Pascal

6. The ‘Provincial Letters’

"Confess, my father, that your order has received an honour which it ill discharges. It abandons that grace which has been intrusted to it, and which has never been abandoned since the creation of the world. That victorious grace which was expected by patriarchs, predicted by prophets, introduced by Jesus Christ, preached by St Paul, explained by St Augustine, the greatest of the Fathers, embraced by his followers, confirmed by St Bernard, the last of the Fathers, sustained by St Thomas, the Angel of the Schools, transmitted by him to your order, maintained by so many of your fathers, and so gloriously defended by your monks under Popes Clement and Paul—that efficacious grace which was left in your hands as a sacred deposit, that it might always, in a sacred and enduring order, find preachers to proclaim it to the world till the end of time—finds itself deserted for interests utterly unworthy. It is time that other hands should arm themselves in its quarrel. It is time that God should raise up intrepid disciples to the Doctor of Grace, who, strangers to the entanglements of the world, should serve God for the sake of God. Grace may no longer count the Dominicans among her defenders; but she will never want defenders, for she creates them for herself by her own almighty strength. She demands pure and disengaged hearts, nay, she herself purifies and delivers them from worldly interests inconsistent with the truths of the Gospel. Consider well, my father, and take heed lest God remove the candle-stick from its place, and leave you in darkness and dishonour to punish the coldness which you have shown in a cause so important to His Church."

The first two Letters are closely connected. They deal with the special question between Arnauld and the Sorbonne. A short "Reply from the Provincial" is interposed between the second and third. This reply may be supposed to be a part of the device employed by Pascal to arouse public attention and circulate the Letters. The friend in the country tells how they have excited universal interest. Everybody has seen them, heard them, and believed them. They are valued not merely by theologians, but men of the world, and ladies, have found them intelligible and delightful reading. This is no exaggerated picture of the sensation which they produced. Their success was prodigious, and increased with every successive Letter. In an atmosphere charged with the theological spirit, yet wearied with the dulness of theological controversy, Pascal's mode of treating the subject came as a breath of new life. Here was one who was evidently no mere theologian—who knew human nature as well as Divine truth. His clear and penetrating intellect saw at once the many aspects of the dispute lying deep in the human interests and passions engaged; and as he touched these one by one, and by subtle and vivid strokes brought them to the front—as Molinist, New Thomist, and Jansenist appeared upon the scene, and showed in their natural characters what play of dramatic life was moving under all the dulness of the debate at the Sorbonne—there was a universal outcry of welcome. The Letters passed from hand to hand. The post-office reaped a harvest of profit; copies went through the whole kingdom.

"‘You can have no idea how much I am obliged to you for the Letter you sent me,' writes a friend to a lady; ‘it is so very ingenious, and so nicely written. It narrates without narrating. It clears up the most intricate matters possible; its raillery is exquisite; it enlightens those who know little of the subject, and imparts double delight to those who understand it. It is an admirable apology; and if they would take it, a delicate and innocent censure. In short, the Letter displays so much art, so much spirit, and so much judgment, that I burn with curiosity to know who wrote it.'"

This is the report of the Provincial; and if it is Pascal himself who speaks, he had little idea that his own badinage would be echoed by grave critics, in after-years, as not in excess of the actual merit of his productions. "The best comedies of Molière," says Voltaire, "have not more wit than the first Provincial Letters." It must be admitted that the brightness of the wit is somewhat dimmed after the lapse of two centuries. Even the genius of Pascal fails to lighten all the tortuous absurdities of controversies so purely verbal, and there is an occasional baldness in the clever device of pitting Molinist, New Thomist, and Jansenist against one another. The professed artlessness of the speeches is at times too apparent. But nothing, upon the whole, can be finer than the address with which this is done; the changes of scene and the turns of the dialogue are managed with admirable felicity; there is an exquisite fitness and Socratic point in all the evolutions of the argument, which we feel even now when we see so clearly behind the scenes, and know that Molinist and New Thomist must have had a good deal more to say for themselves. We have only to imagine the atmosphere of the Sorbonne, or the wider social atmosphere throughout France in the seventeenth century, impregnated to its core by a subtle controversial ecclesiasticism, to realise the impression made by "the Small Letters." The question everywhere was, Who could have written them? There seems at first to have been no suspicion of Pascal. He had previously only been known as a scientific writer; and the secret was, of course, jealously guarded. Although planned at Port Royal des Champs, he did not remain there while engaged in their composition. He repaired, as we have already said, to Paris, and after a while took up his abode "at a little inn opposite to the Jesuit College of Clermont, just behind the Sorbonne." Here he lodged with his brother-in-law, M. Périer, who had lately come to Paris; and here, too, the latter was visited by Père Defrétat, a Jesuit and distant relative, who came to tell him that the suspicions of the Society were beginning to point to Pascal. All the while Pascal was busy in the room below; and, "behind the closed curtains of the bed by the side of which they were talking, a score of fresh impressions of the seventh Letter were laid out to dry." {132}

