Le Gallicanisme de Sorbonne: Chroniques de la Faculte de Theologie de Paris (1657-1688) (review)

The Faculty of Theology of the Sorbonne was for a long time assumed to be Gallican in its ecclesiology, both by adherents and adversaries of that French view of the Church. Robert Bellarmine thought this when he termed "Parisians" those in France who would not accept papal primacy as absolute monarchy, while Bossuet in defending the Gallican Articles of 1682 described himself as diligently upholding the pristine theology of the schola parisiensis. That there were always some at the Sorbonne who adhered to the ultramontane view of papal supremacy has long been known, but now Jacques Gres-Gayer has demonstrated in massive and meticulous detail the diversity of ecclesiologies there. He shows that along with the majority that was consistently Gallican there was quite a sizable minority of the Rome-oriented view, and moreover that there were several variants within each of the two main camps.

He does this by combing through virtually a ton of records of the Faculté de Théologie (which term refers to all those who had received doctorates in theology at the Sorbonne, especially those who continued to participate in proceedings and debates at the school). The records that he examines include the theses written by those receiving doctorates and the records of many significant controversies during the years 1657 to 1688. Some of the latter were the debates and decisions on the Six Articles of 1663, the censures of a pro-papal book by Jacques Vernant and a book on casuistry by Amedeus Guimenius, debates on the French hierarchy's Gallican Declaration of 1682, and the censure of a statement by the bishops of Hungary, condemning the latter declaration. In all these cases Gres-Gayer offers abundant detailed information on the debates, statements of the hundreds of French theologians, all named, who participated, and the votes on the issues. In each case, a solid majority voted for the Gallican position.

But in both this majority camp and in the large Rome-leaning minority there were, in Gres-Gayer's analysis, several attitudes and currents. He identifies four in each, ranging from those really committed in principle to that ecclesiological view to those who had more pragmatic reasons for their votes, again with precise names and numbers of all these groupings. In his principal summation of the totals of the majority and minority parties, based on their decisions in the controversies studied, the Gallicans number 210 and the romains 158. One of the most significant of his conclusions emerges in his analysis of the discussions on the four Gallican Articles of 1682. He says that even though the Gallican majority of the faculty really saw their ideas re-affirmed in the articles, they were not enthusiastic about having them imposed on themselves or others in an authoritarian way by the hierarchy and the king. They saw this ecclesiology as a vital tradition of France that they wanted to preserve, not as the official doctrine of their Faculty or of the state. This work includes an extraordinary array of precise listings and tables of the positions taken by all of the several hundred doctors of the Sorbonne who participated in the numerous debates dealt with in the study. It will certainly stand as the definitive work on the ecclesiology of the Sorbonne in the seventeenth century.