THE WORLD OF PORT ROYAL: THE JANSENIST MOVEMENT IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, 17TH-18TH CENTURIES
On microfiche
Complete Port-Royal collection ("ancien fonds d’Amersfoort") of the Old Catholic Church of the Netherlands
Project advisor: Dale K. Van Kley, Ohio State University
The Project
In 1997 MMF micropublished the first part, "Port-Royal and its Adherents", of the very large body of archival materials relating to Jansenism owned by the Old Catholic Church of the Netherlands and held in the Utrechts Archief (former State Archives). This part represents approximately 15% of the entire collection, which runs to more than 37 shelf meters and over 7,000 inventory numbers as catalogued by Bruggeman and Van de Ven in Inventaire des pièces d'archives françaises se rapportant à l'Abbaye de Port-Royal des Champs et son cercle... (ancien fonds d'Amersfoort). The Hague: 1972. The success of this initial micropublication encouraged MMF to undertake the filming of the rest of the collection, which is now also completely available for research.
Leading scholar of Jansenism, Dale K. Van Kley has said of this collection: "I deem this the most important archival source on the history of seventeenth and eighteenth-century Jansenism outside of France, second only to the collections of the Bibliothèque de Port-Royal. And it is THE richest source on the international vocation of Jansenism in pre-revolutionary Europe, a dimension that is moreover central to the diplomatic history of the papacy and all of the Catholic states."
Background: Origins
In the seventeenth century a heated theological debate raged in Catholic Europe about the respective roles of divine grace and human free will in the work of eternal salvation. The position taken by the so-called Jansenists (named for the Dutch theologian Cornelis Jansen (1585-1638) was deeply pessimistic about "fallen" humanity’s ability to do anything left to its own resources to merit salvation, which was either granted by the grace of God or was not. They based themselves on Jansen’s major study of the theology of St. Augustine, the Augustinus, published posthumously in 1640 and condemned by the Inquisition as early as 1641. The Jansenist position was in some ways close to that of the Protestant Calvinists concerning predestination. From the start they were opposed by theologians of the Society of Jesus (the Jesuits) who took an altogether more optimistic stance on the capacities of human nature for moral good without divine grace and to contribute of its own free will to the work of salvation.The Jansenists also promoted an inward-looking and ascetic spirituality and a moral rigorism in opposition to what they regarded as the worldly humanism and moral laxity in ethical questions attributed to the Jesuits.
Port-Royal
In France the Jansenist movement centered around the Cistercian convent of Port-Royal des Champs, originally located near Versailles but later moved to Paris, where it became known as Port-Royal de Paris. Port-Royal had been reformed in 1609 by its abbess Jacqueline-Marie-Angélique Arnauld (1591-1661) and supported by her brother Antoine (the Great Arnauld) (1612-1694), and other members of this important family. The personal friend of Jansen, Jean Duvergier de Haurannes (1581-1643), abbot of the Benedictine monastery of Saint-Cyran, acted as spiritual adviser to the nuns from 1636. In 1638 the original buildings of Port-Royal des Champs were again put to use by a group of pious laymen and secular priests, known as the Solitaires, who wished to live together under his guidance. In 1648 part of the community returned to Port-Royal des Champs and the Solitaires moved to other quarters nearby.
Saint-Cyran promoted penitential piety and Antoine Arnauld defended the practice of postponing communion as a form of penance in his work On frequent communion (1643). He also struck out at the Jesuits in his Moral Theology of the Jesuits, published in 1643. The movement soon attracted many adherents among the clergy, nobility, members of the Parlement (high court of justice) and lesser magistrates and other orders of society, who entrusted their children to Jansenist teaching in the so-called "Little Schools", run by the Solitaires and frequented by among others the writer Jean Racine.
Conflict with church and state
The movement also quickly drew the wrath of the French state and the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Cardinal Richelieu (d. 1643), chief minister of the crown, had Saint-Cyran imprisoned for reasons at once theological and political and his successor, Cardinal Mazarin, continued the campaign against the Jansenists, as much because he suspected them for complicity in the aristocratic rebellion known as the Fronde as by reason of their reputedly heretical theology. In 1659 he ordered the "Little Schools" closed. The head of the faculty of theology of the University of Paris, guardian of Catholic orthodoxy, identified five allegedly heretical propositions in Jansen’s book that were subsequently condemned by the papal bull Cum occasione issued by Innocent X in 1653. Arnauld counterattacked, claiming the propositions could not be found in the Augustinus. The polemic raged in the following years and he was expelled from the faculty of theology at the Sorbonne in 1656. The philosopher Blaise Pascal came to the support of Arnauld and the Jansenist cause by launching an attack on the Jesuits in his Provincial Letters (1656-1657).
Louis XIV and the Jansenists
With the advent of the personal reign of Louis XIV (1661) the Jansenists gained a totally implacable enemy who could not abide their challenge to the Gallican principle of monarchical control of the French church. The Jansenists were persecuted in the 1660s, with members of the clergy both secular and regular being required in 1661 to sign a "formulary" denouncing Jansen by name as the author of the five propositions condemned by Cum occasione in 1653. Many of the nuns of Port-Royal de Paris refused and were sent back to Port-Royal des Champs, where they were sequestered. Pope Clement IX attempted to quiet the controversy with his "peace of the Church" in 1669, which lasted a decade during which the nuns of Port-Royal des Champs enjoyed the protection of the Duchess of Longueville, a Bourbon related to the king. With the death of Longueville in 1679 the struggle resumed, forcing Arnauld into exile. He ultimately settled in Brussels in 1682 where he remained until his death in 1694, producing a voluminous quantity of Jansenist writings.
