CORNELIUS JANSEN

Fond of Paris from his student days, now in his eighties, the visitor looks back. Here is the past: his own, and others’; much of it known, or learnt. Time was, he remembers, two years after the war, the liberated city took up the reins of a normal life without swastikas; but it did that, not so much with a genuflected grâce au bon Dieu, as with a Gallic exist­entialist shrug. Sure, there had been celebratory Masses in Notre Dame and at lesser altars, and collaborators had been duly disgraced. But the local mood was bitter, on the whole, and cynical. If there was anywhere a spirit of buoyancy and regeneration, it was seldom discernible in the Church: more often in the Communist Party; which had been, he was well aware, far more stubbornly courageous in the Resistance than most adherents of Opus Dei. And this dichotomy, of the sacred and the profane, he now recalled, was not something new: two centuries ago, during the Revolution, churches had been closed and monastic orders proscribed, in a wave of anti-clericalism. In due course, Christianity had re-established itself, but never so solidly as before: France was becoming, officially, a secular state; and that declared itself in all kinds of ways, such as, for instance, the mundane yet significant banning of religious symbols in the schools.

Casting his mind back even further, he reflects that such dichotomies had not always been in conflicts with external enemies: they had occurred, sometimes, within Christendom itself. The most obvious example of this, here, was the punitive campaign of Papists against Protestants, which culminated in the St Bartholomew’s Day massacre of the Huguenots. Yet equally remarkable, but narrower in scope, were the repressions by Roman Catholicism of liberal departures from diehard Vatican traditions. Only a few years ago, before this latest visit of his, Liberation Theology had been disallowed. And around the time when he first knew Paris, the Worker-Priest movement had been similarly clamped down on. Such, he thought, is sadly often the fate of those who seek to reform a monolithic and ossified institution from within. If they are not slaughtered or imprisoned or at least, as some have it, disfellowshipped, they have only two choices: to succumb to authority, or to separate and found their own breakaway sects.

Wandering around one day on foot and by metro, he finds himself in the fourteenth arrondissement. Exiting the Port Royal station, he turns east along the Boulevard du Montparnasse and comes, in a few minutes, to the intersection with the Faubourg St-Jacques. Somewhere around here, so far as he can tell (the guide-book has nothing to say on the subject) is the unmarked site of the Jansenist convent of Port Royal, excommunicated in 1709 and immediately thereafter levelled to the ground. Its ethos, to all intents and purposes, perforce evaporated in Paris and the rest of France. But that was not the end of it: it survived in Holland, surfacing strongly in later times. He knew of this and, in his view, that survival was wholly consistent with what Jansenism had stood for during its inception in the first half of the seventeenth century.

Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638) and his colleague, the Abbé de Saint-Cyran (1581–1643), dedicated themselves to a remodelling of the Church along Augustinian lines. This was, in effect, a renovation, not a retrogression. It sought to revivify Christian culture by summoning up the spirit of St Augustine, whose theology had given the Church a solid foundation in direct descent from the New Testament. This renascent hope was in open opposition to the close-minded theology of the Counter-Reformation which, with rabid backing from the Jesuits, was more interested in the consolidation of pontifical power than in any flexible response to the Gospels.

The exercise of power by the Holy See did come into play, as regarded Jansen, at the end of his life, with some justification. He had adopted a theological position of his own that placed more value on spirituality, as a means of grace, than on good works. His writings, to that effect, were banned. But his devotion to a Christ-centred spirituality contrasted markedly with the devotion of the papal court to money and, be it said, to mistresses.

Jansenist ideas and ideals won the allegiance of many French Roman Catholics — to the alarm of several prelates. The nerve-centre of Jansenism, just outside Paris and in Paris itself, was the two convents of Port Royal. The first of them, in the countryside, had been founded in 1204 for Cistercian nuns. Four hundred years later, the nuns were open to more liberal expressions of faith than were common for Cistercians. St-Cyran became the nuns’ spiritual adviser in 1635; under his guidance, and with the enthusiastic support of Jansen, the community attracted many new vocations, making it necessary to found a sister-house in the city, in the Faubourg St-Jacques. This expansion reflected the spread of Jansenism in the French world at large; and that prompted an increasingly hostile reaction in the Roman Catholic authorities. They condemned the movement in 1661, demanding that the nuns submit to official rebuke. The Paris nuns did so, obediently, but the nuns in the first house refused to; and a persecution began. They persisted in their obduracy until 1679, but then their fate was sealed when an edict was issued that forbade them to accept new novices. In 1705 a papal bull was issued, requiring surrender from the remaining and now elderly nuns. They defied it. So in 1709 the authorities moved in, expelling and dispersing the nuns. At the same time, the city nuns came under suspicion of continued Jansenism, even though they had been outwardly more acquiescent. They, too, were expelled and dispersed; and by 1713 their buildings had been demolished.

