Jansen, Cornelius and Jansenism

JANSEN, CORNELIUS AND JANSENISM. -

I. LIFE

Cornelius Jansenius, nephew of the preceding, bishop of Ypres, b. 28 Oct. 1585 at Ackoy, a village of Leerdam, province of South Holland, and d. at Louvain on 6 May 1638. He studied at Utrecht in the College of St. Jerome, then at Louvain under the Jesuits. The University of Louvain, called by Pallavicino "a great field of battle against the forces of Luther" (l. XV, 97), in those years was agitated by the disputes that the controversies on Grace and predestination aroused among the followers of Bañez and of Molina. Baio had taught at Louvain, and against Baio Leonardo Lessio and Giovanni Du Hamel had ranged themselves. Into this doctrinal polemic that was seething at Louvain under the name and on the doctrine of Baio, Jansenius is introduced by Giacomo Janson, director of the College of Adrian VI, and by Du Vergier de Hauranne, the celebrated abbot of St-Cyran. The influence of Du Vergier will be decisive and constant in the life and work of Jansenius. When in 1604 he moved to Paris, after completing his philosophical studies, in order to complete his theological studies at the Sorbonne, St-Cyran joined him not only as a friend, but as a collaborator in the desire for a theological, moral and disciplinary reform of the Church, inspired above all by the theories of rigid Augustinianism.

Jansenius thought of liberating theology from a supposed scholastic philosophism and rationalism; Du Vergier, of restoring discipline and morals in the rigor of the first centuries. Jansenius was a theorist, Du Vergier a man of practice. But one obstacle seemed to them to hinder the reform: the Society of Jesus, which corrupted theological science with Molinism, and Christian life with probabilism. Their reform would have attacked the Society of Jesus in its theological and moral aspects. In 1617, when Du Vergier was elected abbot of St-Cyran, Jansenius returned to Louvain, where he rebuilt and then for some time directed the College of St. Pulcheria, obtaining the doctoral degree in theology in 1619, and from 1630 holding the chair of Sacred Scripture. In 1635 he was nominated bishop of Ypres by the court of Madrid, and following the approval of Urban VIII, he took possession of the episcopal see in 1636. But after only eighteen months of ministry, consumed by labors and by contagion, he died piously. He had welcomed with sympathy the De republica Christiana of Marcantonio De Dominis, the Protestant Synod of Dordrecht (1619) which repeated the doctrine of Calvin against the Arminians and the Catholics: and these acceptances could have brought him under suspicion of heresy; but at the same time he had published: Alexipharmacum (Louvain 1636), which he had defended with a Spongia notarum (ibid. 1631), against Gilbert Voet, and Mara gallicus (s. l. 1635), in the first of which he defended the truths of the Catholic Church, denying to the Protestants the authority to reform the Church, and in the second, under the pseudonym of Alessandro Patrizio Armacano, he denounced with biting satire the alliances contracted by the kings of France with the German, Swedish and Dutch Protestants against a thesis propounded in 1634 by the theologian of Lyon Besian Arroy. To these works he added the Tetrateuchus (Louvain 1639), a commentary on the Gospels, the Pentateuchus (ibid. 1641) and Analecta (ibid. 1644), that is, commentaries on the Pentateuch, on Proverbs, on Ecclesiastes, on Wisdom, on Habakkuk, on Zephaniah. Nothing therefore serious or censurable could have been cited against the deceased bishop of Ypres, if, posthumously, there had not appeared the Augustinus, seu doctrina s. Augustini de humanae naturae sanitate, aegritudine, medicina adversus Pelagianos et Massilienses (Louvain 1640), which, immediately reprinted in Paris in 1641, obtained an incredible success of editions and of diffusion. How was the Augustinus of Jansenius born? In it one can see the ambiguity of a compromise. The reasons for this compromise, if they started from motives of the controversies debated in the University of Louvain, had far more distant and profound roots, that is, in the very historical origins of the problem of Grace as they appear in the doctrine of Pelagius and of the predestinarians. Into the centuries-old polemic of Grace and predestination the Augustinus of Jansenius introduces itself.

