ARNAULD, FAMILY. - Three names that focus Jansenist spirituality in its theological, ascetic 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, Antoine, all except Simon (d. a soldier in 1639), belonged in some way to Port-Royal. Port-Royal determined the fortune of Jansenism through the active and inflamed work of Mère Agnès, Mère Angélique and their brother Antoine, who were the soul and the brain of the whole movement. Their father had already made himself famous in the anti-Jesuit struggle, but the one who had a singular influence over them was Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, abbot of Saint-Cyran, an intimate friend of Jansenius and the first apostle of Jansenist ideas in France.
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1. AGNÈS (Jeanne)
B. 31 Dec. 1593, d. 19 Feb. 1671, she was the third daughter of the advocate Antoine. Her history and her fortune are linked to those of her great sister Angélique. She thought, prayed and worked in her orbit, less bold than she in undertaking, but more tenacious in persevering. Pious, delicate, subtle, after long hesitations she preferred, to the spiritual direction of St. Francis de Sales, that of the abbot of Saint-Cyran, more austere and rigorist, initiating a sad and severe piety, in which fear dominated love. But she knew how to preserve the personal sentiment of a pondered and discreet humanity, and she was of a gentle gravity and tenaciously penetrating. The most vivid document of her spirituality are her letters, written from 17 Dec. 1626 to 10 Feb. 1671. Severe and austere, while always preserving a certain indulgence and complaisance, she harked back to primitive Christianity and intended to reform Christian life through the direct meditation of Holy Scripture and of the saints, through immediate contact, without mediation and direction of ecclesiastical authority, with Christ. She was abbess in the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Cyr, where she took the veil on 15 June 1600. Called by her sister to Port-Royal, she exercised there the offices of mistress of novices and coadjutrix in 1620, and of 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 this last edition there is annexed a Manuel des âmes religieuses ou abrégé des règles qu'elles doivent observer dans leur conduite).
There remains as her spiritual testament 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 religious of Port-Royal, resists with a curious protest of obedience the authority of the Church.
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2. ANGÉLIQUE (Jacqueline)
B. 8 Sept. 1591, d. 6 Aug. 1661. She is the second of the six A. sisters. At the age of seven (1598) she became coadjutrix, with the right of succession, of 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 infant 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 institution was obtained by deceit (Cardinal d'Ossant passed Jacqueline off as Angélique and gave her the age of 17) and at eleven years old she began her life of command. The reforms date back to 1608, and are of the utmost austerity: absolute communion of goods, strict enclosure, perpetual abstinence.
Ardent, energetic, impatient, almost inhuman, she fearlessly overcame trials, struggles, family and ecclesiastical obstacles. Sainte-Beuve (Port-Royal, t. I, pp. 106-13) describes the famous «journée du guichet», which marks the act of inauguration of Port-Royal and of the history of Jansenist piety. Her rigid and arrogant tendencies were sharpened by the influence exercised over her by the abbot of Saint-Cyran, whom she had known 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 abbatial government, imposing superhuman renunciations, mortifications and a merciless struggle against corrupt nature. For her the whole of Christian life consists in resistance and victory against earthly concupiscence, which is not possible without efficacious grace or heavenly delight. A closed and sealed piety, without openings of mercy and confidence, penetrated with fear and terror. Mère Angélique is irreducible, she condemns all who are contrary to Jansenist ascetics and to her excessive reforms. She renounced everything, but not self-love, and she never succeeded in possessing humility and charity, the essential element of every exterior austerity.
She extended the reforms to other abbeys: at Maubuisson, near Paris, at 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 be elective and temporary) and again returned to office from 1642 to 1654. She founded in Paris, in agreement with Zamet, bishop of Langres, the monastery of the Most Holy Sacrament in rue Coquillière, which lasted only a few years.
Her spiritual doctrine is handed down in works either composed by her or of her immediate inspiration: 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., ibid. 1757); Mémoires et relations sur ce qui s'est passé à Port-Royal des Champs, depuis le commencement de la Réforme de cette abbaye (ibid. 1716); Relations écrites par la Mère Marie-Angélique Arnauld sur ce qui est arrivé de plus considérable dans Port-Royal, down to 12 Jan. 1655, with the Relation de la vie et de la mort de la Mère Angélique.
