In the beginning of the XVIIth century the University of Louvain was in a most flourishing condition; the purity of doctrine that prevailed there, its attachment to the Holy See, and the example of loyal and perfect submission it had recently given before the world by repudiating the errors of Baius, gained for it the respect and good wishes of all Christendom. Some of its professors, however, had not entirely renounced Baianism; and unhappily, in their case, distinguished talents were joined with uncommon activity. The most eminent of these men was Jacques Janson, who was the professor and, as it were, the father of Jansenius. He made the third of the party of whom the future Bishop of Ypres and the Abbé de Saint-Cyran were the other two. Louvain then became the centre of a set of ideas of which the doctrines of Baius formed the basis, and which were ripened and developed by Jansenius during nearly thirty years, to be finally brought forth in his famous Augustinus. It was also at the school of Jacques Janson that Philip Rovenius and several eminent individuals among his clergy received their theological training; they therefore drank of Jansenism at its very source.
The Augustinus was issued in 1640 from the press of Jacques Zegers, of Louvain. Immediately, Philip Rovenius, Archbishop of Philippi, in partibus infidelium, and Vicar Apostolic of the United Provinces; Jean Wachtelaer, his vicar-general; Baudoin Catz, afterwards the successor of Jacques de la Torre; Leonard Marius, professor in the College Hollandais at Cologne, and several besides, gave a public and entire approval to the book of Jansenius, coupled with the most flattering praises. There was at once in Belgium, as well as in Holland, and on the part of many virtuous and well-meaning priests, an infatuation, an enthusiasm, exhibited for the Augustinus, of which the reception given almost in our day to the first volume of the Essai sur l'Indifference will give only a faint idea. But Holland distinguished herself in this concert of praises; S. Augustine himself, people said, had spoken by the mouth of Jansenius; Jean Wachtelaer averred that the Netherland priests were never wearied with reading and meditating this incomparable work; Rovenius went further, and formed a league with the Canon of Furnes, a nephew of Jansenius, and several other partisans of the new doctrines, to prevent the Council of Brabant from putting in execution the first measures taken by the Holy See against the Augustinus. These were the circumstances that preceded the bull In eminenti, published at Rome on the 19th of June, 1643, in which the famous work was proscribed as containing propositions previously condemned;[299] we are thus made aware of the sentiments of the clergy, and the spirit in which the young Levites of the United Provinces were formed. Rovenius submitted to the pontifical definition; in his book on the Christian Republic,[300] printed at Anvers, in 1648, he even renders solemn homage to the infallibility of the Vicar of Christ. This important doctrine was then, as always, held in honor at the University of Louvain. Rovenius had learned it there, and to this powerful preservative he owed the honor and fidelity that attended his last days.
The clergy of Holland seemed at first to imitate the humble obedience of its chief; but it soon became evident that this submission was neither as general nor as perfect as was desirable. Left to its ancient traditions of respect for the Holy See, the Church of Holland would perhaps have escaped shipwreck; but it shortly received as vicar apostolic a man of whom Sainte-Beuve has truly said that he was "the great auxiliary of Port Royal in Holland."[301] Jean Neercassel, priest of the Oratory, had had a share in the government of the mission since the year 1652. Consecrated Bishop of Castoria, in partibus, in 1662, he shortly after became, by the death of Baudoin Catz (1663), the sole vicar apostolic in the United Provinces, and continued so to be for the long period of twenty-three years. The illustrious Archbishop of Malines, who knew, by a painful but glorious experience, how greatly firmness and devotion on the part of a chief pastor were needed in those sad times, said: "I shall always commiserate those bishops who are even on terms with a single one of these innovators."[302] Neercassel invited these innovators all to Holland, and made it a place of refuge for them. Arnauld, du Vaucel, Gerberon, Quesnel, and a multitude of apostate monks and fugitive priests, all in revolt against the decisions of the church, cast themselves upon the poor mission as upon a prey provided for them. From Arnauld's correspondence, and the papers found on Gerberon, Quesnel, and others, we see that the direction of the most important affairs of the vicariate apostolic then passed into the hands of the patriarchs of Jansenism. In this school, the clergy of the Netherlands learned the wretched distinction between right and fact (le droit et le fait). As this distinction tion forms one of the bases of the resistance offered by that clergy to the definitions of the Holy See, it would be proper to give a brief explanation of it.
