Chapter 46: The Jansenists

While Holland and England, both of which acclimated themselves to the formal freedoms of the bourgeois revolution, engendered a multitude of sects whose language — still taking on theological artifices — less and less dissimulated their ideological texture, the Catholic countries, which were prey to the distraction of the Counter-Reformation, once again found in monarchal and pontifical absolutism the guarantee of a Catholicism that was restored to its temporal and spiritual powers.

Indulging in the Constantinian parody of the divine right, Louis XIV persisted in dissimulating — under the pomp of a Church in which Bossuet enjoyed Lully[519] — the pusillanimities of a tormented nature, corroded by the sourness of prestige. The sun, with which (in the manner of the mediocre ones) he claimed to crown himself, only dispensed its light upon the courtiers of literature and the arts, apt to dilute their genius in the artifice of panegyric. On the other hand, obscurantism did not spare free spirits such as Cyrano de Bergerac, the peasants reduced by famine and the rapacity of the tax collectors, or the Protestants condemned by the thousands to the galleys. This was the reign of the hypocrites, who threw upon the pyre the poet Claude the Small for having celebrated the art of fucking while the sovereign bathed the bed of his ancillary couplings with remorse.

The quarrel of Jansenism thus inscribed itself in the archaic framework of theological disputes and the political tradition in which the temporal masters claimed that they should be legislators in spiritual matters.

Michel Baius

Born in 1515 in Meslin-l’Eveque in the Hainaut region, Michel Baius (or de Bay) undertook — as a fervent Catholic and Doctor of the University of Louvain — to combat Lutheranism and Calvinism, which became widespread in the Netherlands by basing themselves on the Scriptures that were erected as the supreme authority by the Protestants.

With his friend John Hessels, Baius opposed to Calvin — for whom the irremediably bad human being was completely in the capricious hands of God — a manner of softening the doctrine that went back to Augustine of Hippone. For Baius, nature was originally good, but eminently corruptible. Adam sinned freely and, through his sin, lost the control he had exercised over his senses. Ever since then, mankind has felt the attraction of concupiscence so vividly that he cannot resist it.

From the Augustinian notion of predestination Calvin induced the idea that, saved or damned by God’s will alone, the [human] creature had no other choice but to assume the burden of his misery as if it were a constant torment in which all pleasure was obscenely dissonant. But predestination also offered to all humans the argument according to which everything was permitted because God mocked human efforts [oeuvres]. Hardly to be suspected of debauchery and licentiousness, Baius merely opened part-way the door of theological free will onto the desperate soaking to which the devout Reformers devoted themselves.

At first, the conceptions of Baius and Hessels did not shock the Cardinal of Granvelle, who was the Governor of the Netherlands, nor the papacy, since the two theologians participated in the Council of Trente.

Even when Pius V reacted in a Papal Bull by condemning 73 propositions advanced by Baius, he — whose name had not been mentioned — remained the Chancellor of the University of Louvain and submitted a retraction in good graces.

Among his adepts were a Louvainist theologian, Jacques Janson, and the Bishop of Ypres, Cornelius Jansenius, who swore to wash Baius’s reputation of suspicions of heterodoxy, which were unmerited in their eyes.

Meanwhile, the Jesuit Lessius revived the quarrel in the milieus that were lying in wait for theological speculations to which they attributed public interest that the majority of the people — already sufficiently encumbered by the constraints of Mass, the sacraments and ecclesiastical rituals — easily dispensed with.

Lessius estimated that sinners lost nothing of their means to accede to the eternal life of the heavens. He agreed with the Spanish Jesuit Luis Molina (1536–1600), for whom the divine presence did not hinder mankind’s free will in its choice between good and evil.

In the wooden language of theology, this was expressed by the discord between the theses expounded by Molina in The Concordance of Grace and Free Will and Jansenism, unless it was in fact the dissent between the Christian presence that governed the world at the cost of necessary compromises and an eremitic Christianity that sought in retreat (far from the world) the feverish and anguished approach of an intransigent God. As Moliere illustrated the situation, it was Tartuffe against the misanthrope of Port-Royal.[520]

Cornelius Jansenius

Born in 1585 near Leerdam in Holland, Cornelius Jansenius studied at Utrecht and Louvain, where his teacher was Baius’ disciple, Jacques Janson. Jansenius was friends with Duvergier of Hauranne, the future Abbey of Saint-Cyran. He devoted himself passionately to the study of Augustine of Hippone and the theses that he opposed to those of Pelage. After a stay in France, he returned to Louvain; he believed he had discovered in Hippone’s philosophy arguments that would properly rehabilitate Baius. It is not easy to disentangle the motives that incited him to confront pontifical thunderbolts and the powerful party of the Jesuits. His affection for Jacques Janson? The hope of shining in the faraway reflection of the pyres? A rigor that corresponded to his taste for asceticism and that incited him to disapprove of the discreet license of the confessors who mixed devotion with the perfume of the boudoir and practiced in theological fashion a psychoanalysis well before there was such a thing?

