Le Chant de la grâce: Port-Royal et la poésie d'Arnauld d'Andilly à Racine (review)

This compelling study takes a single erroneous preconception and stands it on its head, showing not only how a certain accommodation of poetry and poetics was in evidence at Port-Royal in a period when its affiliates might rather have been suspected of an ideological hostility to any such activity, but also that an important evolution takes place within the writing in question. To this end, Tony Gheeraert demonstrates convincingly how a consistent network of images and motifs, stemming most frequently from the Bible and Saint Augustine, defines the poetic tradition of the solitaires and their allies, whilst tracing a shift in the aesthetic by which it is transmitted. He begins with a helpful survey of the definition and limits of the corpus treated, identifying Robert Arnauld d'Andilly, Louis-Isaac Lemaistre de Sacy, La Fontaine (in the Recueil de poésies chrétiennes et diverses) and Jean Racine as central to his concerns, alongside a certain amount of more tangentially related writing, often in a polemical idiom. He opens the first part with an exposition of the aesthetics of Port-Royal, and foregrounds the Augustinian injunction to turn the undisputed power of poetry towards God, rather than allowing it to be an end in itself. In this way, the tainted postlapsarian activity of poetic composition is, at worst, neutral and, at best, capable of promoting redemption in the writer and reader. What is rejected, on the other hand, is l'éloquence profane and, in a compelling analogy, Gheeraert examines the parallels between poetry and grace when viewed in this perspective. But poetry is also memorable, and thus may serve to mediate theological truths, to say nothing of polemical jibes, as was the case in the (controversially scabrous) Enluminures of Lemaistre de Sacy. The images that dominate are thereafter enumerated and exemplified: illumination, le cœur ardent, fall and ascent, wounds and balm, deserts and gardens and, finally, reconciliation. In the second part, Gheeraert explores the differences in tonality between what he sees as the two generations of Port-Royal. He begins by looking at the idea of the poet as déchiffreur of God's presence in the world, and reveals in the process certain unexpected common features in the poetry of Arnauld d'Andilly and that of Christian poets active in (apparently) radically different traditions. The later generation, dominated by Lemaistre de Sacy, turns, on the other hand, to a more critical and reforming attitude towards poetic creation, accepting its presence, but eschewing ornament, ostentation, and indeed any attention paid to the music of the words per se; for Sacy, poetry was an exercise in asceticism, a process of suppression and constraint. What the book as a whole magisterially brings into focus is the degree to which Port-Royal, seen in this light, functions as a microcosm of the evolution of poetic composition in the French seventeenth century tout court, a development that is exemplified in action in the anonymous Lettre au Père Adam jésuite, attributed to Guillaume Le Roy, and incorporated in its entirety as an appendix.