Miguel de Molinos
1628 CE–1696 CE · Modern · Muniesa
Miguel de Molinos (1628–1696) was a Spanish Catholic priest and spiritual director whose 1675 Guía Espiritual (Spiritual Guide) became one of the most widely circulated manuals of contemplative prayer in seventeenth-century Europe, teaching a path of interior silence, self-annihilation, and passive abandonment to God. He settled in Rome after 1663, attracting a large following among clergy and laity before being arrested by papal authorities in 1685. Pope Innocent XI condemned sixty-eight propositions drawn from his writings and correspondence in the apostolic constitution Coelestis Pastor (1687), and Molinos publicly abjured, spending the remainder of his life in Roman imprisonment. His teachings, labeled Quietism by opponents, shaped subsequent mystical currents including the French Quietism of Madame Guyon and indirectly influenced Fénelon and Protestant Pietism. The Roman Catholic Church has not rehabilitated his condemned propositions; his legacy remains the subject of ongoing scholarly debate about the boundaries of orthodox mystical theology.
Contested teaching
Pope Innocent XI condemned sixty-eight propositions attributed to Molinos in the apostolic constitution Coelestis Pastor (1687), judging that his teaching on passive prayer, moral indifference in advanced souls, and the soul's suspension of active resistance to temptation constituted heresy; Molinos publicly abjured before the Inquisition the same year.
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MuniesaSpain
What they did here
Born (baptised 29 June 1628) in Muniesa, a small village in the province of Teruel, Aragon.
About Muniesa
Muniesa, a village in the province of Teruel, Aragon, northeastern Spain. It was the birthplace of the Quietist writer Miguel de Molinos (1628), author of the Spiritual Guide.
In the same place & time
Sages whose lives overlapped with Miguel de Molinos’s in the same cities, drawn from their recorded journeys.
In the same tradition
Pope Alexander VII, Pope Clement IX, Pope Alexander VIII, Pope Clement XI, Pope Clement XII, Pope Innocent XIII, Pope Benedict XIV
The world in their lifetime
Thinkers and teachers of other traditions whose lives overlapped with Miguel de Molinos’s — a glimpse of the wider world they lived in. Drawn purely from recorded birth and death years.
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Works
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