It most certainly does not. Unless you have a different argument than Speray.
An excerpt from the book, "God Owes Us Nothing" by Dr. Kolakowski:
Jansenists hardly ever called themselves “Jansenists,” of course; the name was coined by their Jesuit enemies almost at the beginning of the controversy; it suggested a kind of a new sect set up by one recently deceased theologian. Jansenius’s followers called themselves disciples of Augustine, whose authority had been unshakable in Christianity. They insisted that they—and their master, Jansenius—had nothing new to say; they simply followed and repeated the most traditional teaching of the Church, which conformed to the Gospels and to the epistles of Saint Paul and was codified in Augustinian theology. The “Molinist” doctrine, on the other hand, was, they argued, a novelty in the Catholic Church, even though it brought back to life the most dangerous heresy of the Pelagians or semi-Pelagians (the so-called “Marsilians”).
The Jesuit writers were indeed in an awkward position when they were challenged by the authority of Augustine, and most of the time they preferred to avoid the issue. When pressed on this point, they either issued gratuitous denials or sometimes—not often—pointed out that the great saint, much as he deserved respect, was not infallible, after all, and his writings were not dogmatically binding; they also averred that their own theory of grace was perfectly in keeping with the teaching of Thomas Aquinas, whose authority they often invoked. They accused the Jansenists, however, of being tainted with the horrors of the Calvinist heresy. Good arguments may be advanced to show that both sides were right in their accusations. Jansenists were on firm ground in saying that they were faithful to the Augustinian teaching, and quite justified in scenting Pelagian errors in the Jesuit theology. The Jesuits were no less right in demonstrating the fundamental conformity of Jansenist tenets with Calvin’s theory of predestination. This amounts to saying that Calvin was, on this point, a good Augustinian and that, by condemning Jansenius, the Church was in effect condemning—without, of course, stating it explicitly—Augustine himself, its own greatest theological authority. The pronouncements and the anathemas of the Council of Trent left some ambiguities which both Jesuits and Jansenists could plausibly interpret in their favor; the successive condemnations of Baius, Jansenius, and Quesnel, however, sealed the fate of the Augustinian tradition on this crucial point in the Catholic world. This was a momentous event in the history of Christianity and thus in the European history of ideas, not a long-forgotten quarrel of hair-splitting medieval minds.
The Council of Trent did confirm the Augustinian teaching. Whatever God orders is feasible with his grace but this grace is not always there and not everybody gets it; otherwise we would not need to ask for help. And it is important to keep in mind that grace is refused not only to infidels and obdurate sinners but also to faithful and just people, who really do wish to abide by divine orders: they have will but not power. The paradigmatic example, both to Augustine and to Jansenius, is, of course, the denial of Peter, a supremely iustus vir who had the will to follow the commandments but was not provided with the divine aid to do it. One simple Augustinian sentence (among many) settles the matter: “I want you to will, but it is not enough that you will. You have to be aided so that you will fully accomplish what you will.”7 Even the Lord’s Prayer, “do not lead us into temptation,” implies that “it is not given to all not to be tempted above what they are capable of.”8 The self-conceited Pelagian contention that the will cannot be enslaved, and that we simply do not sin if we do not want to, is to be found among scholastics who fail to see that it is not enough to will, or to will not to, in order to overpower the temptation. “It is grace which causes that we not only will to do what is right but that we are able to do so.” Bad will can be converted into good will only by the power of grace. God demonstrated, through Peter’s example, that he punishes the pride of those who rely on their own powers. “And what is man without grace but what Peter was when he denied Christ?”9
Jansenius claims that Aquinas’s theology does not depart from Augustinian tenets on this point. Did not he say that man is in duty bound to perform acts he is incapable of performing without grace, which God does not always confer (a just punishment for previous crimes or at least for original sin)?10 Didn’t he say that the sinner is guilty even if he cannot escape sinning, not unlike a drunken killer who is not excused just because he committed the crime as a result of being drunk, since he was guilty of having got drunk in the first place?
According to Augustine, Jurieu, and Calvin, human creatures after the Fall can perform no morally good act (conform to divine law) unaided; for every such act they need the infusion of grace which is given to some and refused to others by the sheer wish of God, and not because some are more deserving of grace than others.
According to the semi-Pelagian teaching of the Jesuits, we do need divine grace to do good but “sufficient grace” is given to all, and it needs only our free will to make it efficient. Since this efficient grace is a constant condition of our life, we may say that moral perfection and our salvation depend on our effort and will. According to Aquinas, we have enough grace to perform some good acts by our free choice, but the free choice does not suffice to avoid all sins in all circuмstances.
One might argue that the Augustinians’ fears and worries were not well grounded, as Christianity has after all survived after adopting a semi-Pelagian doctrine of salvation; neither has it been transformed into a secular philosophy, despite the intense efforts of many Catholic theologians. The powerful image of Jesus Christ is still there: a good shepherd with wide-open arms. But it is not the Christianity that the Jansenists carried in their hearts. If they were here now they might say, with infinite sadness, that “the cross has been emptied.” As a result of the long anti-Jansenist campaign, Christianity did undergo a mutation in both theological and cultural terms, imperceptible at the time. This probably made the survival of the Church possible, but at a price which the seventeenth-century Augustinians would have found exorbitant.
Topic: The Absurdities of The Feeneyite Heresy (Read 21580 times)