Chapter V: Mysticism.1 (3)

If Ottoboni and the Inquisition fancied that they had crushed the sect, they were mistaken. It maintained a secret existence for over twenty years, which enabled it to spread far beyond its original seat and, about 1680, it had associations and oratories for mental prayer established in Brescia, Verona, Vicenza, Treviso, Padua, Pesaro, Lucca and doubtless many other places, while its votaries expected it to spread through the world. Ricaldini, at Treviso, was busy in corresponding with the heads of the associations and receiving their visits. In Brescia, Bartolommeo Bona, priest of S. Rocco, presided over an oratory of sixty members and was even said to have six hundred souls under his direction. They were called Pellegrini di S. Rocco, they practised mental prayer assiduously and had even procured an episcopal licence for the association. In Verona, Giovanni Battista Bonioli guided a membership of thirty disciples, many of them persons of high consideration. For the most part the devotees seem to have been quiet and pious folk, humbly seeking salvation by the interior way, but there were some who were given to extravagance. Margarita Rossi had visions and revelations, strangely repeating portions of the fantastic theology of Borri, and when written out by a believer, Don Giovanni Antonio, it was not difficult to extract from them a hundred and thirty-four errors, concerning which she was tortured as to intention as well as _in caput alienum_. Two others, Cosimo Dolci and Francesco Nigra had visions and prophetic insight, for which the latter was sentenced, in 1684, to five years' incarceration.[94]

The sect could not continue spreading indefinitely without discovery. In 1682 the Inquisition suddenly awoke to the necessity of action and it repeated an edict which it had issued in 1656, forbidding all oratories and assemblages for mental prayer. Ricaldini felt his position critical, for he had abjured _de vehementi_ and was liable to the stake for relapse. He disappeared from Treviso and all that the Inquisition could learn was that he was somewhere on the Swiss border. At length, in 1684, his retreat was found to be Chiuro, in the Valtelline, and Antonio Ceccotti, Inquisitor of Brescia, made fruitless attempts to induce the authorities of the Valtelline and the Podestà of Brescia to unite in procuring his extradition, but in March, 1685, Ceccotti had the mortification to learn that he had died on the previous October 6th, having received all the sacraments and with the repute of a most pious Christian.[95]

[Sidenote: _MOLINOS_]

The prominent Pelagini were duly prosecuted, but there seems to have been little vindictiveness aroused in regard to them and little heresy attributable to them. The punishments inflicted were light, for we hear, in 1685, of Bona, one of the leaders, having returned to his district and living in retirement, and of Belleri, another, being in the Valcamonica, where the bishop had appointed him missionary for the whole district. Evidently the disciples must have escaped with a warning. What the ecclesiastical authorities objected to was not Mysticism and its long-accepted practices, but organization, more or less secret, under leaders outside of the hierarchy and free from its supervision, when heated brains, under divine inspiration, indulged in dreams of regenerating the Church. It was not until the case of Molinos had called attention to other dangers that there came from Rome strict orders for the suppression of all oratories and of the practice of mental prayer--that rapture of meditation which had been the distinguishing habit of mystics through the ages.[96]

* * * * *

Miguel de Molinos was a Spaniard, born probably about 1630 at Muniesa (Teruel). After obtaining at Coimbra the degree of doctor of theology, he came to Rome in 1665, in connection with a canonization--probably of San Pedro Arbués, who was beatified in 1668. There he speedily acquired distinction as a confessor and spiritual director. Innocent XI prized him so highly as to give him apartments in the papal palace; the noblest women placed themselves under his care; his reputation spread throughout Italy and his correspondence became enormous. On the day of his arrest it is said that the postage on the letters delivered that day at his house amounted to twenty-three ducats; he made a small charge to cover expenses and, in the sequestration of his property, there were found four thousand gold crowns derived from this source. The letters seized were reported variously as numbering twelve or twenty thousand, of which two hundred were from Christina of Sweden and two thousand from the Princess Borghese. The mysticism which proved so attractive, when set forth by his winning personality, had in it--ostensibly at least--nothing that had not long since received the approbation of the Church in the writings of the great Spanish mystics and of St. François de Sales. It is true that Molinos dropped the machinery of ecstasies and visions, which loom so largely in the writings of Santa Teresa, and confined his way of perfection to the Brahmanical ideal of the annihilation of sense and intellect, the mystic silence or death, in which speech and thought and desire are no more and in which God speaks with the soul and teaches it the highest wisdom.[97] This spiritualized hypnotism was in no way original with Molinos, but was the goal which all the mystic saints sought to attain. To reach it he tells us the soul must abandon itself wholly to God; it must make no resistance to the thoughts or impulses which God might send or allow Satan to send; if assailed by intruding or sensual thoughts, they should not be opposed but be quietly contemned and the resultant suffering be offered as a sacrifice to God.[98] This was the Quietism--the Spanish _Dejamiento_--which was subsequently condemned so severely; there is no question that it had its dangers if the senses were allowed to control the spirit, and the adversaries of Molinos made the most of it, but he taught that the soul must overcome temptation through patience and resignation. When souls have acquired control of themselves, he says, if a temptation attacks them they soon overcome it; passions cannot hold out against the divine strength which fills them, even if the violence is continued and is supported by suggestions of the enemy; the soul gains the victory and enjoys the infinite resultant benefit.[99]

[Sidenote: _MOLINOS_]

