by Will Durant
When Jacqueline, as Mère Angélique, became nominal abbess at Port-Royal (1602), she found only the most genial discipline among the thirteen nuns. Each had her own property, displayed her hair, used cosmetics, and dressed in the fashion of the day. They took the Sacrament infrequently, and had heard no more than seven sermons in thirty years. 11 As she grew more conscious of the life to which her parents had committed her, the young abbess became discontent, and meditated flight (1607). “I thought of leaving Port-Royal and returning to the world, without notifying my father or my mother, to escape this unbearable yoke, and to be married.” 12 She fell ill, and was taken home, where she was nursed by her mother with such tender care that, on recovering, she returned to Port-Royal resolved, for love of her mother, to keep her conventual vows. However, she ordered a whalebone corset to’keep her figure in fashionable bounds. 13 She remained secretly averse to the religious life until, at Easter of 1608, now in the full glow of puberty, she heard a sermon by a Capuchin monk on the sufferings of Christ. “During this sermon,” she later reported, “God touched me in such a way that from that moment I found myself happier in the life of a nun . . . and I know not what I would not have done for God if He had continued the movement which His grace had given me.” 14 This, in her language, was the “first work of grace.”
On November 1 of that year another sermon—the “second work of grace”—filled her with shame that she and her nuns were so lax in observing their vows of poverty and seclusion. Torn between affection for the nuns and desire to enforce the Cistercian rule, she became melancholy, practiced austerities beyond her strength, and fell into a fever. She must have been lovable, for when the nuns asked the reason of her sadness, and she revealed her wish that they should return to the full rule of their order, they consented, pooled their private property, and pledged themselves to perpetual poverty.
The next step, seclusion from the world, was more painful. Mère Angélique forbade the nuns to leave the premises, or to receive visitors—even their nearest relatives—without express permission, and then only in the parlor. They complained that this would be a great hardship. To give them a fortifying example, she resolved not to see her parents on their next visit, except through a grate or lattice window in the door between the parlor and the convent rooms. When her father and mother came they were shocked to find that she would talk to them only through this guichet. The journée du guichet (September 25, 1609) became famous in the literature about Port-Royal.
The anger of the excluded family subsided, and the piety of Mère Angélique (now eighteen years old) so moved them that one Arnauld after another entered Port-Royal. In 1618 Anne Eugénie, sister of the abbess, took the vows. Soon other sisters joined them—Catherine, Marie, Madeleine. In 1629 their mother, now a widow, knelt at the feet of Mère Angélique, and begged to be admitted as a novice. In due time she took the vows, and lived humbly and happily under her daughter, whom she henceforth called Mother. When she died (1641) she thanked God that she had given six daughters to the religious life. Five of her granddaughters later entered Port-Royal. Her son Robert and three of her grandsons became “solitaries” there; her most brilliant son, Antoine Arnauld II, member of the Sorbonne, became the philosopher and theologian of Port-Royal. We marvel at such fertility, and cannot but respect such depth of devotion, loyalty, and faith.*
Step by step Mère Angélique led her flock back to the full Cistercian rule. The nuns, now thirty-six in number, observed all fasts with canonical strictness, maintained long periods of silence, rose at two o’clock in the morning to chant matins, and out of their communal property dispensed charity to the local poor. From Port-Royal the reforms spread; nuns trained there were sent to convents throughout France to spur them back to their rule. A convent at Maubuisson was especially lax: Henry IV had used it as a place of assignation with his mistress Gabrielle d’Estrées; its abbess was surrounded by her own illegitimate daughters; the nuns moved freely from their home to meet and dance with the monks of a neighboring monastery. 16 In 1618 Mère Angélique was requested by her superiors to replace the abbess at Maubuisson; she stayed there for five years; when she returned to Port-Royal thirty-two Maubuisson nuns followed her into the mother convent of the reform.
