Course XXV - Teaching 13: Mystics of Port Royal

It is impossible to speak of the life of Pascal not describing previously Port Royal, which was so closely linked with the soul and mission of this Great Initiate.
In 1602, when the new abbess Angelique Arnaud, at the age of 11, entered the ancient monastery of Citeaux, nobody suspected that a new era started for the church of France, and for the spiritual development of Christendom.
Port Royal was one of so many monasteries of France, where nuns, distinguished young ladies, would spend their time amid elegant conversations, worldly vanities and parties.
To be abbess of a monastery like that was equivalent to represent a wealthy, distinguished family that had achieved this dignity for its daughter in order to grant to her with honors, wealth and lineage. But the little Angelique did not feel happy among so many delicacies. An unknown sadness would consume her sweet face. In vain the thirteen sisters of the community tried to entertain her. She would feel alone and void.
At the age of 15, the preaching of a Franciscan about the Passion of Christ awakens in her an irresistible desire of perfection and reformation of life. Gradually she can make the other nuns feel this irresistible power of her personality, which she will exercise later throughout her life over beings. So she was able to reform gradually the monastery.
In those days it was an admirable thing this exemplary life in a convent of nuns. Even the father of the young lady and all her family were involved in the mysticism of the adolescent abbess who, incorruptibly, imposed seclusion, silence, and poor life and recollection in her convent.
Gradually, Port Royal is being transformed into the beacon of the Church of France. All eyes look at there as at a port of peace and salvation.
But suddenly, in 1619, the fame of mother Angelique soars to the clouds. In Maubissen, the abbess Angelique D’Estrées, by her dissolute life, scandalizes her convent and her friends, until the angry clergy removes her from there and secludes her among penitent women of Paris. Mother Angelique is appointed then to lead and reform this new community. There they receive her coldly and, when they offer her the luxurious room of the abbess, she refuses and occupies the humblest room that is near the sewers. Little by little she attracts the nuns, imposes the rules and reforms the monastery.
But one night, D’Estrées, who has escaped from the penitent women, accompanied by an army of knights who are her friends, appears at the door of the convent, claiming for her rights. The young Angelique is not afraid and refuses to abandon her post; but when the cloister is stormed and she is fiercely beaten, she leaves with dignity the abbey, accompanied by thirty nuns.
Arnauld, his father, followed by archers of the king, runs to the convent. D’Estrées escapes with her companions and the same night mother Angelique can return to Maubissen with her nuns.
From all Cystercian convents she is called to impose the rules and exemplary life; but always is Port Royal where she hankers to return and where finds peace, calm and true fraternity.
A soul like that, in the hands of a sweet director, would have devotes her life to passive contemplation. Seemingly this is her orientation when she knows San Francis of Sales, and puts herself under his guide.
But also a soul like that, in other hands, may become a great fighter. And this founder and master of Jansenism becomes this when after the death of Saint Francis of Sales, she meets and puts herself under the guide of Saint Cyran.
This venerable priest had been close friend of Jansenius (Jansen), Bishop of Ypres, who had written the comment about the doctrine of Saint Augustine (The “Augustinus”, in a visible contradiction with the Thomistic doctrine.
On the point of dying, this Bishop did not imagine he had leave with his book a weapon that would kindle a terrible fire within the Catholic Church. By promulgating the supremacy of grace he would contradict the free will; thence the hard fight waged later by the Jansenists, sons of the austerity and divinity in its abstract concept, against Jesuits, pioneers of the strong and unbreakable will and free will.
In few words and esoteric meaning: Jansenists achieve all by intuition and law of predestination; while Jesuits achieve all by rational analysis and law of possibilities.
Neither ones nor others are exactly in the middle or in the reason; because the two laws become indispensable and correspond in the universe.
Of course, periodically, in great religious and ethical movements prevails one trend or another, so as it had occurred in Christendom with the coming of Luther, and his faith in predestination.
