Under this very reign in which the Jesuits were so powerful, and so formidable, the most terrible strokes were given them, more terrible perhaps than any they had felt till that time. The pleadings of Pasquier and Arnaud were but bombast satyrs, and in a bad taste: the Provincial Letters gave them a wound much more deadly: this master-piece of pleasantry and eloquence diverted and moved the indignation of all Europe at their expense. In vain they replied, that the greatest part of the theologists and monks had taught, as well as them, the scandalous doctrine which they were reproached with: their answers, ill written, and full of gall, were not read, while every body knew the Provincial Letters by heart. This work is so much the more admirable, as Paschal in composing it appears to have divined two things, which seemed not made for divination, language, and pleasantry. The language was very far from being formed, as we may judge by the greater part of the works published at that time, and of which it is impossible to endure the reading: in the Provincial Letters there is not a single word that is grown obsolete; and that book, though written above a hundred years ago, seems as if it had been written but yesterday. Another attempt, no less difficult, was to make people of wit and good folks laugh at the questions of sufficient grace, next power, and the decisions of the casuists; subjects very little favourable to pleasantry, or, which is worse still, susceptible of pleasantries that are cold and uniform, and capable at most of amusing only priests and monks. It was necessary, for avoiding this rock, to have a delicacy of taste so much the greater, as Paschal lived very retired, and far removed from the commerce of the world: he could never have distinguished, but by the superiority and delicacy of his understanding, the kind of pleasantry which could alone be relished by good judges in this dry and insipid matter. He succeeded in it beyond all expression: several of his bon-mots have even become proverbial in our language, and the Provincial Letters will be ever regarded as a model of taste and style. It is only to be feared, that the expulsion of the Jesuits, lessening the interest which we took in this book, may render the perusal of it less poignant, and perhaps make it be one day forgot. This is a fate which the most eloquent author has to apprehend, if he writes not on subjects that are useful to every nation, and to all ages: the duration of a work, whatever merit it may have in other respects, is almost necessarily connected with that of its object. The Thoughts of Paschal, greatly inferior to the Provincials, will live perhaps longer, because there is all reason to believe (whatever the humble society may say of it) that Christianity will last longer than they.
The Provincials would be perhaps more assured of the immortality which they merit in so many respects, if their illustrious author, that genius so elevated, so universal, and so little formed for taking an interest in scholastick trumpery, had turned alike both parties into ridicule. The shocking doctrine of Jansenius, and of St. Cyran, afforded at least as much room for it as the pliant doctrine of Molina, Tambourin, and Vasquez. Every work, in which we sacrifice with success to the publick laughter fanaticks who worry one another, subsists even after those fanaticks are no more. I might venture to foretell this advantage to the chapter on Jansenism, which we read with so much pleasure in the excellent Essay on General History, by the most agreeable of our philosophical writers. The irony is scattered in that chapter to the right and left, with a delicacy and ease which must cover both the one and the other with indelible contempt, and make them weary of cutting one anothers’ throats for nonsensical fancies. Methinks I see Fontaine’s cat[10], before whom the rabbit and the weasel bring their suit on the subject of a pitiful hole which they contend for; and who, by way of decision,
Jettant des deux côtés la griffe en même tems,
Met les plaideurs d’accord en croquant l’un & l’autre.
No body is perhaps fitter than this illustrious writer, to form a history of theological quarrels, in order to render them at once both odious and ridiculous, and thereby deliver mankind for ever from this shameful and terrible scourge.
The Practical Morals of the Jesuits, written by doctor Arnauld, which came out soon after the Provincials, though of a merit greatly inferior, put the finishing stroke to the throwing upon these fathers an odium, which they will never be able to wash off. This unfavourable and deep impression, which is perpetually kept up by the reading of these books, has even now found, at the end of a century, minds disposed to believe all the ill which has been said of the Jesuits, and of approving all the mischief that has been done to them. The term of Jesuitical morals has been, as it were, consecrated in our language, to signify loose morals, and that of Escobarderie to signify an artful lie: and we know how much weight a fashionable way of speaking carries with it, especially in France, towards procuring credit to opinions.
