Pierre Nicole

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A boy sent up to Paris in 1642 to read theology, who took a bachelor’s degree in 1649 and then, in the same year the Sorbonne moved against the Five Propositions, quietly declined both the doctorate and the priesthood — that is the figure from whom the rest of Pierre Nicole’s life unfolds. He would remain a layman in minor orders, a teacher and a writer rather than a prelate, and his refusal of the higher steps was of a piece with the cause he had joined: a Catholicism that distrusted the will’s confidence in its own merits, even the merit of accepting office. Nicole (1625–1695) became the moral theologian and logician of Port-Royal, the convent and intellectual circle that was the heart of the rigorist Augustinian reform in seventeenth-century France. He is remembered on two counts: as the close collaborator of Antoine Arnauld, with whom he produced the work known to two centuries of readers as the Port-Royal Logic, and as the author of the Essais de morale, a long sequence of treatises on conduct and the inner life that made him one of the most widely read religious writers of the French classical age.

The ruins of Port-Royal des Champs, the convent and intellectual circle at the heart of the Jansenist reform — photograph, via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.5)

Born at Chartres on 19 October 1625, Nicole came into the Port-Royal orbit through his aunt, Marie des Anges Suireau, who was for a time abbess there. He taught in the Petites Écoles, the small schools the movement ran for a generation of pupils — among them the young Jean Racine, who would later turn Nicole’s own weapons against him. From that schoolroom Nicole grew into the most learned and most prolific man of letters the movement possessed after Arnauld himself, and into the temperate conscience that repeatedly counseled the party to bend rather than break.

The art of thinking

Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694), le Grand Arnauld, Nicole’s collaborator on the Port-Royal Logic — engraving, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Nicole’s first monument is a textbook. La Logique, ou l’art de penser, composed with Arnauld and first published anonymously in 1662, did something the older manuals had not: it treated logic not as a closed inventory of valid forms but as an account of how the mind actually proceeds when it reasons well. The full title carries the program — logic as the art of thinking — and the book is organized around the four operations the authors take to make up the work of the understanding: conceiving (the apprehension of ideas), judging (the affirming or denying that joins ideas in a proposition), reasoning (the drawing of judgments from judgments), and ordering, or method (the arrangement of knowledge into a system). The sequence is not arbitrary. Each operation works on the products of the one before it, so that the structure of the book is meant to mirror the structure of cognition itself.

What gave the Logic its long afterlife in philosophy was less its syllogistic machinery, much of it inherited, than its theory of the sign and the idea. The Port-Royal authors set their analysis inside the Cartesian theory of ideas — they were near contemporaries and partial allies of René Descartes, and the Logic shares his refusal of the radical Pyrrhonian doubt while keeping his picture of the mind as a thinking substance distinct from extended body. Onto that frame they grafted a distinction that students of meaning have worried over ever since: between the comprehension of an idea — the set of attributes it contains, which cannot be removed without destroying it — and its extension, the range of subjects to which it applies. The two vary inversely; the more an idea contains, the fewer things it reaches. This is, in embryo, the distinction later logic would draw between the intension and the extension of a term, and it is one of the reasons historians of logic treat the book as the hinge between the medieval art and the modern one. The philosopher of science Ian Hacking judged it the most influential logic book between Aristotle and the close of the nineteenth century — a verdict the printing history supports, with the work passing through some fifty French editions and a long train of Latin and English translations, in common classroom use for two hundred years. Modern philosophical scholarship treats the book’s semantics of sign, idea, comprehension, and extension as a genuine bridge to the logic of Frege and after: the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy alike take the text as the pivot between the medieval art and the modern one.

The collaboration also produced a companion, the Grammaire générale et raisonnée of 1660 — the Port-Royal Grammar — written mainly by Arnauld with Claude Lancelot, its project the same: to find behind the accidents of particular languages the universal operations of the reasoning mind. Twentieth-century linguistics rediscovered it; the grammar’s claim that surface forms answer to deeper rational structures was read by Noam Chomsky as an anticipation of generative grammar, a reading much disputed but enough to return the Port-Royal books to the center of the philosophy of language. Authorship between the two collaborators is not always separable — the Logic is conventionally Arnauld-and-Nicole, with the heavier analytic labor often assigned to Arnauld and much of the drafting and exposition to Nicole — but the work belongs to both, and to the schoolroom culture that produced it.

