This book provides an account of a formative Catholic continental influence (Jansenism) on Anglican theology (‘holy living’) in the mid to late seventeenth century. Since ‘Catholic’ and ‘continental’ have been traditionally toxic terms in English public discourse, the Anglican divines in question were wise enough to camouflage their théologie jansénisante as a critique of Catholicism. In part, one suspects, to reassure themselves of their Protestantism but also to appease English enthusiasts of an earlier continental influence, Calvinism. It is the merit of this book sympathetically to view the theological dexterity that this balancing act involved. Particularly at a time when Anglicanism faced, at home, persistent Calvinist criticism and a king well-affected towards Catholicism and, abroad, a geopolitical-commercial situation that set England periodically at loggerheads with continental Protestants, especially the Dutch, and placed it intermittently in hock to Catholic France. Navigating the Scylla and Charybdis of Popery and Geneva was a nontrivial affair, inevitably engendering the sort of theological evenness on which Anglicans came to pride themselves. But that same-levelness (equally critical of both Catholics and Calvinists), coupled with the unavoidable austerity of the approach, proved irksome to clerical troops on the ground. In this context, the Methodists are only the first to spring to mind. It is a minor quibble but I wish the book had more to say about them and how ‘holy living’ translated, or failed to translate, from theological treatise to clerical formation to pastoral life. With Palmer, one never quite quits the laboratory trials to gauge market reaction.

In chapter one, he outlines the gist of the Jansenism espoused, mutatis mutandis, by Anglicans: the allegation that the Jesuit-inspired ‘science of sin’ was baneful because it was laxist and at the root of a general slide in standards. This was less the strongly anti-Protestant theological Jansenism of Michael Baius and Cornelius Jansen’s Augustinus, and more the pastoral variety refined by Arnauld, Pascal, Quesnel, and their supporters. For the latter, the Jesuit Luis de Molina’s De liberi arbitrii (1588) disastrously divorced conscience from truth by separating morality from the eternal law, delegating responsibility to external ecclesiastical authorities (i.e. Jesuit-influenced probabilists) who deemed a range of opinions worthy of acceptance and obliged the individual conscience merely to choose any one of them (p. 32). Of course, probabilism’s early modern popularity was linked to other factors, including the growing importance of sacramental confession, in which Jesuits, their critics argued, salved rather than challenged conscience (p. 34). This point could have done with more explanation and, perhaps, a little more empathy with the casuist enterprise, which was, after all, a house of many rooms. Under Innocent XI, for instance, it included various rigorist strands. Is Palmer, dare one say, somewhat Manichean and perhaps too dismissive when, ventriloquizing Arnauld, he summarizes the mainline Catholic penitential regime as a petty tribunal instead of a school of virtue (p. 220)?

In consecutive chapters, Palmer traces the transmission of Jansenist thought to England and its translation into English. Some of this tale is grubbily political and compulsively fascinating for the historian. It was the divisive political potential of Jansenist controversies in English and Irish Catholic circles that alerted the canny Irish Lord Lieutenant, James Butler, along with Lord Chancellor Clarendon, and their tireless translator, John Evelyn, to the benefits of Jansenism’s transmission outre-Manche. English and Irish Catholic cosying up to the Commonwealth regime steeled returning Anglicans in their mischievous resolve. They got plenty of help. Disaffected Catholic clergy, like Henry Holden, Thomas White (alias Blacklo), and Peter Walsh, cooperated enthusiastically, gulled by the chimera of a Catholic-Anglican union or hopeful of special treatment for the right sort of Catholic (anti-Jesuit, Gallican).

Of course, not all was fumbling in the greasy till of politics. For a number of higher-minded Restoration writers, the Jansenist critique of probability contributed to the development of a theologically coherent Anglican moral outlook, a framework for what they called ‘holy living’. This Anglican pastoral rigorism, perilously poised between Pelagian pride and Manichean fatalism, sought to reconcile, à la janséniste, grace and free will. Given this and their need for what boiled down to a popular asceticism, it is small wonder that Arnauld’s Fréquente communion, and not any of the Jesuit classics, emerged as the crucial influence on ‘holy living’ advocates like Jeremy Taylor. For the latter, there would be no adjustment of the law to suit the frailty of the will; nor any falsely reassuring formalism, that terrible failing of Jesuit-shriven papists. What counted was the continual ‘process’ of moral regeneration, not the sporadic ‘event’ of conversion in either its casuist/Catholic or Calvinist forms. One imagines that the key virtue required in the penitent was a sort of Aquinian longanimity. It might be objected, of course, that the ‘process’ metaphor takes one straight back to the dilemmas of the casuists and to the challenge of persuading the morally discouraged to keep at it. In France, the penitential devices used to sustain religious zeal and check religious confidence (distinguishing attrition and contrition, withholding absolution and abstaining from communion) are well-known. It would have been interesting to discuss what equivalents, if any, holy living Anglicans envisaged. Palmer demonstrates that for Taylor, as for Arnauld and Saint-Cyran, Jesuit casuistry (the wrong sort of casuistry!) was a cop-out, bleakly concluding that this may not have been comforting but at least it was uncompromising (p. 240). However, he does not make it clear, in the Anglican context, why or how this was so or with what pastoral effect.

This fine book draws on the nearly century-old tome of Ruth Clarke, until now a lone classic in the field.Footnote ¹ Less chatty and diverting than its predecessor, Palmer’s book adds to Clarke’s achievement, exploring the more strictly theological dimension of Jansenism’s cross-Channel transmission. As a book, Palmer’s has not quite shaken off the marks of its doctoral origins. There is some repetition; here and there a tendency towards bibliographic archaeology and a little special pleading, for Pascal, no less, someone who was well able to look after himself. Finally, if the historian’s vulgar appetite for evidence of practical pastoral impact goes unsatisfied, at least there is plenty of theology to chew on.