‘L’Action héroïque de Monsieur Arnauld’: A Dramatic Episode at the Sorbonne, 1641

Abstract

This chapter deals with a university viva that took place in Paris on 25 July 1641. The thesis that was being examined hinged on a particular theological point: the question of whether the verb ‘to be’ may apply univocally to God and to humans. Antoine Arnauld had argued that it could indeed, and his student Charles Wallon de Beaupuis was now following his example. However, events soon took an unexpected turn when Arnauld changed his mind in situ. Here, I set the viva episode in the intellectual context of the summer of 1641 more broadly: a time when the protagonists in the viva episode were also responding to Descartes’s Meditations. Subsequent narrations of the viva episode by historians of Port-Royal prompt us to return to seventeenth-century ethical thinking on ‘générosité’ and ‘grandeur’.

KEYWORDS:

• Arnauld
• Descartes
• Port-Royal
• Jansenism
• Sorbonne
• univocity
• heroism

In his biography of Antoine Arnauld, the Jansenist historian Pasquier Quesnel recounts a renowned episode in the long and eventful life of his subject. On 25 July 1641, Arnauld was standing as the supervisor to a student, Charles Wallon de Beaupuis, who was undertaking a viva voce examination for his ‘license de théologie’. His thesis hinged on a particular theological point: the question of whether the verb ‘to be’ may apply univocally to God and to humans. Arnauld had argued that it could indeed, and his student was now following his example. However, events soon took an unexpected turn.

Then as now, the Parisian university viva was a formal yet celebratory affair. In his account of this episode, Quesnel merges the theological and philosophical content with rhetorical playfulness and the social realm of the spectacle: ‘Une License de Théologie de Paris est dans le genre des exercices de Litterature, un des plus beaux spectacles qui se trouvent dans le monde, où l’on voye briller plus d’esprit & plus d’érudition’.¹ It was all the more striking, therefore, when Arnauld himself intervened on stage. Having listened to the interrogation of Beaupuis by his examiner, Léonor de la Barde, Arnauld stood up and announced that he personally had got the facts of the matter entirely wrong. He had misled his unfortunate student, and wanted now to go on record as taking the opposing view. It is easy to imagine that this must have created quite a stir.

Following Quesnel’s lead, I think we can see this ‘exercice de littérature’ as doing a number of different things at once. It bears witness to an instantaneous perception of error, and to an act of changing one’s mind that is not normally witnessed in real time: it dramatizes the acquisition of intellectual conviction. It makes a strong new theological statement: being cannot, in fact, be conceived as univocally common to God and human beings, for there is a radical split between the two. And it also connects to a very fertile intellectual context. In the summer of 1641, Arnauld and La Barde had another significant engagement in common, beyond their appointment to appear at Wallon de Beaupuis’s viva. They were both busy objecting to Descartes’s Meditations, and receiving his own responses to their objections. Indeed, the viva itself took place only one week before the presentation of the Meditations to the same Faculty of Theology, and a month before Descartes’s text was finally published, on 28 August. So, the viva episode also brings into play the contextual relationships between these different thinkers.

The son of a ‘conseiller du roi’, Wallon de Beaupuis (1621–1709) had been a young pupil of the Jansenist Godefroy Hernant at the école de Beauvais in Paris, before following Antoine Arnauld’s philosophy courses at the Collège du Mans in Paris. The precise text that he intended to defend is found in Arnauld’s Conclusiones philosophicae.² We know that it was very common for students to present theses that they had not themselves written: the goal of the exercise was to demonstrate mental agility in acts of summary and response, rather than originality.³ Wallon de Beaupuis went on in 1647 to become the director of one of the Port-Royal ‘petites écoles’, in the rue Saint-Dominique, where among his staff was Pierre Nicole.⁴

