GIBIEUF, GUILLAUME. - Oratorian theologian, b. at Bourges in 1585 (?), d. at Paris on 6 June 1659. He held important offices in the Oratory of Card. Bérulle, who appointed him vicar general in 1625 and visitor of the Carmelites of France; he had notable relations with Descartes, Mersenne, St Cyran and Jansenius.
His books: La vie et les grandeurs de la très sainte Vierge Marie (Paris 1637), 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 greater importance is due to the De libertate Dei et creaturae (ibid. 1630), where he proposes a new solution to the question of the concord of free will with the divine concurrence. The novelty, which provoked a bitter polemic 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 partaker of the infinity of God, and in the consequent definition of freedom as the "amplitude" of the soul. Freedom thus understood is not harmed by the lack of "active indifference," which is repudiated as a non-essential and indeed defective element; for the will to be free, that metaphorical and participated "immensity" which derives to it from union with the infinite is necessary and sufficient. Such a doctrine, insofar as it excludes freedom of indifference, preluded Jansenius, who found in the book "des grandes ouvertures" and examined it in the Augustinus (III, 7, 16).
More uncertain is G.'s influence on Descartes, despite the fact that the latter affirms that he fully accepts G.'s doctrine (cf. the letter to Mersenne, Apr. 1641); it seems that it must be limited to the Neoplatonic and Augustinian elements present in G. and in the philosopher.
Bibliography3 works
Giuseppe Marafini