Showing papers on "Jansenism published in 2010"

A Companion to the Catholic Enlightenment in Europe

Abstract: (ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Brill's commitment to publishing a series of reference books and handbooks on the intellectual and religious life of Europe is to be praised, and this volume of heavily footnoted essays with extensive bibliographies will be particularly useful.The best aspect of this volume is its open struggle with its title term: "Catholic Enlightenment." Ulrich Lehner in his excellent introduction is the first to point out that the term is slippery. This volume of essays, he notes, is a companion not a manual . What the essays make clear in their own ways is that distinctively Catholic thinkers were engaged in a multiplicity of negotiations with exuberant rationality, Baroque spirituality, political philosophies concerning centralization of power, and moral philosophies of varying degrees of laxity and rigor. The essays emphasize the particular negotiations of individuals and religious orders. At the physical center of the book is Mario Rosa's depiction of the mediation skills of Pope Benedict XIV who was able to open spaces for Christian tradition and apologetics to be enriched by "the powerful flow of the new culture of Enlightenment" (227). However, most of the book is not about popes and papal pronouncements. Writing about Benito Jeronimo Feijoo in Spain, Andrea Smidt notes the pervasive issue for enlightened Catholics was to avoid the extremes of "blind belief and obstinate unbelief" (418). Tensions between the tendencies of Jansenists and Jesuits play a variety of roles in most of the essays. In France, Jeffrey Burson describes the psychological and cultural tensions between Jesuit optimism about moral progress and the more pessimistic social reformism of the Jansenist form of an "Augustinian Catholic Enlightenment" (65). Harm Klueting describes the inability of Austrian Jansenism to remain viable within the moderate Catholic Enlightenment as it was co-opted by politics and Protestantism after the Jesuits were repressed. In most of these essays the Jesuit and Jansenist relationship to centralized politics of different countries affects the way each promoted regional versions of enlightened Catholicism.Evident in all the essays is a Catholic eclecticism that undermines old reference-book traditions of hard categories and simple definitions. Jeffrey Burson, for example, writes of a "Jesuit Synthesis" that was "sculpted and refined in various forms by Claude Buffier and Rene-Joseph Tournemine" (79). This synthesis responded to radical statements in Spinoza and Descartes while adapting Malebranche and Descartes to Aquinas by way of Locke (79-80). This kind cut-and-paste thinking was usually regional and ephemeral. It responded to specific needs at specific times, usually supporting specific political and ecclesiastical situations. Andrea Smidt describes the predominance in Spain of a particular Spanish Jansenism, rooted in humanist, Erasmian, episcopalist, and Augustinian traditions peculiar to Spain. Michael Printy writes about rival Catholic enlightenments in the Holy Roman Empire that were not simply manifestations of anti-clerical or anti-religious ideas, but rather, "the culmination of several generations of pious renewal and revival" (173). …

What is ‘Catholic Enlightenment’?

Abstract: Recent research has demonstrated not only the existence of a variety of Enlightenments, but also the importance of the religious aspect to this worldwide process. In particular, special interest has been paid to the long-neglected Catholic Enlightenment, which entailed many strands of thought by Catholic intellectuals and political leaders who attempted to renew and reform Catholicism from the middle of the 18th to the early 19th century. This renewal was an apologetic endeavor designed to defend the essential dogmas of Catholic Christianity by explaining their rationality in modern terminology and by reconciling Catholicism with modern culture. The Catholic Enlightenment was in dialog with contemporary culture, not only by developing new hermeneutical approaches to the Council of Trent or to Jansenist ideas, but also by implementing some of the core values of the overall European Enlightenment process that tried to ‘renew’ and ‘reform’ the whole of society, and thus truly deserves the label Enlightenment.

Resacralizing the World: The Fate of Secularization in Enlightenment Historiography*

Abstract: The earthquake that struck Lisbon in 1755 shook the Enlightenment to its foundations. For Voltaire, the city’s destruction did not announce the vengeance of an angry God, as some Christian apologists would have it, but rather the indifference of nature and the limits of human comprehension. “God alone is right,” he concluded the following year in his Poeme sur la destruction de Lisbonne. There was no judgment to be passed, neither for or against the divine, nor for or against the world. If human suffering served to dispel the “illusion” that “all is well today,” it did not keep the philosophe from embracing the more modest hope that “one day all will be well.”1 It is widely known that Voltaire published these observations, along with Candide, in an effort to undermine the bases of optimism as thoroughly as seismic activity had laid waste the capital of Portugal. In rejecting the traditional rationale for providence, Voltaire followed a host of philosophers and theologians who suspected that the world had been created, and effectively abandoned, by a deity whose motives could never be fully known. While Cartesians responded to this possibility by jettisoning traditional cosmologies, Jansenists such as Pascal adopted a more circumspect view: the soul

The Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment: Jean-Martin de Prades and Ideological Polarization in Eighteenth-Century France

Abstract: In "The Rise and Fall of Theological Enlightenment", Jeffrey D. Burson enriches our understanding of the French Enlightenment by analyzing a diverse constellation of Theological Enlightenment discourses, which were compromised between about 1730 and 1762 by high-stakes cultural and political controversies involving the royal court, the government, and the Catholic Church. Burson places the abbe Jean-Martin de Prades at the center of the storm. In 1749, Prades was working on his doctorate in theology at the University of Paris. An ambitious young theologian, Prades, like his teachers at the Sorbonne and like many lay and clerical apologists in mid-eighteenth-century France, had been deeply inspired by the spirit of the Enlightenment. Burson reinterprets the Jesuit Enlightenment and its influence on French society, arguing that Jesuits had pioneered ways of synthesizing Locke, Malebranche, and Newton in light of the expansion of the public sphere. Hoping to defend Catholic theology against the Radical Enlightenment by adapting these Jesuit Enlightenment discourses to the new developments in natural history and to Enlightenment theological debates, Prades inadvertently sparked a public scandal that galvanized members of the royal court and the Parlement of Paris, Jansenists, Jesuits, and philosophes, alike - all of whom refashioned the person and work of Prades to suit their own ends. Ultimately, the controversy polarized the cultural politics of pre-revolutionary France into two camps, that of a self-consciously secular Enlightenment and that of a staunchly opposed Counter-Enlightenment. Prades' history provides Burson with a lens through which to reevaluate the intersections of theology and Enlightenment philosophy, of French politics and the French Catholic church, and of conservatives, moderates, and radicals on all sides.

The Papacy since 1500: From Italian Prince to Universal Pastor

Abstract: Introduction James Corkery and Thomas Worcester 1 Julius II: prince, patron, pastor Frederic J Baumgartner 2 Clement VII: prince at war Kenneth Gouwens 3 The pope as saint: Pius V in the eyes of Sixtus V and Clement XI Pamela M Jones 4 Pasquinades and propaganda: the reception of Urban VIII Sheila Barker 5 Jansenism vs papal absolutism Gemma Simmonds 6 Pius VII: moderation in an age of revolution and reaction Thomas Worcester 7 Pius IX, pastor and prince Ciaran O'Carroll 8 The social question in the papacy of Leo XIII Thomas Massaro 9 The perils of perception: British Catholics and papal neutrality, 1914-23 Charles R Gallagher 10 Electronic pastors: radio, cinema and television, from Pius XI to John XXIII John F Pollard 11 Mixed reception: Paul VI and John Paul II on sex and war Linda Hogan 12 John Paul II: universal pastor in a global age James Corkery Conclusion James Corkery and Thomas Worcester Select bibliography Index

Ethos in testimony: the case of carré de montgeron, a jansenist and a convulsionary in the century of enlightenment

Abstract: The cultural and religious phenomena of the convulsionaries of Saint-Medard, linked to Parisian Jansenism, raises questions concerning the testimonial discourses and their procedures of validation and accreditation within the context of the eighteenth century in France. The article focuses on Carre de Montgeron’s corpus and examines the discursive modalities concerning the question of authenticity and the choices of rhetoric strategies used in order to legitimate irrational testimony within a hostile model of evidence that privileges rationality and objectivity. I argue that Montgeron intended not only to transmit a real life experience but tended towards the construction of “public opinion” that was likely to influence the course of political and religious events in France.

