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How to Avail Oneself of the Heavenly Bread The following is a chapter from God Owes Us Nothing, A Brief Remark on Pascal’s Religion and on the Spirit of Jansenism, by Leszek Kolakowski. It briefly discusses the differences of attitude and practice between the Jesuits and the Jansenists with regard to the use of the sacraments. It is commonly admitted that the Frequente Communion by Antoine Arnauld (first edition in 1643) became, perhaps not intentionally, a kind of founding manifesto of the Jansenist party and the crucial document that consolidated the movement and gave it a clearly distinguishing theoretical or ideological expression; this is what party manifestos have always been for. Even though anti-Jesuit writings by Saint-Cyran had been in circulation for a decade and a half and the opus magnum by Jansenius for three years, Arnauld’s text, written at Saint-Cyran’s instigation, provided potential adherents of Jansenism with a doctrinal basis in which they could find a well-articulated contrast between their - i.e., Augustinian - idea of Christianity and Jesuit novelties. Unlike Jansenius’s work, the Frequente Communion was written in French and addressed to the general educated public, not only to theologians, its length not-withstanding (Arnauld was totally incapable of being concise in his writing; in this he was similar to his great Calvinist opponent Pierre Jurieu). It immediately became a best-seller. The question how often people should receive Holy Communion might appear of secondary importance to today’s Catholics, but Arnauld, by analyzing the uses and abuses of two sacraments - penance and the Eucharist - managed to oppose to each other two radically different concepts of Christian life and methods of seeking salvation. The text was provided with forty-five approbatur by bishops and theologians, quite an impressive part of the Who’s Who among French (mainly secular) clergy; its target was the Jesuit “Christianity made easy,” and its arguments use quotations from the fathers and councils, occasionally from modern reformers (especially, and not surprisingly, Charles Borromeo; Jansenius is quoted briefly two or three times), as well as references to the customs observed in the early Church. The immense theological erudition of Arnauld is harnessed to show that the Jesuits want to tempt us into the “broad path” and that such people, as John of the Cross said, must not be believed even if they perform miracles. According to Jesuit authors, the Eucharist is a celestial medicine designed to cure the sinful state of our souls; it is natural therefore that the more grievous our sickness the more we need this divine aid, and that the more we feel robbed of grace, the more quickly we have to rush to God. The blood of the Savior annuls our sins and we ought to seek, everyday and without fear, participation in his merits. Once we commit a mortal sin, we go to the confessor and receive absolution, and immediately thereafter we should approach the Lord’s table. True repentance is hardly mentioned in Jesuit teaching, Arnauld avers, whereas it is essential in Church tradition. The Jesuit priests believe that they may not refuse absolution to people who declare that they prefer to postpone their repentance until their sojourn in purgatory. Arnauld argues, quite convincingly, that this approach is both sacrilegious and contrary to well-established tradition. Without the proper spirit of repentance, without penance, the divine bread turns into poison for those who recklessly rely on its salutary effect. And did not Basil say that those who deserve the Holy Sacrament have to be dead to sin, to the world, and to themselves, that they must acquire “perfect sainthood”? Did not Ambrose warn us that whoever wants to eat life, eats it to his damnation unless he changes his own life? Only if you share the virtues of the Christians of old, only if you attain a state of innocence, charity, and ardor of the Holy Ghost, may you take communion frequently, warns Bonaventure. Even those who have already abandoned their evil conduct but are not yet completely cleaned by the pure love of God, not perfectly united with God and not altogether perfect, have no place in the Church, according to Denis. And Cyprian teaches us that “perseverance in piety, in virtue, in faith, in good life and in good works” is the absolute condition of being admitted to communion. The recipients, as John Chrysostom says, have to be “lofty souls having nothing in common with the earth.” “Extreme purity” is required for participation in Jesus Christ’s flesh and one ought to approach the sacrament in “awe and trembling.” Some great saints voluntarily abstained from communion, considering themselves unworthy because of venial sins they had committed. In the first centuries of the Church public penance was customarily required not only for mortal and publicly committed sins; the devil doesn’t care whether a sin is public or secret: his aim is to tear away a baptized person from his place among God’s children. It is the priest’s duty to delay absolution after confession until the sinner has atoned for his crimes by a proportionate penance, shed his old self and changed into the new. We must not just rely on absolution; since only God can forgive our sins, we must beg his forgiveness in pain and tears, in sackcloth and ashes, with mourning and fasting, recognizing the enormity of our misdeeds, mortifying ourselves both in body and in conscience, never despairing about divine mercy but neither assuming that God has already forgiven us. We must not hope for conversion on the death bed after a godless life: poenitentia morituri moritura. Penitents who deplore their sins without abandoning them and those who abandon them without deploring them are equally unworthy of absolution, let alone of communion; so are those in whom the confessor sees no real improvement and who seem likely to revert to their old habits. Many sinners dread hell for no better reason than their amour propre; yet God does not let us into his kingdom as a reward for amour propre. The results of this easy, undemanding Christianity were only too predictable: a catastrophic decline in moral standards and omnipresent corruption in all areas of life. Everybody is willing to rush to the confessional and no