Jansen, Cornelius and Jansenism

GIANSENIO (JANSENS), CORNELIO e GIANSENISMO. -

I. LIFE

Cornelius Jansen (Jansenius), nephew of the preceding, bishop of Ypres, was born on Oct. 28, 1585, at Ackoy, a village in Leerdam, in the province of South Holland, and died at Louvain on May 6, 1638. He studied at Utrecht in the College of St. Jerome, and then at Louvain with the Jesuits. The University of Louvain, described by Pallavicino as "a great armed camp against the forces of Luther" (l. XV, 97), was in those years agitated by the disputes that controversies on Grace and predestination were arousing between the followers of Bañez and Molina. Baius had taught at Louvain, and Leonard Lessius and John Du Hamel had arrayed themselves against Baius. In this doctrinal controversy that was raging at Louvain under the name and concerning the doctrine of Baius, Jansen is introduced by James Janson, director of the College of Hadrian VI, and by Du Vergier de Hauranne, the celebrated abbot of St-Cyran. The influence of Du Vergier was decisive and constant in Jansen's life and work. When in 1604 he moved to Paris, after finishing his philosophical studies, 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 moral and disciplinary theological reform of the Church, inspired above all by the theories of rigorous Augustinianism.

Jansen thought of freeing theology from a pretended scholastic philosophism and rationalism; Du Vergier thought of restoring discipline and morals to the rigor of the early centuries. Jansen was the theoretician, Du Vergier the practitioner. But one obstacle seemed to prevent their reform: the Society of Jesus, which corrupted theological science with Molinism and Christian life with probabilism. Their reform would attack the Society of Jesus in its theological and moral aspects. In 1617, when Du Vergier was elected abbot of St-Cyran, Jansen returned to Louvain, where he rebuilt and then directed for some time the College of St. Pulcheria, obtaining his doctoral degree in theology in 1619, and holding the chair of Sacred Scripture from 1630. In 1635 he was appointed 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 contagion, he died piously. He had welcomed with sympathy the De republica Christiana of Marcantonio De Dominis, and the Protestant Synod of Dordrecht (1619), which reiterated Calvin's doctrine against the Arminians and Catholics; and these acceptances could have brought him under suspicion of heresy. At the same time, however, he had published: Alexipharmacum (Louvain 1636), which he had defended with a Spongia notarum (ibid. 1631), against Gisbertus Voetius, and Mars gallicus (s. l. 1635). In the first of these he defended the truths of the Catholic Church, denying Protestants the authority to reform the Church; in the second, under the pseudonym of Alexander Patricius Armacanus, he denounced with biting satire the alliances made by the kings of France with the German, Swedish, and Dutch Protestants against a thesis advocated in 1634 by the Lyon theologian Besian Arroy. To these works he added the Tetrateuchus (Louvain 1639), a commentary on the Gospels, the Pentateuchus (ibid. 1641), and Analecta (ibid. 1644), namely commentaries on the Pentateuch, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, Wisdom, Habakkuk, and Zephaniah. Thus nothing serious or censurable could have been cited against the deceased bishop of Ypres, had there not appeared, posthumously, 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, achieved incredible success in editions and circulation. How did Jansen's Augustinus come into being? One can see in it the ambiguity of a compromise. The reasons for this compromise, while stemming from the motives of the controversies debated at the University of Louvain, had much more distant and profound roots, namely in the very historical origins of the problem of Grace as they appear in the doctrine of Pelagius and the predestinarians. Jansen's Augustinus inserts itself into the centuries-old polemic of Grace and predestination.

Between the hard determinism of the predestinarians and the reformers and Catholic doctrine, Jansen places his compromise. He attempts a neutral ground in Augustine and casts his appeal for conciliation. He had been preceded by Baius, whose reading is necessary for anyone wishing to study the Jansenist movement. Jansen defends Baius so intimately that, had circumstances been different, the word Baianism might have taken the place in the theological vocabulary today occupied by the word Jansenism. From Baius, Jansen learned the effort to impose, in the name of St. Augustine, one's own critique upon Revelation, outside the authority of Revelation, by studying the Catholic doctrine of Grace outside the ecclesiastical magisterium; or if he claimed to rely upon the Church, he preferred the ancient Church, suspicious of the contemporary one. With Baius, he believed that the Fathers of the Council of Trent had hurled too many anathemas against the reformers; and failing to understand the wise balance of the conciliar definitions, instead of annotating and justifying the articles of 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 Catholic treatises alike relied upon his authority—and even the Council of Trent repeatedly cited him in its decrees—Jansen attempts to find in his works the charter of reconciliation more decisively than Baius. Indeed, Baius was too Pelagian to satisfy the Lutherans and too Lutheran to satisfy the Catholics, thus concluding the history of Augustinianism and initiating that of Jansenism.

