The Revolutionary Personality

Am reading a biography, "The Godwins and the Shellys" by St. Clair. It helps us to understand the mind and origin of the English Revolutionary Personality.

Many revolutionaries or proto revolutionaries, I am discovering, are children or grand-children of, for example, strict Calvinists or strict Jansenists. Historians, applying the theories of Freud, claim that they adopt unitarianism, liberation, and other revolutionary ideals as a way of unleashing the repressed.

What then, would be their penchant for revolutionary acivity? It would be another form of unleashing of the repressed. They tend to arrive at a point when they deny the Trinity, the divinity of Christ, original sin, and other fundamental doctrines. They only accept what is "rational" from the Bible, assuming that whatever is Catholic cannot be rational.

In effec, they become like the revolutionaries of early Christianity. The Arians come to mind. What do they repress? In the interest of pursuing their passions, they repress God, Redemption, authority, and sacrifice. So, when they advocate revolution, they are advocating temporal redemption, human authority (that becomes totalitarian), and instead of sacrificing themselves, they sacrifice the blood of others.

Jansenism

Am reading these days about Jansenism. It might be that secularized Jansenism had not a little to do with the origins of the French Revolution. As the 17th Century wanes into the 18th Century, Jansensists developed a legalistic culture of protest against authority, using all sorts of "democratic" and legalistic mechanisms to avoid obedience to the Pope and to thwart the King. The Jansenists were also looking for a sort of redemptive act that would give real physical expression to the invisible Church, which was being held in bondage by the visible Church and the King.

I know from previous research that Voltaire thought that the Jansenists would he useful allies for a time in paving the way to Revoltuion. He realized that they shared his hatred of the King and authority. Voltaire, at the same time, disliked the Jansenist. His brother got involved in some "signs and wonders" that took place in a Jansenist cemetary in the 1720s. Voltaire took this to be a sign that all Christians were interested in hokey signs and wonders. He also thought that they could be easily duped.