The anatomy of self-love

The second monument is moral. The Essais de morale, begun in 1671 and swelling over the following decades to some fourteen volumes, are short treatises on the business of living — on Christian conduct, on submission to providence, on the education of children, on the keeping of the conscience, on the means of preserving peace among men. Their distinction is a cool, almost clinical attention to the disguises of the self. Nicole’s recurring subject is amour-propre, self-love: the appetite that, in the fallen condition his theology assumed, lies beneath even the conduct that looks most disinterested, dressing pride in the costume of virtue, vanity in the costume of generosity, the hunger for esteem in the costume of courtesy.

What lifts this beyond moralizing is the turn Nicole gives it in the essay De la charité et de l’amour-propre (1675). Charity — the love of God and neighbor for their own sake — is the gift of grace, and rare. But a society composed almost entirely of self-lovers does not therefore collapse into open war; instead, Nicole argues, self-love is providentially arranged so that each person’s interest restrains the next, and the outward forms of mutual regard — politeness, fair dealing, the whole apparatus of civility — are produced by men who seek only their own advantage. Self-love, in other words, can counterfeit charity so well that the commerce of social life runs smoothly on it, even where charity is absent. He drew the conclusion without softening its sting: the order that looks like love is often only enlightened appetite, and the difference is invisible from outside, legible only to grace and to God.

This argument has had a second life its author did not intend. Read forward, his account of a usable, society-building self-interest is one of the early formulations of an idea that the eighteenth century would make central — that private vice or private interest can yield public order without anyone willing the good of the whole. The line is usually traced through Bernard Mandeville to David Hume and to Adam Smith, whose image of an invisible hand turning self-regarding exchange to common benefit restates, in a secular and economic register, what Nicole had stated as a melancholy theological paradox — a genealogy historians of ideas have set out in detail (Mikko Tolonen’s study of Nicole and amour-propre follows the thread from the Augustinian providential argument into eighteenth-century moral and political economy). That John Locke thought the Essais worth carrying into English — he translated three of them during his years in France, abandoning the larger project on learning that another hand had been at work — is a measure of how far beyond Jansenist circles the book’s readers ranged. Nicole himself would have resisted the optimism his pages later licensed: for him the spectacle of a decent society built on self-love was not a vindication of self-love but the sharpest possible proof of how thoroughly grace was needed and how little of it there was.

A rigorist in a rigorist age

Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638), bishop of Ypres, whose posthumous Augustinus gave the movement its name — engraving, Rijksmuseum, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

The current Nicole served took its name from the Flemish bishop Cornelius Jansen, whose posthumous Augustinus (1640) pressed a severe reading of Augustine of Hippo on sin, grace, and predestination: that fallen human nature can do nothing toward its own salvation without an efficacious grace which God grants or withholds freely, and that the will’s vaunted freedom is, without that grace, a freedom only to sin. To its enemies this read as the Calvinism of John Calvin smuggled into the Catholic Church; to Port-Royal it was simply Augustine, against an accommodating doctrine of human merit they associated with the Jesuits and their account of sufficient grace and free cooperation. In 1653 Rome condemned five propositions said to be drawn from the Augustinus, and the movement deployed the famous distinction between right and fact — granting the pope’s authority to condemn the propositions as heretical, denying that they were actually to be found in Jansen’s book. The crown and the papacy were unpersuaded, and the long pressure that followed ended, after Nicole’s death, in the dispersal of the nuns and the demolition of Port-Royal des Champs.

