Blaise Pascal, Pensées, and The Provincial Letters

The Modern Library, New York, 1941, 620 pgs.

Summary: Pascal (1623-1662) was a savant who made contributions in mechanical calculators, vacuum research, geometry, probability, and apologetics. He was a younger contemporary and antagonist of Descartes (1596-1650). Descartes somewhat purposely contributed to the rising skepticism of his age through modification of his Jesuit training. 

Pascal’s family, early in his life, had attached themselves to Jansenism within the French Roman Catholic Church. Jansenism was the last gasp of the Augustinian understanding of total depravity after the Council of Trent (1545-1563). They were also extreme rigorist in exhaustive confession in preparation for the mass, personal ethics, and separation from worldliness. 

The Jansenist and Jesuits tended to compete among the wealthy and the nobles in France as personal confessors. The Jesuits practiced a lax discipline that came to be known as probabilism.

The Jesuit system can be defined as, “if the licitness or illicitness of an action is in doubt, it is lawful to follow a solidly probable opinion favouring liberty, even though the opposing opinion, favouring the law, be more probable” (s.v., The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd Ed.). 

The outcome was that if a Jesuit confessor could find a single historical allowance for some behavior, say fornication or murder, then the penance prior to mass was either avoided or minimal. The two Catholic groups holding to probabilism, the Dominicans and Jesuits, had made a cottage industry of publishing casuistry manuals with precedence for greater and greater moral latitude.  

All of this is important because the behavior to a degree the policy of the political elite were seen as being dependent on the royalty’s confessors. So the dispute between the Jesuits and Jansenist was a struggle over controlling the court and the culture of the country. A king with a Jansenist confessor would necessarily have a different court and therefore regime than one with a Jesuit. 

The Jesuits with the backing of political leaders like Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642) hounded and persecuted the Jansenist out of existence. With the Jansenist demise, Augustinism left the Roman Church and now resides among the Reformed.   

Pascal’s theological writings are pointed both towards Jesuit casuistry and the rising skepticism of the humanist of his day. 

Pensées—is a group of thoughts (pensées in French) that Pascal intending to develop into a defense of the faith. The fragments have been ordered in different ways throughout history, and while some of them are well developed others are obviously notes for further work.  The most developed argument is on the highest probability being on the side of trusting in God and living a holy life in the famous Pascal’s wager. 

Examples:

343: The beak of the parrot, which it wipes, although it is clean.

555:. . . . The Christian religion, then, teaches men these two truths; that there is a God whom men can know, and that there is a corruption in their nature which renders them unworthy of Him. . . .

627:….There is a great difference between a book which an individual writes, and publishes to a nation, and a book which itself creates a nation. We cannot doubt that the book is as old as the people. 

The Provincial Letters—a witty, sarcastic, carefully footnoted, mocking, evisceration of Jesuit casuistry and their unfair attack and persecution of the Jansenist. They were written ostensibly as letters by an urban Parisian to a friend living in the country attempting to explain the Jesuits and Sorbonne’s actions and statements against the Jansenist. The first half are dryly amusing to sublime, but the bitterness increases towards the end.

Benefits/Detriment: The Pensées are interesting; some are very thought provoking, almost all are wholesome for general orthodoxy. The secular popularity is likely due to the fragmentary nature which allows space to fill with the readers’ personal opinions rather than being confronted by an actual controversial system. 

While I enjoyed the letters and the pensées, both works strike me as inlets on larger and more important seas. Interesting as part of a wider reading on broader controversies, for historical background, and the appreciation of literature.