Jansenism

Before persons and dates, the system must be grasped: Jansenism is not first a severe mood, it is a theology of grace with moral, sacramental and ecclesial consequences in a chain.

Efficacious grace and the small number of the elect

The heart of the thesis, inherited from a hardened reading of St Augustine: since the Fall, the human will can only sin without an interior grace which moves it infallibly; when God gives His efficacious grace, it always triumphs; when He refuses it, man necessarily falls.^[8] Christ therefore died effectively only for the elect, a small number snatched from the damned mass (massa damnata), an Augustinian formula turned into a system of majority damnation.^[9] Liberty subsists in name, but a liberty which can never resist the divine motion nor ever do without it is no longer the liberty which the Council of Trent had defined against Luther and Calvin.^[10]

Five propositions drawn from the Augustinus were submitted to the Holy See, first censured by the Sorbonne and eighty-five bishops of France, then condemned by Innocent X on 31 May 1653.^[11] Here they are, for the whole Jansenist century turns around them:

The first four were qualified as heretical in various degrees, the fifth as false and rash, and it is on this base that Rome would build all its later censures.^[12]

"Some commandments of God are impossible to the just who will and strive to keep them, according to the present strength they have; and they lack the grace by which they would become possible." First of the five condemned propositions, constitution Cum occasione, Innocent X, 31 May 1653^[13]

"In the state of fallen nature, interior grace is never resisted." Second of the five condemned propositions, constitution Cum occasione, Innocent X, 31 May 1653^[14]

Morals and the sacraments: the consequences in a chain

From a grace reserved to a small number follows a pastoral care of rarity. Antoine Arnauld, from De la fréquente communion (1643) on, demands before approaching the Eucharist an almost angelic purity: long penance, detachment from venial sin, a purified love of God, so that frequent Communion becomes imprudent, and Communion itself redoubtable.^[15] The directors of Port-Royal delay absolutions, multiply postponements, hold souls at a distance from the holy table for fear of sacrilege, and produce, by excess of reverence, the reverse effect: faithful who almost never communicate.^[16]

The contrast with Catholic doctrine is frontal: the Eucharist is also a remedy, not only the reward of the perfect ("They that are in health need not a physician, but they that are ill," Mt 9:12), and frequent confession, even of venial sins alone, is encouraged by the Church.^[17] Jansenist rigorism on attrition (imperfect contrition, from fear of hell) goes so far as to contest its sufficiency with the sacrament, against the Tridentine teaching which declares it sufficient with absolution.^[18]

How this differs from Calvinism and Lutheranism

Jansenism is not a disguised Protestantism: it keeps the sacraments, the priesthood, the Mass, Marian devotion, the authority of the Church in principle, and its leaders always defended themselves against being heretics.^[19] But on grace, it materially rejoins what Trent had condemned in the Reformers: the negation of cooperating liberty and the restriction of the Redemption. See Calvinism for the double decree of Geneva, Lutheranism for the bound will, and The Council of Trent (1545-1563) for the canons on justification which strike, in advance, the theses of the Augustinus.^[20]

Michel Baius, the condemned forerunner

Half a century before Jansen, Michel Baius (1513-1589), professor at Louvain, had already taught a hardened Augustinian doctrine: fallen man cannot avoid all sin without grace, and the works of unbelievers are sins.^[21] Pius V condemned seventy-nine of his propositions by the bull Ex omnibus afflictionibus (1 October 1567), and Gregory XIII confirmed it in 1580.^[22] The parallel is decisive: Louvain is already the laboratory of a combative Augustinianism, and Jansen, who studies then teaches there, inherits it directly, to the point of making Baius a half-avowed master.^[23]

Jansenius (1585-1638): a life for one book

Cornelius Jansen, Jansenius, is born in 1585 at Acquoy, near Leerdam (United Provinces), studies at Utrecht, Louvain then Paris, and binds himself at Paris with a fiery young Basque, Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, future abbot of Saint-Cyran (1581-1643).^[24] The two friends share the years 1611-1616 at Bayonne around one programme: rereading St Augustine against the reigning scholasticism, Jesuit above all.^[25] Jansen returns to Louvain, becomes professor of Holy Scripture there (1630), then Bishop of Ypres in 1636; he dies of the plague on 6 May 1638, two years after his consecration, leaving a manuscript of nearly a thousand folio pages.^[26]