All this Molinos was allowed to teach for years in the Holy City with general applause, though it had been persecuted in the Pelagini. In 1675, at the height of his popularity, he embodied his doctrine in the _Guida spirituale_, a little volume which came forth with the emphatic approbation of five distinguished theologians--four of them consultors or censors of the Inquisition and all of them men of high standing in their respective Orders of Franciscans, Trinitarians, Jesuits, Carmelites and Capuchins. The book had an immediate and wide circulation and was translated into many languages. Even in Spain there was a Madrid edition in 1676, one at Saragossa in 1677 and another at Seville as late as 1685, without exciting animadversion. Yet such a career as that of Molinos could not continue indefinitely without exciting hostility, none the less dangerous because prudently concealed. His immense success was provocative of envy and, if mystic contemplation was largely adopted as the surest path to salvation, what was to be the result on the infinite variety of exterior works to which the Church owed so much of its power and wealth? It was found that in many nunneries in Rome, whose confessors had adopted his views, the inmates had cast aside their rosaries and chaplets and depended wholly on contemplation. It was observed that at mass the mystic devotees did not raise their eyes at the elevation of the Host or gaze on the holy images, but pursued uninterruptedly their mental prayer. Molinos gave further occasion for criticism by a tract on daily communion, in which he asserted that a soul, secure that it was not in mortal sin, could safely partake of the sacrament without previous confession--a doctrine which, however, theologically defensible, threatened, if extensively practised, largely to diminish the authority of the priesthood, while encouraging the sinner to settle his account directly with God.

To attack as a heretic a man so universally respected and so firmly entrenched as Molinos might well seem desperate, and it is not surprising that the credit for the work was attributed to the Jesuits, as the only body daring and powerful enough. The current story is that, having resolved upon it, they procured Père La Chaise to induce Louis XIV to order his ambassador, Cardinal d'Estrées to labor unceasingly for the removal of the scandal caused by the teaching of Molinos. Whether this was so is doubtful, but it is certain that the first attack came from the Jesuits, and that d'Estrées, who had professed the warmest admiration for Molinos, became his unrelenting persecutor. The campaign was opened in 1678, when Gottardo Bell' Uomo, S. J., issued at Modena a work on the comparative value of ordinary and mystic prayer, which was duly denounced to the Inquisition. Molinos had been made to recognize in various ways the coming storm, and he sought to conjure it in a fashion which revealed his conscious weakness. February 16, 1680, he addressed to the Jesuit General Oliva a long exculpatory letter. He had not attacked the Society but had always held it in the highest honor, and when, in Valencia, the University had forbidden the Jesuit College to teach theology, he was the only one who had disobeyed the order and had come to its aid. He had never decried the Spiritual Exercises of Loyola, but had recognized the vast good accomplished by them, though he held that, for those suited to it, contemplation was better than meditation. He had for some years been persecuted and stigmatized as a heretic, in writing and preaching, by the most distinguished members of the Society, but he rejoiced in this and only prayed God for those who reviled him nor, in his defence of the _Guida_, had he sought aught but the glory of God and, so far from defending the Begghards and Illuminati, he had always condemned them. Evidently the work of the Jesuits in discrediting him had been active and better organized than the records show, and he thought it wiser to disarm, if possible, rather than to struggle with adversaries so powerful. Oliva's answer of February 28th was by no means reassuring. He complimented Molinos on his Christian spirit in returning good for evil and on the flattering terms bestowed on the Society and its founder. He had never read the books of Molinos and could not speak of them with knowledge but, if they corresponded with his letter, his disciples were doing him great wrong in applying his system of contemplation, of which only the rarest souls were capable, indiscriminately to nuns and worldly young women. Finally, he could not understand why so distinguished a member of the Society as Padre Bell' Uomo should have been brought before the Congregation of the Index, and he gave infinite thanks to God for defending him before it.

Promptly on the next day, February 29th, Molinos replied to this discouraging epistle. At much length he disculpated himself for writings and sayings falsely attributed to him. He held meditation in the highest esteem as an exercise suited to all; the loftiest form of contemplation was a gift of God bestowed on the rare souls fitted for it. He again spoke of the persecution to which he was exposed and, as for Padre Bell' Uomo, whom he did not know, if his doctrine was as sound as represented by Oliva, God would enlighten his ministers to recognize it. Oliva's rejoinder to this, on March 2d, would appear to be written in a style of studied obscurity, saying much and meaning little, but one passage reveals a source of Jesuit enmity, in alluding to the number of convents which had passed out of the direction of the Society to practise the new method.[100]

[Sidenote: _MOLINOS_]

The effort of Molinos to propitiate his enemies had only encouraged them by its confession of weakness. Their next step was a dextrous one. Padre Paolo Segneri was not only the most popular Jesuit preacher in Italy, but his favor with Innocent XI was almost as great as that of Molinos. He was selected as the next athlete and, in 1680, he issued a little volume--"Concordia tra la fatica e la quiete nell' oratione," in which he argued that the highest life is that which combines activity with contemplation. He was promptly answered by Pietro Matteo Petrucci, an ardent admirer of Molinos, who was rewarded by Innocent with the see of Jesi. Segneri rejoined in a "Lettera di riposta al Sig. Ignacio Bartalini" and the controversy was fairly joined. A more aggressive antagonist was the Minorite Padre Alessandro Reggio whose "Clavis Aurea qua aperiuntur errores Michaelis de Molinos" appeared in 1682 and boldly argued that the _Guida_ revived the condemned errors of the Begghards, that Quietism destroyed all conceptions of the Trinity, while the practice of prayer without works was destructive of all the pious observances prescribed by the Church, and the teaching that temptation should be endured without resistance was dangerous and contrary to Scripture and to the doctors. Petrucci responded vigorously, while Molinos remained silent. He had, at least, the advantage of official support, for Bell' Uomo's book was forbidden _donec corrigatur_; Segneri's "Lettera" and the "Clavis Aurea" were condemned unconditionally, and Segneri's "Concordia," while it escaped the Index, was quietly forbidden and he was instructed to revise it.[101]