Pascal rejoiced in his incognito. It was not till the controversy had somewhat advanced that he assumed the pseudonym Louis de Montalte. The third Letter he closed mysteriously with the letters E. A. A. B. P. A. F. D. E. P., which have been interpreted to mean "Et ancien ami Blaise Pascal, Auvergnat, fils de Étienne Pascal." There can be no doubt that he took a distinct pleasure in the anonymous wounds which he inflicted. He had a certain love of controversy from the beginning, a feeling of self-assertion when he took up a cause, and a personal ambition to triumph in it, which carried him forward, and which come out with almost painful vividness in the closing letters.

The rage of the Jesuits may be imagined. At first they hardly knew whether to laugh with the world or to be indignant. The first Letter was read in the dining-hall of the Sorbonne itself. Some were amused, others greatly provoked. But, as the Letters proceeded, there was no room for any feeling but indignation. It was so difficult to set forth any direct reply to productions mingling such a subtle irony with grave attack. They could only say of them, as they afterwards more formally did—Les menteurs immortelles. Of the first Letters it is said that 6000 copies were printed; but, as they were easily passed from hand to hand, this gives no idea of the numbers who actually read them. Their fame grew with each successive issue. More than 10,000 copies were printed of the seventeenth Letter; and editions of the earlier ones were so frequently reprinted, that it can no longer be told which belonged really to the first edition.

It is impossible, and would be useless, for us to attempt any description of the whole series of Letters. We have thought it right to dwell at some length on the first two, because they enter so directly into the controversy betwixt Pascal's friends and the Sorbonne, and because they are really, in some respects, the cleverest, if not the most valuable. The third Letter, on the "Censure of M. Arnauld," and again, the three concluding Letters, {133} are closely connected with the first two. Their object, in one form or another, is the defence of the Jansenist doctrine, and of the Port Royalists, as its supporters. The intervening twelve Letters stand quite by themselves. They open up the whole subject of the moral theology of the Jesuits, and constitute the most powerful assault probably ever directed against it. The subject is one which, in a volume like this, we can only touch upon, and this more with the view of drawing out the marked literary features of Pascal's assault, than of meddling with the merits of the controversy which he waged so relentlessly. In the meantime, we must wind up, as briefly as possible, the more personal aspects of the controversy.

Between the date of the second and the third Letter, the process before the Sorbonne had been finished, and M. Arnauld's censure pronounced. The third Letter deals with this censure. The writer represents the long preparation for it, the manner in which the Jansenists had been denounced as the vilest of heretics, "the cabals, factions, errors, schisms, and outrages with which they have been so long charged." Who would not have thought, in such circumstances, that the "blackest heresy imaginable" would have come forth under the condemning touch of the Sorbonne? All Christendom waited for the result. It was true that M. Arnauld had backed up his opinions by the clearest quotations from the Fathers, expressing apparently the very things with which he had been charged. But points of difference imperceptible to ordinary eyes would no doubt be made clear under the penetration of so many learned doctors. Thoughts of this kind kept everybody in a state of breathless suspense waiting for the result. "But, alas! how has the expectation been balked! Whether the Molinist doctors have not deigned to lower themselves to the level of instructing us, or for some other secret reason, they have done nothing else than pronounce the following words: ‘This proposition is rash, impious, blasphemous, deserving of anathema, and heretical!'"

It was not to be wondered at, in the circumstances, that people were in a bad humour, and were beginning to think that after all there may have been no real heresy in M. Arnauld's proposition. A heresy which could not be defined, except in general terms of abuse, seemed at the least doubtful. The writer is puzzled, as usual, and has recourse to "one of the most intelligent of the Sorbonnists" who had been so far neutral in the discussion, and whom he asks to point out the difference betwixt M. Arnauld and the Fathers. The "intelligent" Sorbonnist is amused at the naïveté of the inquiry. "Do you fancy," he says, "that if they could have found any difference they would not have pointed it out?" But why, then, pursues the ingenuous inquirer, should they in such a case pass censure?—