This manuscript, published at Louvain in 1640 by his testamentary executors under the title Augustinus, presents itself as the pure doctrine of the Bishop of Hippo on grace, liberty and predestination: three massive tomes, written against the "modern semi-Pelagians", that is, the Molinists.^[27] The paradox, which Rome will not fail to note: a book which claims the most Catholic of the Fathers in order to teach what the Church had already condemned in Baius and in the Reformers.^[28]

Saint-Cyran, the French organizer

While Jansen writes, Saint-Cyran organizes. Commendatory abbot, redoubtable director of conscience, from 1633 he takes in hand the reform of Port-Royal, becomes the confessor of the Arnaulds, and spreads a spirituality of integral penance: perfect contrition, delays before absolution, distrust of "easy" confessors.^[29] Arrested on Richelieu's order in 1638 and shut at Vincennes until 1643, officially for his positions on attrition and his opposition to the power, in reality to break a network judged factious, he dies a few months after his liberation, on 11 October 1643, designating Arnauld as his spiritual heir.^[30]

His disciples of Port-Royal thus report his thought: outside the Church there is no salvation, but no more salvation for whoever remains in the corruption of the age without a serious penance.^[31]

Angélique Arnauld and the reform (1609-1661)

The Cistercian abbey of Port-Royal des Champs, in the Chevreuse valley, vegetates until its young abbess Angélique Arnauld (1591-1661), appointed at eleven by Henry IV and converted by a Capuchin sermon in 1608, imposes enclosure and the rule there in 1609: the famous "journee du guichet", when she refuses entry to her own father.^[32] Under her direction and that of her sister Agnes, Port-Royal becomes the model of Cistercian reform in France, swarms to Paris (Port-Royal of Paris, rue Saint-Jacques, from 1625), and attracts vocations from the Parisian high robe, including five Arnauld sisters.^[33]

The Solitaries and the Little Schools (1637-1660)

From 1637, laymen, Antoine Le Maistre, his brother Louis-Isaac Lemaistre de Sacy (1613-1684), Antoine Singlin, Robert Arnauld d'Andilly (1589-1674), settle at the Granges of Port-Royal des Champs for a life of prayer, manual work and study under the direction of Saint-Cyran then of Singlin: these are the Solitaries.^[34] Their Little Schools (1637-1660), with Pierre Nicole (1625-1695), Claude Lancelot and the young Jean Racine among the pupils, invent a pedagogy of French, mathematics and ancient languages which remains famous: Lancelot and Arnauld's General Grammar (1660) and Arnauld and Nicole's Logic of Port-Royal (1662) are its monuments.^[35]

From this hearth comes also the Port-Royal Bible, called de Sacy: the New Testament called de Mons appears in 1667, the Old Testament from 1672 to 1696, the first French Bible translated from the Vulgate by Catholics since Louvain, in a language which would mark all later translators.^[36] A lasting paradox: those condemned by Rome give Catholic France its most read Bible of the Grand Siecle.^[37]

De la fréquente communion (1643): the sacramental manifesto

In 1643, the very year of Saint-Cyran's death, the young Sorbonne doctor Antoine Arnauld (1612-1694), twentieth child of the Arnauld family and brother of Angélique, publishes De la fréquente communion: nearly a thousand pages to demonstrate that frequent Communion, without long penitential preparation, is an irreverence.^[38] The book, prefaced by Saint-Cyran, causes scandal: Jesuits and Dominicans see in it an enterprise to turn the faithful from the Eucharist; Arnauld sees in it the restoration of the discipline of the first centuries.^[39] The debate it opens will never close: the whole Jansenist pastoral care, delays of absolution, rare Communions, severe confessors, follows directly from it.^[40]

Pascal beside Port-Royal (1655-1662)

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) is neither priest, nor theologian, nor member of the community: a lay genius, author of the Treatise on Vacuum and of the arithmetical machine, whom his sister Jacqueline, entered at Port-Royal in 1652, draws toward the Solitaries after his "night of fire" of 23 November 1654.^[41] When Arnauld, condemned by the Sorbonne in January 1656 for his Second Letter to a Duke and Peer, must hide, Pascal takes up the pen: eighteen Provincial Letters, signed Louis de Montalte, appear from January 1656 to March 1657, a masterpiece of the French language and a war machine against Jesuit casuistry.^[42]

"It is a strange and long war wherein violence tries to oppress truth. All the efforts of violence cannot weaken truth, and serve only to raise it higher." Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letters, 12th letter, 9 September 1656^[43]

