Miguel de Molinos

Not to be confused with Luis de Molina.

Miguel de Molinos
Born	1628 Muniesa, Spain
Died	December 29, 1696(1696-12-29) (aged 68)

Miguel de Molinos (baptised 29 June 1628 – 29 December 1696) was a Spanish Catholic priest, spiritual director, mystical writer, and the principal figure associated with the controversy later known as Quietism. His best-known work, The Spiritual Guide (1675), was one of the most widely circulated manuals of contemplative prayer in seventeenth-century Europe before its author's condemnation by the Roman Inquisition.

Molinos was arrested in Rome in 1685, publicly abjured in 1687, and was sentenced to life imprisonment. Pope Innocent XI ratified the condemnation in the apostolic constitution Coelestis Pastor, which condemned sixty-eight propositions associated with Molinos and the Quietists. Modern scholarship has often distinguished between Molinos's published teaching in the Spiritual Guide and the more extreme propositions condemned under the name of Quietism. More recent historians have also treated Quietism less as a single coherent system than as a polemical category constructed during disputes over contemplation, passivity, ascetical effort, and the nature of interior prayer in early modern Catholicism.

Biography

Early life and education

Molinos was born in 1628 at or near Muniesa, in the province of Teruel, Aragon, a village about 100 kilometres (60 miles) south of Zaragoza. His date of birth is uncertain, but parish records show that he was baptised on 29 June 1628. He moved as a young man to Valencia, where he studied with the Jesuits at the College of St Paul. He was ordained priest in 1652 and later held a benefice in the church of Santo Tomás. He also received permission to serve as confessor to women religious.

On 4 June 1662 Molinos was admitted to the Valencian chapter of the School of Christ, a religious confraternity devoted to penitence, mental prayer, and spiritual renewal. The School of Christ emphasized mental prayer, recollection, and devotion to the humanity of Christ, and it later played an important role in Molinos's Roman career. He held several offices in the Valencian chapter, at least one of which gave him a place on its governing body.

Move to Rome

In July 1663 Molinos was chosen to travel to Rome as procurator for the beatification cause of Francisco Jerónimo Simón, a Valencian secular priest who had died in 1612. Molinos left Spain in late 1663 and never returned.

Little is known in detail about Molinos's first years in Rome. He became associated with the Roman chapter of the School of Christ and by 1671 had become its leader. He also acquired a reputation as a spiritual director. Among those who knew or admired him were members of Roman aristocratic and ecclesiastical circles, including Cardinal Benedetto Odescalchi, who became Pope Innocent XI in 1676, and Christina, Queen of Sweden, whose Roman household Molinos visited.

The original purpose of Molinos's stay in Rome eventually failed. By 1675 the Sacred Congregation of Rites had refused to reopen the cause of Francisco Jerónimo Simón. Molinos's commission from Valencia and its financial support were revoked, and he lost his official position in the Valencian delegation.

Works and teaching

The Spiritual Guide

In 1675 Molinos published his best-known work, the Guía espiritual, issued in Italian as Guida spirituale, che disinvolge l'anima e la conduce per l'interior camino all' acquisito della perfetta contemplazione e del ricco tesoro della pace interiore. The work received ecclesiastical approval before publication, including the imprimatur of the Dominican theologian Raimondo Capizucchi, the pope's own theologian, and approbations from members of the Trinitarian, Franciscan, Carmelite, Capuchin, and Jesuit orders.

The Spiritual Guide teaches a path of interior prayer centred on recollection, silence, detachment, abandonment to God, and the passage from discursive meditation to a simplified form of contemplation. Molinos distinguished between beginners, for whom meditation and devotional exercises remained useful, and souls whom he believed were being drawn by God toward a more passive and inward prayer.

