En Sorbonne, Autour des Provinciales: Édition critique des Mémoires de l’Abbé de Beaubrun, 1655–1656 (review)

En Sorbonne, Autour des Provinciales: Édition critique des Mémoires de l'Abbé de Beaubrun, 1655-1656. By Jacques M. Gres-Gayer. [Collection des Mélanges de la Bibliothèque de La Sorbonne, 24.] (Paris: Klincksieck. 1997. Pp. xxviii, 1081.)

Blaise Pascal's Provincial Letters remain a masterpiece of irony and satire which succeeded all too well. Over three hundred years later, they continue to seduce readers into taking the side of an extreme, if not outright fundamentalist, theological position which most would reject if they knew the complete story. The story, that of the condemnation of Antoine Arnauld by the theological faculty of the Sorbonne, remains in the collective memory largely because of the existence of the Provincial Letters. However, as Jacques Gres-Gayer notes in his remarkable preface to the volume, the very purpose of at least the first three of the Provinciales is to dismiss the importance of the affaire Arnauld. For Gres-Gayer, the whole story of Arnauld's condemnation is of huge significance to the modern historian of theology because it so clearly reveals those great theological themes which, over and over, divided post-Tridentine Catholicism.

The Mémoires of Beaubrun, which constitute only a single volume of Gres-Gayer's immense project--a study of the Sorbonne during the reign of Louis XIV--are not mémoires in the usual sense of reminiscences. Rather, they are Beaubrun's presentation (in view of publication) of the complete dossier of documents dealing with the censure of Arnauld. Indeed, this dossier represents one of the principal sources used by Gres-Gayer himself in his monumental study Le Jansénisme en Sorbonne, 1643-1656 (Paris, 1996) (reviewed ante, LXXIV [January, 1998], 117-118). Though they intersect with Pascal's Provincial Letters because Arnauld's censure provoked the work, Beaubrun's minutely detailed dossiers hardly make for the kind of exciting reading that the Provincials afford. However, now that we have access to them via Gres-Gayer's magnificent critical edition, they will serve to underscore the many polemical liberties taken by Pascal in his attempt to discredit and dismiss the Sorbonne's condemnation of Arnauld. Whereas Pascal's Thomists are nothing short of crypto-Molinists, the Mémoires reveal that there were few, if any, hard-core Molinists among the Faculty. And the more moderate school of Molinists known as the congruists were as adamantly opposed by the Thomists as by the Augustinians. Whereas Pascal's first three Lettres ridicule the debate in the Sorbonne as an exercise in incomprehensibility, a reading of Beaubrun leads Gres-Gayer to conclude that a serious and wide-ranging debate of the subject of grace indeed did take place within a perspective which was essentially Thomist and greatly influenced by the decisions of the Council of Trent. Moreover, Beaubrun's observations suggest that in spite of the political pressures being applied from all sides, a significant number of the doctors sought to find "un accommodement permettant de sauver l'honneur de tous et de maintenir la paix" (p. 19).

Though Beaubrun's Mémoires are patently polemical and seek to justify Arnauld's position after his censure, they at times reveal a deeply intransigent Arnauld so obsessed with refuting any possibility that human will might ever be thought to play any role whatsoever in the efficacy of grace that he comes dangerously close to contradicting the spirit, if not the letter, of the Tridentine decisions on the matter. One can certainly understand how his adversaries could come to think that he denied any form of grace whose action might involve any degree of human co-operation. Gres-Gayer finds the charge of heresy excessive and points to the blatantly political motivation of the censure: destroying the "Jansenist party" by qualifying its principal theologian as a heretic. Yet he goes...