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Title: God Owes Us Nothing: A Brief Remark on Pascal's Religion and on the Spirit of Jansenism
ISBN: 0226450538
Author:
Leszek Kolakowski
Publicate Date: 1998-05-22
Publish: 1998-05-22
List Price: $14.00
Average Customer Rating: 4.0
Format: Paperback
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Amazon Lowest New Price: $12.53
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| Customer Review: |
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1: A good Introduction to Jansenism
There is very little in print about Jansenism in the English language. This book probably serves as a tentative introduction to the subject. St. Augustine, the foremost doctor of the Catholic church, has always vexed the Catholic church with his more extreme views on the fallenness of the human will and predestination. Jansenism could be seen as a reappropriation of some of Augustine's "unorthodox" views in the 16 and 1700s. The Jansenists are portrayed here as having a gloomy religion for the select few. Therefore the Catholic church and the Jesuits, in particular, had to crush them. To the point of razing their most famous monastery to the ground.
If you believe the Church has remained faithful to Augustine then read Henri de Lubac as he goes to great lengths in "Modern Augustinianism" to debunk the notion that Jansenius was a faithful interpreter of Augustine.
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2: Intellectually challenging
After reading G. Stucco "mr. Guido"'s excellent review, I will only add that, in my opinion, this work (or more precisely, its first part) achieves something pretty difficult : to provide a sociological explanation of the reasons why a theological doctrine (augustinism/calvinism/jansenism) was dropped in favour of another one (semi-pelagianism). Its second part is a lucid sketch of Pascal's thought. And all that without being dry but interesting. To some extent, it reminds me of "The fear of freedom" by Erich Fromm and "The social thought of Bernard Mandeville" by Thomas Horne. Therefore, my rating is between 5 (content) and 4 (pleasure, sometimes falling to 3, sometimes raising to 5).
Besides, I think that anyone looking for a critique from a theological point of view will fruitfully read an article available in [...] which was written by the end of 1995 by Avery Dulles (elevated to cardinal of the Catholic church in 2001, author of "A History of Apologetics").
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3: Excellent and thought provoking!
The title refers to the Augustinian-Jansenist view according to which human beings are absolutely incapable, through their efforts unaided by grace, to please God and to rightfully expect his mercy. The book consists of two parts: the first part focuses on the five Jansenist propositions that were condemned by the Church; the second part deals with Pascal's "sad religion," and its overly theocentric mentality (to shed tears for the death of on'e loved ones and to laugh are unorthy of a Christian).
The main points the author makes are:
* Jansenius correctly interpreted Augustine's theology of grace. Anybody who says otherwise is in bad faith. (Has anybody gotten a chance to peruse Jansenius's opus magnus, Augustinus? I have! There are HUNDREDS of quotations from Augustine's work: anybody who rejects Jansenius' understanding of Augustine OWES a major production of eveidence to that effect!)
* The Church rightly condemned Jansenius. It had to, in order to survive and avoid holing itself up or to go out of the socio-cultural scene as an obsolete phenomenon. The alternative would have been to turn into a little sect of saints (a la Amish), unable to influence the world at large and to become a cultural oddity. The author concludes that the Church loses out when it lives with a besieged fortress mentality. The all-or nothing mentality is a recipe for disaster.
* The Church therefore rightly condemned some Augustinian theological views.
* The Church began to de-Augustinize itself. "It was a momentous event in the history of the Church when it exploited this occasion, adopting practically the Jesuit (or semi-Pelagian) doctrine in the crucial questions of original sin, grace and predestination, and thereby breaking -tacitly, needless to say - with a very important part of its theological heritage and shaping its teaching accordingly." (p. 31)
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