‘L’Action héroïque de Monsieur Arnauld’: A Dramatic Episode at the Sorbonne, 1641

Abstract

This chapter deals with a university viva that took place in Paris on 25 July 1641. The thesis that was being examined hinged on a particular theological point: the question of whether the verb ‘to be’ may apply univocally to God and to humans. Antoine Arnauld had argued that it could indeed, and his student Charles Wallon de Beaupuis was now following his example. However, events soon took an unexpected turn when Arnauld changed his mind in situ. Here, I set the viva episode in the intellectual context of the summer of 1641 more broadly: a time when the protagonists in the viva episode were also responding to Descartes’s Meditations. Subsequent narrations of the viva episode by historians of Port-Royal prompt us to return to seventeenth-century ethical thinking on ‘générosité’ and ‘grandeur’.