Between the hard determinism of the predestinarians and of the reformers and Catholic doctrine, Jansenius places his compromise. He attempts in Augustine a neutral ground, and throws out his appeal for conciliation. He had been preceded by Baio, whose reading is necessary for anyone intending to study the Jansenist movement. Jansenius defends Baio so intimately that, had circumstances been otherwise, the word Baianism could have taken in the theological vocabulary the place today occupied by the word Jansenism. From Baio Jansenius learned the effort to impose, in the name of St. Augustine, his own criticism within Revelation, outside the authority of Revelation, studying the Catholic doctrine of Grace outside the ecclesiastical magisterium; or if he claimed to entrust himself to the Church, he preferred the ancient Church, distrustful of the contemporary one. With Baio he believed that the Fathers of the Council of Trent had hurled too many anathemas against the reformers; and not understanding the wise balance of the conciliar definitions, instead of annotating and justifying the articles of the condemnation, he annotated and justified the condemned propositions. Against the infallibility of the Roman pontiff, like Luther, he followed his own personal critical judgment in the primitive tradition, and since in the ancient Church Augustine dominated with his doctrine and the volumes of the reformers and the Catholic treatises relied on his authority and even the Council of Trent cited him several times in its decrees, Jansenius attempts to find in his works the charter of reconciliation in a more decided manner than Baio. Baio in fact was too Pelagian to satisfy the Lutherans and too Lutheran to satisfy the Catholics. He did not please the one side, he displeased the other, thus concluding the history of Augustinianism and beginning that of Jansenism.

II. THE CONDEMNATION

On August 1, 1641, the Sacred Congregation of the Index and of the Inquisition condemned 18 works, among them the Augustinus of C. Jansenius. With this condemnation begins the history of a heresy born, if one believes the last words of the bishop of Ypres, against the will of its founder, who was not expressly heretical. Jansenius in fact in his testament (which some hold to be falsified), but also more explicitly in several places of his authentic Augustinus (cf., for example, volume II, ch. 29) protested: « Sentio enim aliquid difficulter mutari posse. Si tamen Romana Sedes aliquid mutari velit, sum obediens filius, et illius Ecclesiae in qua semper vixi usque ad hunc lectum mortis obediens sum ». « Sentio aliquid difficulter mutari posse » and « obediens sum »: with an act of pride and with a protestation of faith begins and concludes the posthumous history not only of the Augustinus, but of every Jansenist work. The Augustinus appeared in three folio volumes. Jansenius had worked on it for twenty-two years, rereading the writings of the great African ten, twenty and even thirty times. The first volume is divided into 8 books and sets out and refutes the heresy of Pelagius with the authority of St. Augustine. The second volume, after outlining the limits of reason in theology and of the authority of St. Augustine, treats of the status naturae lapsae and of the status naturae purae. The third directly sets forth the doctrine on Grace, on freedom, on predestination and reprobation. It ends with a critical parallel between the condemned doctrine of the Massilians and the Molinist doctrine of the Jesuits. The Augustinus is therefore predominantly a treatise on Grace, a compendium of doctrinal developments on Grace documented with isolated texts from St. Augustine. Defining the method of theology, Jansenius declares philosophical reason « the mother of all heresies », calls the Scholastics « dogs that bark in the schools », and opposes to them « memory », that is, tradition. But in tradition he has little sympathy for the Greek Fathers, and of the Latin ones he sees only Augustine, « Pater Patrum, doctor doctorum, primus post scriptores canonicos, inter omnes vere solidus, subtilis, irrefragabilis, angelicus, seraphicus, excellentissimus et ineffabiliter mirabilis », etc. In the questions it matters only to ascertain what the opinion of St. Augustine is, and when he comes upon a condemned proposition: « Quid ad propositionem quam proscripsit Apostolica Sedes? — he asks himself —. Haereo, fateor. Sed quid ad doctrinam Augustini?... Nec enim ego quid verum aut falsum, quid tenendum et non tenendum in Catholicae Ecclesiae doctrina tradidi, sed quid Augustinus tenendum asseruerit et docuerit ». « Si quis vobis annuntiaverit — he repeats, paraphrasing St. Paul — praeter id quod ex Augustino accepistis, anathema sit » (volume II, bk. III, ch. 22; volume III, ch. 1, partitio dicendorum). In establishing the doctrine on Grace, Jansenius takes up the interpretation of Baius, the doctrine of the twofold love (the duplex delectatio). Adam before sinning was free, he could sin because he had only sufficient Grace (called by Augustine auxilium sine quo non). After sin, he loses freedom and needs for every good act efficacious Grace (auxilium quo) which infallibly determines the will. Man through sin is intrinsically corrupted and dominated by concupiscence, and therefore dragged to evil without being able to resist it, invincibly. His will is dominated by earthly cupidity or earthly love. His works are nothing but sins unless charity or heavenly love intervenes to determine the will infallibly to good. This twofold love is the principle of our physical, moral and supernatural conduct, and for this reason it is called