In 1626 an epidemic of ague broke out at Port-Royal. Advised that the damp climate there was dangerous, Angélique and her nuns moved to a house in Paris, where, under the influence of Jansenism, they entered upon their historic conflict with the Jesuits and the King. The deserted and dilapidated buildings at Port-Royal-des-Champs—“of the Fields”—were soon occupied by the Solitaries, men who, while not taking monastic vows, wished to lead an almost monastic life. Here came several of the Arnaulds—Antoine II, his brother Robert Arnauld d’Andilly, his nephews Antoine Lemaistre and Simon Lemaître de Séricourt, and his grandson Isaac Louis de Sacy; some ecclesiastics joined them, like Pierre Nicole and Antoine Singlin; even some nobles—the Duc de Luynes and the Baron de Pontchâteau. Together they drained swamps, dug ditches, repaired the buildings, and tended the orchards and gardens. Together or individually they practiced austerities, fasted, chanted, and prayed. They wore the dress of peasants, and during the coldest winter they allowed no heat in their rooms. They studied the Bible and the Fathers of the Church; they wrote works of devotion and scholarship; one of these, L’Art de penser (The Art of Thinking), by Nicole and the younger Arnauld, remained a popular manual of logic till the twentieth century.
In 1638 the Solitaries opened petites écoles, “little schools,” to which they invited selected children of age nine or ten. These were taught French, Latin, Greek, and the orthodox aspects of Descartes’ philosophy. They were required to shun dancing and the theater (both of which the Jesuits approved); they were to pray frequently, but not to the saints; and in the chapel where they heard Mass there were no religious images. At Port-Royal-des-Champs and at Port-Royal-de-Paris the challenge of Arnauld piety to the immorality of the court became also the challenge of the stern Jansenist theology and ethic to the Jesuit mitigation of Christianity to the nature of man.
III. THE JANSENISTS AND THE JESUITS
Cornelis Jansen was a Dutchman, born in the province of Utrecht of Catholic parentage, but closely touched by the Augustinian theology of his Calvinist neighbors. When he entered the Catholic University of Louvain (1602) he found it in the heat of a violent controversy between the Jesuit or Scholastic party and a faction that followed the Augustinian views of Michael Baius on predestination and divine grace. Jansen inclined to the Augustinians. In the interval between his undergraduate studies and his professorial work, Jansen accepted the invitation of his fellow student Jean Duvergier de Hauranne to live with him at Bayonne. They studied St. Paul and St. Augustine, and agreed that the best way of defending Catholicism against the Dutch Calvinists and the French Huguenots was to follow the Augustinian emphasis on grace and predestination, and to establish in the Catholic clergy and laity a rigorous moral code that would shame current laxity in court and convent, and the easygoing ethic of the Jesuits.
In 1616 Jansen, as head of a hostel of Dutch students at Louvain, attacked the Jesuit theology of free will, and preached a mystical puritanism akin to the Pietism that was taking form in Holland, England, and Germany. He continued the war as professor of Scriptural exegesis at Louvain, and as bishop of Ypres. At his death (1638) he left, not quite finished, a substantial treatise, Augustinus, which, soon after its publication in 1640, became the doctrinal platform of Port-Royal, and the center of contention in French Catholic theology for almost a century.
Though the book ended with a curtsy of submission to the Roman Church, the Calvinists of the Netherlands acclaimed it as the very essence of Calvinism. 17 Like Augustine, Luther, and Calvin, Jansen fully accepted predestinarianism: God, even before the creation of the world, had chosen those men and women who should be saved, and had determined who should be damned; the good works of men, though precious, could never earn salvation without the aid of divine grace; and even
among the good minority only a few would be saved. The Catholic Church had not explicitly repudiated the predestinarianism of St. Paul and St. Augustine, but she had let it sink into the background of her teaching as hard to reconcile with that freedom of the will which seemed logically indispensable to moral responsibility and the idea of sin. But man’s will is not free, said Jansen; it lost its freedom by Adam’s sin; man’s nature is now corrupt beyond self-redemption; and only God’s grace, earned by Christ’s death, can save him. The Jesuit defense of free will seemed to Jansen to exaggerate the role of good works in earning salvation, and to render almost superfluous the redeeming death of Christ. Moreover, he urged, we must not take logic too seriously; reason is a faculty far inferior to trustful, unquestioning faith, just as ritual observances are an inferior form of religion as compared with the direct communion of the soul with God.
