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.

The religion of the people and the politics of religion

Abstract: This second volume begins with a Section on the religion of the people. The clergy offered the liturgical services, sermons, evangelistic missions, and the offices sanctifying birth, marriage, and death; distinctions are made between what they intended and how their ministrations were popularly interpreted and incorporated into the social order. Statistical soundings concerning the extent of religious practice and the degree of conviction involved are evaluated. Further chapters deal with processions, pilgrimages, and popular practices and superstitions, with hermits and confraternities, with the impact of reading the Bible and other edifying literature in an age of increasing literacy. Finally comes a view of the twilight world of magic and sorcery. Throughout this Section the comments of theologians and thinkers of the Enlightenment are recorded, whether in coincidence or contradiction. The next section deals with the efficacy of the confessional and the role of the casuistry of the Church in attempting to mould sexual mores, business practices, and in the world of the theatre. In the next two Sections, the role of religious issues in political affairs is detailed. An overview of the Jansenist quarrel and of the activities of the Jesuits brings in the story of the struggle between Crown and Parlement, while an extended portrayal of the life of the Protestant and Jewish communities leads to the history of the debate on toleration, involving the Gallican Church in political interventions and controversy. Throughout the two volumes the rising forces of anticlericalism and the tensions within the ecclesiastical establishment have been recorded, and these themes come to their climax in a final section on the role played by churchmen in the coming of the Revolution.

The Two Loves

Abstract: E. Gilson has said that a doctrine is Augustinian insofar as it tends the more completely to organise itself about charity as its centre.1 Nicole is as Augustinian in this respect as Pascal or St Francois de Sales, and while we find in Nicole no treatise on the love of God such as we find in the saint, the Essais are full of the same doctrine and are similarly concerned to descry the dangers and permitted limits of love for creatures. Nicole’s discussions have a particular interest as throwing light on the extent to which Jansenism is to be equated with puritanical rigour.

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 French Oratorians and absolutism, 1611-1641

Abstract: Contents: Topics include the spiritual development of Berulle and Condren, Carmelite opposition to the vows of servitude, the Oratorians in French society, and conflicts between the Oratorians and Cardinal de Richelieu. This study focuses on the controversies over spirituality that are important in understanding oppositions to absolutism and the rise of the Jansenist movement in France.