Quesnel, Pasquier

QUESNEL, PASQUIER. - Jansenist, b. in Paris on 14 July 1634, d. in Amsterdam on 2 Dec. 1719.

Spiritual heir of Antoine Arnauld, he represents the phase of rebellious Jansenism after the Clementine Peace (1669). His dying mother had charged Arnauld: « Ne se relâcher jamais de la défense de la vérité, et la soutenir sans aucune crainte, quand il irait de mille vies ». Arnauld, faithful to this, had added as a testament to the nuns of Port-Royal: « Ne répondre jamais absolument, mais toujours par " si ". Par là on ne s'engagera à rien ». Q. accepted this traditional charge, and Jansenism found in him a skilful defender, a popular popularizer and a biting propagandist. Less erudite than Arnauld, less insinuating than Saint-Cyran, Q. possessed a passionate flexibility and a stylistic dryness that allowed him to stir up at court, in the parliaments, in the convents and among the clergy « lo spirito di contraddizione ». For this literary and political cunning of his, not devoid of a boldness now masked and prudent, now unscrupulous and impetuous, he was particularly esteemed by the Jansenists and feared by Catholics. But he owes his notoriety chiefly to the particular religious and political situation that arose in France in the last years of the seventeenth century and the first years of the eighteenth, and to his assertion of himself as a link between two movements originally distinct, the Gallican and the Jansenist. Arnauld, Saint-Cyran and the Port-Royalists, by denying their submission, at least internal, to the authority of the Church and by initiating within Catholicism itself the autonomy of the region in the face of the faith, in fact offered an easy landing place to Gallican theories, which sharpened national sentiment to the point of deifying it in political and historical forms, with a consequent resentment toward the Roman Church that condemned every form of state-worship. « Il re - wrote Fénelon in his notes - è in Francia capo della Chiesa più che non il Papa. Libertà di fronte al Papa, servitù di fronte al re ». With this liberty and in this servitude late French Jansenism relives with its double life. Certainly the spirit that animates the Gallicans is different from that of the Jansenists, considered by Louis XIV restless sectaries harmful to his absolutist aims and almost an emanation of the ill-omened Huguenots, and in reality intolerant of pontifical authority and infallibility and at the same time of any state interference. Indeed they turned to the royal parliaments only to escape ecclesiastical condemnations. But there was one point in common: 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, and to this was added a note of nationalist colour: the power of the Pope is limited by the canons of the universal Church and by the rules and customs of the Gallican Church (declaration of the Gallican clergy of 1682).

In this climate Q. began his formation as an Oratorian. Port-Royal had previously had special relations with the Oratory: an anti-Molinist conception in the doctrine of Grace and, in ascetic practice, a piety understood with Christian rigour and nakedness, which the Jansenists later pushed to excess, associated it with Port-Royal. That fear of nature as a weight of death, that taking refuge in God by detaching oneself from creatures, that somewhat timid attitude before the Redeemer made the Oratory lovable in the eyes of the rigorists of Port-Royal. Even after relations with the Oratory ceased, owing to his removal from it, Q. continued to sign himself « prete dell'Oratorio ». Q. did not limit himself to a simple and partial sympathy for Jansenist doctrines, and when De Condren and Bourgong obliged all the Oratorians to subscribe to the formulary of 1657, among those who evaded subscription his name appears. Several times afterward, accused of Jansenism, he subscribed, to avoid worse evils, but only formally, and in such a way that his thought always appeared quite clear. Exiled to Orléans by the archbishop of Paris (1681), expelled from the Oratory (1684), in 1685 he joined Arnauld in Brussels, where together they worked in favour of the heresy. The Réflexions morales sur les Évangiles, already published in 1671 and prohibited by Clement X in 1675, together with the notes and dissertations that had accompanied the complete edition of the works of St. Leo the Great, were extended to the whole New Testament, and he himself prepared various editions of them. The definitive title of the work is: Le Nouveau Testament avec des Réflexions morales, first published in 1668, with annotations on certain words of Jesus, and then in the successive ones enlarged to all the verses of the books of the New Testament, and finally in 1699 published in eight volumes.

