Quietism: Guyon, Fénelon, and the Debate over Pure Love

French writers under Louis XIV, connected to Jansenism, held that humans are driven by relentless self-interest yet want to appear altruistic. This grim view of human nature set the stage for the Quietists' radical claim that self-love could in fact be eliminated entirely, even at the cost of the self and its happiness.

Guyon argued that contemplative prayer and inner stillness were open to everyone, not just the educated, since simple folk were less likely to be misled by their own reasoning. Her writing deliberately emphasized ease and accessibility to encourage believers to attempt spiritual conversion.

Guyon taught that spiritual conversion requires renouncing all personal inclinations, however good they appear, and desiring only what God has willed from eternity. This does not make a person inactive, but means the person performs only pure actions that stem from God's will rather than their own.

Because Guyon told believers to let God worry about their sins rather than obsessing over them, critics worried this implied an anything-goes approach to morality, since inner union with God would make outward conduct irrelevant. Guyon was accused, partly for this reason, of tacit acceptance of debauchery and of hypocrisy in her own personal conduct.

Fénelon argued that true love of God must be entirely disinterested, and to prove this he imagined a hypothetical scenario in which God will destroy the soul along with the body, removing any hope of reward. He claimed one should still love God purely for his perfection, echoing François de Sales's earlier claim that love of God should survive even certain damnation.

Bossuet argued that Fénelon's doctrine of pure love effectively undermined the whole basis of Christianity, because it led to indifference about one's own salvation, which he saw as a dangerous and atrocious consequence.

Malebranche argued that hypothetical thought experiments about a hopeless afterlife are pointless because God wills to be loved as he actually is, not as an impossible counterfactual. He further argued that humans can never want anything but their own happiness, since God created human nature that way, making self-love ineliminable and tying it to pleasure and pain.

Fénelon argued that Malebranche's view eliminates free will, since on that view people would inevitably choose whatever seems most pleasant to them. Fénelon conceded that people often do choose based on pleasure because of self-love, but insisted it is possible to love purely and indifferently, without concern for oneself.

Bossuet held that Fénelon's doctrine of pure love had atrocious theological consequences, since it implied indifference to one's own salvation and undermined the Church's role as intermediary between believer and God. Fénelon and Guyon maintained that disinterested love was the higher spiritual ideal.

La Rochefoucauld argued that even apparently selfless acts, such as dying for one's friends or country, were ultimately motivated by self-love and a desire for posthumous reputation. Fénelon wanted to argue that pure, disinterested love for others and for God was genuinely possible, though he conceded that in non-Christian antiquity love for others was always in fact a manifestation of self-love.