QUESNEL, PASQUIER. – Jansenist, born in Paris on 14 July 1634, died in Amsterdam on 2 December 1719.
The spiritual heir of Antoine Arnauld, he represents the phase of rebellious Jansenism after the Clementine Peace (1669). His dying mother had charged Arnauld: “Never relax in the defense of truth, and support it without any fear, even if a thousand lives were at stake.” Arnauld, faithful to this charge, had added as his testament to the nuns of Port-Royal: “Never answer absolutely, but always with ‘yes.’ In this way one will commit oneself to nothing.” Q. accepted this traditional injunction, and Jansenism found in him a skillful defender, a popular disseminator, and a mordant propagandist. Less learned than Arnauld, less insinuating than Saint-Cyran, Q. possessed a passionate flexibility and a stylistic dryness that enabled him to stir up “the spirit of contradiction” at court, in the parlements, in convents, and among the clergy. For this literary and political astuteness of his, not without a boldness sometimes masked and cautious, sometimes uninhibited and impetuous, he was particularly esteemed by the Jansenists and feared by Catholics. But he owes his renown chiefly to the particular religious and political situation that developed in France in the final years of the seventeenth century and the early years of the eighteenth, and to his role 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 inwardly, to the authority of the Church and by initiating within Catholicism itself the autonomy of reason in relation to faith, in fact provided an easy landing place for Gallican theories, which sharpened national feeling until it was deified in political and historical forms, with a consequent resentment toward the Roman Church, which condemned every form of statolatry. “The king,” Fénelon wrote in his notes, “is in France head of the Church more than the Pope. Liberty before the Pope, servitude before the king.” In this liberty and in this servitude, late French Jansenism lived again, with its double life. Certainly, the spirit animating the Gallicans differed from that of the Jansenists, whom Louis XIV considered restless sectarians harmful to his absolutist aims and almost an emanation of the ill-fated Huguenots, and who in reality were intolerant of pontifical authority and infallibility as well as of every form of state interference. Indeed, they turned to the royal parlements only to escape ecclesiastical condemnations. But there was one point in common: the Pope is inferior to the Council; the Pope’s decisions, even in matters of faith, are not irreformable until they have received the consent of the Church; and there was added a note of nationalistic coloration: the Pope’s power 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 maintained special relations with the Oratory: it was associated with it in a conception of grace opposed to Molinism and, in ascetic practice, in a piety understood with a rigor and Christian bareness that the Jansenists later drove to excess. That fear of nature as a burden of death, that taking refuge in God by detaching oneself from creatures, that somewhat timid attitude before the Redeemer made the Oratory appealing in the eyes of the rigorists of Port-Royal. Even after relations with the Oratory had ceased, because of his departure from it, Q. continued to sign himself “priest of the Oratory.” Q. did not limit himself to a simple and partial sympathy with Jansenist doctrines, and when De Condren and Bourgong compelled all the Oratorians to subscribe to the formulary of 1657, his name appears among those who evaded subscription. Later, accused of Jansenism on several occasions, he subscribed in order to avoid worse evils, but only formally and in such a way that his thought always remained perfectly 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 favor of heresy. The Réflexions morales sur les Évangiles, published as early as 1671 and prohibited by Clement X in 1675, together with the notes and dissertations that had accompanied the complete edition of the works of s. Leone Magno, were extended to the whole of the New Testament, and he himself oversaw various editions. 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 subsequently expanded to include all the verses of the books of the New Testament, and finally published in eight volumes in 1699.