"‘How little you understand the tactics of the Jesuits!' is the answer. ‘How few will ever look into the matter beyond the fact that M. Arnauld is condemned! Let it be only cried in the streets, "Here is the condemnation of M. Arnauld!" This is enough to give the Jesuits a triumph with the unthinking populace. This is the way in which they live and prosper. Now it is by a catechism in which a child is made to condemn their opponents; now by a procession, in which Sufficient Grace leads Efficacious Grace in triumph; and by-and-by by a comedy, in which the devils carry off Jansen; sometimes by an almanac; and now by this censure.' The truth is, that it is M. Arnauld himself, and not merely his opinions, that are obnoxious. Even M. le Moine himself admitted ‘that the same proposition would have been orthodox in the mouth of any other; it is only as coming from M. Arnauld that the Sorbonne have condemned it.' . . . Here is a new species of heresy," concludes the writer. "It is not the sentiments of M. Arnauld that are heretical, but only his person. It is a case of personal heresy. He is not a heretic for anything he has said or written, but simply because he is M. Arnauld. This is all they can say against him. Whatever he may do, unless he cease to exist he will never be a good Catholic. The grace of St Augustine will never be the true grace while he defends it. It would be all right were he only to combat it. This would be a sure stroke, and almost the only means of establishing it and destroying Molinism. Such is the fatality of any opinions which he embraces."

In the three concluding Letters, as we have said, Pascal reverts to the special subject of Jansenism and Port Royal. These Letters are considerably longer than the opening ones. It is of the sixteenth, in fact, that he makes the well-known remark, that "it was very long because he had no time to make it shorter." Upon the whole, also, these Letters are less happy in style and manner. It is evident that Pascal, if he gave blows which made his opponents and the opponents of Port Royal wince, also received some bruises in return. The shamelessness of the attacks made upon his friends and himself, contemptible as they were in their nature, left scars upon a mind and temper so sensitive and reserved as his. The "insufferable audacity" with which "holy nuns and their directors" had been charged with disbelieving the mysteries of the faith was "a crime which God alone was capable of punishing." To bear such a charge required a degree of humility equal to that of the nuns themselves—to believe it, "a degree of wickedness equal to that of their wretched defamers." As for himself, it seemed enough to say of him that he belonged to Port Royal, as if it were only at Port Royal that there could be found those capable of defending the purity of Christian morality. He knew and honoured the work of the pious recluses who had retired to that monastery, although "he had never had the honour of belonging to them." And in the seventeenth Letter he says:—

"I have no more to say than that I am not a member of that community, and to refer you to my letters, in which I have declared that ‘I am a private individual;' and again in so many words that ‘I am not of Port Royal.' . . . You may touch Port Royal if you choose, but you shall not touch me. You may turn people out of the Sorbonne, but that will not turn me out of my lodging."

These statements, of course, are to be received as so far a part of the disguise under which Pascal pursued his task. It was true that he had no official connection with Port Royal, that he was under no rule to live in its retirements, and that he was only occasionally found there. He was singularly free, "without engagements, entanglement, relationship, or business of any kind." All the same he was a Port Royalist in sympathy and community of opinion. The interests of Port Royal were his interests, and its friends his friends. His own sister was one of its zealous inmates. There is a certain force, therefore, in the taunt that Pascal, in "unmasking the duplicity of the Jesuits, did not hesitate to imitate it." His statements are not beyond the licence accorded to those who would drive an enemy off the scent, and shelter themselves within an anonymity which they have chosen to assume; but they are none the less artful and misleading. They justify themselves as the fence of the littérateur, hardly as the armour of the moralist. But the truth is, that long before this Pascal had warmed to his work as a controversialist. He was determined to give no advantage, and to spare no weapons within the bounds of decency, that might make the Jesuits feel the force of his assault. Their accusation of heresy especially exasperated him.

"When was I ever seen at Charenton?" {138} he says in the seventeenth Letter, addressed to the Jesuit Father Annat. "When have I failed in my presence at mass, or in my Christian duty to my parish church? What act of union with heretics, or of schism with the Church, can you lay to my charge? What council have I contradicted? What Papal constitution have I violated? You must answer, father; else—you know what I mean."

The Jansenist doctrine of grace, as we have already explained, approached indefinitely the doctrine of Calvin. Both were derived from Augustine; and St Thomas, as his interpreter, handed on to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the precious deposit. The line of thought was continuous, and it was not easy to break it at Calvin, and isolate him as a heretic, while holding to other teachers as Catholic and orthodox. This was the dilemma of the New Thomists, so pithily expressed by one of themselves in the second Letter. But it was also Pascal's own dilemma; and the consciousness which he and his friends had of the nearness of the Jansenist doctrine to that of Calvin, made them all the more sensitive under the charge of heresy. The Jesuits had art enough to see the advantages which came from this association. The Port Royalists and Pascal failed in the magnanimity which clung to a truth no less because it was identified with an abused name. They insisted upon distinguishing between the tenets of Jansen and Calvinism. If what the Papal decree meant and the Sorbonne meant in the condemnation of the Jansenist proposition was that they condemned the doctrines of Calvin, then they were all agreed.—Jesuits, Jansenists, and Port Royalists.