II. THE CONDEMNATION

On 1 August 1641, the Sacred Congregation of the Index and of the Inquisition condemned 18 works, among which was the Augustinus of C. Giansenio. With

this condemnation began the history of a heresy born, if we are to believe the last words of the bishop of Ypres, contrary to the will of its founder, who was not expressly a heretic. Indeed, Giansenio, in his testament (which some consider forged), but even more explicitly in several passages of his authentic Augustinus (cf., e.g., vol. 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 a profession of faith begins and ends the posthumous history not only of the Augustinus, but of every Jansenist work. The Augustinus appeared in three folio volumes. G. had worked on it for twenty-two years, rereading ten, twenty, and even thirty times the writings of the great African. The first volume is divided into 8 books and expounds and refutes the heresy of Pelagius with the authority of St. Augustine. The second volume, after having outlined the limits of reason in theology and of the authority of St. Augustine, deals with the status naturae lapsae and the status naturae purae. The third directly sets forth the doctrine on Grace, freedom, predestination, and reprobation. It ends with a critical parallel between the reprobated doctrine of the Massilians and the Molinist doctrine of the Jesuits. The Augustinus is therefore predominantly a treatise on Grace, a collection of doctrinal developments on Grace documented with texts isolated from St. Augustine. In defining the method of theology, G. declares philosophical reason to be the «mother of all heresies», calls the scholastics «dogs barking in the schools», and opposes to it «memory», that is, tradition. But in tradition he has little sympathy for the Greek Fathers, and among 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 all questions, the only thing that matters is to ascertain what the opinion of St. Augustine is, and when he comes across 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 » (vol. II, b. III, ch. 22; vol. III, ch. 1, partitio dicendorum). In establishing the doctrine on Grace, Giansenio takes up the interpretation of Baio, 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 the fall, 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 thus drawn to evil without being able to resist it, invincibly. His will is dominated by earthly cupidity or terrestrial love. His works are nothing but sins unless charity or heavenly love intervenes to determine the will infallibly toward the good. This twofold love is the principle of our physical, moral, and supernatural conduct, and therefore is called

«delectatio victrix». Man, subjected to the iron law of an invincible love, thus remains the slave either of earth or of heaven, without personal merit or demerit, dragged toward good or toward evil, toward salvation or toward damnation, by an irresistible heavenly or earthly delight. While Bañezianism and Molinism, 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 upon them the proximate power to fulfill the commandments, and which receives its efficacy either from supernatural action within us (Bañezians) or from the assent of our freedom (Molinists), Giansenio, following in the footsteps of Baio, 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 heaven by a will antecedent to any consideration of merit. Christ died only for the predestined, and to them alone does he give efficacious Grace. Freedom therefore does not exist, and if Giansenio speaks of freedom it is only exemption from external violence or from physical coercion. The entire Augustinus is an immense polemical and partisan arsenal, as his followers would later demonstrate, in defense of the duplex delectatio pushed to the paroxysm of a personal prejudice; the «magna charta» of the theology of Jansenism, which Fénelon would rightly call the «cousin germain du calvinisme».

III. DEVELOPMENTS OF JANSENISM

It seems strange, and no one would have imagined it, least of all Giansenio, that a doctrine so strained and grim, and so different from the sweet liveliness of the French spirit, would achieve a vast and eventful conquest in France and in the Latin countries.

