L'eresia dei perfetti: Inquisizione romana ed esperienze mistiche nel Seicento italiano (review)

Adelisa Malena has provided a fine study of mystics who were investigated for heresy in late-seventeenth-century Italy, based primarily on research in the Vatican's central archives of the Roman Inquisition or Holy Office. Inquisitions tried numerous charismatic mystics, most of them women, who purportedly had divine visions and prophesied. From the 1680's on, people who demonstrated such abilities, which might be suggestive of mystical perfection, were generally suspected of Quietism, the heresy associated with Miguel de Molinos. A Spanish cleric condemned as a heretic in 1687, Molinos preached that the human soul must be entirely passive; spiritual union with God was possible only through contemplation and the complete annihilation of the will. Malena takes issue with recent literature that distinguishes between cases of "pretense of holiness" and "Quietism," claiming that both fall under the broader rubric of "mysticism," which strove for spiritual union with the divine.

Typical of those tried by the Holy Office was Francesca Fabbroni, a Benedictine nun in Pisa who was posthumously condemned of pretense of sanctity. Shortly after taking the veil as a teenager, Fabbroni allegedly began having frequent ecstatic religious experiences. Fabbroni, who, like many other female mystics, received encouragement from her confessor, was eventually credited with the ability to prophesy, heal the ailing, communicate with the deceased, and penetrate and change the souls of others. She purportedly claimed that, having surrendered her free will to God, she no longer had the temptation or even the ability to sin. In 1689, eight years after her death from natural causes, Fabbroni's remains and a portrait of her were burned by order of the Inquisition in a public square in Florence.

Through the records of both the Inquisition and the Index of Prohibited Books, Malena also examines actions taken against mystical publications that church authorities deemed dangerous. Interestingly, among these treatises were two written by an inquisitor. Tommaso Menghini, Inquisitor of Ferrara, composed an important guide to the rules of the Holy Office for the vicars under his supervision. In the late 1680's, however, two other treatises he had written aroused suspicions in Rome. In these writings, he called for the total abandonment of the human will to God. When praying, Menghini wrote, one must not even reflect on what words were spoken to God; one addressed God with the sole aim of totally "losing oneself" in Him. Such language resembled Quietism, and in April, 1688, the Holy Congregation (or supreme court) of the Inquisition banned the two treatises and ordered Menghini removed from his position of inquisitor.

Malena persuasively shows that it is impossible to distinguish acceptable from "heretical" forms of mysticism, observing, for example, that Molinos was expressing ideas that were quite similar to those of earlier mystics whom Catholic authorities considered orthodox. She could have discussed at greater length why mystics were subject to so much scrutiny in the late seventeenth century. She briefly mentions the Church's fears of Protestantism. To be sure, the Inquisition was founded in 1542 with the express goal of combating Protestant "heresies." And since the doctrine of free will was anathema to Lutheran and Reformed theologians, Malena correctly notes that the mystics' denial of free will could provoke suspicions of Protestantism. Be that as it may, Protestantism had basically been squelched in Italy already by the 1580's, and so many of the mystics' other claims—most obviously, the assertion that they were incapable of sinning—were utterly abhorrent to all magisterial Protestants, a fact that could not have been lost on Inquisition authorities. Perhaps inquisitors simply chose to combat non-conformists one at a time. Having vanquished the Protestants and made significant success in fighting various forms of "superstitions" and magic, the most common cases heard by the Holy Office throughout seventeenth-century Italy, inquisitors of the late 1600's probably felt further emboldened to pursue...