← History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps
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Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in munich. Online@historyoffphilosophy.net Today's episode Friends of the Arnauld and Jansenism Hands up who remembers Thomas Bradwardine? He was an archbishop we covered when looking at medieval philosophy. If you do remember him, it will probably be because his name kept coming up in the context of various debates of the 14th century. He anticipated later teachings on grace by insisting on God's predestination, produced innovative writings about logic and including a solution to the Liars Paradox, and even got a mention in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Today's subject Antoine Arnold has put me in mind of Bradwardin because, like him, Arnauld is not terribly famous, yet seems to be pervasive in the philosophical literature of his time. Like Bradwardine, he wrote on both philosophy and theology, making important contributions in logic under the former heading and in his theological writings, developing a position on grace that Bradwardine might have found sympathetic. He was also a man of the church, though he did not rise within the hierarchy as high as Bradwardine did. To the contrary, he became the intellectual leader of a movement that was fiercely opposed by the mainstream French Jansenism. As you can tell, Jansenism is not named after Arnaud, even French. Isn't that strange? Its namesake was Cornelius Jansen, a Dutch bishop who caused a stir in France with a mammoth theological treatise, tellingly called Augustinus. Jansenism took its inspiration above all from St. Augustine and insisted on a rigorous teaching of divine grace. Their main rivals were the Jesuits, to the point that 1 17th century cardinal defined Jansenus as Catholics who don't like Jesuits. Among the Jesuits, grace and predestination were usually understood to work in the way proposed by Luis de Molina toward the end of the 16th century. For the Molinists, God has foreknowledge of how humans will choose, while also knowing that other choices would have been possible. He can tell in advance which possibility we will freely choose and generously bestows grace to help those who will choose to be righteous. For Janssen, this came too close to the Pelagian position already condemned by Augustine in late antiquity. It would suggest that in some sense it does lie within our power to merit salvation. As Janssen acidly remarks in the Augustinus, the Jesuit account amounts to saying that Christ died for nothing and is called Savior for no particular reason. Instead, Janssen and his followers emphasized the sufficiency of what they called efficacious grace, which is freely begiven by God, and guaranteed that the person who has received it will act righteously. Arnaud's affiliation to this movement was itself all but predestined. His father, also named Antoine Arnauld, had a generation earlier polemicized against the Jesuits, going so far as to argue that the order should be expelled from France. His children took up the cause. Two daughters, Angelique and Agnes, were leading figures of the abbey at Port Royale, which from now on I'm just going to call Port Royal as if it were in English. Here they cultivated a rigorously ascetic and profoundly spiritual culture. Angelique emphasized the inwardness of this spirituality, writing, it is by the interior that the exterior must be formed, not by the exterior to make the interior. Along the same lines, Agnes affirmed that silent as well as spoken prayer was practiced at Port Royal, which is another point you might remember, since it was a matter of controversy in Counter Reformation Spain. According to Agnes, the nuns at Port Royal were not so prideful as to think they had become perfect, but that was nonetheless their aim. Such protestations of humility notwithstanding. Archbishop who visited Port Royal said, the nuns there were pure as angels, but proud as devils. Their longer term reputation has been similar. The Jansenists have gone down in history not as friends of the truth, which is how they styled themselves, but as synonymous with rigorism, joylessness and severity in religion. In the words of the editors of a recent anthology of Jansenist texts, one might ask, with Catholics like this, how? Who needs Calvinists? The Jansenist teaching on grace looked suspiciously close to that of the Protestants. And Jansenism has even been described as a reformation that failed. Yet all the leading Jansenists, including Arnaud and Pascal, emphatically rejected Protestantism. Pascal made the point in his inimitable fashion, saying to the Jesuits, the Jansenists resemble the heretics in the reformation of their behavior, but you resemble them in evil. They stayed within the Catholic Church primarily for theological reasons, since they were committed