Jacqueline Pascal

A Cistercian nun, Jacqueline Pascal made a major contribution to philosophy of

education through her treatise on the methods and principles of the pedagogy used
at the convent school at Port-Royal. In her educational theory, the teacher emerges
as a spiritual director who encourages the moral progress of her pupils through
ascetical exercises and personal interviews. The right of women to acquire a
theological culture and the right of the teaching nun to engage in theological
commentary are defended in this model of education. Jacqueline Pascal’s writings
also developed a substantial defense of the freedom of conscience, especially when
exercised by women. She defended the right of women to pursue their personal
vocation, regardless of economic resources and of parental attitude. During the
crisis over Jansenism, she defended the right of women to dissent from certain
ecclesiastical judgments despite civil and ecclesiastical pressures to assent to them.
In her meditations on the divine attributes, Pascal employed a via
negativa theology that stresses the unknowability of the hidden godhead. The
divine essence transcends the gendered contours of the images of God. Long
eclipsed by the philosophical genius of her brother Blaise, Jacqueline Pascal has
recently emerged as the artisan of an educational, political, and religious
philosophy with its own distinctive concerns.

Jacqueline Pascal was born on October 5, 1625 in Clermont in the French province
of Auvergne. A member of the noblesse de robe, the Pascal family had long
distinguished itself by its judicial and political service. A lawyer by training, her
father Étienne Pascal served as president of the Cour des Aides, a provincial tax
court. Her mother Antoinette Begon Pascal descended from a family of French
diplomats and judges. The last of the family’s children, Jacqueline had Gilberte
Pascal Périer (1620-1687) and Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) for siblings. With the death
of his wife shortly after Jacqueline’s birth, Étienne Pascal began to educate his
children at home. An erudite scholar with a pronounced interest in mathematics, the
father provided his children with an education stressing mathematics and
philosophy as well as instruction in literature and history.
Étienne Pascal moved his family to Paris in 1631. He immediately joined the
intellectual circles of the capital, including the circle of Father Mersenne, the patron
of Descartes. Delegated to teach her sister Jacqueline to read, Gilberte Pascal
discovered her sister’s precocious interest in poetry. By the age of eight, Jacqueline
was composing her own verse. At the age of eleven, she wrote and directed an entire
five-act play with two other girls of her own age. At the age of twelve, she published
a book of poetry. With her growing literary reputation, Jacqueline was invited to the
court at Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1638, where Queen Anne of Austria personally
thanked her for a poem she had composed on the queen’s recent pregnancy.
Astonishing onlookers with her ability to write spontaneous poems on themes
assigned by courtiers, Jacqueline Pascal acquired national fame as an artistic
prodigy.
In 1638 the fortunes of the Pascal family grew more somber. Jacqueline fell ill with
smallpox. Although she would recover, the scars from the illness remained for life.
Étienne fell into political disgrace. During a dispute over the payments owed
shareholders in the City Hall of Paris by the crown, a riot of discontented
shareholders broke out. A member of the protesting shareholders, but not physically
present at the disturbance, Étienne Pascal was placed under arrest by Cardinal
Richelieu. Evading arrest, he fled into exile. In 1639 Jacqueline personally
intervened with Cardinal Richelieu to obtain the pardon of her father. Charmed by
the adolescent who had just performed a play in his presence and had shown such
courage in directly addressing the prime minister, Richelieu pardoned Étienne and
appointed him the royal superintendant of tax collection in the province of
Normandy.

The assignment to Rouen would prove a politically hazardous one. Jealous of its
ancient independence from Paris and resentful of the crushing taxes imposed by the
crown for the prosecution of Louis XIII’s wars, Normandy was the scene of recurrent
riots and assaults on representatives of the crown. To help his father, overwhelmed
by the confused tax records of the province, Blaise Pascal invented his celebrated
calculating machine, which permitted the user to perform the basic computational
exercises of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division mechanically.
Jacqueline the poet flourished during the Rouen years. Encouraged by the dramatist
Pierre Corneille, a Rouen native and close family friend, Jacqueline Pascal won the
Prix de la Tour, a prestigious Norman literary award for her poem “On the
Conception of the Virgin.”

