Background
Cornelius Otto Jansen was born on October 28, 1585, in the village of Acquoy (Accoi), Gelderland, Netherlands.
Cornelius Otto Jansen was born on October 28, 1585, in the village of Acquoy (Accoi), Gelderland, Netherlands.
In 1602, he entered the College du Faucon at the University of Louvain, to take up the study of philosophy. After two years, at the solemn promotion of 1604, he was proclaimed first of 118 competitors. He began his theological studies at the College du Pape Adrien VI, whose president, Jacques Janson, taught the doctrine of the theologian Michael Baius.
In 1604 Jansen fell ill and went to live in Paris, where he became more and more intimate with a fellow student of his Louvain days, Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, the future Abbé de St-Cyran, who later would be the most ardent and political defender of his theology. In 1611 Jansen followed Duvergier to the home of the latter’s parents, located in the outskirts of Bayonne. The bishop of the city entrusted to Jansen the direction of the episcopal college there from 1612 to 1614. For three years afterward the young Dutchman, with Duvergier, dedicated himself to the study of the writings of the early Church Fathers.
In 1617 Jansen returned to Leuven, where he directed the college of Sainte-Pulchérie, created for Dutch students. A violent dispute had arisen at Leuven between the disciples of Baius and the Jesuits, who considered as dangerous the doctrines of this theologian, who had been condemned by Pope Pius V in 1567. Jansen then undertook a thorough study of the works of Augustine by which Baius had been inspired. He read them, he declared, 10 times consecutively. But he devoted himself most particularly to the texts drafted by Augustine to combat the doctrine of Pelagius, who had held that, in spite of the fault committed by Adam, man continues to be entirely free to do good and to obtain salvation by means of his own merits. Jansen then began his great work, the Augustinus. For him, the divine grace that alone can save man is not due at all to his good actions. It is, he claimed, a gratuitous gift by means of which Christ leads the elect to eternal life, but the multitude, “the mass of perdition, ” is doomed to damnation. Thus, men are predestined to obtain grace or to suffer condemnation. In reality, Augustine had not envisaged the fate of human beings with such great rigour. He had even proclaimed the power of man’s free will at the time when he was engaged in the struggle against the Manichaeans.
Jansen was so fascinated by Augustine’s treatise against the Pelagians that he apparently lost sight of Augustine’s works against the Manichaeans.
Jansen also wrote commentaries on the evangelists and on the Old Testament—notably on the Pentateuch—as well as a “Discourse on the Reformation of the Inner Man. ” He was likewise the author of pamphlets directed against the Protestants.
Having acquired the degree of doctor in theology at Leuven, Jansen became the rector of that university in 1635, and in 1636 he became bishop of Ypres. On May 6, 1638, a short time after his elevation to the episcopate, Jansen died of the plague. In 1640 his friends published at Leuven the work he had dedicated to St. Augustine, under the title Augustinus Cornelii Jansenii, Episcopi, seu Doctrina Sancti Augustini de Humanae Naturae, Sanitate, Aegritudine, Medicina adversus Pelagianos et Massilienses (“The Augustine of Cornelius Jansen, Bishop, or On the Doctrines of St. Augustine Concerning Human Nature, Health, Grief, and Cure Against the Pelagians and Massilians”).