These ideas came to Port-Royal through Duvergier, who meanwhile had become abbot of St.-Cyran. Fired with zeal to reform theology and morals, and to replace external religion with internal devotion, M. de Saint-Cyran, as he was now called, came up to Paris, and was soon (1636) accepted as spiritual director of the nuns at Port-Royal-de-Paris and of the solitaires at Port-Royal-des-Champs; that double institution now became the voice and exemplar of Jansenism in France. Richelieu thought the reformer a troublesome fanatic, and jailed him in Vincennes (1638). Saint-Cyran was released in 1642, but he died a year later of an apoplectic stroke.
Even from his prison he had continued to inspire innumerable Arnaulds. Antoine II, “the Great Arnauld,” published in 1643 a treatise De la Fréquente Communion, which carried on his father’s war against the Jesuits. He did not name them, but he denounced the idea, which he felt that some confessors had tolerated, that repeated sinning could be compensated by frequent confession and Communion. The Jesuits felt that the attack was meant for them, and they mounted up the score against the Arnaulds. Anticipating trouble, Antoine left Paris for Port-Royal-in-the-Fields. In 1648 the nuns, frightened by the Fronde, also left the capital, and returned to their former home. The Solitaries vacated the rooms there, and moved to a nearby farmhouse, Les Granges.
Pope Urban VIII had already (1642) condemned the general doctrine of Jansen’s Augustinus. In 1649 a professor in the Sorbonne asked the faculty to condemn seven propositions which, he said, were gaining too much popularity. The matter was referred to Innocent X, and the Jesuits took the opportunity to impress upon the Pope the dangers of Jansenism as essentially a Calvinist theology in Catholic guise. At last they prevailed upon him to issue the bull Cum occasione (May 31, 1653), which condemned as heretical five propositions allegedly taken from the Augustinus:
1. There are divine precepts which good men, though willing, are absolutely unable to obey.
2. No person can resist the influence of divine grace.
3. In order to render human actions meritorious or otherwise, it is not requisite that they be exempt from necessity but only free from constraint.
4. The semi-Pelagian heresy consisted in allowing the human will to be endued with a power of resisting grace, or of complying with its influence.
5. Whoever says that Christ died, or shed his blood, for all mankind, is a semi-Pelagian. 18
These propositions were not taken verbatim from the Augustinus: they were formulated by a Jesuit as a summary of the book’s teaching. As a summary they were fair enough, 19 but the Jansenists contended that the propositions, as such, were not to be found in Jansen—though Arnauld slyly suggested that they could all be found in St. Augustine. Meanwhile nobody seems to have read the book.
Antoine Arnauld was a fighter. He acknowledged the infallibility of the pope in matters of faith and morals, but not in questions of fact; and as a matter of fact he denied that Jansen had stated the propositions condemned. In 1655 he again carried the war to the Jesuits by publishing two Lettres à un duc et pair (Letters to a Duke and Peer), attacking what he claimed to be Jesuit methods in the confessional. The Sorbonne entertained a motion to expel him. He prepared his defense, and read it to his friends at Port-Royal. It did not impress them. One of them was a new adherent named Blaise Pascal. Turning to him, Arnauld pleaded, “You, who are young, why cannot you produce something?” 20 Pascal retired to his room, and wrote the first of the Provincial Letters, a classic in the literature and philosophy of France. We should listen to Pascal at some length, for he was not only the greatest writer of French prose, but the most brilliant defender of religion in all the Age of Reason.
IV. PASCAL: 1623–62
1. Himself
His father, Étienne Pascal, was president of the Court of Aides at Clermont-Ferrand in south-central France. His mother died three years after his birth, leaving also an elder sister, Gilberte, and a younger sister, Jacqueline. When Blaise was eight the family moved to Paris. Étienne was a student of geometry and physics, sufficiently advanced to gain him the friendship of Gassendi, Mersenne, and Descartes. Blaise eavesdropped on some of their meetings, and became, in the first period of his life, a devotee of science. At the age of eleven he composed a short treatise on the sounds of vibrating bodies. The father thought that the boy’s passion for geometry would injure his other studies, and forbade his further pursuit of mathematics for a while. But one day (story tells), Étienne found him writing on the wall, with a piece of coal, the proof that the three angles of a triangle equal two right angles; 21 thenceforth the boy was allowed to study Euclid. Before he was sixteen he composed a treatise on conic sections; most of it is lost, but one theorem was a lasting contribution to that science, and still bears his name. Descartes, shown the manuscript, refused to believe that the composition was not by the father but by the son.
