Pierre NICOLE

First edition of this volume 14 of the Essais de morale, whose volumes appeared separately and whose publication spanned several decades. Copy entirely ruled.
Contemporary full old red morocco binding. Jansenist spine with raised bands. Gilt title. Roulette on edges and interior fillet. A slight lack at foot. One leaf sprung. One corner slightly bumped. Dark areas on lower board.
Pierre Nicole was, with Antoine Arnauld, one of the principal authors of Jansenism. Gouget drew upon several manuscripts, notably the memoirs of Nicole's greatest friend, to write a detailed history of Nicole's life, whose purpose is not to draw a portrait but to establish the actions and facts of his existence. At the beginning of the work, a complete bibliography of P. Nicole's works.

First edition. This copy has an autograph inscription from Pierre Nicole to his student and friend M. [Louis] Angran. It also contains two manuscript additions (pp. 48 and 329), most probably from the hand of the author.

Contemporary speckled sheep. Spine in six compartments with gilt fleurons. Gilt roulettes to head- and tail-pieces. All edges speckled red. Two little wormholes to spine, a few more to covers. Joints rubbed and a little cracked. Library label to pastedown.

Louis Angran (1622-1706), from an important family of magistrates near Port-Royal, with ties of kinship to the Arnaulds, was a student of Pierre Nicole alongside Jean Racine in the “little schools” of Port-Royal-des-Champs. Graduating in Theology from the Sorbonne (in 1645) and Canon of Troyes, Louis Angran was part of the Jansenist deputation to Rome on behalf of Augustinus in 1653. It was at his house that Pierre Nicole, under the pseudonym of M. Rosny, stayed during his time in Paris with Antoine Arnauld. Louis Angran was also, with Nicole, one of the principal actors in the Nordstrands affair, the island where the Jansenists deposited their valuables from Port-Royal for fear of persecution.

This precious autograph inscription bears witness to the lifelong faithful friendship that bound pupil and master.

Prior to the revocation of the edict of Nantes in 1685, most polemicist theological writers criticized the Protestant Church on the points of doctrine that separated it from the Catholic Church. The Port-Royal writers, essentially Arnauld and Nicole, were the heralds of the Roman Church, and thus took part in theological jousts with Protestant authors, notably Pierre Jurieu, which sometimes lasted years.

De l'unité de l'église [On the unity of the Church] thus presents itself as a response to Jurieu’s work published in 1686, Le Vrai Système de l'église [The True System of the Church], but the latter was already an attack on Nicole’s Prétendus réformés convaincus de schisme [The pseudo-Reformed determined on Schism]. Each of these books – and there were many of them – follow the same pattern: a systematic and paraphrasing analysis of each chapter of the book under attack, polemicists being alive to the slightest contradiction or imprecision. Thus Jurieu in Le Vrai Système de l'église concludes from Nicole’s book that if the Catholic Church is meant to be universal as the Church of Christ – which he notes it most assuredly isn’t – it contributes by its arbitrary power to the schismatic position of the Protestants. Each of these works pursues the same goal, which is to decry their opponent, render null their attempts to do down the other’s knowledge of their subject, and thus destroy the religious cause it defends. In mounting a constant critique of the aforementioned work by Jurieu, Pierre Nicole asserts once more that there can be only one Church, and only the Catholic Church is the universal Church, which he proves by copiously quoting the Church Fathers. In terms of history, it may seem ironic that the champions of the Catholic cause should emerge from the Port-Royal of the 17th century, when the entire religious community was banned from the abbey in 1709 and the place razed in 1712.

Autograph inscriptions from the 17th century are extremely rare.