On October 5, 1625, Jacqueline Pascal was born into a family of the noblesse de robe in Clermont-Ferrand. Her father Étienne, a lawyer and judge, pursued mathematical research. Her mother, Antoinette Begon, died shortly after¹.Jacqueline’s birth. Her sister Gilberte (1620–87) and her brother Blaise (1623–62) accompanied her through their education at home, which their father personally directed.
In 1631 Étienne Pascal moved his family to Paris, where he plunged into the intellectual debates of the city’s burgeoning salons and academies. Charged with teaching her sister to read, Gilberte Pascal records Jacqueline’s precocious taste for poetry: “We began to teach her to read at age seven. My father had given me this responsibility. But I encountered many obstacles, because she had a great aversion to this. Whatever I tried, she wouldn’t do her lessons. Then one day by chance I read some verse out loud. She liked the rhythm so much that she said: ‘Whenever you want me to read, make me read a book of verse. Then I’ll do my lessons as much as you want.’”² By age eight, Jacqueline was writing poetry herself. At eleven she became the talk of Paris salons when she and two other young girls wrote and performed a complete five-act play. Acclaimed as a literary prodigy, at age twelve Jacqueline published a book of poetry.³ In 1638 her poetic fame became national. Queen Anne of Austria, the wife of Louis XIII, summoned her to court at Saint-Germain-en-Laye to thank her for her recent poem on the queen’s pregnancy.⁴ Jacqueline aston-ished the court by composing spontaneous poems at the request of Made-moiselle de Montpensier⁵ and of the Duchesse d’Aiguillon.⁶ In the same year tragedy struck the Pascal household. Disgraced over a financial dispute with Cardinal Richelieu, Étienne Pascal fled into exile out-side Paris. Jacqueline succumbed to smallpox. After her recovery, her poetry and her correspondence assumed a more austere and religious tone.
In 1639 Jacqueline managed to rehabilitate her family’s political fortunes. Performing in a play at the home of the Duchesse d’Aiguillon, the niece of Cardinal Richelieu, Jacqueline charmed the cardinal. Pleading her father’s case, Jacqueline persuaded Richelieu to pardon him and personally reconciled them in an interview shortly thereafter. To show his new favor, Richelieu appointed Étienne Pascal supervisor of taxes in Rouen.
In the provincial salons of Normandy, Jacqueline’s reputation as a poet grew. Guided by Rouen’s leading writer, the dramatist Pierre Corneille, in 1640 Jacqueline won the coveted Prix de la Tour for her poem “On the Conception of the Virgin.”⁷ Her brother Blaise also began to receive national acclaim for his mathematical genius. To help his father streamline the burdensome job of cal-culating the tax records of the province, the adolescent Blaise devised a counting machine that performed the four basic mathematical operations.
Although Jacqueline Pascal would later abandon writing poetry as incompatible with her religious vocation, her formation as a poet influenced her later work. Many of her letters and later prose works bear the trace of the epigram: the concise, proverb-like phrase that is a central feature of her adolescent poetry. She also developed a taste for another fashionable salon genre: the moral portrait. Her Memoir of Mère Marie Angélique⁸ and numerous letters carefully evoke the moral temperament of a particular person.
The Rouen years also witnessed a religious turning point for the Pascals: their entry into the Jansenist movement. In 1646 Étienne Pascal fell and broke his hip. By expert manipulation of the bones two folk practitioners managed to heal the fracture. Religiously motivated in their service to the sick, the healers explained their attachment to the Port-Royal convent in Paris. They discussed the militant Augustinian theology of the convent, centered in the theories of the late bishop Cornelius Jansenius⁹ as interpreted by the convent chaplain, Saint-Cyran,¹⁰ and by the convent’s leading theological ally, Antoine Arnauld.¹¹ Previously perfunctory in their Catholic practice, all the members of the Pascal family gradually adhered to the austere moral and theological tenets of the Jansenist circle.
In 1647 Jacqueline and Blaise returned to Paris. Blaise pursued his groundbreaking experiments on the vacuum. Descartes visited the Pascal household to honor the new scientific celebrity, now his rival.¹² Jacqueline nursed the sickly Blaise, afflicted by a rare form of tuberculosis, as she intensified her religious study and devotional life. Both became ardent members of the lay circle that attended services at the convent of Port-Royal de Paris.