In that year, 1639, his pretty sister Jacqueline, then thirteen years old, played a dramatic part in the life of the family. The father had invested in municipal bonds; Richelieu reduced the rate of interest paid on these bonds; Étienne criticized him; the Cardinal threatened to arrest him; Étienne hid in Auvergne. But the Cardinal liked plays and girls; Scudéry’s L’Amour tyrannique was performed before him by a group of girls including Jacqueline; he was especially pleased by her acting; she took the opportunity to ask him to forgive her father; he did, and appointed him intendant at Rouen, the capital of Normandy. Thither the family moved in 1641.
It was there that Blaise, now nineteen, contrived the first of several computing machines, some of which are still preserved in the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers at Paris. Their principle was a succession of wheels, each divided into nine digits and zero, each geared to turn one tenth of a revolution for each full revolution of the wheel at its right, and each showing its uppermost figure in a slot at the top. The machine could only add, and was not commercially practicable, but it stands near the head of a development that now astonishes the world. Pascal sent one of his computers to Christina of Sweden, with a very eloquent letter of adulation. She invited him to her court, but he felt himself too frail for that heroic climate.
The eager young scientist was intensely interested in the experiments that Torricelli had published on the weight of the atmosphere. Independently of Torricelli, but probably on a suggestion from Descartes, 22 Pascal conceived the idea that the mercury in a Torricelli tube would rise to different heights in different places according to variations in atmospheric pressure. He sent a request to his brother-in-law in Auvergne to carry a tube of mercury to a mountaintop, and observe any difference, at diverse levels, in the height of the mercury in the closed portion of a tube whose other end was open to the pressure of the atmosphere. Florin Périer did as asked: on September 19, 1648, with several friends, he ascended the Puy de Dôme, a mountain five thousand feet above the town of Clermont-Ferrand; there the mercury rose to a level of twenty-three inches in the tube, whereas at the base of the mountain it rose to twenty-six inches. The experiment was hailed throughout Europe as finally establishing the principle and value of the barometer.
Pascal’s fame as a scientist brought him (16
48) a stimulating appeal from a gambler to formulate the mathematics of chance. He accepted the challenge, and shared with Fermat in developing the calculus of probabilities, which now enters so profitably into insurance tables of sickness and mortality. At this stage of his growth there was no sign that he would ever transfer his devotion from science to religion, or lose his faith in reason and experiment. He continued for ten years to work at scientific problems, chiefly mathematical. As late as 1658 he offered, anonymously, a prize for the quadrature of a cycloid—the curve traced by a point on a circle rolling in a straight line on a plane. Solutions were offered by Wallis, Huygens, Wren, and others; then Pascal, under a pseudonym, published his own solution. A controversy followed in which the competitors, including Pascal, behaved less than philosophically.
Meanwhile two basic influences had come to the fore in his life: sickness and Jansenism. As early as his eighteenth year he suffered from a nervous ailment that left him hardly a day without pain. In 1647 a paralytic attack so disabled him that he could not move without crutches. His head ached, his bowels burned, his legs and feet were continually cold, and required wearisome aids to circulation of the blood; he wore stockings steeped in brandy to warm his feet. Partly to get better medical treatment he moved with Jacqueline to Paris. His health improved, but his nervous system had been permanently damaged. Henceforth he was subject to a deepening hypochondria, which affected his character and his philosophy. He became irritable, subject to fits of proud and imperious anger, and he seldom smiled. 23
His father had always been a devout, even an austere, Catholic amid his scientific avocations, and had taught his children that religious faith was their most precious possession, something far beyond the reach or judgment of the frail reasoning powers of mankind. At Rouen, when the father was seriously injured, a Jansenist physician treated him successfully; through this contact a Jansenist tinge colored the family’s faith. When Blaise and Jacqueline moved to the capital they frequently attended Mass at Port-Royal-de-Paris. Jacqueline wished to enter the convent as a nun, but her father could not bring himself to let her go out of his daily life. He died in 1651, and soon thereafter Jacqueline became a nun in Port-Royal-des-Champs. Her brother tried in vain to dissuade her.