Formulary Controversy

The Formulary Controversy was a 17th and 18th century Jansenist recusancy of the Formula of Submission for the Jansenists by a group of Catholic ecclesiastical personnel and teachers who did not accept that their beliefs, about the nature of man and grace, were heretical as the Holy See declared. In Kingdom of France, it pitted Jansenists against Jesuits. It gave rise to Blaise Pascal's Lettres provinciales, the condemnation by the Holy See of casuistry, and the final dissolution of organised Jansenism.

During the Council of Trent (1545–1563), the Roman Catholic Church reaffirmed, against Protestantism, both the reality of human liberum arbitrium (free will, i.e. "non-necessary" character of human will) and the necessity of divine grace. Catholicism was then divided into two main interpretations, Augustinism and Thomism, which both agreed on predestination and on efficacious grace (or irresistible grace), which meant that, while Divine will infallibly comes to pass, grace and free will were not incompatible. Augustinism was rather predominant, in particular in the University of Leuven, where a rigid form of Augustinism, Baianism, was articulated by Michael Baius. Baius' heterodox propositions on the nature of man and grace were condemned, in the papal bull Ex omnibus afflictionibus promulgated by Pope Pius V in 1567, as heretical. According to Joseph Sollier, in Catholic Encyclopedia, Baius' concept of the primitive state of man was Pelagian; his presentation of the downfall was Calvinist; and, his theory of redemption was more than Lutheran and close to Socinian.