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Fruits of the Cross: Passiontide Music Theater in Habsburg Vienna. By Robert L. Kendrick. Oakland: University of California Press, 2019. xvi + 220 pp. $70.00 hardcover.

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divine predestination and efficacious grace as it was to their Puritan foes at home. The resolution of this paradox in the fifth chapter entails a full exposition of “high” Jansenist… Click to show full abstract

divine predestination and efficacious grace as it was to their Puritan foes at home. The resolution of this paradox in the fifth chapter entails a full exposition of “high” Jansenist theology, not only in comparison to Calvinism but also to the anti-Augustinian theology of the Jesuit theologian Luis Molina that freed the postlapsarian human will to accept or reject the help of a merely “sufficient” grace, in part by substituting divine foreknowledge for Augustinian predestination. That result makes for daunting reading and is not for the theologically faint of heart. But because Palmer’s exposition situates Jansenist theology in relation to Calvinism as well as Molinism, it matches the lucidity of Jean Laporte’s works on Arnauld and Pascal in the early 1920s (La doctrine de Port-Royal, 2 vols. [Les Presses Universitaires de France, 1923]). The resolution of the paradox of a rigorous penitential ethics with a predestinarian Augustinian theology that would seem to undermine it continues in Palmer’s final three chapters on Anglican theology. Here, however, the problem takes the opposite form. For while the likes of Anglican divines Taylor and Thorndike openly, if selectively, borrowed from Dutch Arminians and even Molina and Socinus for vindicating a measure of freedom for the will, they continued less visibly to mobilize Augustine’s struggle-filled psychology of the will for the rigors of “holy living” that they hoped would distinguish their parishioners from the Puritan “elect.” As Protestants, they held that Christ’s sacrificial atonement for original sin alone merited entry into the covenant of grace, but with Augustine—and Jansenists—they demanded that those thus baptized spare no effort to imitate the life of Christ while also relying on grace to transform the humility of setbacks into greater love for God. One minor critical word about an otherwise convincing argument: While Palmer does full justice to Jansenist religious sensibility’s valorization of Cartesian and Augustinian—ultimately Platonic—“reason” and knowledge in relation to the fallen will, he does not do equal if opposite justice to Jesuit sensibility’s reliance on the senses. More scholastic and ultimately neo-Aristotelian in their empirical epistemology, Jesuits had less distrust than Jansenists of the senses as a post-lapsarian ladder in addition to revelation for knowledge of God and natural law.

Keywords: cross passiontide; passiontide music; theology; grace; fruits cross; music theater

Journal Title: Church History
Year Published: 2020

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