Terminology Tuesday: Quietism

The term ‘quietism’ derives from the belief that God is only pleased to work in the heart of a person whose whole being is passive or quiet. It may be applied generally or specifically. In a general sense it denotes an attitude, found in many religions and at all periods of the history of the church, which suggests that one should ‘Let go and let God’ or ‘Stop thinking and empty your mind of everything’ and withdraw, individually or corporately, from concern with the world.


Such tendencies or teaching may have threatened orthodox belief most seriously in the Middle Ages, when they attracted the denunciation of the Flemish mystic Ruysbroeck (1293–1381); but the term quietism is usually reserved for the seventeenth-century controversy which received papal censure. The teaching of the Spanish priest Miguel de Molinos (1628–96) was condemned by Innocent XI in 1687; and the more orthodox ‘semi-quietism’ of the French nun Madame de Guyon (1648–1717), which was defended by Archbishop Fénelon (1651–1715), was condemned by Innocent XII in 1699.


Molinos was condemned for holding that ‘one must totally abandon one’s whole self in God and thereafter remain like a lifeless body’, since ‘natural activity is the enemy of grace and it hinders God’s action and true perfection, because God wishes to act in us without us’. This may seem a very spiritual regard for grace and a rejection of works, but in fact it is the opposite. The ‘natural’ activities of the believer which are discarded include petitionary prayer, self-examination, worship with fellow-believers and participation in the Lord’s Supper. All ordinary means of grace are rejected in favour of an infallible short cut: if the believer makes himself passive, God must raise his soul to union with himself.


Quietism also taught that such an experience of union with God was not a momentary ecstasy, nor a temporary stage on the path of prayer, but a permanent stage of ‘pure love’. Furthermore, because in this ‘mystical death’ God was everything and the believer nothing, the believer was not only unconcerned about his own behaviour, but—on the grounds that all his acts were God’s acts—he could hold that his acts were sinless by definition, even if they caused actual harm to others. Thus quietism represents an individualistic approach to salvation and an ethic similar to that found in *pantheism.


Quietism is a distortion of orthodox *mystical theology, but official condemnation of the one produced deep suspicion about the other. In Catholicism, uncertainty lasted throughout the eighteenth century and caused a virtual suspension of serious reflection on *religious experience. The effect on Protestantism was even more extended. Quietism had some influence on *pietism’s understanding of the Christian life as one of sanctification and *union with Christ. But *Ritschl’s rather unsympathetic Geschichte des Pietismus (History of Pietism, 3 vols., Bonn, 1880–86) did nothing to dissuade subsequent Reformed theologians from feeling that all so-called Christian mysticism was as suspect as quietism.

Bibliography
J. Aumann, Christian Spirituality in the Catholic Tradition (London and San Francisco, 1985); M. de Molinos, The Spiritual Guide, ed. and tr. R. P. Baird (New York, 2010), see esp. B. McGinn, ‘Introduction: Part Two’; E. Herman, ‘Quietism’, ERE 10, pp. 533–538; D. Knowles, What Is Mysticism? (London, 1967); R. A. Knox, Enthusiasm (Oxford, 1950); E. Underhill, Mysticism (London, 1911).

Hillyer, P. N. (2016). Quietism. In M. Davie, T. Grass, S. R. Holmes, J. McDowell, & T. A. Noble (Eds.), New Dictionary of Theology: Historical and Systematic (Second Edition, p. 724). London; Downers Grove, IL: Inter-Varsity Press; InterVarsity Press.

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