Theatrical Activity in Paris (5) — "Port Royal"

— 5 —

"Port Royal"

By the French writer Henry de Montherlant
At the Comédie Française

A play in one act

Place: the reception room of the convent of Port-Royal, in the Saint-Jacques quarter of Paris.
Time: August 21, 1664.

The stage setting is very simple, suiting the atmosphere of austerity that governs the order of the nuns of Port-Royal. The walls are gray. The chairs are of plain straw. In the middle of the room stands a bare wooden table. On the left side of the room, in a niche in the wall, a wooden cross and two candles...

The subject of the play is bound up with a well-known historical event in France: the struggle that broke out between the community of Port-Royal, called the "Jansenists," on one side, and the religious and civil authorities — Rome and the King — on the other. A struggle that lasted seventy years, in the course of which Port-Royal suffered every kind of persecution, imprisonment, and interdiction. Among its fruits were immortal pages of spiritual-philosophical literature set down by Pascal in the "Provinciales" in defense of Port-Royal and in reply to the Jesuits, who helped the authorities to crush this order. The struggle ended with the disappearance of the Jansenists and of Port-Royal from existence: their convent in the valley of the Chevreuse, twenty kilometers from Paris, was demolished by order of Louis XIV in 1709, and the nuns were dispersed, together with the community of ascetics who used to withdraw into the hermitages of the woods of Port-Royal for meditation, prayer, and worship.

Montherlant chose the day of August 21, 1664, in which to gather the storms of this long conflict — the day on which the Archbishop of Paris came to the nuns' convent to demand that they submit to the decree of the Apostolic See declaring heretical five points from the book of Jansenius, Bishop of Ypres... The nuns refuse to sign this order, believing that four of the points in question are not to be found in Jansenius's book, but are merely the interpretations of the theological council of the Sorbonne, nothing more... Jansenius's theory bears on the problem of salvation and the freedom of man, and Jansenius inclines toward pressing to an extreme the Christian view that grace alone saves man...

And when the author gathers up the scattered elements of this storm and confines them within a single day, a single place, and a single act, he does so by design, in order to leave the theater a classical piece in the pure Greek sense — believing that what takes place in the soul by way of inner spiritual overflow is finer and more violent than what a multitude of varied scenes can produce, thereby defying the modern theatrical currents that prefer facility and entertainment to sober classical simplicity...

The debate that takes place between the Archbishop of Paris and the nuns of Port-Royal is nothing but the distillation of that struggle which lasted seventy years between the Jansenists on the one side and the Jesuits and the state on the other; nay, it is the distillation of the conflict between dry absolute idealism and the bent toward practical flexibility; or rather, let us say it is the essence of the ancient quarrel between the individual who dares to say "no" and the authority that tells him "be silent and obey"...

The author makes his position clear in a preface to his play, where he says that he tried to adopt the point of view of authority at one moment and the point of view of the Jansenists at another; for each side has its opinion, and each has a part to play within the broad Christianity that sometimes holds within its bosom two violent adversaries who love one another. He holds that Christianity has its tears and its sufferings — the tears of the nuns of Port-Royal, persecuted for no fault that could justify it, and the tears of the Archbishop, who imposes obedience and does not find it, and who sees in that disobedience a departure from the unity of the truth he represents... Christianity, then, lives by the sufferings it endures and by the sufferings it imposes...

When the nuns refuse to submit to the religious authority, the Archbishop imposes a punishment upon them: twelve nuns are to be removed from the convent of Port-Royal and deprived of the sacrament of Holy Communion. He addresses the Mother Superior:

— I am sorry, Mother, to cause you pain.

The Mother answers him in the tone of a believing Jansenist:

— Truly I tell you, I no longer feel pain; and if I do feel it, I do not distinguish the persons who are its instrument...

The Archbishop tries by every means of persuasion to turn them from their disobedience, saying:

— We have not asked of you anything impossible; all we want is obedience — like the others... Obedience like the others, nothing more...

— We are not like the others... That is our crime... That is the accusation brought against us...

— Obedience... that is all we ask... Your motto is: liberty, purity, truth? And I say to you: there is no liberty, no purity, no truth outside the authority I represent... Truth is one, and if it multiplies it has a name, and that name is being applied to you now...

— We cannot go against our conscience...

