Jansenism
1640 – 1790
Augustine taken at his word about grace, against a church that had quietly stopped believing him, and defended in the best French prose of the century.
- Active
- 1640 – 1790
- Where
- Port-Royal, near Paris
- Status
- extinct
- Tradition
- Christian
The claim
Human nature after the Fall is incapable of good without grace, that grace is given to some and not others, and no amount of effort or casuistry alters this.
What it held
Jansenism is what happens when people take a doctrine the institution officially holds and insist on its consequences. The church affirmed Augustine on grace; the Jesuits had developed an account of free will that softened it considerably; Jansen's posthumous Augustinus argued that this was a betrayal, and the fight consumed French religious life for a century and a half.
What makes it philosophically interesting is Pascal, who was drawn to Port-Royal after his sister entered it. The Provincial Letters are a polemic against Jesuit casuistry so effective that Voltaire, who agreed with nothing in them, called them the best prose in French. The Pensées are fragments of an unfinished defence of Christianity aimed at people who find it implausible.
Pascal's wager belongs here and is routinely misread. It is not an argument that God exists. It is an argument addressed to someone who has concluded that reason cannot settle the question, about what to do when you must act under uncertainty — and it is the first serious use of expected value in a decision.
The Port-Royal Logic, written by Arnauld and Nicole, was the standard logic textbook in Europe for two centuries.
How it argued
Patristic citation against contemporary practice, plus polemic of unusual literary quality, plus the beginnings of formal decision theory.
What it was arguing against
Jesuit moral theology, especially probabilism — the doctrine that one may follow any probable opinion, which the Jansenists said made every sin excusable.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether the five propositions condemned by Rome were actually in Jansen's book. The Jansenists conceded the propositions were heretical and denied they were there, a distinction Rome refused to accept.
Common misconceptions
That the wager is Pascal's proof of God. He explicitly says reason cannot decide it. And Jansenism is not Calvinism — its adherents insisted they were Catholic, and the persecution was intramural.
How it began
Cornelius Jansen's Augustinus, published in 1640 two years after his death, and the convent of Port-Royal-des-Champs under Angélique Arnauld.
What became of it
Suppressed by force. Louis XIV had the convent demolished in 1710 and the bodies in its cemetery dug up. The movement persisted underground and shaped French anticlericalism.
Lasting influence
The Port-Royal Logic on the teaching of logic. Pascal on decision theory and probability. Racine, educated at Port-Royal, on French tragedy.
Why it still matters
The wager is a standard case in decision theory. And the argument about whether moral rules can be applied case by case without dissolving is a permanent one in ethics.
Put another way
A narrow gate that a great many people are told they are not walking through.
Where to start
The Pensées, in the Sellier or Lafuma arrangement, read as fragments rather than as a book.
The surprising bit
Louis XIV did not merely close Port-Royal. He had the buildings levelled, the church destroyed, and the graves exhumed and the remains scattered — an unusual level of attention for a dispute about grace.
In their own words
The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.
Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed.
Connections
- Answers
- Augustinianism
- Opposed by
- Thomism
The verdict
A theological quarrel that produced two of the best books in French and one of the founding ideas of probability.