Mère Angélique was singularly hostile, according to Jansenist custom, to every insinuation or decree or bull of ecclesiastical authority, even of the Supreme Pontiff. And she remains, like so many other figures of Port-Royal, still a moral mystery for her life, which was truly not indulgent to the charms of the world and yet contrasting with the principles of the faith.
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3. ANTOINE
B. 5 Feb. 1612, d. 2 Aug. 1694. He is the twentieth child of Antoine A., and is called also called Arnauld the Great. Raised under the wing of Jean de Hauranne and set by him on the path of Jansenist ideas, he must be regarded not only as the foremost representative of French Jansenism, but also as the leader of Jansenism, which perhaps would have stopped at the first condemnations without his effective support. Polemical, aggressive, rational and lively, he gave soul and system to the doctrines of Jansenius. He received his doctorate at the Sorbonne in 1641 and was ordained a priest in the same year, and in 1643 he became an associate master there. His life was restless, marked by bitter polemics and exile. At his death, which occurred in Brussels, his heart was taken to Port-Royal des Champs and his memory celebrated with numerous epitaphs, the most famous of which are those by Santeuil and Boileau.
The occasion for him to make his Jansenist ideas known was a pamphlet by the Jesuit P. de Sesmaisons, written to reassure the Marquise de Sablé, who communicated often, to the great scandal of the Princesse de Guéméné, her director being Saint-Cyran; it was entitled Question : s'il est meilleur de communier souvent ou rarement ?, in which the practice of frequent communion was justified by the usage of the early Church and the recommendations of the Council of Trent. Antoine, incited by Saint-Cyran, replied with a work that can be considered the program of the whole Jansenist and Port-Royal spirituality: De la fréquente communion, in Aug. 1643, which went through repeated editions and spread rapidly.
The central and dominant idea is this: to return to the usages of the early Church, which is contrary to frequent communion; no one may modify the penitential discipline of the early Church because it is of divine institution. An exaggerated value is given to penance to the detriment of sacramental absolution. In order to communicate one must merit the necessary dispositions. Communion is nothing but the reward of the virtues, and it ceases to be food for the virtues. This book was the object of interminable polemics. Alexander VIII drew from it three propositions, taken almost verbatim and fundamental (the 18th, the 22nd, the 23rd of the 31 proscribed) and condemned them on 7 Dec. 1690.
Two other books by Antoine A. are the Apologies de M. Jansénius (1643-44), where the theses of the bishop of Ypres against sufficient grace and positive reprobation are upheld. In 1649, against Nicolas Cornet, syndic of the faculty of theology, who was working to have censured five propositions extracted from the Augustinus (which were later condemned as heretical by Innocent X on 31 May 1653), A. wrote first 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 of Jansenius).
In the Lettres à un duc et pair (1655-56) he upholds the famous distinction of droit and fait (of droit: the censure of a doctrine, which is accepted. Of fait: the attribution of this doctrine to the book of Jansenius, adherence to which 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, referred to the Sorbonne, were censured on 30 Jan. 1656. The exclusion of Antoine, for having refused to subscribe, from the faculty of theology, gave occasion and subject to Pascal's Lettres à un provincial.
Prolix and lively discussions followed, and Innocent X, in order to eliminate every equivocation and ambiguity, on 15 Febr. 1665 accepted a new proposal at the request of the clergy of France and of the king and prescribed a formulary to be signed, condemning the five propositions of Jansenius, by all ecclesiastics (royal decree of 29 Apr. 1665). The monastery of Port-Royal, citadel of Jansenism, invited to subscribe, subscribed only with the reservation regarding the fact of Jansenius. There followed, after negotiations, the peace of Clement IX, which however internally resolved little. It is to this time that the great work of Antoine, written in collaboration with Nicole, dates: Perpetuité de la foi de l'Église touchant l'Eucharistie (1669, 1672, 1676), which received approvals from Clement IX and from Innocent XI.
Then, because of the severities instituted against the Jansenists by Louis XIV in 1679, Antoine thought it well to take refuge in Holland, where in hiding he continued his polemical works in favor of Jansenism, often anonymous, so that they might easily infiltrate 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); De la calomnie, which appeared in 1695. He published, with Nicole, La logique de Port-Royal (1662) and, with Lancelot, Grammaire générale et raisonnée (1664).
Antoine's activity is therefore manifold and animated by a single fixed idea: the struggle against the Jesuits. He could have become a fervent apologist of the faith and became an impenitent, obstinate apostle of heretical ideas. 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.