"Was that all you meant, father?" asks Pascal in his concluding Letter. "Was it only the error of Calvin that you were so anxious to get condemned under the name of ‘the sense of Jansen'? Why did you not tell us this sooner? you might have saved yourself a world of trouble; for we were all ready without the aid of bulls or briefs to join with you in condemning that error. . . . Now, when you have come the length of declaring that the error which you oppose is the heresy of Calvin, it must be apparent to every one that they [the Port Royalists] are innocent of all error; for so decidedly hostile are they to this, the only error with which you charge them, that they protest by their discourses, by their books, by every mode, in short, in which they can testify their sentiments, that they condemn that heresy with their whole heart, and in the same manner in which it has been condemned by the Thomists, whom you acknowledge without scruple to be Catholics."

The professed point of difference stated in the same Letter—namely, that the Thomists and Sorbonnists (and of course the Port Royalists with them) held that efficacious grace is resistible, while Calvin held that it was irresistible—may or may not hold in reference to special expressions of Calvin. But there is nothing, upon the whole, stronger in Calvin than there is in Augustine on the subject of grace; and on the other hand, an "efficacious grace," which is "resistible"—which the human heart can accept or repel at will—seems open to all the ironical play which Pascal directs so skilfully in his first Letters against the Jesuit doctrine of a sufficient grace which is not yet sufficient. The truth is, that apart from verbal subtleties, which Pascal could handle no less familiarly, only far more skilfully, than his adversaries, there is no rational position intermediate between the Pelagian doctrine (which is also substantially the Aristotelian) of free will and moral habit, and the Augustinian doctrine of Divine grace and spiritual inspiration. The source of character is either from within the character itself, which has power to choose good and to be good if it will, or it is from a higher source—the grace of God, and the power of a Divine ordination. These are the only real lines of controversy. The Christian thinker may decline controversy on such a subject altogether, acknowledging that the mystery of character is in its roots beyond our ken,—that we know not, and in the nature of the case cannot know, where the Human ends and the Divine begins. In such a case there is no room for argument. But we cannot with consistency step off one line on to the other. In other words, we cannot logically abuse Calvin while we hold with Augustine, or profess to revere St Thomas while we abuse Jansen.

But it is more than time to turn from this side of the ‘Provincial Letters.' This was the controversy out of which they sprang—which mingles itself most with the personality of Pascal—and hence it has claimed a somewhat detailed treatment. The great subject to which the intervening and chief portion of the Letters is directed is not, indeed, more important in itself, but it is more diversified, and more practically interesting. Here, however, Pascal was more obviously performing a task than in the other Letters. He was speaking less out of his heart. Having grappled with the Jesuits, and noticed their tactics in the affair of the Sorbonne, he is led to look into their whole system. He takes up their books and studies them, in part at least; while his friends Nicole and Arnauld also study them for him. And the result is the remarkable and memorable assault contained in his thirteen Letters—from the fourth to the sixteenth—directed against all the main principles of the Jesuit system.

It would lead us quite away from our purpose to enter into the range of this great controversy, or to endeavour to estimate its value, or the merits of the attack and defence on particular points. The subject is one by itself, more or less entering into the whole question of morals, and especially the immense fabric of casuistry or moral theology built up by successive teachers in the Jesuit schools. Trained, as he was, a devout disciple of the Roman Church, enthusiastic on behalf of its doctrines and preachers, Pascal had apparently no knowledge of the details of Jesuit doctrine and morality before he began his task of inquiry and assault. Austere and simple in his own principles of virtue, direct and unbending in his modes of action, he was evidently appalled by the study of the Jesuit system, and the endless complexities of compromise and evasion which it presented. In seizing, as he did everywhere, upon the immoral aspects of the system, and touching them with the most graphic colours of exposure, he cannot be said to be unfair; for the materials with which he dealt were all abundant in their writings. His quotations may be sometimes taken at random, and may set forth, without any of the alleviating shades surrounding them in their proper context, special points as parts of a general sequence of thought. They were, no doubt, often furnished to him by Nicole or Arnauld, who hunted them through the immense volumes of casuistical divinity in which they were contained. But there is no reason to suppose that in any case he has been guilty of misquotation, or that he has attributed sentiments to the Jesuit doctors not to be found in them. This is very much his own statement:—

"I have been asked if I have myself read all the books which I have quoted. I answer, No. If I had done so, I must have passed a great part of my life in reading very bad books; but I have read Escobar twice through, and I have employed some of my friends in reading the others. But I have not made use of a single passage without having myself read it in the book from which it is cited, without having examined the subject of which it treats, and without having read what went before and followed, so that I might run no risk of quoting an objection as an answer, which would have been blameworthy and unfair."

