Quietism: A Meditation For Christian Mystics
Molinos, Madame Guyon, Fenelon, Madame Bourignon, Chevalier Ramsay
The first use of the term Quietism comes by way of the Catholic critique on the influential work of the Spanish Priest Miguel de Molinos, who became a friend to Pope Innocent XI (14th) and published The Spiritual Guide in 1675 while in Rome. Although Quietism was coined by the critics of Molinos, such as the Jesuit Giovanni Paolo Oliva, as a label it has outlived its critical origins and serves now as a category of controversial Christian mysticism. But as with many so-called heretic controversies, the dramas attached to them are relatively artificial, existing as they have as a result of the Church’s need to cling to a series of dogmas in order to hold together a coherent Christian worldview and an interpretative model of the scriptures that extends back to canonized Church authorities.
Miguel de Molinos’s work called The Spiritual Guide WHICH Disentangles the Soul, AND Brings it by the Inward Way TO THE Getting of Perfect Contemplation AND THE Rich Treasure of Internal Peace, was an overnight success, being translated in six languages and published in twenty editions in five years. However, Molinos was not under the impression that he was inventing any new form of Christianity, but relied on other mystical Christian authors such as St. Teresa, John of the Cross, [FRAN-sis dee SAYLZ] Francis de Sales and Jane de Chantal’s work as a primary influence. But the Spiritual Guide was not accepted with only open arms. It roused suspicion among Italian Jesuits and French clerics in Rome, set off a contest of pamphlets and books by defenders and opposers, and ultimately led to Molinos’s arrest by the Inquisition in July 18th of 1685. As Molinos’s own opening words explain, “There is nothing more difficult, than to please all People, not more easie and common than to censure Books that come abroad in the World.” And indeed some 12 years after its publication, Molinos’s Spiritual Guide was put on the Index of Forbidden Books, in 1687 when Quietism was officially deemed heretical by the Catholic Church. And most of all the 12,000 letters of Molinos correspondence were likely destroyed after his arrest, making the substance of his sentencing and the evidence against him all the more difficult for historians to find. Thus there is some disagreement about Molinos’s trial and we do not know if his confessions made in 1687 were genuine or given as a means to free himself from imprisonment. Regardless, he was condemned to life in prison wherein he died in 1697.
So what was it that Molinos taught that made him popular among mystics and dangerous to the Church? Some maintain that his more extreme doctrines weren’t actually found in his popular book, but in texts or letters that were later sealed by the Catholic Church.
This essay proposes to sketch a lineage of Quietism based on its early advocates and its later fruits of influence, culminating ultimately in a brand of Christian Universalism so radically different from the typical modern Christianities we have often been led to believe are the exclusive custodians of the correct tradition. I want to stress, however, that Quietism in and of itself should not be seen as a School on its own, with a strict series of disciplines that define it, but rather a tendency with its own varieties, which was at this time becoming popular especially among those seeking to transcend sectarian oppression or achieve an immediate spiritual experience.
In The Spiritual Guide, we find Molinos teaching about the Soul’s need for interior silence, and how in the act of prayer one should remain in quietude with the Divine Presence and give themselves wholly up to God: “… it is expedient to curtail the multiplication of sensible and fervent acts, the soul continuing in quiet and resting in that inward silence.” - Miguel de Molinos (d. 1697)
Molinos taught what has been dubbed a radical passivity. The soul as he saw it could quiet down its association with the body and the sensible world to such a degree that even notions of salvation became obstacles of attachment. Of the soul “Let her be silent, and desire neither to act nor think; let her forget herself and plunge into that obscure faith. How secure and safe would she be, though it might [seem] to her that abiding thus in nothingness she would be lost…” - Miguel de Molinos (d. 1697)
“There are three kinds of silence; the first is of words, the second of desires, the third of thoughts.” And when these modes of silence give way to the Divine Love, “God speaks with the soul, communicates himself to her, and in the abyss of her own depth, teaches her the most perfect and exalted wisdom.”
This, in short, captures a small brush stroke of Molinos’s Quietism, where the individual truly believes in the inner kingdom enough to explore it without permission from some external pretender of authority. That we should find these strands of meditative practice and mysticism among Christians is however not as surprising as it has been made to seem. As we will shortly see, the Quietists did not believe they were contradicting scripture, the Church Fathers, or other venerable mystics of the faith, but rather adhering to a mystical doctrine revealed in these teachings and discoverable for every individual whether they be literate or illiterate, so long as they have a heart to love.
