Thesis--Paris. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [ix]-xxviii) and index. Also issued online.

Univ., Diss.--München, 2004.

No description available.

Thesis (doctoral)--Paris. / Includes bibliographical references and index.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Columbia University. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 159-164).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2005. / Available online via OhioLINK's ETD Center; full text release delayed at author's request until 2010 Dec 22

Thesis--Paris. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [xi]-xvi).

This thesis examines the impact in mid- to later-seventeenth century England of the major contemporary religious controversy in France. The debates associated with this controversy, which revolved around the formal condemnation of a heresy popularly called Jansenism, involved fundamental questions about the doctrine of grace and moral theology, about the life of the Church and the conduct of individual Christians. In providing an analysis of the main themes of the controversy, and an account of instances of English interest, the thesis argues that English Protestant theologians in the process of working out their own views on basic theological questions recognised the relevance of the continental debates. It is further suggested that the theological arguments evolved by the French writers possess some value as a point of comparison for the developing views of English theologians. Where the Jansenists reasserted an Augustinian emphasis on the gratuity of salvation against Catholic theologians who over-valued the powers of human nature, the Anglican writers examined here, arguing against Protestant theologians who denied nature any moral potency, emphasised man's contribution to his own salvation. Both arguments have been seen to contain a corrosive individualism, the former through its preoccupation with the luminous experience of grace, the latter through its tendency to elide grace and moral virtue, and reduce Christianity to the voluntary ethical choices of individuals. These assessments, it is argued here, misrepresent the theologians in question. Nevertheless, their thought did encourage greater individualism and moral autonomy. For both groups, their opponents' theological premises were deficient to the extent that they vitiated morality; and in both cases their responses, centring on the transformation of the inner man by love, privileged the moral responsibility of the individual. Their moral 'rigorism', it is suggested, focusing on the affective experience of conversion, represented in both cases an attempt to provide a sound empirical basis for Christian faith and practice in the fragmented intellectual context of post-reformation Europe.

Entre le début du XVe siècle et la fin du XVIIe siècle, la question de la justice de l’élection et de la damnation divine fait l’objet de débats d’une grande virulence entre les théologiens catholiques. Contre la conception luthérienne d’un «Dieu aimant les uns et détestant les autres d’un amour et d’une haine éternels», les Dominicains et les Jésuites interrogent les raisons motivant le châtiment de Dieu, quand les Jansénistes clament que Dieu ne doit rien à personne. Les théologies de l’imputation morale de la période s’affrontent à propos de la définition de l’offense au Créateur, de la question du salut des païens, des conditions d’attribution de la grâce, et portent à leur paroxysme les tensions inhérentes au catholicisme post-tridentin. Ce présent travail montre comment la théologie n’a pas assisté en spectatrice impuissance à l’élaboration du sujet laïc, mais y a participé de manière active et paradoxale. C’est au beau milieu des feux mutuels que se lancent les polémistes que l’on peut suivre la manière dont s’élabore peu à peu la distinction de deux sphères de l’imputation morale – celle de l’homme et celle du chrétien –, et ainsi, la manière dont on vient à concevoir une version sécularisée de la faute morale, ou une offense à la droite raison qui ne soit nullement une offense à Dieu. / Between the beginning of the 16th and the late 17th century, Catholic theologians argue about the justice of the divine election and damnation. Against the Lutheran conception of “a God loving ones but detesting the others with eternal love and hate”, Dominicans and Jesuits question the reasons motivating God reprobation, while the Jansenist position is that “God owes us nothing”. At this period, theologies of moral imputation fight on multiple topics: how to define the offence to the Creator, how to ground pagans’ salvation, what are the conditions of grace attribution, and overall these debates will bring the tensions inherent to post-Tridentine Catholicism into focus. In this work, I show that theology did not passively watch the making of the secular subject but was instead an active and paradoxical player. It is in the middle of the controversy between the different polemists that we can trace back the way the distinction between the two spheres of moral imputation – the one of the men and the one of the Christians – is progressively grounded, and thus, we can understand the path leading to a secularized version of the moral fault, namely, an offense to reason that is not an offense to God.