Bremond was surprised by this: «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 and the discontented in France and Belgium after the condemnation of Calvinism—of those, that is, who, without compromising themselves with civil and ecclesiastical authority, saw in Giansenio's doctrine a compromise between Catholicism and Protestantism. Furthermore, for certain restless spirits, Giansenio's theories were able to represent the best part of the Catholic Reformation; yet they diverted the desire for a moral and religious renewal—which was necessary and urgent in that century and in that society—in their choice of the reforming principle, preferring to the canons of the Council of Trent and the authority of the Roman pontiff the ambiguities of the Reformation and personal criteria of interpretation and judgment. Yet if this social and spiritual climate favored the development of the heresy, unpredictable encounters, as Bremond asserts, smoothed its path. Jansenism indeed finds its reason for existence in psychology rather than in religious metaphysics. The anathemas of Rome, which mark the progressive death of other heresies, became, for a time, its good fortune. Indeed, it was born, revealed itself, consolidated itself, and wove its history in the dates and forms of the various pontifical condemnations. When the Jesuits got hold of some printed sheets of the Augustinus, they immediately denounced II. Urbano VIII hastened to forbid the continuation of the printing, which was being overseen in secret by Fromond and Calenus. But despite the opposition of the Jesuits, of the internuncio of Bruxelles, and of the University of Lovanio, the printing continued and was completed under the protection of card. Ferdinando, infante of Spain and governor of the Paesi Bassi, to whom it was dedicated; it was published with the privileges of the King of Spain and of Emperor Ferdinando III granted in Jan. 1638 and in Feb. 1640, and with the favorable censorship of Enrico Calenus and Giacomo Pontano, who declared the work «celestial... necessary and most useful to the Church... in conformity with the doctrine of s. Agostino». Its dissemination and reprints were numerous, even in Roma in 1643, meeting with the most varied and heated controversy. Saint-Cyran asserted that, after s. Paolo and s. Agostino, Giansenio was the third who had «spoken most divinely of Grace and created the devotional book of the latter times». The work having been submitted to the judgment of the Sacred Congregation of the Index on June 10, 1643, it was condemned first by a decree of the Inquisition (March 4, 1641), then by the bull In eminenti of Urbano VIII drafted by Francesco Albizzi (March 6, 1642), by the const. Cum occasione of Innocenzo X (May 31, 1653), and finally by the other Ad Sacram beati Petri Sedem of Alessandro VII (Oct. 16, 1656). Innocenzo had appointed five cardinals and thirteen theologians to examine the Augustinus. The examination lasted more than two years over 36 sessions. The Pope also attended the first ten sessions. Giansenio's defenders were permitted to plead their cause, but their defense did not avert the condemnation, which was formulated in the following five propositions declared rash, impious, blasphemous, worthy of excommunication, and heretical (cf. Denz-U, 1092-96): 1) Some of God's commandments are impossible, notwithstanding the goodwill of just men, according to the present powers of nature, because they lack the Grace that makes them possible; 2) Interior Grace in the state of fallen nature is never resisted; 3) To acquire merit or demerit, freedom from internal necessity is not required, but only freedom from external coercion; 4) The Semipelagians admitted the necessity of prevenient interior Grace for individual acts, even at the beginning of faith, and were heretical insofar as they granted to the human will the power to resist or to obey Grace; 5) It is a Semipelagian error to state that Christ died for all men. But this condemnation did not gravely disturb Giansenio's admirers, some of whom wished to appeal from the Pope to an ecumenical council.

The Pope, in their judgment, was incompetent. But such an appeal would have compromised the Augustinus even further. This polemic with Roma intensified the controversy, broadening the dogmatic aspect of the nascent heresy—initially soteriological—to embrace ecclesiastical errors such as diminishing pontifical authority (the Pope was conceived as primus inter pares among the bishops, first in dignity but not in authority, inferior and subordinate to the ecumenical council). But Giansenio's theories were to find their testing ground and their practical implementation at Port-Royal in Parigi.

IV. PORT-ROYAL

Port-Royal (v.) marks the transition of Jansenist heresy from a theological aspect to a polemical and ascetic form not very dissimilar to a schism. Already the condemnations had revealed the ambiguity of the Augustinus and of the faith of the Jansenists, rebellious and intolerant children who do not want to leave the house and live within the family in continuous litigation. Jansenism indeed manifests itself as a heresy in the house, a schism in the family. But of this family rebellion Saint-Cyran was to meet the diplomatic controversialist in Paris ARNALDISTI (v.), a subtle and cunning disquisitor who would teach Jansenism its indefinable polemical tactics. Author of the Logique de Port-Royal, defense attorney of the Augustinus, he knew the tergiversations, amphibologies, and equivocations of defense and offense. He organized the Jansenist ideas, infused them with a soul, and created a system from them. To theology he united ascetics, to the dogmatic reform on Grace he associated a sacramental reform, while never clarifying his personal opinions. He taught not to expose oneself, to scatter orthodox and uncensurable observations throughout the pages defending the heresy. If he was suspected at any time, he immediately realized it, ready to affirm the opposite. With Arnauld the centrifugal parabola of the heresy reached its end. It starts from Jansenius, the theologian, passes through Saint-Cyran, the hyper-mystic, and ends in Arnauld, the diplomatic controversialist.

