Disentangling the Soul
Researching the founder of the 17th-century Quietist movement, I came across this arresting headline in Britain’s Catholic Herald: “Heretic of the Week: Miguel de Molinos.” Molinos, a Jesuit priest and spiritual director, hardly lacked for company as a religious outlaw. Molinos had written a popular book called The Spiritual Guide that advocated a form of contemplative prayer as a pathway to God — hardly objectionable in itself, you would think. After all, his fellow Jesuit, St. Ignatius of Loyola, had published a similar contemplative work, his Spiritual Exercises, without incident more than a century earlier.
Given the tens of thousands of people that the Inquisition condemned for heresy over the centuries, the Catholic Herald is in no danger of running out of subjects for its weekly column any time soon. However, unlike Galileo, who was more or less exonerated of heresy for insisting the Earth orbited the sun, Molinos remains in ecclesiastical hot water after more than three centuries.
So what did Molinos do to earn such undying infamy? I would argue that Molinos’ fate was sealed with the first sentence of the Spiritual Guide, first published in 1675 and widely circulated in his native Spain, as well as in France and Italy. “Thou art to know,” he wrote, “that thy Soul is the Center, Habitation, and the Kingdom of God.” In other words, the pathway to God’s kingdom was not outside oneself but within.
The Spirit Guide initially received the imprimatur of various church authorities and even withstood an initial attempt by the Inquisition to condemn its author for heresy. As it happened, Molinos had friends in high places, notably Pope Innocent XI, who for a while looked to him to spearhead a revival of devotional practices within the church. But soon it became abundantly clear that promoting traditional devotional practices was far from Molinos’ intention.
The full title of Molinos’ book provides a clue as to why he found himself at loggerheads with the Church: “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.” Apart from being a mouthful, the title begs the question of exactly what the soul must be disentangled from. If it were merely worldly concerns and sinfulness, the church would gladly have embraced Molinos’ methods. But he quickly made plain that his “inward way” also involved disentangling oneself from most religious practices and outward displays of piety, such as hymn-singing, fasting and penances. These, of course, were the sine qua non of the Roman Catholic faith.
How was it that Molinos was vilified for his approach to contemplation, whereas Ignatius Loyala, the founder of his order and also a contemplative, was canonized as a saint? Molinos emphasized inner quietude (hence, the disparaging monicker “Quietism”) and complete abandonment to God. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises, by contrast, laid out a structured regime of prayer and meditation designed to discern God's will and to promote active involvement in the Church. In other words, Ignatius urged engagement with the very things Molinos sought to become disentangled from. In the Spiritual Guide, Molinos wrote, “There seems to be a blindness in those believers who always seek God, cry for him, long for him, invoke his name, pray to him daily, while never discovering that they themselves are a living temple and his one true habitation.”
In defending himself against charges of heresy, Molinos maintained that his teachings were in keeping with the mystical traditions of the Church. This may well have been the case. Indeed, had the Spiritual Guide been written in Latin for a select monastic audience, Molinos might have spared himself the unwelcome attention of the Inquisition. But the Spiritual Guide was written in Spanish and translated into other vernacular languages, thereby appealing to a much broader audience. Molinos found himself leading a popular spiritual movement, with some 20,000 believers in Naples alone gathering in small groups to practice “inward” prayer.
In assessing Molinos’ spiritual approach, much depends on where the kingdom of God is to be found and how best to get there. If, as Molinos maintained, God’s kingdom was to be found at the center of one’s own being, there is really no place to get to. Therefore, any pathway that leads elsewhere becomes merely another entanglement of the soul. That would include the various ministrations of the church – prayers, penances, sacraments, good works and every other form of spiritual striving. At a certain point they hinder the progress of the soul by subtly reinforcing the illusion that there is progress to be made. All are essentially means to an end, which becomes superfluous once the end has been realized.
And what happens when the end has emerged? Here Molinos picks up on an idea first articulated by medieval mystics such as Meister Eckhart, Julian of Norwich and Marguerite Porete: the annihilation of the soul. Once you have disentangled the soul of everything that is not God you discover that God is all there is. And when God is all there is, there is no more you, at least not as a being that exists apart from God.
It was this end state that the church found most troubling — and therefore most troublesome for those who espoused it. The French mystic Marguerite Porete, to cite one example, was hauled before the Inquisition and burned at the stake in 1310. She was charged with claiming in her book, The Mirror of Simple Souls, that “the annihilated soul is freed from the virtues.” The Inquisitors charged her with advocating indifference to moral dogmas and offering a license to engage in shameful conduct.
The Inquisition adopted pretty much the same playbook when they went after Molinos more than three centuries later. They combed through the Spiritual Guide seeking any deviations from the accepted dogmas of the church. They scrutinized 20,000 of his letters and interrogated witnesses who could buttress their case. They struck pay dirt with a charge that Molinos’ teachings promoted moral laxity, citing his own behavior as proof. They heard testimony from women who claimed Molinos had used his teachings and position as a spiritual director to obtain sexual favors.
His old patron, Innocent XI, was by now too infirm to do more than spare his life, and Molinos was condemned to solitary confinement in a monastery for the remainder of his days. His works were banned, and he was forced to retract his teachings. His last words to a priest before entering his cell were: "Good-by, Father. We shall meet again on the day of judgement. Then it will be seen if the truth was on your side or mine.” I have no idea whether Molinos was permitted to retain a copy of his book in prison. But if so, I hope he found comfort in these words: “Finally, be of hope, suffer, be silent, and patient: let nothing affright thee: all of it will have an time to end: God only is he that is unchangeable: patience brings a man in every thing. He that hath God, hath all things; and he that hath him not, hath nothing.”
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