At the abbey of Port-Royal-des-Champs in seventeenth-century France, a community of Jansenist nuns and lay intellectuals kept a school of rigorous Christian thought alive under royal suspicion. Blaise Pascal, Antoine Arnauld, and Jean Racine moved in and out of their orbit. From their walls came Pascal’s Pensées and The Port-Royal Logic, until Louis XIV ordered the abbey dismantled stone by stone.
“The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing.”
— PASCAL