The Jesuits, loaded from that time with so much hatred, and such a number of imputations, were not to be till long after the victims of it: they triumphed in the first violence of the attack, and became but the more powerful, the more animated against their enemies, and the more formidable to them. Yet what enemies had they to deal with? With men of the greatest merit and reputation, and whose consideration with the public still increased by their very persecution; an Arnauld, a Nicole, a Saci; in one word, all the writers of the celebrated house of Port-Royal. These adversaries were much more to be dreaded by the society than plain theologists, whom the common run of mankind listen not to, understand not, and have no esteem for: they were great philosophers (as great at least as could be in those days) men of the first class in literature, excellent writers, and men of an irreproachable conduct. They had in the kingdom, and even at court, respectable and zealous friends, whom they acquired by their talents, their virtues, and the signal services for which literature was indebted to them. The general and rational grammar, called the Port-Royal grammar, from their being the authors of it; the excellent Logic called by the same name; the Greek Roots; their learned grammars of the Greek, Latin, Italian, and Spanish; such were the productions of this free and respectable society. The illustrious Racine had been their scholar, and had preserved, as well as Despréaux, his friend, the most intimate connections with them: their works on religion and morality were read and esteemed by all France; and by the masculine and correct style in which they were written, had contributed most of any, next to the Provincials, to the perfection of our language, while the Jesuits counted yet among their French writers only des Barris and des Garrasses. What pity that those writers of the Port-Royal, those men of such superior merit, should have thrown away so much genius and time in ridiculous controversies on the good or bad doctrine of Jansenius, on idle and endless discussions on free-will and grace, and on the important question, Whether five unintelligible propositions be in a book which nobody reads? Tormented, imprisoned, exiled for these vain disputes, and employed perpetually in defending so futile a cause, how many years of their lives have philosophy and letters to regret as lost! What lights would they not have added to those with which they had already illumined their age, if they had not been carried away by these unhappy and pitiful distractions, so unworthy of taking up the thoughts of men like them! May we venture to say a little more of this, at the risk of deviating one moment from our subject? Can reason withhold shedding bitter tears, when she sees how many useful talents the quarrels, so often excited in the bosom of Christianity, have buried? how many ages these wretched and scandalous contests have destroyed to the human understanding? and how many geniuses, formed for discovering new truths, have employed (to the great regret of true religion) all their sagacity and abilities, in supporting or giving reputation to ancient absurdities? When we run through, in the vast royal library, the first apartment, of an immense extent, and find it destined, for the greatest part, to a collection, without number, of the most visionary commentators on the scriptures, of polemical writers on, questions the most void of meaning, of school divines of every sort; in short, of so many works from whence there is no drawing one single page of truth, can we refrain crying out with sorrow (ad quid perditio hæc?) “To what end all this loss?” Again, human nature would have been in no very great degree to be pitied, if all these frivolous and absurd objects, these holy trifles, as a celebrated magistrate calls them[11], had ended in ill language only, and had not occasioned the shedding of torrents of blood. But let us shut our eyes on these dismal objects, and make only one other reflexion, as consolatory as it is humiliating to the human mind. How is it possible, that the same species of beings which invented the art of writing, arithmetic, astronomy, algebra, chemistry, watch-work, the art of weaving, so many things in short worthy of admiration in the mechanical and liberal arts, should have invented the philosophy and divinity of the schools, judicial astrology, the concomitant concourse, versatile and congruous grace, the victorious delectation, absolute accidents, and so many other fooleries, as would occasion the suspending, by authority of justice, the person who should first broach them now-a-days? Plato defined man, “an animal with two feet without feathers.” How ridiculous soever this definition may appear, it was perhaps difficult (the lights of religion set aside) to characterise otherwise the indefinable human species; which on one side seems, by master-pieces of genius, to have approached the heavenly beings, and on the other, by a thousand incredible marks of folly and cruelty, to have set itself on a level with the most stupid and ferocious animals. When we measure the interval between a Scotus and a Newton, or rather between the works of Scotus and those of Newton, we must cry out with Terence, Homo homini quid præstat! “What difference there is between man and man!” Or must we only attribute this immense distance to the enormous difference of ages, and think with sorrow that the subtile and absurd doctor, who wrote so many chimeras, admired by his contemporaries, had perhaps been a Newton in an age more enlightened? Let us weigh well all these reflexions; let us add thereto the perusal of ecclesiastical history, those kalendars of the virtue of some men, and the weak wickedness of so many others; let us behold in that history the usurpations, without number, of the spiritual power; the robberies and the violences exercised under the pretext of religion; so many bloody wars, so many cruel persecutions, so many murders committed in the name of a God who abhors them; and we shall have pretty nearly an exact catalogue of the advantages which the disputes of Christianity have brought upon mankind.
To return to the Jesuits, the nomination of father le Tellier to the place of confessor to Louis XIV. furnished them with an opportunity of wreaking fully their vengeance. This violent and inflexible man, hated by his very brethren, whom he governed with a rod of iron, made the Jansenists drink “to the very dregs,” according to his own expression, “of the cup of the society’s indignation.” Scarce was he in place, but they foresaw the evils of which he would be the cause: and Fontenelle the philosopher said, on learning his nomination, “the Jansenists have sinned.”
The first exploit of this ferocious and fiery Jesuit, was the destruction of Port-Royal, where not one stone was left upon another, and from whence they dug up the very corpses that were interred there. This violence, executed with the last barbarity, against a house respectable for the celebrated persons who had inhabited it, and against poor nuns, more worthy of compassion than of hatred, excited clamours throughout the whole kingdom: these clamours have re-echoed down even to our times; and the Jesuits themselves confessed, on seeing the spectacle of their destruction, that the stones of Port-Royal were falling on their own heads to crush them.
But the indignation which the destruction of Port-Royal excited against them, was nothing in comparison of the general commotion which the bull Unigenitus occasioned. It is certain that this bull was their work: we know also the universal opposition which it produced in almost all the orders of the state: we know the intrigues, the frauds, the violences, which were put in practice to extort the acceptance of it. We may remember that Louis XIV. having succeeded in making it to be received (partly by foul and partly by fair means) by an assembly of forty prelates, saw with pain nine bishops who remained in opposition to it: he could have wished, for the peace of his conscience, an entire uniformity in the episcopal corps. “That is very easy,” said the duchess his daughter to him, “you need only order the forty acceptants to be of the opinion of the nine others.” The propositions condemned were, for the most part, so ill chosen, that it is pretended that a great prince, on reading them in the bull, took them for truths which it enjoined to be believed, appeared edified by them, and was very much surprised, though of a docile disposition, when his confessor undeceived him.