Showing papers on "Jansenism published in 2004"

The Enlightenment and Religion: The Myths of Modernity

Abstract: Preface: The Enlightenment and modernity The rationale of this book The structure of this book 1. The myth of Enlightenment deism The myth of the deist movement The deist myth and modern historians The myth and the historical record The myth and the construction of modernity Historians, religion and the historical record The origins of Enlightenment anticlericalism John Toland, Pierre Bayle and the problem of influence Enlightenment from within or without Christianity? The elite and the written record Scaremongering, public opinion and the construction of the deist scare 3. The English deist movement: a case study in the construction of a myth Post-restoration context. Deists and dissent confused John Toland and Christianity not mysterious Early modern politico-religious propagandists and modern historians Dissent and Enlightenment 4. France: the revolt of democratic Christianity and the rise of public opinion Bourbons, Huguenots and Jansenists The nouvelles ecclesiastiques and Bourbon miscalculation The revolt of the 1750s Popular victory against the Jesuits and the call for toleration The final decline of the absolutist dream 5. Italy: Roman 'tyranny' and radical Catholic opposition Jansenism and Catholic Enlightenment Anti-curial polemic and its context Regalism and Jansenism The temporal imperative: Roman theology and politics fused Radical Jansenism 1770s-1790s 6. The 'public sphere' and the hidden life of ideas The hidden life of ideas Public opinion and the top-down model of intellectual change Anachronism and toleration Appendix - Indicative bibliography of Protestant thought on natural religion Selected bibliography

Translating Tocqueville : The Constraints of Classicism

Abstract: THE CLASSIC Nearly everyone will grant that Tocqueville's Democracy in America deserves to be called a ''classic.'' Does the work's classic status constrain its translator? Should it? And if so, how? These are the questions I want to address. Tocqueville wrote as the self-conscious heir of a long intellectual tradition of writing about politics. Though never a systematic student of the ancient classics, he is known to have consulted Plato, Aristotle, and Plutarch during the period in which he wrote Democracy in America . He also read ''classic'' writers of the postclassical tradition such as Aquinas, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Bacon, Descartes, Pascal, Montesquieu, and Rousseau. His early education owed a great deal to his tutor, the Abbe Lesueur. Lesueur, who had also been his father's tutor, was a man who belonged more to the eighteenth century than to the nineteenth, and who wrote an elegant French in the manner of that earlier time. When the young Tocqueville won a prize in rhetoric at the Metz lycee, he credited the preparation received from his tutor. The good Abbe, moreover, was an ecclesiastic with Jansenist leanings, who probably imparted the values of that austerely cerebral sect to his pupil, and we know that Pascal, the most sparkling of Jansenist writers, remained an important influence on Tocqueville's thinking.

Ideals and Ideas: Platonism in La Princesse de Clèves

Abstract: Religious motif, almost totally absent as it is from the narrative of Mme de Lafayette's La Princesse de Cl`ves, cannot by itself stand as the foundation of the protagonist's moral choices. This article undertakes the study of the two parallel ideological influences on the thematics of the heroine's thought. One is the evident Platonism of the Jansenists and Saint Augustine, which was current in Christian thought in seventeenth century France. The other, more pertinent one is the secular Neoplatonism of the Baroque as it derives from Plato's Dialogues. Finally, the opposition between the Princesse's doubly Platonic idealism and her suitor's Aristotelian, neoclassical code of ethics is brought to light.

"Rien ne nous plaît que le combat", Pascal et le dialogue polémique

Abstract: This PHd thesis analyses the whole of the public debates whether major or minor in which Blaise Pascal was involved. The study stresses the importance of the dialogical form used by Pascal and his contradictors whenever they launched into controversy. It describes how both Pascal and his adversaries acted and wrote polemically. Rather than confronting both sides, the author tries to show how polemics works, how it grows, settles and eventually how it affects the texts themselves. Polemic polarisation is analysed in many ways, which mirrors the polymorphic nature of the polemical genre and the numerous fields it is related to. First theoretical tools try to root out the polemical origins of the fields of controversy. It focuses on such subjects as the void, and the debates on grace as well as on the great seventeenth-century theological and moral questions which occasioned acrid public exchanges. This thesis also resorts to sociological approaches: it raises the issues of the readership and the social origins of the readers. Moreover it tries to assess how controversial the experimental form was by examining the scientific backgrounds in which scientific controversy developed. Third, the literary dimension of polemics is pointed out through the study of the pamphlets on the void circulating in the wordly circles, and through the semi-private letters the scientists were so eager to exchange. It also focuses on the pamphlet wars the jansenist community of the Port-Royal abbey would wage against the jesuits. The thesis lays particular emphasis on Pascal's main polemical text, the Provinciales, and on the whole and complete body of answers it triggered. It aims at defining how wide the readership of the Provinciales was. It moreover tries to show how deep the theoretical and historical consequences of the quarrel with the Jesuits were.

Revisiting Sacred Propaganda: The Holy Bishop in the Seventeenth-Century Jansenist Quarrel

Abstract: In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, prelates such as Borromeo of Milan and de Sales of Geneva, began to reinvigorate this hierarchical office, offering models of episcopal government, discipline and pastorate for other prelates to adopt throughout the Catholic ‘Reformation’ church. This article examines a central aspect of this formation: the ways in which the episcopal office could become a weapon in profound theological conflicts over grace, salvation, morality and ecclesiology. In mid-seventeenth-century France, the militant protagonists in the internationally notorious Jansenist conflict used controversial models and theories of episcopacy to defend their own views of morality and doctrine and to condemn their opponents as disobedient traitors of saintly and revered ‘bishops’, including ancients such as Augustine and the Apostles, and near contemporaries such as the famous Borromeo and de Sales. Their adaptation and manipulation of episcopacy highlights the profound dangers that t...