“The more I advance,” Jansenius wrote to Saint-Cyran, “the more the affair frightens me (...). I do not dare to say what I think about predestination and grace out of fear that, when all is said and done, what has happened to the others will happen to me” (he would be condemned).[521]

Jansenius had the forethought to die from the plague in Ypres shortly after he sent a letter to Pope Urban VIII that declared he was disposed to approve, improve or retract his statements “according to what would be prescribed by the voice of thunder that comes from the skies of the apostolic See.”[522]

His posthumous work, the Augustinus, published in 1640, was condemned by Urban VIII two years later.

The Father of Avrigny summarized Jansenius’ doctrine in his Chronological and Dogmatic Memoirs.

Since the fall of Adam, pleasure is the unique spring that moves the heart of man; this pleasure is inevitable when it comes and invincible when it has come. If this pleasure is celestial, it brings virtue; if it is terrestrial, it determines vise; and the will finds itself necessarily led by the stronger of the two. These two pleasures, the author says, are like the two plates on a balancing scale; one cannot rise without the other one descending. Thus, man does good or evil, invincibly but voluntarily, according to whether he is dominated by grace or cupidity.[523]

Here is proof — if proof was needed — that the root of all that constituted controversial religious matters resided in the tormented attitudes of individuals when they were confronted by the pleasures of a life that was denied them by virtue of the mandates of heaven and the Spirit, which were the sad abstractions of the earth and the body, respectively.

The Church’s obsession was not caused by the scandalous licenses to which pious Jansenius was improbably given access, but by the self-determination that he attributed to man and that — turned towards the most devout asceticism — removed from dogma and the clergy their utility in the government of beings and things.

Jansenism moreover quite rapidly took shape from within a Calvinism transplanted into a society that still had not delegated its powers to free enterprise and the devotion to money sanctified by God.

John Duvergier of Hauranne, the Abbey of Saint-Cyran and a long-time partisan of Baius’ ideas, saw his mission in the propagation of the doctrine of his friend Jansenius. His rigor was greatly displeased by the fact that the enjoyment of pleasures chilled by remorse led to the complacency of disenchantment. He won the sympathies of the Arnauld family, especially Pascal and Nicole, who supported the monastery of Port-Royal and erected it as a bastion of Jansenism.

When Saint-Cyran died in 1643, he was succeeded by the “Great Arnauld,” who took the lead of the movement, which he treated as if it were a family affair. It is not useless to dwell a little upon this clan, which brandished before the court [of France] and Rome a theological arsenal whose fire-power seemed to result from the discourteous relations that divided the members of a brotherhood that was as holy as it was tormented.

The Arnauld Family

Originally from Herment, in le Puy-de-Dome, Antoine Arnauld (1560–1619) was born to a Protestant father whom Saint Barthelemy convinced to convert to Catholicism. Antoine settled in Paris in 1577 and professed a disdain for the glory of weapons and the conquest for royal favors, which made religion his field of battle. From him came a breed of magistrates and learned men whose Puritan rigor, taste for authority, a certain propensity for revolt and a solid sense for business would have turned towards Calvinism if Jansenism had not furnished a better opportunity.

A counselor to Catherine de Medici after he studied at the University of Paris and got a degree in law from Bourges while studying under Cujas, Antoine Arnauld then entered the bar and applied himself with ardor to several polemics against the Jesuits. A Gallician and nationalist, he mocked their “blind obedience to a Spanish General,” defended the University of Paris against them and was opposed to their return after Chatel’s attack against Henry IV caused them to be banished from France.

Antoine’s wife, Catherine Marion (who became a nun at Port-Royal in 1641), gave birth to 20 children, among whom Catherine, Jacqueline-Mary-Angelique, Jeanne-Catherine-Agnes (author of a book called Letters), Anne, Mary, and Madeleine would belong to the Abbey, as did Robert and Antoine, the 20^th child, who became known as the “Great Arnauld.” Henri Arnauld would become the Bishop of Angers, thereby providing his family — always at the frontiers of heresy — with the pledge of his orthodoxy.

