In 1640, a theological treatise entitled Augustinus was published posthumously. Its subtitle was St. Augustine’s Teaching against the Pelagians and the Massalians on The Health, Sickness, and Medicine of Human Nature. Its author was Cornelius Jansen (1585-1638), who had been a professor at the University of Leuven and Bishop of Ypres, Flanders. In it, Jansen opposed certain Jesuit theologians, such as Luis de Molina, for their conception of grace and divine predestination. He defended instead what he took to be St. Augustine’s doctrine on these matters. Before long, proponents of this school of Augustinianism were branded Jansenists by their opponents. Moreover, very soon they were widespread in France, thanks largely to one of Jansen’s like-minded friends from his student days, Jean du Vergier de Hauranne (1581-1643), better known as the Abbé de Saint-Cyran. Saint-Cyran exerted this influence as a spiritual director and confessor of the Abbey of Port-Royal des Champs and through his association with the Arnauld family. Among the most influential figures associated with Port-Royal and the Jansenist movement were the Arnauld siblings (Marie-Angélique, Agnès, and Antoine) and Blaise Pascal. The movement was opposed vehemently by Jesuits, French monarchs, and was even censured by various popes. Many historians believe that, though long gone, the Jansenist controversy influenced the development of modernity and the Church decisively.
In this interview, Dr. Shaun Blanchard will discuss the Jansenist controversy, its impact, and some of the best books on the subject.
Shaun Blanchard is Lecturer in Theology on the Fremantle campus of the University of Notre Dame Australia. He writes on a variety of topics in early modern and modern Catholicism, publishing in outlets like Commonweal, America, Church Life Journal, and The Tablet. He is the author of The Synod of Pistoia and Vatican II: Jansensism and the Struggle for Catholic Reform (OUP: 2020) and, with Ulrich Lehner, co-edited The Catholic Enlightenment: A Global Anthology (CUA: 2021). With Stephen Bullivant, he co-wrote Vatican II: A Very Short Introduction (OUP: 2023) and with Richard T. Yoder, he has co-edited Jansenism: An International Anthology (CUA Press, forthcoming 2024).
- The Provincial Letters
by Blaise Pascal - Adoration and Annihilation: The Convent Philosophy of Port-Royal
by John J. Conley S.J. - The Wanton Jesuit and the Wayward Saint: A Tale of Sex, Religion, and Politics in Eighteenth-Century France
by Mita Choudhurye - The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560-1791
by Dale K. Van Kley - Jansenism: An International Anthology
by Shaun Blanchard and Richard T. Yoder
You opened a 2018 article in Church Life Journal by mentioning how, “Every now and then a friend or colleague asks me some variant of the question: ’So, what was Jansenism?’ ” What’s your answer to that question?
At the time, I was struggling to answer that question and so I wrote a short online essay about it. Now, I would say that Jansenism was an extreme Augustinian reform movement that arose primarily in France. It was a movement that changed, developed, and was exported to various places. However, the French scholar, Simon Icard, says that there are two fundamental lines of continuity: the rigorous predestinarian, Augustinian view of divine grace and an apocalyptic view of history, a specific form of apocalypticism. Icard has convinced me of this with his wonderful new book L'Apocalypse janséniste: Port-Royal et la défense de la vérité. Its continuity lies in its extreme form of Augustinianism and an apocalyptic interpretation of Church history. However, as I explained in my article, Jansenism is very diverse and the term has been used as a symbolic shorthand for all kinds of tendencies, ideals, and problems.
"Jansenism developed into a holistic critique and even an attack on one of the predominant forms of Catholicism: the ultramontane model of the Jesuits. In France, this turned into a tug-of-war between competing groups and interests."
What were the central Jansenist theses on grace, divine predestination, Christian moral life, and the hierarchical structure of the Church?
A great way to understand Jansenism is to go back to the period prior to the nuns of Port-Royal and even Jansen himself.
A series of disputes arose within the Catholic Church during the sixteenth century. Besides Luther and Calvin, there was the Jesuit Luis de Molina and his theory of middle knowledge.
Molina was trying to hold together this old philosophical and pastoral problem of God's absolute power. Clearly, there are passages in Scripture about predestination. Christians also believe that God has given humans free will, desires that all be saved, and that humans stand with life and death before them. How do we reconcile these two beliefs, within the bosom of the Church, notwithstanding all the debates with Protestant reformers? There was the Dominican position, which stressed God’s action moving humans to repentance and good works (they called it “physical premotion”), and the Jesuits’s possibly more positive view of the human will, which came to be called Molinism. All of this came to a head in the De auxiliis controversy. This controversy lasted long and ultimately was inconclusive. The papacy was trying to hold together unity in difference. There really are different ways of resolving this conundrum.
