QUESNEL, Pasquier (1634-1719), Roman Catholic theologian, was born in Paris on July 14, 1634, and, after graduating in the Sorbonne with distinction in 1653, joined the Congregation of the Fathers of the Oratory in 1657, receiving priest’s orders in 1659. In 1675 he published an edition of the works of Leo the Great, in the notes to which the Gallican liberties were defended. The work was consequently put upon the Index in the following year, and Quesnel’s relations with his ecclesiastical superiors became so strained that in 1681 he had to retire to Orleans. Four years later, finding himself unable to sign a document imposed on all members of the Oratory in condemnation of Jansenism, he fled to Brussels, where he was intimately associated with Arnauld, and where, encouraged by him, he published in 1694-95 a complete edition of the Réflexions Morales sur le Nouveau Testament, a work of edification on which he had first begun to engage himself shortly after joining the Oratory, and a part of which had appeared as early as about 1671. The nature of its contents, and still more the known sympathies of its author, made the book an object of unwearying Jesuit hostility; Quesnel was imprisoned for a short time in the palace of the archbishop of Mechlin in 1703, but happily succeeded in escaping into Holland; his papers, however (compromising, it is said, to many persons), fell into the hands of the enemy, and long were to the Père La Chaise his “pot au noir” (as he called it) by means of which he was able to darken the prospects of his adversaries as he chose. The bull Unigenitus, in which no fewer than 101 sentences from the Réflexions Morales were condemned as heretical, was obtained from Clement IX. in September 8, 1713 (see vol. xiii. p. 567). Quesnel died at ...