In Search of Schopenhauer's Cat: Arthur Schopenhauer's Quantum-Mystical Theory of Justice

13. Schopenhauer and Quietism

Chapter 13 Schopenhauer and Quietism Schopenhauer himself gave us a brief but keenly focused definition of “Quietism,” and in doing so, connected it with the concepts of asceticism and mysticism: Quietism, i.e., the giving up of all willing, asceticism, i.e., intentional mortification of one’s own will, and mysticism, i.e., consciousness of the identity of one’s own inner being with that of all things, or with the kernel of the world, stand in the closest connexion, so that whoever professes one of them is gradually led to the acceptance of the others, even against his intention.l.l.l. [T]he writers who express those teachings .l.l. generally do not know one another; in fact, the Indian, Christian , and Mohammedan mystics, quietists, and ascetics are different in every respect except in the inner meaning and spirit of their teachings.1 116 1. WWR-2, 613. Schopenhauer’s point is a strong one. The giving up of all willing, the mortification of one’s own individuated version of the will, and the consciousness of the identity of one’s own inner being, that is, one’s “will,” with the inner being, that is, “will,” of all things, or with “the kernel of the world,” that is, the world as “will,” is his doctrine of the denial of the will to live. And it is also the common discovery and heritage of the deepest thinkers among the world’s widely divergent religious traditions, in a sense, the kernel that lies beneath all genuine religious thought.2 Schopenhauer’s awkwardly and perhaps unfortunately named doctrine of the denial of the will to live is, in that sense, an endorsement of the great mystical understandings, Eastern and Western, that have generated the strangely divergent and yet at the same time common religious doctrines of salvation or deliverance. It is in truth more a doctrine of deliverance than of salvation—deliverance from the sufferings caused by the affirmations of the will to live that accompany daily living. In terms of Western theological understandings of the doctrine of salvation or deliverance, Schopenhauer allied himself formally and expressly with a seventeenth-century movement in Christian mystical theology called Quietism, and with an even earlier precursor of that movement, exemplified in a fourteenth -century work known as the Theologia Germanica. He justi- fied his invocation of that form of Christian mystical theology by likening its tenets to those of the Eastern, predominantly Buddhist Schopenhauer and Quietism 117 2. The Catholic Encyclopedia, in an article understandably treating Quietism somewhat negatively, lists its presence in the “essential” features of Brahmanism and Buddhism, and also lists the Quietist tendency within Stoicism, Neoplatonism, Gnosticism, Messalianism, and Hesychiasm. The article treats some of the Catholic Christian Quietists, e.g., François Fénelon, semi-negatively by referring to their tenets as “Semiquietism.” The Catholic Encyclopedia (Robert Appleton Company, 1911), s.v. “Quietism.” The 1911 edition of The Catholic Encyclopedia is much more thorough than newer editions in its treatment of topics of interest to medievalists and historians of religion. variety: “[N]ot only the religions of the East, but also true Christianity has throughout this fundamental ascetic character that my philosophy explains as denial of the will-to-live, although Protestantism, especially in its present-day form, tries to keep this dark.”3 Schopenhauer may have regarded Quietist spirituality as true Christianity, but the Catholic Church did not. In 1687, Pope Innocent XI, after an investigation by the Holy Inquisition, issued an Apostolic Constitution4 condemning the Quietist teachings of the Spanish Catholic priest, Miguel de Molinos, and ordering the imprisonment of the priest himself. Molinos was one of those whom Schopenhauer cited as an exemplar of the doctrine of the denial of the will to live.5 Among the forty-three propositions taught by Molinos and condemned by the Pope were several with which Schopenhauer would have heartily agreed. For example: 1. It is necessary that man reduce his own powers to nothingness , and this is the interior way. .l.l. 7. A soul ought to consider neither the reward nor punishment, nor paradise, nor hell, nor death, nor eternity. .l.l. 30. Everything sensible which we experience in the spiritual life, is abominable, base, and unclean.6 Many of the other propositions are ones with which Schopenhauer would likely have agreed had he not been an atheist. For example: 12...