Cornelius Jansen was a Dutch Scripture scholar and a professor at the University of Louvain. Eventually, he was made a bishop. He believed that the way to solve this problem was to go back to what he took to be the pure teaching of St. Augustine, the one who interpreted Scripture correctly.
The Catholic University of America Press has published a translation, prepared by my friend and colleague Guido Stucco, of part of Jansen's massive three-volume work on the matter.
Jansen argued that the Dominicans were not heretical but that we should jettison all their confusing mediaeval scholastic terminology and return to Augustine. However, he made very strong accusations against the Jesuits. Essentially, he believed that they were semi-Pelagians. Without being as bad as Pelagius, they had revived a caffeine-free, diet version of Pelagianism that was wreaking great theological and pastoral damage. Jansens’s successors, such as Arnauld and Pascal, connected this to a critique of Jesuit moral theology and practice in the confessional.
This was a wholesale attack on the Jesuits. Linked with the Jesuits was their support of the papacy or what we would now call ultramontanism. In fact, it was around this time that the term, ultramontanism, began to be used. Consequently, the Jansenists eventually became strongly aligned with anti-ultramontanism, though they were not anti-papal as such. Rather, they believed that papal authority had gotten out of control and had to be reined back in.
One of the Jansenists that I discuss in my first book, which was on the Synod of Pistoia, said that the successor Peter had exchanged the keys of the Kingdom – of a Fisherman – for the tiara of an emperor.
Hence, Jansenism developed into a holistic critique and even an attack on one of the predominant forms of Catholicism: the ultramontane model of the Jesuits. In France, this turned into a tug-of-war between competing groups and interests.
Were the Jansenists guilty, as was commonly alleged, of crypto-Calvinism?
That is a great question. Certainly, crypto-Calvinism was a very common allegation. Each side had conspiracy theories about the other. The anti-Jansenist conspiracy theory was that they were really deists who were trying to destroy the Church from within by injecting it with Calvinist pessimism and thereby distancing people from the sacraments. Then there were anti-Jesuit conspiracy theories.
The initial accusation was that the Jansenists were crypto-Calvinists. This was a serious accusation in France in the wake of the wars of religion which, though not motivated solely by religion, did involve a hostility between Calvinists and Catholics.
If one sees their Augustinian theses as Calvinistic, then the Jansenists were Calvinists. However, Jansen did not get his ideas from Calvinists as such. The accusation falls apart when you look at the holistic perspective of the Jansenists, which includes standard accepted Catholic views on the sacraments and many other things.
If we take the 1640 publication of Jansen's Augustinus as the year of Jansenism’s birth, is it possible to date its death?
Yes. Another great question. Personally, I would argue that, as a movement that has vital force within the Church, it is dead by the 1820s or 1830s. The last real offensive and push for Jansenist reform was in the 1790s. The most important of the Italian leaders, Pietro Tamburini and Scipione de’ Ricci died in 1810 and 1827 respectively. Henri Gregoire, one of the constitutional bishops, that is, one of the bishops who supported certain stages of the French Revolution, died in 1831. After that, nobody holding significant offices in either the Church or the State promoted Jansenism. There were isolated, individuals who thought Jansenism was good or right. However, the movement died around 1830. The election of Pope Gregory XVI in 1831 opened the age of Ultramontanism. The Jansenists movement, therefore, lasted for around two hundred years.
You have argued that the accusations of Jansenism that are sometimes bandied around today constitute a misuse of the term. Jansenism no longer exists. What do people mean today when they call someone a Jansenist?
Yes, it is a very common accusation. One reason I became interested in this whole era and these conflicts was that, as a graduate student and recent Catholic convert, I would hear this term. It was so surprising. I did not know what it meant.
Once I was acting as a campus minister in Wisconsin and a young man came up to me. He had just been to confession and was worried because the priest had told him that he was being too much of a Jansenist. He did not know what that meant. I told him, “Do not worry. He means that you need to take it easy on yourself. Maybe you are judging yourself a bit too strictly.” The young man was obviously very scrupulous and so he was relieved.
