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Cornelii Jansenii, Episcopi Yprensis, Augustinus, seu doctrina S. Augustini de humanae naturae sanitate, aegritudine, medicina, adversus Pelagianos et Massilienses (Lovanii 1640)

 

The Augustinus of Cornelius Jansen, Bishop of Ypres

 

 

This is Jansen’s famous exposition of the doctrine of St. Augustine on grace and predestination that was the focus of so much controversy in seventeenth century France.

 

There was no printing of the work from the seventeenth to the twentieth century and then only a single 1960s-vintage photographic reprint, not abundantly disseminated of which this is a photographic scan.

 

This is the original 1640 Louvain edition in Latin. The work has never been translated into English, although a French translation was underway the last I heard. See below for English commentary on the Augustinus.

 

This is a photographic scan of the Augustinus in Adobe .pdf format,* right click to download.

 

Tomus Primus (38.5 Mb)

Tomus Secundus (104 Mb)

Tomus Tertius (121 Mb)

 

(* You can download the Adobe Acrobat document viewer here.)

 

English commentary on the Augustinus

 

See The True Idea Of Jansenisme, Both Historick And Dogmatick By Theophilus Gale (London, 1669) for a history of early Jansenism and an excellent and detailed analysis of the Augustinus.

 

Blaise Pascal discussed the theology of the Augustinus in the seventeenth and eighteenth of his Provincial Letters. His Ecrits sur la Grace give a clear and concise exposition of the early Jansenist doctrine of grace and predestination; extracts translated into English by Professor Jan Miel in Pascal and Theology (John Hopkins Press, 1969).

 

Professor John Kilcullen discussed the doctrines of Augustine, Jansen and Arnauld vis-à-vis the “liberty of indifference” and the conditions for freedom, merit and moral responsibility in his Arnauld on Freewill and Necessity (from Sincerity and Truth: Essays on Arnauld, Bayle and Toleration, Oxford University at the Clarendon Press, 1988).

 

Nigel Abercrombie gave an analysis of the Augustinus in his book, The Origins of Jansenism (Oxford, 1936), pages 125-158. He shouldn’t be taken too seriously when he seeks to draw every benefit for the Molinist party that he can from the ecclesiastical condemnation of five pithy propositions attributed to the book by Rome. This is a photographic scan in Adobe .pdf format, right click to download (4 Mb).

 

The Catholic Encyclopedia offers an article on Jansenius and Jansenism which gives a brief analysis of the doctrine attributed to Jansen by Rome and gives an outline of the history of the controversy surrounding the work; again, a partisan discussion.

 

“The work is divided into three volumes, of which the first, chiefly historical, is an exposition in eight books of Pelagianism; the second, after an introductory study on the limitations of human reason, devotes one book to the state of innocence or the grace of Adam and the angels, four books to the state of fallen nature, three to the state of pure nature; the third volume treats in ten books of “the grace of Christ the Saviour”, and concludes with “a parallel between the error of the Semipelagians and that of certain moderns”, who are no other than the Molinists. The author, if we are to accept his own statement, laboured for twenty years on this work, and to gather his materials he had ten times read the whole of St. Augustine and thirty times his treatise[s] against the Pelagians.” (Catholic Encyclopedia)

 

See the annotated index at http://www.romancatholicism.org for other materials related to the Augustinus and Jansenism.

 

 

 

Cornelius Jansen (1586-1638)