Saving Fear in Christian Spirituality by Ann W. Astell;

Author:Ann W. Astell;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2019-11-06T00:00:00+00:00

I will come back to this last point in a moment. I mention this discussion in the Provincial Letters only as a baseline. But two things need to be emphasized here. First of all, the Jansenist worry, in its highly visible anti-Jesuit polemics like the Provincial Letters, lay on the side of moral concern: the church and larger society were losing their spiritual-ethical focus, and debates over confession and the rest were important because at issue was the church’s witness of holiness within a world of increasing ethical laxity. This sounds very familiar to analogues of our present era: society is going to the dogs, relativism, pornography, materialism, and the rest are destroying us, etc. And Jansenists can sound equally hand-­wringing and shrill. But secondly, and more deeply, this moral concern was tied for most Jansenists to something more fundamental: their fervent theocentrism—the “everything” of God that seeped into all their attitudes and actions. To lessen any part of life’s bondedness to the reality of God’s all-essential pertinence was to cast that life into an abyss of loss. Life was short, and it was all God’s. Any attenuation of this single fact constituted an existential horror.

So, while the public battle and posturing did often overtake the theological issues, the issues themselves were never far from their fundamental motive, as I will argue in a moment.

But back to the baseline. When it comes to the fear of God, we can see two strands of more serious development in the seventeenth-century French discussion. I will call one of these two strands the “standard line,” which was shared largely across the board by theologians and spiritual writers, and I will call the other the “Pascalian” line, taken by a smaller group of Jansenists.

First, according to the standard line, the fear of God is a good that is bound to the service of God’s infinite sovereignty. This perspective took up the tradition, deriving mostly from Augustine, that spoke contrastively of two kinds of “fear”: one “servile” (and hence negative and unedifying) and the other, more properly “Christian,” which Augustine calls a “chaste” fear (timor castus).11 The first, he says, is “the fear of suffering punishment”; the second, of “losing righteousness.” “What great thing is it to fear punishment?” asks Augustine, “The vilest slave and the cruelest robber do so.” Hence, not only Jansenists but most Christian moralists rejected “attrition” as truly “Christian.” But the one who loves righteousness, by contrast, properly “fears” to lose it. As Augustine explains, our love of righteousness is in fact a love for life with God, and so great is such love that no loss could hover more terribly over it than our banishment from God’s presence. “It is not this [fear] that love . . . casteth out, but rather [love] embraces it and keeps it with it, and possesses it as a companion,” even when we see God face to face. Elsewhere Augustine uses the simile of a chaste wife whose fear of losing her husband springs from her love for him.

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