He was afterwards doomed to perpetual imprisonment. On his way to
the prison he encountered one of his opponents and exclaimed, "Farewell,
my father; we shall meet again on the day of judgment, and then it will be
manifest on which side, on yours or mine, the Truth shall stand." For
eleven long years Molinos languished in the dungeons of the Inquisition,
where he died in 1696. His work was translated into French and appeared in
a _Recueil de pieces sur le Quietisme_, published in Amsterdam 1688.
Molinos has been considered the leader and founder of the Quietism of the
seventeenth century. The monks of Mount Athos in the fourteenth, the
Molinosists, Madame Guyon, Fenelon, and others in the seventeenth century,
all belonged to that contemplative company of Christians who thought that
the highest state of perfection consisted in the repose and complete
inaction of the soul, that life ought to be one of entire passive
contemplation, and that good works and active industry were only fitting
for those who were toiling in a lower sphere and had not attained to the
higher regions of spiritual mysticism. Thus the '[Greek: Aesuchastai]' on
Mount Athos contemplated their nose or their navel, and called the effect
of their meditations "the divine light," and Molinos pined in his dungeon,
and left his works to be castigated by the renowned Bossuet. The pious,
devout, and learned Spanish divine was worthy of a better fate, and
perhaps a little more quietism and a little less restlessness would not be
amiss in our busy nineteenth century.
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