« delectatio victrix ». Man subjected to the iron law of an invincible love thus remains a slave either of earth or of heaven, without personal merit or demerit, dragged to good or to evil, to salvation or to damnation, by an irresistible heavenly or earthly delight. While Bañezians and Molinists, safeguarding the omnipotence of Grace and the freedom of man, admit that there is a sufficient Grace, given by God to all men, which confers on them the proximate power to fulfill the commandments, and which receives its efficacy either from the supernatural action in us (Bañezians) or from the assent of our freedom (Molinists), Jansenius, in the footsteps of Baius, proclaims that every grace is efficacious and therefore invincible, and that under the action of efficacious Grace we can do nothing of our own. God predestines to hell or to paradise with a will antecedent to every consideration of merit. Christ died only for the predestined, and to them alone does he give efficacious Grace. There is therefore no freedom, and if Jansenius speaks of freedom it is only exemption from external violence or from physical coercion. The whole Augustinus is an immense polemical and partisan arsenal, as his followers would later demonstrate, in defense of the duplex delectatio carried to the paroxysm of a personal prejudice; the « magna charta » of the theology of Jansenism, which Fénelon would rightly call « cousia germain du calvinisme ».

III. DEVELOPMENTS OF JANSENISM

It seems strange, and no one would have imagined it, least of all Jansenius, that a doctrine so strained and grim, and so different from the gentle liveliness of the French genius, would have met in France and in the Latin countries with a vast and fortunate conquest.

Bremond was surprised by it: «J'attribuirai la naissance du jansénisme à une sorte de génération spontanée. Le nez de Cléopatre... le jansénisme historique est pour moi un véritable monstre. En tant que monstre il n'a pu devoir sa naissance qu'à de bizarres et imprévisibles rencontres». It was instead the natural refuge of the dissatisfied, of the discontented in France and in Belgium after the condemnation of Calvinism, that is, of all those who, without compromising themselves with the civil and ecclesiastical authority, saw in the doctrine of Jansenius a compromise between Catholicism and Protestantism. Moreover, the theories of Jansenius could, for certain impatient spirits, represent the best part of the Catholic Reformation; these, however, diverted the desire for a moral and religious rebirth — which was necessary and urgent in that century and in that society — into the choice of the reforming principle, preferring to the canons of the Council of Trent and to the authority of the Roman pontiff the equivocations of the Reformation and the personal criterion of interpretation and judgment. If, however, this social and spiritual climate favored the development of the heresy, unforeseeable encounters, as Bremond affirms, facilitated its course. Jansenism finds, in fact, its reason for existence in psychology rather than in religious metaphysics. The anathemas of Rome that mark the progressive death of the other heresies become, for a period of time, its fortune. Indeed it is born, reveals itself, consolidates itself, weaves its history in the dates and forms of the various pontifical condemnations. When the Jesuits had in hand some printed sheets of the Augustinus, they immediately denounced it. Urban VIII hastened to prohibit the continuation of the printing, which was being secretly overseen by Fromond and by Calenus. But despite the opposition of the Jesuits, of the internuncio of Brussels, of the University of Louvain, the printing continued and was completed under the protection of Cardinal Ferdinand, infante of Spain and governor of the Netherlands, to whom it was dedicated, and it came out with the privileges of the king of Spain and of the emperor Ferdinand III granted in Jan. 1638 and in Feb. 1640, and with the favorable censorship of Henry Calenus and of James Pontanus, who declared the work «celestial... necessary and most useful to the Church... conformable to the doctrine of St. Augustine». Its diffusion and reprintings were many, even in Rome in 1643, meeting with the most varied and heated polemic. Saint-Cyran affirmed that after St. Paul and St. Augustine, Jansenius was the third who had «spoken more divinely of Grace and created the book of devotion of the last times». Having been submitted to the judgment of the Sacred Congregation of the Index, on 10 June 1643 it was condemned first by a decree of the Inquisition (4 March 1641), then by the bull In eminenti of Urban VIII drafted by Francesco Albizzi (6 March 1642), by the constitution Cum occasione of Innocent X (31 May 1653), and finally by the other Ad Sacram beati Petri Sedem of Alexander VII (16 Oct. 1656). Innocent had appointed five cardinals and thirteen theologians to examine the Augustinus. The examination lasted more than two years in 36 sessions. The Pope also took part in the first ten sessions. The defenders of Jansenius were allowed to plead their own cause, but their defense did not avert the condemnation, which was included in the five following propositions, which it declared rash, impious, blasphemous, worthy of excommunication, heretical (cf. Denz-U, 1092-96): 1) Some commandments of God are impossible, despite the good will of just men, according to the present powers of nature, because there is lacking to them that Grace which renders them possible; 2) Interior Grace in the state of fallen nature is never resisted; 3) To acquire merit or demerit there is not required freedom from internal necessity, but only freedom from external coercion; 4) The Semipelagians admitted for individual acts, even at the beginning of faith, the necessity of interior prevenient Grace, and were heretics inasmuch as they granted to the human will the power to resist or to obey Grace; 5) It is a Semipelagian error to affirm that Christ died for all. But this condemnation did not gravely disturb the admirers of Jansenius, some of whom wished to appeal from the Pope to an ecumenical Council.

