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Updated: June 28, 2025
We strive ineffectually to be the self-sufficing invulnerable being, the teres atque rotundus of the poet; the stoical exemption which philosophy affects to give us over the pains and vexations of human life, is as imaginary as the state of mystical quietism and perfection aimed at by some crazy enthusiasts."
The sentiment of universal brotherhood which directed their policy has never been so fully developed in any branch of the Aryan race, unless it may be found incorporated in the religious quietism of Buddha and his followers. For a proper appreciation of this peculiar composition, some further particulars respecting its origin and character will be needed.
The authority last mentioned also speaks of him as 'a singularly able controversialist in his argument with Hoadly; and adds: 'Of all the writers whom he must have irritated Freethinkers, Methodists, actors, Hanoverians, of all the nonjuring friends whom he alienated by his quietism, none doubted his singleness of purpose. It may be added that there were few of his opponents who might not have learnt from him a lesson of Christian courtesy.
Fenelon published "Maxims of the Saints on the Interior Life." Bossuet wrote on "The States of Prayer." These were the rival books in a controversy about what was called "Quietism." Bossuet afterwards wrote a "Relation sur le Quietisme," of which Fenelon's copy, charged with his own marginal comments, is in the British Museum.
A space-filling individual is a body; a time-filling individual is a soul. It should be inquired whether Nature has not essentially changed with the progress of culture. All activity ceases when knowledge comes. The state of knowing is eudæmonism, blest repose of contemplation, heavenly quietism. Miracles, as contradictions of Nature, are amathematical. But there are no miracles in this sense.
This pious enthusiast easily found a small body of followers in a time when men were weary of war after the cruelties of the Hussite conflicts; but here, too, his theory developed in practice into a kind of Quietism under priestly control, an austere Puritanism, which is the very opposite of the personal freedom of Anarchism. Vorläufer des Neueren Socialismus, Pt. i., p. 230.
It is not an escape from life and action; it is the release of life and action from the prison of the mortal self. Not to realise that, is the heresy of Quietism, of many mystics. Commonly such people are people of some wealth, able to command services for all their everyday needs. They make religion a method of indolence.
May it not mean paradoxically and such a mode of expression is common with the mystics the contrary of that which, at a first and literal reading, it would appear to mean? Is not the whole ethic of submission and quietism an immense paradox, or rather a great tragic contradiction? Is not the monastic, the strictly monastic, ethic an absurdity?
"A pleasing stirring of love," says The Cloud of Unknowing, not a desperate anxious struggle for more light. True contemplation can only thrive when defended from two opposite exaggerations: quietism on the one hand, and spiritual fuss upon the other. Neither from passivity nor from anxiety has it anything to gain.
In a general way, it may be asserted that the same doctrines which in India led to the inculcation of indifference and quietism, led to Stoic activity in Greece and Italy.
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