Despite their counter-reformation, Catholics could not help but to see the beneficial results, which acquired fantastic proportions, of those whom contemptuously they called Protestants. The envious Romans could not but to admire the severity of worship, moral Puritanism, blind obedience to the law of God and asceticism that by firmly jumping over reason is established only in faith. With passion and earnestness, they took out from files ancient texts of Saint Augustine, founder of the early Church, which had been abandoned after the Aristotelian and Scholastic rules.
Jansenism was a little of all this; a return to the blind faith, to the concept of predestination, to severe costumes of Christian principles, exclusively based on Saint Augustine’s doctrine, as if they wished to impose, within the Roman creed, a similar reaction to that of Lutherans, but with completely opposite and orthodox ends.
In these years, in the drama of the world, Blaise Pascal appears. He is born in Clermont, in 1623; his family, of severe Catholics, educates him in the strictest religious sense. But his natural and inner impulse shows, since the first years of this Initiate, how he was destined to discover great physical mysteries.
At the age of 9, he makes an algebraic calculation that amazes his father and grants him full freedom to start his favorite studies. From that time on, he begins this eager search that makes Pascal be able to demonstrate scientifically Galileo’s and Torricelli’s theories.
Successively he will demonstrate, by the experiment called of the bladder, the existence of the vacuum; he will give the formula to demonstrate the weight of the air and the balance of liquids, which is the fundamental basis of hydrostatics.
Just in 1643 he enters the Jansenistic current, after hearing father Singlin’s sermon, who is a disciple of Saint Cyran.
Seemingly it is a contradiction that so positivistic man in his discoveries, embraces this abstract Christendom. But this spirituality is very clear and consistent. The dogmatic reason of Jesuits cannot fill or share the practical rationality of this man who, if he reasons about positive things, needs wide fields of freedom beyond reason, to fly through spiritual spaces.
Her sister Gilberte, the elder, and his sweet and beloved younger sister Giacomette, also are attracted by this religious novelty so in vogue and so discussed in saloons and classrooms of Paris. But there is more; Giacomette can be introduced to mother Angelique, and intensely wishes to become a nun. This idea frightens to Pascal, who is terrible contrary to it, and momentarily he separates her from her new spiritual friends. But Giacomette overcomes these obstacles and, when her father dies, the takes the veil in Port Royal and becomes sister Saint Euphemie.
Here begins the time of Pascal’s worldly life. He is the famous man admired by all; his ethereal aspect, his languid face and his distinguished demeanor attract sympathy and love from women. The Duke of Roanne’ friendship opens to him the doors of all the Parisian aristocracy and seemingly because of his studies, university lectures and friends, he has entirely forgotten the spiritual orientation; but a sudden sadness and discontent assail him. A strange disease that affects him now and then, and leaves him pained and as if paralyzed, often recurs.
On November 23, 1654, at night, in his room, at the Duke of Roanes’ home, where he stayed, a sudden light invades his mind. He falls as if he were in ecstasy. Wonderful beings appear before him. He can never explain what he feels and knows; but from that moment on, which he called the moment of his conversion, his life will never lose its true orientation.
At the threshold of the new life, the soul of his religious sister waits for him, and he advises him to share his abode with eremites of the fields –Jansenists– exiled near Port Royal. Among these people his soul seeks refuge by entrusting his spiritual guide to Da Saci.
But times persecution begin for the Jansenists. Relentlessly harried by the Jesuits, finally the Pope condemns them in 1661. Then the general dispersion occurs.
Angelique’s mother had died by those days, being content, as she said, for she would escape from that world of iniquities. Three months later, overwhelmed by sorrow, also the sweet Sister Saint Euphemie dies. With the rest of Jansenists, Pascal has to escape from one house to another, being persecuted everywhere.
The spiritual work fails; he neither wishes to live nor wants to give up to his creed. His disease assails and torments him more and more until August 17, 1662, at his sister Gilberte’s house, when he breaks the physical ties and achieves his desired freedom.
To him this moment had to be beautiful: then he saw that his work had not failed, since he had established two truths on Earth, and these truths would conquer the world: the prevalence of reason over intuition, of faith over reason, and the need of a practical demonstration of every theoretical discovery.