pure passivity of inner contemplation was achieved, lower forms of prayer
and meditation, as well as the pursuit of virtue, were useless. Quietism picked
up on Spanish themes, especially the concept of dejamiento, abandonment,
or letting go, which may have entered the Keswick movement from Madame
Guyon, a semi-Quietist writer admired by Wesley and other evangelicals.
Semi-Quietism is the label given to the Francois Fénelon’s theology of pure
love, condemned by Rome. Fénelon picked up the notion of not willing
salvation from the writing of Saint Francis de Sales. Francis’s focus is on
love rather than intellect. He develops an Augustinian psychology of love as
the desire for union with God. He raises new and un-Augustinian questions,
however, when he suggests that the higher forms of love involve a holy
indifference to anything but God’s will.
“Pure love,” for Fénelon, meant loving God without the sel¿ sh desire to
¿ nd happiness in God. To condemn the aspiration for such pure love is to
insist, with Augustine and Aquinas, that the desire to ¿ nd happiness in God
as one’s ultimate goal is not only necessary but morally right and essential.
The appeal of pure love theology is a symptom of a key challenge posed
to Catholic theology by modernity, with its denial of inherent teleology
in nature—so that pursuing the goal of ultimate ful¿ llment, which is the
essence of medieval Christian ethics, comes to seem sel¿ sh. Ŷ
de Sales, Treatise on the Love of God.
John of the Cross, The Spiritual Canticle.
Teresa of Avila, The Interior Castle.
———, The Life of Teresa of Jesus.
Suggested Reading