Miscellaneous Studies; a series of essaysPater, Walter
Philosophy
Miscellaneous Studies; a series of essays
Pater, Walter
Essays
The so-called Jansenist doctrine, on the other hand, of [ ]+ but
irresistible grace was the appropriate view of the Port-Royalists,
high-pitched, eager souls as they were, and of their friend Pascal
himself, however much in his turn he might refine upon it. Whether or
not, as a matter of fact, upon which, as distinct from matters of
faith, an infallible pope can be mistaken, the dreary old Dutch bishop
Jansenius had really taught Jansenism, the Port-Royalists had found in
his "Augustinus" an incentive to devotion, and were avowedly his
adherents. In that somewhat gloomy, that too deeply impressed, that
fanatical age, they were the Calvinists of the Roman Catholic Church,
maintaining, emphasising in it a view, a tradition, really constant in
it from St. Augustin, from St. Paul himself. It is a merit of Pascal,
his literary merit, to have given a very fine-toned expression to that
doctrine, though mainly in the way of a criticism of its opponents, to
one side or aspect of an eternal controversy, eternally suspended, as
representing two opposite aspects of experience [70] itself. Calvin
and Arminius, Jansen and Molina sum up, in fact, respectively, like the
respective adherents of the freedom or of the necessity of the human
will, in the more general question of moral philosophy, two opposed,
two counter trains of phenomena actually observable by us in human
action, too large and complex a matter, as it is, to be embodied or
summed up in any one single proposition or idea.
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