My point in bringing up this somewhat silly story, although maybe not an uncommon sort of story, is that there is a pastoral use of the term. The pastoral use of the term is somewhat akin to the way people in Protestant communities might tell someone not to be a Puritan and have a beer at the church cookout. It can be harmless to use ‘Jansenist’ in this way.
My problem is with those who use ‘Jansenist’ as a slogan or accusation to shut down a debate. Without wanting to wade into controversial territory, take the debate over Amoris laetitiae. This is a debate over serious issues and there are good people who disagree about the conditions for the reception of communion by couples who have divorced and remarried. In the article you mentioned, I was arguing that we should not call our opponents Jansenists but take what they are saying seriously. There are important issues over which people of goodwill disagree. We should argue the issues, not just smear each other. Some do not like Cardinal Burke. Fine, but they should not call him a Jansenist. Some do not like Cardinal Kasper and were calling him a Jansenist because he allegedly supposed that divine grace would not actually help people obey the commandments. Calling someone a Jansenist can be a lazy smear.
"We can understand certain important psychological, theological, and ecclesial dynamics by looking at the Jansenist controversy and studying it closely."
If Jansenism is long dead and gone, why do we still need to take Jansenism into consideration?
Yes, it might seem to be a bit contradictory to claim that it is so important but has been dead for almost two hundred years.
We can understand certain important psychological, theological, and ecclesial dynamics by looking at the Jansenist controversy and studying it closely. I shall mention just one of the many examples that I could give.
Right now, there is quite a charged debate in the English-speaking world about papal authority; about the role of bishops, bishops’ conferences, and the laity; about synodality; about the reception of disciplinary and doctrinal decrees. Like any other group of humans, we sometimes feel that we are experiencing something unprecedented. Americans, for example, love to say that such and such a thing is unprecedented in the history of the Presidency. Usually, it is not.
The same might be going on in the Church. The Jansenist conflict can illuminate how Catholics have dealt with these same debates in healthy or unhealthy ways, a productive or unproductive manner. That is why I go back to it when I teach.
Last semester, for example, I taught a class on the liturgy and the Eucharist for seminarians and theology majors. I went back to some of the eighteenth-century debates and pastoral problems, and looked at how those tensions were resolved. Whatever is going now on has happened before. In this regard, the Jansenist movement can help us understand ourselves better, why we are where we are, and maybe how we can avoid repeating some of the same mistakes.
Three popes issued documents condemning Jansenism. There was Innocent X’s bull Cum occasione (1653), Alexander VII’s bull Ad sanctam beati Petri sedem (1656) and the apostolic constitution Regiminis Apostolici (1665), which contained a Formula of Submission for the Jansenists, and Clement XI’s bull Unigenitus (1713). Could you briefly explain the motive, teaching, reception, and impact of these papal documents?
The first one is the easiest to explain. Cum occasione is Innocent X’s condemnation of Jansenism.
At the time, doctrinal censure would begin in a university faculty or with the local bishop, and, eventually, make its way to Rome. The theology faculty at the Sorbonne, Paris, had extracted nine propositions from Jansen's Augustinus. A Roman committee narrowed it down to five propositions. Pope Innocent signed off on it and promulgated it.
So, it was a condemnation of five propositions that, allegedly, were to be found in Jansen's book. Four were condemned as heretical; one as erroneous and proximate to heresy. However, it did not clearly state that Jansen was a heretic or that his Augustinus was heretical because these propositions were definitely in it.
Regiminis Apostolici gave rise to the Formulary Crisis. The Jansenists responded by accepting the right of the pope to condemn error but disputed that these propositions were in fact in the book. This annoyed Louis XIV. Sick of the Jansenists and their distinctions, he asked Rome for a clearer condemnation. Innocent X’s successor, Alexander VII, came up with a formulary that the Jansenists had to sign and acknowledge that the condemned propositions were in fact in the book and had been condemned in the way that the author intended them. The formula thereby aimed to close off the loopholes, because the Jansenists danced around the condemnation by claiming that the book and its propositions had an orthodox interpretation. Now they would have to view the book as heretical or at least doctrinally problematic.
A couple of years later, there was a tacit peace: the Peace of the Church. Essentially, the next Pope permitted the distinction between fact and right: that the pope has the right to condemn error but was not making a judgement about Jansen or his intent. That peace broke down in the late 1600s for a variety of reasons. There were personal rivalries. Fénelon, for example, was deeply anti-Jansenist. There were theological arguments between the doctors at the Sorbonne. The whole controversy flared back up and the standard-bearer of the second generation of Jansenists was Pasquier Quesnel, a former Oratorian and the author of a very influential biblical commentary, Moral Reflections on the New Testament.
