ARNAULD, FAMILY. - Three names that focus the spirituality of Jansenism 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 a general attorney 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) were in some way connected with Port-Royal. Port-Royal determined the fortunes of Jansenism through the active and fervent work of Mother Agnès, Mother Angélique, and their brother Antoine, who were the soul and mind of the entire movement. Their father had already become famous in the anti-Jesuit struggle, but the one who exercised a singular influence over them was Jean Duvergier de Hauranne, Abbot of Saint-Cyr, intimate friend of Jansenius and the first apostle of Jansenist ideas in France.
1. AGNÈS (Jeanne)
B. Dec. 31, 1593, d. Feb. 19, 1671, was the third daughter of the lawyer Antoine. Her story and her fortune are bound up with those of her elder sister Angélique. She thought, prayed, and worked in her orbit, less bold than she in taking initiatives, 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-Cyr, more austere and rigorist, initiating a sad and severe piety, where fear dominated love. Yet she knew how to preserve the personal sentiment of a measured and discreet humanity, and was of a sweet and tenaciously penetrating gravity. The liveliest document of her spirituality is the letters, written from Dec. 17, 1626 to Feb. 10, 1671. Severe and austere, yet always preserving a certain indulgence and compliance, she harked back to primitive Christianity and sought to reform Christian life through direct meditation on Holy Scripture and the saints, through immediate contact, without mediation or direction by ecclesiastical authority, with Christ. She was abbess in the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Cyr, where she took the veil on June 15, 1600. Called by her sister to Port-Royal, there she exercised the offices of novice mistress and coadjutor in 1620, and twice of abbess, 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 donnes 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 1663); 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 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 Dec. 10, 1664, in which, ambiguously like the other religious of Port-Royal, she resists with a curious protest of obedience to the authority of the Church.
2. ANGÉLIQUE (Jacqueline)
B. Sept. 8, 1591, d. Aug. 6, 1661. She is the second of the six Arnauld sisters. At seven years of age (1598) she was coadjutor, with right of succession, of Jeanne Boulehart, abbess of the Cistercian abbey of Port-Royal, and took the veil on Sept. 27, 1599, not in the abbey of Port-Royal (because the Pope had refused the bulls on account of her tender age), but in the abbey of Maubuisson, near Pontoise. When Jeanne de Boulehart died on July 5, 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’Ossat made Jacqueline pass as Angélique and gave her the age of 17) and at eleven she began her life of command. The reforms date from 1608, and are of the utmost austerity: absolute community of goods, strict enclosure, perpetual abstinence.Fiery, energetic, impatient, almost inhuman, she overcame fearlessly trials, struggles, family and ecclesiastical obstacles. Sainte-Beuve (Port-Royal, vol. I, pp. 106-13) describes the famous “journée du guichet,” which marks the act inaugurating Port-Royal and the history of Jansenist piety. Her rigid and arrogant tendencies were sharpened by the influence that the Abbot of Saint-Cyr exercised over her; she had known him in 1623 and remained faithful to him 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 over earthly concupiscence, which is impossible without efficacious grace or celestial delight. Her piety was closed and sealed, without openings of mercy and confidence, steeped in fear and terror. Mother Angélique is unyielding; she condemns all who are opposed to Jansenist asceticism and its excessive reforms. She renounced everything, but not self-love, and never succeeded in possessing humility and charity, the essential elements of all outward austerity.
She extended the reforms to other abbeys: to Maubuisson, near Paris, to 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 held the office from 1642 to 1654. In Paris, in agreement with Zamet, Bishop of Langres, she founded the monastery of the Most Holy 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 Révérende Mère Marie-Angélique de Sainte-Magdeleine Arnauld, abbesse et réformatrice de Port-Royal (3 vols., Utrecht 1742-1744); Entretiens ou Conférences de la Révérende 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 Jan. 12, 1655, with the Relation de la vie et de la mort de la Mère Angélique.
Mother Angélique was singularly hostile, in the Jansenist manner, to every insinuation or decree or bull of ecclesiastical authority, even that of the Supreme Pontiff. And she remains, like so many other figures of Port-Royal, a moral mystery because of her life, which was certainly not indulgent to the vanities of the world and yet in conflict with the principles of the faith.
