Jansen

Jansen, CORNELIUS, from whom the sect of Jansenists derives its name, was born in 1585, at Acquois, near Leerdam, in Holland. He made his studies at Utrecht, Louvain, and Paris, and from early youth was familiar with some of the disciples of Bajas (q.v.), and with the Abbé de St Cyran. For some time he filled a chair at Bayonne; and in 1617 he was called to Louvain, where in 1630 he was appointed professor of Theology. In 1636 he was made Bishop of Ypres, and in this city he died of the plague, May 6, 1638, just as he had completed his great work of more than twenty years' preparation, the Augustinus, seu Doctrina S. Aug. de Hum. Naturæ Sanitate, Ægritudine, Medicina, adversus Pelagianos et Massilienses (4 vols.), which proved the occasion of a great theological controversy. The main object of this work was to prove, by an elaborate analysis of St Augustine's works, that the teaching of this Father against the Pelagians and semi-Pelagians on Grace, Free-will, and Predestination was directly opposed to the teaching of the modern, and especially of the Jesuit schools, which latter teaching he held to be identical with that of the semi-Pelagians. Jansen repudiated the ordinary Catholic dogma of the freedom of the will, understood to mean the power to choose at the time good or evil (libertas contra- dictionis), asserting merely the existence of freedom from external constraint (libertas a coactione), not inward necessity. He also refused to admit merely sufficient grace, maintaining that interior grace is irresistible, and that Christ died for all. In the preface Jansen submitted the work to the judgment of the holy see; and on its publication, under the care of Frommond, in 1640, being received with loud clamour, especially by the Jesuits, the Augustinus was prohibited by a decree of the Inquisition in 1641; in the following year it was condemned in general terms, as renewing the errors of Bajas, by Urban VIII. in the bull In Eminenti. This bull encountered much opposition in Flanders; and in France the Augustinus found many partisans, animated both by doctrinal predilection and antipathy to the alleged laxity of moral teaching in the schools of the Jesuits, with whom the opposition to the Augustinus was identified. Most eminent among these were the celebrated scholars and divines who formed the community of Port Royal (q.v.), Arnauld, Nicole, Pascal, and others. Nevertheless, the syndic of the Sorbonne extracted from the Augustinus seven propositions (subsequently reduced to five) which were definitively condemned as heretical by Innocent X. in 1653. The friends of the Augustinus, while they admitted that in point of right the five propositions were justly condemned as heretical, yet denied that in point of fact these propositions were to be found in the Augustinus, at least in the sense imputed to them by the bull. Arnauld in a celebrated Lettre admitted the church's infallibility on the former question, and the duty of entire submission, but held that the latter was a question of historical fact on which the church might err, and that it was sufficient if the faithful received her decision on it with 'respectful silence.' Meantime the controversy had produced one work that holds its immortality as securely as any book in the range of literature, the Lettres Provinciales of Pascal. Arnauld's distinction between right and fact was at length condemned by the Sorbonne, and himself and sixty other doctors expelled, and in October 1656 a further condemnation of the Augustinus, 'in the sense of the author,' was issued by Alexander VII., rigidly enforced in France, and generally accepted; and early in 1669 peace was partially restored by Clement IX.—at least all overt opposition was repressed by the iron rule of Louis XIV.

The more rigid Jansenists, however, and at their head Antoine Arnauld, emigrated from France, and formed a kind of community in the Low Countries. The controversy was revived with new acrimony by the dispute on the so-called 'case of conscience,' whether a dying ecclesiastical could lawfully be absolved who was not convinced that the five propositions as condemned by the church were contained in the Augustinus; and still more angrily in the person of the celebrated Quesnel, whose Moral Reflections on the New Testament was denounced to the pope, Clement XI., as a text-book of undisguised Jansenism. This pope had already in 1705 decided the case of conscience by the bull 'Vineam Domini,' when in 1713 he condemned by the bull 'Unigenitus' as many as 101 propositions extracted from the Moral Reflections. After the death of Louis XIV. the regent, the Duke of Orleans, was urged to refer the whole controversy to a national council, and the leaders of the Jansenist party appealed to a general council. The party thus formed, which numbered in 1717 four bishops and many inferior ecclesiastics, were called, from this circumstance, the Appellants. The firmness of the pope, and a change in the policy of the regent, brought them into disfavour. An edict was published, June 4, 1720, receiving the bull; and even the parliament of Paris submitted to register it, although with a reservation in favour of the liberties of the Gallican Church. The Appellants for the most part submitted, the recusants being visited with severe penalties; and on the coming of age of the new king, Louis XV., the unconditional acceptance of the bull was at length formally accomplished. From this time forward the Appellants were rigorously repressed, and a large number emigrated to the Netherlands, where they formed a community, with Utrecht as a centre. The party still remaining in France persisted in their inveterate opposition to the bull, but the real significance of Jansenism may almost be said to have died with Quesnel in 1719, and, indeed, the movement inaugurated by such intellects as Arnauld and Pascal ended in France before the middle of the century in fanaticism and superstition. The miracles in the St Médard cemetery, and the physical convulsions that became common, brought Jansenism in France to a discredited conclusion (see CONVULSIONARIES).

In one locality alone, Utrecht, and its dependent churches, can the sect be said to have had a regular and permanent organisation. The vicar-apostolic, Peter Kodde, having been suspended for Jansenist sympathies by Clement XI. in 1702, the chapter of Utrecht refused to acknowledge the new vicar named in his place, and angrily joined themselves to the Appellant party in France, many of whom had found a refuge in Utrecht. At length, in 1723, they elected an archbishop, Cornelius Steenhoven, for whom the form of episcopal consecration was obtained from the French bishop Varlet (titular of Babylon), who had been suspended for Jansenist opinions. A later Jansenist Archbishop of Utrecht, Meindarts, established Haarlem and Deventer as his suffragan sees; and in 1763 a synod was held, which sent its acts to Rome, in recognition of the primacy of that see. Since that time the formal succession has been maintained, each bishop, on being appointed, notifying his election to the pope, and craving confirmation. The popes, however, have uniformly rejected all advances, except on the condition of the acceptance of the bull Unigenitus; and the definition as of Catholic faith of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary (1854) and the Papal Infallibility (1870) have been the occasion of fresh protests. The Jansenists of the Utrecht Church still number about 6000 souls, and are divided over twenty-five parishes in the dioceses of Utrecht and Haarlem. Their clergy are about thirty in number, with a seminary at Amersfoort. Loos, the Jansenist Archbishop of Utrecht, consecrated Dr Reinkens bishop for the German Old Catholics. Pius IX. restored the Dutch hierarchy in 1851, so that there is now an orthodox Archbishop of Utrecht. The Dutch Jansenists are in doctrine and discipline strictly orthodox Roman Catholics, being known by their countrymen as Oude Roomsche ('Old Roman').

See vol. ii. of Hergenröther's Allgemeine Kirchengeschichte (1877-78); Fuzet, Les Jansénistes (1877); Neale, Jansenist Church of Holland (1858); Reuchlin, Gesch. von Port-Royal (1839-44); Sainte-Beuve, Port-Royal (1860); a German work by Nippold (1872); Séché, Les derniers Jansénistes (1891); French Jansenists, by Mrs Tollemache (1893).