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.

Réforme éducative et politique parlementaire en France (1753-1783)

Abstract: SUMMARY In the second half of the eighteenth century, debates on school reform were recurrent. The parlements, and particularly the Paris parlement, took part in them and became involved in school issues, notably at the time of the ban placed on the Jesuits. This parliamentary intervention can be explained by a Gallican attitude and a Jansenist bias. The members of the parlements favoured a system of education that would be national, moral and dual. La Chalotais, Guyton de Morveau and Rolland d'Erceville were the theorists of these proposed reforms. The involvement of the parlements did not upset the traditional cursus studiorum, but it betokened both a political and a social ambition. It also amounted to an intervention by lay authorities in an area hitherto reserved to Church authorities, and thus to a moment in the process of separation between Church and State that would expand during the French Revolution.

Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France. Volume 1: The Clerical Establishment and its Social Ramifications; Volume 2: The Religion of the People and the Politics of Religion (review)

Abstract: Church and Society in Eighteenth-Century France. Volume 1: The Clerical Establishment and its Social Ramifications; Volume 2: The Religion of the People and the Politics of Religion. By John McManners. [The Oxford History of the Christian Church.] (New York: Oxford University Press. 1998. Pp. xviii, 817; xiv, 866. $155.00, $165.00 clothbound; $49.95, $45.00 paperback.) The British are renowned travelers. An innate sense of curiosity seems to take them to every possible place on earth, to visit, to observe, and to report. These travel stories have taken many shapes from Dr. Burney's European musical journeys to A Year in Provence, but they share a common perspective: a keen attention to the details, especially the whimsical ones, and a slightly amused way of describing their experience. This view, I suspect, has also influenced British historians, who have with the same flair visited the past and come back with reports that are both comprehensive and entertaining. Since his 1960 dissertation, dedicated to the city of Angers in the eighteenth century, John McManners has proven himself to be the master of this type of historical exploration. With his deep attachment to the Ancien Regime tempered by a very British sense of humor, the future Regius Professor of ecclesiastical history at Oxford gave us the most readable work of social history. The book under scrutiny, written after his retirement from teaching, represents the magnum opus that many academics dream of, but few actually produce. Its well-filled 1700 pages present a complete survey of the French church from Louis XIV's reign to the eve of the French Revolution. Divided into two volumes available separately, it presents successively the clerical establishment (vol. 1) and religious life and politics (vol. 2). In exactly fifty chapters the author offers a complete, up-to-date, and precise description of every aspect of the life of the French church: three chapters on the bishops, three on the parish priests, two on canons and chapters, four on male and female religious orders, preceded by five on Church and State, and followed by a last one on "the Art of Obtaining a Benefice," constitute the first volume. In the second one, nine chapters cover religious practice, including "The Dark Side of the Supernatural" (chap. 30), followed by four very engrossing studies of clerical interventions on moral issues: usury, sexuality, and entertainment. More political, the second part of the book describes the Jansenist conflict that followed the crisis of Unigenitus and the relations of the established church with religious minorities, Protestants and Jews. Entitled "The Crisis of the Ancien Regime," the final three chapters analyze the situation that represented the prodromes to the French Revolution: the political role of the Jansenists, of the bishops, and of the cures. Being a professional historian and a devoted admirer of John McManners, I must confess that long before being asked to review this book I had bought it. …

The Emperor’s Legacy

Abstract: The religious climate in the Austrian Netherlands at the accession of Maria Theresa was characterized by a rigid Catholic orthodoxy tempered by determined opposition to Dutch Calvinism and promoted by a century-long struggle between Jansenist theologians and the pro-papal Archbishops of Malines. Jansenism, with its strong “Gallican” propensities, had appealed to a people accustomed to upholding their cherished “rights” in the face of foreign domination, and for a time — just after the turn of the century — it had appeared to be in the ascendancy as its tenets found forceful expression in the Jus ecclesiasticum universum (1760) and other treatises of Zeger Bernard van Espen, professor of jurisprudence and canon law at the University of Louvain. Van Espen had written against excessive veneration of relics and the saints, the practice of simony, Jesuit casuistry, and unwarranted papal intervention in the affairs of the Belgian episcopacy. Rome, he had insisted, should not dominate the church but should be subject to the restraints of monarchy and episcopacy as was the case in its early history. He had resisted promulgation of the bull Unigenitus which condemned substantive portions of Pasquier Quesnel’s Reflexions morales, and had ranged himself on the side of the Dutch church of Utrecht in its struggle to free itself from papal authority. However, the determined efforts of the curia and the stringent measures employed by Maria Elizabeth, iron-willed sister of Charles VI and his regent for the Lowlands, had succeeded by 1730 in eradicating Jansenist dissenters from the faculty of Louvain. Henceforth this onetime Jansenist center became the outspoken champion of ultramontanism and strict religious orthodoxy.

Lengua, gramática, enseñanza: Salvador Puig i Xoriguer

Abstract: In 1770, Salvador Puig i Xoriguer published Rudimentos de gramatica castellana in Barcelona, under the auspices of the city’s bishop, Josep Climent. This article discusses the circumstances of the publication of this work, such as the Castilianisation of the territories owned by the old Aragonese Crown, the author’s Jansenist tendencies, or the enlightened spirit the grammar is imbued with, and the theoretical analysis in the text, making novel contributions and drawing on interesting sources.

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. …