The Pope, in their judgment, was an incompetent. But such an appeal would have prejudiced the Augustinus even more. This polemic with Rome made the controversy more lively, broadening the dogmatic aspect of the nascent heresy, initially soteriological, to embrace ecclesiastical errors such as that of reducing the pontifical power (the Pope was conceived as primus inter pares among the bishops, first in dignity not in authority, inferior and subordinate to the ecumenical Council). But the theories of Jansenius were to find their theater of trial, their practical realization, at Port-Royal in Paris.

IV. PORT-ROYAL

Port-Royal (v.) marks the passage of the Jansenist heresy from a theological aspect to a polemical and ascetic form not very dissimilar from schism. The condemnations had already revealed the ambiguity of the Augustinus and of the faith of the Jansenists, rebellious and impatient children who do not wish to leave the house and live in the family in continuous quarrel. Jansenism indeed manifests itself as a heresy within the house, a schism within the family. But of this rebellion within the family Saint-Cyran would encounter in Paris the diplomatic controversialist in the person of Antoine Arnauld (v.), a subtle and astute quibbler who would teach Jansenism its indefinable polemical tactics. Author of the Logique de Port-Royal, defense counsel of the Augustinus, he knows the tergiversations, the amphibologies, the equivocations of defense and offense. He organized Jansenist ideas, infused them with a soul, created a system out of them. To theology he joined ascetics; to the dogmatic reform on Grace he associated a sacramental reform, though he never clarified his personal opinions. He taught not to reveal oneself, to scatter through the pages in defense of the heresy orthodox and unobjectionable observations. If he is sometimes suspect, he immediately notices it, ready to affirm the contrary. With Arnauld the centrifugal parabola of the heresy reaches its end. It begins with Jansenius, the theologian, passes through Saint-Cyran, the hypermystic, and concludes in Arnauld, the diplomatic controversialist.

To him are owed the tergiversations in the face of the pontifical condemnations, for which Port-Royal will remain famous. Arnauld admonished: «ne répondre jamais absolument, mais toujours par si. Par là on ne s'engagera à rien». Therefore, to the condemnation of the five propositions, to those who called the Pope incompetent and wished to appeal to an ecumenical Council, he advised condemning, together with the Pope, the five propositions. He denied, however, that they were to be found in the work of Jansenius or, in the event that they were found there, he affirmed that they were not condemnable in the sense of the author, which was that of St. Augustine, which the Pope had undoubtedly not reproved nor could reprove. Thirty-eight bishops then, assisted by many theologians, on 28 March 1654 declared that the five propositions had been taught by Jansenius and in the sense of Jansenius had been condemned. The Pope expressly defined: «Quinque illas propositiones ex libro praememorati Cornelii Jansenii Episcopi Yprensis, cui titulus Augustinus, excerptas ac in sensu ab codem Cornelio intento damnatas fuisse, declaramus et definimus». But this was not enough. In two letters in defense of the Duke of Liancourt in Feb. 1655 Arnauld distinguished between a question of right and a question of fact. The Church, the Pope, is infallible when it judges questions of dogma or of morals contained in Revelation and in the exposition of their doctrine (quaestio iuris), not in the judgment brought upon the doctrine of a book by a human author or upon the true sense that he has given to his words (quaestio facti). In the quaestio iuris interior assent to the decisions of the Church is prescribed; in the quaestio facti the Church has no power; at most it can require a respectful silence (silentium obsequiosum). Moreover, he added with a thoroughly Jansenistic spirit, St. Peter, in his fall, lacked the necessary Grace. Together with Arnauld, upholder of this equivocal policy, is Pierre Nicole, to whom are owed the works: Les imaginaires ou lettres sur l'hérésie imaginaire and Tractatus de distinctione iuris et facti in causa yanseniana, fundamental for understanding the shifts and artifices of Jansenism. From heresy it declines toward schism, from error on the doctrine of Grace to error on pontifical infallibility. The Pope can infallibly condemn a doctrine as heretical, Nicole repeats, but cannot infallibly determine that that doctrine is found in a book (Augustinus); the five condemned propositions are not found in the Augustinus or at least not in the sense in which they have been condemned. The Pope is badly informed or, if well informed, is not infallible by himself but only with the consent of the universal Church. And if this consent is attained (as in the Council of Trent), appeal is made to a future council (ready to appeal again to infinity), just as appeal is made to the discipline of the ancient Church in order to subvert the discipline of the contemporary Church. The Jansenists did not notice that, by insisting on the reformist movement of autonomy of reason from the Faith, they were placing alongside the Catholic faith in agony their own faith.

