At the site of Port-Royal des Champs during the autumn of 2001, Marie-José Michel and Bernard and Monique Cottret organized a colloquium on Jansenism and Puritanism. The two simultaneous religious movements invite comparison: both took their theological cues from Saint Augustine, both espoused the doctrines of divine predestination and human dependence on efficacious or irresistible grace, both resulted in a rigorous and book-oriented piety, and both fell afoul of their respective confessional monarchies. The book which emerged from the colloquium—Bernard Cottret, Monique Cottret, and Marie-José Michel, eds., Jansénisme et puritanisme (Paris, 2002)—is the best treatment of this comparison.
But at one point in the discussion, the great French historian of Jansenism Jean Mesnard rose to sound a discordant note. For the Jansenists alone, he observed, justification demanded a life of penitence. Calvinists left their “justified” off the hook by demanding faith alone and assuring those thus “elected” of perseverance to the end. But Jansenism's Jesuit enemies, in contrast, did so by endowing post-lapsarian human nature with a will free enough to avail itself of merely “sufficient” grace and by watering down the demands of divine law by means of their lax confessional ethics.
Mesnard's unpublished remark is fundamental to the counterintuitive but persuasive thesis of Thomas Palmer's Jansenism and England. Palmer's English counterpoint in comparison is not to Puritans but rather to disestablished anti-Puritan Anglicans in exile during the interregnum of 1640–1660, some of them literally so in Paris. There, they came to know Jansenists, initially attracted by the Jansenist critique of the Jesuits’ permissive casuistry or “circumstantial ethics” in the confessional that, pilloried by Pascal in his Provincial Letters and Antoine Arnauld in his Théologie morale des jésuites, they found useful against the threat posed by Catholicism in England, especially after the Restoration of the Catholic-leaning Stuart dynasty in 1660. By associating this critique with Catholicism as a whole, they hoped to revive the English Protestant fear of a “popish plot” featuring the Jesuits as papal agents. Another hope was to use this critique to peel off an anti-Jesuit chapter of the secular Catholic clergy known as the Blackloists in view of a possible union between that chapter and a thereby-strengthened national church.
From the second into the fifth chapters of this fine piece of detective work, Palmer tracks down the transmission, collection, translation, and reception of this and other Jansenist literature into England. From deep within Charles II's ministry, the mastermind of the strategy of dividing the English Catholic community was Chancellor Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon, seconded by others such as James Butler, Duke of Ormond. But as the real movers and shakers of this effort, Parsons identifies a group of seriously pious Anglican divines such as Richard Allestree, John Evelyn, Henry Hammond, Jeremy Taylor, and Herbert Thorndike.
But this much is only half of Palmer's argument. The heftier half concerns the moral and theological attraction of Jansenism for these Anglican divines. Treated in the first chapter, the most obvious pole of attraction is the substance of the Jansenist critique of the Jesuits’ misuse of confessional casuistry, known as “probabilism,” which weakened the force of divine and natural law by leaving the post-lapsarian will free to follow the least “probable” among theologically authorized opinions about its applicability to a particular case of conscience. Another and more domestic pole of attraction is the Jansenist critique of the Calvinist version of the doctrine of predestination, treated in parts of the fifth chapter, that seemed to free the “elect” justified by the gift of faith from any obligation to observe divine commandments by assuring them of a “perseverance” to the end. Both freed the sinner from any personal responsibility to the law by “externalizing” that responsibility—Jesuit probabilism to the authority of theologians and Calvinists to a righteousness externally “imputed” to the elect by God. Apparent throughout these expositions is the interest of these Anglican clergymen in a theological justification for “holy living” sustained by Pauline “fear and trembling” that they sought to instill in their parishioners after the reestablishment of their church in 1660.
But the problem they confronted in their admiration for Jansenist critiques of the ethics of their Catholic and intra-Protestant foes was how to find any such theological justification in a Jansenist theology that was as beholden to Augustine's doctrines of divine predestination and efficacious grace as it was to their Puritan foes at home. The resolution of this paradox in the fifth chapter entails a full exposition of “high” Jansenist theology, not only in comparison to Calvinism but also to the anti-Augustinian theology of the Jesuit theologian Luis Molina that freed the post-lapsarian human will to accept or reject the help of a merely “sufficient” grace, in part by substituting divine foreknowledge for Augustinian predestination. That result makes for daunting reading and is not for the theologically faint of heart. But because Palmer's exposition situates Jansenist theology in relation to Calvinism as well as Molinism, it matches the lucidity of Jean Laporte's works on Arnauld and Pascal in the early 1920s (La doctrine de Port-Royal, 2 vols. [Les Presses Universitaires de France, 1923]).
The resolution of the paradox of a rigorous penitential ethics with a predestinarian Augustinian theology that would seem to undermine it continues in Palmer's final three chapters on Anglican theology. Here, however, the problem takes the opposite form. For while the likes of Anglican divines Taylor and Thorndike openly, if selectively, borrowed from Dutch Arminians and even Molina and Socinus for vindicating a measure of freedom for the will, they continued less visibly to mobilize Augustine's struggle-filled psychology of the will for the rigors of “holy living” that they hoped would distinguish their parishioners from the Puritan “elect.” As Protestants, they held that Christ's sacrificial atonement for original sin alone merited entry into the covenant of grace, but with Augustine—and Jansenists—they demanded that those thus baptized spare no effort to imitate the life of Christ while also relying on grace to transform the humility of setbacks into greater love for God.
One minor critical word about an otherwise convincing argument: While Palmer does full justice to Jansenist religious sensibility's valorization of Cartesian and Augustinian—ultimately Platonic—“reason” and knowledge in relation to the fallen will, he does not do equal if opposite justice to Jesuit sensibility's reliance on the senses. More scholastic and ultimately neo-Aristotelian in their empirical epistemology, Jesuits had less distrust than Jansenists of the senses as a post-lapsarian ladder in addition to revelation for knowledge of God and natural law.
