ARNAULD, FAMIGLIA. — Three names that concentrate Jansenist spirituality in its theological, ascetical, and mystical aspects belong to this family, originally from Provence and transplanted to Paris in 1547: Antoine, Angélique, Agnès. Their father Antoine, married to Catherine, daughter of an advocate general at the Parliament of Paris, had twenty children. Of the ten who reached maturity, Robert, Henri (bishop of Angers), Simon, Catherine, Jacqueline, Jeanne, Anne-Eugénie, Marie-Claire, Madeleine, and Antoine all, except Simon (d. as a soldier in 1639), belonged in some way to Port-Royal. Port-Royal determined the fortunes of Jansenism through the active and impassioned work of mère Agnès, mère Angélique, and their brother Antoine, who were the soul and the brain of the entire movement. Their father had already made a name for himself in the anti-Jesuit struggle, but the person who exerted a singular influence on them was Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, abbot of Saint-Cyran, intimate friend of Jansen, and the first apostle of Jansenist ideas in France.
1. AGNÈS (Jeanne)
Born on 31 Dec. 1593 and died on 19 Feb. 1671, she was the third daughter of the lawyer Antoine. Her history and fortunes are bound up with those of her elder sister Angélique. She thought, prayed, and worked within her orbit, less daring than her in undertaking projects, but more tenacious in perseverance. Pious, delicate, subtle, after long hesitation she preferred to the spiritual direction of s. Francis de Sales that of the abbot of Saint-Cyran, more austere and rigorist, thus beginning a sad and severe piety in which fear dominated love. Yet she knew how to preserve the personal feeling of a measured and discreet humanity, and she possessed a gentle and tenaciously penetrating gravity. The most vivid document of her spirituality is her correspondence, written from 17 Dec. 1626 to 10 Feb. 1671. Severe and austere, while always preserving a certain indulgence and conciliatory spirit, she looked back to primitive Christianity and sought to reform Christian life through direct meditation on Sacred Scripture and the saints, through immediate contact with Christ, without mediation or direction from ecclesiastical authority. She was abbess of the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Cyr, where she took the veil on 15 June 1600. Called by her sister to Port-Royal, she served there as mistress of novices and coadjutrix in 1620, and as abbess twice, from 1636 to 1642 and from 1658 to 1661. She was also abbess of Tard from 1630 to 1636.She wrote: Le chapelet secret du Saint Sacrement (1627); Avis donnés aux religieuses de Port-Royal, sur la conduite qu'elles doivent garder, au cas qu'il arrivât du changement dans le gouvernement de la maison (June 1665); L'image d'une religieuse parfaite et d'une imparfaite, avec les occupations intérieures pour la journée (Paris 1665 and other editions in 1666, 1693, and 1711; at the end of the latter edition there is appended a Manuel des âmes religieuses ou abrégé des règles qu'elles doivent observer dans leur conduite).
Her spiritual testament remains the Relation de la captivité de la Mère Catherine-Agnès de Saint-Paul Arnauld, dated 10 Dec. 1664, in which she, equivocally, like the other nuns of Port-Royal, resists ecclesiastical authority with a curious protestation of obedience.
2. ANGÉLIQUE (Jacqueline)
Born on 8 Sept. 1591 and died on 6 Aug. 1661. She was the second of the six A. sisters. At the age of seven (1598) she became coadjutrix, with right of succession, to Jeanne Boulehart, abbess of the Cistercian abbey of Port-Royal, and took the veil on 27 Sept. 1599, not in the abbey of Port-Royal (because the Pope had refused the bulls on account of her childish age), but in the abbey of Maubuisson, near Pontoise. When Jeanne de Boulehart died on 5 July 1602, six months later, on the day of her first Communion, she took possession of her abbey. The bull of appointment was obtained by deception (Cardinal d'Ossant passed Jacqueline off as Angélique and gave her age as seventeen), and at eleven she began her life of command. The reforms date from 1608 and were of the utmost austerity: absolute community of goods, strict enclosure, and perpetual abstinence.Ardent, energetic, impatient, almost inhuman, she fearlessly overcame trials, struggles, and familial and ecclesiastical obstacles. Sainte-Beuve (Port-Royal, t. I, pp. 106–13) describes the famous «journée du guichet», which marks the inaugural act of Port-Royal and of the history of Jansenist piety. Her rigid and arrogant tendencies were intensified by the influence exerted over her by the abbot of Saint-Cyran, whom she had met in 1623 and to whom she remained faithful even after his imprisonment and death (1643). Authoritarian, she identified the history of Port-Royal with her rule as abbess, imposing superhuman renunciations, mortifications, and a merciless struggle against corrupt nature. For her, the whole of Christian life consisted in resistance to and victory over earthly concupiscence, which is impossible without efficacious grace or heavenly delight. A closed and sealed piety, without openings toward mercy or trust, permeated by fear and terror. Mère Angélique was uncompromising: she condemned all who opposed Jansenist asceticism and her excessive reforms. She renounced everything except self-love, and never succeeded in possessing the humility and charity that are an essential element of every outward austerity.
She extended the reforms to other abbeys: Maubuisson, near Paris, and Tard, near Dijon. At Port-Royal she was abbess from 1609 to 1630, when she resigned (having obtained from the king that the office of abbess should be elective and temporary), and she returned to office from 1642 to 1654. In Paris, together with Zamet, bishop of Langres, she founded the monastery of the Most Blessed Sacrament in rue Coquillière, which lasted only a few years.
