Jansenism

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JANSENISM

Jansenism is a polemical term introduced by Jesuit critics to label those sympathetic to the theological views of Cornelius Jansen, the Louvain theologian and later bishop of Ypres. Supporters of Jansen protested that Jansenism is merely a "phantom" of the Jesuits and preferred to be called Augustinians. Jean Orcibal (1953) draws attention to the considerable difficulties in providing a precise definition of the term jansénisme. Even so, Jansenism can be understood in contrast to Jesuit theology, and the Jansenist movement did play a particularly significant political role in pre-revolutionary modern France. Moreover, Jansenism is of philosophical interest given its connections, both real and perceived, to Cartesianism.

Jansenist Theology

Jansen's main theological work is his Augustinus, posthumously published in 1640. He called for a return to the emphasis in Augustine on the importance of the workings of grace in the salvation of the elect. He was explicit in rejecting the view of the Jesuits, defended in the sixteenth century by the Spanish Jesuit Luis de Molina, that though grace is needed for salvation, it is also necessary that the will freely cooperate with the working of grace. For Molina, such freedom requires an "indifference" that makes it possible for the will to reject divine assistance. In response Jansen insisted that since the grace that heals the will is fully efficacious, it determines the will to meritorious action in a way that excludes indifference.

The Jesuit charge was that the theology of the Augustinus gives aid and comfort to a heretical Calvinist view that God determines one's salvation in complete independence of the works of one's free will. Jansen's defenders countered that the standard Molinist line supports the heretical doctrine of Pelagius, which Augustine and the early church had condemned as heretical, that one's salvation is due to one's free actions rather than to the workings of grace.

Pope Urban VIII initially condemned the Augustinus in the 1643 bull In eminenti on the technical grounds that it violated an earlier decree in Rome prohibiting inflammatory remarks concerning free will and grace. This decree was connected to a bitter dispute at the end of the sixteenth century that pitted Molina and the Jesuits against Domingo Bañez and other members of the Dominican order (of which St. Thomas Aquinas had been a member). To resolve the dispute, Pope Clement VIII established the Congregatio de Auxiliis (Congregation on Grace) in 1597 to determine whether Molina's views were heretical. At certain points there were rumors that the decision was about to go against Molina and the Jesuits. However, the congregation ended in a stalemate, and Pope Paul V closed it in 1607 with a decree forbidding either side of the dispute to charge the other with heresy. He further promised a resolution of the issue at "an opportune time," but the issue remains unresolved to this day.

In the case of Jansenism, however, the church took action. In 1653 Innocent X issued the bull Cum occasione, which condemned as heretical or temerarious the following five propositions that anti-Jansenist theologians in the Sorbonne had claimed to find in the Augustinus :

Some of God's commandments are impossible for the just despite their desire and their effort [to keep them], given the forces that they have presently and also the lack of the grace that makes them possible.
In the state of fallen nature, no one [can] ever resist interior grace.
For merit or demerit in the state of fallen nature, it is not required that man be free from the necessity of willing and acting; it is sufficient for him to be free from constraint.
The Semi-pelagians admitted the necessity of interior prevenient grace for all good works, even for the beginning of faith; but they were heretical in claiming that this grace is such that the human will may either resist or obey it.
To say that Jesus Christ died and shed his blood for all men, without a single exception, is to speak as a Semi-pelagian (Denzinger 1963, p. 445f).

In 1656 Alexander VII closed a loophole created by Cum occasione, which failed to mention the Augustinus explicitly, and issued Ad sacram, which claimed that the propositions are to be found in Jansen's text in their condemned sense. Thus did Jansenism become a formally defined heresy within the Catholic Church.

French Jansenism

Jansen was a friend of the French religious figure Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, abbé de Saint-Cyran, who served as the spiritual advisor to the reformist convent of Port-Royal des Champs. Though Jansenism began in Louvain, several theologians associated with Saint-Cyran and attached to Port-Royal as solitaires came to be identified as the leaders of the Jansenist faction. These individuals were known for their opposition to a moral laxism that they found in the work of the Jesuits. This aspect of Jansenism is most evident in the Lettres provincials (1656–1657) of the Port-Royalist solitaire Blaise Pascal (the brother of Jacqueline Pascal, a member of Port-Royal). Another famous solitaire, the Sorbonne theologian Antoine Arnauld (the brother of Jacqueline-Marie-Angélique Arnauld, the prioress of Port-Royal), wrote a defense of Saint-Cyran's penitential theology in the 1643 De la fréquente communion, and later was an active supporter of Jansen and the Augustinus.

Saint-Cyran had been an opponent of Cardinal Richelieu, the French first minister, and Cardinal Mazarin, Richelieu's successor, inherited a suspicion of those associated with Port-Royal. As part of a campaign against Port-Royal, Mazarin lobbied for an official condemnation of Jansenism in Rome. The effort resulted in Cum occasione, but Arnauld argued that the five propositions have both heretical and nonheretical senses and that the Augustinus endorses them only in their nonheretical senses. When Rome answered with the explicit condemnation of Jansen's text in Ad sacram, Arnauld then insisted on the distinction between questions of faith (questions de droit ), on which the pope's word is authoritative, and questions of fact (questions de fait ), on which the pope has no special authority. He appealed to this distinction in claiming that whereas Catholics must accept the pope's claim that the propositions are heretical, they are entitled to retain a "respectful silence" with respect to the claim that the propositions are to be found in the Augustinus. Arnauld was expelled from the Sorbonne in 1656 for writing in support of the Duc de Liancourt (Roger du Plessis-Liancourt), who was refused absolution due to his failure to affirm the presence of the condemned propositions in the Augustinus.

