Port-Royal

PORT-ROYAL. - Cistercian monastery founded in 1204, which became an abbey from 1212, famous in the 17th century as the center of Jansenism (v. GIANSENIO and GIANSENISMO).

Situated in the Chevreuse valley, two hours' walk from Versailles (hence called P.-R. des champs), in 1626, because of the unhealthy air, it moved to Paris in the suburb of St-Jacques (P.-R. de Paris). The abbey would have become the French center of Catholic spirituality within the framework of the "Counter-Reformation," had Saint-Cyran not made it a source of religious uneasiness and disorder; for this reason, on 29 Oct. 1709, by royal decree, the nuns were removed from it, and on 29 Jan. 1710 it was demolished. To its ruins the scattered Jansenists hastened in melancholy pilgrimage; famous was the one held on the centenary of its destruction and commemorated by Eustache Degola (v.), the surviving Genoese Jansenist. P.-R. subsequently became a myth to which Mme de Sévigné, Racine, Voltaire, Sainte-Beuve, Renan, and Gazier paid their historical-literary devotion, regarding it now as a spiritual Lycaeum, now as a mystical Thebaid, now as a school of humanism. Because of the influences that the Oratorian spirituality of Bérulle and that of St. Francis de Sales himself had exercised there, it could have achieved such goals had Du Vergier de Hauranne not directed such moral rebirth toward heresy and sect. The original sin of P.-R. was the Augustinus of Jansenius, whose doctrine emerged refined by the sensibility of the Port-Royalists, while nonetheless remaining the pessimistic vision of the world and of life. To this were added an "angelic pride" and a "spiritual wrath" which, impatient of the authority of the Church's magisterium, turned souls to live in the Church in spite of the Church, with equivocations and ambiguities that remained typical in the vicissitudes of Jansenism and repeated, almost identically in all its epigones, the mystique of disobedience. P.-R., spiritual family of the Arnauld (v.), especially of Mère Angélique its reformer, was composed of Les Vierges, Les Messieurs, Les Petites Ecoles; these were centers of education and at the same time institutes of culture kept and directed by the nuns and the solitaries. The nuns had boarding schools where they received girls destined for the cloister or for the world, and the solitaries had the schools properly so called where they instructed the children. From the boarding schools and the schools came nuns and women of the great Parisian world and distinguished men such as Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal, and Racine. Les Messieurs, lay or ecclesiastical, called solitaries, were spiritual sons of St-Cyran, to whom the whole renewing idea is owed, confessors, directors, and teachers in the Petites écoles: an association therefore of persons of piety, grouped in small number, who worked simultaneously, in their own condition, for "the salvation of the soul." In their purpose of imitating the Christians of the primitive Church, they devoted themselves to spiritual works and to material works for four hours a day and to personal and common prayers that resounded in the valley of P.-R. des champs. Their directors were Singlin, Mangueline, and Le Maître de Saci, nephew of Angélique Arnauld, an illustrious orator and lawyer, councilor of state, who had abandoned his profession to found this family of hermits, called "fathers of the desert," in the new Thebaid of P.-R. Some of them also devoted themselves to humble offices, such as De la Petitière, the best soldier of France who, out of penance, after a duel, had accepted the trade of shoemaker, and De la Rivière, a scholar of Hebrew, Greek, and Spanish, who became a forest ranger. The solitaries, 10 in 1647 and 25 in 1652, grew gradually. Les Vierges, spiritual daughters of Angélique Arnauld, often came from families of lawyers and magistrates, and were inclined to see miracles everywhere, to find in Holy Scripture texts that would precisely justify the occasions of their conventual life and of the life of the world, and disposed to regard every idea of their own brain as divine inspiration, every work of their apostolate as a sacred mission, and every contradiction as persecution. They did not tolerate being accused of Jansenism, nor did they endure Jansenius or St-Cyran or Arnauld being condemned. And when the Pope or an ecclesiastical superior required submission, rather than obey interiorly, they repeated in chorus: "blessed are those who suffer persecution for justice's sake." Among them was the famous Jacqueline, sister of Pascal and "sa directrice," besides the sisters of Angélique Arnauld. Theology, mysticism, ascetics, and diplomacy of Jansenism were strangely mingled within the walls of P.-R., and the pages of the Augustinus of Jansenius did everything, like Les lettres chrétiennes et spirituelles of St-Cyran and the treatise De la fréquente Communion by Antoine Arnauld, works that were later replaced, in the saddest hour of the abbey, by the Réflexions of Quesnel, which united all the preceding motives of the heresy, constituting its fundamental and undisputed code. To these documents must be added Les lettres of Angélique, of Madeleine, of Agnès Arnauld, in order to know the intimate chronicle of Jansenist rigorism, which had in P.-R. its experimental center, not excluding Le chapelet secret du St-Sacrement. In the austere awareness of a God, a distant father, of a Christ severe judge and mediator, of a mother Mary, sublimated by a "terrible" dignity, in a vocabulary in which the terms "inaccessible," "incomprehensible," "incommunicable," "ineffable" are frequent, in a complicated and rigid sacramental life, P.-R. shut itself within its ancient walls in a frigid piety, in a stoic pride, for a perfection without holiness, following a logic, La logique de P.-R., of Antoine Arnauld, always attempted and never resolved.

Benvenuto Matteucci