The Mystery of the Alumbrados
Once again the word 'chew' has been substituted to circumvent Google censorship and shadow banning of this wesbite.
An interesting historical character to emerge from the gloom of the
Jesuits is Miguel de Molinos. As a youth he was educated by the Jesuits and
ordained as a Jesuit priest in 1652, joined the brotherhood of the School of
Christ. He was sent to Rome where he became very influential and soon developed
a powerful network of patrons including the exiled Queen of Sweden.
While in Rome he developed the ‘philosophy’ or perhaps more accurately,
the heresy for which he has become recorded in history: ‘Quietism’, the details
of which he thoroughly outlined in his book ‘The Spiritual Guide which
Disentangles the Soul’.
The key point of the book is Miguel’s advocacy for what he terms
‘contemplation’ over the ‘meditation’ of the Jesuits. Meditation in his terms
refers to the Jesuit techniques of visualising key scenes from the Bible,
specifically the Passion of Christ and also visualising hell itself as we have
just read in the Spiritual Exercises of Ignacio Loyola. The ostensible purpose
of Molino’s Spiritual Guide was to teach man a method of drawing closer and
knowing God by curtailing the activity of the mind and the personal will.
After a hitherto successful career in the church and Molinos’ doctrine
of Quietism having become broadly accepted and not then considered heretical, something
changed. Jesuits felt they needed to rebut the specific attacks made in the
book about their methods of ‘meditation’ and there was a lively back and forth
between Quietists and Jesuits as to which method was the best, whether the
‘meditation’ (which is more like a form of contemplation) of the Jesuits or
‘contemplation’ (which is really a form of meditation) of the Quietists. The
Inquisition took an interest and investigating in 1681 declared the Spiritual
Guide of Miguel de Molinos orthodox and compatible with the teachings of the
Church. However, in 1685 the tide turned against him and he was arrested under
instruction from French authorities and while many in Rome were sympathetic to
Molinos in 1687 he confessed his errors to the Inquisition and died after
spending nine years in prison. At his trial according to Britannica.com:
“Molinos defended sexual aberrations committed
by himself and his followers as sinless, purifying acts caused by the Devil. He
claimed they were passively allowed in order to deepen a quiet repose in God.”
Pope Innocent XI wrote of Molinos:
“….these doctrines were leading the faithful from true religion and from
the purity of Christian piety into terrible errors and every indecency.”
The Catholic Herald online summarises thus:
“In that same year, however, he
published his Spiritual Guide, which purported to lead the reader through the
various stages of the spiritual life to perfection in this world, whereby one
would remain perfectly passive before God as the highest state. Once there, a
person need not fear sins committed under the temptations of the Devil, but
should remain at peace, even after committing the vilest acts.”
This ‘doctrine’ if we can call it that,
ought to recall what we have seen of the Kabbalah and the idea of ‘holy sin’ or
sin even serving a useful purpose in making a person more righteous before God.
We even find this very dangerous idea had
crept into the theology of Pope Gregory I to whom Molinos
refers:
“That we may not make Poison of Physick, and Vices of
Vertues, by becoming vain by ‘em; God would have us make Vertues of Vices,
healing us by that very thing which would hurt us: So says St. Gregory.”
And Pope Gregory reaches this conclusion by some highly
Kabbalistic logic worthy of Simon Magus himself:
“I'd like to look inside the fortified bosom of grace
with how much God keeps us by the favor of mercy. Behold, he who exalts
himself about virtue returns through vice to humility. But he who is
extolled for his virtues, is wounded, not by the sword, but, so to speak, by
medicine. For what is virtue but medicine? and what is vice but
wound? Because, therefore, we treat the wound as a medicine, he makes the
medicine of the wound, so that we who are smitten by virtue may be cured by
vice.”
It is
all rather unfortunate because most of the early elements of the Spiritual
Guide and the core of Quietism is basically a form of Zen meditation which is
an extremely useful spiritual and psychological tool which can be used to
experience other states of being once the mental chatter of the brain has been
quietened, however this is not an idea original to Molinos and it is likely he
learned about it in his studies and decided to adopt it as a plausible cover
for his true aims which may have been deliberate subversion or at least, an
excessive enjoyment of physical pleasures. The Catholic Herald reports how:
“Cardinal
Benedetto Odescalchi and the exiled Queen Christina of Sweden became admirers
(although the Queen regarded Fr de Molinos’s huge appetite for food with
sceptical amusement).”
The
true origins of Molino’s ‘Quietism’, or at least those to emerge in the West,
are to be found in the works of a late 5th Century Greek philosopher
using the pseudonym of a 1st Century Greek convert to Christianity
by Saint Paul known as ‘Dionysius the Areopagite’. Pseudo-Dionysus
the Areopagite as
he is known was a philosopher
who apparently was both a Christian and conversely, a Neo-Platonist. He
expounded proto-Kabbalistic ideas which we can derive from the following from Corrigan
& Harrington (2014):
“According to pseudo-Dionysius, God is better
characterized and approached by negations than by affirmations.
All names and theological representations must be negated. According to
pseudo-Dionysius, when all names are negated, ‘divine silence, darkness, and
unknowing’ will follow.”
A PHD thesis by R. A. Agnew for the University of
Edinburgh comments on Pseudo-Dionysus linking his philosophy to the
‘Illuminati’:
“He, further, explains that Quietude and Silence are
necessary, since ‘only like can know like’; and ‘God is peace’ and ‘Repose’, ‘the
One all perfect source ...
of the Peace of all’; and He is Silence ‘the angels are, as it were, the
heralds of the Divine Silence’.
In silence then ‘let the intelligent soul transcend intelligence and it forgets itself ... Closed, ... mute and silent ... and sheltered, not only from exterior but also from interior impulses; he is made God.’ This is deification, the principle of Eckhart, the doctrine of the Brethren of the Free Spirit, and the teaching of the Illuminati.”
