Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The Great Contest of Faith and Reason: Selections From the Writings of Pierre Bayle
Ironically, the gulf between faith and reason was first revealed by controversies among the Christian faithful. Within the Roman Catholic Church, the Jansenists 2 had been attacking the relaxed morality of the Jesuits 3 since before 1650. The Jesuits in turn had been trying to convict the Jansenists of heresy, and both groups were engaged in a running controversy with the Protestants. All three were obliged in turn to defend themselves against such heterodox rationalists as the Socinians.4 The attempts of each group to destroy the intellectual foundations of all the others forced a general reappraisal of the traditional fundaments of be lief. Should the decision of the visible Catholic Church be the authority of last appeal? If so, should the voice of the councils be heard in preference to that of the Pope, as the Jansenists maintained, or was the Pope above the councils, as the Jesuits insisted?
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