Under the influence of the convent’s confessor, Abbé Singlin,¹³ and the abbess, Mère Angélique,¹⁴ Jacqueline decided she had a vocation to become a nun at Port-Royal. Étienne Pascal did not share Jacqueline’s enthusiasm for her religious vocation. To resolve the conflict, father and daughter agreed that Jacqueline’ would remain with her father until his death and that Étienne’ would permit his daughter to live a secluded home life as a de facto nun.
Jacqueline remained under the direction of Port-Royal, composing her devotional treatise On the Mystery of the Death of Our Lord Jesus Christ¹⁵ shortly before she entered the convent. The work elaborates a one-to-one correspondence between attributes of Christ’s suffering in his Passion and the analogous virtues that a female disciple of Christ should cultivate. Clearly shaped by Jansenist theology, the treatise dwells on the passivity and abandonment of Christ in the Passion rather than on the physical and emotional dimensions of his suffering on the cross.
After her father died on September 24, 1651, Jacqueline prepared to enter the convent. It was Blaise, grown cool to religious concerns, who now begged her to remain at home. Defying her brother, however, Jacqueline entered Port-Royal on January 4, 1652.
Under the direction of Mère Agnès,¹⁶ the sister of Mère Angélique, Jacqueline pursued an abbreviated postulancy, given the reclusive years she had already spent in service to her father.
Still opposed to her vocation, Blaise communicated with his sister through letters and visits. The conflict between Jacqueline and Blaise became especially bitter over the question of the dowry. As was customary in monastic houses, Jacqueline expected her family to provide her convent with a substantial dowry at the moment she professed her vows. Since her father had left a large bequest to his three children, she assumed that her share of the inheritance would constitute this dowry. Unexpectedly Blaise and Gilberte, now married to Florin Périer, opposed the project and threatened legal action to keep the money in the family.
In her subsequent Report of Soeur Jacqueline de Sainte Euphémie to the Mother Prioress of Port-Royal des Champs,¹⁷ Soeur Jacqueline recounts her struggle to accept the advice of her superiors to enter the convent without a dowry and to overcome her repugnance at the humiliation of an undowered vocation.
Breaking the link between a dowry and the right to pursue a religious vocation constituted one of the axes of Port-Royal’s reform of monastic life. In her later practice as novice mistress, Soeur Jacqueline would stress the freedom of the religious vocation and its independence from financial considerations. At the end of the dispute, however, Blaise Pascal relented and made a substantial contribution to the convent. Jacqueline was clothed in the religious habit on May 26, 1652, and solemnly professed vows on June 5, 1653.
The convent Jacqueline Pascal entered was already riven by controversy. Founded in 1204, the original Port-Royal (Port-Royal des Champs) was in a valley twenty miles south of Paris. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, the convent had declined to a dozen nonobservant nuns living in a dilapidated building. In 1608 the young abbess, Mère Angélique, began a vigorous reform that made the convent a model of asceticism. Flush with new vocations, in 1630 the community moved to a larger building in the Faubourg Saint-Jacques: Port-Royal de Paris. In 1638 a group of laymen (les solitaires) occupied the old buildings at Port-Royal des Champs and began their petites écoles for boys, complementing the work of the convent school for girls revived by Mère Angélique. In 1649 the bourgeoning community sent some of the nuns to reoccupy the Port-Royal des Champs cloister, thus establishing two convent locations. Throughout its reformed period, Port-Royal was largely an enterprise of the Arnauld family, another dynasty of the noblesse de robe. Sisters Jeanne Arnauld (Mère Angélique) and Agnès Arnauld (Mère Agnès) were its major superiors. Their brother Antoine Arnauld was its leading theologian, brother Henri (bishop of Angers) its chief episcopal defender, and nephew Antoine Le Maître a preeminent teacher and writer in the petites écoles.
From its inception, the reformed Port-Royal aroused opposition. Jesuit theologians attacked its moral rigorism and its theology of radical human depravity as suspiciously Calvinist. Political authorities, starting with Richelieu, criticized the democratic tendencies of the convent’s theology and noted the attraction of the convent church for prominent aristocrats opposed to royal absolutism. With the appointment of Saint-Cyran as convent chaplain in 1636, the Augustinianism of Port-Royal became a militant Jansenism.
Soon after profession, Soeur Jacqueline assumed several positions of authority in the community: schoolmistress in the convent school, novice mistress, and subprioress. In her role as schoolmistress, Soeur Jacqueline composed her most influential work, A Rule for Children.¹⁸ Written in 1657 at the request of her spiritual director, Abbé Singlin, the treatise details the spirit and method of education she employed with the boarding students at the convent.