3. ANTOINE
B. Feb. 5, 1612, d. Aug. 2, 1694. He is the twentieth child of Antoine Arnauld and is calledEven the great Arnauld. Reared in the shadow of Jean de Hauranne and guided by him into Jansenist ideas, he must be regarded not only as the leading representative of French Jansenism but also as the founder of the Jansenist school, which might perhaps have remained at the level of the first condemnations without his vigorous support. Polemical, aggressive, rational and lively, he gave soul and system to the doctrines of Jansenius. Graduating from the Sorbonne in 1641 and ordained priest in the same year, he became an associate master there in 1643. His life was restless, marked by bitter controversies and exile. At his death in Brussels, his heart was taken to Port-Royal des Champs and his memory celebrated in numerous epitaphs, the most famous of which are those by Santeuil and Boileau.
An occasion for the manifestation of his Jansenist ideas was provided by a pamphlet by the Jesuit P. de Semsaisons, written to reassure the Marquise de Sablé, who communicated frequently, to the great scandal of the Princess de Guéméné, directed by Saint-Cyran, entitled: *Questi non : s’il est meilleur de communier souvent ou rare-ment*?, in which he justified the practice of frequent communion by appeal to the usage of the early Church and the recommendations of the Council of Trent. Antoine, urged on by Saint-Cyran, replied with a work that may be considered the programme of all Jansenist spirituality and of Port-Royal: *De la fréquence de la communion*, published in August 1643, which ran through many editions and was rapidly diffused.
The central and dominant idea is this: to return to the usages of the early Church, which is opposed to frequent communion; no one may alter the penitential discipline of the early Church because it is of divine institution. An exaggerated value is placed upon penance to the detriment of sacramental absolution. To receive communion one must merit the necessary dispositions. Communion is nothing more than the reward of virtue and ceases to be a nourishment for virtue. This book was the object of endless controversy. Alexander VIII extracted three propositions from it, taken almost verbatim as the basis (the 18th, 22nd and 23rd of the 31 condemned) and condemned them on 7 December 1690.
Two other books by Antoine Arnauld are the *Apologies de M. Jansenius* (1643–44), in which the theses of the Bishop of Ypres are defended against sufficient grace and positive reprobation. In 1649, in opposition to Nicolas Cornet, syndic of the faculty of theology, who was working to have five propositions extracted from the *Augustinus* condemned (which were later condemned as heretical by Innocent X on 31 May 1653), A. first wrote *Considerations* 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 imposées* (a new apology for Jansenius).
In the *Lettres à un duc et pair* (1655–56) he advances the famous distinction between *de droit* and *de fait* (*de droit*: the censure of a doctrine is accepted; *de fait*: the attribution of this doctrine to the book of Jansenius is rejected on the pretext that the Church is not infallible in matters 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, for refusing to subscribe, from the faculty of theology, gave Pascal the occasion and subject for his *Lettres à un provincial*.
Lengthy and lively discussions followed, and Innocent X, to remove all ambiguity, on 15 February 1665, at the request of the French clergy and the king, prescribed a formulary to be subscribed by all ecclesiastics condemning the five propositions of Jansenius (royal decree of 29 April 1665). The monastery of Port-Royal, citadel of Jansenism, was invited to subscribe, but did so only with the reservation regarding the *de facto* question of Jansenius. This was followed, after negotiations, by the Peace of Clement IX, which, however, soon proved ineffective. It was at this time that Antoine’s great work, written in collaboration with Nicole, *Perpetuité de la foi de l’Église touchant l’Eucharistie* (1669, 1672, 1676), appeared, which received the approval of Clement IX and Innocent XI.
Later, because of the rigours instituted against the Jansenists by Louis XIV in 1679, Antoine took refuge in Holland, where in hiding he continued his polemical works in favour of Jansenism, often anonymously, so that they might more easily infiltrate France, 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 was therefore manifold and animated by a single fixed idea: the struggle against the Jesuits. He might have become a fervent apologist of the faith, but instead became an unrepentant, obstinate apostle of heretical ideas. A man in whom reason prevailed over the heart, he preached a gospel without humility or heart, and a theory cold and rigid as glass.