Miguel de Molinos

Miguel de Molinos (born 1628 near Muniesa, in Aragon, died in Rome in 1696) was a Spanish Catholic mystic and the leading representative of Quietism, a movement the Church eventually condemned. His teaching is sometimes called Molinism in Spanish, though it should not be confused with the older Molinism of Luis de Molina.

He was educated by the Jesuits in Valencia, where he was ordained and worked as a confessor to a community of nuns. In the 1660s he went to Rome to promote the beatification cause of Francisco Jerónimo Simón, and he never returned to Spain. There he became an influential spiritual director. In 1675 he published his Spiritual Guide, arguing that the soul should rest in a quiet, passive state, leaving aside active effort and discursive meditation. Its ideas alarmed the Jesuits, and in 1685 he was arrested by the Inquisition. After a long trial he abjured his errors in 1687 and received a life sentence, which Pope Innocent XI confirmed in the bull Coelestis pastor.

His book found far more readers abroad than in Spain, appearing in several European languages. The debate it provoked reached France, and in the twentieth century writers such as Aldous Huxley, the poet José Ángel Valente and the philosopher María Zambrano returned to his work.