Cornelius Jansen (1585-1638) [Aquoi, Louvain, Paris, Ypres]. Jansen tended to support the Augustinians in a struggle against the Jesuits, whom he accused of granting absolution without sufficient regard for the disposition of penitents. He maintained that the utter corruption of human nature made man helpless, without free will, and completely dependent upon the grace of God for salvation. He and his followers (the Jasenists) were noted for their severity and moral rigorism. Jasen was interested in a plan to make Belgium an independent Catholic republic analogous to Protestant Holland. The Church disapproved his doctrines and so too his writings. His great work Augustinus, finished just before his death, was published posthumously (1640).
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He had been associated with Bacon for some time, and was undoubtedly influenced by him. He drew the materialistic conclusion. He professed nominalism and analysed mind as composed of sensory contents. Reality is individual and corporial. He denied spiritual substance, yet he held that the appearances we experience are not identical with the material bodies that produce them. He thought of man fundamentally as a kind of mechanism, he even thought of state as matter in motion. Against this background, Hobbes developed in Leviathan (1651) a theory of the State, beginning with the assumption that men are by nature self-seeking and hostile toward each other. Yet finding constant hostility intolerable, they form a contract and turn over the enforcement of it to a sovereign power, to which men are thereafter irrevocably bound to be loyal in all circumstances. The State which is subject to rejection is no State at all but only disguised chaos. The purpose of the Leviathan was to expound the basis of human government, in the course of his discussion Hobbes raised many detailed questions about the books of the Bible. In this way he participated in the development of critical Bible study. Despite his professed interest in the subject of the Christian Commonwealth, the underlying naturalism in his theory of man and society aroused great hostility during and after his
He had been associated with Bacon for some time, and was undoubtedly influenced by him. He drew the materialistic conclusion. He professed nominalism and analysed mind as composed of sensory contents. Reality is individual and corporial. He denied spiritual substance, yet he held that the appearances we experience are not identical with the material bodies that produce them. He thought of man fundamentally as a kind of mechanism, he even thought of state as matter in motion. Against this background, Hobbes developed in Leviathan (1651) a theory of the State, beginning with the assumption that men are by nature self-seeking and hostile toward each other. Yet finding constant hostility intolerable, they form a contract and turn over the enforcement of it to a sovereign power, to which men are thereafter irrevocably bound to be loyal in all circumstances. The State which is subject to rejection is no State at all but only disguised chaos. The purpose of the Leviathan was to expound the basis of human government, in the course of his discussion Hobbes raised many detailed questions about the books of the Bible. In this way he participated in the development of critical Bible study. Despite his professed interest in the subject of the Christian Commonwealth, the underlying naturalism in his theory of man and society aroused great hostility during and after his