Towards an Equality of the Sexes in Early Modern France by Derval Conroy

Author:Derval Conroy [Conroy, Derval]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781000348941
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2021-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

The Port-Royal Nuns and the Jansenist Controversy

The Port-Royal community became enmeshed in the Jansenist controversy because of its strongly Augustinian religious orientation, and because the attacks on the seminal work on Augustine, the Augustinus, by Cornelius Jansen, the Louvain theologian and Bishop of Ypres, were viewed by those espousing Augustinianism as attacks on Augustinian theology. The nuns were cast as active players in the controversy through the decision of the Assembly of Clergy in 1656 to require all religious, including nuns, to sign a Formulaire or Formulary condemning the Augustinus for containing five heretical propositions propounding a theology of predestination. This injunction placed the nuns of Port-Royal, therefore, in the situation of having to undertake a personal and public act either to condemn the Augustinus by signing the Formulaire, thus going against their own religious beliefs, or to refuse to sign it, thereby putting themselves under suspicion of heresy. Perversely, the requirement that each choir nun had to sign the Formulaire introduced a de facto gender equality into the controversy. Each choir nun’s signature was of equal importance to that of her male counterpart. The process of winning a nun’s signature became significant, each one the outcome of a bitter battle between Port-Royal and the senior Catholic clergy, the latter backed by King Louis XIV who made it a priority of the early years of his personal rule to secure the submission of male and female religious to the condemnation of the Augustinus.

The response of the Port-Royal community and of the theologians acting in support of the nuns was to protest against the nuns having to sign the Formulaire by foregrounding arguments of female inferiority. Port-Royal would defend Jansen’s work by arguing that the nuns’ ignorance of theology made them unable to judge the Augustinus and thereby unable to sign the Formulaire (although Sr Jacqueline opposed this approach, arguing instead that they should be explicit in their defence of Jansen).18 The nuns’ defenders repeatedly drew on the gendered argument that the nuns could not condemn the Augustinus because, as women, they were ignorant of matters of theology and could not, therefore, comment upon them. Antoine Arnauld set out the characteristic argument: “The Pope commands this signature from nuns even though he knows that they do not have any knowledge of this fact through their own understanding because they are not capable of understanding Jansenius’ book.”19 The theologian, Noel de la Lane, repeated this argument in his Defense de la foy des Religieuses de Port-Royal et de leurs directeurs in which he stated: “It is a question of their ignorance of the ‘fact’ of Jansenius since they do not and cannot understand his book and, as a consequence, they cannot know if this fact is true or false.”20 As late as 1694, the leading Jansenist of the time, Pasquier Quesnel, reiterated the gendered argument of female incapacity, stating that the nuns could not swear that errors which they detested were contained in a Latin book that “they do not understand” [“qu’elles n’entendent point”].

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