For the next exponent of Quietism we find a character perhaps better known than Molinos, who fleshes out her practice of contemplative and passive meditation in no shortage of books and controversies. This is the divine Jeanne Guyon, better known as Madame Guyon.
Madame Guyon was born to a noble family in France in 1648, to devoutly religious parents. She was exposed early on to the notions of a pious life devoted to God, and demonstrates her will for self education in numerous books, including her autobiography wherein she recounts her variety of mystical experiences and her ultimate realization that the Soul is made to enjoy God, and can exist in a state where there is no distinction between Soul and God. She suffered various abuses throughout her life, and taught herself to weather the storms of abuse with wit and tranquility, foreseeing that she would endure great pains on her quest to love God completely but would never give up that Love. As she summarizes it: “The world, seeing I quit it, persecuted and turned me into ridicule. I was its entertainment, and the subject of its fables.” When Guyon’s denial of the world resulted in her pursuing her devotion instead of parties, dinners, and walks with the finery, she was judged as being defeated and lost, when in reality she believed this was her victory over the world: the annihilation of the self and the unification with the love of God, the victory after the dark night of the Soul.
It was Madame Guyon’s treatise A Short and Easy Method of Prayer, published in 1685, which both secured her influence and helped land her into imprisonment in 1688 for the better part of a year. This work was not initially intended for publication, but directed to a small audience seeking a new connection with divinity. In fact, Guyon’s primary aim in writing it was to induce from others their total and complete love of God with all their hearts. She believed all souls were called to prayer and capable of salvation. This is the application of the heart to God, and she finds continual examples throughout scripture to support her understanding that Christians are called to a state of Prayer; such as (1 Thess. 5:17) and (Mark 13:33) where we are told "Rejoice evermore. Pray without ceasing. In every thing give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.” - (1 Thess. V 17) and "See, watch, and pray; for you do not know when the time may be.” - Mark 13:33
Her treatise on prayer was spread through the French royal court of Louis XIV (14th), and was the subject of increasing alarm especially after the official condemnation of Molinos’s Quietism.
In the act of prayer, Guyon found the universal applicant and means for liberation. Strictly a prayer of the heart and not the mind, for “the prayer of the heart is not interrupted by the exercises of reason…” God was not a stern and brooding patriarch possessed only of an inaccessible superiority and the powers of judgement, but was all that there is, and therefore to Guyon, “Nothing is so easily obtained as the possession and enjoyment of God…” Her approach was one of direct experience. Hurtling at once over the meddling middlemen that pretend they can stand in between the Souls of others and that Ultimate Reality these Souls are already immersed in. God as that which exists at the very summit of perfection by necessity is a power seeking us with a much greater degree of potential than we can muster for ourselves. “Though you think yourselves ever so stupid, dull, and incapable of sublime attainments, yet, by prayer, you may live in God Himself with less difficulty or interruption than you live in the vital air.”
There are two methods the Madame teaches for introducing the soul to prayer. One is Meditative Reading, which is quite the opposite of the style of fast-reading for maximum gains of information, and is instead a gentle, deliberately minimal reading of a certain practical or speculative truth, a tasting of information that we feel connected with, and then a meditative reflection upon this information. The second method is Meditation, which Guyon explains to be seasonal, in that we are not always in a state where we truly feel a charged Presence of God. But when you have found that state, “…pause gently and sweetly thereon, not to employ the reason, but merely to calm and fix the mind: for you must observe, that your principal exercise should ever be the Presence of God; your subject, therefore, should rather serve to stay the mind, than exercise the understanding.”
With this the Soul may begin to learn of itself by approaching that inward place where the greatest powers of God already dwell. There unfolds layers of warmth and resonant meaning, a deep embrace and acceptance. And in this exalted state, though the intellect is paused, there is still a great deal of learning. Learning by “..animating the will by affection, rather than fatiguing the understanding by study..”