To him are owed the tergiversations regarding the pontifical condemnations for which Port-Royal remained famous. Arnauld admonished: «ne répondre jamais absolument, mais toujours par si. Par là on ne s'engagera à rien». Therefore, regarding the condemnation of the five propositions, to those who called the Pope incompetent and wanted 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, asserted that they were not damnable in the sense of the author, which was that of St. Augustine, which the Pope undoubtedly had not reproved nor could reprove. Thirty-eight bishops then, assisted by many theologians, on March 28, 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 that was not enough. In two letters in defense of the Duke of Liancourt in Feb. 1655, Arnauld distinguished between a question of law and a question of fact. The Church, the Pope, is infallible when judging questions of dogma or morals contained in Revelation and in the exposition of their doctrine (quaestio iuris), not in the judgment rendered on the doctrine of a book by a human author or on the true sense that he may have 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 exact a respectful silence (silentium obsequiosum). Moreover, he added with a thoroughly Jansenist spirit, St. Peter, in his fall, lacked the necessary Grace. Alongside Arnauld as an assertor 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, which are fundamental for understanding the subterfuges and artifices of Jansenism. From heresy one 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 to be 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 were condemned. The Pope is ill-informed or, if well-informed, is not infallible in himself but only with the consent of the universal Church. And if this consent is reached (as in the Council of Trent) one appeals to a future council (ready to appeal again infinitely), just as one appeals to the discipline of the ancient Church to subvert the discipline of the contemporary Church. The Jansenists did not realize, by insisting on the reforming movement of the autonomy of reason from Faith, that they were putting together their own faith alongside the agonizing Catholic faith.

In defense of Arnauld, his friend, Blaise Pascal (v.) also became entangled in the intrigues of the Jansenist party. He had his sister Jacqueline in Port-Royal, «sa directrice» as he called her. For the love of his sister and out of a commitment of friendship with Arnauld, he wrote a pamphlet, a literary apologia for Port-Royal, an anti-Molinist prosecution, Les provinciales (1656-57), which could be defined as the pleasure of the screened shield canonized to the detriment of the Society of Jesus. But Pascal, like Nicole, soon understood that all this polemic was becoming «a pure comedy and a bad taste joke» (Nicole) and that one could not make «an idol of truth itself, because truth outside of charity is not God, and is an image and idol that one must neither love nor adore» (Pascal), and they withdrew from the subtle and refined quibbles that succeeded in saving neither charity nor truth.