to the need for a priesthood to administer the sacraments. They were certainly not motivated by any affection for the scholastic theology still dominant within the Catholic hierarchy. To the contrary, Janssen himself was highly dubious of scholastic thought, which he considered to be undermined by its dependence on pagan philosophy. Aristotle and the other Greeks had exalted human nature and considered it possible to perfect that nature through freely chosen effort. A vital correction to this had been provided by Augustine, who refuted the pagan celebration of pure nature with his teachings about grace and original sin. Pascal expresses this outlook in many passages of his for example, humans, it is hopeless to look for the remedy for your wretchedness in yourselves. All your intelligence can only bring you to realize that it is not in yourselves that you will find either truth or good. According to the Jansenists, scholastic thinkers like Molina and other Jesuits failed to appreciate the Augustinian critique fully. They continued to use natural reason when trying to plumb the depths of Christian theology and as a result, exaggerated the contribution of humans to their own salvation. As Janssen put philosophy accommodated divine grace to the tyrannical commands of human freedom. Since the truths of religion are in fact beyond human reckoning, we must find them in Scripture and in the authoritative writings of the Church Fathers, basing ourselves on transmitted tradition rather than our own minds. Janssen thus, just as the intellect is the proper faculty to undertake the study of philosophy, remembrance is the proper faculty to undertake the study of theology. Arnauld agreed, repeatedly quoting a line from what we know we owe to reason, what we believe to authority. He wound up paying the price for those beliefs. At the behest of another early Jansenist leader, the Abbot of Saint Cyran, Hanaud wrote an apology for Jansen. Here he explained the ideas of the Augustinus in French for the first time, broadcasting them to a wider audience. In 1563, Janssen was condemned for teaching five unacceptable propositions, with the key issue being his teaching on grace. The Jansenists responded by saying that the five offending propositions were not to be found anywhere in Janssen's writings. So now arguments raged over what Janssen had even said, never mind whether his teachings were true. Arnauld was right at the center of all this. He and his colleague Pierre Nicole contributed a typically nuanced distinction to the debate. There was, on the one hand, the question of what Janssen had in fact written, on the other hand, the question whether his intended teaching was right. Arnaud argued that the Pope was within his rights as a religious authority to pronounce on what is right, but not on matters of fact, which sounds reasonable enough, but the implications were unnerving, at least for the Church. After all, any judgment the papacy might make would always involve some questions of fact. If the Pope has no authority to decide those questions, then none of his judgments can apply to any concrete situation. He would be like a judge who can say that murder is wrong, but never say whether a certain person has committed murder. Thus Arnaud was intentionally or not, undermining the whole basis of papal authority. As a result, he was stripped of his doctorate and expelled by the Paris theology faculty, or Sorbonne, in 1656. As if that weren't enough, all the theologians who had voted in his favor were also expelled. It was this that drew Pascal into the fray. His provincial letters used his considerable rhetorical skills to defend Arnauld and attack the Sorbonne and for good measure, heat scorn on the Jesuits. One Jesuit described Pascal's letters in a way that makes clear their effectiveness as well as his own outrage. There are subtle jokes to divert fine minds, useful ones to interest rich people, low ones to amuse valets and servant girls, impious ones to satisfy libertines, and sacrilegious ones to have sorcerers dancing at their Sabbath. Ultimately, though, the eloquence of Pascal and the hairsplitting distinctions of Arnaud were in vain. King Louis XIV proved to be a determined opponent of the Jansenists. He moved against port Royal in 1679, dispersing its members and closing its schools. Though the abbey was allowed to struggle on in diminished form until 1709, Arnauld fled to the Netherlands and spent the rest of his life there, dying in 1694. So that's Antoine Arnaud, religious reformer and controversialist. But there was also Antoine Arnauld, Cartesian philosopher. This Angloud was also quite a controversialist. Most famously, he was one of the men asked to write objections to Descartes Meditations, in which context he first raised the problem of the Cartesian circle. He also disputed with other philosophers in writing, including Malebranche