MOLINOS, MIGUEL de. — Quietist, born at Muniesa (Spain) on 29 June 1628, died in Rome on 28 December 1696. Ordained priest in 1652, he was sent to Rome in 1663 as procurator in the cause of the Venerable Francesco Simon. He remained in Rome and became renowned as a spiritual director and mystical writer. In 1685 he was imprisoned by the Holy Office; after a trial, he abjured his Quietist errors in September 1687. The bull *Caelestis Pastor* of Innocent XI (20 November 1687) condemned MOLINOS himself as a formal heretic.
MOLINOS published *Guía espiritual* (Rome 1675), which “disencumbers the soul and leads it along the interior path to attain perfect contemplation and the rich treasure of interior peace”; *Breve trattato della comunione quotidiana* (ibid. 1675); and *Cartas escritas a un caballero español desengañado para animarle a tener oración mental dándole modo para ejercitarla* (ibid. 1676).
The mystical theories of MOLINOS, which were condemned, represent the most precise and conscious formulation of the Quietist movement (v. QUIETISMO). The nuances of his mysticism are extremely subtle, and his expressions belong to the most refined and evanescent literary psychology: this explains the infatuation with MOLINOS in Rome before his imprisonment. Yet whoever goes beyond a superficial reading finds a clear and trenchant theological substructure. MOLINOS maintained that actively striving is an offense to God and that one must instead abandon oneself to Him and remain like a dead body; that natural activity is hostile to grace and hinders true perfection; that without action the soul annihilates itself, thus returning to its principle, which is God, and is thereby deified so that God and the soul are no longer two united beings but one; that in contemplation every reflection is harmful, even when directed to one’s own actions and defects; that whoever has surrendered free will to God need no longer concern himself with his own perfection, virtue, holiness, or salvation, nor need he worry about temptations; he must offer no positive resistance to them but only negative resistance, and if nature stirs, let it stir, for it is nature (sometimes carnal acts are performed directly by the devil without consent); and that in acquired contemplation one can no longer commit sins.
The condemnation of the Holy Office also touched on MOLINOS’s practical life; it is impossible to know to what extent and how far he stained himself, under the pretext of contemplation, with carnal guilt. Contemporary testimony accuses MOLINOS of various turpitudes. As for the importance of MOLINOS in the history of Italian Quietism, caution is needed: the MOLINOS affair was certainly the most sensational, but it was neither the only nor the first, since Quietism in Italy was already flourishing before MOLINOS’s arrival.