Although later controversy identified Molinos almost exclusively with Quietism, historians of mysticism have situated many of the themes of the Spiritual Guide within older traditions of apophatic and contemplative spirituality. Modern scholars have noted parallels between Molinos's language concerning interior suffering, self-annihilation, and abandonment to God and earlier mystical authors such as Mechthild of Magdeburg, Henry Suso, John of the Cross, and Maria Maddalena de' Pazzi. Bernard McGinn argues that Molinos's emphasis on passivity and interior quiet belonged to a much older Christian current that stressed recollection, purity of intention, detachment from self-will, and receptivity to divine action.

The book was highly successful. By 1685 seven editions had been printed in Italy and three in Spain. Translations appeared in Latin in 1687, French, Dutch, and English in 1688, and German in 1699. Its success made Molinos one of the most visible representatives of a wider current of seventeenth-century Catholic spirituality concerned with recollection, interior silence, acquired contemplation, infused contemplation, and the soul's passivity under divine action.

Other writings

Molinos also wrote Trattato della cotidiana communione (Brief Treatise on Daily Communion), published in 1675, in which he argued that those wishing to receive the Eucharist daily should not be prevented by confessors if they were in a state of grace. Like the Spiritual Guide, it initially received ecclesiastical approval.

In 1676, Cartas a un caballero desengañado was published in Spanish and Italian. The work was addressed to a person beginning the life of prayer, and it instructed him in meditation rather than contemplation. Its publication is important for interpreting Molinos's teaching, since it shows that he did not reject meditation as such, but assigned it to a particular stage and vocation in the spiritual life.

In response to criticism of the Spiritual Guide, Molinos composed an unpublished apologetic work, Defensa de la contemplación (Defence of Contemplation), around 1679–1680. In it he appealed to earlier mystical and theological authorities and argued that the passage from meditation to contemplation belonged to established Catholic spiritual tradition. He also praised the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola as useful for conversion and for beginners, while denying that they were the immediate means to the highest contemplative union.

A devotional work, La devoción de la buena muerte, published at Valencia in 1662 under the pseudonym Juan Bautista Catalá, has also been attributed to Molinos.

Quietist controversy

See also: Quietism (Christian philosophy)

Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, the church in which Molinos publicly abjured in 1687.

The controversy over Molinos's teaching centred on the relation between meditation and contemplation, interior quiet and vocal prayer, passive receptivity and ascetical effort. Molinos and his defenders held that some souls, after a period of discursive meditation, could be drawn by God into a simpler prayer of quiet and loving attention. His opponents, many of them Jesuits influenced by the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola, feared that such teaching encouraged premature abandonment of meditation, devotion to the humanity of Christ, sacramental practice, and moral effort.

The dispute formed part of wider seventeenth-century Catholic debates over interior prayer and the relation between acquired and infused contemplation. Historians have also connected the controversy to earlier tensions within Christian mysticism concerning passivity, inward illumination, ascetic discipline, and ecclesiastical authority.

A related issue was the distinction between acquired and infused contemplation. Acquired contemplation was generally understood as a simplified form of prayer reached through ascetical practice and habitual recollection, while infused contemplation was regarded as a supernatural gift received more directly from God. Critics feared that Molinos and related writers blurred this distinction, making passive contemplation appear too easily available and encouraging souls to abandon meditation or ordinary devotional practices prematurely.

The first major attack on Molinos's teaching appeared in 1678 in a work by Gottardo Bell'huomo, although it did not explicitly name Molinos or the Spiritual Guide. Molinos responded by drafting the Defence of Contemplation, but he did not publish it. He also appealed to the Jesuit superior general Giovanni Paolo Oliva, assuring him that he did not reject Jesuit spirituality or the value of meditation for those called to practise it.

A second stage of the controversy began with the Jesuit preacher Paolo Segneri. In 1680 Segneri published Concordia tra la fatica e la quiete nell'orazione (Agreement Between Effort and Quiet in Prayer), defending meditation and ascetical effort against the teachings associated with interior quiet. The dispute was referred to the Inquisition. In 1681 the Holy Office judged the Spiritual Guide orthodox and placed Segneri's book, and later Bell'huomo's work, on the Index of Forbidden Books.