The Normandy years also witnessed a capital religious change in the Pascal family:
their conversion to Jansenism. In 1646 Étienne Pascal broke his hip in an accident.
Two lay medical doctors, the Deschamps brothers, restored him to health through
careful treatment of the broken bones. As they supervised his recovery, they shared
the austere version of the Catholic faith which they had learned from the Abbé Saint-
Cyran, the chaplain of the Port-Royal convent in Paris. Saint-Cyran promoted the
neo-Augustinian theory of grace, predestination, and the elect defended by his friend
Jansenius, the deceased Louvain theologian and bishop of Ypres. To this theology of
grace Saint-Cyran added his own distinctive moral rigorism and opposition to Jesuit
casuistry. Étienne, Blaise, and Jacqueline Pascal were quickly converted to the
Jansenist cause. During a home visit in Rouen, the newly married Gilberte Pascal
Périer and her husband Florin Périer also joined the controversial movement.

The religious conversion marked an intellectual change in the family. Theology

replaced the older focus on science and literature. Through the programmatic
spiritual reading pursued by the family members, Jacqueline Pascal acquired a new
Augustinian philosophical culture. She studied the works of Saint Augustine himself
as well as the writings of later medieval Augustinian writers, notably Saint Bernard
of Clairvaux. She read the central works of the burgeoning Jansenist
movement: Jansenius’s Reform of the Interior Man, Antoine Arnauld’s Of Frequent
Communion, and Saint-Cyran’s Familiar Catechism and Christian and Spiritual Letters.
The works of François de Sales and Pierre de Bérulle were also carefully studied.
When they returned to Paris in 1647, Blaise and Jacqueline Pascal regularly attended
services at the Port-Royal convent, the center of the Jansenist movement. Jacqueline
nursed her sickly brother and served as his amanuensis as he pursued his
groundbreaking research on the problem of the vacuum and contested the physics
of Descartes. Under the spiritual direction of Port-Royal’s chaplain Antoine Singlin
and abbess Angélique Arnauld, Jacqueline decided that she had a vocation to the
convent but her father strongly opposed it. As a compromise, Jacqueline agreed to
remain with her ailing father in his Paris and Clermont households until his death;
in return, her father agreed to permit Jacqueline to live a quasi-monastic life of
prayer and asceticism within his home. Following the death of Étienne Pascal on
September 24, 1651, Jacqueline prepared to enter the convent, but her vocation was
now opposed by her brother Blaise, who had grown dependent on his sister’s nursing
and secretarial skills and whose religious fervor had waned. Defying her brother,
Jacqueline entered the Port-Royal convent on January 4, 1652. On May 26, 1652,
Jacqueline was clothed in the habit of a nun and assumed her new religious name:
Soeur Jacqueline de Saint-Euphémie.

During her novitiate years, the lingering animosity between Soeur Jacqueline and
Blaise Pascal burst into open conflict during the crisis of the dowry. Breaking with
the custom of leaving the bulk of a family’s estate to the eldest son, Étienne Pascal’s
will and testament had divided his substantial estate equally among his three
children. As a novice and a legal major, Soeur Jacqueline could still dispose of her
share of her inheritance as she saw fit, but once she pronounced her final vows as a
nun, she was forbidden by canon and civil law from receiving or disposing of wealth.
In the French civil law of the period, a professed cloistered nun was dead to the world
and had lost civic personhood. When Soeur Jacqueline announced to her siblings
that she had decided to give her share of the inheritance to the convent of Port-Royal,
Blaise and Gilberte violently objected. They claimed that such a gift went far beyond
the familial provision of a dowry that was customary for a nun during this period.
The siblings objected that the use of Jacqueline’s portion of the inheritance for the
convent would deprive Blaise and the Périer children of income necessary for their
research and education. They pointed out that the estate of Étienne Pascal was still
under the purview of the courts since questions concerning their father’s debtors and
creditors were still unresolved. If Soeur Jacqueline went ahead with her proposed
donation to Port-Royal, the siblings threatened legal action against her.

When a stunned Jacqueline Pascal sought the counsel of Mère Angélique, the
convent abbess advised her to abandon her claims to the disputed inheritance and
pronounce her vows as an undowered nun. One of the reforms introduced by Mère
Angélique at Port-Royal had been the abandonment of the traditional dowry
requirement and the insistence that admission to the convent should not depend on
the economic resources of the candidate. As the subsequent stormy interviews with
her brother Blaise in the convent parlor indicated, such wise and liberating counsel
was not easily accepted by Soeur Jacqueline since it wounded her family and class
pride. Shortly before her profession as a nun, Blaise agreed to provide a donation to
the convent that was equivalent to a generous dowry for a cloistered nun at the time,
although Jacqueline had renounced her legal rights to the inheritance and the
convent had clearly indicated that there was no requirement for such a payment.
Soeur Jacqueline de Sainte-Euphémie pronounced her vows on June 5, 1653. During
her decade at Port-Royal, Soeur Jacqueline would be entrusted with major offices:
headmistress of the convent school, novice mistress, and subprioress.