Meanwhile, Léonor de La Barde (1607–1672), Beaupuis’s senior and his examiner in the viva, had entered the Oratory with Jean du Vergier de Hauranne, the abbé de Saint-Cyran (1581–1643) in 1627. He is known to have defended Claude Seguenot, who was imprisoned in May 1638, at roughly the same time as Saint-Cyran, following the publication of Augustine’s De la sainte virginité; and he frequented Port-Royal until his death in 1672.⁵ His commentary on the Meditations forms part of the sixth set of objections collected by Mersenne; Descartes refers to this set in a letter of 23 June 1641. Descartes’s own responses accompany a further letter to Mersenne, this given an approximate date of 22 July, only three days before the viva takes place. He notes there that ‘La reputation du R. Pere de la Barde a passé aussi jusques à moy dans le desert’.⁶

Arnauld (1612–1694), Beaupuis’s supervisor, had only commenced his ‘license’, the degree that would make him a ‘docteur en théologie de Sorbonne’, in 1638. This means that the period from 1639 to 1641 in which he taught philosophy to students was taken during his own higher degree. He was awarded his ‘bachelier’ in 1635, his first ‘thèse de license’ in 1638, his second or ‘thèse mineure’ in 1639, his third in 1640 and the fourth, or ‘thèse de doctorat’, at the end of 1641; in the last of these, he tackled the Jesuits and La Mothe le Vayer on the subject of the salvation of pagan philosophers (whose virtues he holds not to be virtues at all, since they are not performed in the service of God).⁷ Arnauld had studied under Jacques Lescot, Richelieu’s confessor and future bishop of Chartres, but was open throughout in his preference for the teaching of Saint-Cyran, who encouraged Arnauld to take the writings of Augustine as his subject matter, because they provided a welcome contrast to the dryness of scholastic philosophy. From his ‘bachelier’ onwards, indeed, Arnauld expressed ideas that were directly contrary to Lescot’s teachings.⁸ In other words, he outlines a conception of grace and predestination based on the stringent form of Augustinianism that would also find expression in Jansen’s Augustinus, posthumously published in 1640; his own Augustinianism therefore pre-dates as well as conforms with Jansen’s. Arnauld’s objections to the Meditations form the fourth set, written in late 1640 or early 1641. Later, in 1644, when he was in hiding during the controversy surrounding his De la fréquente communion, he would send Wallon de Beaupuis to converse with Descartes on his behalf.⁹

Beyond mentions in Quesnel’s Histoire abrégée and his later Justification, Arnauld’s intervention also goes down in other histories of Port-Royal as a moment of extraordinary rhetorical and dramatic force. We know that Beaupuis continued to speak of this event even in his old age, after decades of teaching at Port-Royal and as a Solitaire. His friend Germain Vuillart, describing the viva in his own correspondence, insists that ‘je le sçay d’original’: he had witnessed Beaupuis’s ongoing admiration for his supervisor.¹⁰ This is Vuillart’s narration of events:

Après que l’écolier eut répondu de son mieux, appuyé de son maistre qui avoit encore de grandes ressources pour des réponses subtiles et specieuses, cet humble maître y renonça hautement pour rendre gloire à la vérité et pour déclarer que l'opinion de M. de La Barde estoit plus solide que la sienne, et que par cette raison il l’embrassoit avec le répondant pour n’en avoir jamais d'autre sur ce sujet. Ceux qui savent combien les Professeurs sont d’ordinaire jaloux de leurs opinions, et avec quelle subtilité ils poussent et forment leurs écoliers à les soutenir, admirèrent en cette rencontre l’équité, l’humilité, la générosité, autant que la solidité de M. Arnauld. (p. 111)

All other accounts take the same form. This is a vocabulary of the highs and lows of sudden transformation. The moment is both immediate and lasting. In Vuillart’s version, Arnauld is rejecting ‘des réponses subtiles et specieuses’; in Quesnel’s, ‘une distinction telle quelle’; ‘des faux-fuyants et des défaites’.¹¹ He knows that these tools of the scholastic trade are available to him, but puts them aside. He discards the clichéd posture of the academic disputant and his weightless examples for and against, ‘dont jamais professeur ne manqua en pareille occasion’, as Quesnel has it.¹² He turns this occasion into something different: a moment of conversion.

