Pierre Nicole, Jansenist and Humanist: A Study of His Thought

190 Pages·1972·8.89 MB·English

by  E. D. James (auth.)

PIERRE NICOLE, JANSENIST AND HUMANIST
ARCHIVES INTERNATIONALES D'HISTOIRE DES IDEES
INTERNATIONAL ARCHIVES OF THE HISTORY OF IDEAS
Series Minor
1
E.D. JAMES
PIERRE NICOLE, JANSENIST AND HUMANIST
A STUDY OF HIS THOUGHT
Directors: P. Dibon (paris) and R. Popkin (Univ. of California, La Jolla)
Editorial board : J. Aubin (Paris); J. Collins (St. Louis Univ.); P. Costabel
(paris); A. Crombie (Oxford); I. Dambska (Cracow); H. de la Fontaine-Verwey
(Amsterdam); H. Gadamer (Heidelberg); H. Gouhier (Paris); T. Gregory
(Rome); T.E. Jessop (Hull); P. O. Kristeller (Columbia Univ.); Elisabeth
Labrousse (Paris); S. Lindroth (Upsala); A. Lossky (Los Angeles); J. Orcibal
(Paris); I. S. Revah (Paris); J. Roger (Paris): H. Rowen (Rutgers Univ., N.Y.);
G. Sebba (Emory Univ., Atlanta); R. Shackleton (Oxford); J. Tans (Groningen);
G. Tonelli (Binghamton, N.Y.).
PIERRE NICOLE,
JANSENIST AND HUMANIST
A STUDY OF HIS THOUGHT
E.D. JAMES
Fellow 0/ St John's Col/ege, Cambridge
MARTINUS NIJHOFF / THE HAGUE / 1972
© 1972 by Martinus Nijhoff, The Hague, Netherlands
A.ll rights reserved, including the right to translate or to
reproduce this book or parts thereof in any form
ISBN-13: 978-90-247-1282-3 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-010-2784-7
DOl: 10.1007/978-94-010-2784-7
CONTENTS
PREFACE VII
INTRODUCTION 1
PART 1 -GRACE, FREEDOM AND POWER
Ch. 1 THE ARGUMENT FOR GENERAL GRACE 7
Ch. 2 NATURAL POWERS AND ADAM'S GRACE 22
Ch. 3 ILLUMINATION AND UNCONSCIOUS THOUGHTS 32
PART 2 -APOLOGETIC
Ch. 1 THE ERRORS OF PAGAN PmLOSOPHY 45
Ch. 2 THE IMMORTALITY OF THE SOUL 53
Ch.3 THE EXISTENCE OF GoD. NICOLE AND PASCAL 58
Ch. 4 THE EXISTENCE OF GoD. NICOLE AND DESCARTES 64
Ch. 5 MIRACLES. CoNCLUSION 68
PART 3 -THE PROBLEM OF MYSTICISM
Ch. 1 METHOD IN PRAYER 75
Ch.2 FORMS OF CoNTEMPLATION 82
Ch. 3 SECHERESSE AND ABANDON 90
PART 4 - MORAL DOCTRINES
Ch. 1 FAITH AND WORKS 99
Ch. 2 THE TWO LoVES 108
Ch. 3 'KNOW THYSELF' 116
Ch. 4 CoNCLUSION - REASON AND THE GooD LIFE 132
PART 5 -SOCIAL AND POLITICAL THEORY
Ch. 1 THE MORAL BASIS OF AUTHORITY 137
Ch. 2 THE MORAL BASIS OF SOCIETY AND ITS LAws 148
CoNCLUSION 163
APPENDIX THE AUTHORSHIP OF LA LOGIQUE 175
BmuoGRAPHY 179
INDEX 189
PREFACE
The present study had its origins long ago in a doctorate thesis presented
at the University of Cambridge. The work has been considerably enlarged
in scope, if not in bulk, but has always been conceived as a whole. Nicole's
thought is, in any case, remarkably coherent. I make use of articles of
mine published in French Studies for April 1960 and July 1967, and my
thanks are due to the General Editor of that journal for permission to
do so.
lowe a great debt of gratitude to Dr M.G. Wallas, who guided my
researches in the early years. The penetration and lucidity of her criticism
were equalled only by her kindness and patience. To Mr N.J. Abercrom
bie, who had himself worked on Nicole for a number of years, I am
deeply grateful for the gift of books, notes and analyses. Probably every
section of this study owes something to his work, hints of the importance
of the influence on Nicole of St Fran~ois de Sales proving particularly
fruitful. One of the most pleasant moments in the course of my researches
was spent at the Rijksarchief in Utrecht, to the staff of which, and to
Dr AJ. van de Yen, Keeper of the Archives of the Oud-Bisschoppelijke
Clerezij, I am much indebted for their kind help.
