Miguel de Molinos
Miguel de Molinos 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, 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.
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.