Clearly, the narration of this event evokes the true conversion that is the referent and stake of Jansenist discourse more generally. In all subsequent accounts of this event, Arnauld’s humility before La Barde is an extension of his Christian humility before God. Indeed, the vocabulary of abandonment used by these historians as they record Arnauld’s readiness to forsake one way of thinking and embrace another is strikingly the same vocabulary used in, and of, Augustine’s Confessions. Even prior to the publication of Jansen’s Augustinus, the conversion scene of the Confessions is possessed of extraordinary exemplary value, as we see, for instance, in the Sermons of François de Sales.¹³

Augustine, for St François, works at the limits of what it is possible to know, establishing cross-cutting associations between ‘humilité’ and ‘science’:

Vous aurez ouy dire que l'humilité se trouve rarement avec la science qui d'elle mesme enfle (I Cor., vin, 1.), moins avec une aussi haute science que celle de saint Augustin; néanmoins elle estoit chez luy accompagnée d'une si profonde humilité qu'on ne sçait s'il avoit plus de science que d'humilité ou plus d'humilité que de science.¹⁴

Lacking a knowledge of Greek, Augustine ‘ne cacha point cecy, ains le confessa ingenuement et franchement’ (p. 110). Corrected – and corrected, vitally, in public – he submits himself to superiors and inferiors alike, as when Jerome ‘luy fait une correction non point petite ni en le flattant, mais grande et digne de la généreuse humilité du cœur d’Augustin’ (pp. 110–11). Augustine’s response, here, prefigures Arnauld’s: ‘je me sousmets et reçois de bon cœur la censure et correction que tu me fais, confessant que tu as juste rayson de me la faire’ (p. 111). St Francois’s audience is invited to consider ‘la candeur, simplicité et humilité des paroles de ce glorieux Père’ (p. 111). All those present at the viva admired ‘l’équité, l’humilité, la générosité, autant que la solidité de M. Arnauld’.¹⁵ As Thomas du Fossé puts it, ‘Jamais peut-être n’a t’on vu un homme d’une plus grande simplicité’.¹⁶ Arnauld’s action sets him apart. Sainte-Beuve will refer to ‘ce que nos bons historiens appellent l’action héroïque de M. Arnauld’.¹⁷ Alongside the earlier emphases on ‘gloire’, ‘générosité’ and ‘candeur’, this comment adds an extra dimension to the interest of the viva, because it suggests a nuancing of what is often meant by l’action héroïque in the seventeenth century.

The discursive formulations of the viva episode all complicate a story about heroism that is often told in connection with the ‘morales du grand siècle’. In his book of that name, Paul Bénichou first outlines a heroic, aristocratic optimism; a supreme, sublimely elevated confidence in human nature, which he associates with the powerful heroes of Pierre Corneille, or the mystical writings of St. François, the latter because they reveal the force of the individual’s own perception of their mental states.¹⁸ For Bénichou, Descartes also participates in this ‘philosophie aristocratique’, which ‘emploie les plus hautes facultés de l’homme à la conquête d’une liberté dont le désir précède et ennoblit tout’ (p. 33). This tendency he then sees as being progressively dismantled (‘la démolition du héros’) by the approach of Jansenist writers, and their emphasis on the inevitability of self-deception, in a move which is also taken as ideological, because their bourgeois status is stressed. ‘La gloire’ is emptied out of all meaning that is not divine, as Bénichou puts it: ‘L’homme n’est pas grand. Le désir qu’il a de se grandir ne le grandit pas’ (p. 142). In this way, Jansenism ‘éloigne Dieu lui-même du monde et n’accorde de réalité, dans un univers aveugle, qu’à une humanité sans gloire et sans vertu’ (p. 144).

But here, in accounts of the viva, we find a full and frank celebration of a ‘générosité’, a ‘grandeur’, that is not contrasted but aligned with humility. And candour or ‘simplicité’ means both an ennobling directness and the ability to admit error, by following one’s own complex thought processes as they move. It is not that one category (greatness) is demolished and replaced by another (humility). Instead, both appear together in Arnauld’s strong, confident statement about his own faulty thinking on univocity. Accounts of Arnauld’s changing mind, so close semantically to Salesian accounts of Augustine’s conversion, provide a good demonstration of a point noted by Michael Moriarty: that St François and Port-Royal should not necessarily be taken as ‘embodying antithetical tendencies’.¹⁹ It is not always the case that St François elevates the mind’s far-reaching mystical abilities, where Port-Royal always takes a sceptical view. In both cases, tracking down the deceits of self-love can be a route to virtue and to glory, as the epistrophic rhetoric of St François makes clear: ‘Ce que ce glorieux Saint fit voir lors qu’estant interrogé quelle estoit la premiere vertu il respondit: C’est l’humilité. Et la seconde? C’est l’humilité. Et la troisiesme? C’est l’humilité’. ²⁰

