DUVENECK, FRANK (1848-1919), American figure and portrait painter, was born at Covington, Ky., Oct. 9, 1848. He was a pupil of Diez in the Royal Academy of Munich, and a prominent member of the group of Americans who in the '7os overturned the traditions of the Hudson river school and started a new art move ment. His work shown in Boston and elsewhere about
attracted great attention, and many pupils flocked to him in Germany and Italy, where he made long visits. After returning from Italy to America, he gave some attention to sculpture, and modelled a fine monument to his wife, now in the English ceme tery in Florence. In 1915 he presented to the Cincinnati (0.) Museum a large collection of his own works. He died in Cincinnati, Jan. 3, 1919.
abbot of St. Cyran, father of the Jansenist revival in France, was born of wealthy parents at Bayonne and studied theology at Louvain. After taking holy orders he settled in Paris, where he became known as a mine of miscellaneous erudition. His friend ship with Cornelius Jansen, a young champion of Augustinian ism, led him to oppose the Louvain Jesuits who stood for Scholas ticism. The two divines retired to Du Vergier's home at Bayonne, where he became a canon of the cathedral, and Jansen a tutor in the bishop's seminary. Here they remained some years, intently studying the fathers. Eventually, Jansen went back to Louvain, while Du Vergier became confidential secretary to the bishop of Poitiers, and was presently made sinecure abbot of St. Cyran. Thereafter he was generally called M. de St. Cyran. At Poitiers he met Richelieu—as yet simply the zealous young bishop of the neighbouring diocese of Lucon. Western Touraine being the headquarters of French Protestantism, the two prelates turned St. Cyran's learning against the Huguenots. He began to dream of reforming Catholicism on Augustinian lines, and thus defeating the Protestants by their own weapons. They appealed to primi tive antiquity; he answered that his Church understood antiquity better than theirs. They appealed to the spirit of St. Paul; he answered that Augustine had saved that spirit from etherealizing away, by coupling it with a high sacramental theory of the Church. They flung practical abuses in the teeth of Rome; he entered on a bold campaign to bring those abuses to an end. Before long, his reforming zeal necessitated his removal to Paris where his attempt to gain the support of influential people led to his friendship with the Arnauld family. Jansen was now attack ing Jesuit dialectics, which he thought had corrupted theology, by writing a book on Augustine, the great master of theological method. St. Cyran attacked their hand-to-mouth utilitarianism, which had played havoc with traditional church institutions, and their defiance of episcopal authority by his Petrus Aurelius (1633). This work so annoyed Richelieu, now the powerful and extremely Erastian prime minister, that St. Cyran was imprisoned until Richelieu's death in 1642. St. Cyran himself died of a stroke of apoplexy in Oct.
St. Cyran's character has been always something of a puzzle. Many excellent contemporary judges were profoundly impressed; others, as one of them said, went away bewildered by this strange abbe, who leapt from one point to another in incoherent phrases. Grace of expression he had none ; perhaps no man of equal spir itual insight ever found it so hard to make his meaning clear. On the other hand, Jansenism, considered as a practical religious revival, is altogether his work. He dragged the Augustinian mys ticism out of the Louvain classrooms, and made it a spiritual force in France. Without him there would have been no Pascal— no Provincial Letters, and no Pensees.
See C. Lancelot, Memoires de M. de S. Cyran (Cologne, 1738) ; Sainte-Beuve, Port-Royal, 5 ed. (1888) . J. Laporte, La doctrine de Port-Royal, vol. I (1923) contains a list of the printed and ms. works of St. Cyran.