Now really sick of Jansenism, Louis XIV destroyed its centre, the Convent of Port-Royal. The exiled nuns were separated and forced to transfer into different religious houses around France. Louis XIV then solicited from Rome a definitive condemnation of Jansenism. The committee in Rome did not want to make the same mistakes as Cum occasione, so they extracted verbatim 101 statements from Quesnel’s commentary. Clement XI condemned the propositions but once again there was some ambiguity. He did not distinguish which of these were heretical, which ones were erroneous, and which were offensive to pious ears. All were condemned indistinctly at the end. There was a global condemnation of them all which listed all of the possible censures but did not specify to which propositions each one applied. For decades afterward, theologians wrote dissertations on the bull and argued about which censure each of the propositions fell under.
Although Unigenitus aimed to be more exact than the initial condemnations, it still generated a huge amount of theological controversy. In France, it also generated much political controversy because it was seen as a struggle between the absolutist monarchy—which, ironically for Gallican France, was linked with the papacy—and the authority of the local clergy and the parliaments. Unigenitus became a lightning rod of division, even for people who had no interest in debating divine grace, free will, and similar matters.
"This is a very sad episode in Church history. There were very good people on each side of this dispute."
Were the Jansenists treated fairly?
It is safe to say that they were treated unfairly. Nevertheless, they brought a lot of their problems on themselves. In this sense, it was the reverse of the adage from Alice in Wonderland that “everybody has won and all must have prizes.” Rather, it was a case of “A pox on everybody's house.”
This is a very sad episode in Church history. There were very good people on each side of this dispute, but because of some sinful personalities, personal rivalries, and powerful competing systems (the French monarchy and the papacy), it turned into a regrettable episode.
As a twenty-first-century Catholic, the Jansenist view of divine grace is quite foreign to me. It is also quite bleak if we hope for the salvation of all. It endorses the old and horrifying notion of the massa damnata: the idea that the great majority of human beings will be damned. Nevertheless, those of Jansen’s opponents who emphasised free will did not necessarily believe that the majority of people would avoid damnation. Hence, these debates about grace and penance can seem foreign to us. We have certainly and, in my view, fortunately, moved away, as a Church, from many of the Jansenist ideas. Nevertheless, the Jansenists also upheld some beautiful aspects of the Catholic faith, such as the importance of reading Scripture, the liturgy, the right of lay people to speak their minds, the dignity of the office of local bishop. Jansenism was a mixed bag. The way their condemnation was handled was a catastrophe. Like the First World War, holistically it is hard to say who was right and who was wrong.
Were the Jansenists and Jesuits archenemies?
They certainly were. Like the Jansenists, the Jesuits held certain ideals from which we have moved away but they also preserved some beautiful aspects of the Christian faith as well. There were remarkable people on each side of this sad, fiery, and divisive conflict, whether it be courageous Jesuit missionaries or the amazing nuns of Port-Royal.
Theological disputes and political motivations were often intertwined in the opposition to Jansenism. What were the political motives for opposition to Jansenism?
Jansenism becomes a movement during a time of civil instability in France. During a period of civil war, the Jansenists are seen to side with the nobility against the king in some cases, and in some cases they did. Through the Arnauld family, the Jansenists always had a connection with the parliaments, which were a soft check on royal power. Theoretically, Louis XIV emerged from these civil wars an absolutist king. As with the papacy, there were always practical, pragmatic checks on his power. Louis XIV decided that the Jansenists were infected with a kind of subversiveness or disobedience. They wanted to debate his ideas or decrees rather than obey him. The king tied his authority to the papacy. He wanted his authority and throne to be clearly aligned with the papal altar. This was ironic, given the conflict between Gallicanism and Ultramontanism. The Jansenists were in opposition to this. The Pope was not on their side, in theory at least, because he had condemned Jansen's book. The king was not on their side because he saw them, like the Protestants and other political enemies, as one of the many factors that was destabilising France. Moreover, he treated all his enemies in the same way.
Jansenist ideas and texts were exported around the Catholic world. As a result, there were Jansenist sympathisers from Mexico to Lebanon. In Latin America, they argued for republicanism against the Spanish or Portuguese crown. Enlightened absolutists, such as Joseph II of Austria, were often philo-Jansenists. These iterations of Jansenism’s influence were political, but religious ideals (especially ecclesiological ideals) were always present as well. However, it originated within a particular situation in France.
