“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.”