I will not venture upon a discussion of the difference existing between the Jansenists and the Reformed on this matter.  They are not perhaps always fully in accord [348] with themselves as regards things, or as regards expressions, on a matter where one often loses one’s way in bewildering subtleties.  Father Theophile Raynaud, in his book entitled Calvinismus Religio Bestiarum, wished to strike at the Dominicans, without naming them.  On the other hand, those who professed to be followers of St. Augustine reproached the Molinists with Pelagianism or at the least semi-Pelagianism.  Things were carried to excess at times by both sides, whether in their defence of a vague indifference and the granting of too much to man, or in their teaching determinationem ad unum secundum qualitatem actus licet non quoad ejus substantiam, that is to say, a determination to evil in the non-regenerate, as if they did nothing but sin.  After all, I think one must not reproach any but the adherents of Hobbes and Spinoza with destroying freedom and contingency; for they think that that which happens is alone possible, and must happen by a brute geometrical necessity.  Hobbes made everything material and subjected it to mathematical laws alone; Spinoza also divested God of intelligence and choice, leaving him a blind power, whence all emanates of necessity.  The theologians of the two Protestant parties are equally zealous in refuting an unendurable necessity.  Although those who follow the Synod of Dordrecht teach sometimes that it suffices for freedom to be exempt from constraint, it seems that the necessity they leave in it is only hypothetical, or rather that which is more appropriately termed certainty and infallibility.  Thus it results that very often the difficulties only lie in the terms.  I say as much with regard to the Jansenists, although I do not wish to make excuse for those people in everything.

372.  With the Hebrew Cabalists, Malcuth or the Kingdom, the last of the Sephiroth, signified that God controls everything irresistibly, but gently and without violence, so that man thinks he is following his own will while he carries out God’s.  They said that Adam’s sin had been truncatio Malcuth a caeteris plantis, that is to say, that Adam had cut back the last of the Sephiroth, by making a dominion for himself within God’s dominion, and by assuming for himself a freedom independent of God, but that his fall had taught him that he could not subsist of himself, and that men must needs be redeemed by the Messiah.  This doctrine may receive a good interpretation.  But Spinoza, who was versed in the Cabala of the writers of his race, and who says (Tractatus Politicus, c. 2, n. 6) that men, conceiving of freedom as they do, establish a dominion within God’s dominion, has [349] gone too far.  The dominion of God is with Spinoza nothing but the dominion of necessity, and of a blind necessity (as with Strato), whereby everything emanates