THE STRUGGLE WITH THE JANSENISTS
The story of the Jesuits in France from the middle of the seventeenth to the middle of the eighteenth century is rich in material for the interpretation of their character. We find every conceivable type of Jesuit rising to prominence at some period in the long chronicle. While a Father François Régis or a Julien Manvir sustains the finest traditions of the Society by a splendid expenditure of a noble character in the service of the squalid peasantry, his colleagues smile indulgently upon the perfumed vices of nobles and princes, enter into the most unscrupulous intrigues for the destruction of their theological opponents, and encourage Louis XIV. in the belief that he may do penance for his sins on the backs of the Jansenists and Protestants. While, during a whole generation, they direct the fingers of the Pope in virtue of their supreme and peculiar zeal for his authority, they, in the next generation, secure the praise of the Parlement and the gratitude of the court by a most extraordinary intrigue against the Papacy. In the new-built palace of Versailles they obtain a paramount influence over the greatest autocrat of modern history; they fill the Gallican Church with prelates who will obey their commands; they crush Protestantism in France; and they seem to have almost attained the great ideal of their Society—the control of the courts which control the earth. And within another generation their varied enemies unite and drive them ignominiously from the country.
This singular history centres, for the greater part of the time, on the struggle between the Jansenists and the Jesuits, the origin of which may be briefly recalled. I have in earlier chapters referred to the theological victory of the Jesuits over Michel de Bay at Louvain, and to the fierce and protracted struggle they had with the Dominican theologians in Spain and Italy. It may be remembered that this furious struggle as to the real relations of divine grace and the human will had to be suppressed by the Papacy, and all further controversy on the subject was forbidden. When therefore, in the thirties of the seventeenth century, the Jesuits heard that a certain brilliant and virtuous abbé at Paris and a learned theologian of Belgium were plotting to introduce a new work on the subject, they watched them with care.
Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, or the abbé de St. Cyran, was an energetic Basque who had finished his theological studies at Louvain University. There he had become intimate with a Belgian student named Jansen, who had views, opposed to those of the Jesuits, on the action of grace. St. Cyran, returning to France, became a secret apostle of these views, and hinted that a learned defence of them was being written. It happened that at that time a Puritan movement was arising within the French Church, as a protest against the extreme laxity of the age; and, as the Jesuits were regarded by the Puritans as encouraging this laxity by their remarkable works on casuistry (as we shall see later), there was a predisposition to accept anti-Jesuit views. Further, there was already a tradition of hostility to the Jesuits among the Puritans. The chief centre of the ascetic movement was the famous abbey of Port Royal, and the abbess of Port Royal, Angélique Arnauld, was a daughter of the great lawyer who had more than once formulated the grievances of the Parlement against the Society. Several members of his large and brilliant family were drawn into the movement.
Angélique Arnauld had been committed to the abbey at a very early age by her parents; and, although it shared the general laxity of convents at that time, she chafed for years against her fate. The abbey was in a wild, marshy, unhealthy valley, about eighteen miles from Paris. In the course of time Angélique was converted, and she became abbess of the convent, and devoted all her energy and talent to the purification of its life. It became a famous garden of conventual virtues, and, when the unhealthiness of the valley compelled the nuns to transfer their establishment to Paris in 1626, every pietist in the city was attracted to the abbey of Port Royal de Paris. St. Cyran fell into correspondence with Angélique, defended a book of hers which the Jesuits denounced, and in 1633 became the spiritual director of the community. The convent now had pretensions to be a school of fine taste in letters as well as of virtue, and numbers of the more sincerely religious writers and ladies of Paris looked to it as a kind of club. The Jesuits regarded this independent school of virtue and theology with some apprehension, and, when Jansen died in 1638, and whispers of a posthumous publication of his great work were intercepted, St. Cyran was imprisoned in Vincennes by order of Richelieu. We need not press the suspicion that the cardinal was instigated by the Jesuits. Jansen had satirically assailed the policy of Richelieu in a political work, and the cardinal may have thought it advisable to seize the papers of St. Cyran in order to find some clue to the mysterious work of Jansen which his admirers were secretly promising to the world. St. Cyran also had declined to oblige the cardinal, and he assailed doctrines which Richelieu had espoused in his early theological works. It is, however, to be noted that, when St. Cyran was released, at the death of Richelieu (1642), and his papers restored, it was found that the Jesuits had appropriated some of his letters.
