Jansenist Orientalism

Bonaparte before the Sphinx, by Jean-Léon Gérôme

In his groundbreaking study, Orientalism (1978), Edward Said describes the biographies of several early orientalists. In discussing Antoine-Isaac Silvestre de Sacy (1757–1838), Said drops a small detail about his religious formation: Silvestre de Sacy was “born in 1757 into a Jansenist family,” before receiving his education from the Benedictines. This detail would seem insignificant were Sacy the only example of a Jansenist in the ranks of early French Orientalism. But his student Étienne Marc Quatremère (1782–1857) was also from a Jansenist background, as was his good friend and colleague Abraham-Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (1731–1805). The latter even studied at the Jansenist seminary of Amersfoort, under the schismatic Diocese of Utrecht (today the Old Catholic Church of Utrecht). It was in that clerical context that he first learned Arabic.

Siep Stuurman has suggested that Anquetil-Duperron’s Jansenism was an important factor in his egalitarian worldview, though not the predominant element. Urs App, also writing of Anquetil, has shown that his interest in the history and literature of Eastern civilizations came from a youthful belief that a theologian must be as knowledgeable as possible in order to distinguish true and false revelation. Nicolas Lyon-Caen has perhaps gone the furthest toward illustrating the pertinence of Jansenism to the history of Orientalism in a recent essay on Silvestre de Sacy. He has demonstrated that Sacy’s family was part of a broader Parisian bourgeois milieu, and that, as Augustin Gazier claimed in 1924, the scholar was indeed a participant in the convulsionnaire movement. This radical fringe of Jansenist piety centered on charismatic worship services that included full-body convulsions, alleged healing miracles, and rituals of highly dramatized, theologically-charged violence. Yet these clandestine circles were not unknown to the premier Arabist in France, a scholar whose output helped lay the groundwork for the academic study of Islam and the Arabic tradition more broadly.

Lyon-Caen is surely correct to argue that Sacy—and other erudite Jansenists—were likely drawn to study Hebrew for two reasons. The first was a Biblicist and Patristic primitivism among Jansenists and “Jansenizers” since at least the middle of the seventeenth century. In fact, Silvestre de Sacy probably added the cognomen “Sacy” to his family name in homage to the Jansenist priest Louis-Isaac Le Maistre de Sacy (1613–1684), translator of the Bible. A second, related reason was an obsession with prophecy in some Jansenist and convulsionnaire communities, especially prophecies that foretold an eventual mass conversion of the Jews before the second coming of the Messiah. The study of Hebrew thus led to other languages of the “Orient.”

One could perhaps guess at Silvestre de Sacy’s religious leanings by the preponderance of Jansenist literature in his library. His collection spans the whole of the Jansenist controversies, from the Augustinus (1640) of Jansen himself, to apologetic works by Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, to the Abbé Grégoire’s Les Ruines de Port-Royal des Champs (1809). He owned multiple editions of Pascal’s Lettres Provinciales (1656/57) in three different languages. Perhaps most intriguingly, Sacy also possessed a catechetical work by Germanos Adam (1725–1809), the Melkite bishop who was best known for leading the Synod of Qarqafe (1806). This synod took its inspiration from the Jansenist Synod of Pistoia (1786). One wonders if Sacy, one of France’s premier orientalists, might represent a link between the dwindling French Jansenist circles of the Napoleonic era and the abortive attempt at Melkite Jansenist reform in Lebanon. Further research could clarify this question.

Anquetil-Duperron, better known for translating the Avestas and the Upanishads, shared an interest in Jansenist literature. Although his library does not feature them quite so heavily, he still possessed a few books by Quesnel, Pascal, the Port-Royal circle, and even the Jansenist canonist Van Espen (who was hugely important to the Church of Utrecht). Yet Anquetil wrote more openly of his sympathy for the cause of the Jansenists than Sacy ever did. He kept up correspondence with his old friend and classmate, Gabriel Dupac de Bellegarde. As historian Dale Van Kley has shown, Dupac de Bellegarde stood at the center of a network of anti-Jesuit, reformist Catholics whom he has called “a veritable Jansenist International and conciliar counter-Catholic Church with regional capitals in Utrecht and Pavia.” Having trained in Utrecht’s seminaries, Anquetil was part of that network.

True, Anquetil-Duperron seems not to have shared the anti-Jesuit sentiments of his coreligionists; he even corresponded with Jesuit scholar-missionaries in China, something which would have been anathema to an earlier generation of Jansenists. In a 1937 article, George Sarton claims that Anquetil’s later years were marked by “a kind of syncretism” which blended “not only the Jansenist devotion of his youth, but also Avestan and Hindu cravings.” Said’s picture of Anquetil-Duperron is similar. He calls him

an eccentric theoretician of egalitarianism, a man who managed in his head to reconcile Jansenism with orthodox Catholicism and Brahmanism, and who traveled to Asia in order to prove the actual primitive existence of a Chosen People and of the Biblical genealogies.