No doubt this is true. There is all, and more than all, that Pascal quoted to be found in the Jesuit writings, and his own language is not too strong in speaking of much that he quotes as "abominable." Notwithstanding, it may be said that the effect of his representation is a certain unfairness towards the Jesuits. He presses them at a cruel advantage when he insists upon developing from his own point of view, or still more from the mouth of some of their too simple followers, all the practical consequences of their special rules. The system of casuistry was one not solely of Jesuitical invention. It was the necessary outgrowth of the radical Roman principle of Confession. Nay, it flourished to some extent within the Protestant Church itself in the seventeenth century, as the writings of two very different men, Jeremy Taylor and Richard Baxter, show. Once admit the principle of directing the conscience by external rather than internal authority, and you lay a foundation upon which any amount of folly, and even crime, may be built up. This was the general principle of Jesuitism as a system of education; but it came to it from the Church which Pascal, no less than the Jesuits, revered. Nay, it was in its general character a principle as characteristic of Port Royal as of Loyola and his followers. There is the enormous difference, no doubt, that the ethics of Port Royal were comparatively faithful to the essential principles of morality which Nature and the Gospel alike teach—that its practical excesses were quite in a different direction from the laxity of the Jesuits. But two things are to be remembered, not in favour of the Jesuits, but in explanation of their excesses: 1st, that they aimed, as Pascal himself points out, at governing the world, and not merely a sect—that their whole idea of the Church in relation to the world was different from that of the Port Royalists; and 2d, that their system of morals not merely rested on a wrong and dangerous principle (which Pascal's no less did), but had been endlessly developed in their schools by many inferior hands. This was Pascal's great weapon against them, and so far it was quite a legitimate weapon, as he himself claimed. As none of their books could appear without sanction, the Order was more or less responsible for all the frightful principles set forth in some of these books. All the same, it is not to be presumed that such a system of moral, or rather immoral, consequences was deliberately designed by the Society. Pascal himself exempts them from such a charge. "Their object," he says, "is not the corruption of manners; . . . but they believe it for the good of religion that they should govern all consciences, and so they have evangelical or severe maxims for managing some sorts of people, while whole multitudes of lax casuists are provided for the multitude that prefer laxity." {144a} The Jesuit system of morality, in short, was the growth of the Jesuit principle of accommodation, added on to the Roman principle of external authority. Looking at morality entirely from without, as an artificial mode of regulating life and society for the supreme good of the Church, the Jesuit casuists were driven, under the necessities of such a system, from point to point, till all essential moral distinction was lost in the mechanical manipulations of their schools. Whatever happened, no man or woman was to be lost to the Church; the complications of human interest and passion were to be brought within its fold and smoothed into some sort of decent seeming, rather than cast beyond its pale and made the prey of its enemies. {144b} The task was a hopeless one. In the pages of Pascal the Jesuits too obviously make a deplorable business both of religion and morality. But they were as much the victims as the authors of a system which Rome had sanctioned, and which came directly from the claims which it made to govern the world not merely by spiritual suasion, but by external influence. Jesuitism may be bad, and the Jesuit morality exposed by Pascal abominable, but the one and the other are the natural outgrowth of a Church which had become a mechanism for the regulation of human conduct, rather than a spiritual power addressing freely the human heart and conscience.

Our space will not admit of an analysis of the thirteen Letters dealing with the Jesuits, and we can hardly give any quotations from them. Suffice it to say, that Pascal passes in the fourth Letter to a direct assault upon the Society. "Nothing can equal the Jesuits," the Letter begins. "I have seen Jacobins, doctors, and all sorts of people; but such a visit as I have made today baffles everything, and was necessary to complete my knowledge of the world." He then describes his visit to a very clever Jesuit, accompanied by his trusty Jansenist friend, and gradually unfolds from the mouth of the former the whole system of moral theology which had grown up in the Jesuit schools,—their notions of "actual grace," or the necessity of a special conscious knowledge that an act is evil, and ought to be avoided, before we can be said to be guilty of sin in committing the act; their famous doctrines of probabilism and of directing the intention, and all the consequences springing out of them. Nothing can be more ingenious than the manner in which the Jesuit is led forward to unfold point after point of his hateful system, as if it were one of the greatest boons which had ever been invented for mankind, until from concession to concession he is plunged into the most horrible conclusions, and the Jansenist can stand the disclosures no longer, but breaks forth in the end of the tenth Letter into a powerful and eloquent denunciation of the doctrines to which he has been listening.