On several particulars, the Rule reflects the pedagogical principles of the Jansenist messieurs who directed the petites écoles for boys. Like the messieurs, Soeur Jacqueline insists that pupils’ successful moral and religious education demands that the teacher develop a personal, comprehensive knowledge of the moral character of each one.’ Humility is the key virtue to be cultivated; dishonesty is the vice to be extirpated. Their salvation requires strict surveillance at all times, but she eschews violent measures such as corporal punishment, which only alienate children. Soeur Jacqueline’s methods incorporate several of the pedagogical innovations of the petites écoles. She introduces the phonetic method of learning French and tutorial methods of instruction. Nonetheless, the curriculum is much less ambitious than that proposed in the petites écoles.
Even though influenced by the pedagogy of the male Jansenists, the educational theory and practice of Soeur Jacqueline differ substantially from that championed by the messieurs. This difference reflects a clear concern to offer an education proper to a school with a female faculty and student body.
First, the model of education she proposes integrates the students into the liturgical life of the convent. The typical school day begins as follows: rising between 4:00 a.m. and 5:00 a.m.; rising prayer; dressing in silence; silent kneeling prayer of adoration; recitation of liturgical offices of prime and compline; examination of conscience; silent breakfast at 7:00 a.m., during which the martyrology is read aloud. The entire day follows such a religiously charged pattern, modeled after the strictest monastic tradition.
If this approach to education reflects Port-Royal’s effort to renew the ascetic fervor of the primitive church, it also contains its own subversion of the religious and the social orders. By insisting that pupils participate in the monastic office rather than confining their piety to popular devotions, the Port-Royal school subtly undermined the distinction between the laity and the vowed religious. The only book each pupil was to own, a Latin/French psalter, was not an uncontroversial choice in a period when the church frowned on vernacular translations of the Bible and the psalter was considered the exclusive prayer book of priests and religious. The catechism recommended by Soeur Jacqueline, the Théologie familière of Saint-Cyran, had been censured by the archdiocese of Paris in 1643. The Rule’s instructions for preparing students for confession and Holy Communion, which stress the danger of sacrilege and discourage frequent reception of the sacraments, trumpeted the school’s Jansenist ethos.
Even more subversive is the spiritual authority the Rule gives to women. If the priest is the sole confessor, the nun-teacher is now spiritual director, preparing the pupils for confession, knowing their moral struggles, monitoring their conduct after confession, and advising the confessor on the general moral state of the class. The chapter on instruction condemns rote catechesis. The nun-teacher is to explain religious doctrine at length, find appropriate applications for female students, field their questions, and encourage reflection on religious truths rather than simple memorization. This insistence on young laywomen’s critical acquisition of a theological culture usually reserved to priests fueled the suspicion that Port-Royal was subtly eroding the hierarchical structure of the church.
During Soeur Jacqueline’s decade at Port-Royal, the opposition to the Jansenists intensified. In 1653 Pope Innocent X issued the bull Cum occasione, which condemned as heretical five propositions concerning grace and freedom. It further argued that Cornelius Jansenius had defended these propositions in his controversial Augustinus (1640). In 1656 Pope Alexander VII reiterated this condemnation in Ad sanctam beati Petri sedem and insisted that the church was condemning these propositions precisely in the way that Jansenius had held them.
Reinforced by similar condemnations by the Sorbonne theology faculty and by the Assembly of the Clergy, the papal censures seemed to mark the end of Jansenism as a Catholic movement. Antoine Arnauld, however, devised a clever theological distinction to defend the Jansenist viewpoint. Arnauld argued that the church enjoyed divine assistance only in judgments concerning matters of faith and morals (droit), since these truths are central to salvation itself. However, when the church made judgments on matters of fact (fait), such as whether a given book was indeed heretical, its judgments were fallible, hence vulnerable to subsequent revision or even reversal. The application to the Jansenist case was clear. The Jansenists accepted the church’s judgment of droit that the five propositions were heretical. But they rejected the judgment of fait that Jansenius and his disciples had endorsed such theories. The droit/fait distinction enraged the critics of the Jansenists, who argued that it destroyed church authority, and it disturbed a minority of Jansenists (especially the Port-Royal nuns) as disingenuous. However, it quickly gained support among the Jansenist clergy and among the Jansenist sympathizers in the aristocracy.