In this regard, the fact that the viva episode is so closely contemporaneous with Arnauld and La Barde’s readings of Descartes also seems significant. The main text of the Meditations makes a fundamental point: only by attending to our own thoughts, when these are stripped back to the basics of clear and distinct ideas, can we attain such reliable truths as the existence of God, and the separation of mind and body: the immortality of the soul. But as the Meditations progress, we also find ourselves examining the pressures of the body on the soul, thinking about the limits to our attention, and contrasting the eye of our own understanding, ‘shrouded as it is in darkness’ (AT VII, 52), with the eternity of the divine.

Descartes is operating, in other words, with a radical disjunction between human and divine knowledge, reinforced by the objections and responses to the Meditations when the term ‘univocity’ comes into play. In the Second Replies, Descartes claims that ‘we recognize that, of the properties which, on account of the imperfection of our understanding, we ascribe to God in a piecemeal fashion, corresponding to the way in which we perceive them in ourselves, none belong univocally to God and to us’ (AT VII, 137; IX, 108). In the Sixth Replies, addressed partly to La Barde, he notes again that ‘no essence can pertain univocally to God and to a creature’ (AT VII, 433; IX, 233). And Descartes also aligns himself with Arnauld’s new position on univocity in his 1644 Principles, when he turns the scholastic question of univocal predication into a point about the univocity of substance: ‘The term “substance” does not apply univocally, as they say in the Schools, to God and to other things, that is, there is no meaning that can be distinctly understood as common to God and to his creatures’ (AT XIIIA, 24).²¹ In 1647, Arnauld hammers the point home: his student Wallon de Beaupuis presents another of his theses, this one entitled Quod est nomen Dei?, which also asserts that ‘rien ne convient de manière univoque à Dieu et aux creatures’.²² From this later episode too, Quesnel proceeds to a redefinition of Jansenist grandeur: ‘Ces choses paraissent petites; mais petites, tant qu’on voudra, en elle-mêmes, elles sont grandes devant Dieu, et rares devant les hommes’.²³

The echoes of the viva in Descartes’s Replies and Principles are interesting²⁴; but so in this context is Descartes’s later ethical re-evaluation of those who are ‘portés à faire de grandes choses’ (AT XI, 447). This comes in the context of his discussion of ‘la générosité’ in the Passions de l’âme. Famously defined in article 153 of the Passions, Cartesian generosity is a firm and constant resolution to use one’s free will well, which ‘fait qu’un homme s’estime au plus haut point qu’il se peut legitimement estimer’ (AT XI, 446) and makes the generous person master their passions perfectly. This strong, gendered terminology of mastery has reinforced the cross-generational comparisons between Corneille and Descartes mentioned earlier, inflecting the work of Gustave Lanson as well as Bénichou and others.²⁵ And yet, if we read a little further, Cartesian ‘générosité’ is also advertised as a habit of the soul, or something that all readers can acquire over time if they put their minds to it (art. 161), and turns out to be coextensive with a form of humility. Article 153, entitled ‘En quoi consiste la générosité’, is closely paralleled in both form and content by article 155, entitled ‘En quoi consiste l’humilité vertueuse’ – each article unfolding in a single sentence, each commencing with a capacious ‘ainsi’. This virtuous humility is in turn defined as a meditation on error, or ‘la réflexion que nous faisons sur l’infirmité de notre nature et sur les fautes que nous pouvons autrefois avoir commises ou sommes capables de commettre’ (art 155, AT XI, 447). Descartes now creates a critical landscape in which the exceptional nature of generous action and the virtuous use of free will are curiously but strongly associated with vulnerability, and our recognition of it.

