Showing papers on "Jansenism published in 2012"

Tocqueville's politics of providence: Pascal, Jansenism and the author's introduction to Democracy in America

Abstract: One aspect of Alexis de Tocqueville’s particular genius is his ability to combine social science and political rhetoric. The category of Providence is a wonderful example of this mix. Though infrequently used, it appears at key moments in Tocqueville’s texts. In this article I argue that there are two senses in which Tocqueville uses Providence, with distinct intellectual histories. The first can be traced to the Bishop Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet. Its history and function is well understood. The second, notably expressed in the Author’s Introduction to Democracy in America, has yet to be sufficiently contextualized. It is best understood in relation to the Jansenist religious tradition in France, especially the works of Blaise Pascal.1

Scaffold, Pulpit, Booth, and Possibly a Death-Bed: Scenes of Confession in Hawthorne and Poe

Abstract: In one of Anglophone poetry's most unlikely moments, Poe's Tamerlane confesses to a Christian monk who has found his way along the blood-drenched road to Samarkand. Poe justifies the scenario in a note to the version of 1829: "How I shall account for giving him a 'friar' as a death-bed confessor--I cannot exactly determine. He wanted someone to listen to his tale--and why not a friar?" (1386). Even before the enactment of the law of 1647 ordaining banishment or death for Roman Catholic priests, finding one in Boston was almost as unlikely. (1) Yet Hawthorne had considered having Dimmesdale confess to such a priest, and James Russell Lowell, for one, was "sorry he didn't." (2) One might argue, of course, that the presence of a professional listener whose calling requires him to judge and to console is, like the mirror that reveals the features of a heroine or hero, a trusty narrative device. Yet in the largely Protestant culture of the U.S.A. that Poe and Hawthorne knew, an ambivalent fascination with confession flourished, as it did in Britain. (3) The confessional presence in their works is a response both to the polemical tumult of their day and their own artistic (and personal) concerns with silence, secrecy, and speaking out. In anti-Catholic polemics of the nineteenth century and beyond, the sacrament of penance and reconciliation (to use its formal name) was a spiritual abomination in itself, encouraging sinners to take absolution for granted and claiming for the priesthood a power to forgive that rightfully was God's alone. Moreover, the social effects of confession exemplified Rome's aggressive tendencies. Taking a then- familiar line, William Hogan, an apostate priest and militant nativist, presents the confessional as a means of political indoctrination and the exploitation of gullible immigrants: But how is it with the Roman Catholic who comes amongst you? Scarce does he land on your shores, when he becomes more turbulent, more noisy, and more presumptuous, than when he left his native bogs. As soon as he confesses to his priest, he hurrahs for democracy, by which he means anarchy, confusion, and the downfall of heretics. He must vote; if he cannot do so fairly, his priest tells him how to evade the obligations of an oath. (122) (4) Thus, in the U.S., the Roman Church is the enemy within, a threat to nation and to family. Patriarchs who allow a family member to convert are "moral assassins": Do any of those fathers know the questions which a Romish priest puts to these children, at confession? Do husbands know the questions which priests put to their wives, at confession? Though a married man, I would blush to mention the least of them. (170) In the same year as Hogan's tirade, 1845, Jules Michelet's Du Pretre, de la femme, de la famille appeared in Paris, followed right away by an English translation published in Philadelphia: Spiritual Direction, and Auricular Confession. While Hogan takes up the language of sixteenth-and seventeenth-century hard-line Protestantism, Michelet begins with seventeenth-century controversies among French Catholics, specifically between the Jansenists and the Jesuits. (5) Like Pascal in his Lettres provinciales (1656-57), Michelet attacks the position of those among the Jesuits who offered to the socially privileged a regime pleasingly mild and quick to excuse. (6) Michelet deplores the "sweet language of pious tenderness" (67) and goes beyond Pascal in claiming that priests vied with each other in permissiveness: Let one imagine to himself this general emulation between confessors, directors, and consulting casuists, to justify every body, and to find continually some adroit means to go farther in indulgence, and to make some new case innocent which had before been deemed culpable. (48) The words case and casuistry deserve noting, as does directors. When understood in a hostile sense, a case is an act (quite possibly a bad act) assessed in its extenuating circumstances, and casuistry is the means by which the act can be made to seem trivial, or easily forgivable, or even praiseworthy, quite possibly with the aid of equivocation. …

The Oratory in the seventeenth-century Low Countries. Filippo Neri, Pierre de Bérulle, and the Oratory of Jesus

Abstract: In the particular context of the early modern Low Countries, subject to political divisions and confessional dissensions, the Catholic Reform movement found its primary expression in missionary work for which the new institutes of secular priests proved to be an appropriate instrument. They fostered a new, Christ-centred spirituality and united the clergy closely around the local hierarchy. The institutional formula finally adopted was that of the Oratory, according to the inspiration of either Saint Philip Neri or Pierre de Berulle. This article analyses the laborious and complex genesis of this formula in the early modern Low Countries, the early links and long lasting relations between the two Oratories and the measure of their interrelationship, and their development towards an increasing autonomy, among each other as well as with respect to foreign authorities, until the Jansenist crisis of 1729. Finally, it shows the diverging evolution of the Berullian Oratory (including members from the United Pro...