There is some truth to these words. For instance, in his preface to the Oupnek’hat, his Latin translation of the Upanishads, Anquetil-Duperron writes,

“the very same dogma of a single parent of the universe and unique spiritual principle” is described “clearly and transparently” in “the books of Solomon, the ancient Chinese Kims [Ch. jing, classics], the sacred Beids [Vedas] of the Indians, and the Zend-avesta of the Persians.

Cornelius Jansen, Evêque d'Ypres (1585–1638)

This is a far cry from the exclusivist, Christocentric soteriology of the earlier Jansenists, many of whom attacked Jesuits for making similar points about primitive revelation (especially during the Chinese Rites Controversy).

Nevertheless, we must not fail to take seriously the extent of Anquetil’s public advocacy of the Jansenist cause as it had evolved by the late eighteenth century. In 1789, Anquetil-Duperron published a book on political economy entitled Dignité du commerce et de l’état de commerçant (1789). In this work, he argues that the Estates General must strike down the religious ordinances that barred Jansenists from the priesthood and the universities. He refers to the Formulary of Alexander VII (1665) and the papal bull Unigenitus (1713) as, collectively, “this new slavery of the whites,” which “must be denounced by name to the Nation, just like that of the Blacks.”

Though not all Jansenists supported the Revolution, Anquetil-Duperron was a committed ally of the Constitutional clergy. He was a member of the Société de philosophie chrétienne (SPC), essentially the steering committee of the Constitutional Church between its rebirth after the Terror until the Napoleonic Concordat in 1801. This group, whose meetings the royalist Sacy also attended, included several other Jansenists like the jurist Louis-Adrien Le Paige and the abolitionist Abbé Henri-Baptiste Grégoire. It also published a newspaper entitled the Annales de la religion. In its edition from November 1797, the Annales reports that “Citizen Anquetil, author of the Zend-Avesta, has prepared a new edition of the Treatise on the Church, by M. Legros. He has added to it learned notes and dissertations.” This text is a work of ecclesiology by a prominent Jansenist theologian of the early eighteenth century.

This common religious factor has gone largely unremarked upon by historians of academic Orientalism. While most note it, few go into any depth about what Jansenism may have meant for these men, or why it matters. This is all the more unfortunate since scholars such as Ines Županov and Ângela Barreto Xavier have drawn our attention to a distinctly “Catholic Orientalism” from the sixteenth century forward. Jansenists represent an important French iteration of what Županov and Xavier describe as a predominately Portuguese and Italian venture.

Portrait of Silvestre de Sacy

The reasons that Jansenist scholars turned to the study of “oriental” languages are still not entirely clear, though historians such as Nicolas Lyon-Caen and Urs App have offered some good suggestions. I would add that the context of the Chinese and Malabar Rites controversies may offer some clue as well. Some Jansenists might have wished to use knowledge of these languages, religions, and cultures to offer a better missional alternative to the Jesuits and their longstanding practice of “accomodatio,” or adaptation to local circumstances. The Church of Utrecht received its episcopal orders from the Jansenist Dominique-Marie Varlet (1678–1742), a bishop who was originally in the Missions Étrangères de Paris (MEP)—a congregation specializing in Asian missionary work. The very fact that Utrecht’s seminary taught Arabic may have spoken to missionary aspirations inherited from Varlet, hopes that ultimately proved abortive. Again, further research could shed considerable light on this question.

Regardless of the reasons why they came to the field, it remains clear that Jansenists contributed to the development of early Orientalism—and thus, to the modern study of religion as such. Sacy and Anquetil were not alone in this respect. One of the most celebrated works of comparative religious ethnography published in the eighteenth century, the Cérémonies et coutumes religieuses de tous les peuples du monde (1723–43), issued from the engraver Bernard Picart and the publisher Jean Frédéric Bernard. Both knew and sympathized with the persecuted French Jansenists; Picart even released the first engraving that attacked the destruction of Port-Royal-des-Champs. The Abbé Grégoire’s multivolume Histoire des sectes religieuses (1810/1814/1828), though more heresiological in scope, nevertheless stands as yet another Jansenist contribution to the early study of comparative religion.

These facts illustrate that, at least in the French context, academic Orientalism and the study of religion emerged in part as the project of scholars with Jansenist commitments. Jansenist Orientalism, a sub-species of a broader “Catholic Orientalism,” matters insofar as it was a particularly French tributary to religious modernity as such—the overlooked contribution of a prominent if persecuted minority.

Note: A translated excerpt from the Acts of the Synod of Qarqafe will appear in From Port-Royal to Pistoia: A Jansenist Anthology, a volume of Jansenist primary sources that I am presently co-editing with Shaun Blanchard. This text will be the first major anthology of Jansenist sources in English translation.

Richard Yoder is pursuing a PhD in History at Penn State University, where he specializes in early modern religious history.