This early decision did not end the controversy. Molinos's prominence in Rome, the rapid circulation of his book, tensions between advocates of meditation and contemplation, and wider political pressures made his teaching increasingly suspect. César d'Estrées, the French ambassador in Rome, denounced Molinos to the authorities. On 18 July 1685 Molinos was arrested by the pontifical guards and imprisoned in the Castel Sant'Angelo.

Molinos was not the only figure in Italy implicated in the wider controversy. Pier Matteo Petrucci, bishop of Jesi, also defended contemplative passivity and wrote on acquired mystical contemplation. Petrucci drew on earlier mystical authorities such as Johannes Tauler, John of the Cross, Louis de Blois, and Jean de Saint-Samson, but he too came under investigation, and propositions extracted from his writings were condemned. Unlike Molinos, Petrucci retracted privately and was not subjected to the same public humiliation or life imprisonment.

Trial and condemnation

In 1687 Molinos appeared before the tribunal of the Holy Office. At first 263 propositions were examined. By July the tribunal had reduced these to sixty-eight propositions for formal censure. On 2 September 1687 Molinos was sentenced to life imprisonment. On 3 September he publicly abjured in the Dominican church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva.

On 20 November 1687 Pope Innocent XI issued Coelestis Pastor, condemning sixty-eight propositions associated with Molinos and the Quietists. The condemned propositions included claims concerning the annihilation of the soul's powers, the cessation of devotional acts, indifference to salvation, the uselessness of resistance to temptation, and other statements judged incompatible with Catholic teaching.

The precise relation between the condemned propositions and Molinos's own published teaching remains a major issue in scholarship. Bernard McGinn argues that many of the propositions condemned in Coelestis Pastor are not found in the Spiritual Guide itself, although he also argues that Molinos's language was often insufficiently qualified and therefore vulnerable to hostile interpretation. Contemporary rumours and hostile pamphlets also circulated accusations of moral misconduct, especially concerning Molinos's relations with female penitents. Later historians have treated these accusations cautiously, since the surviving public record does not allow a complete reconstruction of the trial.

Molinos remained imprisoned for the rest of his life. He died in the prison of the Holy Office in Rome on 29 December 1696.

Reputation and reception

Catholic and scholarly reception

For much of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries, Molinos was usually treated as the principal representative of Quietism and as a warning example in Catholic discussions of mystical theology. Older accounts often identified his teaching directly with passivity, antinomianism, moral indifference, or the rejection of ordinary devotion.

Later twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship became more cautious. Eulogio Pacho, José Ignacio Tellechea Idígoras, Bernard McGinn, Christian Renoux, and other historians distinguished more carefully between Molinos's own texts, the propositions condemned in 1687, hostile polemical caricatures, and the broader traditions of contemplative spirituality within which the controversy arose. In this reassessment, Quietism is often treated less as a single coherent doctrinal system than as a series of disputes concerning mystical authority, contemplative prayer, ecclesiastical discipline, ascetical effort, and interior religion.

Some modern historians of spirituality have also interpreted Molinos within broader transnational traditions of interior devotion extending across Catholic and Protestant contexts. Studies of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mysticism have linked his reception to networks associated with figures such as Jeanne Guyon, François Fénelon, Jean de Bernieres-Louvigny, and other advocates of contemplative prayer and spiritual abandonment.

Influence outside Spain

Although Molinos's teaching had limited lasting influence in Spain, the Spiritual Guide circulated widely elsewhere in Europe. It was read in Italy, France, the Low Countries, Germany, and England, and formed part of the broader reception of Catholic interior spirituality among some Protestant readers. Patricia A. Ward notes that Molinos's Spiritual Guide belonged to a body of devotional literature that crossed confessional boundaries and was read alongside works by Thomas à Kempis, Francis de Sales, François Fénelon, and Jeanne Guyon.

