For me it is a strange sight to see them all, even in the midst of the middle age, crying out against the mystics, and then falling into mysticism themselves. The declivity must, indeed, be rapid and insurmountable.
In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the profound Rusbrock and the great Gerson imitate precisely those they blame; and in the seventeenth, the Quietists Bona, Fenelon, even Lacombe, Madame Guyon's director, speak severely and harshly of the absolute Quietists: they all point out the abyss, and all fall into it themselves.
No matter who the person may be, there is a logical fatality. The man who, by his character and genius is the farthest removed from passive measures, he who in his writings condemns them the most strongly, even Bossuet, in practice tends towards them, like the others.
What signifies their writing against the theory of Quietism? Quietism is much more a method than a system: a method of drowsiness and indolence which we ever meet with, in one, shape or other, in religious direction. It is useless to recommend activity, like Bossuet, or to permit it, like Fenelon, if, preventing every active exercise of the soul, and holding it, as it were, in leading-strings, you deprive it of the habit, taste, and power of acting.
Is it not then an illusion, Bossuet? if the soul still seems to act, when this activity is no longer its own, but yours. You show me a person who moves and walks; but I see well that this appearance of motion proceeds from your influence over that person, you yourself being, as it were, the principle of action, the cause and reason of living, walking, and moving.
There is always the same sum of action in the total; only, in this dangerous affinity between the director and the person directed, all the action is on the side of the former; he alone remains an active force, a will, a person; he who is directed losing gradually all that constitutes his personality, becomes—what?—a machine.
When Pascal, in his proud contempt for reason, engages us to become stupid, and bend within us what he calls the automaton and machine, he does not see that it will only be an exchange of reason. Our reason having herself put on the bit and bridle, that of another man will mount, ride, and guide it at his will, as he would a horse.
If the automaton should still possess some motion, how will they lead it? According to the probable opinion, for the probablism of the Jesuits reigned in the first half of the century. Later, when its motion ceased, the paralysed age learned from the Quietists that immobility is perfection itself.
The decay and impotency which characterised the latter years of Louis XIV. are rather veiled by a remnant of literary splendour; they are, nevertheless, deeply seated. This was the natural consequence, not only of great efforts which produce exhaustion, but also of the theories of abnegation, impersonality, and systematic nullity, which had always gained ground in this century. By dint of continually repeating that one cannot walk well without being supported by another, a generation arose that no longer walked at all, but boasted of having forgotten what motion was, and gloried in it. Madame Guyon, in speaking of herself, expresses forcibly, in a letter to Bossuet, what was then the general condition: "You say, Monseigneur, there are only four or five persons who are in this difficulty of acting for themselves; but I tell you there are more than a hundred thousand. When you told me to ask and desire, I found myself like a paralytic who is told to walk because he has legs: the efforts he makes for that purpose serve only to make him aware of his inability. We say, in common parlance, every man who has legs ought to walk: I believe it, and I know it; however, I have legs, but I feel plainly that I cannot make use of them."