To the full understanding of the Provincials, however, some idea of the controversies which occasioned their publication seems almost indispensable. This I have attempted to furnish in the Historical Introduction; which will also be found to contain some interesting facts, hitherto uncollected, and borrowed from a variety of authorities not generally accessible, illustrating the history of the Letters, and the parties concerned in them, with a vindication of Pascal from the charges which this work has provoked from so many quarters against him.
HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION
TO
THE PROVINCIAL LETTERS.
BY THE TRANSLATOR.
The Church of Rome, notwithstanding her pretensions to infallibility, has been fully as prolific in theological controversy and intestine discord as any of the Reformed Churches. She has contrived, indeed, with singular policy, to preserve, amidst all her variations, the semblance of unity. Protestantism, like the primitive Church, suffered its dissentients to fly off into hostile or independent communions. The Papacy, on the contrary, has managed to retain hers within the outward pale of her fellowship, by the institution of various religious orders, which have served as safety-valves for exuberant zeal, and which, though often hostile to each other, have remained attached to the mother Church, and even proved her most efficient supporters. Still, at different times, storms have arisen within the Romish Church, which could be quelled neither by the infallibility of popes nor the authority of councils. It is doubtful if religious controversy ever raged with so much violence in the Reformed Church, as it did between the Thomists and the Scotists, the Dominicans and Franciscans, the Jesuits and the Jansenists, of the Church of Rome.
Uninviting as they may now appear, the disputes about grace, in which the last mentioned parties were involved, gave occasion to the Provincial Letters. The origin of these disputes must be traced as far back as the days of Augustine and the Pelagian controversy of the fifth century. The motto of Pelagius was free-will; that of Augustine was efficacious grace. The former held that, notwithstanding the fall, the human will was perfectly free to choose at any time between good and evil; the latter, that in consequence of the fall, the will is in a state of moral bondage, from which it can only be freed by divine grace. With the British monk, election is suspended on the decision of man’s will; human nature is still as pure as it came originally from the hands of the Creator: Christ died equally for all men; and, as the result of his death, a general grace is granted to all mankind, which any may comply with, but which all may finally forfeit. With the African bishop, election is absolute—we are predestinated, not from foreseen holiness, but that we might be holy;[[1]] all men are lying under the guilt or penal obligation of the first sin, and in a state of spiritual helplessness and corruption; the sacrifice of Christ was, in point of destination, offered for the elect, though, in point of exhibition, it is offered to all; and the saints obtain the gift of perseverance in holiness to the end.[[2]]
Pelagius, whose real name was Morgan, and who is supposed to have been a Welshman, belonged to that numerous class of thinkers, who, from their peculiar idiosyncrasy, are apt to start at the sovereignty of divine grace, developed in the plan of redemption, as if it struck at once at the equity of God and the responsibility of man. He is said to have betrayed his heretical leanings, for the first time, by publicly expressing his disapprobation of a sentiment of Augustine, which he heard quoted by a bishop “Da quod jubes, et jube quod vis—Give, Lord, what thou biddest, and bid what thou wilt.” It would be easy to show that, in recoiling from the odious picture of the orthodox doctrine, drawn by his own fancy, he fell into the very consequences which he was so eager to avoid. The deity of Pelagius being subjected to the changeable will of the creature, all things were left to the direction of blind chance or unthinking destiny; while man, being represented as created with concupiscence, to account for his aberrations from rectitude—in other words, with a constitution in which the seeds of evil were implanted—the authorship of sin was ascribed, directly and primarily, to the Creator.[[3]]
Augustine was a powerful but unsteady writer, and has expressed himself so inconsistently as to have divided the opinions of the Latin Church, where he was recognized as a standard, canonized as a saint, and revered under the title of “The Doctor of Grace.” On the great doctrine of salvation by grace, he is scriptural and evangelical; and hence he has been frequently quoted with admiration by our Reformed divines, partly to evince the declension of Rome from the faith of the earlier fathers, partly from that veneration for antiquity, which induces us to bestow more notice on the ivy-mantled ruin, than on the more graceful and commodious modern edifice in its vicinity. When arguing against Pelagianism, Augustine is strong in the panoply of Scripture; when developing his own system, he fails to do justice either to Scripture or to himself. Loud, and even fierce, for the entire corruption of human nature, he spoils all by admitting the absurd dogma of baptismal regeneration. Chivalrous in the defence of grace, as opposed to free-will, he virtually abandons the field to the enemy, by teaching that we are justified by our works of evangelical obedience, and that the faith which justifies includes in its nature all the offices of Christian charity.