St. Cyran continued to direct the movement from Vincennes, and it entered upon a singular and momentous development. Angélique inspired her nephew, the brilliant young lawyer Le Maistre, her brother Antoine, and other able and serious young men, with her sentiments, and they determined to live a communal and ascetic life. In 1637 they took possession of the deserted buildings of Port Royal aux Champs, and were soon known to all Paris as the virtuous "Solitaries" of the bleak and remote valley. The joy of the good clergy and the amusement of the frivolous were equalled by the exasperation of the Jesuits. The Solitaries passed stern censure on the leniency of Jesuit confessors; and their spirit spread like a ferment through the city, and had the singular effect of inducing penitents to abandon their Jesuit confessors because they had been converted to virtue. At the same time the rumour spread that Jansen's great work was about to see the light. He had died in 1638, leaving his manuscript in the charge of his friends at Louvain. The local Jesuits watched their movements with the assiduity of detectives, and discovered that the work was in the press. It is acknowledged that they bribed the printers, who were sworn to secrecy, to give them sheets of the book, and they complained to the Nuncio that the Louvain professors were about to issue a work on the forbidden topic of grace and free will. Intrigue was met by counter-intrigue,—a piquant situation in view of the sacred theme of the book,—and it was published in 1640, and immediately afterwards published also at Paris.
This small, innocent, and academic treatise, the Augustinus of Jansen, was destined to set Europe aflame for decades. The historic controversy of St. Augustine and the Welsh priest Pelagius, which it recalled, was far surpassed by this modern effort to conciliate the freedom of the human will with the compelling power of grace. Pulpits and schools rang with mutual anathemas; pamphlets of ponderous learning and biting irony mingled with the latest chronique scandaleuse on the book-stalls. But the Jesuit was never content with that free arena of controversy in which he claimed to excel. Rome must condemn his opponents, and the familiar intrigues were set afoot at Rome. The Inquisition denounced the book on the ground that the subject was prohibited. That did not suffice for the Jesuits, nor did it check the flow of argument and invective; and on 6th March 1642, Urban VIII. solemnly condemned the book. The Jansenists had now, however, friends among the prelates, and the bull was not published in France with the customary solemnity. The controversy still raged sullenly, only restrained by Richelieu's spies; and when he died and St. Cyran was released (in the same year), it broke out again into flagrant publicity.
Meantime, a new champion had entered the field, and the attack on the Jesuits assumed a more personal form. Anne de Rohan, Princess of Guémenée and mistress of Archbishop Paul de Gondi (later Cardinal de Retz), fell under the influence of Arnauld d'Andilly and St. Cyran, and their oratory and her advancing years persuaded her that the hour had come to turn to virtue. She had had a Jesuit confessor, like so many of the noble dames and bejewelled prelates who did not deign even to conceal their amours, and he was naturally piqued to find that, as the princess advanced in virtue, she discarded him in favour of St. Cyran. There is no doubt whatever of Anne de Rohan's sincerity, and it is little short of infamous for Crétineau-Joly to say that she "placed her elegant coquetries under the safeguard of the aged Arnauld d'Andilly," and that she was at the same time "the guest of Port Royal and the mistress of Paul de Gondi." The discarded Jesuit submitted to her a manuscript attack on the more rigorous principles she had embraced; Anne de Rohan showed this indignantly to St. Cyran; and the brilliant young brother of Angélique Arnauld was requested to reply. His book De la fréquente Communion (1641) led to a controversy as acrid and noisy as that over the Augustinus.
Arnauld had foreseen the attack; he had submitted the manuscript to theologians, and, when it was denounced by the angry Jesuits, he was able to secure the support of four archbishops, twelve bishops, and a number of doctors of divinity. This alliance of a powerful minority of the higher French clergy with the Jansenists was destined to give the Jesuits serious trouble. One cannot quite endorse the statement that all the virtuous men in the French episcopacy were opposed to the Jesuits, and all the vicious prelates in favour of them. But it was an age so flagrantly immoral that the greater part of the higher clergy had their mistresses, their hounds and hawks, and their boxes at the opera, while on the fringe of the Church were crowds of abbés (often not priests) who led very dissolute lives. The Jesuits had for some time, in virtue of their influence at court, had a voice in the appointment of prelates—we shall find them entirely controlling it in a few years—and there is no doubt that they nominated men of little character who were willing to support them; just as they accepted for the English mission priests of little culture or character, because they could be the more easily dominated. On the other hand, the Jansenists represented, above all things, a rigorous standard of Christian character. The name which the Jesuits have fastened on them implies that they were wedded to certain academic, if not heretical, theories of Bishop Jansen. This is untrue. They were mostly laymen, indifferent to speculative theology, pleading only that the Christian faith demanded a stricter standard of conduct than French Christians generally exhibited. The correct name for them is the Puritans.