one to do penance; there have never been so many confessions and communions and never so much depravity and disorder. “Who does not know that for 20 years fornication has been regarded as a slight failing; adultery, one of the worst crimes of all, as a piece of good fortune; fraud and betrayal as virtues of the Court; godlessness and libertinage as strength of mind.” Corruption in marriage and family, corruption among the youth, fondness of luxury, gambling, blasphemy, cheating in trade, usury, simony - this is the picture of the age (it is not obvious what those “20 years” refer to - perhaps to the beginning of Richelieu’s power). Sancta sanctis, holy things for holy people - this adage aptly sums up the tenor and the content of Arnauld’s passionate plea for the restoration of the Christianity of the fathers. He is well aware, of course, that lamenting the decline of Christian virtues among the faithful has been standard in theological and devotional writings since the third century. But he seems to believe that the world had never sunk so deep into the abyss of sin. What he wants is clear: a Church of saints, or rather a sect of saints. The inevitable decline in the number of those who will be accepted into the communion of the Church does not bother him at all. Gideon drove away all the cohorts from his army and only 300 were left to fight and win; “and is it not certain that 300 Christians who live in the zeal of faith bring more glory to the Church than 30,000 men who are similar to the cowardly soldiers of Gideon?” The sacrament of Holy Communion builds or restores the communion not only with Jesus Christ but also with his mystical body, the Church. Under the conditions set up by Arnauld, if one took them seriously, the Church would inevitably dwindle to a tiny sect of the perfect, with no prospect of influencing the impure world, let alone of conquering it. It would perhaps go back to the catacombs. It would certainly become what the rigorists wanted it to be and what they thought it had once been, in the good old days: a healthy but foreign body in a world dominated by evil. Perfect sainthood, extreme purity, innocence and Christian zeal, being dead to the world, a blameless life - this is what is expected from any Christian willing to remain in communion with the Church, not just from the monks of the contemplative orders; there is no gradation of merits, no attenuating circumstances, not the slightest leniency for human weakness; the same spirit that was displayed by the great martyrs of the early Church is now required as the general norm. A provincial synod, Arnauld reminds us, made a praiseworthy decision in imposing ten years of penance on a priest who was guilty of fornication and volunteered the self-accusation. Francois de Sales suggests that no more than one among 10,000 directeurs des consciences is up to the task. Arnauld, and all Jansenists, when accused of demanding the impossible and of imposing impracticable requirements on people and priests, replied: what is at stake is eternal salvation and on this point there is no bargaining or looking for easy solutions; it is a deadly serious thing, indeed the only thing that really matters. The Jesuit fathers could certainly not be accused of neglecting eternal salvation; on the contrary, they wanted to make it as widely accessible as possible. Indeed they made it easy. They were not accused - not even by Jansenists - of being self-indulgent and benefiting themselves with their easy-to-follow routes to eternal bliss; their personal moral discipline was not an issue. But they obviously wanted to maintain and extend the Church’s sway over the royal court and upper classes of any society where they operated, and this they could not do without accepting social conditions or “human nature” for what they were. One may safely say that the need for less exacting, to put it mildly, rules of Christian life was too imperative not to be met; why the Society assumed this task is a separate question. It was known that Louis XIV, whose conduct was notoriously less than edifying by Christian standards, lived in terror of hell. One can hardly imagine the arch-Christian monarch being unable to find confessors ready to bring solace to his tortured soul and to let him continue. The Jesuits were well aware of being innovators; Arnauld quotes his adversary Father de Sesmaison, S.J., who wants to build “une Eglise d’a present,” a modern church. He himself was well aware of being what we would call “reactionary” in the strict sense: he wanted to go back to the Church of the Apostles no matter what the price, and if this meant reducing it, like Gideon’s army, to 1 percent - from 30,000 to 300 - so be it. Naturally enough, he was the implacable enemy of all who, in religious matters, sought any foundation other than the divine authority and the fathers. He allowed reliance only on “this truth established in the Tradition which recognizes no visions, no revelations, no reasoning and no particular opinions but is the arbiter of all visions, all revelations, all reasoning and all true and Catholic opinions.” While the Church is incorruptible in faith, the conduct of the majority is not only corruptible, it is bound to grow worse the nearer we come to the end of the world. God visited his unfaithful flock with various calamities, proportional to their weakness; he let the devil bring about the heresies of Luther and Calvin and he let the Turks invade Christian kingdoms. One must not pass over in silence the decay in the Church; better to provoke a scandal than to abandon the truth, as Saint Bernard says (melius est ut scandalum oritur quam veritas relinquitur). And it is the calling of bishops to restore proper discipline. The Jesuits did not deny the magnitude of corruption among Christians but their therapy was quite different: precisely because virtue has become so feeble, the healing power of sacraments has to be distributed more lavishly. The Jansenists - as well as many Thomist theologians and many bishops and priests who, without necessarily sharing the doctrine of Jansenius, remained loyal to the tradition - argued that the Jesuit medicine exacerbated the sickness they claimed to cure: it let people continue in their wicked habits with impunity and degraded absolution to a mechanical formality.

Antoine Arnauld (1612-1694)