As for the senses which become obstacles if we continue to turn our mind to their bidding in this process, Guyon says that in meditation “…we wage insensibly a very advantageous, though indirect war with them.” If the Kingdom of God is truly within us all, as it is told in scripture, then we can look within to live in this kingdom. Even the outside world is in the heart of God wherein we move and hath our being, but far greater are the powers within that have manifested this seemingly external reality. The prayer must begin with closing the eyes as a signal of opening the soul, whereby the person collects themselves inwardly, gradually mutes out the irritations of the senses, and then beholds with the heart the glow of God’s love, increasing and increasing. Here the person may speak their Lord’s Prayer in their native tongue or confess their wants and give all of themselves to God, so that there are no hidden agendas or shadows between. But if the inclination is to peace and silence, then naturally it is better to move beyond the words. This art of meditation retains a sure degree of flexibility. Words and prayers may serve at one time to bring us into sync with the Divine Presence, where at others we must do nothing but remain in stillness with our hearts fixed inwardly on the peace of Divine Love. This is the fruit of the Quietist: extending the periods of meditative silence and decreasing the exertion of reason. And this quieted experience of Divine Love opens the gates to the second degree of prayer, which presents Guyon’s notion of the abandonment of the self—which she by no means pretends to be the inventor of, but rather finds support for this in scripture and in previous mystics of her faith.
“Abandonment is the casting off of all selfish care, that we may be altogether at the Divine Disposal. All Christians are exhorted to this resignation: for it is said to all, “Be not anxious for tomorrow, for your Heavenly Father knoweth all that is necessary for you” (Matt. xx. 25). “In all thy ways acknowledge him, and he shall direct thy paths” (Prov. iii. 6). “Commit thy ways unto the Lord, and thy thoughts shall be established” (Prov. xvi. 3). “Commit thy ways unto the Lord, and he himself will bring it to pass” (Psa. xxxvi. 5).”
Madame Guyon did not believe that all people could sink into nothingness and also commit themselves to the will of God. Rather that this method of meditation was a sure means of experiencing Union with God, and directly inhaling the love that is our divine right. It did not mean that the Soul would not be called into a different activity altogether, and “..as soon as God is pleased to withdraw this view from the soul, it should freely yield to the deprivation.” If the season changes and the Soul is called to external actions, it does not suit to forget those states of union but to practice virtue in the world, and to let the kiss of God live on within us, refusing to bloody our hands with fruitless desires or put on a mask for the wishes of others, but to tend only those desires aligned with the Divine Presence, and leave all judgment to the Higher Power.
In her Commentary On the Song of Songs, which Guyon apparently wrote over the course of a day and a half, she writes on the different grades of Union with God and His Divine Love, saying: “These unions are of two sorts: one transitory and short lived, the other permanent and sustained by the perpetual presence of God, and a sweet and tranquil love which continues in the midst of everything. Such, in a few words, is the union of the powers which is a union of betrothal.” - Madame Guyon ()
She goes on to mention that a result of this spiritual marriage unites the Soul to God in a manner that no longer requires the persons of the Trinity. This and many other instances were seen by certain dogmatists as a breach of the Catholic tradition. Which we can find another example of when Guyon explains that in the mystical union the distinctions between the Self and that which is are no longer a part of the experience: “Here the soul cannot and ought not any longer to make such a distinction; God is she and she is God, since by the consummation of the marriage she is absorbed into God and lost in him without power to distinguish or find herself again.” - Madame Guyon
Her second imprisonment at [vin-SENZ] Vincennes Fortress came in 1695 and would last until January of 1698, when she was moved to the Bastille in Paris until 1703. This seven years of imprisonment was not only due to the unfavorable reception of her works by Catholic authorities, but also as a result of the Quietist Controversy between her staunch supporter Francois Fenelon, and the then religious adviser to King Louis 14th, Bishop Jacques-Benigne Bossuet, whose fiery conflict we will come to shortly.
Before her first detainment we should note that Madam Guyon refused to renounce her beliefs when the agents of the king’s minister came for her in 1688. And a few days after her release, she met the acquaintance of Francios Fenelon, a public intellectual and the Bishop of Cambray, who would become in 1689 the tutor to the young Duke of Burgundy, then second in line to the throne and the future King of France.