1.
The first recommended book is Pascal’s The Provincial Letters. This series of eighteen fictitious letters was published between 1656 and 1657. In them, M. Louis de Montalte informs his friend in the provinces of the theological disputes raging in Paris. The first four letters deal with grace. The rest are an attack on the casuistry of certain Jesuit moral theologians. Pascal used the Summula casuum conscientiae of Antonio Escobar SJ as his sourcebook of the casuists’s opinions and Antoine Arnauld’s Théologie morale des Jesuites to critique them. Why does this book top your list?
Well, reading The Provincial Letters is an exciting and enjoyable way to enter into the conflict. Why did this conflict matter to so many people? There would have been so many people walking around in Paris who had no interest in the De auxiliis controversy. They did not know anything about Thomist views of physical premotion or the Molinist doctrine of middle knowledge. However, The Provincial Letters brought a very scholastic theological debate into the mainstream culture.
Everyone has wondered whether there is some way of justifying something they should not do but want to do. Confessors need to think about tough cases and deal with people as they are. To some extent, The Provincial Letters are a bit unfair to confessors. Pascal gives the impression that the moral life is straightforward: that we know what the right thing to do is. That is not always the case.
Nevertheless, he attacks a decadence in French culture. Many French had a sense that something outrageous was going on at the heart of their culture. There was the opulence of the aristocracy, sexual promiscuity, both extreme wealth and poverty. Many of us feel that this is how things are in the West today. As if bursting a balloon with a pin, Pascal’s satire shows the absurdity of attempts to justify what was obviously wrong.
Last semester, I taught a moral theology class and assigned two of The Provincial Letters. The students really enjoyed them. They could also relate to them as things are not so different today. People post things anonymously on the internet and ask others what they think about such and such a case. Alternatively, people present their crises of conscience to the priest in confession. Pascal put his finger on the human condition and brought stodgy, technical theological debates into the mainstream culture. This explains why the Jansenist crisis involved so many people for so many years.
Did Pascal influence Alexander VII’s condemnation of laxists, such as Tomás Sánchez SJ, in 1666?
The great tide of “rigorist” authors, of which Pascal was one, certainly influenced these papal teaching documents. I do not know whether Pascal himself influenced that document. However, there was certainly a general backlash against probabilism. This backlash was widespread and strong in France and some other Catholic nations. This certainly influenced Pope Alexander directly.
The popes were trying hard to be referees and set up the out-of-bounds lines. They wanted a legitimate plurality of theological schools and pastoral formation. They did not want to condemn either Augustinianism, Thomism, or Molinism, nor did they want to condemn any of the systems of moral theology. However, they wanted to show that extreme positions were out-of-bounds. Following the condemnation of Jansenism, they were worried that moral laxism was prevailing. That is why a series of quite rigorous moral statements came out of the Holy See, to the point that some anti-Jansenists began to slander Blessed Innocent XI for being a closet Jansenist on account of the vehemence with which he condemned moral errors.
This was a complicated dance for the papacy. The popes aimed to save the Church from serious error at any extreme. They had come down against the Augustinian extreme when it came to divine grace. Then they rebuked probabilism, which was closely connected to Molinism.
"The Convent of Port-Royal is indispensable for learning about Jansenism. These nuns were remarkable and some of the most interesting women in the history of Christianity."
2.
One Archbishop of Paris, Hardouin de Péréfixe de Beaumont, famously described the nuns of Port-Royal “as pure as angels, as proud as devils.” However, they were also learned. Your second recommended book is John J. Conley S.J.’s Adoration and Annihilation: The Convent Philosophy of Port-Royal. It is a study of the writings of the two Arnauld sisters and their niece, Mère Angélique de Saint-Jean. All three served as abbesses of Port-Royal. The book also contains ample excerpts from their writings. Have you chosen this book because these three abbesses of Port-Royal give us an insight into the Jansenist doctrines or because, as women who participated learnedly in theological debates, they are remarkable for the time?
For both reasons.
I wanted one of the books to be one that focussed directly on Port-Royal. This one is a good choice. In it, John J. Conley continues the typically Catholic tradition in which some of the best historians of Jansenism are Jesuits. This is ironic. Similarly, Pope Francis recently released an apostolic letter in praise of Blaise Pascal.
