Baianism
[1] Its foremost apologists, Baius among them, largely claimed this school and its teachings to be a return to a sort of Augustinianism, against the reliance on Scholasticism and Scholastic writings which held sway over most Catholic theologians at the time.
[4] At the request of the Franciscans, the Sorbonne university of Paris censured eighteen propositions embodying the main innovations of Baius and Hessels.
[5] Pope Pius IV, through Cardinal Granvelle, Archbishop of Mechelen imposed silence upon both Baius and the Franciscans, without, however, rendering any doctrinal decision.
On 1 October 1567, Pope Pius V signed the papal bull "Ex omnibus afflictionibus", in which were to be found a number of condemned propositions, but without mention of Baius' name.
Baius abjured to Morillon, de Granvelle's vicar general, all the errors condemned in the Bull, but was not then and there required to sign his recantation.
It came under the title of the "Explicatio articulorum", in which Baius averred that, of the many condemned propositions, some were false and justly censured, some only ill expressed, while still others, if at variance with the terminology of the Scholastics, were yet the genuine sayings of the Fathers; at any rate, with more than forty of the seventy-nine articles he claimed to have nothing whatever to do.
The Maurist monk Gabriel Gerberon gave a more complete edition: M. Baii opera cum bullis pontificum et aliis ad ipsius causum spectantibus (Cologne, 1696).
The gist of Baianism is also found in the 79 propositions censured by Pius V.[6] The first 60 are easily identified in Baius' printed works, and the remaining 19 – "tales quae vulgo circumferrentur", says an old manuscript copy of the bull "Ex omnibus"– represent the oral teaching of the Baianist wing.
[7] Baius believed that the primitive state of man necessarily included destination to heaven; immunity from ignorance, suffering, and death; and the inherent power of meriting.
[8] The downfall of man is not, and cannot be, according to Baius, the mere forfeiting of gratuitous or supernatural gifts, but some positive evil reaching deep into our very nature.
Baius speaks of the remission of sin as necessary for justification, but this is only a fictio iuris; in fact, a catechumen before baptism, or a penitent before absolution may, by simply keeping the precepts, have more charity than certain so-called just men.
If the catechumen and penitent are not styled just, it is only in deference to Holy Scripture, which requires for complete justice both newness of life (i.e. moral action) and pardon of sin (i.e. of the reatus, or liability to punishment).
With regard to the sacraments of the living, the Eucharist–the only one on which Baius expressed his views–has no other sacrificial value than that of being a good moral action drawing the recipient close to God.
Those two sessions, both anterior to Baius' writings, contain three statements which are obviously irreconcilable with Baius' three main positions described above: (1) Man's original justice is represented as a supernatural gift; (2) Original Sin is described not as a deep deterioration of human nature, but as the forfeiture of purely gratuitous privileges[dubious – discuss]; (3) Justification is depicted as an interior renovation of the soul by inherent grace.
The Augustinian School, represented by such men as Henry Noris, Fulgentius Bellelli and Giovanni Lorenzo Berti, adopted, though with qualifications, the idea of man's natural aspiration to the possession of God and beatific vision in Heaven.
Matulewicz, "Doctrina Russorum de Statu iustitiæ originalis" (Cracow, 1903), says that modern Russian theology embodies in great measure the views of Baius.