and Leibniz. It's natural to ask what connects the two versions of Arnaud, and more generally, what connects Cartesian philosophy to the Jansenist religious movement. Even in his objections to the Meditations, it's recognizable that we are dealing with the same man. Steeped as he was in Augustinian thought, he was just as quick as Massen to note the parallel between Descartes cogito and an anti skeptical argument found in Augustine. He also worried that Descartes skeptical strategy could cause offense to theologians, since calling absolutely everything into question would involve doubting things we are meant to believe by faith. Perhaps, then, the truths of Christianity should be excluded from the method of doubt. Descartes readily agreed to this suggestion in his replies, probably just so that the issue could then be safely ignored. As Descartes himself admitted, I keep away as far as possible from questions of theology. Which makes it puzzling that, as one 17th century Protestant remarked, the theologians of Port Royal are as devoted to Cartesianism as they are to Christianity. The two were so closely linked that when Cartesian philosophy was repressed in the 1670s, it may have been in part because of its links to Jansenism. What, then was the appeal of Cartesianism to a man like Arnauld? Well, the enemy of your enemy is your friend. Descartes. Dismissal of Scholasticism and fresh start in philosophy were bound to appeal to Arnauld. Descartes was somewhat more friendly to the Jesuits than Arnault was, admittedly a low bar, as we can see, from the fact that he tried to win them over to the ideas of the Meditations. But those ideas represented a clean break with Scholastic modes of thought, which Arnault, like his father before him, deeply opposed. A further reason for Arnauld's Cartesian sympathies was that he saw Cartesianism as providing strong arguments for fundamental Christian doctrines like the existence of God and the separability of the soul from the body. Still, Hanaud didn't agree with Descartes about everything. In addition to raising the Cartesian circle and worries about the method of doubt, there was a potential incompatibility of Cartesian physics with church doctrine. In his objection to the Meditations, and then in a further letter, Arnaud pointed out to Descartes that his theory of matter could render the Eucharistic miracle impossible. If matter is just extension, then how could Christ's body be present in the host without being present locally or in place as the Church instructed? One might think that Descartes would have an easy answer. Yes, the Eucharist involves something impossible. But that's alright, because God can make impossible things happen. It's not clear, though, whether God actually does ever make impossible things happen. According to Descartes, their Cartesian position is rather that God could do that in some merely theoretical sense, since it is God who decides what is possible and impossible in the first place. Descartes faithful disciple Richard Robert Desgarbet, emphasized this idea, even though Descartes himself had proposed it only rather tentatively. For Desgarbe, eternal truthsfor instance, the truth that every body has extension, or that triangles have three sides, are immutable because God has willed them into being in a way that transcends time and thus change. Arnaud does not seem to have shared this distinctive Cartesian view. We see this from his discussion of the Eucharist, where he assumes that God has no power over what is possible and impossible, and and from other passages too, like one where he says that God would not be able to make a void space, if Cartesian physics is true. So Arnaud apparently saw logical possibility as a constraint on God's actions. Still, when it comes to human action and moral responsibility, he put great emphasis on divine power. As a Jansenist philosopher, he was bound to think deeply about free will and its relation to divine grace. As we've by now seen innumerable times, anyone who addressed this question had to steer a path between two dangers. If you emphasize human freedom, then divine grace may be unnecessary. But if you emphasize the role of grace, you threaten to make humans into God's puppets rather than freely choosing and responsible agents. Janssen and his followers were obviously flirting with the second of these dangers. The idea of efficacious grace is as stark as it is straightforward. If God does not give you grace, you will definitely remain sinful. If God does give it to you, you cannot fail to be righteous. Grace has its effect necessarily or through itself. By its very nature, it cannot fail, and it needs no contribution from the side of the human to be effective. Rather, it heals the weakness inflicted on humans by original sin. Janssen spoke of the victorious pleasure felt by the recipients of grace, which makes them do