May 1971 E.D.J.
INTRODUCTION
It is something of a paradox that so retiring a man as Pierre Nicole
should have had so important a role in the Jansenist controversy of the
mid-seventeenth century. In fact in his middle and later years, the most
productive of his life, his preferred occupation was the composition of
works of piety and morality and he withdrew from the Jansenist battle,
though not from all controversy. Essentially an homme de cabinet, he
sought to clarify disputed questions in the interests of truth and moral
good. His constant concern was with the capacities, needs and duties of
man - fallen yet living in hope of things to come, a transient inhabitant
of an imperfect world yet contriving to make of it his home.
The present study aims at providing a more comprehensive view of
Nicole's thought than can be obtained from existing piecemeal discussions
in articles, in chapters of general works and in the notes and commentaries
of anthologists. A brief introduction outlines the course of Nicole's
life and indicates the place his chief works occupy in it.
Born at Chartres on 13 October 1625, son and nephew of high-ranking
magistrates, Nicole was sent to school at the College d'Harcourt in Paris.
He was not long in displaying considerable intellectual gifts, great
proficiency in the humanities and a pious disposition. His father's choice
for him of a career in the Church was an appropriate one. The family
connection with Port-Royal had preceded the implantation of Jansenism
and two women relatives of Nicole - sometimes referred to as 'aunts' -
were nuns (one eventually abbess) there. It was natural, therefore, that
while reading for his degree in theology at the Sorbonne Nicole should
frequent Port-Royal de Paris. His theological studies coincided with the
early stages of the controversy with the Jesuits, and in 1647-8 he took the
Jansenist side in a dispute between two of his teachers, Sainte-Beuve,
an Augustinian and Le Moine, a Molinist, both moderates. When the
Jansenist controversy became acute in 1649, the year of his Baccalaureate
in Theology, he characteristically decided to abandon his plans to go on
2 INTRODUcnON
to the doctorate and in 1650 retired to Port-Royal-des-Champs. There
he taught in the petites ecoles and helped in the production of text-books,
of which the Logique de Port-Royal was to be the most significant. No
doubt he would have remained in retirement had not the Jansenist leader
Antoine Arnauld summoned him to Paris at the end of 1655 to assist him
in the controversy.
Nicole's learning, acute mind and elegant Latin made him an excellent
auxiliary and he clearly entered with conviction into the struggle which
produced the Provinciales. Nevertheless, his theological position soon
proved to differ from that of his party and he became engaged in a dispute
with his fellow Jansenists over the universality of divine grace which was
to assume particular prominence in the last years of his life. His Latin
disquisitions of 1657, under the name Paul Irenaeus, which defend the
Jansenist position in neo-scholastic terms, aroused suspicion among the
more rigid Jansenists, and his Latin translation of the Provinciales,
published the next year under the pseudonym Wendrock, appends to the
eighteenth letter a dialogue containing the germ of his personal doctrine
of grace. In treating there of the relations between grace, freedom and
power, Nicole already formulates the essential principles of his concep
tion of the devout life. The problems raised by the vogue of quietism in
seventeenth-century France also preoccupied him from a relatively early
age until the year of his death. From praising in 'Wendrock' Saint
Cyran's defence of a mystical writing of Mother Agnes Arnauld without
fully appreciating the issues involved, Nicole soon passes in the Vision
naires of 1665-6 to a scathing attack on the alleged quietism of the play
wright, devotional writer and eccentric, Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin. Here
again fundamental principles are formulated which will still govern his
thinking in the Refutation des quietistes published in 1695, the last year of
his life. These principles prove to be the counterpart of those which are
found in the dialogue appended to the eighteenth of the Provinciales.
The devout life is a life of continuous moral endeavour from which the
seductive illusions of quietism turn Christians aside.
