D’un Jansénisme à l’autre. Chroniques de Sorbonne (1696–1713) (review)

With this volume, Jacques Gres-Gayer brings to completion a four-volume project that began with the publication in 1991 of Théologie et pouvoir en Sorbonne. La Faculté de théologie de Paris et la bulle Unigenitus, 1714–1721.The three volumes published since 1991 have applied the methods used in that first volume to the Paris theology faculty in its dealings with the questions of Jansenism and Gallicanism between 1643 and 1713. Drawing in each volume on a substantial but complex body of manuscript and printed sources, the author has navigated his way with great assurance through some highly contentious theological disputes and their ramifications, religious and political. In each volume he has examined the faculty’s internal politics, assemblies, and working methods through a prosopographical approach that seeks essentially to quantify and evaluate the participation of the faculty’s body of doctors in approving books for publication and censuring books, theses, and propositions already in circulation that were submitted to it for its consideration. This volume focuses on the major crises or controversies of the period under consideration, analyzing the faculty’s makeup that was in constant flux and evolution during the long reign of Louis XIV. It is a history that is highly sensitive to theological, generational, and political shifts within the faculty and that refuses to reify the parties and their ideological stances.

Despite its dates (1696–1713) the volume covers a series of debates running essentially from 1696 to 1704, since the faculty was not a major player in the events following the papal bull Vineam Domini Sabaoth (1705), nor in the maneuvers that led to its successor Unigenitus (1713). In 1696, the faculty as an institution was largely becalmed, due to the master clerical politician François de Harlay, who insisted, as did his successor Louis Antoine Noailles, on the ultimate responsibility of bishops for the religious orthodoxy of their dioceses, yet employed doctors of the faculty as advisers or censors. The historical magisterium of the faculty from Jean Gerson to Edmond Richer seemed all but extinguished. The new regime of Noailles was initially more inclined to give the faculty greater leeway, but as Noailles himself was suspected of Jansenist affinities, he was increasingly wary, after 1700, of allowing the faculty to regain its earlier independence. It was Noailles who famously declared in 1702 that bishops were the first casuists of their diocese, a claim that had wider ramifications to theological authority than is immediately obvious. It was all the more paradoxical, therefore, that the incident that sparked the crisis of the so-called second Jansenism involved the faculty engaging in a fairly “standard” exercise in casuistry concerning the actions of a penitent and his confessor with regard to the first papal condemnation of Jansenism.

This volume analyzes five particular debates of varying duration and significance between 1696 and 1704. Some were interconnected but discontinuous, as with the 1696 debates over the translation of the work of a Spanish female mystic, Maria of Agreda, and those of 1699 over François Fenelon and quietism. The Saint-Pons consultation of 1699 was triggered by a local dispute over sacramental practices, especially penitential ones, that would resurface with the 1702 “case of conscience.” In between lay the question of the “Chinese rites” (1700) sparked by Jesuit missionary practices in China. In one way or another, these issues involved conflicts with the Jesuits, Molinist theology, the role of papal authority, and the nature of revealed and natural religion. Gres-Gayer also notes, interestingly, a far greater concern among faculty members around 1700 than in previous generations with the pastoral implications of the issues they debated, if only because many doctors were parish priests in Paris and its environs or administrators employed by bishops. Even though the faculty’s debates were, with the exception of that over the Chinese rites, less momentous than...