The Convent of Port-Royal is indispensable for learning about Jansenism. These nuns were remarkable and some of the most interesting women in the history of Christianity. Their severity can seem foreign to our world, and yet they write movingly and with real beauty about Christ, prayer, the absolute necessity of love, and their experiences of being overwhelmed by divine love. They describe how, once our selfishness and sin are burned away, there is no longer any sense of duty or law. There is only a sense of love of God and utter abandonment to him.
These women emerged from a real revival. Only a part of that revival is extreme Augustinianism or, should I say, Jansenism. Another part is the seventeenth-century French school of spirituality, embodied in figures such as St. Francis de Sales. These women are very influenced by Cardinal Bérulle, the founder of the French Oratory. They were also great fans and devotees of St. Bernard of Clairvaux. They had deeply imbibed this Christocentric and often Augustinian renewal. At one point, the first of these three abbesses, Angélique Arnauld, was one of St. Francis de Sales’s correspondents.
Their writings give you a taste of the overwhelming spiritual genius that was present in many groups within seventeenth-century France. They also give you a window into the theological core of Port-Royal and Jansenism.
The Jansenists seemed to have had a fairly advanced view of the rights of women for the time. Is that correct?
Yes, I think so. Certainly, they were not egalitarian. They did not envision massive societal changes. However, they did believe that women should be reading the Bible and that they had a right to appeal and speak out if they believed that they were being treated unfairly by a civil or religious authority.
Quesnel has a great line that, unfortunately, was condemned in Unigenitus. “It is an illusion to persuade oneself that a knowledge of the mysteries of religion ought not to be communicated to females by the reading of the sacred books. The abuse of the Scriptures has arisen, and heresies have sprung up, not from the simplicity of women, but from the haughty knowledge of men.”
The Jansenists, unlike some Catholics of the time, were less likely to view women as irrational or prone to be swept away by emotions. They did not view them therefore as easily deceived and uniquely prone to religious error. The Jansenists tended to flip this and say that women have a greater simplicity and docility to the spirit of God; that men are the ones who come up with crazy theories or nurse the prideful ideas that block us from receiving God's grace. Today, people might deem that a patronising claim about woman being more religiously pure because they are more submissive. However, for the Jansenists it was a compliment that recalled Christ’s teaching: “Blessed are the pure of heart.” By having less civil and social ambition, women were in fact spiritually more open than men. Much of the theological advice that Port-Royal would give the incredibly intelligent and ambitious young men who were attracted to the movement was that it would be very difficult to be saved if they served in the army or at the court of the king. There would be all sorts of temptations for young men. What they needed was a religious community and simplicity of life.
Some speak of Jansenism’s proto-feminism but it was never politicised in any modern way. Rather, the Jansenists had a refreshing openness to women and defended the rights of women, in certain contexts at least.
3.
Going by the title, some might think that Mita Choudhury’s The Wanton Jesuit and the Wayward Saint: A Tale of Sex, Religion, and Politics in Eighteenth-Century France is a spicy romantic novel of the sort that you can pick up at a supermarket. It does explore, albeit in a scholarly fashion, a sex scandal that shook France in 1731. Catherine Cadière accused her Jesuit confessor, Jean-Baptiste Girard, of using witchcraft to sexually abuse her and compel her to procure an abortion. Does the book’s exploration of the episode explain why eighteenth-century France became disenchanted not only with the Society of Jesus, but more generally with the Church’s role in society.
I chose this book because Mita Choudhury is one of the most important scholars of Jansenism in the English-speaking world, but also because this episode, as Pascal had done in The Provincial Letters, brought the disputes of theology faculties over divine grace, of bishops over the confessional practice of their priests, and of parliaments over royal absolutism, into the popular realm. This episode is another example of why the Jansenist conflict is so important for understanding the history of the Church and developments in French society.
Choudhury explores one of many incidents that divided the French public, whether it be a cause célèbre or a socio-political event, into roughly a pro-Jansenist faction and a pro-Jesuit one. This can be difficult for us to understand today. However, that was how society worked at the time in France.
Many followed this high-profile criminal trial of a priest accused of sexually abusing a young woman and it impacted their view of religious and regal authority in the Kingdom of France. The destabilisation of French society was an unintended consequence of the conflict between Jesuits and Jansenists. This rolled all the way down to the French Revolution.
