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Updated: June 28, 2025
They carry their countries and their hatreds with them. Two French priests, who had emigrated to Brussels during the Revolution, showed the utmost horror of each other, and when one of them was asked why, he replied with a glance at his companion in misery: "Why? because he's a Jansenist!" Dante would gladly have stabbed a Guelf had he met him in exile.
After his simple and severe training, and the society of his Jansenist friends, it must have been a change full of excitement, possibly of moral danger, to the once enthusiastic student; for the society of the time was charged with the elements both of sceptical and moral indifference.
"I am persuaded that on hearing such strange news, you will begin by interrogating him who testifies to its truth, as to his position, his feelings, his confessor, and other such points; and when from his air, as from his speech, you have perceived that he is a poor workman, and when having no confessional ticket to show you, he has confirmed your notion that he is a Jansenist, Ah, ah, you will say to him, you are a convulsionary, and have seen Saint Pâris resuscitated.
His clear and penetrating intellect saw at once the many aspects of the dispute lying deep in the human interests and passions engaged; and as he touched these one by one, and by subtle and vivid strokes brought them to the front—as Molinist, New Thomist, and Jansenist appeared upon the scene, and showed in their natural characters what play of dramatic life was moving under all the dulness of the debate at the Sorbonne—there was a universal outcry of welcome.
There is certainly less to love in him than to admire—less to call forth delight than respect. The play of natural individuality is hidden behind lines of lofty distance, and latterly of Jansenist severity. A proud, ascetic, and worn figure seems to rise before us; but strangely Pascal’s portrait, as known to us, conveys no idea of asceticism.
With this social tendency to dissect the human heart and to seize its most secret movements, was combined the religious and, as we may put it, protestant fashion of the hour, in the spirit of Port Royal. To be a moralist was almost in itself to be a Jansenist, and we see the author of the "Maximes" presently claiming to be, after a fashion, evangelical.
But it is quite an error to presume, as some writers have done, that there was a kind of factory for maxims, out of which sentences were turned which really belonged to no one in particular. The "Maximes" of Mme de Sablé and those of the Abbé Esprit the latter contained in a Jansenist volume called "The Falsity of Human Virtues" were published independently, but in the same year, 1678.
Four years later the pope issued a famous bull, called "Unigenitus" , definitively condemning Jansenist doctrines as heretical; but the sect still lived on, especially in Holland, and "Unigenitus" was disliked by many orthodox Roman Catholics, who thought its condemnations too sweeping and too severe.
It was on that ground that they had rejected the introduction of the Legend of, Gregory VII., recently canonized at Rome, and had sought to mix themselves up in the religious disputes excited just then by the pretended miracles wrought at the tomb of Deacon Paris, a pious and modest Jansenist, who had lately died in the odor of sanctity in the parish of St. Medard.
As for his reading, it was often Jansenist books, of which he had a great many, and which he greatly praised and lent freely to others." The Orator. "He prepared for the sacraments by meditation and retreat, The Critic. "And generally came out of his retreat more excited than ever against the Church." The Orator.
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