The five famous propositions having been referred to the tribunal of the Sovereign Pontiff by eighty-five French bishops, the so-called disciples of S. Augustine sent a deputation to Rome to defend the sense of Jansenius. They prepared, on this occasion, the celebrated Ecrit à trois Colonnes, in order, said they, "to show fully the state of the controversy, and to furnish the Pope with the means of knowing exactly upon what he had to give judgment." For each proposition there is distinguished, 1st, the sense of Luther or of Calvin, which is condemned; 2d, the natural sense, prout a nobis defenditur, the sense of Jansenius—in a word, that said to be the sense of the church and of S. Augustine;[303] 3d, and last, the Pelagian or semi-Pelagian, which is rejected like the first. At this time, then, the party acknowledged, in an official and authentic document, that it defended the five propositions in the sense of Jansenius, and that this sense was the only natural and legitimate one. The whole question was to know if this sense were heretical or not. It was upon this point that the Pope's decision was invoked both by the bishops and by the partisans of Jansenius.
The decision was given the 31st of May, 1653, in the bull Cum occasione, which condemned the five famous propositions. The church evidently aimed a blow at the spirit of the book, which alone conveyed the error. The Jansenists understood it as every one else did at the time, and were confounded by it. But in their farewell audience, the deputies of the party asked the Pope if he had been understood to condemn the opinion in regard to efficacious grace by itself—the doctrine of S. Augustine. Certainly not, replied the Holy Father. The whole of Jansenism was embraced in this equivocal question; for the Jansenists reasoned thus: the Augustinus contains nothing but the pure doctrine of S. Augustine; we can therefore submit to the bull without rejecting the sense of Jansenius.
To prevent and eliminate in advance every pretext for disobedience, Pope Alexander VII., in 1665, ordered, in a new bull, that the condemnation of the five propositions in the sense of Jansenius should be subscribed to; he directed at the same time, according to the ancient usage of the church, that the signature should be attached to a formula in these words: "I,——, submit to the Apostolic Constitution of Pope Innocent X., dated the 30th of May, 1653, and to that of the Sovereign Pontiff Alexander VII., dated the 16th of October, 1665; I condemn and reject heartily and in all sincerity the five propositions taken from the Augustinus of Cornelius Jansenius in the same manner as they are condemned by the said constitutions; I condemn them in the sense of that author; thus I swear. May God help me and this holy Gospel!"
Then it began to be said in the camp of Jansenius: The pope and the bishops may well decide if the propositions are heretical; it is a question of right. Créance au droit! But are the propositions taken from the Augustinus, and do they convey its sense? That is a question of fact, in regard to which the church might be mistaken. Nevertheless, respect au fait! After this, it was signed, excluding (en exceptant) the sense of Jansenius. The more determined refused their signature; after the time of Pierre Codde, the successor of Neercassel, this was the general rule.
No one, in my opinion, has more fully set forth the state of this question than the author of the Provincial Letters, whose genius demonstrates conclusively the absurdity of this celebrated distinction.[304] He thus expresses himself in a passage wherein he maintains his opinion against Arnauld, Nicole, and others: "The whole dispute is in ascertaining if there be a fact and a right disconnected from one another, or if there be only a right; that is, if the sense of Jansenius ... does nothing but indicate the right. The Pope and the bishops are on one side, and they claim that it is a point of right and of faith to say that the five propositions are heretical in the sense of Jansenius; and Alexander VII. declares in his constitution that, to be in the true faith, we must say that the words, 'sense of Jansenius,' express only the heretical sense of the propositions, and that thus it is a fact which carries with it a right, and makes an essential part of the profession of faith; as if we should say: The sense of Calvin on the Eucharist is heretical, which is certainly a point of faith."[305]
Nothing could be better said. But what is the conclusion? It is this, and Sainte-Beuve himself says the same in other words:[306] the church must be denied all infallibility on the question of right; we must allege that she can be mistaken even as to the true and natural sense of her own decrees, if we would maintain that she could err as to the fact in Jansenius. In a word, we must either completely break with the church, or condemn the sense of Jansenius.
M. Réville seems to know very little of the question of fact as regards Jansenius. One might say that, to form his opinion on this point, he had consulted only a report of the Jansenist Bishop of Utrecht, which contains an account of the latter's interview in 1828 with the Papal nuncio, Mgr. Capaccini. In this, the representative of the Holy See is made to use absurd and ridiculous language; the author of Port Royal, who was not any too well versed in theology, had a better knowledge of the question than this nuncio. How could M. Réville regard this as a serious relation? Has a witness who could neither understand the Catholic theologians nor Pascal himself the right to be believed on his word when he reports, word for word, a long conversation with his opponent, a kind of diplomatic passage-at-arms, wherein it was greatly to his interest to make the best figure for himself? And, besides, what guarantee of exactitude have we in a relation published for the first time twenty-three years after the interview, and six after the death of Cardinal Capaccini, the only person able to rectify the assertions of his interlocutor?[307]