Quietism (Christian Philosophy) - 17th Century

17th Century

The Capuchin friar Benet Canfield (1562-1611), an English Catholic living in Belgium, espoused quietism in his Way of Perfection a tract on deep prayer and meditation.

However, quietism's primary defender was Miguel de Molinos, referred to by the Catholic Encyclopedia as the "founder" of Quietism. The apostle of the Quietist movement in 17th-century France was Molinos' correspondent, the prolific writer Mme Guyon, who won an influential convert at the court of Louis XIV in Madame de Maintenon and an ally within the Catholic hierarchy in Archbishop Fénelon.

Molinos and the doctrines of quietism were finally condemned by Pope Innocent XI in the Bull Coelestis Pastor of 1687. A commission in France found most of Madame Guyon’s works intolerable and the government confined her, first in a convent, then in the Bastille. In 1699, after Fénelon’s spirited defense in a press war with Bossuet, Pope Innocent XII prohibited the circulation of Fénelon’s Maxims of the Saints, to which Fénelon submitted at once. The inquisition's proceedings against remaining quietists in Italy lasted until the eighteenth century.