Morales en conflit: Théologie et polémique au Grand Siècle (1640–1700) (review)

Abstract: Morales en conflit: Theologie et polemique au Grand Siecle (1640-1700). By Jean-Pascal Gay (Paris: Les Editions du Cerf. 201 1 . Pp. 984. euro45,00 paperback. ISBN 978-2-204-09150-3.) In this major study of one of the most notorious of intra-Catholic disputes in early-modern France, Jean-Pascal Gay provides a tripartite survey of the Jansenist-Jesuit controversy. He begins, persuasively but surprisingly, at the end, with the censure of laxism by the Assemblee du Clerge in 1700, before retracing both the growing critique of casuistry and the attendant evolution of rigorism from the earlier years of the century. Among the many complex and overlapping considerations that arise are the question of Gallicanism (the degree, in other words, to which this conflict was aggravated by its origins in the French Church or, conversely, by the suspicion within France of an ultramontane agenda, focused on the Roman center and its links with the Society of Jesus); the relationship among casuistry, stricto sensu, and the various penitential hypotheses to which it gave rise (tutiorism [the safer], probabiliorism [the more probable] and, most controversial of all, probabilism [that which is simply probable]); the internal differences within both warring factions and, more controversially again, the perceived proximity between Jansenism and Calvinism; the local variations within the French jurisdiction; the accessibility (or not) of casuistic publications (in French and Latin), and the uses to which they were put; and the prehistory of the tradition and the appeal to precedent. The three parts are broadly diachronic (narrating the evolution of the controversy), ideological (examining the core issues at stake), and generic (examining the respective arenas of theology and polemic). There are four dominant texts (alongside an immense corpus of more technical treatises, from all of which extensive quotation is provided): the hostile Theologie morale des Jesuites, attributed to Antoine Arnauld (1643); the Lettres provinciales of Blaise Pascal (1656-57), constituting a turning point in the popularization of the debate and the trigger for a great deal of what was to follow, both in writing and in practice; the response, in the form of the Apologie des casuistes by the Jesuit Pere Georges Pirot (Paris, 1657); and the rigorist Theologie morale de Grenoble (Paris, 1676), whose influence was to continue well into the eighteenth century (and the broader scope of reference of the study extends both backward into the sixteenth century and forward to the 1730s). …

A RHETORIC OF DISCONTINUITY: On Stylistic Parallels between Pascal's Pensées and Samuel Beckett's L'Innommable

Abstract: Through a comparative stylistic analysis of Pascal's Pensees and Beckett's L'Innommable, this article assesses the significance of the striking correspondences between the two writers' use of language. Focusing in particular on their reliance upon the rhetorical figure of paradox, it suggests that Beckett's practice of a combinatory and fragmentary art was arguably inspired by his careful reading of the Pensees.Samuel Beckett read Pascal throughout his life, and a copy of the Pensees, an undated reprint of the 1670 edition by the Parisian publisher Ernest Flammarion, was in his personal library at the time of his death.1 Traces of his readings of the Pensees can be found in his "Whoroscope" and "Sottisier" Notebooks, which he kept, respectively, in the late 1930s, and until the 1980s. Rachel Burrows' s notes show that Pascal was an underlying presence in the 1931 lectures on Racine in Trinity College Dublin, for Beckett frequently established a correspondence between the nature of the tragic in Racine's plays and Pascal's Jansenist denial of free will.2 The Pensees (1670) likewise remained a key reference in Beckett's early critical writings on art and literature, where frequent parody of, playful allusions to, and, occasionally, direct quotations from Pascal can be found. Some instances are given in the entry on Pascal in the Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett (Ackerley and Gontarski, 428) .3 Furthermore, a close reading of the 1931 Proust monograph would reveal that the Pensees also served as a primary subtext in Beckett's interpretation of ? la recherche du temps perdu. More significantly, Beckett seems to have knowingly incorporated thematic and aesthetic elements of Pascal's work into the essay.4There are many indications that Beckett's use of Pascal corresponds to the intellectual practice of his time and that he shared his admiration for Pascal with his contemporaries, including some of the foremost writers and intellectuals of the Parisian scene, in particular those close to the Nouvelle Revue Francaise? His conception of Pascal was probably influenced by his admiration for writers such as Andre Gide and Marcel Proust, both of whom saw in Pascal the first 'modern' thinker and insisted on the unique quality of his prose (Gide, 281; Landes-Ferrali, 411). In 1923, Paul Valery, with whom Beckett became acquainted through Joyce (Ellmann, 615), wrote a "Variation sur une pensee" for the celebration of the tercentenary of Pascal's birth, praising Pascal for his poetic eloquence and intellectual genius, even as he denounced the stifling impact of a Jansenist angst upon his work (461-63). Like some of these intellectuals, Beckett distanced himself from the apologetic and mystical elements of Pascal's thought (Bryden, 20). In addition, from reading Sainte-Beuve, he was aware of the ongoing critical tradition that sought manifestations of l'esprit francais in the history of French literature, of which Pascal is an outstanding representative. Beyond intellectual fashion, however, given the many allusions to Pascal in Beckett's early work and teaching, his reading of Pascal arguably had a profound impact upon him, particularly in his formative years, even if he did not explicitly acknowledge a debt towards Pascal, as he had for other writers of the French seventeenth century, such as Descartes and Racine.Some two decades after the publication of Proust, interpretations of En attendant Godot established the existence of thematic similarities between Beckett and Pascal in addition to a common ethical stance. In 1953, the playwright Jean Anouilh famously described the play as "a music hall sketch of Pascal's Pensees performed by the Fratellini clowns" (qtd. in Robinson, 248). He was alluding to the poignant evocation of the tragic nature of the human condition in the Pensees with its insistence on misere (suffering), human limitations, and contingency in the face of the passage of time that makes the very stuff of the Pensees. …