Book I. Dialogue II: On the particular errors of the false mystics of the seventeenth century: Bossuet opposes to them the principles of the true mystics
I
Q. Could you not summarize these errors in a few words, so that I could more easily remember them ?
A. Bossuet himself did it, in these words i1 ‘ The keynote of the errors of Quietism is to attribute sublimity and perfection to things which have it not, or at any rate have it not in this life; this leads them to suppress, in certain states, and in those whom we call perfect contemplatives, many acts essential to piety and expressly commanded by God: for instance, the acts of explicit faith contained in the Apostles 5 Creed; all petitions, even those of the Lord’s prayer; reflections, thanksgivings and other acts of this nature, that one finds commanded and exemplified in all the pages of Holy Scripture and in all the works of the Saints. 5
Q. Is that, then, true Quietism ? Is that a just summary of its errors ?
A. That is how Bossuet expressed it to us, and that is how you will see it developed and condemned throughout this work.
Q. I begin to see that there are very few people who have a true knowledge of the most dangerous sort of Quietism. The gross kind carries its own antidote in its very horrors; and so I suppose that was why Bossuet undertook only to combat spiritual Quietism, thinking it unnecessary to combat the other kind, which sufficiently refutes itself.2
A. He tells us this so often that he seldom gives us the chance to forget it. For he repeatedly writes against these spiritual enormities, against these excessive sublimities which are not, in any case, of this world, as he has just said.
d* What gave rise to these spiritual enormities? For in the matter of piety it is more often through default than through excess that people err.
A. This is what our author says i3 ‘ The new mystics, so far from tempering by sane interpretations the excessive expressions of various authors on the states of contemplation and extraordinary prayer, have done just the opposite; for, not content with taking these expressions literally, they have pushed them to an extreme for which there is no justification, and added things that none of the ancient writers before them had thought of. Thus were born all those errors unknown to the mystics that we propose to set forth. 5 d» To what does Bossuet attribute these extremes?
A. ‘ These views, 5 he says,4 ‘ have their beginnings in the natural vanity of the human mind, which always wants to distinguish itself, and therefore unless one takes great care, infuses into everything, and even into Prayer, which is the centre of Religion, some arrogant peculiarities.’ d- What is this arrogant peculiarity?
A. It is the continual and invariable act of what they miscall contemplation.
d- On what principles do they base such an act, which seems so extraordinary ?
A. Let us hear Bossuet: c The first principle of the new mystics 3 is that when one is once truly given up to God, the act always continues, provided it is not revoked, and it need be neither repeated nor renewed. 5
Q. On what grounds does Bossuet attribute to them so obviously false a view ?
A. On a large number of passages which he quotes, both from the letter from Fr. Jean Falconi and from MalavaFs book, but chiefly from the Interpretation du Cantique and from the Moyen Court, in which, he goes on,
‘ the perpetuity of these unrepeatable acts is declared openly by the new mysticism. 51
Q. And how did Bossuet infer from this false first principle the suppression of all the acts of piety that he tells of in his summary of Quietism ?
A. By two obvious steps: from this continual and permanent act it follows:
(i) That explicit acts on the Trinity, on the divine attributes, on the articles of the Creed, on the petitions of the jP ater, are no longer obligatory for these supposedly perfect ones. Because there is for them now 2 only a single continuous and universal act, in which everything is included, and in which they claim all the other acts of religion are comprehended in the highest degree, and so far as is necessary to please God;
(ii) All the petitions, prayers and thanksgivings are equally suppressed by the false assumption of this permanent and unrepeatable act, which leaves our * perfect 5 friends nothing more to do or to ask for.
Q. Did you not give me to understand at the start that the Bishop of Meaux and the other Bishops declared that these errors were merely an obvious abuse of the good doctrine of the true mystics ? In what, on this point then, does this abuse consist ? For this may help me to understand that which you have just told me.
A. The abuse is in trying to perpetuate in and exclude from their Prayer what, in the prayer of the true mystics, was neither perpetuated nor excluded.
1 Book I, § 29.
a Book II, § 1.
QO
II
Q. Explain this first abuse to me.
A. The true mystics teach that the act in which one contemplates God by regarding him in pure faith may last for some time, longer or shorter according to one's habitual disposition, and most of all according to the force of the grace which draws the mind and the heart to God. The false mystics pretend that this act may last for whole years or for a lifetime without any need of repetition. This Bossuet calls5 a sublimity of perfection which does not exist, or which exists only in Heaven and not in this life, where there are so many causes of distraction and dissipation. 2
Q. Explain the second abuse.
A. The true mystics teach that the loving gaze on God in contemplation, being an act of pure charity which believeth all things ) hopeth all things, endureth all things, and beseecheth all thmgs, itself contains equivalently all the other acts of religion, but without discharging us from the obligation of performing at the proper time the particular acts of these virtues. The false mystics, on the other hand, assert— or at any rate it follows from their doctrine of uninterrupted contemplation—that they are exempt from the detailed carrying out of all these interior practices, which in their system are only for beginners although absolutely commanded for all: they therefore exclude them from the state of the perfect.
