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The primary aim was to live up to a common ideal of Christian perfection, and to react against the general corruption by establishing thoroughly moral schools and publishing works denouncing, in strong terms, the glaring errors of the time, the source of which was considered, by both the Abbé of Saint-Cyran and Jansenius, to lie in the Jesuit Colleges and their theology.
Saint-Cyran had been imprisoned in 1638, and not until after the death of Richelieu, in 1642, was he liberated.
The great-souled M. de Saint-Cyran, with his vision of Christ restored; M. Le Maitre, who, at the summit of a brilliant career, turned from the world to meditation and penitence; Pascal, with his genius and his triumphs, his conflicts of soul and fleshly martyrdom; Lancelot, the good Lancelot, ideal schoolmaster, who wrote grammar and edited classical books; the vigorous Arnauld, doctoral rather than saintly, but long-suffering for the faith that was in him; and all the smaller names Walon de Beaupuis, Nicole, Hamon spirits of exquisite humility and sweetness a perfume rises from the page as one reads about them.
The old abbey buildings near Versailles were later occupied by a community of learned and pious men who were, for the most part, pupils of the celebrated Abbé of Saint-Cyran, who, with Jansenius, was living at Paris at the time that Mère Angélique was perfecting her reforms; she, attracted by the ascetic life led by the abbé, fell under his influence, and the whole Arnauld family, numbering about thirty, followed her example.
At the age of twenty she became a nun, having been reared in the convent by her aunt, Marie, who was the most perfect disciple of Saint-Cyran. Mère Angélique was especially conspicuous for her obstinacy, and when the nuns were forced to accept the formulary of Pope Alexander VI., she, alone, was excepted, because of that well known characteristic.
Port-Royal, which owed its existence to a Basque, the Abbé de Saint-Cyran, a man of the same race as Iñigo de Loyola and as he who writes these lines, always preserved deep down a sediment of religious despair, of the suicide of reason. Loyola also slew his reason in obedience. Our affirmation is despair, our negation is despair, and from despair we abstain from affirming and denying.
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