The Jesuits, however, were not the only body interested in the downfall of Molinos. There is a curious anonymous tract devoted to explaining what it calls the secret policy of the Quietists, assuming their main object to be the destruction of all the religious Orders and especially of the Dominicans and Franciscans. Apparently taking advantage of the development of the Pelagini about this time, it asserts that the Quietists had organized conventicles and oratories throughout Italy; that they had a common treasury in which 14,000 ducats were found; that they flattered the secular clergy and sought to unite them in opposition to the regulars, whom they systematically decried, raking together all the stories of their corruption and ignorance. In short, Quietism was a deep-laid conspiracy, through which Molinos expected to revolutionize the Church and reduce the religious Orders to impotence.[102] The only importance of the tract is as a manifestation of the attitude of the regulars towards Molinos and the hostility aroused by his success in winning from them, for his disciples, the directorship of souls which was their special province.

The enormous influence of the elements thus combining for his destruction left little doubt of the result. The first open attack was made in June, 1682, when Cardinal Caraccioli, Archbishop of Naples, a pupil of the Jesuits, reported to the pope that he found his diocese deeply infected with this new Quietism, subversive of the received prescriptions of the Church, and he asked instructions for its suppression, nor was he alone in this for similar appeals came from other Italian bishops. Molinos was too firmly established in the papal favor for this to dislodge him, but the hostile forces gradually gathered strength and, in November, 1684, the Congregation of the Inquisition formally assumed consideration of the matter. At its head was Cardinal Ottoboni, a fanatic whose experience with the Pelagini, when Bishop of Brescia, had sharpened his hatred of mysticism. The spirit in which he conducted the inquest is revealed in a memorandum in his handwriting of the points to be elaborated in the next day's meeting of the Congregation--that this heresy is the worst of all and if left alone will become inextinguishable; that it is spreading in Spain through the Archbishop of Seville and in France with many books of the most dangerous nature; that it destroys the Catholic faith and all the religious Orders; that in Jesi the canons and the cura of the cathedral keep a school for its propagation; that a rich and powerful citizen of Jesi threatens the witnesses and that a vigorous commissioner must be sent there; that the monasteries of Faenza and Ravenna are infected and one in Ferrara has a Quietist confessor; that this pestilence calls for fire and steel.[103] In a court presided over by so bitter a prosecutor, the judgement was fore-ordained.

For awhile the contending forces seem to have been equally balanced and eight months were spent in gathering testimony sufficient to justify arrest. At last, on July 3, 1685, at a meeting of the Congregation, Cardinal d'Estrées insisted that no one should leave the chamber until the arrest was ordered and executed. This was agreed to; the sbirri were despatched and Molinos was lodged in the prison of the Inquisition.[104] Yet when, on November 9th the Spanish Holy Office condemned the _Guia espirituale_ as containing propositions savoring of heresy and Illuminism, the Congregation addressed to the pope a vigorous protest against its action on a matter which was still under consideration at headquarters.[105]

[Sidenote: _MOLINOS_]

The influence of Queen Christina, we are told, was exerted to procure for Molinos better treatment than was usual with prisoners. Of the details of the trial we know little or nothing, but, as torture was habitual in the Roman Inquisition, it is not probable that he was spared. As his books had not been condemned, the evidence employed was drawn exclusively from the immense mass of his correspondence and MSS. which had been seized, the depositions of witnesses and his own confessions, so that we are unable to judge how far it justified the conclusions set forth in the sentence, though, from the manner in which that discriminates between what he admitted and what he denied, it is but fair to assume that it represents correctly the evidence before the tribunal. The trial was necessarily prolonged. In his defence interrogatories were forwarded to Saragossa and Valencia, in 1687, where his witnesses were duly examined.[106] Two hundred and sixty-three erroneous propositions were extracted by the censors from the mass of matter before them, to which he of course was required to answer in detail, and these seem to have been condensed into nineteen for the consideration of the Congregation.[107]

Petrucci was threatened and his elevation to the cardinalate, September 2, 1686, was ascribed to the desire of Innocent to save him from prosecution. Shortly afterwards, two of the principal assistants of Molinos, the brothers Leoni of Como, of whom Simone was a priest and Antonio Maria was a tailor, were arrested. Then, on February 9, 1687, followed the arrest of the Count and Countess Vespiniani, of Paolo Rocchi, confessor of the Princess Borghese, and of seventy others, causing general consternation, not diminished by the subsequent imprisonment of some two hundred more. The Congregation was doing its work thoroughly and it was even said that, on February 13th, it appointed a commission which examined the pope himself. A revolution in the traditional standards of orthodoxy could not be effected without compromising multitudes, and the victors were determined that their victory should be complete. On February 15th, Cardinal Cibò, the secretary of the Congregation, addressed to all the bishops of Italy a circular stating that in many places there existed or were forming associations called spiritual conferences, under ignorant directors, who, with maxims of exquisite perfection, misled them into most pernicious errors, resulting in manifest heresy and abominable immorality. The bishops were therefore ordered to investigate and, if such assemblies were found, to abolish them forthwith, taking moreover especial care that this pestilence was not allowed to infect the monasteries.