Any lighter vein that may have lingered in the Letters is abandoned from this point. Pascal ceases to address his friend in the country; the playful interchange that sprang from the idea of a third party, to whom Pascal was supposed to be merely reporting what he had heard, occurs no more. He turns to the Jesuit fathers directly, and addresses them, as if unable any longer to restrain his indignation, commencing the eleventh Letter with an admirable defence of his previous tone, and of the extent to which he had used the weapon of ridicule in assailing them, and passing on to reiterate his charges, and to repel the calumnies with which they had assailed him and his Port Royalist friends. The reader may weary, perhaps, for a little, as he threads his way through the successive accusations, and the monotonous train of evil principles which underlies them all, more or less. He may wish that Pascal had gone to the roots of the system more completely, and had laid bare its germinal falsehood, instead of heaping detail upon detail, and always adding a darker hue to the picture which he draws. But any such mode of treatment would not half so well have served his purpose. His audience were not prepared for any philosophy of exposure, still less for any attack upon the essential principles of the Church; he himself did not see how the successive laxities which he fixes with his poignant satire, or sets in the light of his withering scorn, spring from a vicious conception of Christianity and of the office of the Church. He does what he does, however, with exquisite effect; and the Jesuit Order, many and powerful as have been its opponents, never before nor since felt itself more keenly and unanswerably assailed. Many of them were forced to laugh at the picture of their own follies, and the immoral nonsense which distilled from the lips of Father Bauny and others, in explanation or defence of their practices. "Read that," says the confidential Jesuit who expounds to Pascal their system: "it is ‘The Summary of Sins,' by Father Bauny; the fifth edition, you see, which shows that it is a good book. ‘In order to sin,' says Father Bauny, ‘it is necessary to know that the thing we wish to do is not good.'" "A capital commencement," I remarked. "Yet," said he, "only think how far envy will carry some people. It was on this very passage that M. Hallier, before he became one of our friends, quizzed Father Bauny, saying of him ‘Ecce qui tollit peccata mundi—Behold the man who taketh away the sins of the world.'" {147} Then after an elaborate description of all that goes to make a sin—

"‘O my dear sir,' cried I, ‘what a blessing this will be to some friends of my acquaintance! You have never, perhaps, in all your life met with people who have fewer sins to account for! In the first place, they never think of God at all, still less of praying to Him; so that, according to M. le Moine, they are still in a state of baptismal innocence. They have never had a thought of loving God, or of being contrite for their sins; so that, according to Father Annat, they have never committed sin through the want of charity and penitence. . . . I had always supposed that the less a man thought of God the more he sinned; but from what I see now, if one could only succeed in bringing himself not to think of God at all, everything would be peace with him in all time coming. Away with your half-and-half sinners who have some love for virtue! They will be damned every one of them. But as for your out-and-out sinners, hardened and without mixture, thorough and determined in their evil courses, hell is no place for them. They have cheated the devil by stern devotion to his service!'" {148}

It is in hits like these, everywhere scattered throughout the earlier letters, to which no translation can do justice, and which lose half their edge by being separated from their context, that the wit of Pascal shines. A more delicate, and at the same time more scathing irony, cannot be conceived. He hits with the lightest stroke, and in the most natural manner, yet his lash cuts the flesh, and leaves an intolerable smart. All that could be said in answer was, that his representations were lies. They were conscious exaggerations, no doubt, as all satirical representations are. This is of their very nature. But the extent to which they told, and the bitterness of the feeling which they excited at the time, and have continued to excite amongst the Jesuits and their friends, show how much truth there was in them. Nothing can be more pitiful and less satisfactory than mere complaints of their falsehood. Such complaints were hardly to have been expected from any other quarter than the Jesuits themselves. Yet even Chateaubriand, in his new-born zeal for the Church, could say of their author, "Pascal is only a calumniator of genius. He has left us an immortal lie."

Of the graver part of the Letters, the following are the only extracts that our space will permit:—

JESUIT LAXITY AND CHRISTIAN INDIGNATION.

"Such is the way in which our teachers have discharged men from the ‘painful' obligation of actually loving God. And so advantageous a doctrine is this, that our Fathers Annat, Pintereau, Le Moine, and A. Sirmond even, have defended it vigorously when assailed by any one. You have only to consult their answers in the ‘Moral Theology;' that of Father Pintereau, in particular (second part), will enable you to judge of the value of this dispensation by the price which it has cost, even the blood of Jesus. This is the crown of such a doctrine." (A quotation is then given from Father Pintereau to the effect that it is a characteristic of the new Evangelical law, in contrast to the Judaical, that "God has lightened the troublesome and arduous obligation of exercising an act of perfect contrition in order to be justified.") "‘O father,' said I, ‘no patience can stand this any longer. One cannot hear without horror such sentiments as I have been listening to.' ‘They are not my sentiments,' said the monk. ‘I know that well; but you have expressed no aversion to them; and far from detesting the authors of such maxims, you cherish esteem for them. Do you not fear that your consent will make you a participator in their guilt? Was it not sufficient to allow men so many forbidden things under cover of your palliations? Was it necessary to afford them the occasion of committing crimes that even you cannot excuse by the facility and assurance of absolution which you offer them? . . . The licence which your teachers have assumed of tampering with the most holy rules of Christian conduct amounts to a total subversion of the Divine law. They violate the great commandment which embraces the law and the prophets; they strike at the very heart of piety; they take away the spirit which giveth life. They say that the love of God is not necessary to salvation; they even go the length of professing that this dispensation from loving God is the special privilege which Jesus Christ has brought into the world. This is the very climax of impiety. The price of the blood of Jesus, the purchase for us of a dispensation from loving Him! Before the incarnation we were under the necessity of loving God. But since God has so loved the world as to give His only Son for it, the world, thus redeemed by Him, is discharged from loving Him! Strange theology of our time!—to take away the anathema pronounced by St Paul against those "who love not the Lord Jesus Christ;" to blot out the saying of St John, that "he that loveth not abideth in death;" and the words of Jesus Christ Himself, "He that loveth me not keepeth not my commandments!" In this manner those who have never loved God in life are rendered worthy of enjoying Him throughout eternity. Behold the mystery of iniquity accomplished! Open your eyes, my father; and if you have remained untouched by the other distortions of your Casuists, let this last by its excess compel you to abandon them.'" {150a}