When Nicole threw himself into the Jansenist controversy at the time
of the Provinciales he could hardly have foreseen that it would mean
spending some years in hiding, or at least under a false name, in or outside
Paris. If, in his Lettres sur l'heresie imaginaire of 1664-5, he did not spare
the authorities who attempted to impose on Port-Royal a formula of
submission, he was at the same time contemplating retirement from the
controversy. In 1663 he had already been concerned in an attempt to
interpret the five condemned Jansenist propositions in an orthodox and
conciliatory way and can only have welcomed in 1668 the lull in the
INTRODUCTION 3
controversy known as the Peace of the Church. He was now able to give
himself to the composition of the first volumes of his most famous work,
the Essais de morale, which elaborate and illustrate the conception of
human nature and the devout life sketched in the early writings. The
first volume of Essais to appear, the De ['Education d'un Prince of 1670
(reprinted as Essais, T. II) was strongly influenced by Pascal's Pensees, in
the editing of which Nicole probably shared. The title-treatise itself is
admittedly suggested by Pascal; the work contains Pascal's Discours sur la
condition des grands and Nicole's pendant to it - the essay De la Grandeur;
there is a critique of Senecan Stoicism and an apologetic treatise both
owing something to Pascal. The other treatises are more characteristic
of what are to be known as the Essais de morale, they reveal Nicole's
preoccupation with the analysis of factors making for and against reason
able conduct in social relations.
The nature and genesis of the Essais are discussed in the preface to the
volume known as Essais, T. I, published the next year. Any implication
in the etymology of the word that the Essais are in any way a 'tentative'
treatment of morals is set aside and they are seen to be essays in a modern
sense of the word : works of reflection and analysis in which the author
does not claim to exhaust his subject. The reasons given for adopting this
form of writing are the impossibility of treating the whole field of morals
in extenso, and the facility which the essay offers both of eliminating
matters of secondary importance which would of necessity be treated in
a more formal work, and of including matters of importance which the
plan of a formal work would exclude. Nicole explains in a letter how some
particular problem would set his mind to work and would lead to his
generalising the resulting reflections.l
The Essais were written in the heyday of the reflexion and the maxime.
One need only recall the circle of Mme de Sable who, from 1656, resided
within the precincts of Port-Royal de Paris and received Nicole, Pascal,
Arnauld and Domat, as well as La Rochefoucauld and others. The
avertissements to early editions of the first three volumes of the Essais
show that the separate traites originated simply as collections of related
re1lections on a particular topic. Indeed, the posthumously published
sixth volume contains a large number of disconnected pensees. In the
early editions of the first volumes the treatises consisted of numbered
reflections, but very soon the treatises were re-divided into chapters each
with its own heading. Thus the first Essais proper were simply collected
thoughts on a particular theme. Nicole was one of a number of observers
1 Essais, T. VIII, p. 122, Lettre LXXIV in fin.
4 INTRODUCTION
in the second half of the century setting down disconnected reflections on
human behaviour.
For seven years from 1671, Nicole was mostly resident in the ecuries
of the Duchesse de LonguevilIe, who played an important role as protect
ress of Port-Royal. He had indeed spent a short time in the ecuries during
the period of controversy before the Peace of the Church. Mme de
Longueville found him more agreeable than the less polished Arnauld,
and the contact with an aristocratic milieu must have been valuable to
the moralist. He also frequented what has come to be known as the
'Hotel Liancourt', the residence of La Rochefoucauld's uncle, where
discussions of a philosophical nature appear to have flourished between
1669 and 1674. The seventies were also years in which he composed
several works defending the Catholic faith against the Protestants. Part
of the year 1676 was spent travelling in France - visiting at Annecy the
burial place of St Fran~ois de Sales whom he greatly revered, and,
important for Nicole, consulting Nicolas PavilIon, Bishop of Aleth, on
the advisability of taking holy ordl;rs. The refusal of the Bishop of
Chartres to grant him permission to be ordained came as a relief and
left him free to return to his retiring way of life.
The Peace of the Church was now coming to an end. The authorities
looked with a jaundiced eye upon meetings of Jansenists at the ecuries of
Mme de Longueville and were irritated by signs of a recrudescence of the
controversy. These were due rather to extremist and lesser figures in the
movement, but Nicole himself reluctantly agreed in 1677 to compose in
his elegant Latin a letter to the Pope protesting against Jesuit casuistry.
Called to Chartres upon the death of his father the following year, Nicole
seems mostly to have kept away from Paris thereafter. When Mme de
Longueville died in April 1679 and persecution of the Jansenists was
resumed and intensified, Nicole fled with Arnauld to Mons and thence
to Brussels but refused to go on with him into Holland. He soon made
his peace with the Archbishop of Paris, to the accompaniment of vocif
erous protests from more extreme Jansenists, and after a last meeting with
Arnauld in 1680 he returned first to Chartres in 1681 and then in 1683 to
Paris where he was to spend the rest of his life in quiet retirement. By the
time of his return to the capital the Jansenist organisation in France was
well on the way to being crushed.
It seems likely that some of the essays and pensees in the posthumously
published fifth and sixth volumes of the Essais de morale were written
during these times of persecution and that the Instructions morales,
also published posthumously, were begun during the same period. The
several volumes of Instructions - on the Creed, the Decalogue, the Sacra-