These Réflexions, and even more so their inclusion in the Index and their condemnation, gave rise in France and the Netherlands to an abundant polemical literature: a series of pamphlets on Confession and Communion, on the death of Christ and the blessedness of a Christian death, etc.; a veritable flood of theological and polemical writings, directed against episcopal or papal condemnations, or exalting and defending the Jansenists: brief pamphlets, learned tomes, and volumes in-fol. and in-quarto, for the most part anonymous or published under a pseudonym. And since in France it was forbidden to enter into polemics on Jansenist questions, while the Catholics remained silent, this varied literature created the commonplace notion that all learning and true doctrine were on the Jansenist side, and that their adversaries knew how to defend themselves only through forceful measures, by sending books to the flames or to the Index, and by exiling people held in esteem for their sanctity and learning. Thus the sect grew, and in order to reply to one of Q.’s publications, 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 » (letters of 9 October 1712); a freedom that often became audacity. If Arnould, in dealing with Rome, sought to preserve the external forms and avoid an open rupture, Q. threw off the mask and moved directly to a harsh and incisive attack, leading the generation of rebels known as the « appellants », because of their continual appeals to the better-informed Pope or to a Council in disputes and disagreements: appeals, that is, to a tribunal that neither existed nor could exist, for the simple reason that they would never have recognized as legitimate a Council that condemned them; mere pretexts for ecclesiastical disobedience that always ended in compelled submission to the civil tribunals. The 101 propositions that Clement XI found condemnable in the Réflexions in 1693 constituted the danger of a schism, not extensive but grave. The ecclesiastical history of that period is filled with episodes, assemblies, equivocations, and ambiguities on the part of Cardinal de Noailles, Bishop Soanen, and not a few other religious and theologians. Louis XIV himself, although a fierce opponent of Jansenism, while raising one arm to strike it, offered it refuge in Gallicanism with the other. When Arnould died in Brussels on 8 August 1694 in his arms, he entrusted Q. with the direction of the party. Arrested by Philip V of Spain in May 1703, he succeeded in escaping in September, and Utrecht became the center of the entire Jansenist movement. He was excommunicated by the archbishop of Mechelen on 10 September 1704. The Holy See meanwhile decided upon the definitive condemnation of all his errors in the first bull Universis of 1708, and then, in the bull Unigenitus of 8 September 1713, condemned en bloc the 101 propositions, in which, alongside the errors of Jansenius and Saint-Cyran, Richer (v.) concerning the constitution of the Church. The so-called « Quesnellism » arose, which identifies Jansenism after the papal condemnation. Q. did in fact effect a singular fusion of Gallicanism and Jansenism, but an authentic judgment on his person and work showed him to be only an audacious and unscrupulous repeater of the doctrine of Jansenius and Arnould.
In place of systematic or complete treatises on nature and Grace and on the various theological questions, Q. offers only fragmentary points of view, glosses, and doctrinal sketches set forth at random in the commentary on a text. This form offered the author the advantage of concealing himself behind a text of Sacred Scripture, while the absence of a systematic context provided him with easy evasions.
This indeterminacy of doctrinal exposition makes an exact understanding of his thought, and at the same time of his condemnation, difficult. Nor, even by carefully collecting all the texts that deal with the same questions, could one obtain a sufficiently clear idea of his system—not only because of the difficulty of reducing the fragments to a systematic chapter, but also because Q. is never theologically clear and precise. It may be observed that if in Baio,
as in Jansenius and Arnould, for example, the system of Grace begins with a comparative study of the original state of our progenitors and their fallen state, Q. is oriented rather toward a central idea: the excellence and omnipotence of the Grace of Jesus Christ. And the immense success of his Réflexions, beyond the political and religious reasons that made that book the symbol of a struggle to attribute jurisdiction to the bishops against the Pope, and to the lower clergy and 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 enjoyed by all works defending the solitaries of Port-Royal, to the beauty of their style, and to the spiritual passion that led the Jansenist Batterel to 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 ». When Arnould was dying, Q. had destined his heart for the Cistercian nuns of Port-Royal; when he himself died, he seemed not to have changed his faith, although he subscribed to a highly debatable formula of Catholic faith. The « prior father », as the surviving Jansenists called him, left behind a generation that, through its contempt for authority and its ecclesiastical criticism, was preparing the ground—together with the denial of every revealed truth—for the revolutionary Enlightenment of the end of the century.