A Heresy Still With Us



Archbishop Fenelon, a

saintly proponent of the

Quietist Heresy

In a recent post (August 19), I mentioned the heresy of Quietism.  Quietism basically posits that the soul, when it comes to its perfection, is completely at rest in and submissive to the Will of God and that spiritual and moral perfection consists in this state of absorption in the Divine.  Many of the great mystics such as Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross speak of the union of the Soul with God as the pinnacle of prayer—but they don’t define that union as perfection but take the spiritual journey further to where the soul is transformed in its loving union with God and by its loving union with God so that it, the soul, can love with the same love with which God loves.  That may be confusing, but let’s put it this way—for the Quietists the soul gets off the train a station early, preferring to “rest quietly” in the love of God rather than continue on to its destiny of loving God and (and this is crucial,) neighbor.  This is what was meant by the quote of Innocent XI condemning Quietism in my previous entry (August 1) by speaking about two bishops who were proponents of this heresy—that the one prelate loved God too much while the other loved his neighbor too little. Quietism falls into the trap of focusing solely on the love of God without due concern for love of neighbor.    

Quietism still exists in the Church today—and in fact is quite alive and well in contemporary Christianity.  The “Christian” whose concern is for ritual and ceremony while ignoring questions of poverty and injustice is typical of the Quietist heresy.   The “evangelical” whose concern is with the “Law of God” and so is anxious to prevent same-sex marriage and abortion but who has indifference to the sufferings of those at the lowest end of the socio-economic scale is yet another.  Indeed, evangelicalism has long been associated with Quietism—a tragic fate for genuine evangelicalism.  In the centuries old struggle of Protestantism to maintain the doctrine of salvation by faith alone, the inherent relationship between faith and works has been lost and a pseudo-Christianity that permits charity and justice to be optional characteristics of discipleship has emerged.  This was only exaggerated in the American experience by untrained lay preachers in 19^th century Methodism where faith came to be measured by religious or pious “feeling” rather than by concrete commitment to practical discipleship.   Even Catholics have fallen under the spell of what is truly the great American heresy—“feeling” religion.  Whether it is the “liberal” who wants the emotional high of a frantic and frenetic liturgy with drums and dancing or a pseudo-traditionalist who thinks that for the Mass to be the “most beautiful thing this side of heaven” it must be in Latin and facing the wall, “form over substance Catholicism” reflects the Quietist tendency to let one’s feelings be the guide of all things good and holy.  There is, in fact, nothing inherently wrong (nor inherently more sacred) with the Drum and Dancing Mass or the Solemn Tridentine Mass or any Liturgy on the spectrum between.  We each have our own preference for worship style, but what our Catholic faith demands in its orthodoxy is a relationship with God in which we mature beyond our pious comforts and find ourselves purified of the desires for our personal spiritual consolations so that we may be totally at the disposal of God’s Will for us to love our neighbor not merely on the natural level of human affection but on the Supernatural level of Charity—that is, of loving others with the Love that fills God’s Own heart and not merely with the emotions that spring from ours.  A Christianity which ignores the requirements of societal justice (notice, I am avoiding the more narrow term “social justice”) is off track when it comes to orthodoxy. It brings to mind the axiom of Saint John Chrysostom

"Do you wish to honour the body of Christ? Do not neglect it when you find it naked. Do not do it homage here in the church with silk fabrics only to neglect it outside where it suffers cold and nakedness”.  

I say this in the context of visiting a parish that was once known for its commitment to make concrete the principles outlined by the Social Justice magisterium as found in Mater et Magistra, Gaudium et Spes, and Popolorum Progressio but now where the priest busies himself only with a wide range of pious devotions.  A parish that ten years ago was packed out for three liturgies on Sunday now has two Masses with a combined attendance of less than 300.  The pastor is proud that they have adoration every day and a variety of novena devotions for each day of the week, but it is clear that they have lost their sense of mission and consequently have lost the essence of the Gospel.  There is nothing wrong with a devotional life, but prayer that is meant only to engender pious feelings and does not impel us from the Church into the World armed with the Good News of Jesus Christ and a compassion for the least of his brothers and sisters is not true prayer and is not our Catholic heritage.

