Stafford Henry Northcote

“ Hence arose the great Quietist doctrine of disinterested love. “The Quietists maintain,” says a contemporary writer, “that Christian perfection means a love of God so absolutely free from all desire of happiness that it is indifferent to salvation. The soul is moved neither by hope nor fear, nor even by the foretaste of eternal bliss. Its only motive is to do the will and promote the glory of God. ”

“ But in the heat of battle with Bossuet, Fénelon carried his principles beyond all reasonable bounds. The theme of his Maxims; is that, as men grow in holiness they become utterly indifferent to themselves. Not only do they cease to covet the consolations of religion; they lose all incidental pleasure in its exercise. ”

“ Luther had already broken through one link in this chain, when he taught the Protestant world to come directly to Jesus, without troubling about the Church; but Luther still assumed that God could only be reached through the intermediacy of Jesus. Molinos wished to find a royal road to God without any intermediaries at all. The Reformation maintained that the Church, so far from being a help, was a hindrance, to union with Jesus; whereas Molinos welcomed both Church and Jesus as helps to union with God, always provided that the believer treated both as means to an end beyond themselves. ”

“ Fénelon is on firmer ground when he leads a reaction against the “mercantile system” of Colbert, with its crushing restrictions on trade; or when he sings the praises of agriculture, in the hope of bringing back labour to the land, and thereby ensuring the physical efficiency of the race. Valuable and far-sighted as were these ideas, they fitted but ill into the scheme of a romance. Seldom was Voltaire wider of the mark than when he called Télémaque a Greek poem in French prose. It is too motivé, too full of ingenious contrivances, to be really Greek. ”

“ St Cyran’s character has been always something of a puzzle. Many excellent contemporary judges were profoundly impressed; others, as one of them said, went away bewildered by this strange abbé, who never argued a question out, but leapt from one point to another in broken, incoherent phrases. Grace of expression he had none; perhaps no man of equal spiritual insight ever found it so hard to make his meaning clear, whether on paper or by word of mouth. ”

“ Constitutional Gallicanism dealt with the relation of church and state in France. It began in the 13th century, as a protest against the theocratic pretensions of the medieval popes. They claimed that they, as vicars of Christ, had the right to interfere in the temporal concerns of princes, and even to depose sovereigns of whom they disapproved. ”

“ Quietism is an outgrowth from the mysticism of the great 16th-century Spaniards, St Teresa and St John of the Cross, though it would be unfair to hold them responsible for all the utterances of their disciples. Certainly St Teresa made much of “passivity,” but she only regarded it as a refuge for a few specially constituted souls; whereas the Quietists designedly brought it within the reach of everyone. In St Teresa the passivity itself was balanced by a strong attachment to the virtues of the active life, and an equally strong devotion to the Church. ”

“ Here he argues that the more love we have for ourselves, the less we can spare for our Maker. Perfection lies in getting rid of self-hood altogether—in never thinking of ourselves, or even of the relation in which God stands to us. The saint does not love Christ as his Redeemer, but only as the Redeemer of the human race. Bossuet (q.v.) attacked this position as inconsistent with Christianity. Fénelon promptly appealed to Rome, and after two years of bitter controversy his book was condemned by Innocent XII. in 1699. As to the merits of the controversy opinion will always be divided. ”

“ All through her unhappy married life the mystical attraction had grown steadily in violence; it now attached itself to a certain Father Lacombe, a Barnabite monk of weak character and unstable intellect. In 1681 she left her family and joined him; for five years the two rambled about together in Savoy and the south-east of France, spreading their mystical ideas. At last they excited the suspicion of the authorities; in 1686 Lacombe was recalled to Paris, put under surveillance, and finally sent to the Bastille in the autumn of 1687. ”

“ Andilly’s five daughters all took the veil there; the second, Angélique de St Jean Arnauld d’Andilly (1624–1684) rose to be abbess, was a writer of no mean repute, and one of the most remarkable figures of the second generation of Jansenism. One of Andilly’s sons became a hermit at Port Royal; the eldest, Antoine (1615–1699) , was first a soldier, afterwards a priest. As the Abbé Arnauld, he survives as author of some interesting Memoirs of his time. The second son, Simon Arnauld de Pomponne (1616–1699) , early entered public life. ”

“ On the 3rd of September 1687 he made public profession of his errors, and was sentenced to imprisonment for life. In the following November, Innocent signed a bull condemning sixty-eight propositions from the Guida spirituale and other unpublished writings of its author. At some date unknown in 1696 or 1697 Molinos died in prison.
Contemporary Protestants saw in the fate of Molinos nothing more than a persecution by the Jesuits of a wise and enlightened man, who had dared to withstand the petty ceremonialism of the Italian piety of the day. ”

