3. Four Quietistic aberrations.
Now it is certain that the error of Quietism has, in no doubt many cases, not remained confined to such mistakes in psychological analysis and theological doctrine, but that these have joined hands with, and have furnished a defence to, sloth and love of dreamy ease, or to some impatience of the necessary details of life, or to fanatical attachment to some one mood and form of experience; and that they have, thus reinforced, ravaged not a few wills and souls.
Four chief Quietistic aberrations can be studied in history.
(1) The neglect or even contempt of vocal prayer, and of the historical and institutional elements of religion, at least in the case of more advanced souls, is one of these abuses.—Now it is true, and Catherine has been a striking instance, that the proportion of all these different elements towards one another vary, and should vary, considerably between soul and soul, according to the attrait and degree of advance of each; that the soul’s most solid advance is in the direction of an ever-deepened spiritual devotedness, and not in that of a multiplication of particular devotions; that the use of even the more central of those elements and means may, for souls called to the prayer of Quiet, become remarkably elastic and largely unmethodized; and that, for such souls (and, in various degrees and ways, sooner or latter, for perhaps most other souls), a prayer of peacefully humble expectation and of all but inarticulate, practically indescribable, brooding of love, and of dim, expansive trust and conformity is possible, sometimes alone possible, and is proved right and useful, if it leaves them strengthened to act and to suffer, to help and to devote themselves to their fellows, to Christ, and to God.
But it remains equally true, even for these as for all other souls, that the historical and institutional elements must ever remain represented, and sufficiently represented; indeed the persistence in these elements of religion will be one of the chief means for avoiding delusion. We have St. Teresa’s experience and teaching here, as a truly classical instance. And if the prayer of Quiet will give a special colour, depth, and unity to those more contingent-seeming practices, these practices will, in return, give a particular definiteness, content, and creaturely quality to that prayer. And thus too the universally and profoundly important union and interchange with souls of other, equally legitimate, kinds and degrees of spirituality will be kept up. Only the sum-total of all these souls, only the complete invisible Church, is the full Bride of Christ; and though the souls composing her may and should each contribute a varying predominance of different elements, no soul should be entirely without a certain amount of each of these constituents.
(2) Another abuse is the neglect, contempt, or misapplied fear of not directly religious occupations and labours which, however otherwise appropriate or even necessary to this soul’s growth and destination, tend to disturb its quiet and to absorb a part of its time and attention. Here it is doubtless true that the other elements of religion are also all more or less apprehensive and jealous with regard to actual, or even only possible, non-religious rival interests. And it is certain that they are all right in so far as that a certain interior leisureliness and recollection, a certain ultimate preference for the spiritualizing religious force of the soul as against the materials, non-religious and other, which that force is to penetrate, are necessary to the soul that would advance.
But the fear that characterizes the Historical and Institutional elements is rather a fear, respectively, of error and of disobedience and singularity, whereas on the part of the Mystical element it is a fear of distraction and absorption away from the Unum Necessarium of the soul. Perhaps even among the Canonized Mystics there is none that has more impressively warned us, both by word and example, against this insidious danger, than the distinguished Platonist scholar and deep spiritual writer, Père Jean Nicolas Grou, who, right through the long mystical period of his life, alternated his prayer of Quiet with extensive and vigorous critical work on the Graeco-Latin classics, and whose practice only wants further expansion and application, (according to the largely increased or changed conditions of such not directly religious work), in order to bear much fruit, not only for criticism and science, but, (by the return-effect of such occupations upon the soul’s general temper and particular devotional habits), for spirituality itself. But we must return to this point more fully in our last chapter.
(3) The third abuse is the neglect or contempt of morality, especially on its social, visible, and physical sides. Particular Mystics, and even whole Mystical schools and movements, have undoubtedly in some instances, and have, possibly, in many more cases, been maligned on this point, since even such a spotless life as Fénelon’s, and that of such a profoundly well-intentioned woman as Madame Guyon, did not, for a time, escape the most unjust suspicions. It is also true that, as a man advances in spirituality, he lays increasing stress upon the intention and general attitude of the agent, and increasingly requires to be judged by the same interior standard, if he is to be rightly understood at all. God may and does, to humble and purify him, allow painful temptations and trials from within to combine, apparently, against him, with persecutions and much isolation from without. And the difference, rather than the similarity, between Religion and Morality,—the sense of pure grace, of free pardon, of the strange profound “givenness” of even our fullest willings and of our most emphatically personal achievements,—can and should grow in him more and more.
And yet it is clear that there must have been some fire to account for all that smoke of accusation; that the material and the effect outwards, the body of an action, do matter, as well as does that action’s spirit; that this body does not only act thus outwards, but also inwards, back upon the spirit of the act and of the agent; and that temptations and trials are purifying, not by their simple presence but in proportion as they are resisted, or, if they have been yielded to, in proportion as such defeats are sincerely deplored and renounced. Thus everywhere the full development of any one part of life, and the true unity of the whole, have to be achieved through the gradual assimilation of at first largely recalcitrant other elements, and within an ever-abiding multiplicity—a maximum number of parts and functions interacting within one great organism. And hence not the outrage, neglect, or supersession of morality, but, on the contrary, its deeper development, by more precise differentiation from, and more organic integration into, religion proper, must, here again and here above all, be the final aim. Once more again it is the Incarnational type which is the only fully true, the only genuinely Christian one.
(4) And, finally, there are certain hardly classifiable fanaticisms, which are nevertheless a strictly logical consequence from a wrongly understood Quiet and Passivity,—from Quietism in its unfavourable, condemned sense. I am thinking of such a case as that of Margarethe Peters, a young Quietist, who caused herself to be crucified by her girl-companions, at Wildenspuch, near Schaffhausen, in 1823,—in order to carry out, in full literalness and separateness, the utmost and most painful passivity and dependence and resistless self-donation, in direct imitation of the culminating act of Christ’s life on earth and of His truest followers.[124] Here, in the deliberate suicide of this undoubtedly noble Lutheran girl, we get an act which but brings out the strength and weakness of Quietism wherever found. For the greatest constituents of the Christian spirit are undoubtedly there: free self-sacrifice, impelled by love of God, of Christ, and of all men, and by hatred of self.—Yet, because they here suppress other, equally necessary, constituents, and are out of their proper context and bereft of their proper checks, they but render possible and actual a deed of piteous self-delusion. How terrible is false simplification, the short cut taken by pure logic, operating without a sufficient induction from facts, and within an ardent, self-immolating temperament!