Madame Guyon recalls: “We had some conversations on the subject of a spiritual life, in which he [Fenelon] made several objections to my experiences therein. I answered them with my usual simplicity, which, as I found, gained upon him. As the affair of Molinos at that time made a great noise, the plainest things were distrusted, and the terms used by mystic writers exploded. But I so clearly expounded everything to him, and so fully solved all his objections, that no one more fully imbibed my sentiments than he [Fenelon]; which has since laid the foundation of that persecution he has suffered. His answers to the Bishop of Meaux [Bossuet] evidently show this to all who have read them.” - Guyon
While Fenelon, himself a frenchman born to a line of old nobility, was tutoring the Duke of Burgundy, he wrote his famous work The Adventures of Telemachus, which made several attacks on the absolutism and divine right of monarchs, and argued for a certain separation of Church and State coincidentally around the same time John Locke was also writing of such a separation. Fenelon’s novel was originally written for the young Duke alone, but was leaked from the royal household by a servant or copyist and published without Fenelon’s consent. The Adventures of Telemachus would go on to become the most popular book in 18th century France behind the Bible, influencing the Great Awakening in America, the ideas of Thomas Jefferson, and shaped the modern usage of the word mentor as being an experienced and trusted advisor. Fenelon was ahead of his time in many other ways, conceiving of the the world as one great republic, and that all wars are actually civil wars between the great family of the human race. A number of sympathies can be found between he and Guyon’s understanding of the internal spiritual life, as this extract from his work Spiritual Progress shows:
"No, O my God! it is not necessary to descend into the depths nor to pass beyond the seas; it is not necessary to ascend into the heavens to find Thee; Thou art nearer to us than we are to ourselves.” - Fenelon (d. )
Spiritual Progress: Or Instructions in the Divine Life of the Soul. Translated by James W. Metcalf. New York: M. W. Dodd, 1853.
In 1697, the Bishop Paul Godet des Marais [mah-ray] expressed new concerns over Madame Guyon’s opinions and was worried they were too similar to the Quietism of Molinos. The Madame de Maintenon who received these suspicions responded with a request for an official examination of Guyon’s beliefs by Church authorities, which happened to be carried out by two of Fenelon’s friends at the time. This all culminated in the 34 Articles of Issy which condemned certain opinions in Guyon’s writings and resulted in (Boh-SWAY) Bossuet, the Bishop of (Mohw) Meaux, to order her not to write any book or proceed to lead any souls in prayer. These articles were signed by Guyon in an official retraction, through she contested as well that certain of her writings had been altered without her control. But it didn’t end here. Bossuet was asked to follow up on the articles with an exposition detailing the outcome and the beliefs of Guyon, an exposition also sent to Fenelon, who was a member of the commission tasked to address Guyon’s opinions. Fenelon, however, then a friend to Bosseut, refused to sign this exposition, and set out to defend Madame Guyon in one of his famous works Maxims of the Saints. This work would come as a surprise to Louis 14th and many others, resulting in a major fall out between Fenelon and the royal court. King Louis promptly took the issue of Fenelon up with the Pope and removed Fenelon from his tutorship of the Duke of Burgundy, banished him from Versailles and ordered him to remain within the archdiocese of Cambrai, resulting in a clash of pamphlets and the formal condemnation of Fenelon’s Maxims by the Inquisition. Fenelon as a result submitted to the Pope’s ruling and, too all observing eyes, had put the matter of the Quietist Controversy to rest. However, this would be the same year The Adventures of Telemachus was published, which further irritated Louis the 14th, who would never revoke the charges against Fenelon, who was to remain the Archbishop of Cambrai while under house arrest.
The war of books between Fenelon and Bossuet and the resulting 100 meetings between Cardinals over and the entanglements of Louis 14th and Pope Innocent the 12th over the whole affair, is known as the Quietist Controversy, and at its center were the writings of Madame Guyon and the issue of Divine Love.