Her spiritual doctrine is contained in works either composed by her or directly inspired by her: Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire de Port-Royal et à la vie de la Récérende Mère Marie-Angélique de Sainte-Magdeleine Arnauld, abbesse et réformatrice de Port-Royal (3 vols., Utrecht 1742–1744); Entretiens ou Conférences de la Récérende Mère Angélique Arnauld (3 vols., there 1757); Mémoires et relations sur ce qui s'est passé à Port-Royal des Champs, depuis le commencement de la Réforme de cette abbaye (there 1716); Relations écrites par la Mère Marie-Angélique Arnauld sur ce qui est arrivé de plus considérable dans Port-Royal, up to 12 Jan. 1655, with the Relation de la vie et de la mort de la Mère Angélique.
Mère Angélique was exceptionally hostile, in accordance with Jansenist custom, to every insinuation, decree, or bull of ecclesiastical authority, even that of the Supreme Pontiff. And, like so many other figures of Port-Royal, she remains a moral mystery because of a life that was certainly not indulgent toward the attractions of the age, yet was also at odds with the principles of the faith.
3. ANTOINE
Born on 5 Feb. 1612 and died on 2 Aug. 1694. He was the twentieth child of Antoine A., and is calledalso the great Arnauld. Raised in the shadow of Jean de Hauranne and initiated by him into Jansenist ideas, he must be regarded not only as the foremost representative of French Jansenism, but also as the leading figure of Jansenism, which perhaps would have stopped at the first condemnations without his vigorous support. Polemical, aggressive, rational, and lively, he gave soul and system to the doctrines of Jansenius. He received his degree from the Sorbonne in 1641 and was ordained a priest in the same year; there he became an aggregated master in 1643. His life was troubled, marked by bitter controversies and exile. At his death, which occurred in Brussels, his heart was taken to Port-Royal des Champs, and his memory was commemorated in numerous epitaphs, the most famous being those of Santeuil and Boileau.
The occasion for him to manifest his Jansenist ideas was provided by a pamphlet by the Jesuit P. de Sesmaisons, written to reassure the marquise de Sablé, who received Communion frequently, to the great scandal of the princess de Guéméné, who was directed by Saint-Cyran. It was entitled: Question : s'il est meilleur de communier souvent ou rarement ?; in it, the practice of frequent Communion was justified by the usage of the primitive Church and the recommendations of the Council of Trent. Antoine, prompted by Saint-Cyran, replied with a work that may be regarded as the program of the whole spirituality of Jansenism and Port-Royal: De la fréquente communion, in August 1643, which went through repeated editions and spread rapidly.
The central and dominant idea is this: to return to the practices of the primitive Church, which is opposed to frequent Communion; no one can modify the penitential discipline of the primitive Church because it is of divine institution. Excessive importance is given to penance, to the detriment of sacramental absolution. In order to receive Communion, one must merit the necessary dispositions for II. Communion is nothing but the reward of the virtues, and ceases to be nourishment for the virtues. This book became the object of interminable controversies. Alexander VIII extracted from it three propositions, taken almost verbatim and fundamental (the 18th, 22nd, and 23rd of the 31 proscribed propositions), and condemned them on 7 December 1690.
Two other books by Antoine A. are the Apologies de M. Jansénius (1643–44), in which the theses of the bishop of Ypres against sufficient grace and positive reprobation are defended. In 1649, against Nicolas Cornet, syndic of the faculty of theology, who was working to have five propositions extracted from the Augustinus censured (they were subsequently condemned as heretical by Innocent X on 31 May 1653), A. first wrote Considérations on this undertaking and then, in 1651, an Apologie pour les saints Pères de l'Église, défenseurs de la grâce de Jésus-Christ contre les erreurs qui leur sont imposés (a new apology for Jansenius).
In the Lettres à un duc et pair (1655–56), he defended the famous distinction between law and fact (as a matter of law: the censure of a doctrine is accepted; as a matter of fact: the attribution of this doctrine to the book of Jansenius, adherence to it is refused on the pretext that the Church is not infallible in questions of fact).
Two propositions taken from the second letter, one of which contained this distinction, were referred to the Sorbonne and censured on 30 January 1656. Antoine’s exclusion from the faculty of theology, for having refused to sign, provided the occasion and subject matter for Pascal’s Lettres à un provincial.
Lengthy and lively discussions followed, and Innocent X, in order to eliminate every equivocation and ambiguity, accepted a new proposal on 15 February 1665, at the request of the clergy of France and the king, and prescribed a formulary to be signed, condemning Jansenius’s five propositions by all ecclesiastics (royal decree of 29 April 1665). The monastery of Port-Royal, the citadel of Jansenism, when invited to sign, did so only with a reservation concerning the question of Jansenius’s fact. After negotiations, the Peace of Clement IX followed, though inwardly it resolved little. To this period belongs Antoine’s major work, written in collaboration with Nicole, Perpetuité de la foi de l'Église touchant l'Eucharistie (1669, 1672, 1676), which received approbations from Clement IX and Innocent XI.
Then, because of the rigoristic measures instituted against the Jansenists by Louis XIV in 1679, Antoine thought it best to take refuge in Holland, where, living clandestinely, he continued his polemical works in favor of Jansenism, often anonymously, so that they could easily be smuggled into France as well, such as Phantôme du jansénisme (1686); Morale pratique des Jésuites représentés en plusieurs histoires arrivées dans toutes les parties du monde (I, 1669; II, 1683); and De la calomnie, which appeared in 1695. With Nicole, he published La logique de Port-Royal (1662), and with Lancelot, Grammaire générale et raisonnée (1664).
Antoine’s activity was therefore multifaceted, animated by a single fixed idea: the struggle against the Jesuits. He could have become a fervent apologist for the faith, but instead became an unrepentant and obstinate apostle of heretical ideas. He was a man in whom reason prevailed over the heart; he preached a Gospel without humility and without heart, and a theory as cold and rigid as glass.