The resonance is immense, and the miracle of the Holy Thorn on 24 March 1656 seems to give Heaven itself: Marguerite Perier, Pascal's niece, a boarder at Port-Royal of Paris, is instantly healed of a lachrymal fistula on contact with a relic of the Crown of Thorns; surgeons attest, the Church of Paris recognizes, and Port-Royal triumphs.^[44] Pascal dies on 19 August 1662, at thirty-nine, reconciled and fortified with the sacraments, without ever having signed the Formulary or broken with Rome: his cause, reopened by the wish for beatification expressed by Francis in 2017, remains that of a Catholic genius marked by Port-Royal, not of a formal heretic.^[45]

St Vincent de Paul and the adversaries of the movement

Jansenism had from the origin first-rank Catholic adversaries. St Vincent de Paul (1581-1660), who had known Saint-Cyran since 1624 and had broken with him on the question of grace, worked actively for the condemnation of the five propositions and warned the Daughters of Charity against the "novelties of Port-Royal".^[46] The Jesuits, attacked by name in the Provinciales, and the majority of the French episcopate supported Rome at each censure: eighty-five bishops had already asked for the condemnation in 1649.^[47]

The five propositions condemned on 31 May 1653

After the Sorbonne censure (1649) and the bishops' petition, Innocent X promulgates the constitution Cum occasione on 31 May 1653: the five propositions drawn from the Augustinus are condemned, the first four as heretical in various degrees, the fifth as false and rash, with the solemn formula which strikes both Jansen's meaning and any equivalent doctrine.^[48] A stable doctrinal reference ever since: Denzinger, nos. 2001-2007.^[49]

The distinction of right and fact: accepting without submitting

Arnauld's reply, formulated at once (1654), is a masterpiece of subtlety: in right, the five propositions are justly condemned; in fact, they are not found in the Augustinus in the condemned sense, so the Church would be infallible on right (doctrine) but fallible on fact (attribution to Jansen).^[50] Alexander VII decides by the constitution Ad sanctam beati Petri sedem (16 October 1656): the propositions are indeed Jansen's, condemned in Jansen's sense, and the Formulary of assent, imposed on the clergy from 1661 then by the constitution Regiminis Apostolici (1665), demands the signature of all.^[51]

The Formulary, the nuns and the Clementine Peace (1661-1669)

The demand to sign makes heroic and ambiguous victims: the nuns of Port-Royal, Jacqueline Pascal at their head, sign in 1661 with mental restrictions which empty the signature of its meaning; Jacqueline dies of grief over it on 4 October 1661, at thirty-six.^[52] The Solitaries are dispersed (1660), the Little Schools closed, Arnauld hidden then exiled. Then Clement IX, in 1669, accepts a compromise peace, the Clementine Peace or Peace of the Church: the Jansenists sign the Formulary while keeping "respectful silence" on the fact, and Port-Royal is reborn for forty years.^[53] A lame peace, which resolves nothing on the substance and prepares the relapse.^[54]

The Moral Reflections of Pasquier Quesnel (1634-1719)

The torch passes to the Oratorian Pasquier Quesnel (1634-1719), excluded from the Oratory in 1684 for his positions and a refugee at Brussels: his Moral Reflections on the New Testament, first an abridgment in 1668, complete edition in 1692, translated and spread by the hundred thousand, carry Jansenism into every parish under cover of evangelical piety.^[55] Cardinal de Noailles, Archbishop of Paris, had first approved them (1695) before retracting: the trap is redoubtable, for the book mixes edifying maxims and condemned theses.^[56]

The one hundred and one propositions condemned on 8 September 1713

At the request of Louis XIV, exasperated by a party become a Gallican and parliamentary faction, Clement XI promulgates the constitution Unigenitus Dei Filius on 8 September 1713: one hundred and one propositions of Quesnel are condemned there with the gravest qualifications, false, captious, scandalous, pernicious, injurious to the Church, seditious, blasphemous, heretical.^[57] Doctrinal reference: Denzinger, nos. 2390-2490.^[58] Among the most famous: the restriction of prayer and grace to the predestined alone, the condemnation of all servile fear, the affirmation that unjust excommunication must not hinder duty, a whole parallel Church spirit.^[59]