[Sidenote: _MOLINOS_]

There could be but one end to the trial. Every possible accusation was brought against Molinos, even to a foolish self-laudatory speech made to the sbirri who arrested him, and his admiring certain anagrams made of his name. One charge, which he denied, was his giving to a certain person the soiled shirt in which he had come from Spain, saying that, after his death, it would be a great relic. He seems to have responded with candor to the various articles, denying some and admitting others. Of the articles the most important were his justifying the sacrilege of breaking images and crucifixes; depreciating religious vows and dissuading persons from entering religious Orders; saying that vows destroyed perfection; that, by the prayer of Quiet, the soul is rendered not only sinless but impeccable, for it is deprived of freedom and God operates it, wishing us sometimes to sin and offend him, and the demon moves the members to indecent acts; that the three ways of the spirit, hitherto described by the doctors, are absurd and that there is but one, the interior way; that he had formed conventicles of men and women and permitted them to perform immoral acts and to eat flesh on fast days. He admitted excusing the breaking of images and crucifixes; he denied depreciation of solemn vows, but admitted it as respects private ones, and he had only dissuaded from entering religion those whom he knew would create scandal. He denied teaching that in Quietism the soul becomes impeccable, but only that it did not consent to the act of sin and he said that he knew many persons practising it who lived many years without committing even venial sin. He denied also that Quietism deprived the soul of freewill, but said that, in that perfect union with God, it was God who worked and not the faculties, and when he said that God sometimes wished sin, he meant material sin (as distinguished from formal), and that the demon, as God's instrument to mortify the flesh and purify the soul, causes sometimes the hand and other members to perform lascivious acts. He denied condemning the three ways of the spirit, having meant only that the interior way was so much more perfect that the others were negligible by comparison. He denied forming conventicles in which lascivious acts were permitted and he had excluded some persons who would not refrain from them. He admitted eating flesh on prohibited days, and that he had not perfectly observed a single Lent since he came to Rome, but said that this was by licence of his physician. He confessed that for many years he had practised the most indecent acts with two women, the details of which need not be repeated; he had not deemed this sinful, but a purification of the soul and that in them he enjoyed a closer union with God; these were merely acts of the senses, in which the higher faculties had no part, as they were united with God. When he was told that these were propositions heretical, bestial and scandalous, he replied that he submitted himself in all things to the Holy Office, recognizing that its lights were superior to his own.[108]

A sentence of condemnation was inevitable. It was drawn up, August 20, 1687; on the 28th an inquisitorial decree was signed embodying sixty-eight propositions, drawn from the evidence and confessions, which were condemned as heretical, suspect, erroneous, scandalous, blasphemous, offensive to pious ears, subversive of Christian discipline and seditious; they were not to be taught or practised under pain of deprivation of office and benefice and perpetual disability, and of an anathema reserved to the Holy See. All the writings of Molinos, in whatever language, were forbidden to be printed, possessed or read, and all copies were, under the same penalties, to be surrendered to the inquisitors or bishops, who were to burn them.[109] This was posted in the usual places on September 3d, the day fixed for the atto di fede in which Molinos was to appear.

Under a heavy guard he was brought, on the previous evening, from the inquisitorial prison to the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva, in which the atto was to be celebrated. In the morning, in a room next to the sacristy, he was exhibited to some curious persons of distinction, eliciting from him an expression of indignation, construed as indicating how little he felt of real repentance. This was confirmed by what followed, explicable possibly by Spanish imperturbability, but more probably by the Quietism which led him to regard himself as the passive instrument of God's will, and superbly indifferent to whatever might befall him, so long as his soul was rapt in the joys of the mystic death, which he had taught as the _summum bonum_. Called upon to order a meal, he specified one which in quantity and quality might satisfy the most voracious _gourmet_ and, after partaking of it, he lay down to a refreshing siesta, until he was roused to take his place on the platform where, in spite of his manacles, his bearing was that of a judge and not of a convict.

[Sidenote: _CONDEMNATION OF MOLINISM_]

The vast church was thronged to its farthest corner with all that was notable in Rome, including twenty-three cardinals, and the spacious piazza in front and all the neighboring streets were crowded. An indulgence of fifteen days and fifteen quarantines had been proclaimed for all in attendance, but in Rome, where plenary indulgences could be had on almost every day in the year by merely visiting churches, this could not account for the eagerness which brushed aside the Swiss guards stationed at the portals, requiring a reinforcement of troops and resulting in considerable bloodshed. As the long sentence was read, with its details of Molinos's enormities, occupying two hours, it was interrupted with the frequent roar of Burn him! Burn him! led by an enthusiastic cardinal and echoed by the mob outside. Through all this, we are told, his effrontery never failed him, which was reckoned as an infallible sign of his persistent perversity. The sentence concluded by declaring him convicted as a dogmatizing heretic but, as he had professed himself repentant and had implored mercy and pardon, it ordered him to abjure his heresies and to be rigidly imprisoned with the sanbenito for life, without hope of release, and to perform certain spiritual exercises. This was duly executed and he lingered, it was said repentant, until his death, December 28, 1696. The day after the atto di fede his disciples performed their abjuration. There was no desire to deal harshly with them, and they were dismissed with trivial penances, except the brothers Leoni. Simone the priest, who had been a popular confessor, was sentenced to ten years' imprisonment; Antonio Maria, the tailor, who had been a travelling missionary and organizer, was incarcerated for life. There was still another victim, the secretary of Molinos, Pedro Peña, arrested May 9, 1687, for defending his master. He was fully convicted of Quietism and, on March 16, 1689, he was condemned to life-long prison.[110]