DEFENCE OF RIDICULE AS A WEAPON IN CONTROVERSY.

"What, my fathers! must the imaginations of your doctors pass for faithful verities? Must we not expose the sayings of Escobar, {150b} and the fantastic and unchristian statements of others, without being accused of laughing at religion? Is it possible you have dared to repeat anything so unreasonable? and have you no fear that in blaming me for ridiculing your absurdities, you were merely furnishing me with a fresh subject of arousing attack, and of pointing out more clearly that I have not found in your books any subject of laughter which is not in itself intensely ridiculous; and that in making a jest of your moral maxims, I am as far from making a jest of holy things as the doctrine of your Casuists distant from the holy doctrine of the Gospel? In truth, sirs, there is a vast difference between laughing at religion and laughing at those who profane it by their extravagant opinions. It were an impiety to fail in respect for the great truths which the Divine Spirit has revealed; but it would be no less impiety of another kind to fail in contempt for falsehoods which the spirit of man has opposed to them. . . . Just as Christian truths are worthy of love and respect, the errors which oppose them are worthy of contempt and hatred: for as there are two things in the truths of our religion—a divine beauty which renders them lovable, and a holy majesty which renders them venerable; so there are two things in such errors—an impiety which makes them horrible, and an impertinence which renders them ridiculous." {151a}

Many examples from the Scriptures and the Fathers are then quoted in defence of the practice of directing ridicule against error; and he closes with a singularly appropriate passage from Tertullian: "Nothing is more due to vanity than laughter; it is the Truth properly that has a right to laugh, because she is cheerful—and to make sport of her enemies, because she is sure of victory."

"Do you not think, my fathers, that this passage is singularly applicable to our subject? The letters which I have hitherto written are ‘only a little sport before the real combat.' As yet I have been only playing with the foils, and ‘rather indicating the wounds that might be given you than inflicting any.' I have merely exposed your sayings to the light, without commenting on them. ‘If they have excited laughter, it is only because they are so laughable in themselves.' These sayings come upon us with such surprise, it is impossible to help laughing at them; for nothing produces laughter more than surprising disproportion between what one hears and what one expects. In what other way could the most of these matters be treated? for, as Tertullian says, ‘To treat them seriously would be to sanction them.'" {151b}

APPEAL AGAINST THE JESUITS.

"Too long have you deceived the world, and abused the confidence which men have put in your impostures. It is high time to vindicate the reputation of so many people whom you have calumniated; for what innocence can be so generally acknowledged as not to suffer contamination from the daring aspersion of a society of men scattered throughout the world, who, under religious habits, cover irreligious minds; who perpetrate crimes as they concoct slanders—not against, but in conformity with, their own maxims? No one can blame me, surely, for having destroyed the confidence which you might otherwise have inspired, since it is far more just to vindicate for so many good people whom you have decried, the reputation for piety they deserved, than to leave you a reputation for sincerity which you have never merited. And as the one could not be done without the other, how important was it to make the world understand what you really are. This is what I have begun to do; but it will require time to complete the work. The world, however, shall hear of you, my fathers, and all your policy will not avail to shelter you. The very efforts you make to ward off the blow will only serve to convince the least enlightened that you are afraid, and that, smitten in your own consciences by my charges, you have had recourse to every expedient to prevent exposure." {152}