In Fenelon’s biography, written by his Scottish protege and the literary maverick, Chevalier Ramsay, Ramsay recalls: (Boh-SWAY) “M. Bossuet, accustomed to have himself admired as the first genius of his age, was not able to tolerate anyone who had turned their eyes upon him to direct their gaze towards Fenelon.” - Ramsay, Life of Fenelon
“The Bishop of Meaux [Bossuet] had always held a contrary opinion on disinterested love. He believed that he understood the dogma better than any person, and could never endure, when one tried to make him perceive diferently, that the tradition of the Church upon a point so essential had escaped him.” - Ramsay, Life, p. 52
Bosuett in his condemnation of Guyon’s Quietism wrote “…it was not an affair of remote results, but of a system coherent in all its parts, wherein the evident design was to establish a brutal indifference for heaven and hell, for vice and for virtue; a forgetfulness of Jesus Christ and all His mysteries—a brutish inaction and an impious quietude.” - Bossuet
Madame Guyon for herself would never concede to this criticism, and in her defense Fenelon writes: “All interior paths lead toward a pure or disinterested love. This pure love is the highest degree of Christian perfection; it is the end of all the ways that the saints have known. … If someone should doubt the truth and perfection of this love, I offer to show him a universal and evident tradition from the Apostles down to St. Frances de Sale without a single interruption.” - Fenelon
Reflecting in the aftermath of this whole affair is a certain Scotsman who, in 1710 visits Fenelon on a spiritual quest of his own. Enter Andrew Micheal Ramsay, or Chevalier Ramsay as history would remember him: a member of the Royal Society, friend to Isac Newton, Freemason, a Knight of St. Lazarus, and a tutor of royalty. In Masonic history he is known as the legendary orator whose speech would end up shaping how the Order moved and developed throughout France and Europe in the 18th century and ever since.
Ramsay was born in Ayr, Scotland probably around 1686. At fourteen years old he entered the University at Edinburgh, and when he finished his schooling accepted the role of tutoring the two sons of the 4th Earl of Wemyss, whereupon he wrote at the time in 1706: “All my ambition now is to live forgotten by all,” and “I have nothing to interrupt my conversation within, but an hour or two’s attendance at night upon two of the most innocent and spright little boys I ever knew.”
Before he was 23 years old, Ramsay, who had now had access to one of the largest libraries in his country, penned a number of poems revealing a spiritual depth and perhaps his innate tolerance for the Quietist approach to Divine Love :
“O sovereign beauty, boundless source of love,
From thee I'm sprung, to thee again I move!
Like some small gleam of light, some feeble ray
That lost itself by wandering from the day,
Or some eclips'd, some faint and straggling beam
That fain would wrestle back from whence it came,
So I, poor banish'd I, oft strive to flee
Through the dark maze of nothing up to Thee!”
Chevalier Ramsay
Divine Friendship
Ramsay probably already encountered a form of Quietism in Scotland per the teachings of the mystic Madame Antoinette (boo-ree-nyon) Bourignon, whose writings were condemned by all Church authorities. In the Netherlands, Ramsay would have certainly encountered her work through Pierre Poiret, a devoted pupil of Madame Bourignon who stayed by her side until her death. Madame B urged her audience to pray continually for greater light on divine matters, and believed she channeled the Holy Spirit and could discern between good and evil spirits, disclaiming to her audience that: “It is the Spirit that teaches me the doctrine which I write, but as for the faults which are in the words, it is I who commit them, and not the Holy Spirit.” - Madame Bourignon (d. )
“They who see me write, know very well that I do it without any human speculation or study, and that it flows from my spirit as a river of water flows from its fountain, and that I only lend my hand and my spirit to another power than mine.” - Madame Bourignon
The attested psychic powers of Madame Bourignon ranged from precognitive dreams and automatic writing, to telepathy, but she stressed that these abilities should never take priority over the individual’s path to Divine Love, and could be a means for evil entities to deceive the person if he does not bring to these experiences an incorruptible goodness. She writes: “I have sometimes had Dreams and Visions coming from God, as I may afterwards make appear by Experience; but I do not rely on these Dreams and Visions, unless the same things that I have seen and dream'd be confirm'd unto me by a secret Notice…”
She attests to having witnessed a variety of miracles in her life and compares these events to the ultimate alchemical work: “some were blind for years, and received their sight in an instant; others were dumb, and recovered their speech by supernatural means; others did hang and flee visibly in the air, before all the people; others were without pulse and motion for some nights and days, and in an instant would arise and walk cheerfully.”
“These are true miracles … With these philosopher’s stones they change earthly souls into the pure gold of Divine charity.”
The Scottish Bishop George Garden who wrote Bourignon’s biography and paid dearly for defending her confirmed that Bourignon was tested by the devil with specters and terrible noises during meditation. These intrusive works of Satan, as she understood them to be, were aspects of the corruptible nature that had to be subdued. In this way, the discovery of internal love lies in getting through the dark nights of the soul, and much like Madame Guyon would later expand on, Bourignon believed: “God created Man only to be loved by him, and for no other End.”