There still remained the publication to Christendom of the new position assumed by the Holy See towards Mysticism. The sixty-eight propositions, condemned in the inquisitorial decree of August 28th, were printed in the vernacular and placed on sale, but were speedily suppressed. There must still have been opposition in the Sacred College, or on the part of Innocent XI, for the bull _Coelestis Pastor_ was not drawn up and signed until November 20th, and was not finally published to the world until February 19, 1688. This recited the same series of propositions and the condamnation of Molinos and confirmed the decree of August 28th. The propositions condemned consisted, for the most part, of the untenable extravagances of Quietism, including impeccability and the sinlessness of acts committed while the soul was absorbed with God, but it was impossible to do this without condemning much that had been taught and practised by the mystic saints, and there were no saving clauses to differentiate lawful from unlawful converse of the soul with its Creator. The Church broke definitely with Mysticism, and by implication gave the faithful to understand that salvation was to be sought in the beaten track, through the prescribed observances and under the guidance of the hierarchical organization.[111]

This change of front was emphasized in various ways. Innocent's favor saved Cardinal Petrucci from formal prosecution; to the vexation of the Inquisition, his case was referred to four cardinals, Cibò, Ottoboni, Casanate and Azzolini; he professed himself ready to retract whatever the pope objected to and, though the Inquisition held an abjuration to be necessary, he was not required to make it; he was relegated to Jesi and then recalled to Rome, where he was kept under surveillance. He could not, moreover, escape the mortification of seeing the books, which had been so warmly approved, condemned by a decree of February 5, 1688. Many other works, which had long passed current as recognized aids to devotion, were similarly treated--those of Benedetto Biscia, Juan Falconi, François Malaval and of numerous others--even the _Opera della divina Gratia_ of the Dominican Tommaso Menghini, himself Inquisitor-general of Ferrara and author of the _Regole del Tribunal del Santo Officio_, which long remained a standard guide in the tribunals. What had been accepted as the highest expression of religious devotion had suddenly become heresy.[112] Apparently it was not until May, 1689, that instructions were sent everywhere to demand the surrender of all books of Molinos and to report any one suspected of Molinism.[113]

[Sidenote: _THE BECCARELLISTI_]

Persecution received a fresh impulse when Cardinal Ottoboni, as Alexander VIII, succeeded Innocent XI, October 6, 1689. Bernino tells us that he appeared to him an angel in looks and an apostle in utterance when he declared that there was no creature in the world so devoid of sense as a heretic for, as he was deprived of faith so also was he of reason. His first care was to remove from office and throw into irremissible prison every one who was in the slightest degree suspect of Molinism; in this he did not even spare his Apostolic camera, for he arrested an Apostolic Prothonotary and, although in the Congregation of the Inquisition there were four kinsmen of the prisoner, zeal for the faith preponderated over blood.[114] Fortunately his pontificate lasted for only sixteen months, so that he had but limited opportunity for the gratification of his ardent fanaticism and scandalous nepotism.

In spite of all this, there were still found those who indulged their sensual instincts under cover of exalted spirituality. In 1698 there was in Rome the case of a priest, named Pietro Paolo di San Giov. Evangelista, who had already been tried by the tribunals of Naples and Spoleto, so that his career must have been prolonged, while references to a Padre Benigno and a Padre Filippo del Rio show that he was not alone. He had ecstasies and a following of devotees; he taught that communion could be taken without preliminary confession and that, when the spirit was united with God, whatever acts the inferior part might commit were not sins. He freely confessed to practices of indescribable obscenity with his female penitents, whom he assured afterwards that they were as pure as the Blessed Virgin. He was sentenced to perpetual prison, without hope of release, and to a series of arduous spiritual penances, while Fra Benigno escaped with seven years of imprisonment.[115]

Another development of the same tendencies--probably a survival of the Pelagini--was discovered in Brescia in 1708. The sectaries called themselves disciples of St. Augustin, engaged in vindicating his opinions on predestination and grace, but they were popularly known as Beccarellisti, from two brothers, priests of the name of Beccarelli, whom they regarded as their leaders. For twenty-five years--that is, since the ostensible suppression of the Pelagini--the sect had been secretly spreading itself throughout Lombardy, where it was said to number some forty-two thousand members, including many nobles and wealthy families and ecclesiastics of position. They had a common treasury and a regular organization, headed by the elder Beccarelli as pope, with cardinals, apostles and other dignitaries. The immediate object of the movement, we are told, was to break the power of the religious Orders and to restore to the secular priesthood the functions of confession and the direction of souls which it had well-nigh lost, but there was taught the Quietist doctrine of divine grace to which the devotee surrendered all his faculties. This was allowed to operate without resistance, and Beccarelli held that Molinos was the only true teacher of Christian perfection, but we may safely reject as exaggeration the statement that carnal indulgence was regarded as earning a plenary indulgence, applicable to souls in purgatory. Cardinal Badoaro, then Bishop of Brescia, took energetic measures to stamp out this recrudescence of the condemned doctrines; the leaders scattered to Switzerland, Germany and England, while Beccarelli was tried by the Inquisition of Venice and was condemned to seven years of galley-service.[116]

Probably the latest victims who paid with their lives for their belief in the efficacy of mental prayer and mystic death were a beguine named Geltruda and a friar named Romualdo, who were burnt in a Palermitan atto di fede, April 6, 1724, as impenitent Molinists after languishing in gaol since 1699.[117]

[Sidenote: _FÉNELON AND BOSSUET_]

