soul, or to impress it with their debasing influence. See BOSSUET, FÉNELON, GUYON, MOLINOS; also Heppé, Geschichte der Quietistischen Mystik in der Kathol. Kirche (1875).