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Jansenism

About: Jansenism is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 189 publications have been published within this topic receiving 1397 citations. The topic is also known as: jansenisme & jansenists.


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Book ChapterDOI
01 Jan 2010
TL;DR: In this article, the authors 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.
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

2 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
01 Mar 1989
TL;DR: One such new resource for the history of the people is the study of liturgy as discussed by the authors, a word of great interest, one which has acquired a deeper resonance through each successive stage of its use for 2,700 years in Western Civilization.
Abstract: The history of the masses has enjoyed a generation of expansion, and fashion, in which scholars have grown increasingly severe with chroniclers of the high policy of rulers who show no interest in the deeper and more permanent needs of the ruled or with historians of ideas who handle abstract concepts in a vacuum without reference to the popular climate in which they have originated. 'The people' has become a primary association of historical inquiry. In being concerned with 'the people', historians today are more and more interested in the processes of social change, with the experiences, states of mind, and attitudes of whole groups, their institutions and social arrangements, in short all that we have to know in order to understand what the evolution of society has been like with all its marvellous complications and rich variety. As the prism of the past has shifted dramatically to the 'history of the people', new kinds of sources have become important.' In our time historians are increasingly aware of the bias that comes from a close study of written texts alone, documents that may not reflect the interplay in society of all groups and classes.? The temptation to generalize 'the mind' of an age from the written works of a handful of great men is being resisted. Today historians are discovering that written texts are but one deposit of the ultimate object of historical study, knowledge about how the large majority of people in the past thought, felt, and lived. Textual evidence has restricted findings about the past primarily to one group alone, to educated men. Now historians are looking for information about other people, even the inarticulate, and the sources are proving abundant, even overwhelming. One such new resource for the history of 'the people' is the study of liturgy.:' Liturgy is a word of great interest, one which has acquired a deeper resonance through each successive stage of its use for 2,700 years in Western Civilization. Moeris long ago dated the first reference to liturgy in Attic tablets of the seventh century B.C.E.4 By the fifth century

2 citations

Journal Article
TL;DR: In one of Anglophone poetry's most unlikely moments, Tamerlane confesses to a Christian monk who has found his way along the blood-drenched road to Samarkand.
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. …

2 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore the origins of the Highland/Lowland divide through the personal history of a leading actor in the drama, who was involved in the anti-Jansenism controversy in the Scottish Catholic Mission.
Abstract: The 'chief trial' affecting the Scottish Catholic Mission in the first half of the eighteenth century was undoubtedly the accusation of Jansenist heresy which was laid against leading missioners, including bishops, by a section of the clergy.1 The factors involved in 'anti-Jansenism', arguably more significant than what it claimed to attack, have recently been clarified.2 The quarrel certainly went well beyond its ostensible focus, the Bull Unigenitus of 1713, which condemned the theology and narrow pastoral emphasis of Cornelius Jansen as reaffirmed by Quesnel. While an international view is in one sense appropriate for this issue, with French Gallicanism close to its heart, another concerns 'frontier' Catholicism,3 the implication for Scotland being that missionary priests were influenced by the Calvinism which they were trained to confront. The best specifically pastoral training was obtained in the Scots College, Paris, in comparison with the Jesuit education provided at the other 'abroad' colleges of Rome, Madrid and Douai.4 But the split was not simply a matter of Paris-trained against the rest. And although Jesuits and Benedictines lined up on the prosecution side the dispute was much more than an extension of the regularsecular issue which had been the chief trial hitherto—and which was eased when the Scottish clergy were placed under the episcopal jurisdiction of a vicar-apostolic, Thomas Nicolson. Within Scotland, the most significant factor in the quarrel over Jansenism, it has been acknowledged, was the division between Highland and Lowland Catholics.5 That is the broad theme of this paper too, but it seeks to explore the origins of that Highland/Lowland divide through the personal history of a leading actor in the drama. When the storm broke in 1731 it was Fr Gregor or Kilian McGregor, OSB, who laid charges of heresy against those who controlled the Mission. Under the pressure of events Bishop James Gordon then agreed to exact an anti-Jansenist oath from his priests, but in 1735 two leaders of the

2 citations

Book ChapterDOI
01 Jan 2014
TL;DR: A nucleus of elements of Molina's authentic doctrine exists which has long remained known to all European scholars, even when they had never read the books directly, and which can provide us with the means for testing what type of relationship a determined author had with "Molinism", including partial adhesion, competition, or open hostility.
Abstract: "Molinism" is one of the ghosts that haunt the theological and philosophical controversies of the 17th century. For Luis de Molina's early adversaries it was simply a new edition of Pelagian heresy, and rivers of ink were poured to confirm or confute this identification. For the Jansenists, "Molinism" was not only a doctrine of grace and of freedom, but the first step of a wide series of evil moral innovations, ranging from probabilism to the doctrine of "philosophical sin", in short a "relaxed" doctrine whose ultimate aim would be to promise men a cheap salvation. A nucleus of elements of Molina's authentic doctrine exists which has long remained known to all European scholars, even when they had never read Molina's books directly, and which can provide us with the means for testing what type of relationship a determined author had with "Molinism", including partial adhesion, competition, or open hostility. Keywords: Luis de Molina; Molinism; Pelagian heresy; philosophical sin

2 citations


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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
20203
20194
20182
20178
20167
20156