The Critique of Calvin in Jansenius's Augustinus

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The Critique of Calvin in Jansenius’s Augustinus

Ralph Keen

Jansenism was merely another form of Calvinism, or so it was commonly assert- ed by Jesuits and others, who found the Jansenist position on sovereign grace a denial of the freedom of the will that had been a central point of difference between Catholics and Protestants since the beginning of the Reformation. An anonymous polemic of 1650, attributed to the Jesuit François Vavasseur (1605–1681), charged Jansenius with five points of similarity with the Calvin- ists.1 Refuting Calvinism, or what was included under that term, had been a Jesuit-led enterprise for decades before the appearance in 1638 of Jansenius’s Augustinus; thus the charge of Calvinism, when leveled against the Jansenists, needed little explanation. It identified the followers of the Bishop of Ypres and the Abbot of St.-Cyran with Protestants already condemned a century before in the harshest of terms. Cornelius Jansenius (1585–1638) and Jean du Vergier de Hauranne, abbot of St. Cyran (1581–1643) were no Calvinists; and neither was Antoine Ar- nauld (1612–1694), although his grandfather had been for a while and some members of his family remained Reformed. The label was used for polemical purposes to identify those holding views of sin and grace more readily associ- ated with Reformed anthropology than with the system of cooperating grace and merit that characterized religious teaching and practice in Counter- Reformation Catholicism. Research into the Reformation-era confessionalizing of the Church Fathers has revealed the degree to which efforts to deploy Patristic testimony helped shape religious argumentation by virtually every party to the controversies of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the process the familiar rubrics of “scripture alone” and “scripture and tradition(s)” which had been used to char- acterize Protestant and Catholic positions on authority in doctrine have been replaced by a more subtle awareness that the theological tradition, whether as source or as corroboration, was no less a contested field than scripture itself for much of the extended Reformation era. Given the centrality of the doctrines of justification and sanctification, and contrasting conceptions of merit accom- panying the formulations of these doctrines, there is no mystery surround- ing the enduring importance of Augustine as the touchstone of orthodoxy in

1 François Vavasseur, Cornelius Iansenius Iprensis Suspectus (Parisiis: apud Sebastianum and Gabrielem Cramoisy, 1650), sigs. O8-S2.

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2018 | doi 10.1163/9789004356795_026 406 Keen religious controversy of the Reformation and post-Reformation eras. If it can be said that the beginnings of the Reformation were a series of footnotes to the Pauline corpus, its continuation through the following century was a series of footnotes to Augustine. Within Catholicism, no theologian was more zealous in recovering Augus- tinianism than the Bishop of Ypres from 1635 to 1638, Cornelius Jansenius, and few were more controversial. Educated at Louvain, where he became a follower of Michael Baius and the “Augustinian” reaction to the Jesuit theology then dominant elsewhere, Jansenius represents a reaction both to the severe Protestant appropriation of the Augustinian legacy (which may be said to cul- minate in the Synod of Dordrecht) and the method of accommodation associ- ated with the Jesuits. Jansenius’s work was the Catholic recovery of Augustine, an effort occupying two dimensions. On the one hand, as with Patristic reception generally, Janse- nius’s task was to present the legacy of the Church Father in a way that un- derscored his importance in the seventeenth century: a Counter-Reformation ressourcement in which the early tradition never loses its relevance. In its polemical mode, the weight of the tradition had often been brought to bear on the questions of the present. The other dimension, one that became a priority as the Reformation progressed and Patristic authority was being summoned to the support of positions on every side, was that of a Catholic interpretation of these early sources, one in which the Reformers’ allegedly erroneous and heretical appropriation of these authors would be fully exposed.2 Such confes- sionally differentiated interpretations of the Church Fathers became common after the Council of Trent, polemical erudition arguably reaching its peak in the work of Cardinal Robert Bellarmine.

1 Jansenius and His Circle

According to the brief Life published with the Augustinus, Cornelius Jansen was born to a devoted Catholic family, attended Louvain as a member of the Falcon, and after studying Greek in Paris, moved to Cambridge where he stud- ied the Church Fathers, especially Augustine. Jansenius considered no other Church Father equal to Augustine, and held that all things originated in and

2 See Erika Rummel, The Confessionalization of Humanism in Reformation Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) and Irena Backus, Historical Method and Confessional Identity in the Era of the Reformation (1378–1615), Studies in Medieval and Reformation Thought (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 94.