GIBIEUF, GUILLAUME. — Oratorian theologian, b. at Bourges in 1585 (?), d. in Paris on 6 June 1659. He held important offices in the Oratory of Cardinal Bérulle, who appointed him vicar general in 1625 and visitor of the Carmelites of France; he maintained significant relations with Descartes, Mersenne, St Cyran, and Jansen.
His books, La vie et les grandeurs de la très sainte Vierge Marie (Paris 1637) and Cathéchèse de la manière de la vie parfaite (ibid. 1637), faithfully reflect the principles of Bérullian spirituality and earn him a notable place among the mystical writers of the “French school.” But G.’s greatest importance derives from De libertate Dei et creaturae (ibid. 1630), in which he proposes a new solution to the question of the harmony between free will and divine concurrence. The novelty, which provoked a bitter controversy with the Jesuit theologians F. Annat and Th. Raynaud, lies in the notion of free will as a faculty which, freeing itself from the slavery of created things, becomes a participant in God’s infinity, and in the consequent definition of freedom as the “breadth” of the soul. Freedom understood in this way is not impaired by the absence of “active indifference,” which is rejected as a non-essential, indeed defective, element; for the will to be free, that metaphorical and participated “immensity” deriving from its union with the infinite is necessary and sufficient. Insofar as it excludes freedom of indifference, this doctrine anticipated Jansen, who found in the book “des grandes ouvertures” and examined it in the Augustinus (III, 7, 16).
G.’s influence on Descartes is more uncertain, despite the latter’s assertion that he fully accepted G.’s doctrine (cf. the letter to Mersenne, Apr. 1641); it seems to have been limited to the Neoplatonic and Augustinian elements present both in G. and in the philosopher.