THE NEW SCHAFF-HERZOG
MOLINOS, MIGUEL DE: The founder of Spanish quietism; b. at Saragossa Dec. 25, 1640; d. at Rome Dec. 28, 1697. The son of noble parents and educated at Coimbra, where he received his doctorate in 1669 or 1670, he settled at Rome, where he gained the friendship of distinguished ecclesiastics, through his personal piety. Among Life and his patrons was Benedetto Odeschal- Writings. chi, who ascended the papal throne as Innocent XI. in 1676. In the previous year Molinos had published the work on which bis fame rests — the Guida spirituale, che disinvolge I'anima e la conduce per Vinterior camino all aquisto delta perfetta contemplazione e del ricco tesoro della pace interiore (Rome, 1675; Eng. transl., The Spiritual Guide which Disentangles the Soul, and Brings it by the Inward Way to the Getting of Perfect Contemplation, and Internal Peace, London, 1688, and often; reprint, Glasgow, 1885; Golden Thoughts from the Spiritual Guide, Glasgow, 1883). To this was usually appended (after 1687) the Breve trattato della cottidiana communione. Though published with reluctance by Molinos, both works proved most popular among Protestants as well as Roman Catholics. Long before the appearance of the " Spiritual Guide " the Jesuits had begun their propaganda in France against Jansenism and mysticism as well as against Protestantism. Even Molinos' favor with the pope and the esteem in which he was held as a priest and confessor in Rome could not prevent the Jesuits from regarding his concentration on inward piety to the neglect of outward religion as perilous. The first formal attack was by the Jesuit Paolo Segneri, in his Concordia tra lafatica e la quiete nelV oratione (Bologna, 1681). Feeling ran high in favor of Molinos, and the Inquisition appointed a committee to investigate the writings of Molinos and the Contemplazione mistica acquistata of his friend Petrucci, bishop of Jesi. The result was a complete approval of the writings of Molinos and Petrucci (1682) and the more or less complete condemnation of the polemics against them.
The struggle was now transferred from literature to the political arena. In 1585, at the instance of Pere La Chaise, Louis XIV urged the pope to proceed against Molinos' doctrines, which Teachings were endangering the Church. At first Condemned, referring the matter to the tribunal of the Holy Office, Innocent soon found that his favor to Molinos gave rise to suspicions of himself, and felt himself obliged to change his course. In 1685, accordingly, Molinos was placed under arrest. His position was rendered still more grave by the revelations of some 20,000 letters from all parts of the Roman Catholic world, showing not only the wide diffusion of his mystical teachings, but also their danger for the Church and even for morality. Molinos was now kept in confinement until he should recant, and in Feb., 1687, about 200 persons, some of high rank, were suddenly arrested by the Inquisition for " Quietism." In August of the same year the Inquisition pronounced its condemnation, and three months later the verdict was confirmed by the pope. Molinos escaped the stake by recantation, probably in harmony with
his own teachings of submission, but was confined in a Dominican monastery until his death. While the records of the trial have never been published, though preserved in manuscript at Munich, the nineteen articles of accusation issued by the Inquisition {La Condemnation du Docteur Molinos el de la secte des Quittistes, Cologne [?], 1687), and the sixty-eight propositions on which the condemnation was based (reprinted from the decree of the Holy Office as an appendix to A. H. Francke's Latin translation of the Guida spirituale, Manductio spiritualis, Leipsic, 1687, and repeatedly since, e.g., in H. Denzinger's Enchiridion symbolorum, pp. 266- 274, Wiirzburg, 1888), suffice to show that the unfavorable verdict was rendered partly because ol unhappy expressions and partly because of passages where misinterpretation might readily have been distinguished from true opinion. In any case a man who declared that meditation, confession, and outward mortifications were only for tyros, and who counseled monks and nuns to discard their rosaries and relics to serve God inwardly, could only have been regarded by the Jesuits as perilous to the traditions of the Church and as opening the way for the inroads of Protestantism. The excitement roused by his trial at a time when the continued triumph of the Jesuits and the still undecided struggle between papal authority and the Gallican Church formed the center of attention, was intense among both clergy and laity. In Germany this interest was heightened by the affinity between Molinos and the Pietists, who, feeling the common bond of inward piety, saw in Molinos an innocent victim ol Jesuit intrigue. The persecution of his adherents lasted into the eighteenth century.
The teachings developed by Molinos in his Guida spirituale are based on principles adopted (on a
Neo-Platonic basis) by the Church,
His developed by Dionysius the Areopa-
Doctrines. gite, and maintained more or less by
the foremost ecclesiastical authorities. Mystical phenomena and testimonies were especially rich in Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and Molinos himself was deeply influenced by St. Theresa (q.v.), St. John of the Cross, the Mexican hermit Gregorio Lopez (d. 1596), and Madame de Chantal. Otherwise his sources were such fathers and mystics as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Bernard, Dionysius the Areopagite, and Bonaventura; and the true bases of his doctrines were simple experiences of Christian piety. Endeavoring to reconcile the life of active service with the life of contemplation, Molinos seeks in his " Spiritual Guide " to show the way to inward peace. This way is fourfold: prayer, obedience, frequent communions, and inward mortification. Yet he is so far from urging abstraction from external affairs of life, that he characterizes the exercise of one's ordinary calling, provided it be done with true inward concentration and devotion to the divine will, as " virtual prayer." At the same time, he is in harmony with those who see the highest degree of mysticism in an inward abstraction which even excludes either theoretical speculations on the Godhead or practical longing for it. From meditation, necessary for the beginner, the mystic must pro-