In defense of Arnauld, his friend, Blaise Pascal (v.) also remained entangled in the intrigues of the Jansenist party. He had at Port-Royal his sister Jacqueline, «sa directrice» as he calls her. Out of love for his sister and out of a bond of friendship with Arnauld he wrote a «pamphlet», a literary apology for Port-Royal, an anti-Molinist indictment, Les provinciales (1656-57), which could be defined as the pleasure of the screen canonized to the detriment of the Society of Jesus. But Pascal, like Nicole, soon understood that all this polemic was becoming «una pura commedia e uno scherzo di cattivo gusto» (Nicole) and that one could not make «un idolo della stessa verità, perché la verità fuori della carità non è Dio, ed è immagine e idolo che non bisogna né amare né adorare» (Pascal), and they withdrew from the subtle and refined subtleties that succeeded in saving neither charity nor truth.

V. FROM PORT-ROYAL TO PISTOIA

It was natural that, in withdrawing from the spiritual authority of the Church, Jansenism should fall back, in order to survive, upon the temporal power of the State and upon forms of superstition. To the first phase of the history of Jansenism, centered on Grace, predestination and sacramental rigorism, there thus succeeds a second, in which theology and morals seem to drown in Gallican theories and in hypermistic manifestations. The polemic of Port-Royal, which continued that of the Protestants while throwing a screen over the ecclesiastical magisterium, had prepared the way for it. Already in the Petrus Aurelius of Saint-Cyran there are to be found essentially the theories of Richer and De Dominis, of Pithou and De Marca. Cardinal Richelieu had welded

France into political and religious unity, but at the same time he had sharpened the desire of the King of France to take the Church under his protection. Rome appeared almost a foreign power, and Gallicanism attempted to subject it to the state absolutism of Louis XIV. Under the banner of national sentiment, historical and political forms were divinized to the detriment of Catholic and supernatural doctrine and life, which brought Jansenism into close alliance with Protestantism at the Gallican courts. If, like Luther, Jansenism had overthrown every authority in matters of faith, and after the likeness of Calvinism had assumed a democratic and revolutionary character, with ecclesiastical criticism, moreover — so akin to free examination — it drove not only toward the denial of revealed truth, but toward the search for a point of support amid the succession of Rome's anathemas. In order to continue in their criticism and to avert, or at least to safeguard themselves from, the pontifical condemnations, the Jansenists fell back upon a religious hybridism, which forced them into a double life. Indeed, Jansenism and Gallicanism cannot be confused. The true Jansenists bore the pontifical authority and infallibility ill, but they were equally intolerant of any state interference, and when they turned toward the Parlements they did so in order to escape ecclesiastical condemnations. They had, however, one point in common: the pope is inferior to the council; the decisions of the pope, even in matters of faith, are not irrefragable except after the consent of the Church. If the Jansenists found a refuge in the Gallicans, the Gallicans found a pretext in the Jansenists. National reasons and theological reasons, and still more polemical reasons, made them close and friendly, so friendly as to make them be believed twins born of the same bed, but the diversity existed. Bossuet, a Gallican, was always an adversary of the Jesuits. The Gallicans, heirs of Philip the Fair, are decided; the Jansenists, followers of Arnauld, temporize, do not like to compromise themselves or to take a position. It is repeated that if the doctrines of Baius and of Jansenius drew close to the Gallican spirit, this was the work of Pasquier Quesnel (v.). This is not exact. The union between the two movements is due to the particular political-religious situation that arose in the wake of the jurisdictional struggles between the French Court and Rome. His Réflexions morales (1671) are a clear testimony to it. In captious form they repeated exactly the doctrine of Jansenius and of Arnauld, rekindling their controversies. They were prohibited by Clement X in 1675, but this prohibition gave rise to a swarming of polemical pamphlets and did not prevent Quesnel, revising and enlarging them, from republishing them several times and in different formats. Amid so much polemical literature, a pamphlet published in 1702 caused a stir, entitled A Case of Conscience, namely whether one should absolve those who maintained an "obsequious silence" regarding the condemnation of the five propositions. Clement XI on 12 Feb. 1702 also proscribed the obsequious silence and three years later (16 July 1703) confirmed with the bull Vineam Domini (Denz-U, 1350) the condemnations of his predecessors. The nuns of Port-Royal, which had remained as a center of propaganda and a "foyer d'agitation frondeuse," and who opposed the pontifical bull, were dispersed and the monastery was razed to the ground by royal decree (1710). But Quesnel's Réflexions for decades kept the Jansenist questions alive among the Parlements, the bishops, the religious Orders and the secular clergy, especially because of the equivocal attitude of Cardinal Noailles who, after having approved it, had taken up the defense of Quesnel's book. When a direct and decisive intervention of the Holy See was requested, this came on 8 Sept. 1713 with the bull Unigenitus (Denz-U, 1351-1451), which condemned 101 propositions of Quesnel, that is, the whole theological, ascetical, moral and ecclesiastical doctrine of Jansenism. An appeal was made by some Jansenists to an ecumenical Council (1717), thus creating the party of the appellanti, excommunicated by Clement XI with the bull Pastoralis officii (1718). After the death of the regent Philip of Orléans (1723) and of Noailles (1729), the Jansenists had their only support in the Parlement, and thus rebellious and factious they became a politico-philosophico-religious sect with an ever more aggressive accent against the theology, morals and piety of the Society of Jesus, in particular against probabilism and devotion to the Sacred

