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Arnauld retired willingly before a new writer summoned by himself into the field, and girded with his blessing as he went forth to the encounter. The five propositions, which were professed to be extracted from Jansen’s book, and as such were condemned by the Papal Bull of 31st May 1653, are so intimately connected with the ‘Provincial Letters’ as to claim a place in our pages.
They endeavoured therefore, first of all, to prevent the publication of Jansen’s work; and failing in this, they directed all their efforts to procure a condemnation of the book from the Court of Rome. “Never,” it has been said, “did any book receive a more stormy welcome.
He explains the question of fact as consisting in the point whether M. Arnauld was guilty of temerity in expressing his doubts as to the propositions being in Jansen’s book after the bishops had declared that they were.
They extracted from it two propositions which in their view clearly contravened the Papal verdict—namely, 1st, that he had expressed doubts whether the five propositions condemned as heretical were in Jansen’s book at all; and 2d, that he had really reproduced the first of the five condemned propositions in one of his own statements, that according to both the Gospel and the Fathers, St Peter, a just man, was wanting in grace when he fell.
Within a few weeks of its appearance the University, the Jesuits, the executors of Jansen, the printer of the ‘Augustinus,’ the Spanish governor of the Low Countries, and the Papal Nuncio were engaged in a warfare of pamphlets, treatises, pasquinades, pleadings, synods, audiences, which it would be impossible to set forth in historical sequence.” In the midst of all this, Jansen’s old fellow-student received the book, in the preparation of which he also had had some share, in his prison at Vincennes, as if an echo of his own thoughts. “It would last as long as the Church,” he said. “After St Paul and St Augustine, no one had written concerning grace like Jansen.”
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