Cornelius Otto Jansen, (born Oct. 28, 1585, Acquoi, near Leerdam, Holland—died May 6, 1638, Ypres, Flanders, Spanish Netherlands [now in Belgium]), Flemish leader of the Roman Catholic reform movement known as Jansenism. He wrote biblical commentaries and pamphlets against the Protestants. His major work was Augustinus, published by his friends in 1640. Although condemned by Pope Urban VIII in 1642, it was of critical importance in the Jansenist movement.
Education
Jansen entered the University of Leuven (Louvain), in the Spanish Netherlands in 1602 to study theology. According to the custom adopted by the humanists of the Renaissance, Jansen Latinized his name to Cornelius Jansenius. His teacher, Jacques Janson, taught the doctrine of the theologian Michael Baius (Michel de Bay), who had died at Leuven in 1589. According to the latter, man is affected from his birth by the sin of Adam, his ancestor. His instincts lead him necessarily to evil. He can be saved only by the grace of Christ, accorded to a small number of the elect who have been chosen in advance and destined to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. This doctrine, inspired by certain writings of St. Augustine, attracted Jansen and another student who had come to study at Leuven, a Frenchman named Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, who was to become a leader of the Jansenist movement. The two young men became friends in Paris, where Jansen went in 1604. They decided to revive theology, which they believed the theologians of the Sorbonne had reduced to subtle and vain discussions among Scholastics. Jansen and Duvergier thought that it was necessary to render to God the homage owed by men and that the pride of the Renaissance savants had alienated Christians from the Jesus who loved the simple and the humble.
In 1611 Jansen followed Duvergier to the home of the latter’s parents, located in the outskirts of Bayonne. The bishop of the city entrusted to Jansen the direction of the episcopal college there from 1612 to 1614. For three years afterward the young Dutchman, with Duvergier, dedicated himself to the study of the writings of the early Church Fathers.
Return to Leuven: the Augustinus
In 1617 Jansen returned to Leuven, where he directed the college of Sainte-Pulchérie, created for Dutch students. A violent dispute had arisen at Leuven between the disciples of Baius and the Jesuits, who considered as dangerous the doctrines of this theologian, who had been condemned by Pope Pius V in 1567. Jansen then undertook a thorough study of the works of Augustine by which Baius had been inspired. He read them, he declared, 10 times consecutively. But he devoted himself most particularly to the texts drafted by Augustine to combat the doctrine of Pelagius, who had held that, in spite of the fault committed by Adam, man continues to be entirely free to do good and to obtain salvation by means of his own merits. Jansen then began his great work, the Augustinus. For him, the divine grace that alone can save man is not due at all to his good actions. It is, he claimed, a gratuitous gift by means of which Christ leads the elect to eternal life, but the multitude, “the mass of perdition,” is doomed to damnation. Thus, men are predestined to obtain grace or to suffer condemnation. In reality, Augustine had not envisaged the fate of human beings with such great rigour. He had even proclaimed the power of man’s free will at the time when he was engaged in the struggle against the Manichaeans. But Augustine had then been constrained to enclose the liberty of man within strict limits, in order to refute the affirmations of Pelagius, who had radically reduced the value of the divine grace obtained by Jesus on the cross.
Jansen was so fascinated by Augustine’s treatise against the Pelagians that he apparently lost sight of Augustine’s works against the Manichaeans.
Jansen also wrote commentaries on the evangelists and on the Old Testament—notably on the Pentateuch—as well as a “Discourse on the Reformation of the Inner Man.” He was likewise the author of pamphlets directed against the Protestants.
Last years
Having acquired the degree of doctor in theology at Leuven, Jansen became the rector of that university in 1635, and in 1636 he became bishop of Ypres. The Jesuit scholar René Rapin asserted in his book Histoire du Jansénisme (1861) that Jansen had obtained his mitre as a result of the personal intervention of the king of Spain, Philip IV. This sovereign had recognized him for having published a pamphlet entitled Mars Gallicus, in which he strongly criticized the policy of the French cardinal and prime minister, Richelieu, who had contracted an alliance with the Dutch Protestants against Spain. In 1638, a short time after his elevation to the episcopate, Jansen died of the plague. In 1640 his friends published at Leuven the work he had dedicated to St. Augustine, under the title Augustinus Cornelii Jansenii, Episcopi, seu Doctrina Sancti Augustini de Humanae Naturae, Sanitate, Aegritudine, Medicina adversus Pelagianos et Massilienses (“The Augustine of Cornelius Jansen, Bishop, or On the Doctrines of St. Augustine Concerning Human Nature, Health, Grief, and Cure Against the Pelagians and Massilians”).
This book had cost its author 22 years of effort. In the epilogue Jansen declared: “I leave my work to the judgment of the Roman Church. . . . I retract all that she will decide that I ought to (must) retract.”