A Fear of Spirituality

Archbishop Fenelon

Sorry for the hiatus—every so often I get swamped with things and the blog falls back in priorities, but I want to return to a topic we were discussing a week and more ago—the tensions about the liturgy in the Church today.  I had written in my entry of August 13^th  of the dearth of spirituality in the Church today.  This is tragic in a faith that has a heritage rooted in the personal encounter with Christ by his disciples, male and female, reflected by its scriptures and flowering in a history of mysticism from the profound experiences of Paul and John the Divine through the Desert Fathers and Cassian, Ephrem the Syrian and Pseudo-Dionysisus and John Damascene, Bernard, Francis, and Julian, a Kempis, Ruyersbroeck and Tauler, Teresa, John and Ignatius, deSales, Marie of the Incarnation, and Brother Lawerence, Thérèse, Elizabeth of the Trinity, and Edith Stein—not to mention Gertrude of Helfta, Beatrice of Nazareth, Richard Rolle, Hadjewich, Dom Augustin Baker, and countless others all the way down to Thomas Merton, Jessica Powers, and Mother Theresa.

Some intellectual historians speak of “the suppression of mysticism” as a reaction to the Quietist heresy of the seventeenth century.  I think there is something to this.  Ever since antiquity the Church has been afraid of “illuminism,” the idea that one should be guided by an “inner light” that trumps the faith of the community.  Several of the heresies that tore apart the ancient Church were driven by this passion for radical subjectivity.  The Montanists—among others—embraced this conviction that it was The Holy Spirit that spoke to the individual believer and that such personal inspiration reflect a sort of ongoing revelation that could overrule even scripture.  It was in reaction to this radical religious individualism that the Church early developed a commitment to the idea that the truth resides not in the individual, even the inspired individual, but in the community’s collective discernment.  Here is found the sensus fidelium—the living faith of the faithful—as the guarantor of orthodoxy.  Along with the scholarship of the theologians and the pronouncements of the magisterium, but even more foundational than the scholarship and the magisterium, the sensus fidelium was the bulwark of orthodoxy. 

Illuminism continued to haunt the Church throughout its history.  It surfaced again at the time of the Cathar heresy in the 12^th and 13^th centuries and it haunted the nightmares of the Spanish Inquisitors in the sixteenth century.  There was a revival of illuminism at the time of the Protestant Reformations and indeed it would seize and shape the Radical Reformation—the Reformation of the Anabaptists in Holland and Germany and the Quakers and Shakers and Diggers and Fifth Monarchy Men in Protestant England and its American colonies.           

Despite the Church’s vigilance against illuminism it would raise its head in the sixteenth century in a particular incarnation referred to as Quietism.  Quietism rejected the more extraverted and extravagant manifestations that illuminism had held before.  Indeed it shadowed Catholic orthodoxy so closely that most Quietists though they were secure within the teaching of the Church.  Moreover, many of its proponents were genuinely holy people, just a bit too holy. Quietism can be compared, perhaps, to a good cell gone rogue in the body that becomes cancerous but which had once been a healthy part of the body. 

Classic 17^th century Quietism was so close to Catholic orthodoxy that much of what some of its writers wrote—Archbishop Fenelon for example—is perfectly orthodox, indeed sound Catholic spiritual reading.  Sometimes perfectly sound Catholic spiritual masters, Brother Lawrence for example, were accused, or at least suspected, of quietism when their doctrine is quite sound. 