If, in the condemnation of Molinos, Mysticism was not wholly condemned, what was lacking was supplied when the duel between the two glories of the Gallican Church--Bossuet and Fénelon--induced an appeal to the Holy See. Beyond the Alps, mystic ardor was not widely diffused in the seventeenth century, yet there were those who revelled in the agonies and bliss of the interior way. St. François de Sales, who died in 1622, was beatified in 1661 and canonized in 1665, taught Quietism as pronounced as that of Molinos, although he avoided the application to sensuality. The soul abandoned itself wholly to God; when divine love took possession of it, God deprived it of all human desires, even for spiritual consolations, exercises of piety and the perfection of virtue. He said that he had scarce a desire and, if he were to live again, he would have none; if God came to him, he would go to meet him but, if God did not come, he would remain quiescent and would not seek God. Freedom of the spirit consisted in detachment from everything to submit to the will of God, caring neither for places, or persons, or the practice of virtue.[118] It followed that the soul, absorbed in divine love, had nothing to ask of God; it rested in the quiet of contemplation, while vocal prayer and all the received observances of religion were cast aside, as fitted only for those who had not attained these mystic altitudes. Then there was Antoinette Bourignon (1616-1680) who, in her voluminous writings, taught the supremacy of the interior light, the abandonment of the faculties to the will of God, and the utter renunciation of self in the ardor of divine love.[119] There was Jean de Bernières-Louvigny (1602-1659) whose writings had an immense circulation and whose views as to mystic death were virtually the same as those of Molinos.[120] All these and others taught and wrote without interference, save from polemics, such as those of Pére Archange Ripaut, Guardian of the Capuchin convent of S. Jacques in Paris, who devoted a volume of near a thousand pages to their refutation and reprobation. If we are to believe him, these superhuman heights of spirituality were accompanied in France, as elsewhere, with sensuality.[121]

The condemnation of Molinos and the sixty-eight propositions attributed to him naturally attracted attention to the more or less quietistic developments of Mysticism, but it is probable that no action on the subject would have been taken in France had not personal motives suggested the persecution of one who chanced at the moment to be the most prominent representative of the interior way--that very curious personality, Jeanne Marie Bouvières de la Mothe Guyon, whose autobiography, written with a frank absence of reserve, affords a living picture of the self-inflicted martyrdom endured in the struggle to emancipate the soul from the ties of earth. When she reached the final stage she tells us that formerly God was in her, now she was in him, plunged in his immensity without sight or light or knowledge; she was lost in him as a wave in the ocean; her soul was as a leaf or a feather borne by the wind, abandoning itself to the operation of God in all that it did, exteriorly or interiorly. She acquired the faculty of working miraculous cures and her power over demons was such that, if she were in hell, they would all abandon it. At times the plenitude of grace was so superabundant and so oppressive that she could only lie speechless in bed; it so swelled her that her clothes would be torn and she could find relief only by discharging the surplus on others.[122]

It is beyond our province to enter into the miserable story of her persecutions, commenced by some of her relatives and carried on by Bossuet, leading to her reclusion in convents and imprisonment in Vincennes and the Bastile. It suffices for us that her influence stimulated Fénelon's tendency to Mysticism and converted into bitter hostility the friendship between him and Bossuet. A commission, appointed to examine her doctrine and headed by Bossuet, drew up, in 1694, a list of thirty-four errors of Mysticism, which Fénelon willingly signed and which Bossuet and Noailles, then Bishop of Châlons-sur-Marne, issued with instructions for their dioceses, including condemnations of the _Guide_ of Molinos, the _Pratique facile_ of Malaval, the _Règle des Associés de l'Enfant Jésus_, the _Analis_ of Lacombe and Madame Guyon's _Moyen court_ and _Cantique des Cantiques_. By this time Madame Guyon had been put out of the way, and the matter might have been allowed to rest under the comprehensive definitions of the bull _Coelestis pastor_, but Bossuet's combative spirit had been aroused and he was determined to crush out all vestiges of Mysticism, heedless of what the Church had accepted for centuries. He drew up an Instruction on the various kinds of prayer, in which he pointed out, in vigorous terms, the dangers attendant on contemplation. Noailles, now Archbishop of Paris, signed it with him, and they invited Fénelon to join but he refused, in spite of entreaties and remonstrances, for it attributed to Madame Guyon all that was most objectionable in Illuminism.

[Sidenote: _FÉNELON AND BOSSUET_]

The breach between the friends had commenced and it widened irrevocably when Fénelon, in justification of himself, published, in February 1697, his _Explication des Maximes des Saints sur la Vie intérieure_, with a letter to Madame de Maintenon animadverting sharply on Bossuet's injustice. The book was based chiefly on the utterances of St. François de Sales, but it carefully guarded the practice of Quietism from all objectionable deductions. There was no self-abandonment to temptations and no claim of impeccability; souls of the highest altitude could commit mortal sin; they were bound daily to ask God for forgiveness, to detest their sins and seek remission, not for the mercenary motive of their own salvation but in obedience to the wishes of God. It is true that they were not tied down to formal observances, but vocal prayer was not to be decried,--though its value depended upon its being animated by internal prayer. The indifference, which was the point most objected to in Quietism, was greatly limited by Fénelon. The senseless determination to wish for nothing was an impious resistance to the known will of God, and to all the impulses of his grace; it is true that the advanced soul wishes nothing for itself but it wishes everything for God; it does not wish perfection or happiness for itself, but it wishes all perfection and happiness, so far as it pleases God to make us wish for these things, by the impulsion of his grace. In this highest state the soul does not wish salvation in its own interest, but wishes it for the glory and good pleasure of God, as a thing which he wishes and wishes us to wish for his sake.