“The Good Spirit and the Evil, may be known by the Qualities which they have. The Spirit of God has in him a Peace and Sweetness that comforts the Soul, and draws it to an inward Quiet. But the Spirit of the Devil disturbs the Understanding, disquiets it, and robs it of Tranquility and Rest. The Spirit of God acts sweetly and strongly in Peace and Tranquility of Mind.” - Madame Bourignon
Bourignon would write some twenty-two works and achieve a fair degree of renown, criticism, and harassment in her time. Her work has received little scholarly attention, which means, like all of the Quietist literature, it represents a major opportunity for future study.
Now Chevalier Ramsay’s association with Bourignon’s pupil Poiret was short-lived, and came as a result of Ramsay’s personal spiritual quest, not merely his literary potential. Ramsay admits to searching all the religions of his native country for the truth and coming out unsatisfied. He saw too many contradictions among the Protestants and considered Atheism to be most absurd and far more extravagant and unsupportable than the wildest sect of believers. He then sought out Deism as a sober refuge but could not shake his respect for the Christian religion, though he thought to take up among them in any denomination to be a childish weakness. “My mind was often overwhelmed with a thousand doubts.”
And it was with these stirring doubts in mind that in 1710 Ramsay visits Cambrai and meets Francios Fenelon, where together the two men would spend six months examining every aspect of religion. Ultimately, Fenelon won Ramsay over with a peculiar Catholic conversion, meticulously combing out a context to fit the Church into and the necessity for an authoritative interpretive power over the scriptures, lest any literate peasant band together the most extreme conceptions without consequence, and cause an unpredictable ripple of confusion.
Ramsay reasserts his suspicion of all sectarians, and Fenelon encourages him to understand that if you regard the Church only through the lens of its human flaws you will erase all of the good found therein. Rather, it would be wiser to focus on the positive effects of such an order and the broad scale advantage it offers.
Through a long and intriguing episode, Ramsay converts to Fenelon’s Catholicism, but nonetheless veils his own Universalism from the public throughout his life, which would become definite public knowledge after the posthumous publication of Ramsay’s Masterwork on the Universality of Religion: The Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion.
Judging by Ramsay’s account of the conversations between he and Fenelon, we can understand what Ramsay was searching for and how Fenelon was able to convey a brand of Christian faith that this complex gentleman required. And much like his mentor’s premiere novel, Ramsay wrote a novel that achieved a renown of its own. This was The Travels of Cyrus, which became a bestseller of its time and used a fictional depiction of the Persian King Cyrus as a vessel by which to convey the religious doctrines of the pagans, including that of the Egyptian Hermes. This novel condemns the indulgence of luxury and power, and certainly critiques the pomposity of wealth and its corruption of monarchs. It also reveals the unorthodox leanings of Ramsay himself and foreshadows his ability to connect modern traditions back to their familiar predecessors, as he would come to do for Freemasonry after being initiated into the Order at Horn Lodge in Westminster around 1729.
In 1737, Ramsay not only prepared the most famous Masonic Oration in history, which probably effected the comparatively dry second edition of James Anderson’s Masonic constitutions, but Ramsay urged Cardinal Fluery, then the chief minister to King Louis the 15th, to push for the Church’s blessing and legitimization of the fraternity. The Cardinal’s response, written on the letter itself, said something akin to: “The King will not hear of it.” And in the wake of Ramsay’s letter, Louis the 15th issued a rather unenforceable edict in 1738 prohibiting subjects from Masonic association. This set the stage for Pope Clement XII 12th’s Papal Decree against Freemasonry and other secret societies in the same year, being the first of many future decrees against Freemasonry from the Vatican.
I cover Ramsay’s influence on Freemasonry elsewhere, but it is in his 1,000 page master work, published eight years after his death where the true theology and labor of Ramsay’s career lives on. Though Ramsay commits to his unique Christian faith, he expounds nonetheless on the universality of all religions, including an unprecedented comparison of accessible Chinese and Indian texts, along with the study of certain indigenous beliefs found in the Americas. While American Masons place Albert Pike on a pedestal due also to the nature and length of his writings, in the 18th century, there are no Masons who come close to Chevalier Ramsay’s volume of work, his influence on the higher degree systems in Europe, or the breadth of his philosophical development. Ramsay held to the view that there was an antediluvian religion which diffused itself over the world after the flood, and that all religious peoples worshiped a singular divinity, who represents Himself across a spectrum. As he states in the conclusion of his magnum opus: "Thus, we have shown, that vestiges of the most sublime truths are to be found in the Sages of all nations, times, and religions, both sacred and profane; and that these vestiges are emanations of the antediluvian and Noevian tradition, more or less disguised and adulterated.