How the west was won. Essays on literary imagination, the canon, and the christian middle ages for Burcht Pranger

Abstract: Preface Publications of Burcht Pranger Contributors Part 1: Literary Imagination 1. "Movesi un vecchierel canuto et bianco...": Notes on a Sonnet of Petrarch, Peter Cramer 2. Moments of Indecision, Sovereign Possibilities: Notes on the Tableau Vivant, Frans-Willem Korsten 3. History and the Vertical Canon: Calvin's Institutes and Beckett, Ernst van den Hemel 4. Christ's Case and John Donne, "Seeing through his wounds": The Stigma of Martyrdom Transfigured, Anselm Haverkamp 5. Playing with History: The Satirical Portrayal of the Medieval Papacy on an Eighteenth-Century Deck of Playing Cards, Joke Spaans 6. From East to West: Jansenists, Orientalists, and the Eucharistic Controversy, Alastair Hamilton 7. Labouring in Reason's Vineyard: Voltaire and the Allegory of Enlightenment, Madeleine Kasten Part 2: The Canon 8. The Search for the Canon and the Problem of Body and Soul, Piet de Rooy 9. Music at the Limits: Edward Said's Musical Elaborations, Rokus de Groot 10. The Canonisation of the Medieval Past: England and the Continent Compared, Peter Raedts 11. Scholarship of Literature and Life: Leopold Zunz and the Invention of Jewish Culture, Irene Zwiep 12. Censorship and Canon: A Note on Some Medieval Works and Authors, Leen Spruit 13. Does the Canon Need Converting? A Meditation on Augustine's Soliloquies, Eriugena's Periphyseon, and the Dialogue with the Religious Past, Willemien Otten 14. Between Pedagogy and Democracy: On Canons and Aversion to Conformity in Ordinary Language Philosophy, Asja Szafraniec 15. On the Significance of Disagreement: Stanley Cavell and Ordinary Language Philosophy, Paola Marrati 16. Fast Forward, or: The Theologico-Political Event in Quick Motion (Miracles, Media, and Multitudes in St. Augustine), Hent de Vries Part 3: The Christian Middle Ages 17. Tangere autem corde, hoc est credere: Augustine on 'Touching' the Numinous, Giselle de Nie 18. The Fame of Fake, Dionysius the Areopagite: Fabrication, Falsification and the 'Cloud of Unknowing', Bram Kempers 19. Two Female Apostolic Mystics: Catherine of Siena and Madame Jeanne Guyon, Bernard McGinn 20. De obitu Valentiniani: Abelard, Bernard of Clairvaux, and the Canonization of Ambrose of Milan on Baptism by Desire, Marciaa L. Colish 21. The 'Whole Abelard' and the Availability of Language, Babette Hellemans 22. Tempus longum ... locus asper ... : Chiaroscuro in Hugh of Saint-Victor, Ineke van 't Spijker 23. Obedience Simple and True: Anselm of Canterbury on How to Defeat the Devil, Arjo vanderjagt 24. The Monastic Challenge: Remarks, Helmut Kohlenberger Index of Personal Names

Catholic Enlightenment And Reform Catholicism In The Holy Roman Empire

Abstract: The Catholic Enlightenment in the territories of the Holy Roman Empire was at once an episode specific to the intellectual and cultural conditions of early modern Germany and also part of a much broader shift in religion, politics, and culture in eighteenth-century Europe. The author briefly elaborates three sets of related concepts that may serve as nodes connecting the history of the Catholic Enlightenment in the Holy Roman Empire to other historical movements and literatures. These sets of concepts may be loosely categorized as: Catholic Enlightenment and Reform Catholicism; Enlightenment and Religion in Germany; and Jansenism and Baroque Catholicism. The latter portions of this chapter show how the rise of the state and the concomitant social changes gave way to a sharper conflict. Keywords: Catholic Enlightenment; eighteenth-century; Germany; Holy Roman Empire; Reform Catholicism

Jansenismo francês num códice da Biblioteca Nacional de Portugal

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the infl uence of Jansenism, namely through French authors, in Codex 13049 from the National Library of Portugal (BNP). The codex is composed of six parts, three of which are Portuguese translations of the work Defense de lʼEglise Romaine contre les calomnies translations of the work Defense de lʼEglise Romaine contre les calomnies (BNP). The codex is composed of six parts, three of which are Portuguese des Protestans, by French Jansenist Dom Gabriel Gerberon (1628-1711). Protestants (Calvinists) accused the Roman Church of being Pelagian. Dom Gerberon attempts to illustrate the differences between Catholic, Protestant and Pelagian doctrines concerning the mysteries of Predestination and Grace. The work includes a collection of dialogues between Deodatus and Romano that could be seen as a sort of Jansenist Catechism. The Codex also reveals the infl uence of other Jansenist authors such as Vivien de Laborde and Jerome Besoigne.