I have recently been very intrigued by the question of how the historical forces of individuation (the systematic break up of traditional communities, such as the church, trade guilds, etc.) cooperated with the rise of the centralized authority of the nation-state. Of course, my interest is in how these forces have been detrimental to the life of the church. Last semester I had the chance to explore these issues in depth in a wonderful class with Dr. Scalberg, “Church in the Age of Reason.” Here is an excerpt from a paper I wrote on Angelique Arnauld and the origins of French Jansenism:
The situation which Angelique Arnauld helped create as the “reformatrix” of Port-Royal and one of the first causes of Jansenism was one of the most complex in French ecclesial and political history. Of course, in the era of the Gallican Church, there could be no clear distinction between politics and ecclesiology.
In sum, there were two parties vying for influence in France, each bound by two conflicting interests. On the one hand were Jesuits. They stood for ultramontanism, casuistry, and free will. Ever faithful to Rome, the order begun by St Ignatius Loyola was often a thorn in the side of Philip IV, Louis XIII, and Louis XIV, each of whom were the glad defenders of Gallican rights. This faithfulness to Rome put the Jesuits on the front lines of the Tridentine reform movement. However, the Jesuits were also the great propagators of casuistry, the manuals of endless caveats by which confessors could grant indulgence in place of penance. Needless to say, this made them extremely desirable as confessors for royalty. Finally, the Jesuits were theologically committed to human free will. In the wake of the success of Luther and Calvin, the post-reformation theological scene was supremely focused on the subject of divine grace and human freedom in their relationship. In stark contrast to the protestant emphasis on the overwhelming influence of divine grace, the Jesuits took an opposite tack. While “no theologian was prepared to argue that man was capable of achieving redemption entirely on his own” (Alexander Sedgwick, Seventeenth Century Jansenism, 6). the Jesuit position was that once the offer of grace was presented to man, the onus was on man to either accept or deny it.
On the other hand the Jansenists stood for Gallican rights. Being a threatened minority, they saw a potential ally against Rome in the French church. This turned out to be untrue, but the commitment to Gallican liberties remained an integral aspect of the movement. Against casuistry, Jansenism saw contrition as central to the process of penitence. Repenting and receiving one’s salvation is hard work, and cannot be casually bestowed by a caveat. It must be earned through the denial of self. Theologically, where the Jesuits were threatened with the label “Pelagian,” the Jansenists were threatened with the equally dangerous “Calvinist.” They emphasized the priority and irresistibility of divine grace, and holding to a very pessimistic view of human nature, in which original sin permits no possibility of meritorious action towards God. Gerald Cragg highlights a twofold emphasis that was latched onto by the opponents of Jansenism:
“(1) [W]ithout the assistance of a special grace from God, men cannot perform his commandments; (2) the operation of grace is irresistible, and men are therefore subject to a determinism either of a natural or supernatural kind, though neither is violently coercive in character” (The Church and the Age of Reason, p. 27).
It would be a mistake to assume that this constituted the whole of Jansenist theology, but this was what was latched onto.
At any rate, question that we have to answer in light of the fact that Augustinianism was never outside of orthodox Catholicism is twofold. First, what made Jansenism popular, and second, why was its popularity a threat to the reigning powers? It seems clear that we must look to the political situation to account for the charges of heresy leveled against the Jansenists. “Jansenism” is a misnomer, for it associates an entire movement with the controversy that was stirred up over Cornelius Jansen’s work. Jansen wasn’t the beginning of the movement, nor was he the beginning of the controversy surrounding it. A tentative answer may be given that addresses both.
Elizabeth Rapley writes, “Absolutism was more than a system imposed from above; it was the answer to a craving by respectable people of all social ranks for the law and order that they had lacked so long” (The Devotes: Women & Church in Seventeenth Century France, 12) Jansenism fits as a variation on this theme – all of the movements in the 17th century were moving towards absolutist forms of social order: Jansenism was not unique in this sense. It’s uniqueness was found in the way that it envisioned submission to authority – not that it absolutized authority. It’s popularity drew on the same social situation as did the growing authority of the Ancien Régime. It was inevitable, then, that the established powers would see this upstart movement as a siphon of the devotion owed to the state and its established avenues of religion. Alexander Sedgwick’s diagnosis of this issue is, as usual, acute.
“This independence and sense of self-sufficiency, caused by a profound personal commitment to God and by a detachment from all worldly influences, was bound to displease religious authorities, who preferred attitudes of conformity and submissiveness among the faithful. Such independence was also intolerable to a government seeking to establish greater control and uniformity throughout the kingdom….These essential characteristics of French Jansenism—profound personal commitment to God, psychological detachment from the world and its ways, reforming zeal, and dévot ideals—aggravated the tensions that existed between the followers of Angélique Arnauld and Saint-Cyran and the authorities of Church and state throughout the long reign of Louis XIV” (46).
Just like Jansen wasn’t as foundational and definitive for the actual nature of the Jansenist movement, so also was the conflict that arose around the publication of his Augustinius by no means an exclusively theological conflict.
Port-Royal and the Jansenist movement that was to grow up around it was a point of contact for a larger social conflict that we described above. While it cannot be assumed that Port-Royal and Jansenism were synonymous, it is clearly the case that without Port-Royal there is no Jansenism, and not vice-versa. Henry Phillips writes,
“Clearly, not all Jansenists in seventeenth-century France resided at Port-Royal, although there are interesting cases of society figures who resided as close to the Paris monastery as they could. Nor did all those who espoused Augustinian theses similar to the Jansenists express direct allegiance to Port-Royal. But Jansenism did constitute itself as a space at Port-Royal in the sense that some major figures in addition to the nuns of the reformed Cistercian order lived there, and for a short time it had its own school. It was also a space targeted by royal and ecclesiastical power.” (Church and Culture in Seventeenth Century France, 189-190)
Why was there such great consternation over this little convent? If such things were possible to attribute to individuals, Angélique Arnauld certainly would provide us with a soul grand enough to “make history” in the classical sense of the notion. But that is not how history works, and that was not how history played out at Port-Royal. As F. Ellen Weaver makes so clear in her work, The Evolution of the Reform of Port-Royal, the reforms implemented by Angélique, while notable for their rigueur, were not unique among the kind of reforms being put into practice elsewhere during the Counter-Reformation, especially in the Cistercian order. None of this is to claim that Jansenism was not distinctive. It was, but its distinctiveness, whether the Augustinian strain of its theology, or the rigueur of its piety, had always been a legitimate option within the boundaries of Catholic orthodoxy. This forces us to assume that these other contextual issues were what caused its persecution in France.