Descartes wants to show that we are all capable of exercising discipline and that, if we acquire the best habits of the soul, God will preserve us from error. But we cannot separate this goal from the cognitive usefulness, the genuine intellectual interest, to be found in mistakes. We have to try to separate out the areas of thought where errors can occur from those in which we cannot be deceived. When combined with reflection on our tendency to err through the inappropriate use of our free will, contrasted in the Objections and Replies with God’s eternally perfect use of the divine will, such meditation may lead to the possibility of right action. It may lead, ultimately, to ‘la générosité’, and the ordered yet passionate life that allows us to ‘goûter le plus de douceur en cette vie’ (article 212, AT XI, 448).

To return to our starting point: the events of 25 July 1641 represent an extension of the correspondence moving back and forth between Arnauld, La Barde and Descartes over the same period. They enable Arnauld to demonstrate the same capacity for argumentative flexibility and insight that is noted by Descartes, who writes of a form of attachment between the two: ‘Il est entré plus avant qu’aucun autre dans le sens de ce que j’ai écrit’.²⁶ And they allow for subtle but significant shifts in definitions of virtue, ‘gloire’, and, to quote Sainte-Beuve again, ‘ce que nos bons historiens appellent l’action héroïque’. In sum, this very small ‘exercice de littérature’ can open out onto points of more expansive critical interest. It illustrates one of the great lessons to be learnt from early modern French thought, as this straddles the realms of theology, philosophy and spectacle: that humility, self-knowledge and confidence can and should coincide.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Emma Gilby

Emma Gilby is Professor of Early Modern French Literature and Thought at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Descartes's Fictions: Reading Philosophy with Poetics (Oxford: OUP, 2019) and the co-editor of The Places of Early Modern Criticism (Oxford: OUP, 2021). Much of her research has focused on poetic theory and its connections to the rhetoric, philosophy and theology of seventeenth-century France.

Notes

1 Histoire abrégée de la vie et des ouvrages de Monsieur Arnauld (Cologne: chez N. Schouten, 1695), p. 36. See also the ‘Discours historique et apologétique’ in introduction to the Justification de M. Arnauld, Docteur de Sorbonne, contre la Censure (Liège: Hoioux, 1702), 3 vols, ‘tome préliminaire’, pp. 24–5. After graduating from the Sorbonne with distinction in 1653, Quesnel (1634–1719) joined the French Oratory in 1657; he came to be regarded as one of the key figures in the Jansenist movement.

2 ‘L’étant convient de manière synonyme à Dieu et à la créature, à la substance et à l’accident.’ ‘Conclusions philosophiques’, in Textes philosophiques, trans. and ed. by Denis Moreau (Paris: PUF, 2001), pp. 1–25 (p. 11).

3 Véronique Meyer, ‘Les thèses, leur soutenance et leurs illustrations dans les universités françaises sous l’ancien régime’, in Mélanges de la Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne 12, 1993, pp. 76–86.

4 On the education offered at the petites écoles, see N. Hammond, Fragmentary Voices: Memory and Education at Port-Royal (Tübingen: Narr [Biblio 17], 2004), ch. 2; many of the Mémoires discussed there speak respectfully of Wallon de Beaupuis as a teacher. See for example Du Fossé, Mémoires pour server à l’histoire de Port-Royal (Cologne: aux dépens de la Compagnie, 1739), p. 18.

5 See Jean Lesaulnier, ‘L’oratorien Léonor de la Barde, lecteur de saint Augustin et de Descartes’, in Images de Port-Royal (Paris: Garnier, 2016), vol. 2, pp. 495–511 (p. 497). La Barde publicly defends Antoine Arnauld in 1644 during the controversy surrounding De la fréquente communion.

6 Œuvres de Descartes, ed. by Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (Paris: Léopold Cerf, 1897–1913), 12 vols, vol. 3, p. 420 (subsequent translations from Latin into English my own). Given that La Barde’s reputation received a huge boost after the stunning effect he had on Arnauld on 25 July, it is tempting to wonder if this approximate date ought in fact to be resituated after that event. However, Erik-Jan Bos (in personal correspondence) suggests otherwise: postal delivery dates mean that the earliest Descartes could have heard about the viva would have been 4 August. A reply after that date would probably not have left enough time to print the Meditations by 28 August.