Heart of Jesus. From 1727 the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques became the organ of the party, and the schismatic Church of Utrecht (v.) its moral point of reference. The movement of the convulsionaries of St. Médard (v.) and figurism (v.) contributed rather to divide than to unite minds (the doctrine degenerating into superstitious facts and beliefs) in the religious controversy that persisted throughout the eighteenth century and in which the Parlements meddled until Benedict XIV in 1756 renewed the prohibitions of the bull Unigenitus. During the French Revolution, Grégoire, Mouton and a few other Jacobin priests would repeat Jansenist names and facts, but true Jansenism is by now overwhelmed by the new Enlightenment theories.

VI. ITALIAN JANSENISM

The Jansenist diaspora, if it is vast on the individual level, socially presents only two territorial appearances: at Utrecht, and more properly at Pistoia. But in Utrecht the Jansenists recognize only a moral refuge and receive an incitement in the struggle with Rome. Overwhelmed by condemnations, they turn to the Dutch schismatic bishops out of a sympathy of persecution, as they are wont to say, an identity of martyrdom for the truth, against Roman tyranny. In Italy, on the other hand, the Jansenist heresy seems to assume an aspect of continuity. Along with philosophical and scientific thought, religious questions enter by parallel paths at the end of the seventeenth century, but especially in the eighteenth century. Port-Royal is known through Pascal's Les provinciales, and Jansenism is prepared by anti-Jesuit polemics, by the Gallican politics of the courts, by controversies over Grace and over morals. The most notable ecclesiastical figures to whom a Jansenist orientation is owed — although none of the three professed to be a Jansenist — are Cardinal Noris, Fulgenzio Belelli, and Lorenzo Berti, Augustinians, called semi-Jansenists because they affirmed the necessity of Grace not ex necessitate, but only ex decentia. That is, they defended the Augustinian system while rejecting the interpretation of Jansenius. Accused of Baianism and Jansenism, they vigorously defended themselves against these accusations. Their intention was to insist on the distinction between the two states before and after the Fall. Before the Fall, they said, Adam, under the influence of a versatile grace, could freely determine himself to good or to evil; after the Fall, choice is possible only under the influence of an efficacious Grace ab intrinseco, such that it gives both the possibility and the act. The efficacy of this Grace consists in delectation, not indeed relative, that is, by superiority of degrees, but absolutely victorious, whereby God infallibly moves the will to free consent. There is a sufficient Grace (auxilium sine quo) which can be resisted and which remains without effect if the medicinal aid of efficacious Grace (auxilium quo) does not supervene. Berti is careful constantly to point out the differences that, in his opinion, separate his system from that of Jansenius. Delectation — he affirms — does not come necessarily, but infallibly, without offending man's freedom. Not only among the Augustinians, but also among prelates such as Giovanni Bottari and Francesco Foggini and among cardinals such as Passionei, the anti-Jesuits, the rigorists, and the French appellants find sympathy; and generally among the Filippini. In Rome, in fact, at the Archetto and at the Oratory in the eighteenth century, the principal Italian Jansenists meet, establish relations and friendships: Tamburini, Zola, Scipione de' Ricci, Serrao, G. Capecelatro. Rome represents in the first half of the eighteenth century the formative phase, even if underground, timid and uncertain, of Italian Jansenism, which will then find in the second half of the century the generation of rebels in the two principal circles of Pavia and Pistoia. Pavia, a center of the dissemination of ideas with Pietro Tamburini; Pistoia, a field of experience with Scipione de' Ricci. But Jansenists are also found at Genoa; to cite only a few names: Palmieri, Degola, Solari; at Naples: Serrao, Capecelatro, Simioli, Natale; at Turin, at Milan, at Venice. Italian Jansenism is in fact an aristocratic phenomenon of small groups, not a broad movement like that in France, which penetrated almost all social strata; it has no unitary and original character but varies from region to region, and often from person to person; it possesses only scanty theological foundations and doctrinal motives. To the primitive doctrines of Jansenius, of Saint-Cyran, of Arnauld it prefers the spirit as revealed in Quesnel and Duguet, deriving immediately from the French appellants by way of the Count Dupac de Bellegarde and the missionaries of the schismatic Church of Utrecht, and welcoming Febronian, Richerist and Enlightenment elements. Thus there is a regalist Jansenism at Milan and at Pavia, a revolutionary and republican Jansenism at Genoa, and an ecclesiastical and liturgical Jansenism at Pistoia. It unites, that is, a religious problem (religion and a Church to be reformed) with a social and political one (an aspect not Jansenist of the heresy, but a fulcrum). The Annali ecclesiastici, on the model of the French journal of the same name, testify to how theology and morals were swept away by political and jurisdictional preoccupations. Law and theology change with events, while there remains in the epigones the faith in the theories of the three fathers of traditional Jansenism.