It is difficult to see what objection could be raised to a Quietism thus strictly limited and guarded, and no one who compares the _Maximes des Saints_ with the extravagance of the great mystic saints can fail to recognize that the violent quarrel which arose was a purely personal matter. In this Fénelon defended himself with dignity and moderation, while the violence of Bossuet's attack sometimes bordered on truculence. He was secure in the support of the court. Louis XIV had been won over, and it soon became to him a matter of personal pride to overcome all resistance to his will. Fénelon was banished to his diocese of Cambrai and deprived of his position of preceptor to the royal children, showing that he was in complete disgrace and warning all time-servers to abandon him.

It was soon evident that the matter would have to be settled in Rome. Bossuet sent an advance copy of his Instruction to Innocent XII, pointing out that he was applying in France the principles affirmed in the condemnation of Molinos. Fénelon followed his example and, on April 27th, sent the _Maximes_, stating that he submitted it to the judgement of the Holy See. The curia gladly accepted the task, rejoiced at the opportunity of intervening authoritatively in a quarrel within the Gallican Church. Fénelon was refused permission to go to Rome and defend himself, but he had a powerful protector in the person of the Cardinal de Bouillon, then French ambassador and a member of the Congregation of the Inquisition, who loyally stood by him even at the expense of a rebuke from his royal master. He also secured the support of the Jesuits, whose Collége de Clermont had approved of the _Maximes_, and who promised to manifest as much energy in his defence as they had shown in procuring the condemnation of Cornelis Jansen. These weighty influences might secure delay and discussion, but they could not control the result against the overmastering pressure of such a monarch as Louis XIV who, on July 27, 1697, wrote to the pope that he had had the _Maximes_ examined and that it was pronounced "très mauvais et très dangéreux," wherefore he asked to have judgement pronounced on it without delay. Then, on May 16, 1698, the nuncio at Paris reported that the king complained of the delay; it was in contempt of his person and crown, and if Rome did not act promptly he would take such measures as he saw fit. Threats such as this were not to be lightly disregarded, and still more ominous was an autograph letter to the pope, December 23d, expressing his displeasure at the prolongation of the case and urging its speedy conclusion.

[Sidenote: _FÉNELON AND BOSSUET_]

To Bossuet's representative and grand-vicar, the Abbé Phelippeaux, we owe a minute report of the long contest, which affords an interesting inside view of the conduct of such affairs, showing how little regard was paid to the principles involved and how completely the result depended on intrigue and influence. The case passed through its regular stages. A commission of seven consultors had been found, to whom, after a struggle, three were added. These disputed at much length over thirty-seven propositions extracted from the book and, when at length they made their report to the Congregation of the Inquisition, they stood five to five, showing that each side had succeeded in putting an equal number of friends on the commission. In the Congregation, the struggle was renewed and continued through thirty-eight sessions. Had the fate of Europe been at stake, the matter could not have been more warmly contested. At length the inevitable condemnation was voted, and then came a fresh contest over the phraseology of the decree. Bossuet's agents were not content with the simple condemnation of twenty-three propositions and the prohibition of the book, and they struggled vigorously for clauses condemning and humiliating Fénelon himself, showing how purely personal was the controversy. In this they failed, as well as in the endeavor to have the propositions characterized as heretical; they were only pronounced to be respectively rash, scandalous, ill-sounding, offensive to pious ears, pernicious in practice and erroneous. The principal doctrine aimed at was that the pure love of God should be wholly disinterested, and that its acts and motives should be divested of all mercenary hope of reward. The brief was finally agreed to, on March 12, 1699, and published on the 13th. It was in the form of a _motu proprio_ which, under the rules in force in France respecting papal decrees, precluded its acceptance and registration by the Parlement, but Louis, ordinarily so tenacious about papal intrusion, found indirect means of eluding the difficulty.

Fénelon, however, had not awaited this cumbrous procedure. In a dignified letter of submission to the pope, April 4, 1699, he stated that he had already prepared a _mandement_ for his diocese, condemning the book with its twenty-three propositions, which he would publish as soon as he should receive the royal permission. This was promptly given and, on April 9th he issued it, forbidding the possession and reading of the _Maximes_, and condemning the propositions "simply, absolutely and without a shadow of restriction." Innocent XII, who had more than once indicated sympathy with Fénelon, responded May 12th, in a brief expressing his cordial satisfaction, bestowing on him his loving benediction and invoking the aid of God for his pastoral labors. Bossuet, with the royal assistance, had triumphed, at the cost of a stain on his reputation; what the Church had gained, in condemning the sublimated speculations of a rarefied and impracticable Mysticism, it would be hard to say.[123]

Yet, as though to indicate that there is no finality in these matters, Pius VI, in 1789, beatified the Blessed Giovanni Giuseppe della Croce ([dagger symbol] March 5, 1734), who was much given to contemplation and to union with God, in which all his faculties were lost, as completely as in the trances of his prototype, San Juan de la Cruz, or as in the mystic death of Molinos. That his Mysticism did not forfeit the favor of heaven was shown by his possessing the gift of bilocation--of being in two places at one time--of which numerous instances were cited in the beatification proceedings.[124]

* * * * *

The Spanish Inquisition which had so long carried on single-handed the struggle against Mysticism, watched with satisfaction the Roman proceedings against Molinos. As we have seen, his arrest, on July 3, 1685, was promptly followed, November 9th with a condemnation of the _Guida_ which, for nine years, had been allowed to circulate freely in Spain. The edict pronounced it to contain propositions ill-sounding, offensive to pious ears, rash, savoring of the heresy of the Alumbrados, and some erroneous ones, and the title was denounced as misleading because it spoke only of the interior way.[125] When the sentence of the Roman Inquisition was published, September 3, 1687, although as a rule the Spanish Holy Office paid no attention to its decrees, the sixty-eight propositions were speedily translated into the vernacular and widely distributed. On October 11th, sixty copies were sent to Valencia to be posted, with orders to print more if they should be required. These were accompanied with an edict, commanding obedience and threatening the most rigorous prosecution for remissness, while all persons were ordered to denounce, within ten days, contraventions of any kind coming to their knowledge. This edict was to be published in all churches of the capitals of _partidos_ and an authentic record of such publication was to be affixed to the doors. In due time, when the bull _Coelestis pastor_ was issued, it was circulated with the same prescriptions.[126] There was evidently a determination to make the most of this new ally in the struggle with Mysticism.

