Cornelius Jansen

Cornelius Jansen (/ˈdʒænsən/; Dutch: [ˈjɑnsə(n)]; Latinized name Cornelius Jansenius; also Corneille Jansen; 28 October 1585 – 6 May 1638) was the Dutch Catholic bishop of Ypres in Flanders and the father of a theological movement known as Jansenism.

He was born to humble Catholic parents Jan Ottje, a smith, and Lijntje Gijsberts at Acquoy (then in the province of Holland, now in Gelderland). In 1602 he entered the University of Leuven, then in the throes of an ideological conflict between the Jesuit – or scholastic – party and the followers of Michael Baius, who swore by St. Augustine. Jansen ended by attaching himself strongly to the latter "Augustinian" party, and presently made a momentous friendship with a like-minded fellow-student, Jean du Vergier de Hauranne, afterwards Abbé de Saint-Cyran.

After taking his degree he went to Paris, partly to improve his health by a change of scene, partly to study Greek. Eventually he joined du Vergier at his country home near Bayonne, and spent some years teaching at the bishop's college. All his spare time was spent in studying the early Fathers with du Vergier, and laying plans for a reform of the Church.

In 1616 he returned to Leuven, to take charge of the college of St Pulcheria, a hostel for Dutch students of theology. Pupils found him a somewhat choleric and exacting master and a great recluse from academic society. However, he took an active part in the university's resistance to the Jesuits, for they had established a theological school of their own in Leuven, which was proving itself a formidable rival to the official university faculty of divinity. In the hope of suppressing their encroachments, Jansen was sent twice to Madrid, in 1624 and 1626; the second time he narrowly escaped the Inquisition. He warmly supported the Catholic missionary archbishop (apostolic vicar) of the Catholic Holland Mission in the Dutch Republic, Philippus Rovenius, in his contests with the Jesuits, who were trying to evangelize that country without regard to the archbishop's wishes. He also crossed more than once the Dutch Calvinist–Presbyterian champion, Gisbertus Voetius, still remembered for his attacks on René Descartes.

Antipathy to the Jesuits brought Jansen no nearer to Protestantism; on the contrary, he yearned to beat them with their own weapons, chiefly by showing them that Catholics could interpret the Bible in just as mystical and pietistic a manner. This became the great object of his lectures, when he was appointed regius professor of scriptural interpretation at Leuven in 1630. Still more was it the object of his Augustinus, a bulky treatise on the theology of St. Augustine, barely finished at the time of his death.

Its preparation was his chief occupation since his return to Leuven. He had introduced in this treaty a long development favourable to contrition (IIIrd part, De gratia Christi salvatoris, book V, chap.XXI–XXV). In its appendix, titled Erroris Massiliensium, et opinionis quorumdam recentiorum parallelon et statera, he harshly condemned the Jesuits, in particular Luis de Molina, Gabriel Vasquez and Leonardus Lessius.

But Jansen, as he said, did not mean to be a school-pedant all his life; and there were moments when he entertained political ambitions. He looked forward to a time when Flanders would throw off the Spanish yoke and become an independent Catholic republic, possibly even Flemish-ruled, according to the model of the Protestant United Provinces. These ideas became known to his Spanish rulers, and to assuage them he wrote a philippic called the Mars gallicus (1635), a violent attack on French ambitions generally, and on Cardinal Richelieu's indifference to international Catholic interests in particular.

The Mars gallicus did little to help Jansen's rather persecuted theological friends in France, but it reversed Madrid's wrath with Jansen; in 1636 he was appointed bishop of Ypres (Ieper) in West Flanders by the Pope and the Spanish Court. Within two years he was however cut down at age 52 by a sudden illness; the Augustinus, the book of his life, was published posthumously in 1640.