“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:—