Chapter 53
Section 53 of A History of the Inquisition of Spain, Volume 4. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information, or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. A History of the Inquisition of Spain, Volume 4, by Henry Charles Lee. Book 8. Chapter 11. Part 1.
Spheres of Action Jansenism Jansenism is a convenient term wherewith to stigmatize as heresy whatever is displeasing to Ultramontanism, whether in church or state,
and it served as a pretext for the continued existence of the Inquisition, after the older aberrations were exterminated. As a concrete heresy, however, it defies accurate theological definition. It took its rise in the interminable disputes over the insoluble questions of predestination,
grace, and free will, as settled by St. Augustine and the Second Council of Orange, and accepted by the Church, till the use made of predestination by Calvin forced a modification by the Council of Trent, and the daring Jesuit, Luis de Molina, revived the problem. Then the discussion became a trial of strength between the rising company of Jesus
and its elder rivals, the Augustinians and Dominicans, when Clement VIII vainly imposed silence on the disputants. Cornelius Jansen, bishop of Ypres, sought to vindicate St. Augustine in his work entitled Augustinus, around which the controversy raged until the Jesuits won a victory in 1653, by procuring the condemnation of the famous five propositions drawn from the work,
a condemnation to which the followers of Jansen assented while denying that he had taught them. Another contest, of which we shall see the results, was waged over the writings of Cardinal Henry Norris, in which the Jesuits suffered defeat. He was also an Augustinian and professor of ecclesiastical history at Pisa, who busied himself in vindicating the doctrines of St. Augustine.
Two of his works, the Historia Pellagiana and the Dissertatio di Quinta Sinodo Ecumenica, were accused, before publication, of Bayanism and Jansenism. The MSS were ordered to Rome and were carefully examined by revisers, who pronounced them orthodox and license to print was granted. When published, interpolations in the press were charged and disproved.
Norris was called to Rome as chief of the Vatican Library by Innocent XI, and, as this was regarded as a step to the cardinalet, fresh accusations of Jansenism were brought against him. His promotion was deferred. Eight theologians were set to work upon his books.
Their favorable report was confirmed by the Congregation of the Inquisition, and Innocent appointed him one of its consultors. A text on him continued, which he answered in five dissertations printed in 1685, when Innocent gave him a cardinal's hat and made him member of several important congregations, including that of the Inquisition, in which he served with distinction until his death in 1704.
France, however, was the principal seat of Jansenism, where the impalpable doctrinal points involved after the decision of 1653 were obscured by more living issues. The Jansenists represented the more austere and puritanical portion of the clergy, as opposed to the supporters of the relaxed morality of probabilism, of which the Jesuits were the foremost advocates, an aspect of the controversy which has been immortalized by Pascal.
Besides, as Rome had decided against Jansen, those who had defended him were naturally led to minimize the authority of the Holy See, to disregard its condemnatory utterances as surreptitious, to assert the supremacy of general councils, and to exalt the independence and privileges of the Gallican Church, which, since the time of St. Louis in the 13th century, had steadily resisted the encroachments of the papacy. There was a re-infusion of theology in the quarrel, when the Jesuits procured the condemnation in the bull unigenitus of Quesnel's views on sufficing contrition and inchoic charity, but this was only another incident in the struggle between rigorism and laxism. While
Jansenism thus was denounced as a heresy, it really was concerned much less with faith than with discipline and morals, and everyone hostile to probabilism, Jesuitism, and ultramontanism was stigmatized as a Jansenist. Louis XIV and Madame de Maintenon, who had persecuted the original Jansenists, were of the sect because of their enforcement of the royal prerogative. Bosuet was suspected of Jansenism for his defense of the Declaration of the Gallican
Clergy in 1682 against the ultramontane doctrines of the papal power. Cardinal Aguirre was a Jansenist because he opposed the laxity of probabilism, and so was even the Jesuit general Tirso González because he wrote a book to prove that the Jesuits were not all laxists. When, under the protection of Leopold, Grand Duke of Tuscany, Bishop Scipione de Ricci,
in his Council of Pistoja, in 1786, sought without papal authority to effect an internal reformation of his church, he was a Jansenist, and, after his protector had been transferred to the imperial throne, Pius VI, in 1794, had the satisfaction of condemning, in the bull, octorum fidei, no less than 85 errors of the Council, mostly Jansenistic. In France, the clergy were, for the most part, attached to Gallicanism and were largely rigorous,