"The grace of Jesus Christ, which is the efficacious principle of every kind of good, is necessary for every good work; without it, not only is nothing done, but nothing can be done." (translated from the Latin) Pasquier Quesnel, Moral Reflections, proposition 2 condemned in Unigenitus (DH 2402): true in itself, false in the system which makes it a grace never resisted^[60]

The lesson of method is capital: Unigenitus does not condemn phrases materially false one by one, but assertions true in isolation and false in the spirit of the system, the mark of a learned heresy, which says the true to smuggle the false.^[61]

The destruction of Port-Royal (1708-1713)

Meanwhile, the power has struck the symbol. Clement XI suppresses Port-Royal des Champs by a bull of 1708; on 29 October 1709, the last twenty-five nuns are expelled by force and dispersed into other monasteries; in 1710, on Louis XIV's order, the buildings are razed, the church demolished, and even the bodies of the cemetery exhumed: a destruction so complete that, so to speak, nothing remained standing.^[62] Port-Royal of Paris, submissive, survives until the Revolution. The violence of the execution, applauded by the Jesuits and mourned by all France counts of independent minds, makes Jansenism a party of victims of despotism, and secures it a political posterity well beyond theology.^[63]

The appeal to the council (1717-1730)

Unigenitus divides France in two: acceptants and appellants. In March 1717, four bishops, including Soanen of Senez, then the Sorbonne, twelve bishops and hundreds of parish priests appeal from the bull to the future general council, reviving the old conciliarist and Gallican theses.^[64] See Gallicanism (15th-19th century) for the political soil of this appeal: late Jansenism is as much a parliamentary and Gallican party as a theology.^[65] The appeal is condemned by Rome (1718); the appellants submit one after another or persist: Soanen is deposed at the council of Embrun (1727).^[66]

Saint-Medard and the convulsions (1727-1732)

Deacon Francois de Paris (1690-1727), a notorious appellant dead in the odour of sanctity in extreme destitution, draws onto his tomb in the Saint-Medard cemetery crowds of sick: alleged healings, then convulsions, glossolalia, violent "helps" administered to the convulsionaries.^[67] The Archbishop of Paris then the power close the cemetery on 27 January 1732, whence the famous distich placarded on the gate: "By order of the King, God is hereby forbidden / To perform miracles in this place" (in French: "De par le Roi, defense a Dieu / De faire miracle en ce lieu").^[68] The Church sees in it neither the sobriety of recognized miracles nor the fruits of the Spirit, but the hysteria of a sect: the contrast with the healings of Lourdes or the miracle of the Holy Thorn, discerned with rigour, is total.^[69]

The Nouvelles ecclesiastiques (1728-1803)

From 1728, the party gives itself a clandestine journal, the Nouvelles ecclesiastiques, which appears without interruption until 1803: the first religious opinion press of France, it keeps the chronicle of the persecution, peddles the "miracles" of the party, and forms generations of parish priests in detestation of the Jesuits and of Rome.^[70] When the Society of Jesus is suppressed in France (1764) then by Clement XIV (1773), the Jansenists and the parlements jubilate: their oldest enemy falls, but the triumph is political, not doctrinal.^[71]

The Church of Utrecht: a schism that lasts

The irreconcilable appellants find refuge in the United Provinces: the chapter of Utrecht, in rupture with Rome since the deposition of the archbishopric, elects its own archbishops and has itself consecrated by Dominique-Marie Varlet (1678-1742) in 1724, a consummated schismatic act.^[72] This "Old Catholic" Church of Utrecht, Jansenist in origin, subsists to this day outside Roman communion: it is she who will receive in the 19th century the German and Swiss Old Catholics after Vatican I.^[73]

The synod of Pistoia (1786) and Auctorem fidei (1794)

The last continental avatar is Italian: Scipione de' Ricci (1741-1810), Bishop of Pistoia under the protection of Grand Duke Leopold of Tuscany, has voted in September 1786 a synod which takes up wholesale the Jansenist programme: rare Communion demanded, low Masses multiplied, devotion to the Sacred Heart suspected, appellants rehabilitated.^[74] Pius VI answers with the bull Auctorem fidei (28 August 1794), which censures eighty-five propositions: the amplest condemnation of Jansenism, become with Unigenitus the charter of the magisterium on grace, the sacraments and the Church.^[75] Reference: Denzinger, nos. 2600-2700.^[76]