As has been remarked, it is easier to kill a person than to kill an idea. The demolition of Port Royal may have meant the end of Jansenism in its original setting. But the movement persisted across two borders, in Holland, which was actually Jansen’s birthplace. There it met with a somewhat more relaxed response from the policemen of the Counter-Reformation, who were primarily interested in stemming the spread of Dutch Protestantism. Mainly concentrated around Utrecht, the Dutch Jansenists continued their stalwart variations on Roman Catholic themes; and only when it became apparent that there were irreconcilable differences did they separate from Rome. They did not move, however, in a Protestant direction. The local Reformation was stringently Calvinist, and they found that both unattractive and illegitimate. Instead, they simply organized themselves as Old Catholics, and held their ground.

What they stood for was at odds with the papal norms of the time and was, in fact, far in advance of such norms. They insisted on vernacular worship, and they permitted clerical marriage and the use of contraception. Rome only made room for vernacular worship some sixty years ago, and it has yet to make clerical celibacy optional rather than compulsory — contraception, of course, under a succession of popes has remained forbidden. Meanwhile the Old Catholics have persevered, and are now in full communion, since 1932, with Anglican, Lutheran, and Orthodox Churches.

The liberalism of the Old Catholic Church contrasts strikingly with the inflexibility of the two denominations to its right and left, so to speak: Roman inflexibility, on matters of doctrine and practice, is adamant­ine; and the rigidity of the Dutch Reformed Church is famous — some people would say it is notorious, given its record of support for Apartheid in South Africa. It would not, perhaps, be going too far to say that the contrast between the Old Catholics and their Roman or Calvinist contemporaries is the contrast between genuine piety and mere pietism.

One cannot, in that regard, do otherwise than reflect on the irony of using the Latin word pius, as it has been used, as a titular name by the last four popes who have adopted it. In antiquity, the adjective was famously used by Virgil in the “Aeneid”, where he constantly calls his hero pius Aeneas, referring not to any religious devoutness of Aeneas’s, but to his dutiful sense of filial piety: his father, Priam, had ruled mightily in Troy; Aeneas, after Troy fell, made it his mission, in honour of his father, to found Rome and create an Empire as powerful as Troy’s had been. Thus pius Aeneas.

What he could not have foreseen was that Rome, more than a millennium later, would be headquarters not only of a secular empire, but also of a world religion. After the promotion of Christianity, by Constantine, to the status of a State religion, the popes enjoyed an ascendancy scarcely less magisterial than that of the emperors themselves. And even after Rome, the city, fell to the barbarians, Roman pontiffs governed the Christian faith with undiminished authority. Indeed, even after the Great Schism of 1054, the popes of Western Christendom exercised power that was not merely ecclesiastical and doctrinal, but worldly, too: they had a big say in who might, or might not, become Holy Roman Emperor; and they imposed their views, often enough, by the force of arms.

In the centuries that followed the late-mediaeval corruptions and the crusades against dissidents or separatists, the popes limited their autocracy to ecclesia. Kings and Parliaments could no longer be made to do their bidding. But Archbishops could be, and lesser clerks all the way down to the humblest deacon — let alone the layfolk in the pews. By the middle of the nineteenth century, Roman Catholics were entirely subject to whatever Rome decreed. And then the Cardinals crowned a quartet of popes, all called Pius, whose record has much to do with formulaic pietism, and not very much to do with the down-to-earth teachings of Jesus. They were Pius IX, Pius X, Pius XI, and Pius XII.

It was Pius IX who, with astonishing arrogance, pronounced the doctrine of Papal Infallibility. Pius X, with the blind conservatism of an archduke and the overbearing manner of a regimental sergeant-major, repressed any attempts to align the Church with modern sensibilities, especially in France, where the government, no longer at diocesans’ beck and call, were translating the parable of Dives and Lazarus into the vernacular of a welfare state. Pius XI, like all his successors, led a harsh campaign against the use of contraception, thus thrusting obedient families into the pit of poverty. And Pius XII was scandalously willing to temporize with Hitler as early as 1933; despite his many other good works, he cannot escape going down in history as a collaborator — and what has that to do with piety?

The visitor pauses in the Faubourg St-Jacques. Somewhere hereabouts, long ago, pious nuns went about the daily business of prayer and praise, but were not content: not content to servilely do the bidding of a hierarchy at once remote and bigoted; to accept without question dogmas that could not withstand the scrutiny of an educated mind; or to bow the knee to a Vicar of Christ who bore small resemblance to a true Christian.

He shrugs — almost for the moment a Parisian himself. But fairness intervenes. This, after all, is a city, like any other, full of contra­dictions. Christians here may have fallen sadly short, all too often, of what their faith requires. Yet here, too, a Christian culture has nourished the likes of Blaise Pascal, Vincent de Paul, François de Sales, in times gone by; and in our own time, the likes of Pierre Tailhard de Chardin, Olivier Messiaen, Simone Weill. All of whose good works have nothing to fear from any comparison with what the world has received, here, from its secular saints: formerly, from François Rabelais, Jean-Baptiste Molière, François-Marie Arouet aka Voltaire; within living memory, from Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, André Malraux.

Voici ensemble la figure humaine et le milieu divin.