The convent entered by Jacqueline Pascal was the object of increasing persecution.
Since the appointment of Saint-Cyran as its chaplain in 1638, Port-Royal had become
the center of the Jansenist movement. With a rural branch (Port-Royal des Champs)
and an urban branch (Port-Royal de Paris), the convent disseminated Jansenist
ideas to a large lay public. It conducted a school for girls and provided a hostel for
women desiring to make retreats. Its large Parisian church featured sermons and
conferences directed at educated laity. The messieurs, a group of erudite laymen who
occupied buildings adjacent to the convent at Port-Royal des Champs, conducted a
school for boys and published influential textbooks, translations, and theological
treatises.
Published posthumously in 1640, the Augustinus of Jansenius contained the creed of
the movement. The book argued that the salvation of the elect was completely
dependant upon God’s grace and that the Jesuits, among others, had dangerously
exaggerated the contribution of free will and meritorious works to the act of
salvation. At the urging of the French crown, the Vatican had censured
the Augustinus in 1642. In 1653 Pope Innocent X condemned five propositions on
free will and grace as heretical and linked these propositions to Jansenius and his
disciples. In 1656 Pope Alexander VII declared that the church was condemning
these propositions precisely in the sense in which Jansenius had defended them. The
Sorbonne theological faculty and the French Assembly of the Clergy delivered similar
condemnations throughout the 1650s.
The Jansenists had their own powerful defenses. The publication of Blaise
Pascal’s Provincial Letters (1655-1656) reduced the opponents of Jansenism to
ridicule. The miraculous healing of Soeur Jacqueline’s niece Marguerite Périer, a
pupil at Port-Royal, in 1656 was grudgingly declared worthy of belief by the
Archdiocese of Paris and trumpeted by the Jansenists as divine vindication of their
cause. To defend the Jansenist party from threatened excommunication, Antoine
Arnauld, the movement’s leading theologian, devised the ingenious distinction
between droit and fait. According to this distinction, Catholics were required to
submit to church judgments on matters of droit (the law concerning faith and
morals) since right belief and right conduct were essential to salvation. But they
could not be compelled to assent to church judgments on matters of fait (empirical
facts, such as whether a particular book or author had made a heretical statement),
since the church did not enjoy the charism of infallibility on such an empirical
matter. A minority of French bishops defended such distinctions as legitimate and
traditional in the church.
Despite these defenses, the persecution of Port-Royal and the attendant Jansenist
movement intensified once Louis XIV assumed the personal governance of France
in 1661. The throne drew up a formulary that affirmed the church’s earlier
condemnation of the five heretical propositions, and of Jansenius for having held
them. All clergy, members of religious orders, and teachers on French soil were to
sign the formulary under oath. The nuns at Port-Royal were singled out for the
mandated signature. The crisis of the signature divided the Jansenist community.
The convent chaplain Antoine Singlin counseled an unreserved signature as an act
of submission to church authority. Antoine Arnauld recommended that the nuns
sign but make clear that they were assenting only to the document’s judgments
of droit (the condemnation of heretical propositions concerning free will and grace)
and that they were maintaining silence on the judgments of fait (that Jansenius had
actually endorsed these heretical theories.) The majority of nuns, led by Soeur
Jacqueline, were inclined to refuse even a reserved signature to the formulary since
they could not in conscience even appear to assent to a condemnation of an author
they believed innocent of the accusation of heresy.
As the community debated the question of the signature, the crown moved against
the suspect convent. In the spring of 1661, royal emissaries banished the convent’s
confessors and spiritual directors, closed the convent school, and expelled the
convent’s postulants and novices. In the summer of 1661, the new royal
superintendent of the convent, Abbé Louis Bail, conducted an interrogation of the
nuns regarding their theological views and devotional practices. Soeur Jacqueline
was interrogated in July, with particular emphasis on her views on predestination
and free will. In June of 1661, Soeur Jacqueline wrote a letter stating her opposition
to any signature of the controversial formulary, but, like the other Port-Royal nuns
under duress, she ultimately signed the formulary. In concert with the other nuns,
she added a written codicil to her signature that explained the strictly reserved
nature of her assent.

On October 4, 1661, Soeur Jacqueline de Sainte-Euphémie died after a brief illness.

The physical cause of her death remains unclear, but Jansenist authors quickly
acclaimed her as the protomartyr of the persecuted movement. In their eulogies of
Soeur Jacqueline, they claimed that the ecclesiastical and political coercion during
the crisis of the signature had brought about the untimely death of a conscientious
nun.