[Sidenote: _MOLINISM_]

The Seville tribunal, indeed, had not waited for this, as it had already, April 24, 1687, arrested a canon of the church of San Salvador, Joseph Luis Navarro de Luna y Medina, who was a correspondent of Molinos and had sent him his autobiography, in order to obtain instructions for his spiritual guidance. He had previously been deprived of his licence as confessor, on charges of imprudent conduct as spiritual director of a nunnery, but Jaime de Palafox, Archbishop of Seville, who was a warm admirer of Molinos, had restored the licence, introduced him in all the convents and adopted him as confessor of himself and his family. For four years Navarro endured incarceration and the torture which was not spared, but he succumbed at last, confessed and sought reconciliation. His sentence declared him guilty of the errors of the Lutherans, Calvinists, Arians, Nestorians, Trinitarians, Waldenses, Agapetæ, Baianists and Alumbrados, besides being a dogmatizer of those of Molinos, with the addition that evil thoughts arising in prayer should be carried into execution, and also that, when his disciples assembled in his house, the lights would be extinguished and he would teach doctrines too foul for description. The tribunal itself could scarce have believed all this, for he was only required to abjure, to be deprived of benefice and functions, to be recluded for two years and be exiled for six more. When the term had expired he returned to Seville and then, until his death, in 1725, he passed his days in the churches, where the Venerable Sacrament was exposed for adoration, carrying with him a hinged stool on which he sat, gazing at the Host.[127] He was not the only Molinist in Seville for in 1689, after three years' trial, Fray Pedro de San José was condemned as a disciple of Molinos, for committing obscenities with his penitents and foretelling his election as pope and his suffering under Antichrist, who was already in Jerusalem, twenty years old. He was sentenced to abjure _de vehementi_, to undergo a circular discipline in his convent, to perpetual deprivation of teaching and confessing, and to six years' reclusion in a convent, with the customary disabilities.[128] Soon afterwards there was penanced in an auto, May 18, 1692, a woman named Ana Raguza, popularly known as _la pabeza_, as an Alumbrada and Molinista. She had come from Palermo as a missionary to convert the wicked, probably in the train of Palafox, who had been Archbishop of Palermo. She called herself a bride of Christ, she had visions and revelations, she denied the efficacy of masses and fasts, and she had the faculty of determining the condition of consciences by the sense of smell. She escaped with two years of reclusion and six more of exile.[129]

[Sidenote: _MOLINISM_]

The condemnation of Molinos seems to have stimulated the Inquisition to greater activity in the suppression of mysticism, for cases begin to appear more frequently in the records and henceforth the term Molinism, to a great extent, takes the place of Illuminism. We hear of a Molinist penanced in a Córdova auto of May 12, 1693,[130] and he cannot have been the only one there for Fray Francisco de Possadas of that city tells us that he was led to write his book against the carnal errors of Molinos by his experience in the confessional, showing that some of his penitents had been misled by them.[131] The report of the Valencia tribunal, for 1695, contains three cases then on trial. The Franciscan, Fray Vicente Selles, had been arrested in 1692. He had led a life exteriorly austere, practising meditation and contemplation, and he freely admitted that when Molinos was condemned he held that the pope was wrongly informed. His overwrought brain gave way under the stress of confinement; at times he was full of religious emotion and solicitous as to his salvation, while at others he was violently insane, performing various crazy freaks. On August 24th he attempted suicide by dashing his head against a projecting piece of iron, causing a wound so serious that several pieces of skull were discharged and, on February 6, 1693, the surgeons reported his life to be still in danger. He remained _melancolico_, variable in mood, confessing and retracting until, on October 23d, he confessed fully to Molinism, naming eleven women with whom he had had relations in the confessional and also admitting unnatural crime and other offences. At the date of the report his trial was still unfinished. Another phase of these eccentric methods of salvation is presented in the case of Vicente Hernan, a hermit of San Cristóbal of Concentayna, accused by three women of teaching them the way of bruising the head of the serpent by sleeping with them and resisting temptation, and of attempting indecencies, which they denied permitting. He was arrested September 23, 1692, and in two audiences he was a _negativo_. Then on December 17th he asked for an audience in which he said that for eight days some little flies and black pigeons had been biting him and reminding him of things forgotten, whereupon he told of the women whom he had got to sleep with him, sometimes two or three at a time, and he also mentioned numerous miraculous cures which he had wrought. In January 1693, he said that the demons with the voice of flies had been recalling his sins, and he told of three other women. Doubts arose as to his sanity and, at the end of 1693 steps were taken to investigate it, which were still in progress at the time of closing the report. The third case was that of Mosen Antonio Serra, whose doctrines the calificadores reported to be Molinistic. He was arrested December 19, 1695, so that his trial had only begun.[132]