Quietism’s best description was given by Innocent X in his condemnation of the heresy.  Referring to two leading spiritual writers among the Quietist faction, Archbishop Fenelon of Cambrai and Bishop Bossuet of Meaux, the pope said: “Cambrai loves God too much, Meaux loves man too little.”  Quietism is the heresy which stresses the love for God to the point where love for neighbor becomes unimportant.   One priest described it, in its contemporary manifestation, as “the heresy of the daily communicant.”  It certainly is alive and well today hiding in the pious life of the Christian Pharisee.  But rather than look at its modern manifestations in this posting, I would suggest that we look at the fear that it caused on the part of many bishops and priests that led to a “suppression of mysticism” in the Church from the 17^th through the 20^th centuries.

The broader heresy, illuminism, had always caused fear on the part of the orthodox in the Church—and not without reason. Attempts to discourage people from a life of deep personal prayer, of contemplative prayer, and to limit themselves to pious practices had long been a common error on the part of some Church authorities.  Both Saint Teresa of Avila and Saint John of the Cross refer to this in their writings.  Teresa tells her readers not to be afraid of contemplative prayer and says that she herself had been dissuaded from it for many years thinking it was for souls more educated, more virtuous, more advanced than hers, but she had eventually understood that Christ calls all of his disciples to the intimacy with him that can be found in such prayer alone.  John of the Cross likewise tells his readers that he is not writing for some select group of spiritual proficients, but to encourage all his readers to undertake contemplative prayer.  The Jesuits have always been anxious to share the profound experience of their founder, Ignatius Loyola, in the cave at Manressa and thus offered the Spiritual Exercises in order to guide others along the path of contemplation marked out by Ignatius’ conversion experience.  Francis de Sales was anxious to bring spirituality to ordinary souls and so we have his Introduction to the Devout Life. Yet at the same time these saints were marking out the path of prayer, there were voices warning people not to go down that road.

While all religious had been ordered to daily periods of “mental prayer” in the sixteenth century by Clement VIII, this time was often filled by one person reading aloud a meditation or at least various points on which all gathered were to meditate.  Sometimes devotions involving meditation such as the rosary or the Stations of the Cross were prescribed for this period.  Mental prayer, for those allowed to practice it, became highly structured with an invocation of the Holy Spirit, an act of contrition to prepare, the formation of specific resolutions drawn from the prayer, the Lord’s Prayer, an act of thanksgiving and other conclusions being prescribed leaving little time for the actual meditation.  What time was left for the individual often turned to more theological reflection than attentive and silent listening to God’s stirrings in the soul.  There was a fear of such stirrings.  One had to report any such stirring to one’s spiritual director for confirmation and directors were aggressively managerial over their subject’s spiritual life. 

Also, and I think under the influence of Jansenism (the other leading heresy of the 17^th century) “spirituality” took an excessive interest, a compulsive interest, in the moral conduct of the individual under direction.  Prayer retreated into the shadows and the spotlight shown on morality, not solely sexual morality but certainly emphasizing that field of behavior.  A relative degree of moral perfection became the sine qua non of the spiritual life so that many people began focusing on sin in their lives rather than the grace being offered in a relationship with God.  The premise was that one could have no relationship with God as long as sin was substantially present.  This false assertion alone locked the doors of the Castle of the Soul against many who otherwise might have advanced far in the spiritual life—and been converted in the process.  More and more, a life of deep prayer was becoming the unique prerogative of the  cloistered nun or monk.  The most the rest of us could do was frequent confession, occasional communion (don’t’ forget daily communion was not allowed until Pius X at the beginning of the 20^th century), and our devotions. 

The suppression of mysticism, the discouraging of people from pursing contemplative prayer, mentioned in my last blog entry, has left a great spiritual shallowness in the contemporary Church.  Moral integrity became a pre-requisite in the minds of many—including clergy—for a relationship with God rather than the fruit of that relationship.  This created an obsessive fascination with sin rather than an emphasis on grace in Christian life and has perverted much spirituality over the last three centuries.  And this, in turn, I think is much the root of what is unhealthy in the life of the American Church today.