Jesuits vs Dominicans
One of the countries where the reforms of the Council of Trent had certainly not taken root was France. King Louis XIII’s ambitious Minister, Cardinal Richelieu (+1642), for example, was simultaneously absentee Bishop of Luçon and Abbot of the important abbeys of Cluny, Cîteaux and Prémontré.
A pen and watercolour image of Prémontré Abbey by Tavernier de Joniquières, 1780s
The French hierarchy was reserved for the aristocracy, the ‘common people’ being eligible only for the lower priesthood. This explains the popularity of the French Oratory, a clerical congregation founded by Cardinal Bérulle (1611), which markedly raised standards – and opportunities.
At the same time, the lower French clergy were passive witnesses of the most vitriolic debate on the subject of God’s Grace between the Jesuits and the Dominicans. To us it is scarcely believable that such a subject should have inflamed passions throughout a whole nation – indeed, continent – but the pamphlets flew thick and fast. Essentially, the Dominicans, following their own St. Thomas Aquinas, taught that God’s Grace precedes all human good; the Jesuits that God’s Grace accompanies all human good when we have willed to do it.
To their many enemies the Jesuits seemed to be promoting a kind of ‘apply-to-God-if-you-feel-like-it’ faith. They were being ‘Jesuitical’, a synonym for ‘slippery’. They were opposed by more rigorous believers who acquired the name of ‘Jansenists’ (a term of abuse given them by the Jesuits, and taken from their inspirational source, the Dutch theologian Cornelius Jansen). These stressed the need for an unflinching acceptance of God’s will. However, the Jesuits had the King’s ear, and in 1713, by order of King Louis XIV, the Jansenists’ ‘powerhouse’, the Parisian abbey of Port-Royal, was closed, demolished, and its cemetery dug up and the bones scattered.
The Jesuits promoted the role of reason as an accompaniment to the act of faith. Unwittingly, they paved the way for those who would see Reason as an self-sufficient force, requiring no alliance with faith at all. This principle blossomed into the so-called Enlightenment and its child was the French Revolution.
French clergy, who had witnessed these storms raging over them, rather like deep-sea creatures beneath a tsunami, now found themselves liable to lose their heads.
The net result of these confused times was to present a ‘two-tier’ image of the world, with “nature” on the ground floor and “super-nature” on the first floor. The floors were connected, as it were, by a spiral staircase up and down which went the clergy, conveying messages from one realm to the other.