After Mazarin's death in 1661, Louis XIV followed his former first minister's policy of suppressing Jansenism and started to put considerable pressure on the nuns and solitaires at Port-Royal. His attempts during the 1660s to impose an anti-Jansenist formulary both on those associated with Port-Royal and on the clergy brought the French church to the brink of schism. However, with the help of Pope Clement IX, Louis was able to institute a Peace of the Church in 1669 that allowed for the respectful silence that Arnauld had advocated. This brought to an end the predominance of what Louis Cognet (1968) calls "First Jansenism," for which theological issues were most crucial. Cognet contrasts this sort of Jansenism with a "Second Jansenism" that started to emerge after the end of the Peace of the Church in 1679 and that was more concerned with political issues. During the 1680s Jansenists such as Arnauld, then in exile in the Spanish Netherlands, took the side of the pope in political disputes between Paris and Rome. After 1700 Louis attempted to ally himself with anti-Jansenist elements of the Roman curia to bring an end to what he took to be a politically subversive form of Jansenism in the work of Pasquier Quesnel. His efforts led Pope Clement XI to issue the bull Unigenitus (1713), which condemned Quesnel's views. The Parlement de Paris initially refused to register the bull due to Gallican concerns that the sanctioning there of unjust excommunication compromised French sovereignty. Though Louis succeeded in having the bull registered and approved through intimidation, there was significant parlementary opposition to Unigenitus throughout the eighteenth century. Port-Royal could no longer be a source of support for this opposition, however, since Louis, with the encouragement of his confessor, the Jesuit père de la Chaize (Jean Chastain), disbanded the convent in 1709 and had it destroyed the following year.

During the 1730s Jansenism became associated with the convulsionnaires, so called because they experienced uncontrollable convulsions at the grave of François de Paris in the cemetery of Saint-Médard. This group of individuals claimed that the grave was the site of miracles that confirmed divine support for Jansenism. In response the French government closed the cemetery and countered Jansenist political opposition by making Unigenitus a law of state. After the 1650s, however, the Jansenist journal Nouvelles Ecclésiastiques played a prominent role in the parlementary campaign against the Jesuits, and this campaign ultimately resulted in the suppression of the Jesuit order in France in 1764 (see Van Kley 1975). Jansenist resistance to the French political establishment also arguably helped to set the stage for the French Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century, though the secularism that dominated the revolution was far removed from the Augustinian spiritualism that pervaded the Jansenist movement.

Jansenism and Cartesianism

Francisque Bouillier, the nineteenth-century historian of Cartesianism, claims that there is "a natural alliance of the doctrine of Jansenius with that of Descartes." His specific proposal is that this alliance derives from the fact that the Cartesians "make God the unique efficient cause, the only actor who acts in us," whereas the Jansenists "give everything to the grace that operates in us without us" (1868, vol. 1, p. 432f).

The association of Jansenism with Cartesianism goes back to the seventeenth century, as indicated by the remark in the 1690 Voyage du Monde of the Jesuit Gabriel Daniel that "there are very few Jansenists who are not Cartesians" (1690, p. 285). This association was due in no small part to the interest in Cartesianism at Port-Royal. Cartesianism infuses La logique ou l'art de penser (1662) of Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, a text that reflects the teaching in the petite écoles of the convent before their suppression in 1660. Moreover, issues involving Cartesianism were prominent at discussions among Port-Royalist sympathizers held at the hôtel of the Duc de Liancourt from 1669 to 1674.

Even so, it is important to keep in mind that René Descartes himself was never associated with Jansenism during his lifetime, although the Augustinus was published a decade before his death. The connection between Jansenism and Cartesianism is a genuinely post-Descartes phenomenon. It is also noteworthy that there was significant opposition to Cartesianism from within Port-Royal, as indicated in the record of the Liancourt discussions. Some of this opposition was due to a fear of the heretical implications of Cartesian natural philosophy, particularly with regard to the theology of the Eucharist. Another source of opposition was the belief, widespread among the Jansenists and arguably present in the Augustinus itself, that human reason can accomplish little on its own given the corrupted state of fallen human nature. Even Arnauld, who among the Port-Royalists was the most supportive of Cartesianism and the use of reason in philosophy, criticized Descartes at one point for offering an account of human freedom in his correspondence that is "full of Pelagianism."

The historical realities are thus more complex than Bouillier's thesis suggests. There is need for caution even with respect to his proposal that the Cartesian claim that God is the only cause is naturally connected to the Jansenist emphasis that grace brings about one's meritorious action. Nicolas Malebranche was most responsible for the perception that Cartesianism leads to the occasionalist conclusion that God alone has causal power. But Malebranche insisted, against the Jansenists, that one has the freedom to reject divine grace. Arnauld in fact found such a view to be Pelagian, and he campaigned to have Malebranche's works placed on the Index of Forbidden Books in Rome, which they were in 1690. For his part, Malebranche noted the irony that he was being condemned because "I have refuted the opinions that the Church has condemned in Jansenius" (1958–1984, vol. 19, p. 548).