As the persecution against Port-Royal intensified, the unexpected occurred: a miracle. On Good Friday, March 24, 1656, the nuns and pupils in the convent boarding school went to the chapel to venerate a relic of the crown of thorns. Marguerite Périer, the niece of Soeur Jacqueline and a pupil at the school, had been suffering from a large abscess beneath her eye. The bone under the abscess was diseased, the wound had repeatedly hemorrhaged, and her eyesight had seriously deteriorated. Several doctors had recently examined Marguerite and had scheduled an operation. Shortly after she touched the relic to her eye, however, the abscessd disappeared and she totally regained her vision.
Despite the allegations of fraud by Jesuit pamphleteers, a series of medical and legal inquests led the archdiocese of Paris to declare the authenticity of the miracle on October 22, 1656. An exultant Blaise Pascal, who was periodically publishing his Provincial Letters against Jesuit moral laxness the same year, celebrated the miracle as a sign of divine favor for the Jansenists against their enemies.
As soon as Louis XIV assumed personal government of the realm in 1661, the persecution quickened. On February 1, 1661, the Assembly of the Clergy drew up a formulary (formulaire) to be signed by all priests, nuns, and teachers. In the formulary the signatory submitted to the popes’ earlier condemnations of Jansenius and the five propositions. On April 13 the king’s council ratified the formulary and planned specific moves against Port-Royal, the center of Jansenist resistance. On April 20 the confessors and spiritual directors of the convent were dispersed. On April 23 and 24 the boarding students were dismissed and the convent school was closed. On May 31 the postulants and novices were expelled.
On June 8 the vicars general of the archdiocese of Paris officially presented the formulary for signature by subjects of the archdiocese. The Port-Royal nuns were singled out for signature. The vicars, however, softened the formulary by their introductory pastoral instruction (mandement), which explicitly recognized the validity of the droit/fait distinction in interpreting the condemnation of Jansenius.
Although Antoine Arnauld had urged the nuns to sign this irenic document, Jacqueline Pascal refused. In her letter of June 23, 1661, Soeur Jacqueline insisted that signing would be duplicitous, seeming to assent to a condemnation she knew to be wrong. She insisted that women, despite their lack of formal theological education, had a right to make a conscientious decision on this matter. She argued that martyrdom would be preferable to the violation of conscience that the diplomatic Jansenist clergy were tempting the nuns to accept: “What are we afraid of? Exile and dispersion for the nuns, confiscation of our temporal goods, prison and death, if you will? But isn’t this our glory and shouldn’t this be our joy?”¹⁹ Despite her objections, Soeur Jacqueline signed the formulary with the other nuns on June 24–25. In violation of Arnauld’s counsel, however, they added written codicils to their signatures specifying the heavily conditional nature of their assent to the church’s condemnations.
Simultaneous with the “crisis of the signature,” Port-Royal underwent several ecclesiastical inquests. The first series, conducted by the newly imposed overseer of the convent, Monsieur Bail, occurred on June 26–29. The second series, conducted by Monsieur Bail and Monsieur de Contes, grand vicar of Paris, took place on July 11–26.
The interrogation of Soeur Jacqueline tried to unearth possibly heretical beliefs that the nun might have communicated to her charges in her roles as novice mistress and teacher. Avoiding entrapment on the more controversial Jansenist doctrines, Soeur Jacqueline gave a number of equivocal responses. On the disputed issue of the small number of the saved, for example, she artfully transformed a controverted point of grace and freedom into a question of piety: “Usually, when I am praying, especially when I am before a crucifix, that question comes to mind. Then I say to the Lord: ‘My God, how is it possible, after everything you have done for us, that so many people perish in misery?’ But when these thoughts haunt me, I reject them, because I don’t think I have the right to sound out the secrets of God.”²⁰ If Soeur Jacqueline opposed Arnauld’s casuistry on the question of the signature, she was more than capable of devising her own subtle theological distinctions to defend the orthodoxy of Port-Royal in the moment of its virtual dissolution.
On October 4, 1661, Jacqueline Pascal died. The physical cause of her death remains obscure. But the chroniclers of Port-Royal immediately pro-claimed her the proto-martyr of the movement. In the space of several months she had witnessed the destruction of her life’s work (the school and the novitiate) and had been subjected to a harrowing interrogation. Above all, by a bitterly regretted signature she had compromised the rights of conscience she had so stoutly defended.
Jacqueline Pascal A R U L E F O R C H I L D R E N A N D O T H E R W R I T I N G S
Edited and translated by John J. Conley, S.J.
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