Jansenism and the Bull Unigenitus

Cornelius Jansen, bishop of Ypres, died in May 1638. In a will dictated on his deathbed he left his writings in explanation of St Augustine to be published faithfully, and added that if the Roman See wished anything changed he was its obedient son (Jansen, Augustinus, vol. 1, will of 6 May 1638, printed behind the title page). The work was printed at Louvain in 1640 under the title Augustinus; its first volume, the title page says, sets out from Augustine the errors of Pelagius (Jansen, Augustinus, vol. 1, title page) (compare Augustine’s dispute with Pelagius).

On 31 May 1653 Innocent X condemned five propositions. They say that some of God’s commandments are impossible for just people who wish and strive to keep them, given the strength they now have, and that they also lack the grace that would make them possible; that in the state of fallen nature interior grace is never resisted; that to merit or lose merit in that state a person needs freedom from compulsion but not freedom from necessity; that the Semipelagians admitted the need of prevenient interior grace for every act, even for the beginning of faith, and were heretics in holding that the human will could resist or obey that grace; and that it is Semipelagian to say that Christ died or shed his blood for all people without exception (Innocent X, Cum occasione, Denzinger nos. 1092–1096).

The learned men who lived in retirement at the convent of Port-Royal, Saint-Simon says, were accused of Jansenism (Saint-Simon, Memoirs, chapter 46 (the year is named in chapters 44 and 47)). Blaise Pascal, writing at Paris in January 1656, reported the question of fact then before the Sorbonne: Antoine Arnauld had written that he had read Jansen’s book carefully and had not found the condemned propositions in it, though he condemned them wherever they might occur (Pascal, Provincial Letters 1). A year later Pascal wrote that those accused condemned the five propositions and could not admit that Jansen had taught them, and that whether an author holds a doctrine is a question of fact, the denial of which is no heresy (Pascal, Provincial Letters 17).

Rome refused the distinction. In October 1656, before the second of those letters, Alexander VII declared and defined that the five propositions were taken from Jansen’s Augustinus and were condemned in the sense that Jansen intended (Alexander VII, Ad sanctam beati Petri sedem, Denzinger no. 1098), and he later prescribed a formula in which the signer swore to condemn them in that sense (Alexander VII, Ad sanctam beati Petri sedem, the formula of submission, Denzinger no. 1099). In 1705 Clement XI ruled that a “respectful silence” on the question did not suffice: the condemned sense of Jansen’s book was to be rejected not with the mouth only but with the heart (Clement XI, Vineam Domini, Denzinger no. 1350). The duc de Saint-Simon, a courtier who called Jansenism a heresy invented by the Jesuits, tells that on the night of 28 to 29 October 1709 troops surrounded the convent of Port-Royal des Champs, that the nuns were carried off to other houses, and that the buildings were afterwards razed (Saint-Simon, Memoirs, chapter 46 (the year is named in chapters 44 and 47)).

On 8 September 1713 Clement XI issued the constitution Unigenitus against a French New Testament with moral reflections (Clement XI, Unigenitus, title of the Paris printing of 1713), which the edition cited names as the work of Pasquier Quesnel (Clement XI, Unigenitus, editor’s heading and note to nos. 1351–1451 in Denzinger (p. 371)). It condemned 101 propositions taken from the book, among them that without the grace of Jesus Christ nothing good can be done, that the reading of Scripture is for all, and that fear of an unjust excommunication should never keep a person from doing his duty; the censure says that they renew the propositions of Jansen (Clement XI, Unigenitus, propositions 2, 80 and 91 and the closing censure). Saint-Simon called it an “infamous bull”, forced upon the pope by the Jesuit Le Tellier and his friends (Saint-Simon, Memoirs, chapter 63).