III
Q. Do they not make other exclusions in abusing the good doctrine of the mystics ?
A. Another abuse is that they exclude from the prayer of the perfect what ought never in any circumstances to be excluded. For the true mystics teach:
(i) That every object of faith can be an object of contemplation;
(ii) That in what they call the pure and perfect con - templation of the incomprehensible being of God, one should not think of truth directly, nor of Jesus Christ, nor of the divine attributes: but that this only applies to the period of this kind of prayer, and even then does not ever positively and intentionally exclude the other particular and distinct ideas of the Faith. The false mystics for their part recognize as true contemplation only that which is directed to God alone, and, greatest error of all, they assert that this vague, general and indistinct knowledge of God is the sole and perpetual act of the perfect contemplative. This obviously implies the formal exclusion in certain states of acts of explicit and distinct faith.
- Let these false contemplatives know,’ said Bossuet,6 ‘ that the setting up of prayers in which by definition and deliberately one ceases to think of Jesus Christ, of his mysteries, of the Trinity, on the pretext of more completely losing oneself in the divine essence, is false piety and the illusion of the evil spirit.’
IV
Q. I cannot understand how the true mystics managed to turn the purest, the most perfect contemplation into the vague, general and indistinct idea of the incomprehensible being of God. Surely the distinct and particular notions of his power, his wisdom, his goodness, his infinite holiness, mean a more perfect and wider knowledge of God ?
A. Let Bossuet himself answer: 2 4 The Scholastics,’ he says, 4 are in agreement that the most perfect contemplation of the divine nature is that in which one regards it after the least restricted notions, such as being, truth, goodness, perfection; not only because these are the purest, the most intellectual, the most abstract, the most elevated from corporal images called by the School phantasms; but also because by their universality they help to make more easily understood the universal perfection of God in its whole extent, a thing which the more particular and restricted ideas of powerful, wise, of good and of holy, etc., cannot do. This, 5 he continued, c is the excellent doctrine of Duns Scotus and Suarez; and I dare declare, 5 he adds, c that in these general ideas one attributes to him to a greater extent those infinite perfections which are confusedly and universally understood in these abstract notions; also arousing to a greater extent that wonder (note these words), that astonishment, that silence, in which contemplation begins, and which made David say: “ O Lord, our Lord, how admirable is thy name in the whole earth, 55 etc. and too: “ Silence is thy praise. 55 5
Q. This beautiful passage in our author will help to disentangle many things in my mind; but I would like to know what inferences he draws.
A. Two: the first is against the false mystics, where he says i7 c Though these universal ideas may in a sense be the more sublime, it is wrong to vilify the others to the extent of excluding the more particular ones from contemplation, such as the ideas of the power, wisdom, holiness and goodness of God. 5
The second is in favour of the good doctrine of the true Mystics: he says 2 that ‘ a soul attracted to the contemplation of God, as God, in his pure incomprehensibility, can and should give himself up to that general and indistinct notion, so as not to slip from the present attraction or to put obstacles in the way of Grace. 5
Q. What would one reply to those who object that a philosopher, a Mohammedan, a Jew, a Deist, could contemplate God in this way, in view of the general, abstract idea that they have of the sovereign Being as much as we ?
A. After showing them that they were taking in the wrong sense this objection that Bossuet merely indicates, 3 you should say that in order to apply themselves to this kind of prayer two things are necessary that they lack: (i) the infused gift of the faith received in Baptism; (ii) that God should give them at the time an extraordinary or special grace to exercise this faith by the contemplation we are talking of.
Q. What is the final conclusion of this Second Book of Bossuet’s Instruction Pastorale ?
A. He himself drew his final conclusion; but in order to make it more clearly understood, he repeats it in these terms i 1
‘ The objection to the false mystics is their necessary and permanent exclusion of these divine objects in perfect contemplation, and what is even more pernicious, the exclusion of this throughout the whole of this state, for the act of pure contemplation is, according to them, continuous and perpetual; this leads them to the suppression of explicit acts of faith, which are expressly commanded by the Gospels; from which you will see that in order to be orthodox in these matters it is enough never purposely to exclude from perfect contemplation, and even less from every state the consideration of the perfections of God or the Divine Persons.’
» Book II, § 26.
E
Footnotes
Chapter 6 of 31