The First Vatican Council and the closing of the Gallican file

The constitution Pastor aeternus (18 July 1870), pontifical primacy and infallibility, definitively buries the Gallican-Jansenist ecosystem of appeal to the council against the pope.^[77] Jansenism as a party then dies; it survives as a temperament: moral rigorism, rare Communion, distrust of Rome, an elite Church, a spirit found again, diluted, in many later stiffnesses, right as well as left.^[78]

What the Church holds for certain

Facing the system, the magisterium recalls three certainties, defined at Trent and constant ever since:

"God, our Saviour, will have all men to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth." St Paul, First Epistle to Timothy, 2:4^[84]

"Come to me, all you that labour, and are burdened, and I will refresh you." Jesus Christ, Gospel according to St Matthew, 11:28^[85]

These two words alone ruin the system: a God who calls all the burdened does not reserve His efficacious grace to an unknowable small number, and a Redemption offered for the whole world is not an elite ransom.^[86]

Why severity is not the problem

The Church never blamed the Jansenists for loving penance, retreat, purity of worship, the reading of Scripture: Port-Royal produced missed saints and masterpieces, and the Logic, the Grammar, the Sacy Bible remain common goods.^[87] She blamed them for turning counsels of exactingness into dogmas of damnation: when prudence before communicating becomes the ban on communicating, when humility before grace becomes the negation of liberty, spirituality changes nature; it no longer raises toward God, it despairs of mercy.^[88] Jansenism is the proof, by history, that one can damn oneself by excess of severity as surely as by laxity.^[89]

In the Church: diffuse rigorism and its correctives

The party dead, the spirit survives by capillarity: Communion rarefied in French parishes until the decree of Pius X on frequent Communion (Sacra Tridentina Synodus, 20 December 1905) and the lowering of the age of First Communion (Quam singulari, 8 August 1910), two acts which are, a century and a half later, the Roman pastoral answer to the sacramental legacy of Port-Royal.^[90] The Alphonsian moral of benignity, carried by St Alphonsus Liguori (1696-1787) against the ambient rigorism, completes the rebalancing of casuistry: his Equiprobabilism reopens to scrupulous souls the path which Jansenist directors closed to them.^[91]

Outside the Church: a literary and political myth

Sainte-Beuve and his monumental Port-Royal (1840-1859, five volumes) make the vanquished the heroes of conscience against absolutism, a reading taken up by the whole anticlerical 19th century, which enrols the Jansenists in its own war against the Jesuits and Rome.^[92] Catholic historians, Louis Cognet (Jansenism, "Que sais-je?", 1961), the works of the school of Jean Orcibal, have since restored a juster picture: neither monsters nor martyrs, but exacting Christians led astray by a false system of grace, and finally broken by a power which confused heresy with the fronde.^[93]

The Catholic criterion for today

The criterion does not change: any spirituality which lastingly distances from the sacraments in the name of purity, which makes Communion a reward instead of a remedy, or which presents God as reserving His love to an elite, resumes, without knowing it, the gesture of Port-Royal.^[94] Conversely, any exactingness which leads to the sacraments, to frequent confession and to trust in mercy remains in the great tradition: severity toward oneself is Catholic only if it ends in abandonment.^[95]

• Read Calvinism and Lutheranism for the doctrines of predestination condemned by the Council of Trent, and The Council of Trent (1545-1563) for the decrees on justification and the sacraments.
• Read Gallicanism (15th-19th century) for the political soil of the appeal against Unigenitus and the destruction of Port-Royal.
• Cornelius Jansen, Augustinus (Louvain, J. Zeger, 1640, 3 folio vols.): the matrix text, to consult in great libraries (Gallica, university libraries).^[96]
• Antoine Arnauld, De la frequente communion (Paris, A. Vitre, 1643); Blaise Pascal, The Provincial Letters (1656-1657) and the Pensees (Lafuma or Sellier ed.).^[97]
• Louis Cognet, Jansenism, PUF, "Que sais-je?" series, 1961: the surest Catholic synthesis to enter the subject.^[98]
• Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve, Port-Royal (Paris, Hachette, 1840-1859, 5 vols.): the literary monument, to read with discernment, so much does the author take sides with the vanquished.^[99]
• Magisterial texts: Cum occasione (Innocent X, 31 May 1653), Unigenitus Dei Filius (Clement XI, 8 September 1713), Auctorem fidei (Pius VI, 28 August 1794), in Denzinger-Huenermann, Enchiridion symbolorum, and for Trent the decree De iustificatione (VIth session, 13 January 1547).^[100]