Stafford Henry Northcote

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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) . ”