The effect of the ‘Provincial Letters' was not only to alarm the Jesuits, but the Church. The scandal of their exposure was so deeply felt, that the curés of Paris and Rouen appointed committees to investigate the accuracy of Pascal's quotations, and the result of their investigation was entirely in Pascal's favour. This led ultimately to the matter being carried before a General Assembly of the clergy of Paris, which, however, declined to give any formal decision. In the meantime, an ‘Apology for the Casuists' was published by a Jesuit of the name of Pirot, of such a character as to increase rather than abate the scandal, and a new controversy gathered around this publication. The Sorbonne took up the question, and, after examination, condemned Pirot's Apology (July 1658) as they had formerly done Arnauld's propositions, and ultimately it was included by Rome in the ‘Index Expurgatorius,' along with the ‘Provincial Letters,' to which it was designed as a reply. While the question was before the Sorbonne, the curés of Paris published various writings, under the name of ‘Facta,' in support of the conclusions to which they had come. These writings were prepared in concert with Pascal and his friends, and the second and fifth are ascribed entirely to his pen. It is even said that he looked upon the latter, in which he drew a parallel betwixt the Jesuits and Calvinists (to the disadvantage of the Protestants), as the best thing he ever did. {153} Long after Pascal's death (in 1694) an elaborate answer appeared, by Father Daniel, to the ‘Provincial Letters,' under the title of ‘Entretiens de Cléandre et d'Eudoxe sur les Lettres au Provincial;' but notwithstanding a certain amount of learning and apparent candour, the reply made no impression upon the public. Even the Jesuits themselves felt it to be a failure. "Father Daniel," it was said, "professed to have reason and truth on his side; but his adversary had in his favour what goes much farther with men,—the arms of ridicule and pleasantry." As late as 1851 an edition of the ‘Letters' appeared by the Abbé Maynard, accompanied by a professed refutation of their misstatements. But the truth is, Pascal's work is one of those which admit of no adequate refutation. Even if it be granted that he has occasionally made the most of a quotation, and brought points together which, taken separately in their connection, have not the offensive meaning attributed to them, this touches but little the reader who has enjoyed their exquisite raillery or has been moved by their indignant denunciation. The real force of the Letters lies in their wit and eloquence—their mingled comedy and invective. They may be parried or resented—they can never be refuted.

We have already quoted Voltaire's saying, "The best comedies of Molière have not more wit than the first Provincial Letters." "Bossuet," he added, "has nothing more sublime than the concluding ones." They were regarded by him as "models of eloquence and pleasantry," as the "first work of genius" that appeared in French prose. When Bossuet himself was asked of what work he would most wish to have been the author, he answered, "The ‘Provincial Letters.'" Madame de Sévigné writes of them (Dec. 21, 1689): "How charming they are! . . . Is it possible to have a more perfect style, an irony finer, more delicate, more natural, more worthy of the Dialogues of Plato? . . . And what seriousness of tone, what solidity, what eloquence in the last eight Letters!" Our Gibbon attributed to the frequent perusal of them his own mastery of "grave and temperate irony." Boileau pronounced them "unsurpassed" in ancient or modern prose. Encomiums could hardly go higher, and yet the language of Perrault is in a still higher strain: "There is more wit in these eighteen Letters than in Plato's Dialogues; more delicate and artful raillery than in those of Lucian; and more strength and ingenuity of reasoning than in the orations of Cicero." Their style especially is beyond all praise. It has "never been surpassed, nor perhaps equalled." There may be, as there is apt to be in all such concurrent verdicts, a strain of excess. The duller English sense may not catch all the finer edges of a style which it may yet feel to be exquisite in its general clearness, harmony, and point; the absurdities of verbal argument and of Jesuit sophistry may sometimes pall upon the attention, and hardly raise a smile at this time of day. It is the fate of even the finest polemical literature to grow dead as it grows old; yet none can doubt the immortality of the genius which has so long given life to such a controversy, and charmed so many of the highest judges of literary form. It is not for any Englishman to challenge the verdict of a Frenchman in a matter of style.

Pascal himself evidently thought highly of his success. He liked the controversy, its excitement, and the applausive echo which followed each Letter. Like every true artist, he felt the joy and yet the gravity of his work. He took up his pen with a pleasurable sense of mastery, and yet he wrote some of the Letters six or seven times over. He spared no pains, yet he never wearied. All his intellectual life for the time was thrown into the controversy, and his most finely-tempered strokes made music in his own mind, while they carried confusion to his adversaries and triumph to his friends. The sensation made by the Letters was, of course, mainly confined to France; but the nervous Latinity of Nicole soon communicated something of the same sensation to a wider circle. {156} Pascal has himself told us that he never repented having written them, nor "the amusing, agreeable, ironical style" in which they were written. Even the condemnation of the Papal See, abject in some respects as was his devotion to his Church, did not move him on this point. He left on record, amongst his Thoughts, the following solemn declaration: "IF MY LETTERS ARE CONDEMNED IN ROME, WHAT I CONDEMN IN THEM IS CONDEMNED IN HEAVEN. AD TUUM, DOMINE JESU, TRIBUNAL APPELLO."