Word: jansenist
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Reductions. Despite their remarkable accomplishments, the Jesuits were suppressed in 1773 by Pope Clement XIV, and the order was disbanded for 41 years. The suppression grew out of a convergence of hatreds. The anticlerical freethinkers of the Enlightenment detested the Jesuits. So did Jansenist Catholics, who adhered to a puritanical view of man's depravity. Their most articulate spokesman was Blaise Pascal, who, in his eloquently satirical Provincial Letters, accused the Jesuits of abetting the decay of Christianity by their lax moral and ascetic teachings. Their papal loyalty, furthermore, infuriated believers in the new nationalism. A magnanimous missionary project...
...them, a kind of inverted love story that's interesting mainly for the reasons the love doesn't come off, which are metaphysical, contradictory, and above all, intellectual. A knowledge of Pascal seems important in sorting out patterns of thought, since the sophisticated conversations ("you're more of a Jansenist than I am") are often elliptical, but don't be put off: with Rohmer, as with his New Wave cohorts, academic expertise is neither necessary nor sufficient for understanding his intellectuality. Most of the ideas are hashed over at Maud's in brilliant, circuitous, and convoluted dialogue, which, like most...
...poor dead Jesus." Principato, the beleaguered hero of this hilarious novel, finds out about the Corrigans the hard way by marrying Cynthia, the barge-footed only daughter of the clan. Battening off a string of funeral homes and ghetto bars, his in-laws scheme constantly within a parochial Jansenist world of indulgences and spiritual bouquets. For them, a family's social status is measured by the number of priests and nuns it has produced...
...country owned by Englishmen or their clients after 1662, a small farmer could not afford even to think about sex. Marriage for him was early death. And he clung to a religion that often tended to confirm his caution. The 18th century priests, trained in the flesh-hating Jansenist seminaries of France, gave him the rationale for what he had to do anyway. It was not a specifically Catholic matter. Protestant churches in Scotland and Wales, countries also under the British thumb, were equally repressive...
...seems bare. His well-meaning priest remarks that he has never read Paradise Lost-whose author also, as it happens, tried to "justify the ways of God to men." Certainly Greene's priest cannot justify them; he can only insist that they are somehow just. Greene's Jansenist mind-again in Milton's words-"can make a Hell of Heaven"; his stricken world suggests his fellow Catholic Francis Thompson...
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