Presumed portrait of Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), whose Lettres provinciales were the model for Nicole’s polemical letters — anonymous painting, Musée Carnavalet, via Wikimedia Commons (public domain)

Nicole spent his working life inside that struggle and gave it some of its sharpest prose. When the Jesuits charged that the heresy Port-Royal was accused of existed only in its own teaching, Nicole answered in Les Imaginaires (1664) and Les Visionnaires (1666) — letters modeled on the Provinciales of Blaise Pascal, arguing that the heretical opinions ascribed to the Jansenists existed only in the imaginations of their accusers. The campaign caught a casualty he had not aimed at: an attack on the moral danger of the stage and the novel, condemning the playwright as a poisoner of souls, drew a furious anonymous reply from Racine, Nicole’s former pupil, and opened one of the durable literary quarrels of the age. With Arnauld he also carried the long war with Protestantism onto the ground of the sacrament: the multivolume La Perpétuité de la foi de l’Église catholique touchant l’eucharistie set out to show that the Church had held the real presence from its earliest centuries, against the Calvinist minister Jean Claude, who answered that the doctrine was a later invention without scriptural warrant.

Yet the temperament that ran beneath this polemical labor was conciliatory. Nicole was the cautious one. Where Arnauld — le Grand Arnauld, the movement’s most formidable and most combative theologian — wanted to fight, Nicole counseled accommodation, and during the negotiations that produced the so-called Peace of the Church in 1668–69 he was among those who sought a settlement rather than a victory. When persecution sharpened, he shared Arnauld’s exile to the Spanish Netherlands in 1679, living with him in Brussels and Liège; but where Arnauld stayed out of France to the end, Nicole, old and unwell and weary of the fugitive life, sent a measured submission to Harlay, the archbishop of Paris, and was permitted to return — to Chartres, then to Paris — about 1683. The peace he made was an ambiguous one, neither surrender nor triumph, and it cost him.

It cost him, above all, with the stricter members of his own party, and the breach widened into doctrine. In the 1690s Nicole advanced the idea of a general grace — a grace extended to all, carrying at least an implicit knowledge of moral truth — and this struck the strict Augustinians as a concession to the very doctrine of sufficient-grace-for-all that Jansenism had been founded to deny; to its hardest critics it looked frankly Molinist. Arnauld himself wrote against his old collaborator. Nicole’s positions on grace were gathered after his death in the Traité de la grâce générale (1715), and they were refuted by men of the next Jansenist generation. The conviction that he had defended Port-Royal’s doctrine more stubbornly than almost anyone in the years of the Provinciales did not shield his memory among those who held the line he had loosened.

The deeper argument

What held the two halves of the work together — the logic of the mind and the anatomy of the heart — was a single conviction: that the examination of human interiority is itself a religious task. The Logic taught how the understanding ought to proceed if it would reach truth; the Essais showed how rarely the will lets it, how the same mind that can frame a clean syllogism spends most of its effort flattering itself and disguising its appetites. The mind, left to its own devices, was for Nicole an organ chiefly of self-deception, and grace was everything; the Essais are the patient working-out of that double thought, neither despairing of reason nor trusting it. He held this position with a psychological exactness that drew admirers far outside Jansenist circles — younger moralists who borrowed his observations, readers across confessional lines who found in his pages a mirror held to motives they recognized — and without the combative edge that made Arnauld feared. Pierre Bayle, no friend to the cause, ranked him among the finest minds of the century.

Nicole died in Paris on 16 November 1695, the controversies he had served still running and the harder men of his own movement still distrustful of him. The quarrels he wrote into did not survive their century with much force; the Augustinus is read now mostly by specialists, and the Peace of the Church is a footnote. What lasted was the part of him least bound to the fight: the textbook that taught Europe how thinking divides into conceiving, judging, reasoning, and ordering, and the essays that taught it to look for self-love beneath its own civilities. There is a consistency in this that the quarrels obscure: the man who distrusted the combative certainties of his own party was the same man who had made self-deception his lifelong subject. Nicole suspected the will’s hunger to be right — in himself as in everyone — and a thinker who begins there will counsel the settlement over the victory, and will be distrusted by the partisans for doing so. The conciliator and the anatomist of pride were one person reasoning from a single premise about the human mind.

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