In Austria and Lombardy the point of support for Jansenism was Joseph II, in Naples Tanucci, in Tuscany Peter Leopold (1765-90). Scipione de' Ricci became its faithful minister of Grace and Justice. They collaborated together, though with different aims: Leopold for political purposes, Ricci out of religious illusion. Thus were born the ecclesiastical reforms which, through the bishop's work, had Pistoia as their experimental center. But other bishops were not lacking, such as Msgr. Sciarelli, bishop of Colle, and Msgr. Pannilini, bishop of Chiusi and Piacenza, to give the reforms a regional character. Contributing to them, besides the two episcopal printing houses of Bracali in Pistoia and Vestri in Prato, were other centers of editorial propaganda in Turin, Venice, Lugano, Florence, Naples, Pavia. Reforms in part praiseworthy, but undermined by a subtle schismatic and heretical poison which had its concrete realization in the Synod of Pistoia, in 1786, in the presence of 234 priests called "fathers of the Council." The Synod was to prepare the assembly of the bishops and archbishops of Tuscany so as to lead to a national Council and perhaps to a separate Church, on the model of that of Utrecht, to which Ricci and the other Italian Jansenists were devoted. The Assembly held in Florence in 1787 caused the schismatic plan to fail because of the opposition of the bishops. The people, who did not understand the theological questions and were annoyed by the liturgical reforms, rebelled in a series of riots that forced Ricci and the other reformers to withdraw, and the grand ducal government to take measures. But the Synod in France, in Spain, in Austria, in Holland had rekindled hopes among the Jansenists. The Holy See, asked for a definitive judgment, on 28 Aug. 1794 promulgated the bull Auctorem Fidei, drafted by Card. Gerdil, which condemned in 85 propositions, set out in 44 titles according to the diversity of the subjects, all the hereditary and adventitious errors of Jansenism (Denz-U., 1501-99). To avoid the malice of the Jansenists with a blanket condemnation, as in the bull Unigenitus, each assertion was condemned with its own qualifications and with the multiple senses it could present. Seven propositions were condemned as heretical, the others proscribed with various attributions. It was the tombstone of Jansenism. That markedly Enlightenment character which Jansenism had among us, united with a desire for doctrinal and disciplinary, interior and moral reform, survives in Eustachio Degola (v.), who at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth felt alone, because of "the extreme scarcity of successes of the Port-Royal Maccabees." In Paris Saint-Severin, the Parisian church of the last Jansenists, becomes ever more deserted. The scattered Jansenists entrusted themselves to the constitutional clergy of the Revolution. Ricci too thought of a possible restoration, but it is only a vain mirage. When on 29 Oct. 1809 "the friends of truth" called for a pilgrimage to the ruins of Port-Royal, Degola wove a panegyric of it, but by now life was lived on memory, on recollections. On those ruins the Genoese would linger from 1801 to 1810, melancholically among brambles, stones and rubble, measuring the ground, recording plans, uncovering tombstones, taking notes, even writing poems. After Ricci's death, with Eustachio Degola Jansenism died out, joining in the same memory the material ruins of Port-Royal with the spiritual and symbolic ruins of the Synod of Pistoia. If in the Italian Risorgimento there still surface names, correspondences and doctrines of some Jansenists, the link can be recognized in the non-Jansenistic character of Italian Jansenism, that is, in the common, though not univocal, conception of the temporal power of the pope. Other causes undoubtedly influenced it, such as a democratic system of life and politics, a new direction in philosophy and in religious problems, and above all a bitter antipathy toward the Roman Curia. Liberals indeed saw in the temporal power an impediment to national political unity, Jansenism an impediment to religious reform. Thus is explained the prejudicial historiography that exalted and exalts all rebels against Rome as if they were pure spirits and martyrs of liberty. Some Jansenistic trace also remained in the sacramental rigorism of certain dioceses, in the tragic conception of human nature in certain literary works, in the anti-curial spirit of politicians, in the religious criticism of free thinkers, but as germs breathed in the air and sprouted in a climate and a soil already prepared by other doctrines and other revolutions.

