The Enlightenment & Awakening Era · 1675-1699 · Spain, France
Quietist Controversy (Molinos, Guyon)
Part of another tradition's story
This group's story is told as part of another tradition here, rather than as its own entry.
About This Movement
In 1675 a Spanish priest living in Rome, Miguel de Molinos, published The Spiritual Guide, teaching a prayer of total interior passivity: stop striving, stop even asking, and let God act. It was hugely popular until it was not; Molinos was arrested in 1685 and sixty-eight propositions drawn from his work were condemned in 1687. The quarrel then moved to France, around Jeanne Guyon, a widow whose Short and Easy Method of Prayer taught something similar, and who found a defender in Fénelon, archbishop of Cambrai, and an implacable opponent in Bossuet, bishop of Meaux. Guyon spent years in confinement, including in the Bastille; Fénelon's defence of her was condemned by Rome in 1699, and he read out his own submission from his own pulpit.
Sources
- Molinos, The Spiritual Guide (1675); the Inquisition process (1685-87) and Coelestis Pastor's 68 condemned propositions (1687) (primary) — The condemned-proposition lists reflect the prosecutor's framing, and confessions were extracted under trial pressure.
- Madame Guyon: A Short and Easy Method of Prayer (1685), her autobiography, the prison narratives (Mourad & Guenin-Lelle, The Prison Narratives of Jeanne Guyon, OUP, 2012) (primary) — A woman's voice at the center of the controversy, documented under real institutional pressure - the autobiography was written under her spiritual directors' orders and revised while she was imprisoned.
- The Fenelon-Bossuet contest: Maximes des saints (1697), Bossuet's Relation sur le quietisme, the 1699 condemnation (Cum alias) (primary) — The controversy's public record, in both principals' own words.
- Bernard McGinn, The Crisis of Mysticism: Quietism in Seventeenth-Century Spain, Italy, and France (2021), with Patricia Ward, Experimental Theology in America (2009) (secondary) — Ward covers the Protestant afterlife of Guyon's texts.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 7, 'Continental Catholic Europe' (Aston) (reference) — The nearest chapter covering this intra-Catholic spirituality dispute.