Molinos also became a literary and philosophical figure. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a sonnet on him, and William James discussed him in The Varieties of Religious Experience, where he called him “that spiritual genius” in the course of a sympathetic discussion of Molinos's teaching on repentance. In twentieth-century Spanish literature and thought, José Ángel Valente and María Zambrano treated Molinos as an important figure for the themes of silence, nothingness, contemplation, and poetic language.

Works

• La devoción de la buena muerte, Valencia, 1662.
• Guía espiritual, Rome, 1675.
• Trattato della cotidiana communione, Rome, 1675.
• Cartas a un caballero desengañado, Rome, 1676.
• Defensa de la contemplación, written c. 1679–1680; first published in modern scholarly editions.

See also

• Christian contemplation
• Christian mysticism
• Inquisition
• Quietism (Christian philosophy)
• The Spiritual Guide

References

• This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Molinos, Miguel de". Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.

Further reading

Editions of Molinos

• Molinos, Miguel de. Guía espiritual: edición crítica, introducción y notas. Edited by José Ignacio Tellechea Idígoras. Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 1976.
• Molinos, Miguel de. Defensa de la contemplación. Edited by Eulogio Pacho. Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española / Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, 1988.
• Molinos, Miguel de. The Spiritual Guide. Edited and translated by Robert P. Baird. Introduction by Robert P. Baird and Bernard McGinn. New York: Paulist Press, 2010.
• Molinos, Miguel de. Guía espiritual. Edited by José Ángel Valente. Barcelona: Barral, 1974.
• Molinos, Miguel de. Guía espiritual. Edited by S. González Noriega. Madrid: Editora Nacional, 1977. ISBN 8427603924.

Secondary literature

• Andrés Martín, Melquiades. Los recogidos: nueva visión de la mística española (1500–1700). Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 1975.
• Dudon, Paul. Le quiétiste espagnol: Michel Molinos (1628–1696). Paris: Gabriel Beauchesne, 1921.
• Ezquerra Gómez, Jesús. El profundo de la nada: el desapego de Dios en el místico aragonés Miguel de Molinos. Zaragoza: Institución Fernando el Católico, 2014. ISBN 9788499112718.
• Knox, Ronald. Enthusiasm: A Chapter in the History of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950.
• Lea, Henry Charles. "Molinos and the Italian Mystics". The American Historical Review, vol. 11, no. 2, 1906, pp. 243–262. doi:10.2307/1834643.
• McGinn, Bernard. The Crisis of Mysticism: Quietism in Seventeenth-Century Spain, Italy, and France. New York: Crossroad, 2021.
• Moreno Rodríguez, Pilar. El pensamiento de Miguel de Molinos. Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española / Universidad Pontificia de Salamanca, 1992.
• Pacho, Eulogio. "Molinos (Miguel de)". In Dictionnaire de spiritualité, vol. 10. Paris: Beauchesne, 1980.
• Renoux, Christian. "Quietism". In Philippe Levillain, ed., The Papacy: An Encyclopedia, vol. 3. London: Routledge, 2002.
• Rodríguez López-Ros, Sergi. "Molinos y el quietismo". El Ciervo: Revista mensual de pensamiento y cultura, no. 771, 2018, pp. 26–27.
• Rodríguez López-Ros, Sergi, ed. Cartas para el ejercicio de la oración mental. Barcelona: Herder, 2023. ISBN 9788425448171.
• Tellechea Idígoras, José Ignacio. Molinosiana: investigaciones históricas sobre Miguel de Molinos. Madrid: Fundación Universitaria Española, 1987.
• Ward, Patricia A. Experimental Theology in America: Madame Guyon, Fénelon, and Their Readers. Waco, Texas: Baylor University Press, 2009.

External links

• "Molinos, Miguel de" . New International Encyclopedia. 1905.
• The Spiritual Guide at the Christian Classics Ethereal Library
• Coelestis Pastor at Papal Encyclicals Online
• Media related to Miguel de Molinos at Wikimedia Commons
• Works by or about Miguel de Molinos at Wikisource