so practically Jansenism flourished and made itself felt in such measures as the expulsion of the Jesuits. The ex-Jesuit, Borghini, took his revenge by writing a book to prove that the Jacobinism of the Revolution was merely Jansenism in action. In fact, the civil constitution of the clergy of 1790 was clearly Jansenistic because, without meddling with dogma, it embodied the democratic development of Gallicanism. Spain paid little attention to the theological
controversy over Jansen, though his works and those of his followers were duly condemned by the Inquisition. It is a curious illustration of this indifference that when the great bibliographer Nicolás Antonio, in defending Prudentius against the attack of Hincmar of Rhymes, pronounced as good Catholic doctrine the assertion of Prudentius that the blood of Christ was shed only for believers and not for unbelievers, this, which is virtually the same as the fifth of the condemned
propositions of Jansen, escaped attention. The book was printed in Rome at the expense of Cardinal Aguirre. The Spanish Inquisition took no note of it in the indexes of 1707 and 1747, and the passages retained in the edition of 1788, produced under the auspices of Carlos III. Yet Spain could not keep wholly out of the quarrel, for its Flemish provinces were a hotbed of Jansenism which could not be eradicated from the University of Louvain. In 1649, Dr. Resch, as the representative of the
University and of its great protector, Engelbert Dubois, Archbishop of Malines, came to Madrid, where he printed and circulated a memorial against the Bull of Urban VIII and the Archduke Leopold so insulting to both that the Inquisition suppressed it by a decree of September 13, 1650. This did not cool the ardor of the Flemish followers of Jansen, and in 1656, Alexander VII felt obliged to address Don John of Austria, then governor of the Low Countries, with an urgent
exhortation to suppress the propagation of the condemned errors. The struggle continued, and soon after 1690, Carlos II was induced to issue an order that all Jansenists and rigorists and other innovators should be dismissed and excluded from all offices and preferment, secular and ecclesiastical. Under this decree, some of the prominent Jansenists were deprived and exiled. among them five doctors of Louvain, Goumer Higgins, E. Van Geet, G. Berts, R. Box, and Willem van den Enden.
The persecuted sect appealed to Rome and procured from Innocent XII a brief of February 6, 1694, addressed to the bishops, forbidding that anyone should be defamed for Jansenism on vague charges or be excluded from any spiritual function or office unless convicted, in the regular order of justice, of having merited a punishment so severe. This trammeled Episcopal action,
for it was represented that the bishops could not be expected to undergo the expense and the labor of regular trials requiring absolute proof and subject to legal cavils, but it did not affect the secular arm and the elector of Bavaria, then Governor of Flanders, reiterated in October and November 1695 to the councils of the provinces and the university the repeated royal orders to exclude from all ecclesiastical dignities in
secular employment those suspected of Jansenism and rigorism. Then on March 1, 1696, Carlos modified his decrees in a manner to embolden the schismatics, who seem to have had abundant popular and official support. We hear of a writing in defense of the Catholic Party being publicly burnt by the executioner in Brussels, in front of the palace, and, on January 29, 1698, the people of Brussels went tumultuously to the Archbishop of Malines, Ferdinand de Berlo de Brousse,
demanding that he should withdraw his opposition to N. van Eastbeek, who had been appointed by the chapter of the Church of St. Gudule as their parish priest. This condition of affairs led the Jesuit General González
to address a memorial to Carlos, warning him that this spirit, unless suppressed, would lead to the ruin of religion and the destruction of his dominions, and supplicating in terms much less respectful than Spanish custom required,
that he should represent to the Pope the dangerous consequences of the papal brief, that he should punish those who procured it, as well as the authors of a memorial presented to Carlos in 1696, and that he should order the Flemish bishops to disregard the pretexts put forward as to vague accusations. The Jesuits overshot the mark in this insolent interference, and the memorial was suppressed
by the Spanish Inquisition in a decree of September 28, 1698, as insulting to the authorities, secular and ecclesiastical, of Flanders. Spain, though with less success than France, had long been struggling to emancipate itself from papal control, and it is a curious paradox that its most resolute assertion of political Jansenism arose from an attempt to discredit doctrinal Jansenism. Jesuit influence had
