Colloquium November 24-25, 2016 at ENS
Placed between the Constitution civile du clergé and the Concordat, Auctorem fidei had all the palette needed to color the twilight of the Jansenist quarrel, to give it its "fin de siècle" aspect. Even if one defends the commonly accepted conception of 18th-century Jansenism, born of the challenge toUnigenitus and symbolically closed by the bull of 1794, one might wonder about the pole usually placed in 1713. Is Auctorem fidei merely the aftershock, in the seismic sense of the word, of theUnigenitus "shock"?
Auctorem fidei also goes beyond the simple question of Jansenism, not least because of the text's posterity. Roman and ultramontane interpreters gave this condemnation a lasting authority and a more general scope than the specific circumstances of its drafting. In 1850, the future Cardinal Villecourt, an uncompromising polemicist, translated and distributed the text on the other side of the Alps. Philippe Boutry shows that the Bull then left the strict domain of the Jansenist quarrel to appear as "the 'missing link' between the pontifical texts of the 18th century and Gregory XVI's encyclical Mirari vos " condemning Lamennais' theses, in particularindifferentism.
This often overlooked document represents "a fundamental turning point in the development of the intransigent theology of the first nineteenth century". Auctorem fidei calls into question a periodization that is too divided between the obsession with Jansenism (17th and 18th centuries) and the pursuit of relativism and modernism (19th and 20th centuries); the Bull can be seen as a transitional document.
