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Updated: June 28, 2025
This thinker takes thirty years to move from the Epicurean quietude to the quietism of Fenelon, and this only speculatively, for his practical life remains the same, and all his anthropological discovery consists in returning to the theory of the three lives, lower, human, and higher, which is in Pascal and in Aristotle. And this is what they call a philosopher in France!
Mr Hopgood had never been particularly in earnest about religion, but his wife was a believer, neither High Church nor Low Church, but inclined towards a kind of quietism not uncommon in the Church of England, even during its bad time, a reaction against the formalism which generally prevailed. When she married, Mrs Hopgood did not altogether follow her husband.
I have always hesitated on this point, and I have wasted years in futile self-reproach and useless fits of activity. My western conscience, penetrated as it is with Christian morality, has always persecuted my oriental quietism and Buddhist tendencies. I have not dared to approve myself, I have not known how to correct myself.
Carlyle, indeed, used different language, and some remarks of his about a lost lamb bleating on the mountains, having been unfortunately repeated to Miss Nightingale, required all Mr. Jowett's suavity to keep the peace. In a letter of fourteen sheets, he turned her attention from this painful topic towards a discussion of Quietism.
And there was a wide difference between the calm statement of a number of political propositions about government, and their transformation into dramatic invective against the arrogance of all social inequality that does not correspond with inequalities of worth. There is no contradiction between this and the social quietism of other parts of the book.
Was there not an inspired apostle, who could but say the very same thing of himself, and look forward to a future life in which he would "know even as he was known"? It is well worth observing too, that so far from the moral of this Bhagavat-Gita issuing in mere contemplative Quietism, its purpose is essentially practical.
To some extent this is already done: traditionalism and liberalism, sacramentalism, revivalism, quietism, have each their existing cults. But these varying types of church now appear as competitors, too often hostile; not as the complementary and graded expressions of one life, each having truth in the relative though none in the absolute sense.
Asceticism, quietism, enthusiasm, ecstasy all systems which imply an unnatural repression or an unnatural excitation of our faculties are ill-suited for the mass of mankind.
In his theology he admits, under the circumstances we have mentioned, anthropomorphic gods, pretending to account for their origin in the chance concourse of atoms, and suggesting that they display their quietism and blessedness by giving themselves no concern about man or his affairs.
It is thought that Bossuet, who had always been his great exemplar, urged him to undertake a reply to the heresies of Mme de Guyon and Fénelon, and that so he was dragged into that very painful quarrel. At all events, he started a series of "Dialogues on Quietism," in which all the extreme doctrines of Molinos and his disciples were examined and ridiculed.
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