gradually dominated the Inquisition, and as we have seen, Cardinal Norris was the special object of Jesuit hatred. When in 1721 the Augustinian Manso published at Valladolid his St. Augustinus di virtutibus infidelium. The work was condemned and suppressed in 1723, while virulent attacks on him by Jesuits, in both Latin and the vernacular, were allowed free circulation. The culmination came when the Jesuit padre Rábago, confessor of Fernando VI, controlled
the weak and irresolute Inquisitor General Pérez de Prado y Cuesta, bringing about an anomalous condition in which the Inquisition defied the Holy See, the so-called Jansenists became the warmest defenders of papal authority, and the Jesuits asserted the supremacy of the Regalias. When Prado y Cuesta assumed his office in September 1747, it was announced that the Suprema had a new index expurgatorius in an advanced state of preparation by the Jesuits
Cassani and Carrasco. The printing was nearly finished when the 1744 edition of the Biblioteque Janseniste of the Jesuit Dominique de Colonia reached Madrid. This was substantially a polemical work, a catalogue of writers and books opposed to Jesuitism, and the Jesuits conceived the brilliant idea of printing it as an appendix to the index and thus suppressing at one blow all antagonistic literature. Some trifling omissions were made, but when the index appeared, it contained Norris's
Historia Pelagiana and Dissertatio. There were many other equally orthodox books, but these became the storm center as they had been repeatedly and formally approved by the Holy See after special examination. Appeal was made to Benedict XIV, who addressed July 31, 1748, to Prado y Cuesta, a brief in which he recited the investigations into Norris's books, and pointed out that all questions concerning them had been finally settled by the solemn judgment of Rome,
so that it was not lawful for the Spanish Inquisition to reopen the question, and much less to condemn the books. He could not patiently endure the injury thus without reason inflicted on Norris, and he admonished Prado y Cuesta to find means to avert discord between Spain and Rome. The Inquisitor General adopted the favorite inquisitorial device of evasion. He replied that he had found the index nearly printed when he assumed office. He had endeavored to have it
issued without his name, but this was impossible. He had not known that Norris's name was in it until the Augustinians complained, and he dwelt on the difficulty of making a change, especially in view of the grave reasons for which the books had been included. This correspondence was strictly secret, but the brief had been shown in Rome to the Augustinian procurador-general, who sent a copy to Madrid, where it was busily transcribed and circulated
throughout the land, creating a tremendous sensation. Prado y Cuesta addressed September 16, 1748, a bitter complaint to Benedict, dwelling on the indiscretion of allowing such matters to be gossiped on the streets, and of affording such comfort to the heretics. The Jesuit party openly proclaimed the independence of the Spanish Inquisition in such matters, and asserted that its honor was at stake. Padre Rabago undertook to manage the king,
and induced him to inform the Pope that he would not permit any invasion of the privileges of the Inquisition. The affair dragged on. Porto Carrero, the ambassador to Rome, hurried to Spain and came to a compromise with Prado y Cuesta, but Rábago, who would agree to nothing but the submission of the Holy See, persuaded Fernando to hold firm, and the affair became a struggle between the Regalías and the Papal Supremacy, in which Norris was merely an incident. Fernando wrote July 1,
1749, to Benedict, stating plainly that he would not permit his rights and those of the Inquisition to be impaired. It was of no importance whether the faithful in Spain could or could not read the works of Norris, but it was of supreme importance to him to remove the discord excited among his subjects. Benedict replied moderately, and the king relented insofar as to offer a compromise which would have closed the matter had it not become doubly embroiled by a papal decree
of September 24th condemning Colonia's Bibliotheque Janseniste, thus putting on the Roman index a considerable section of the Spanish. In a letter to the Spanish agent in Rome, Rabagot threatened in retaliation that the king would not only prohibit the works of Norris, but the Roman index itself. Still more audacious were the instructions which he sent to Porto Carrero. Of these, there were two sets, one long and argumentative, the other briefer, to be used
only in case of necessity. It insolently asserted that the papal eagerness in defense of Norris was a new argument against infallibility, that Popes Liberius and Honorius, for suspicions no graver, had been anathematized by a synod, and it would be humiliating to his holiness if the same should happen to him. Porto Carrero was a trained diplomatist, but in an audience of November 26, 1749, he handed to Benedict a copy of this portentous document, translated into choice
Italian, and the next day he wrote cheerfully to Rabago that he thought it would end the affair. The Pope was displeased, but, knowing his character, this need caused no alarm. End of Section 53. Recording by Linda Johnson.