During the dark ages, the Church of Rome, professing the highest veneration for St. Augustine, had ceased to hold the Augustinian theology. The Dominicans, indeed, yielded a vague allegiance to it, by adhering to the views of Thomas Aquinas, “the angelic doctor” of the schools, from whom they were termed Thomists; while the Franciscans, who opposed them, under the auspices of Duns Scotus, from whom they were termed Scotists, leaned to the views of Pelagius. The Scotists, like the modern advocates of free-will, inveighed against their opponents as fatalists, and charged them with making God the author of sin; the Thomists, again, retorted on the Scotists, by accusing them of annihilating the grace of God. But the doctrines of grace had sunk out of view, under a mass of penances, oblations, and intercessions, founded on the assumption of human merit, and on that very confusion of the forensic change in justification with the moral change in sanctification, in which Augustine had unhappily led the way. At length the Reformation appeared; and as both Luther and Calvin appealed to the authority of Augustine, when treating of grace and free-will, the Romish divines, in their zeal against the Reformers, became still more decidedly Pelagian. In the Council of Trent, the admirers of Augustine durst hardly show themselves; the Jesuits carried everything before them; and the anathemas of that synod, which were aimed at Calvin fully as much as Luther, though they professed to condemn only the less guarded statements of the German reformer, were all in favor of Pelagius.
The controversy was revived in the Latin Church, about the close of the sixteenth century, both in the Low Countries and in Spain. In 1588, Lewis Molina, a Spanish Jesuit, published lectures on “The Concord of Grace and Free-Will;” and this work, filled with the jargon of the schools, gave rise to disputes which continued to agitate the Church during the whole of the succeeding century. Molina conceived that he had discovered a method of reconciling the divine purposes with the freedom of the human will, which would settle the question forever. According to his theory, God not only foresaw from eternity all things possible, by a foresight of intelligence, and all things future by a foresight of vision; but by another kind of foresight, intermediate between these two, which he termed scientia media, or middle knowledge, he foresaw what might have happened under certain circumstances or conditions, though it never may take place. All men, according to Molina, are favored with a general grace, sufficient to work out their salvation, if they choose to improve it; but when God designs to convert a sinner, he vouchsafes that measure of grace which he foresees, according to the middle knowledge, or in all the circumstances of the case, the person will comply with. The honor of this discovery was disputed by another Jesuit, Peter Fonseca, who declared that the very same thing had burst upon his mind with all the force of inspiration, when lecturing on the subject some years before.[[4]]
Abstruse as these questions may appear, they threatened a serious rupture in the Romish Church. The Molinists were summoned to Rome in 1598, to answer the charges of the Dominicans; and after some years of deliberation, Pope Clement VIII. decided against Molina. The Jesuits, however, alarmed for the credit of their order, never rested till they prevailed on the old pontiff to re-examine the matter; and in 1602, he appointed a grand council of cardinals, bishops, and divines, who convened for discussion no less than seventy-eight times. This council was called Congregatio de Auxiliis, or council on the aids of grace. Its records being kept secret, the result of their collective wisdom was not known with certainty, and has been lost to the world.[[5]] The probability is, that like Milton’s “grand infernal peers,” who reasoned high on similar points,
“They found no end, in wandering mazes lost.”