Angélique de Saint-Jean Arnauld d'Andilly: Writings of Resistance transed. by John J. Conley (review)

Giving English readers access to the captivity narratives (and two short related texts) by one of the most theologically learned women of seventeenth-century France is an excellent idea. The future Port-Royal abbess Angélique de Saint-Jean recounts her ten-month detention in a Parisian convent in 1664–65 for her refusal to sign the anti-Jansenist formulary. Her defense of the rights of conscience and condemnation of blind obedience are as pertinent today as then, and could be paired fruitfully with contemporary memoirs of hostages and political dissidents. John Conley comes to this translation having written Adoration and Annihilation: The Convent Philosophy of Port-Royal (2009), on the philosophy of the three Arnauld abbesses, and having translated texts by Blaise Pascal's sister Jacqueline, also a Port-Royal nun. Louis Cognet published an annotated French edition of the captivity narrative in 1954 that was reissued in 2005. The Introduction gives a good account of Angélique's career and major themes, but may leave readers wondering how Jansenism's theology of grace and penitence and Port-Royal's spirituality attracted so much of France's intellectual and spiritual elite. The papal bull condemning Jansenism listed five propositions that it claimed represented Cornelius Jansen's teaching. The Jansenists said that the propositions were ambiguous enough that they could accept their condemnation. However, they refused to concede that the propositions represented Jansen's thought. They accepted the church's judgment on the issue of faith (droit), but not its judgment on the fact (fait) that the propositions summed up Jansen's theology. The nuns based their refusal to sign a formulary on the issue of fact. Conley presents Angélique's refusal as gendered, but her position is more complicated than his summary suggests. He says she claimed the right to enter the public arena on theological issues that supported the right of nuns to speak publicly: "Just as the abbesses of the reformed convent had the right and duty to offer public commentaries on the Scriptures… the nuns have the right and duty to enter the theological disputes of the day" (12). However, the Port-Royal nuns did not contest the church's interpretation of 1 Timothy 2.11–15 and 1 Corinthians 14.33–35, which held that women should avoid dogmatic theology and not preach publicly. What was true for women in general was even truer for nuns. As Angélique writes, "Our part is not science; rather, it is piety" (86)—that is, devotional writing is appropriate for nuns; systematic theology is not. The oral commentaries on scripture that Angélique gave her nuns were in-house, not public. Theologians equated such speeches to those of a mother instructing her children and servants in the privacy of her home. Angélique's speeches were only published long after the convent ceased to exist.

In fact, the nuns' official defense on the question of whether the five propositions represented Jansen's thought was predicated on this common misogynist view of women's role in the church. As nuns, who should avoid dogmatic theology that was generally conducted in Latin, they were unable to ascertain for themselves the technical question of whether the propositions were Jansen's book written in Latin. Rather, they relied on people they respected who argued that the propositions were not representative. The nuns thus claimed their right as nuns not to take a stand on an issue that was inappropriate for them as women; for them to say the propositions were in Jansen's book—a book that they had not read—would be to lie and thus to commit an offense against their moral conscience. As Angélique wrote the archbishop, it was "a matter that doesn't concern them, that their ignorance makes them incapable of comprehending, and...