Introduction

Pierre Nicole (1625–95) was a French essayist, religious controversialist, and educator. His whole adult life was bound up with a French religious group known as the Jansenists and with the passionate theological controversies in which its members engaged. Although he spent much of his time teaching in and organizing Jansenist schools for the children of pious members of the aristocracy, it was his marked talents as a scholar and a polemical writer that made him indispensable to the movement. Nicole helped the great mathematician and religious thinker Blaise Pascal prepare the Provincial Letters (1656–7), a series of attacks on Jesuit casuistry that did more to destroy the credibility of that form of moral counseling than did any other single piece of work. With the Jansenist apologist Antoine Arnauld, Nicole composed the Port-Royal Logic (1662), a textbook used for generations. He also helped Arnauld prepare many defenses of Jansenism and himself against attacks by Jesuits and other defenders of orthodoxy. And from 1675 on, Nicole published ever-growing editions of his Moral Essays, a series of writings exhortative, analytical, or polemical by turn, some long, some short, dealing with innumerable aspects of people's relations with God and with one another.

The religious movement that so engrossed Nicole was named after Cornelis Jansen, the bishop of Ypres (1585–1638) who expounded his views on grace and salvation in a lengthy book entitled Augustinus, published in 1640 after his early death from the plague.