NOTES
38. *A lecture delivered to the University Extension Students, Oxford, 2 August, 1892. Published in the Fortnightly Review, Oct. 1892, and now reprinted by the kind permission of the proprietors.
PASCAL*
[62] ABOUT the middle of the seventeenth century, two opposite views of a question, upon which neither Scripture, nor Council, nor Pope, had spoken with authority—the question as to the amount of freedom left to man by the overpowering work of divine grace upon him—had seemed likely for a moment to divide the Roman Church into two rival sects. In the diocese of Paris, however, the controversy narrowed itself into a mere personal quarrel between the Jesuit Fathers and the religious community of Port-Royal, and might have been forgotten but for the intervention of a new writer in whom French literature made more than a new step. It became at once, as if by a new creation, what it has remained—a pattern of absolutely unencumbered expressiveness.
In 1656 Pascal, then thirty-three years old, under the form of "Letters to a Provincial by one of his Friends," put forth a series of [63] pamphlets in which all that was vulnerable in the Jesuit Fathers was laid bare to the profit of their opponents. At the moment the quarrel turned on the proposed censure of Antoine Arnauld by the Sorbonne, by the University of Paris as a religious body. Pascal, intimate, like many another fine intellect of the day, with the Port-Royalists, was Arnauld's friend, and it belonged to the ardour of his genius, at least as he was then, to be a very active friend. He took up the pen as other chivalrous gentlemen of the day took up the sword, and showed himself a master of the art of fence therewith. His delicate exercise of himself with that weapon was nothing less than a revelation to all the world of the capabilities, the true genius of the French language in prose.
Those who think of Pascal in his final sanctity, his detachment of soul from all but the greatest matters, may be surprised, when they turn to the "Letters," to find him treating questions, as serious for the friends he was defending as for their adversaries, ironically, with a but half-veiled disdain for them, or an affected humility at being unskilled in them and no theologian. He does not allow us to forget that he is, after all, a layman; while he introduces us, almost avowedly, into a world of unmeaning terms, and unreal distinctions and suppositions that can never be verified. The world in general, indeed, se paye des paroles. That saying belongs to Pascal, and [64] he uses it with reference to the Jesuits and their favourite expression of "sufficient grace." In the earliest "Letters" he creates in us a feeling that, however orthodox one's intention, it is scarcely possible to speak of the matters then so abundantly discussed by religious people without heresy at some unguarded point. The suspected proposition of Arnauld, it is admitted by one of his foes, "would be Catholic in the mouth of any one but M. Arnauld." "The truth," as it lay between Arnauld and his opponents, is a thing so delicate that "pour peu qu'on s'en retire, on tombe dans l'erreur; mais cette erreur est si déliée, que, pour peu qu'on s'en éloigne, on se trouve dans la vérité."
Some, indeed, may find in the very delicacy, the curiosity, with which such distinctions are drawn, by Pascal's friends as well as by their foes, only the impertinence, the profanities, of the theologian by profession, all too intimate in laying down the law of the things he deals with—the things "which eye hath not seen" pressing into the secrets of God's sublime commerce with men, in which, it may be, He differs with every single human soul, by forms of thought adapted from the poorest sort of men's dealings with each other, from the trader, or the attorney. Pascal notes too the "impious buffooneries" of his opponents. The good Fathers, perhaps, only meant them to promote geniality of temper in the debate. But of such failures—failures of taste, of respect towards one's [65] own point of view—the world is ever unamiably aware; and in the "Letters" there is much to move the self-complacent smile of the worldling, as Pascal describes his experiences, while he went from one authority to another to find out what was really meant by the distinction between grace "sufficient," grace "efficacious," grace "active," grace "victorious." He heard, for instance, that all men have sufficient grace to do God's will; but it is not always prochain, not always at hand, at the moment of temptation to do otherwise. So far, then, Pascal's charges are those which may seem to lie ready to hand against all who study theology, a looseness of thought and language, that would pass nowhere else, in making what are professedly very fine distinctions; the insincerity with which terms are carefully chosen to cover opposite meanings; the fatuity with which opposite meanings revolve into one another, in the strange vacuous atmosphere generated by professional divines.
Up to this point, you see, Pascal is the countryman of Rabelais and Montaigne, smiling with the fine malice of the one, laughing outright with the gaiety of the other, all the world joining in the laugh—well, at the silliness of the clergy, who seem indeed not to know their own business. It is we, the laity, he would urge, who are serious, and disinterested, because sincerely interested, in these great questionings. Jalousie de métier, the reader may suspect, has something to do with [66] the Professional leaders on both sides of the controversy; but at the actual turn controversy took just then, it was against the Jesuit Fathers that Pascal's charges came home in full force. And their sin is above all that sin, unpardonable with men of the world sans peur et sans reproche, of a lack of self-respect, sins against pride, if the paradox may be allowed, all the undignified faults, in a word, of essentially little people when they interfere in great matters—faults promoted in the direction of the consciences of women and children, weak concessions to weak people who want to be saved in some easy way quite other than Pascal's high, fine, chivalrous way of gaining salvation, an incapacity to say what one thinks with the glove thrown down. He supposes a Jansenist to turn upon his opponent who uses the term "sufficient" grace, while really meaning, as he alleges, insufficient, with the words:—"Your explanation would be odious to men of the world. They speak more sincerely than you on matters of far less importance than this." With the world, Pascal, in the "Provincial Letters," had immediate success. "All the world," we read in his friend's supposed reply to the second "Letter," "sees them; all the world understands them. Men of the world find them agreeable, and even women intelligible." A century later Voltaire found them very agreeable. The spirit in which Pascal deals with his opponents, his irony, may remind us of the "Apology" of [67] Socrates; the style which secured them immediate access to people who, as a rule, find the subjects there treated hopelessly dry, reminds us of the "Apologia" of Newman.
The essence of all good style, whatever its accidents may be, is expressiveness. It is mastered in proportion to the justice, the nicety with which words balance or match their meaning, and their writer succeeds in saying what he wills, grave or gay, severe or florid, simple or complex. Pascal was a master of style because, as his sister tells us, recording his earliest years, he had a wonderful natural facility à dire ce qu'il voulait en la manière qu'il voulait.