Port-Royal, the Cistercian monastery synonymous with French Jansenism, holds a privileged position in the study of seventeenth-century French literature for the prodigious textual output of its members and its role in shaping the affective outlook, thought, and style of Blaise Pascal and Jean Racine. Philippe Sellier, in the third volume of Port-Royal et la littérature, continues his examination of the way Port-Royal's theology and devotional practices found literary expression, with special emphasis on Pascal's writings. Composed of twenty short studies divided into four sections, nine of the essays appear in print for the first time in this volume, while the other eleven first appeared elsewhere. Coherent in its approach without developing a unified argument, an analysis of the “osmose entre littérature et théologie” (“osmosis between literature and theology,” 294), vivified by love for Pascal, binds the essays together.
The volume's closing essay—first written and published as the preface to the Italian translation of volume 1—forms the book's heart. It recounts Sellier's discovery of Pascal's writing in the 1950s and reflects on how more than half a century spent studying the author of the Mémorial and the Pensées has left a Pascalian mark on Sellier's thought, discernible, among other traces, by an interest in existential questions, attention to life's oscillation between misery and grandeur, and fascination with the fine line between vertigo and doubt before a hidden God. In Sellier's words, “Pascal n'a cessé de m'accompagner, de me fortifier de ces empreintes” (“Pascal has not ceased to accompany me, to strengthen me by these marks,” 300). Rarely does a scholar write so candidly about the personal transformation effected in them by the sustained relationship with their research subject. One could say that Pascal has irradiated Sellier in the same way that Sellier has shown Augustine and Saint-Cyran to have infused Pascal.
Thematically, this process of textual infusion, irradiation, or haunting by which a literary work bears the imprint of a longer theological tradition constitutes the volume's through line. After two opening chapters that introduce Port-Royal and its importance for interpreting Pascal's writing, part 1 turns to Port-Royal's role as producer of spiritual texts by studying the monastery's book of hours and its translation of the works of the fifth-century ascetic John Cassian. One of this section's central questions concerns Port-Royal's methods for dealing with a theological forebear whose values did not entirely match its own. As Cistercians who followed the Rule of Saint Benedict, the monks and nuns of Port-Royal were encouraged to read Cassian, whose Conférences and Institutes Benedict promoted as texts for meditation alongside the Bible. Cassian, however, held a view of divine grace opposed to Port-Royal's view. Whereas Port-Royal was staunchly Augustinian in its view of grace as a divine gift to a chosen few, Cassian thought humans could, by the strength of their will, choose to turn toward God, a position called Semi-Pelagianism. Sellier argues that the French translations of Cassian's works published in the 1660s under the pseudonym de Saligny (a possible play on Madeleine de Sainte-Agnès de Ligny) were prepared by Antoine-Joseph Mège and published with the help of Port-Royal, after purifying them of Semi-Pelagian passages.
Parts 2 and 3 explore Pascal as theologian and spiritual master. Under the rubric of theology, Sellier addresses Pascal's use of Augustine to show how his Against Faustus and On Rebuke and Grace reverberate through the Pensées and the Provinciales, informing Pascal's vision of the Old Testament, his apology for Catholicism, and his understanding of the relationship between truth and charity. Under the rubric of spirituality, Sellier analyzes Pascal's attention to Christ at prayer and Pascal's own Prière pour demander à Dieu le bon usage des maladies. Infused by the Psalms, the liturgy, and Pascal's reading of Augustine, Charles de Condren, and Saint-Cyran, the prayer moves, according to Sellier, from shadow to light, passing from humankind's suffering after the Fall to jubilation at God's consoling grace. Part 4, consisting of just two essays other than Sellier's reflection on his debt to Pascal, considers Racine's liturgical borrowings and Bossuet's Augustinianism. Although repetitive in places due to its nature as a compilation, Sellier's volume leaves readers with a deep appreciation for the way Port-Royal and its best-known author absorbed and innovated within the Christian tradition.