The last child of Catherine Marion, the Great Arnauld (born in 1612), was seven years old when his tyrannical and brutal father died; the child was educated by his mother or, more exactly, by the celebrated Abbey of Saint-Cyran, who presided over the destiny of Port-Royal. Yet the world seduced little Antoine; jurisprudence attracted him; he frequented the mansion of Rambouillet; and he was initiated into the literary art of preciousity and imitated Voltaire. But his fate had been decided: he belonged to theology. Enrolled at the Sorbonne in 1633, he studied Augustine under the spiritual direction of Saint-Cyran. The latter, for whom “nothing is as dangerous as knowledge,” imposed ordeals on the young man: fasting twice a week, praying and reading the Holy Scriptures on bended knee.

After being ordained a priest, the young man entered Port-Royal one year later (in 1641), resolved to “flee the conversation of the world like poisoned air.” One says that he pushed the love of mystery to the point of denouncing as false a thesis that he judged to be too intelligible. The Frequent Communion (1643), which was published the year that Saint-Cyran died, brought him to the head of the Jansenist current and aroused the hatred of the Jesuits, who schemed to incarcerate him in the Bastille. During the 25 years that his retreat lasted, the Great Arnauld engaged in polemics against the Jesuits (New Heresy in Morality, The Moral Practice of the Jesuits), which furnished Pascal with the material for his Letters Written to a Provincial. Returned to grace in 1669, the Great Arnauld became friends with Boileau and Racine, and violently attacked Calvinism, thereby rejoining his brother, Henri, the Bishop of Angers, who applauded the revocation of the Edict of Nantes.

When politics took a hostile turn at Port-Royal, the Great Arnauld fled to Mons, Tournai and Brussels, where he died in 1694. A letter from his friend, the abbey of the Trappist monastery, shows the esteem in which he was held: “At last, Monsieur Arnauld is dead. After pushing his career as far as he could, he had to end it. Whatever else one says, these questions are now closed.”[524] To Abbey Bremond, here was “a theological machine-gun in perpetual movement, but completely emptied of interior life.”[525] At the time, it was not necessary to perceive that Arnauld’s grandeur resulted from an accumulation of pettiness.

A similar social life and an eloquent refusal of the world also animated the life of Robert, called Arnauld of Andilly. His Memoirs served his own glory more than that of the God he claimed to venerate: “I have never had an ambition, because I had too many.” The supremacy of the absolute nevertheless tallied with the art of intrigue and influence peddling. A madrigal that he offered in the manner of the Garland of Julie showed that he wedded devotion to gallantry without too much difficulty. Saint-Cyran made Robert his residual heir on the condition that he retired to Port-Royal. Robert then used all kinds of pretexts to delay the date of his retirement. He schemed at becoming the tutor of the Dauphin; he published Stanzas on Diverse Christian Truths; wrote a poem on the life of the Christ; produced his Letters, in which he took care to include endorsements from the Jesuits. In vain. The charge that he so coveted escaped him and disappointment pushed him to Port-Royal, where he hastened to send six of his daughters (out of his 15 children). The scandal of his retirement, orchestrated for so long, made him a celebrated person and made Jansenism fashionable.

In 1664, the dispersion of the community caused Robert to go into exile in Pomponne, where one of his sons lived. Having been a odious father, he seemed execrable to his daughter-in-law, who saw him die without displeasure in 1674. He had translated the Augustine’s Confessions, Saint Theresa’s works and Flavius Joseph’s History of the Jews.

Jacqueline-Mary-Angelique, the daughter of Antoine the Elder (born in 1591), was of a completely different nature. Her brutal frankness broke with the caution of Robert and the Great Arnauld, people who were much closer to Tartuffe than to Moliere’s Misanthrope. Intelligent and lively, she preferred marriage to the Abbey, which was imposed on her from the age of seven. “You would like me to be a nun,” she said; “I would quite like that, but on the condition that I am an Abbess.” At the age of nine, she made her profession of faith, but not without specifying that she “felt free in front of men, and committed to God.” Her frenzied calling was always a horror: “I was cursed when men, not God, made me an Abbess and when the monks of the Citeaux consecrated me at the age of 11.” From the other side of the window, she was visited by her father and when he, furious, treated her like a parricidal monster, she stated: “My parents made me a nun at the age of nine, when I did not want to be one; today they want me to damn myself by not observing my order.”

While one after another of her sisters entered Port-Royal, she became fervent as if overcome by a somber and desperate ecstasy. Named Abbess in 1642, she wedded the cause of Jansenism, and did not hesitate to treat Pope Innocent X as a deceiver when the five propositions of Augustinus were condemned in 1653. God was the weapon of her vengeance against the men who banned her from the world. This passionate woman, whose intelligence and sadly constrained sensuality merited a destiny better suited to her hopes, died in 1661, while Pope Alexander promulgated new condemnations in a formulary that the clergy had to sign.