Arnauld Antoine (1612–94), French theologian and philosopher, perhaps the most important and best-known intellectual associated with the Jansenist community at Port-Royal, as well as a staunch and orthodox champion of Cartesian philosophy. His theological writings defend the Augustinian doctrine of efficacious grace, according to which salvation is not earned by one’s own acts, but granted by the irresistible grace of God. He also argues in favor of a strict contritionism, whereby one’s absolution must be based on a true, heartfelt repentance, a love of God, rather than a selfish fear of God’s punishment. These views brought him and Port-Royal to the center of religious controversy in seventeenth-century France, as Jansenism came to be perceived as a subversive extension of Protestant reform. Arnauld was also constantly engaged in philosophical disputation, and was regarded as one of the sharpest and most philosophically acute thinkers of his time. His influence on several major philosophers of the period resulted mainly from his penetrating criticism of their systems. In 1641, Arnauld was asked to comment on Descartes’s Meditations. The objections he sent – regarding, among other topics, the representational nature of ideas, the circularity of Descartes’s proofs for the existence of God, and the apparent irreconcilability of Descartes’s conception of material substance with the Catholic doctrine of Eucharistic transubstantiation – were considered by Descartes to be the most intelligent and serious of all. Arnauld offered his objections in a constructive spirit, and soon became an enthusiastic defender of Descartes’s philosophy, regarding it as beneficial both to the advancement of human learning and to Christian piety. He insists, for example, that the immortality of the soul is well grounded in Cartesian mind– body dualism. In 1662, Arnauld composed (with Pierre Nicole) the Port-Royal Logic, an influential treatise on language and reasoning. After several decades of theological polemic, during which he fled France to the Netherlands, Arnauld resumed his public philosophical activities with the publication in 1683 of On True and False Ideas and in 1685 of Philosophical and Theological Reflections on the New System of Nature and Grace. These two works, opening salvos in what would become a long debate, constitute a detailed attack on Malebranche’s theology and its philosophical foundations. In the first, mainly philosophical treatise, Arnauld insists that ideas, or the mental representations that mediate human knowledge, are nothing but acts of the mind that put us in direct cognitive and perceptual contact with things in the world. (Malebranche, as Arnauld reads him, argues that ideas are immaterial but nonmental objects in God’s understanding that we know and perceive instead of physical things. Thus, the debate is often characterized as between Arnauld’s direct realism and Malebranche’s representative theory.) Such mental acts also have representational content, or what Arnauld (following Descartes) calls ‘objective reality.’ This content explains the act’s intentionality, or directedness toward an object. Arnauld would later argue with Pierre Bayle, who came to Malebranche’s defense, over whether all mental phenomena have intentionality, as Arnauld believes, or, as Bayle asserts, certain events in the soul (e.g., pleasures and pains) are non-intentional.
This initial critique of Malebranche’s epistemology and philosophy of mind, however, was intended by Arnauld only as a prolegomenon to the more important attack on his theology; in particular, on Malebranche’s claim that God always acts by general volitions and never by particular volitions. This view, Arnauld argues, undermines the true Catholic system of divine providence and threatens the efficacy of God’s will by removing God from direct governance of the world.
In 1686, Arnauld also entered into discussions with Leibniz regarding the latter’s Discourse on Metaphysics. In the ensuing correspondence, Arnauld focuses his critique on Leibniz’s concept of substance and on his causal theory, the preestablished harmony. In this exchange, like the one with Malebranche, Arnauld is concerned to preserve what he takes to be the proper way to conceive of God’s freedom and providence; although his remarks on substance (in which he objects to Leibniz’s reintroduction of ‘substantial forms’) is also clearly motivated by his commitment to a strict Cartesian ontology – bodies are nothing more than extension, devoid of any spiritual element. Most of his philosophical activity in the latter half of the century, in fact, is a vigorous defense of Cartesianism, particularly on theological grounds (e.g., demonstrating the consistency between Cartesian metaphysics and the Catholic dogma of real presence in the Eucharist), as it became the object of condemnation in both Catholic and Protestant circles.
See also BAYLE, DESCARTES, LEIBNIZ , MALE- BRANCH. S.N.