QUESNEL, PASQUIER. - Jansenist, born in Paris on 14 July 1634, died in Amsterdam on 2 December 1719.
Spiritual heir of Antoine Arnauld, he represents the phase of rebellious Jansenism after the Peace of Clement (1669). His dying mother had entrusted Arnauld with the words: «Ne se relâcher jamais de la défense de la vérité, et la soutenir sans aucune crainte, quand il irait de mille vies». Faithful to this charge, Arnauld 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». Quesnel accepted this traditional legacy, and Jansenism found in him a skilled defender, a popular disseminator, and a biting propagandist. Less erudite than Arnauld, less insinuating than Saint-Cyrán, Quesnel possessed a passionate pliability and a stylistic acuity that enabled him to stir up «a spirit of contradiction» at court, in the parliaments, in the convents, and among the clergy. For this literary and political cunning—now masked and prudent, now bold and impetuous—he was particularly admired by the Jansenists and feared by Catholics. Yet his fame chiefly derives from the peculiar religious and political situation in France during the late 17th and early 18th centuries, and from his role as a link between two originally distinct movements: the Gallican and the Jansenist. Arnauld, Saint-Cyrán, and the Port-Royalists, by refusing to submit—at least inwardly—to ecclesiastical authority and by initiating within Catholicism a kind of autonomy of reason over faith, readily lent themselves to Galilean theories, which exalted national sentiment to the point of divinizing it in political and historical forms, thereby fostering resentment toward the Roman Church, which condemned every form of statolatry. «The king», wrote Fénelon in his notes, «is in France the head of the Church more than the Pope is. Freedom with respect to the Pope, servitude with respect to the king». In this duality of freedom and servitude, late French Jansenism lived out its double life. Certainly the spirit animating the Gallicans differed from that of the Jansenists, whom Louis XIV regarded as restless sectarians harmful to his absolutist designs and almost as an emanation of the detested Huguenots; in reality, they were intolerant of papal authority and infallibility and likewise of any state interference. They turned to the royal parliaments only to escape ecclesiastical condemnations. Yet they shared a common point: the Pope is inferior to the Council; papal decisions, even in matters of faith, are not irreformable unless they receive the consent of the Church; and to this they added a nationalistic hue: the Pope’s power is limited by the canons of the universal Church and by the rules and customs of the Gallican Church (as declared by the Gallican clergy in 1682).
It was in this climate that Quesnel began his formation as an Oratorian. Port-Royal had previously maintained special relations with the Oratory: it shared with them an anti-Molinist doctrine of grace and, in ascetical practice, a rigorist and nakedly Christian piety, which the Jansenists later pushed to extremes. That fear of nature as a burden of death, that refuge in God by detachment 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 ceased—owing to his expulsion—Quesnel continued to sign himself «Priest of the Oratory». He did not limit himself to a mere and partial sympathy for Jansenist doctrines; when De Condren and Bourgoing compelled all Oratorians to subscribe to the formulary of 1657, his name appeared among those who evaded subscription. On several subsequent occasions, accused of Jansenism, he subscribed only formally—so as to avoid worse penalties—but 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 Evangiles*, first published in 1671 and condemned by Clement X in 1675, together with the notes and dissertations accompanying the complete edition of the works of St. Leo the Great, were extended to the entire New Testament, and he himself oversaw various editions. The definitive title of the work is: *Le Nouveau Testament avec des Réflexions morales*, first issued in 1668 with annotations on certain words of Jesus, then progressively expanded to cover every verse of the New Testament, and finally published in eight volumes in 1699.
These *Réflexions*, and even more their inclusion in the Index and their condemnation, gave rise in France and the Netherlands to a flood of polemical literature: a series of pamphlets on Confession and Communion, on the death of Christ and the happiness of Christian death, etc.—a veritable inundation of theological and controversial writings, either attacking episcopal or papal condemnations or defending and extolling the Jansenists. These took the form of short pamphlets, learned tomes, and folio or quarto volumes, mostly anonymous or under pseudonyms. And since in France it was forbidden to enter into controversy over Jansenist questions, while Catholics remained silent, this varied literature fostered the common opinion that all science and true doctrine were on the Jansenist side, and that their adversaries could defend themselves only by force—by burning books, placing them on the Index, and exiling men of recognized holiness and learning. Thus the sect grew, and in order to respond to one of Quesnel’s publications, Fénelon had to plead: «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 October 1712); a freedom that often became audacity. Whereas Arnauld had sought to preserve external forms and avoid an open rupture with Rome, Quesnel cast off all disguise and launched a harsh, incisive attack, leading the generation of rebels known as «appellants», who continually appealed to a better-informed Pope or to a Council in their disputes and disagreements—«appeals», that is, to a tribunal that neither existed nor could exist, since they would never have recognized as legitimate a Council that condemned them; mere pretexts for ecclesiastical disobedience that always ended in obligatory recourse to civil tribunals.
The ten propositions that Clement XI found objectionable in the *Réflexions* in 1693 posed the threat of a schism, not numerically large but grave. The ecclesiastical history of that time is filled with episodes, assemblies, misunderstandings, and ambiguities on the part of Cardinal Noailles, Bishop Soanen, and not a few other ecclesiastics and theologians. Even Louis XIV, though a fierce opponent of Jansenism, while raising one arm to strike it offered the other as refuge in Gallicanism. When Arnauld died in Brussels on 8 August 1694 in his arms, he entrusted the leadership of the party to Quesnel. Arrested by Philip V of Spain in May 1703, he escaped in September, and Utrecht became the center of the entire Jansenist movement. He incurred the excommunication of the Archbishop of Mechelen on 10 September 1704. Meanwhile, the Holy See issued the definitive condemnation of all his errors in the bull *Universi* of 1708, and then, on 8 September 1713, the bull *Unigenitus* condemned en bloc the ten propositions, which combined the errors of Jansenius and Richer (v.) on the constitution of the Church.
Thus arose the so-called «Quesnelism», immediately absorbed into Jansenism after the papal condemnation. Quesnel indeed effected a singular fusion of Gallicanism and Jansenism, but a true judgment on his person and his work reveals him only as a bold and unscrupulous transmitter of the doctrine of Jansenius and Arnauld.
In place of systematic or comprehensive treatises on the relationship between nature and grace and the various theological questions, one finds in Q. only fragmentary viewpoints, marginal notes, and doctrinal sketches presented haphazardly in the commentary on a text. This form offered the author the advantage of concealing himself behind a text of Holy Scripture, and the absence of a systematic context provided him with easy loopholes.
This indeterminacy in doctrinal exposition makes it difficult to grasp his thought precisely, and likewise to understand his condemnation. Nor could one obtain a sufficiently clear idea of his system by carefully collecting all the texts that deal with the same questions, not only because of the difficulty of reducing the fragments into a systematic whole, but also because Q. is never theologically clear and precise. It may be observed that whereas in Baius, as in Jansenius and Arnauld, for example, the system of grace begins with a comparative study of the primitive state of our first parents and that of 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*, apart from the reasons of a political and religious order that made that book the banner of a struggle to attribute to bishops jurisdiction over the Pope and to the rebellious clergy and laity the personal right to judge 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 exclaim: «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».
Like Moredo Arnauld, Q. had devoted his heart to the Cistercian nuns of Port-Royal; dying himself, he seemed not to change his faith, even though he subscribed to a highly questionable 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 ecclesiastical criticism, prepared the ground—together with the denial of every revealed truth—for the revolutionary Enlightenment of the end of the century.