“ During these latter years her retreat at Blois became a regular place of pilgrimage for admirers, foreign quite as often as French. Indeed, she is one of the many prophetesses whose fame has stood highest out of their own country. French critics of all schools of thought have generally reckoned her an hysterical degenerate; in England and Germany she has as often roused enthusiastic admiration. ”

“ Bossuet can only be thought of as the high-priest of authority and common-sense; but Fénelon has been made by turns into a sentimentalist, a mystical saint, an 18th-century philosophe, an ultramontane churchman and a hysterical hypocrite. ”

“ Their whole soul is taken up in loving God; and they neither know nor care whether God loves them in return. But Bossuet had little trouble in persuading the world that Wenn ich Dich liebe, was geht es Dich an? is but a sorry foundation on which to build up a personal religion; and the condemnation of the Maxims proved the deathblow to official Quictism. But flickers of “passivity,” not always easily distinguishable from the teaching of Molinos, are still here and there produced by violent reaction from the prevailing legalism of the church of Rome. ”

“ And neither is intelligible, except in relation to the rival theory of Ultramontanism (q.v.) . Dogmatic Gallicanism was concerned with the question of ecclesiastical government. It maintained that the church’s infallible authority was committed to pope and bishops jointly. The pope decided in the first instance, but his judgments must be tacitly or expressly confirmed by the bishops before they had the force of law. This ancient theory survived much longer in France than in other Catholic countries. ”

“ Why it is unfitted to be a test of sanctity in general has been explained at length by Bossuet in a remarkable Instruction sur les états d’oraison, published while the Quietist controversy was at its height. ”

“ The abiding result of his tutorship is a code of carefully graduated moral lessons—the Fables, the Dialogues of the Dead (a series of imaginary conversations between departed heroes) , and finally Télémaque, where the adventures of the son of Ulysses in search of a father are made into a political novel with a purpose. Not, indeed, that Fénelon meant his book to be the literal paper Constitution some of his contemporaries thought it. Like other Utopias, it is an easy-going compromise between dreams and possibilities. ”

“ Angélique’s strength lay chiefly in her character. Her sister and collaborator, Agnes, was also a graceful writer; and her Letters, edited by Prosper Feugère (2 vols., Paris, 1858) , throw most valuable light on the inner aims and aspirations of the Jansenist movement. The first relative to join their projects of reform was their nephew, Antoine Lemaistre, who threw up brilliant prospects at the bar to settle down at the Abbey gates (1638) . Here he was presently joined by his brother, de Saci, and other hermits, who led an austere semi-monastic existence, though without taking any formal vow. ”

“ Among the Quietists both these checks disappear, and passivity becomes the one and only test of holiness. But if passivity is all in all, there is no room for the Virtues of the active life; all Quietists cherished the ancient saying that one moment’s contemplation is worth a thousand years’ good works. Still less room had they for the Church. It only professed to guide men to God ”

“ Nay, the soul must be ready to renounce its hopes of heaven, 'and the scrupulous will often feel themselves bound to do so; for in the last and fiercest trials they are invincibly persuaded of their own damnation. ”

“ Protestantism had tried to put an end to this state of things by sweeping away the Church altogether, but the Quietists were more tolerant than Luther. They did not wish to abolish the Church; they admitted that it was a necessary stage in the evolution of the human soul; but' they insisted that it could only bring a man on to the lowest slopes of Paradise. Those who aspired to be really holy must learn to look beyond the Church, and enter into immediate, personal relations with their Maker. ”

“ It was administered with great strictness, and yet on broad and liberal lines. There was no bureaucratic fussiness, no seeking after popularity; but every man, whether great or small, was treated exactly as became his station in the world. ”

“ It found enthusiastic friends and violent detractors. Bossuet approved its orthodoxy, but not its over-elaborate style; and it was destructively criticized by Richard Simon, the founder of Biblical criticism in France. ”

“ But his general projects of reform were by no means allowed to sleep, though here he worked hand in hand with his old friend Jansen. Both traced the evils of their time to the Jesuits and Schoolmen. Their dialectic had corrupted theology; their hand-to-mouth utilitarianism had played havoc with traditional church-institutions. Accordingly, Jansen set to work to remedy one evil by writing a big book on St Augustine, the great master of theological method. St Cyran dealt with the other evil in an equally bulky treatise, the Petrus Aurelius (1633) . ”

“ He began to dream of reforming Catholicism on Augustinian lines, and thus defeating the Protestants by their own weapons. They appealed to primitive antiquity; he answered that his Church understood antiquity better than theirs. ”