In his encyclical Dilexit nos Pope Francis speaks about how devotion to the Sacred Heart helped counteract the errors of Jansenism and Gnosticism. Could you please tell me what Jansenism and Gnosticism were, so I can understand this better?
To put your question in context, in paragraph 84 of this wonderful encyclical Pope Francis writes; “The promotion of Eucharistic communion on the first Friday of each month, for example, sent a powerful message at a time when many people had stopped receiving communion because they were no longer confident of God’s mercy and forgiveness and regarded communion as a kind of reward for the perfect.
In the context of Jansenism, the spread of this practice proved immensely beneficial, since it led to a clearer realisation that in the Eucharist the merciful and ever-present love of the heart of Christ invites us to union with him. It can also be said that this practice can prove similarly beneficial in our own time, for a different reason. Amid the frenetic pace of today’s world and our obsession with free time, consumption and diversion, cell phones and social media, we forget to nourish our lives with the strength of the Eucharist.”
What was Jansenism? The movement takes its name from Cornelius Jansen (1585-1638), a Dutch theologian who was a professor at Louvain University in Belgium and later bishop of Ypres. He was one of the key figures in the controversy over the relationship between grace and free will, which was occupying theologians at the time.
Jansenius, as he was more commonly known, followed the Augustinian tradition, which saw God’s role in providing grace as primary and man’s capacity to correspond to it as limited, due to original sin. He taught that God gives grace only to a few predestined elect and withholds it from others.
The theology of Jansenism led to an extreme moral rigorism, which emphasised man’s sinfulness and helplessness in corresponding to God’s grace. This pessimistic view led to a very strict approach to Holy Communion.
Antoine Arnauld, a leading Jansenist, believed that widespread and frequent Communion would be sacrilegious because few people were worthy enough to receive it or had the grace of true repentance. He taught that confession of sins was necessary before every Communion. As Pope Francis writes, at that time many people had stopped receiving Communion and were regarding it as a reward for the perfect. In answer to this, devotion to the Sacred Heart and the promotion of Holy Communion on the first Friday of each month did much to emphasise God’s love, mercy and forgiveness. Indeed, as the church teaches, Holy Communion, far from being a reward for the perfect, forgives venial sins.
The pope also spoke of Gnosticism; “It could be argued that today, in place of Jansenism, we find ourselves before a powerful wave of secularisation that seeks to build a world free of God… I must warn that within the church too, a baneful Jansenist dualism has re-emerged in new forms. This has gained renewed strength in recent decades, but it is a recrudescence of that Gnosticism which proved so great a spiritual threat in the early centuries of Christianity because it refused to acknowledge the reality of ‘the salvation of the flesh’” (DN, 87).
Gnosticism, a dualist philosophy which was common at the end of the first century, taught that God was spiritual and therefore good, while matter was evil, having been created by an inferior being. For Gnostics, the only way to salvation was to gain secret, divine knowledge, whence the name Gnostic, meaning “having knowledge.” Some Gnostics, like the Manichaeans and Docetists, denied that Christ had truly come in the flesh with a human heart, since matter was evil. For this reason, the Catholic teaching that Christ was truly God and truly man, with a human body and a heart of flesh, along with devotion to the Sacred Heart, were so important in counteracting the Gnostic heresy.