V. FROM PORT-ROYAL TO PISTOIA

It was natural that, by moving away from the spiritual authority of the Church, Jansenism should fall, 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 morality seem to drown in Gallican theories and hyper-mystical manifestations. The polemic of Port-Royal, continuing the Protestant one by casting a shadow over the ecclesiastical magisterium, had prepared the way. Already in the Petrus Aurelius of Saint-Cyran one essentially finds 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 as 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 together with Protestantism in the Gallican courts. If, like Luther, Jansenism had struck down all authority in matters of faith, and in likeness to Calvinism had assumed a democratic and revolutionary character, with ecclesiastical criticism—subsequently so akin to free examination—it pushed not only toward the denial of revealed truth, but toward the search for a foothold against the succession of Rome's anathemas. To continue in their criticism and ward off or at least safeguard themselves from pontifical condemnations, the Jansenists retreated into a religious hybridism, which forced them into a double life. In fact, Jansenism and Gallicanism cannot be confused. The true Jansenists poorly tolerated pontifical authority and infallibility, but they were also intolerant of any state interference, and when they turned toward the Parliaments they did so to escape ecclesiastical condemnations. They had one common point, however: the pope is inferior to the council; the decisions of the pope, even in matters of faith, are not irreformable 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 even more so polemical reasons, made them close and friendly—so friendly as to believe them twins born from 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 resolute; the Jansenists, followers of Arnauld, temporize, and do not like to compromise themselves or take a stand. It is often repeated that if the doctrines of Baius and Jansen approached the Gallican spirit, it was Quesnel (v.). This is not exact. The union between the two movements is due to the particular political-religious situation that arose following the jurisdictional struggles between the French Court and Rome. His Réflexions morales (1671) are a clear testimony to this. In a captious form, they repeated exactly the doctrine of Jansen and Arnauld, rekindling their controversies. They were prohibited by Clement X in 1675, but such a prohibition gave rise to a swarm of polemical pamphlets and did not prevent Quesnel from revising, expanding, and republishing them several times and in various formats. Among so much polemical literature, a pamphlet published in 1702 entitled Un cas de conscience—namely, whether one should absolve those who maintained a "respectful silence" regarding the condemnation of the five propositions—created a stir. On Feb. 12, 1702, Clement XI also proscribed respectful silence and three years later (July 16, 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 kept Jansenist issues alive for decades among the Parliaments, the bishops, the religious Orders, and the secular clergy, above all due to 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, it came on Sept. 8, 1713, with the bull Unigenitus (Denz-U, 1351-1451), which condemned 101 propositions of Quesnel—that is, the entire theological, ascetic, moral, and ecclesiastical doctrine of Jansenism. Some Jansenists appealed to an Ecumenical Council (1717), thus creating the party of the appellants, who were excommunicated by Clement XI with the bull Pastoralis officii (1718). After the death of the Regent Philippe d'Orléans (1723) and of Noailles (1729), the Jansenists had their sole support in Parliament, and thus rebel, factional individuals became a political-philosophical-religious sect with an increasingly aggressive accent against the theology, morality, and piety of the Society of Jesus, and in particular against probabilism and devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. From 1727, the Nouvelles ecclésiastiques became the organ of the party, Utrecht (v.) became its moral point of reference. The convulsionaries of Saint-Médard (v.) Figurism (v.) contributed to divide rather than unite hearts (as the doctrine degenerated into superstitious facts and beliefs) in the religious controversy that lasted throughout the eighteenth century and in which the Parliaments interfered until Benedict XIV renewed the prohibitions of the bull Unigenitus in 1756. During the French Revolution, Grégoire, Mouton, and a few other Jacobin priests would repeat Jansenist names and facts, but true Jansenism was by then overwhelmed by the new Enlightenment theories.

VI. ITALIAN JANSENISM

The Jansenist diaspora, while vast individually, socially presents only two territorial manifestations: in Utrecht, and more properly in Pistoia. But in Utrecht the Jansenists recognize only a moral refuge and receive an encouragement in their struggle with Rome. Overwhelmed by condemnations, they turn to the schismatic Dutch bishops out of a sympathy of persecution, as they used 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. Alongside philosophical and scientific thought, religious questions entered through parallel paths at the end of the seventeenth century, but above all in the eighteenth. Port-Royal is known through Pascal's Les provinciales, and Jansenism is prepared by anti-Jesuit polemics, the Gallican policy of the courts, and controversies on Grace and morals. The most notable ecclesiastical figures to whom a Jansenist orientation is due, although none of the three professed to be or was a Jansenist, are Card. Noris, Fulgenzio Belelli, and Lorenzo Berti, Augustinians, termed semi-Jansenists because they affirmed the necessity of Grace not ex necessitate, but only ex decentia. That is to say, they defended the Augustinian system while rejecting Jansen's interpretation. Accused of Baius's error and Jansenism, they vigorously defended themselves against these charges. It was their intention to insist on the distinction of 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 evil; after the fall, choice is possible only under the influence of Grace effective ab intrinseco, such that it gives both the possibility and the act. The efficacy of this Grace consists in delectation, not relative, i.e., through 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 unless the medicinal aid of effective Grace (auxilium quo) supervenes. Berti constantly strives to point out the differences that separate, in his opinion, his system from that of Jansen. Delectation — he asserts — comes not necessarily, but infallibly without offending human 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, rigorists, and French appellants find sympathy; and generally among the Filippini. Indeed, in Rome at the Archetto and 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, albeit underground, timid and uncertain, of Italian Jansenism, which in the second half of the century will then find the generation of rebels in the two main circles of Pavia and Pistoia. Pavia, a center of the dispersal of ideas with Pietro Tamburini; Pistoia, a field of experience with Scipione de' Ricci. But Jansenists are also found in Genoa; to cite only a few names: Palmieri, Degola, Solari; in Naples: Serrao, Capecelatro, Simioli, Natale; in Turin, Milan, Venice. Italian Jansenism is in fact an aristocratic phenomenon of small groups, not a broad movement like in France that penetrated almost all social strata; it lacks a unitary and original character, varying from region to region, and often from person to person; it possesses only scarce theological foundations and doctrinal motives. Rather than the primitive doctrines of Jansen, Saint-Cyran, and Arnauld, it prefers the spirit as it reveals itself in Quesnel and Duguet, deriving directly from the French appellants through Count Dupac de Bellegarde and the missionaries of the schismatic Church of Utrecht, and welcoming Febronian, Richerian, and Enlightenment elements. Thus one has a regalian Jansenism in Milan and Pavia, a revolutionary and republican Jansenism in Genoa, and an ecclesiastical and liturgical Jansenism in Pistoia. That is, it unites a religious problem (religion and the Church to be reformed) with a social and political one (a non-Jansenist aspect of the heresy, but a stepping stone). The Annali ecclesiastici, patterned after the French review of the same name, testify to how theology and morals were overwhelmed by political and jurisdictional concerns. Law and theology change with events, while the epigones still retain faith in the theories of the three fathers of traditional Jansenism.