"Ironically, the French Revolution occurred shortly after the Jansenists achieved their great victory with the suppression of the Jesuits, in France in 1764, and then throughout the Church in 1773. Just when it looked like the Jansenists were winning, the French Revolution brought about the ultimate destruction of Jansenism as a movement."
4.
Like the preceding book Dale K. Van Kley’s, The Religious Origins of the French Revolution: From Calvin to the Civil Constitution, 1560-1791, argues that Jansenism prepared the terrain for the Revolution by challenging absolutism. Why is this book one of the better studies on Jansenism?
This is one of my favourite books ever. Unfortunately, Dale Van Kley passed away recently. He was an emeritus professor at Ohio State and very generous to me whenever we corresponded over e-mail.
Beginning in the seventies, he took up where his mentor, R.R. Palmer, left off. Essentially, his thesis is that the Jansenist-Jesuit conflict did not cause the revolution but it did condition the divisions that, ultimately, came tumbling down in 1789: the rifts between bishops and their priests; between the king and the parliament; between the Gallican and Roman model of the Church. These rifts were conditioned by the long-running debate that began with the nuns of Port-Royal, the condemnation of Jansen’s Augustinus, ran through Unigenitus and public scandals, such as the one just discussed. For example, a controversy arose in the 1750s when the Archbishop of Paris tried to deny dying Jansenists the sacraments and this measure backfired. There was also a prominent underground Jansenist journal, Nouvelles ecclésiastiques, that was published between 1728 and 1803. So, there were all these pressure points within France and the revolution brought down an already deeply riven society.
Ironically, the French Revolution occurred shortly after the Jansenists achieved their great victory with the suppression of the Jesuits, in France in 1764, and then throughout the Church in 1773. Just when it looked like the Jansenists were winning, the French Revolution brought about the ultimate destruction of Jansenism as a movement. When the dust of the Revolution finally settled, Napoleon made a deal with the Pope, not with the Gallican Church. That really put an end to Jansenism. The French Revolution was a pyrrhic victory for the Jansenists. Some of them found themselves under the same guillotine as some of their opponents. Ironies abound and Van Kley teases them out beautifully and in great detail.
5.
Can you tell us about your forthcoming Jansenism: An International Anthology?
Yes. I was talking with a friend of mine, Richard Yoder, a doctoral candidate at Penn State University, about teaching Jansenism. Those interested in the subject can get a hold of Pascal. A little bit Arnauld has been translated. There are great scholarly works, such as those just mentioned, but there is no way for English speakers to trace the Jansenist movement through primary texts. Many of our students and lots of intellectually curious laypersons and priests are interested in the subject. Many cannot read the primary texts in French, Italian, or German. It would be much more convenient for non-scholarly audiences to have access to them in English.
So, Rick and I assembled a team of sixteen translators. The anthology starts with Jansen, Saint-Cyran, and the nuns of Port-Royal, and goes all the way up to the French Revolution. It includes texts from the Synod of Pistoia, in Tuscany, the constitutionalist bishop Henri Grégoire, and even a synod held in Arabic in Lebanon. It provides the reader with thirty-one relatively short primary source readings. It starts in France and ends up tracing the spread and mutations of Jansenism throughout the Catholic world. It opens with an introductory chapter on Jansenism. Though scholarly, we hope that a seminarian or theology major will be able to understand, follow, and benefit from it.
"Jansenism is still with us insofar as these debates are very much alive and must still be reckoned with. It has stamped the way that we think and act as Catholics."
You have also written on Vatican I and Vatican II. Do these councils address and deal with the lingering legacy of the Jansenist controversy?
Yes, they certainly do. The First Vatican Council represents a real triumph of Ultramontanism and many of its prominent theologians are Jesuits.
In 1814, Pius VII restored the Society of Jesus and soon certain Jesuits, especially those of the Roman College, were among the most important prominent theologians at Vatican I.
Pastor Aeternus¸Vatican I’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church of Christ, declares two dogmas. One is on the pope’s supreme jurisdiction; the other is on his infallibility. The canon condemning those who deny the pope’s supreme jurisdiction is formulated against Jansenists specifically. The relatio or explanation of the canon cites four figures, three of whom were Jansenists. The canon is a self-conscious rejection of the ecclesiology of the Jansenists and Gallicans, who believe that the pope’s authority to directly intervene administratively or jurisdictionally in other local churches was limited.
Of course, this is still a debated issue. How does that primacy of jurisdiction square with the rights of the other bishops? This rolls into the Second Vatican Council.