with holy love, which they already knew they ought to do but were too weak to carry out. Janssen qualified this by saying that even when we are doomed to act wrongly by sin, or guaranteed to act rightly by grace, we do still retain the power to do the opposite. This proposal goes way back through the Augustinian tradition, for instance, to the early medieval thinker Anselm. He offered the following. Someone in a state of sin can be good, but only in the sense that a blindfolded person can see. In such cases, one has a power that one isn't presently able to use. Being an Augustinian traditionalist and defender of Janssen, you would expect Arnaud to follow this line, and at first he did. But in the mid-1680s, after reading a lot of Aquinas, he changed his mind. It's not enough, he now thought, that one could act differently under different circumstances, like the man who could see if someone removed his blindfold. Rather, we need to be able to act differently in the present circumstances if we are to count as free. Sometimes no alternatives are available. No one can stop wishing to be happy, and no one can withhold their assent from clear and distinct ideas. A reminder of Arnaud's Cartesianism. But apart from that, every choice we make is such that we could have chosen differently. This now sounds more Jesuit than jansenist, but our node 2 adds an important qualification. Even Though it's genuinely possible to choose one action over another, the choice could stem from an overwhelmingly powerful desire. He gives the example of a tyrant who has been offended by one of his subjects. Clearly, the tyrant could just let the insult go. But let's face it, given his personality, he is obviously going to punish the subject mercilessly. Or consider, could a perfectly wise sage cut off his own nose for no reason? Yes, he could, but of course he never would. Likewise, we act wrongly because sin gives us an irresistible motivation to do so. And when God gives us grace, we acquire an opposite motivation to act well, which is equally irresistible. That's why efficacious grace is guaranteed to work. Here, then, we have Arnaud's explanation of why God is not just a puppet master. Puppeteers make Punch and Judy hit each other by pulling their strings, not by instilling in Punch and Judy a furious anger they cannot resist. And unlike puppets, humans feel strongly that they could act differently if they wanted to. It's just that they do very much want to act the way they are acting. Arnaud offers a memorable example to underscore this. No matter how determined I am not to go naked into the street, I nevertheless have the power to do it, and I would do it if I wanted. How far has Arnaud wandered from Janssen's original position here? Janssen clearly adopted a form of what philosophers would now call compatibilism. This is the view that freedom is compatible with causal determination. Thus, for Janssen, even when some cause makes it necessary for you to act as you do, you can still be free. This is because you still retain a power to act differently, albeit one you cannot presently use. In his later career, Unknowd seems to abandon that idea because he puts so much stress on our genuine inability to act otherwise. This might sound like the modern day position called libertarianism, which sees determinism as incompatible with freedom. But the examples he gives still seem to be cases where people are determined to act as they do. It's just that what determines them is their own motivations. The sage could theoretically cut his nose off, but his beliefs and desires ensure that he won't. In light of this, I think it would be more accurate to say that Arnaud remained a compatibilist, as we should expect, given his devotion to the Jansenist cause. It's just that he thought our freedom is compatible with causal determination only if the causes in question are our own desires. That's something a lot of modern day compatibilists would say too, though without all the theological trappings. So now we've met two versions of Arnauld, the critically minded Cartesian philosopher and the no less critically minded Jansenist theologian. Arnaud was famously disputatious, and criticism is the thread that runs throughout his whole career, as we'll find when we meet two further versions of Arnaud alongside the Cartesian circle. His most famous contributions in philosophy were an attack on Malebranche and a critical rethinking of the art of logic. I'll postpone the attack on Malebranche until we've discussed him too, so that both parties to the dispute have been introduced. But we're ready now to tackle Arnaud the logician. This is the Arnaud who produced a bestseller textbook together with his friend Pierre Nicole. As I keep saying, it's very famous, honest. And next time we'll find out why, as we delve into the Port Royal logic here on the history of philosophy without any gaps.