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Because these men were showing the ‘courage of nuns,’ Jacqueline argued that the time had come for nuns to shake the ecclesiastical hierarchy from it’s foundations. She justified this bottom up initiative with a passage from St.Bernard of Clairvaux (1090-1153): St.Bernard teaches us through his wonderful manner of speaking that the most insignificant person within the Church not only can, but must, cry out with all her strength when she sees the bishops and pastors of the Church in the state that we now find them, when he said: ‘Who can find fault that I cry out, I who am a little lamb, to try to wake up my pastor when I believe that he is asleep and is about to be devoured by a cruel beast?’ Thus, Pascal justified the nuns actions by evoking the efforts of the order’s founder to defend the Church from royal encroachments. She then explained her disdain for the right/fact distinction with an analogy based on a hypothetical situation involving Augustine. She asked her reader to consider what Augustine would do if he had been ordered to sign a bull that confirmed the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. She assented that they both knew he would probably sign without hesitation. She then suggested that they consider what would happen if an infidel prince came to the throne in Augustine’s country and ordered him to sign a bull that denied the unity of God and instead ruled for a plurality of gods. She asked ‘Would Augustine sign this formulary in the interest of peace?.’ She answered, ‘I do not think so.’ She then suggested that one may claim that the nuns’ authority does not equal that of Augustine. To this objections she responded that, when one is talking about members of the Church, ‘the little weight of their authority makes them no less guilty if they use it against the truth.’ Even though the heading Jacqueline proposed for the nuns signatures relied on the tradition of treating women as ignorant and innocent in the Church, she defended it with arguments that had the force of asserting individual women’s right to reason and theological knowledge. Her defense of reason was inherent in her attack on the right/ fact distinction, in which she argued that ignorance was no excuse for using the distinction because doing so would be an act of evasion for women as much as for men. Her defense of women’s theological knowledge can be gleaned from the passage describing a hypothetical situation in which Augustine had to defend his ideas on the Trinity; Jacqueline probably deliberately chose this scenario as a way to cite his authority on the matter. Augustine used the mystery of the Trinity to argue for the spiritual equality of the sexes in book twelve of his work On the Holy Trinity. In addition to asserting gender equality in spiritual matters, Augustine also argued for people’s obligation to use knowledge to avoid sin. Although Jacqueline did not explicitly argue for women’s theological knowledge, her allusion to Augustine’s thoughts on the Trinity had the force of defending this knowledge because she drew attention to those writings where he defended female knowledge and spiritual equality.

From Absolutism, Feminism, Jansenism: Louis XIV and the Port Royal Nuns by Daniella Kostroun