Pius VI’s bull Auctorem fidei (1794) was the last sweeping condemnation of the Jansenist movement. It condemns the Synod of Pistoia and is similar to Unigenitus in that it is very long and reproduces verbatim the condemned propositions, eighty-five of them.
This bull is used at Vatican II in the preparatory drafts of several documents. However, the bishops who were influenced by ressourcement theologians such as Yves Congar, Henri de Lubac and Joseph Ratzinger, seized the initiative and rewrote most of them, including the document on Divine Revelation. They removed all the references to Auctorem Fidei. This was not because they were Jansenist sympathisers. Rather, unlike the minority of traditionalist bishops, they no longer saw anti-Jansenism as a prism for doing theology. The use of anti-Jansenism as a lens for doing theology had been on the decline, particularly since the 1950s and in the run-up to Vatican II.
Obviously, there are material similarities between Jansenist views and some of Vatican II’s reforms, such as its reform of the liturgy and its promotion of the reading of Sacred Scripture. There is also the debate over episcopal collegiality, which goes back to Vatican I. Cardinal Avery Dulles said that we needed Vatican II to balance an unbalanced council. For various reasons, Vatican I did not issue a statement on the bishops.
However, at Vatican II, the debate over episcopal collegiality made some of the more traditionalist bishops nervous that the doctrine would impinge upon papal supremacy. In that debate, the Bishop of Segni, Mons. Luigi Carli, argued that the defenders of episcopal collegiality would need to ensure their claim did not contradict two of the positions condemned in Autorem fidei. A huge debate broke out over this. The bishops supporting collegiality were offended. They felt that they were being called Jansenists and were outraged. The debate boiled on for a bit and then calmed down. Carli stated that he had not intended to accuse proponents of episcopal collegiality of Jansenism but to warn the council fathers of the need to be careful in their approach to the issue.
At any rate, this debate from Vatican II over the relation between papal and episcopal authority goes back one thousand years. It flared up powerfully in the Jansenist controversy. Vatican I comments on papal authority and a sort of resolution is reached in Vatican II.
I find it fascinating that a papal bull condemning a diocesan synod in Tuscany in the 1790s is then brought up in the 1960s in a way that really influences the tenor of the debate at Vatican II. I dedicated a chapter of my book on the Synod of Pistoia to this debate. That chapter is entitled, “The Ghosts of Pistoia.” Jansenism is still with us insofar as these debates are very much alive and must still be reckoned with. It has stamped the way that we think and act as Catholics.
One of the reasons that Vatican I did not get around to balancing its teaching on papal primacy was that it was suspended on account of the fall of the Papal States. The council was not closed officially until John XXIII did so in 1960. However, were there strategic motives for removing the references to Auctorem fidei in the documents of Vatican II. The Jansenists approved of celebrating the liturgy in the vernacular, as did Vatican II. Was taking Auctorem fidei off the table meant to clear the way for such reforms?
Possibly. During the first session of the Council, the Archbishop of Agrigento, Giovanni Battista Peruzzo, was very troubled by Sacrosanctum Concilium and made an intervention in which he traced a genealogy of errors. He started with the humanists, and then cited the Protestant Reformers, the Jansenists, and modernism. He brought up the Jansenists at Pistoia, the target of Auctorem fidei, in the debate over celebrating the liturgy in the vernacular.
Many of the bishops at Vatican II simply thought that the language of the liturgy was a disciplinary matter. There could be good reasons for celebrating the liturgy in the vernacular. They acknowledged that one could propose these valid reasons in a disrespectful way, by setting unreasonable demands and ultimatums. However, they did not believe that this was what they were doing. They believed that they were proposing an organic pastoral accommodation.
Nevertheless, you are right. The bishops who wanted certain reforms did not want them to be associated with condemned movements. I call these condemned movements ghosts, whether it be Jansenism, Protestantism, or any other heretical, divisive, traumatic -ism there has been in the history of the Church. Those proposing a reform want to tag it onto something positive. If you are promoting the reading of Scripture, you want to quote St Jerome rather than Martin Luther or Antoine Arnauld. Similarly, the drafters of Dignitatis humanae did not want to cite, Syllabus of Errors or certain other eighteenth and nineteenth-century papal statements on religious liberty. They want to stick with sources that they believe will help them make their case: Scripture, some of the Church Fathers, Leo XIII, Pius XII, and John XXIII. They did not want to quote Pius IX. Such dynamics were at the Council for sure.
