Adoration and Annihilation: The Convent Philosophy of Port-Royal

4. Mère Angélique de Saint-Jean Arnauld d’Andilly: Persecution and Resistance

175 C h A p t e r 4 mère Angélique de SAintJeAn ArnAuld d’Andilly Persecution and Resistance The niece of Mères Angélique and Agnès, Mère Angélique de Saint-Jean Arnauld d’Andilly (1624–84) dominates the second generation of the reformed Port-Royal. Enclosed within the convent from her entry into the convent school at the age of six until her death as its abbess, Mère Angélique de Saint-Jean became the leader of Port-Royal’s intransigents during the convent’s persecution. A scholar renowned for her fluency in Latin and Greek, she developed an elaborate theology of the monastic life in her massive conferences and correspondence. Artisan of a philosophy of strict resistance to an allegedly oppressive church and state, she combined the rhetoric of a lawyer, delivering a crisp brief on the rights of nuns, with that of a poet, evoking the apocalyptic signs of God’s absence. Not surprisingly for a second-generation leader called to institutionalize the charisms of the founding generation, Mère Angélique de Saint-Jean develops her philosophy principally through commentaries on the works of others. Her conferences on the Rule of Saint Benedict analyze the virtues proper to monasticism, transposed to reflect the experience of women. Her gloss on the Constitutions of Port-Royal 176 Adoration and Annihilation develops an Augustinian argument on the spiritual war between the two cities which every nun must confront. As the persecution of the convent intensified, her commentary on the Counsels of Mère Agnès regarding a hypothetical persecution applies the earlier tract’s principles to the concrete moral dilemmas of the nuns actually suffering exile and interdict. Other more personal treatises complement the philosophy of spiritual combat elaborated in the commentaries. Several devotional works examine how the deprivation of sacramental mediation during persecution paradoxically brings the persecuted to a closer union with God. An epistemological treatise on the danger of doubt in the midst of oppression demonstrates how the virtue of humility can be manipulated by the powerful for immoral purposes. Marshaling the resources of her extensive patristic culture, Mère Angélique de Saint-Jean constructs an ethics of resistance for an embattled PortRoyal destined for destruction. voCAtion oF A militAnt Born on November 28, 1624, at the ancestral estate of Pomponne, Angélique Arnauld d’Andilly was the eldest daughter of Robert Arnauld d’Andilly and Catherine Le Fèvre de la Broderie Arnauld d’Andilly.1 The daughter of a father from a prominent family of jurists , who at her birth was superintendent of the estate of Gaston d’Orléans, brother of Louis XIII, and of a mother from a prominent diplomatic family, the infant Angélique entered a society dominated by court politics. She also entered a society absorbed by the reform of Port-Royal. Six of her aunts were nuns at Port-Royal: Angélique de Sainte-Magdeleine Arnauld, Agnès de Saint-Paul Arnauld, Madeleine de Sainte-Christine Arnauld, Marie de Sainte-Claire Arnauld, Anne-Eugénie de l’Incarnation Arnauld, and Catherine de SaintJean Arnauld Le Maître. In her widowhood, her grandmother Catherine de Sainte-Félicité Marion Arnauld also entered Port-Royal. Four of her sisters followed her to the convent: Anne-Marie, Catherine de Sainte-Agnès, Marie-Charlotte de Sainte-Claire, and MarieAng élique de Sainte-Thérèse. Her brother Charles-Henri Arnauld Mère Angélique de Saint-Jean Arnauld d’Andilly 177 de Luzancy became a priest who ministered to both the Port-Royal nuns and to the solitaires; her brother Simon Arnauld, marquis de Pomponne, became a minister in Louis XIV’s cabinet and a court apologist for the persecuted nuns. Her uncle Antoine Arnauld would emerge as the leading theologian of the Port-Royal circle, while her uncle Henry Arnauld, bishop of Angers, would act as the convent’s defender within the French episcopate. Her cousins Antoine Le Maître , Louis-Isaac Le Maître de Saci, and Simon Le Maître de Séricourt would distinguish themselves by their scholarship and their pedagogical skill during their association with the solitaires. A cradle Port-Royalist, Angélique entered the convent’s school as a boarder in 1630. From the beginning she showed an ardent attraction for the cloistered life and exhibited a capacity for intellectual work that astonished her contemporaries. Despite the...