VII. JUDGMENT ON JANSENISM

Just as it had been born and prepared in secret in the drafting and printing of the Augustinus, so it remained in the Church an invisible and indefinable enemy, even though it took part in the political-religious revolutions of states. Indivisible and indefinable, but not a "fantôme" as Arnauld would insinuate, not an "hérésie imaginaire," as Nicole would repeat. Cardinal Richelieu would have to experience it when he attempted to crush it by imprisoning the abbot of Saint-Cyran, and Louis XIV when he first suppressed and then destroyed the monastery of Port-Royal. A whole vocabulary, a whole phraseology of commonplaces concerning Jansenism must be revised in ancient and modern historians and men of letters. Jansenism is not a political movement, a school of philosophy and of religious life, an academy of scholars, the struggle against the Baroque and rhetoric, the return to the measured and historical sense of the Greeks, the enlightened rebellion against a moral and rational pomp, or a suggestive theme of love in culture; it is a heresy or rather a complex of theological errors, a deviation from dogma, from morals and from ecclesiastical discipline. Its backbone is formed by the theology of Grace (Jansenius), by sacramental morals (Arnauld), by disciplinary and spiritual practice (Saint-Cyran) and by the diplomatic polemic that sustains and defends it (Quesnel). But one does not exclude the other; it includes it. Once condemned, Jansenism assumes schismatic aspects at Port-Royal, at Utrecht, at Pistoia. Through life's necessities it is accompanied now by Gallicanism, now by jurisdictionalism, now by a philosophical and religious hybridism, now by Enlightenment revisions, that is, by external motives, but its soul is the desire for a reform, an act of conciliation between Calvinism and Catholicism, a masked survival of Protestantism, and the fundamental questions are predestination, the corruption of human nature, the doctrine on the efficacy of the Redemption, the return to the discipline of the primitive Church, a moral and sacramental rigorism. Motive: hatred of the Society of Jesus. But it would be a gross delusion to believe with Gazier, by antithesis, that Jansenism is a monster created by the Jesuits and comparable to hippogriffs and unicorns. The Jesuits were the most intolerant enemies of the Jansenists for the same reason that the Jansenists were their ardent adversaries: not for a personal or caste motive, nor even solely for a disciplinary or moral controversy, but for a theological reason, the same theological reason as the Catholic Reformation. The Augustinus indeed survives in the climate of Protestantism: in the same distrust of philosophical reason regarding the exposition of dogmas, in the positive sentiment of holding the keys of tradition, in the critical spirit of free thought concerning the faith in considering oneself directly enlightened by God and a depositary of the truth, in the religious absurdity that mixes theology and politics for expediency, in the affirmation of an interior and invisible assent, in believing oneself to represent the better part of a decadent Christianity, in the rebellion against every form of ecclesiastical authority as the norm of faith and the imposition of one's own personal judgment, in the accusation of casuistry when one speaks of moral voluntariness, and of tyranny when one speaks of discipline. But the duplex delectatio appears more in certain spiritual hardnesses of modern literature, as in the novels of Bernanos and Mauriac; psychoanalytic literature seems to close the cycle of the delectatio terrestris in deified sex, as the autonomous and angelic literature fixes the delectatio caelestis in the human word elevated to divinity. An anti-humanistic presence that always made Jansenism an individual heresy, never a social one. Its history is the history of individual Jansenists, a sylloge of biographies annotated by a chronicle of events wrapped in a religious psychology in which theological and moral, social and ecclesiological errors take shape, in the various encounters and various territorial appearances. In the reforms that Jansenism desired and carried out, especially in Italy, not everything is condemnable, nor was everything condemned. Indeed, in some reforms it anticipated the times, but the spirit that animated them demanded a renewal of the Church outside the Church. From Baius to the Synod of Pistoia there is in fact a secret continuity of doctrine and method, and whoever wishes to understand the nature and history of Jansenism must fix his attention not so much on the biography of its protagonists, who live on equivocations and trickery, as on the study of the texts, incriminated works and documents of condemnation. It is above all the reading of these that should be recommended to those who desire a doctrinal knowledge of the Jansenist heresy.