Showing papers on "Jansenism published in 1979"

Church and society in Catholic Europe of the eighteenth century: The Spanish church

Abstract: The Spanish church of the Counter-Reformation, with its array of saints, theologians, canonists and missionaries, or the church caught in the bitter political struggles of the twentieth century, has offered more attractive fields of study to the historian than an eighteenth-century church that produced no St Theresa of Avila, no St John of the Cross, no Luis de Leon, no spectacular missionary achievements in distant and exotic lands. Even the Inquisition went about its work with a desultory spirit that would have shocked the harsh inquisitors of an earlier age. But the church of the eighteenth century, if it lacked the vitality of its predecessors, continued to be an immensely rich and powerful institution in a land where religious practice was deeply rooted and luxuriant in its variety. Moreover, an understanding of the problem of the church in modern Spain requires some knowledge of the long process of disintegration of the Old Regime church that began in the late eighteenth century and continued through the far-reaching liberal reforms carried out between 1835 and 1860. It has been fashionable to consider the history of the Spanish church as a long continuum from the time of Ferdinand and Isabella to the militant and intolerant church of the years prior to and during the civil war of the twentieth century. But the structure, economic base and mentality of the church in modern Spain are very different from those of the church in the Old Regime.

The Triumph of Art over Nature in the Maximes

Abstract: In a letter of 1664 to Pere Thomas Esprit La Rochefoucauld discusses the reactions of the first readers of his Maximes and avers that his objective is to show that without religious faith, the apparent virtues of man in general and the philosophers of antiquity in particular are false.1 The latter part of this objective is confirmed by the frontispiece of the first edition of the Maximes on which a winged child who symbolizes ‘L’Amour de la Verite’ strips the smooth mask of benign reason and smiling virtue from the bust of Seneca to display the scowling human features. In this way the Maximes explicitly align themselves against writers such as Pere Sirmond and La Mothe Le Vayer who, in order to refute the doctrine of Jansenius as embodied in the Augustinus (1640) had written respectively Defense de La Vertu (1641) and De la Vertu des Payens (1642). Both argued in favour of the merits of good works performed without the aid of supernatural grace which the Jansenists considered fundamental to salvation. La Rochefoucauld’s attack on antique philosophy places him on the same side of the theological divide as the Jansenists. But in spite of the letter quoted above and the passage in La Rochefoucauld’s Avis au Lecteur (1666) stating that he had viewed man in his natural state of sin, the Maximes point up the contradictions lurking under the mask of reason and virtue without reference to the need of divine grace. They do not seek to affect what Pascal called ‘ce vilain fond de l’homme, ce figmentum malum’, which to the Jansenists rendered good works morally null and void.2

The Biliotheque de la Societe de Port-Royal

Abstract: The present librarian of the Bibliotheque de la Societe de PortRoyal, Andre Gazier, is fond of describing a visit to his father, Augustin, the noted historian of Jansenism, by a canon of NotreDame. The canon asked to purchase books from this library in order to burn them! For some, Jansenism remained an emotional issue until well into the twentieth century. Augustin himself refused to allow Jesuits to use the library, and he vehemently discouraged scholars from studying the eighteenth-century convulsionaries of Saint-Medard, who, he believed, had embarrassed the "Disciples of Saint-Augustine." The Bibliotheque de la Societe de Port-Royal, sometimes referred to as the "library of Jansenism," is located on the third floor of a decrepit building at 169 rue Saint-Jacques in Paris. Operated by a private organization, the Societe de Port-Royal (which also owns the ruins of Port-Royal des Champs), the library contains unmatched holdings on Jansenism and on the religious history of seventeenthand eighteenth-century France. There is, unfortunately, no accurate way to determine the size of the library, but I would estimate perhaps sixty thousand volumes. One must bear in mind that this is not a library in the hands of trained librarians, and therefore it is deficient in both professional help and bibliographical aids. Much of the library is catalogued on hand-written fiches organized alphabetically by author and by subject. A fiche will direct the researcher to the appropriate room and book. Thus, one can easily locate books written by a particular seventeenthor eighteenth-century Jansenist. More difficulty occurs with the attempt to utilize either pamphlets or manuscripts. To take