These Réflexions, and even more their inclusion in the Index and their condemnation, gave occasion in France and the Low Countries for an abundant polemical literature: a series of pamphlets on Confession and Communion, on the death of Christ and on the happiness of the Christian death, etc., a veritable flood of theological and polemical writings, against episcopal or papal condemnations or in exaltation and defense of the Jansenists: brief pamphlets, erudite tomes and in-fol. and in-quarto volumes, for the most part anonymous or under a pseudonym. And since in France it was forbidden to enter into polemics on Jansenist questions, the Catholics keeping silent, this varied literature created the commonplace that all science and true doctrine were on the Jansenist side and that their adversaries knew how to defend themselves only with measures of force, by sending books to the fire or to the Index and by exiling people who were held in esteem for holiness and doctrine. Thus the sect grew, and in order to respond to a publication of Q., Fénelon had to ask permission: « Pendant que j'ai les mains liées pour la défense de la foi, M. Habert a la liberté d'écrire pour soutenir son erreur » (letter of 9 Oct. 1712); a freedom that often became audacity. If Arnould sought, with regard to Rome, to save external forms and avoid an open rupture, Q. threw off the mask, passing directly to a harsh, incisive attack, leading the generation of the rebels, called "appellants," because of the continual appeals to a better-informed Pope or to a Council in discussions and dissensions: appeals, that is, to a tribunal that did not exist and could not exist for the simple reason that they would never have recognized as legitimate a Council that had condemned them; pure pretexts of ecclesiastical disobedience that always ended in a forced deference to the civil tribunals. The 101 propositions that Clement XI found condemnable in the Réflexions in 1693 constituted the danger of a schism, not numerous, but grave. The ecclesiastical history of that time is full of episodes, assemblies, equivocations, ambiguities on the part of Cardinal de Noailles, of Bishop Soanen, and of not a few other religious and theologians. Louis XIV himself, though a proud adversary of Jansenism, while raising one arm to strike it, with the other offered it a refuge in Gallicanism. When on 8 Aug. 1694 Arnould died at Brussels in his arms, he entrusted to Q. the direction of the party. Having had him arrested by Philip V of Spain in May 1703, in Sept. he managed to escape, and Utrecht became the center of the entire Jansenist movement. The excommunication of the Archbishop of Malines reached him on 10 Sept. 1704. The Holy See meanwhile decided the definitive condemnation of all his errors in the first bull Universis of 1708, then in that Unigenitus of 8 Sept. 1713 it condemned in a body the 101 propositions where, together with the errors of Jansenius and of Saint-Cyran, are found the ideas of Richer (v.) on the constitution of the Church. Thus was born the so-called "Quesnellism," which identifies Jansenism after the pontifical condemnation. Q. in fact brought about a singular fusion between Gallicanism and Jansenism, but an authentic judgment on his person and on his work showed him to be only a bold and unscrupulous repeater of the doctrine of Jansenius and of Arnould.

In place of systematic or complete treatises on the relationship between nature and Grace and the various theological questions, there are found in Q. only fragmentary points of view, marginal notes, doctrinal sketches set out at random in the commentary on a text. This form offered the author the advantage of hiding behind a text of Sacred Scripture, and the absence of a systematic context lent him easy escape routes.

This indeterminacy of doctrinal exposition makes difficult the exact understanding of his thought and at the same time of his condemnation. Nor, by carefully gathering all the texts that speak of the same questions, could one have a sufficiently clear idea of his system, not only because of the difficulty of reducing the fragments into a systematic chapter, but also because of the fact that Q. is never theologically clear and precise. One may observe that if in Baius as in Jansenius and Arnould, for example, the system of Grace starts from the comparative study of the primitive state of our first parents and from their fallen state, Q. orients himself rather toward a central idea: the excellence and omnipotence of the Grace of Jesus Christ. And the immense success of his Réflexions, beyond the reasons of a political and religious order that made that book the sign of a struggle to attribute to bishops jurisdiction against the Pope and to the lower clergy and to the laity the personal right to judge in matters of faith and morals, is due to the particular favor of Cardinal de Noailles, to the esteem for all the works in defense of the solitaries of Port-Royal, to the beauty of their style and to the spiritual passion that made the Jansenist Batterel repeat: « Nous n'avons jamais eu de plume dans l'Oratoire qui ait parlé de Dieu d'une manière si noble, si élevée, si lumineuse; j'ajoute, si pure et si élégante ». On Arnould's death, Q. had destined his heart to the Cistercian nuns of Port-Royal; on his own death, he seemed not to change faith, though subscribing to a very debatable formula of Catholic faith. The "father prior," as the surviving Jansenists called him, left behind him a generation that, in its contempt for authority and in ecclesiastical criticism, was preparing the ground, together with the denial of every revealed truth, for the revolutionary Enlightenment of the end of the century.

Benvenuto Matteucci.