In Austria and Lombardy the stronghold of Jansenism was Joseph II, in Naples Tanucci, in Tuscany Pietro Leopoldo (1765-90). Scipione de' Ricci became his faithful Minister of Grace and Justice. They collaborated together, albeit with different ends: Leopoldo for political purposes, Ricci out of religious delusion. Thus the ecclesiastical reforms were born, which, through the bishop's work, had Pistoia as their experimental center. But there was no lack of other bishops, such as Msgr. Sciarelli, bishop of Colle, and Msgr. Pannilini, bishop of Chiusi and Piacenza, who gave the reforms a regional aspect. Contributing to this, in addition to the two episcopal printing houses Bracali in Pistoia and Vestri in Prato, were other centers of editorial propaganda in Turin, Venice, Lugano, Florence, Naples, and Pavia. These reforms were partly commendable, but undermined by a subtle schismatic and heretical poison which found its concrete realization in the Synod of Pistoia in 1786, in the presence of 234 priests called "fathers of the Council." The Synod was intended to prepare the assembly of the bishops and archbishops of Tuscany to culminate in a national Council and perhaps in a separate Church, akin to 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 due to the opposition of the bishops. The people, who did not understand 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 had rekindled hopes in Jansenists in France, Spain, Austria, and Holland. The Holy See, having been asked for a definitive judgment, on August 28, 1794 promulgated the bull Auctorem Fidei, drafted by Card. Gerdil, which condemned in 85 propositions, set out under 44 headings according to the diversity of matters, all the hereditary and adventitious errors of Jansenism (Denz-U., 1501-99). To avoid the malice of the Jansenists through a global 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 Enlightened character which Jansenism had among us, combined with a desire for doctrinal and disciplinary, interior and moral reform, Degola (v.), who at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century felt alone, due to "the extreme paucity of successes of the portorealist Maccabees." In Paris, Saint-Severin, the Parisian church of the last Jansenists, became increasingly deserted. The scattered Jansenists entrusted themselves to the constitutional clergy of the Revolution. Ricci too thought of a possible restoration, but it was only a vain mirage. When on October 29, 1809 "the friends of truth" pointed to a pilgrimage to the ruins of Port-Royal, Degola wove a panegyric for it, but by then people lived on memory, on recollections. The Genoese would linger upon those ruins from 1801 to 1810 melancholically among brambles, stones, and rubble, measuring the ground, taking drawings, discovering tombstones, taking notes, even writing poetry. With the death of Ricci, Jansenism was extinguished in Eustachio Degola, uniting in the same memory the material ruins of Port-Royal with the spiritual and symbolic ones of the Synod of Pistoia. If in the Italian Risorgimento the names, correspondence, and doctrines of some Jansenists still surfaced, the link can be recognized in the non-Jansenistic character of Italian Jansenism, that is, in the common though not univocal conception of the pope's temporal power. Undeniably, other causes influenced this, such as a democratic system of life and politics, a new direction in philosophy and religious problems, and above all a bitter antipathy toward the Roman Curia. Liberals indeed saw temporal power as an impediment to national political unity, and Jansenism as an impediment to religious reform. Thus one can explain the biased historiography that praised and praises all rebels against Rome as if they were pure spirits and martyrs of liberty. Some Jansenistic traces also remained in the sacramental rigorism of some dioceses, in the tragic conception of human nature in some literary works, in the anti-clerical spirit of politicians, in the religious criticism of free thinkers, but as germs breathed in the air and sprouted in a climate and soil already prepared by other doctrines and other revolutions.