Jansen and the Jansenists
Friends of truth or intellectual subversives undermining the authority of both Rome and Versailles? Alexander Sedgwick follows the story of how a theological argument about grace and freewill became enmeshed in the politics of seventeenth-century France.
The condemnation by the papacy in the middle of the seventeenth century of several propositions allegedly contained in a ponderous theological treatise written by an obscure Flemish bishop, Cornelius Jansen, provoked a movement in France that posed a serious challenge to the authority of Church and State and contributed to the political currents that undermined the French monarchy. Those who defended Jansen's doctrine against the combined efforts of king and pope to declare that doctrine heretical, did so in the name of the conscience and reason of the individual, and in so doing contributed to the development of modern western culture. In defence of their beliefs, Jansenists allied themselves with those elements within the judiciary and the Church that challenged the absolute power of king and pope.
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