Antoine Arnauld

Antoine Arnauld (February 6, 1612 – August 8, 1694) — le Grand, as contemporaries called him, to distinguish him from his father — was a French Roman Catholic theologian, philosopher, and mathematician. He was one of the leading intellectuals of the Jansenist group of Port-Royal and had a very thorough knowledge of patristics.

Antoine Arnauld was born in Paris to the Arnauld family. The twentieth and youngest child of the original Antoine Arnauld, he was originally intended for the bar, but decided instead to study theology at the Sorbonne. Here he was brilliantly successful, and his career was flourishing when he came under the influence of Jean du Vergier de Hauranne, the spiritual director and leader of the convent of Port-Royal, and was drawn in the direction of Jansenism.

His book, De la fréquente Communion (1643), was an important step in making the aims and ideals of this movement intelligible to the general public. It attracted controversy by being against frequent communion. Furthermore, in the frame of the controversy around Jansenius' Augustinus, during which the Jesuits attacked the Jansenists claiming they were heretics similar to Calvinists, Arnauld wrote in defense the Théologie morale des Jésuites (Moral Theology of Jesuits), which would put the base of most of the arguments later used by Pascal in his Provincial Letters denouncing the "relaxed moral" of Jesuit casuistry. Pascal was assisted in this task by Arnauld's nephew Antoine Le Maistre. The Jesuit Nicolas Caussin, former penitentiary to Louis XIII, was charged by his order of writing a defense against Arnauld's book, titled Réponse au libelle intitulé La Théologie morale des Jésuites (1644). Other libels published against Arnauld's Moral Theology of Jesuits included the one written by the Jesuit polemist François Pinthereau (1605–1664), under the pseudonym of the abbé de Boisic, titled Les Impostures et les ignorances du libelle intitulé: La Théologie Morale des Jésuites (1644), who was also the author of a critical history of Jansenism titled La Naissance du Jansénisme découverte à Monsieur le Chancelier (The Birth of Jansenism Revealed to Sir the Chancellor, Leuven, 1654).

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