7 This hard-line position is discussed in Michael Moriarty, Disguised Vices: Theories of Virtue in Early Modern French Thought (Oxford: OUP, 2011).

8 Jean Orcibal, Les Origines du Jansénisme (Paris: Vrin, 1947-62), vol. 3, pp. 97–8.

9 Baillet gives the following account: ‘[M. Wallon de Beaupuis] rendit compte de sa visite à M. Arnaud avec les compliments de M. Descartes; mais il ne parla presque que de la surprise où il avoit été, non seulement de trouver un Philosophe trés-accessible et trés-affable, mais encore de voir un si grand génie dans une simplicité et une taciturnité toute extra-ordinaire.’ Adrien Baillet, La Vie de Monsieur Descartes (Paris, Horthemels, 1691) 2 vols, vol. 2, pp. 129–30.

10 Letter of 27 June 1697, in Lettres de Germain Vuillart à M. Louis de Préfontaine (1694-1700), ed. by Ruth Clark (Geneva : Droz, 1951), p. 111.

11 Lettres de Germain Vuillart, p. 111 ; Histoire abrégée, pp. 36–7; Justification, p. 12. See also J. Besoigne, Histoire de l’abbaye de Port-Royal, 6. vols (Cologne: aux dépens de la Compagnie, 1752–3), vol. V, pp. 350–1; ‘Mémoires sur la vie de M. Charles Walon, Sieur de Beaupuis’ in the Abbé de la Croix’s collection, Vies intéressantes et édifiantes des amis de Port-Royal (Utrecht, aux dépens de la Compagnie, 1751), pp. 1–343 (pp. 14–15); Thomas du Fossé, Mémoires [1739], ed. by F. Bouquet (Rouen : Ch. Métérie, 1876), 4 vols, vol. 3, pp. 175–6; Sainte-Beuve, Port-Royal [1840] (Paris: Gallimard, Pléiade, 1952–1955), 3 vols, vol. 2, pp. 15–17.

12 ‘Discours historique et apologétique’ in Justification, p. 25.

13 See Courcelles, Les Confessions de Saint Augustin dans la tradition littéraire (Paris, Etudes Augustiniennes, 1963), chapter 7.

14 Sermon pour la fête de Saint Augustin, 28 August 1621, in Oeuvres de Saint François de Sales (Annecy: J. Niérat, 1892–1932), vol. 10, pp. 99–115 (p. 109).

15 Lettres de Germain Vuillart, p. 111.

16 Mémoires, vol. 3, pp. 175–6.

17 C.-A. Sainte-Beuve, Port-Royal (Paris: Renduel, 1842), 2 vols, vol. 2, p. 14.

18 Paul Bénichou, Morales du grand siècle (Paris: Gallimard [folio], 1948 [1997]).

19 Fallen Nature, Fallen Selves: Early Modern French Thought II (Oxford: OUP, 2006), pp. 307–8.

20 ‘Sermon pour la fête de Saint Augustin’, in Œuvres de Saint François de Sales, p. 109.

21 Principles, 1:51. For a discussion of precisely what is entailed by the denial of univocity for Descartes, see Roger Ariew, ‘A Metaphysical Element in Descartes and the First Cartesians: Non-Univocal Predication’, in The European Legacy 27:3–4 (2022), pp. 227–38.

22 Textes philosophiques, p. 27; see Moreau’s intro, p. 4.

23 Quesnel, Histoire abrégée, p. 47.

24 Denis Moreau takes on the question of influence in Deux Cartesiens: La polémique entre Antoine Arnauld et Nicolas Malebranche (Paris: J. Vrin, 1999).

25 There is an update in Descartes Fictions, Reading Philosophy with Poetics (Oxford: OUP, 2019), where the viva episode is also mentioned briefly. More work is done there to connect Descartes’s thoughts on passionate action to contemporary literary critical theory.

26 Letter to Mersenne, 4 March 1641 (AT III, 331).