“These scattered rays do not appear in all their splendor when read cursorily by men that have no knowledge of great principles; but when they are concentred and re-united, they form a perfect evidence.”
It is possible that this was front of mind when Ramsay requested the following words to be engraved on his tombstone: “Defender and martyr of the universal religion.”
In closing, it would be difficult to ascertain a better summary of Quietism than that given by Chevalier Ramsay, who was at one point intimately involved with Fenelon and Guyon’s life, and brushed shoulders with other inheritors of a Quietistic teaching. Here Ramsay provides what might be called the three stages of Quietism, specifically that which can be found Madame Guyon which Fenelon was defending in that so-called Battle of Olympians between he and Bosuett. And like Fenelon, Ramsay himself was inclined to defend Guyon, and critiques Bosuett’s attack, saying “the noble and free endeavours of divine Love are not determined by the dogmatic rigour of terms.”
This is Ramsay’s summary of Quietism given in, The Life of Fenelon:
“Love is the beginning and the end, the rule, and consummation of all the laws, duties and virtues, and the two ways of arriving at this perfect Love are prayer and evangelical self-denial.
Prayer is not a sweet sensation, neither the charm of a heated imagination, nor an abstract speculation, but a central inclination of the soul towards its principle, of which the most simple are capable, which nothing ought to interrupt, and is compatible with all the obligations of our mortal state.
It is necessary, at first, to make vigorous efforts, to multiply actions, to retire frequently near God, in order to separate all the objects of our passions, to banish from us all occurrences which excite us, so that we may receive, concentrate and enclose ourselves in our spiritual nature, and thus form, little by little, the habitude of living in the Divine presence in a manner more simple, uniform and more intimate.
Whilst the mind thus rises up toward the Sovereign truth, the heart disengages itself not only from all the grosser affections, but from all the most refined passions. Behold the source of wisdom, of the two operations which are so different.
God in the beginning detaches our hearts from impure pleasures by the taste of a heavenly delectation. Animated by the tender sentiments of a new-born love, we exercise ourselves with a noble and masculine vigour in all the labours of an active virtue. The soul satiated with the Divine amiableness becomes impervious to the seducing charms of a profane sensuality. Afterwards, God commences in us another operation in order to destroy the false love of ourselves, not by pleasures but by pains.
After we have separated ourselves from earthly objects, He shuts us up in the solitude of our being, there to realise the darkness, the inability, and the void. We discover there all the horrors of the ego, the impurity of its virtues, and usurpations upon the rights of the divinity. What a source of sorrows for a creature, idolater of faith and ordinary virtue! The soul will find nothing in it worthy of its love, and being no more able to support the ennui of one’s own company, will come out of itself to fall into the Love of the only Lovely.
Then the troublesome commotion of the senses and the imagination, the tumult of thoughts and of passions cease; and the whole mind, subdued into a profound silence, adores in spirit and in truth He who surpasses all speech and all conception. But this silence only excludes reflections, superfluous reasonings, and barren speculations which interrupt the action of the heart. In loving God purely we believe everything He teaches, we obey everything He commands, we expect all He promises; for that overmastering Love produces, animates, and perfects in us all the human and divine virtues.
Such is the system of Madame Guyon that Fénelon would never condemn.”
This has been an examination of Quietism and some of the farseeing minds who cemented it into Religious History.
VIDEO: Youtube
SOURCES:
The Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite of Freemasonry, Charles Sumner Lobingier 33° (1856-1956)
Chevalier Ramsay, The Philosophical Principles of Natural and Revealed Religion, V.I-II.
Chevalier Ramsay, The Life of Fenelon
Bernard McGinn, The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism, 2006
Garden, George, An Apology For M. Antonia Bourignon, 1649-1733
Madame Guyon, A Short and Easy Method of Prayer, 1685
Fenelon, Maxims of the Saints, 1698.