This dispute ends with the removal of the twelve nuns from Port-Royal, after each of them has knelt before the Archbishop to ask his blessing, and after he has asked each of them to remember him in her prayers in the hour of her sufferings in her prison...

The subject of the play does not stop at this point, but goes beyond it to what is weightier and more far-reaching. For the author calls upon us to look behind the well-known historical events, to discover the deep emotions that stir in suffering, frightened souls... With the lens of his piercing mind and his wide learning he takes aim, to reveal to us the secrets of two souls whom he chooses from within the walls of the persecuted convent, each of them made manifest in her progress toward blessed grace or toward dark doubt...

The first is Sister Angélique de Saint-Jean. Historians are all agreed that she was among the most astonishing personalities Port-Royal ever knew, and among the richest of them in soul. Yet she was the only one who faced a violent spiritual crisis that nearly destroyed her faith. She was intelligent and cultivated, known for her stubbornness and the firmness of her opinions; contradictions met in her, for she overflowed with feeling and love while wearing an appearance of deliberate hardness. And for all the sharpness of her intelligence and the breadth of her learning, she was weak of nerve, prey to violent disturbances of the soul that robbed her of sleep and cast her into deep spiritual distress... We see her, when persecution falls upon her convent, stiffening the resolve of the sisters to stand against the unjust current and hold firm in the face of the harsh authority... And here she is, at the same moment, in a violent spiritual struggle that all but destroys her faith, for doubt has begun to creep into her soul with its cold iron grip... And all the elements of the universe conspire to create this agonizing crisis — where is the escape? The religious authority demands obedience; the King stretches out the rod of his overwhelming power; the sisters flounder in emotions of every kind — among them the hesitant and the fearful, and among them the traitor... And the month is August... blazing August, heavy of tread, wrecking the nerves... And the hour: a decisive noon that seals the fate...

Sister Angélique confides her anxiety and her fear to Mother Agnès:

— Open to me the depths of your thought, Mother... What is destined for us? Persecution? Dispersion? Prison?...

— Do you believe in God, and yet fear anything?

— I fear myself, and I fear everything else... It seems to me that I carry my soul and rock it to make it forget its pains, as a weaned child is rocked to make him forget his nurse...

— The Church has preserved its truths by its sufferings more than it has preserved them by the truths themselves. So it is with individuals: the sufferings of their souls are fertile...

— And I tell you there are barren sufferings — dead sufferings that drag toward death everything they find in the soul, until that soul imagines it no longer believes in its Creator...

And she pours forth, like a terrifying volcano, a confession of anxiety mounting steadily until she says:

— I have passed through the gates of hell with a disgust and a shudder you cannot conceive...

Over against this suffering soul stands Sister Françoise, her pupil — nay, her spiritual nursling — who loved her greatly and looked upon her with admiration and esteem, finding in her the sound mind and the luminous richness of spirit. She would try to be guided by her wisdom, and had long received her correction and her reproof with submission and humility — until cruel fate came, and the thunderbolt fell with its iron fingers upon their convent, and her path proved other than her elder sister's. For while Sister Angélique was suffering the crisis of her faith, asking why God had abandoned her in the hour of distress, and why He did not deliver her pure and righteous convent from its tyrannical enemies, Sister Françoise was turning toward the cross to throw herself before it in supplication — and behold, grace filled her soul, and she felt a spiritual outpouring illuminating her... She confides this to Sister Angélique, who asks her:

— And how was your prayer? What words did you utter?

— I think I said: "My Lord and my God"...

— Nothing else?

— Nothing else...

— You said everything...

XXXX

This play was performed for the first time at the Comédie Française in December 1954, and was revived this year; up to the eleventh of last May it had been performed 208 times... The author says it is the last piece he will offer the theater, for after it he will write no play whatever — as though he wished to leave the modern theater his message of classicism, into which he has poured the distillation of his learning and his art; indeed, it is a mirror of his temperament, for he is a child of classicism, inclined by nature to seclusion and solitariness. He has often been accused of pride and of a feeling of scorn for his generation and his contemporaries; for he belongs to that small company that lives in its ivory tower and refuses to enroll in any school or particular tendency. And although he has written much about himself, proclaiming his beliefs and his positions — and they are many — he still perplexes the critics and disturbs a great many people. We do not think for a moment that he is one of the believers who carry the banner of the Church, for he values Christianity intellectually, not spiritually — but he commands by the breadth of his learning and the power of his eloquence...