The end of Port-Royal and the bull Unigenitus
In 1705 Pope Clement XI issued a new anti-Jansenist bull, Vineam Domini, to which the sisters of Port-Royal refused to submit. In 1709 the community was definitively broken up and exiled to various convents. In the next few years the buildings themselves were razed. Port-Royal was no more, but the Jansenist movement was by no means dead. The chief Jansenist spokesman of the period was Pasquier Quesnel (1634-1719), a theologian and former member of the Oratorian congregation of priests and friend and companion in exile of Arnauld. His publication of 1692, Réflexions morales, was a major Jansenist tract whose doctrinal positions kept alive the conflict with the papacy. In 1713 at the behest of the aging Louis XIV (d. 1715), who wanted to be done with the Jansenists for good, Pope Clement XI promulgated the bull Unigenitus dei Filius (Only Begotten) anathematizing 101 of Quesnel’s theological propositions. Rather than extinguishing the controversy, however, the bull provoked increased resentment and opposition both within the French clergy and the Parlements. Several French bishops led by the cardinal-archbishop of Paris, Louis-Antoine de Noailles, issued an "appeal" (to a future council of the church) against Unigenitus in 1717 that was supported by many Jansenist clergy. The crown held fast and in 1730 declared the bull to be a law of the land, but the controversy continued to reverberate throughout the 18th century down to the French Revolution and beyond.
International influence of Jansenism
Theologically and philosophically Jansenism represented the pessimistic and rigorist view of man that formed the darker counterpart to the optimistic and tolerant spirit of the Age of Enlightenment. Politically it embodied resistance to royal absolutism and the doctrine of papal infallibility and thus tended to merge with Gallicanism and with the struggle of the parlementaires against the monarch. In addition to its central role in the history of France in the 17th and 18th centuries, it exerted a great deal of influence on Catholics in other countries as well. In the Dutch Republic, for example, where many Jansenists including Quesnel lived in exile, a schismatic church broke with Rome in 1723 and became known as the Old Catholic Church of the Netherlands. In Catholic countries such as the Habsburg Netherlands (Belgium), Austria, Italy, Spain and Ireland too, Jansenism had its adherents throughout the 18th century and into the 19th, influencing education, literature and forms of religious practice and spirituality.
The Port-Royal collection (ancien fonds d’Amersfoort) of the Old Catholic Church of the Netherlands: The Archive, its History and Inventory
This very large body of primary sources actually consists of two separate collections with different provenances.
For some time before its destruction in 1709, Port-Royal was not considered a safe repository. In order to protect its archives therefore arrangements were made with the chapter of the apostolic vicariate in Utrecht, which was in contact with Port-Royal and sympathetic to the Jansenist cause. They were to split with Rome in 1723. Exactly when, how and under what conditions the transfer was effected is unfortunately no longer known. Subsequently, the records and correspondence of French and Belgian refugees were added to this collection, such as those of the Cistercians of the Abbey of Orval who had refused to submit to Unigenitus and had gone into exile in 1726. These documents were later transferred to the Old-Catholic seminary at Amersfoort, hence the name "ancien fonds d’Amersfoort" and are contained in the first part (Première section) of the inventory that was completed in manuscript by J. Bruggeman, archivist of the Old Catholic Church of the Netherlands, in 1944.
The second part of this vast collection (Deuxième section) came to the Netherlands thanks to the efforts of C. Karsten, professor at the Amersfoort seminary, who had good relations with a circle of Jansenist sympathizers in Paris in possession of a substantial amount of correspondence and other writings of the appellants against Unigenitus from the decades after 1713. These papiers de famille (of the Jansenist church), as Karsten called them, were in danger of falling into the wrong hands or being dispersed if the aging circle was not able to perpetuate itself. Karsten argued successfully for their transfer to the Netherlands where they arrived in 1867. A.J. van de Ven, archivist of the state archives in Utrecht, completed their inventory after his retirement. The inventory of the entire collection was published in 1972.
Contents of the Collection
The collection contains literally thousands of original letters, writings and other documents, mostly in manuscript, produced by major and minor figures of the Jansenist movement, its sympathizers and opponents from the early 17th century until the early 19th. Most of this material has never been published in any form. The index of personal names compiled for the inventory runs to over 6,000 entries ranging from the highest dignitaries of the church, such as cardinals, archbishops and bishops to simple priests and nuns. The laity is also well represented from the highest ranks of the nobility of the sword to persons of lesser quality. The documents emanate from or concern hundreds of places in France ranging from major Jansenist centers such as Port-Royal itself, Paris and Montpellier to obscure provincial parishes. From outside France there are materials present from the Dutch Republic, the Habsburg Netherlands, Austria; Italy, and to a lesser extent Spain, Portugal, Switzerland and others. The great majority of the documents are in French. Other languages found include Latin, Italian and Spanish.