The name given to a mystical religious turn of mind which seeks to attain spiritual illumination and perfection by maintaining a purely passive and susceptive attitude to Divine communication and revelation, shutting out all consciousness of self and all sense of external things, and independently of the observance of the practical virtues. The high-priest of Quietism was the Spanish priest Molinos (q. v .), and his chief disciple in France was Madame de Guyon, who infected the mind of the saintly Fénélon. The appearance of it in France, and especially Fénélon's partiality to it, awoke the hostility of Bossuet, who roused the Church against it, as calculated to have an injurious effect on the interests of practical morality; indeed the hostility became so pronounced that Fénélon was forced to retract, to the gradual dying out of the fanaticism.
The Nuttall Encyclopædia: Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge[1] is a late 19th-century encyclopedia, edited by Rev. James Wood, first published in London in 1900 by Frederick Warne & Co Ltd.
WikipediaEditions were recorded for 1920, 1930, 1938 and 1956 and was still being sold in 1966. Editors included G. Elgie Christ and A. L. Hayden for 1930, Lawrence Hawkins Dawson for 1938 and C. M. Prior for 1956.[2]
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