Pascal's Wager

by James A. Connor

  Actually, the abbess was more infamous than the mistress. Gabrielle had reproached her at least once, saying that she was an embarrassment to the family, the “disgrace of our house.” A mistress can play the coquette, apparently, but not an abbess. Either way, life was not very difficult in Angélique’s monastery, for religious discipline was nearly nonexistent. The ladies, all from wealthy families, spent their days in idle pursuits, gossiping, eating delicate foods, and even engaging in secret liaisons from time to time. Jacqueline Arnauld took to the life like a fish, and on her confirmation changed her name to Angélique to mimic her heroine, her mentor, her abbess. It must have seemed like a perfect life to an independently minded young girl—no family obligations, no parental nattering, and yet all the comforts she could ask for. Jacqueline, now Angélique, spent her days reading novels and Roman history, walking in the woods, and visiting with friends in the city. She ate sweetmeats and pastries, fine delicate cheeses from the country, and drank the best wine. Her family could come and go as they pleased, and everyone thought that the arrangement was perfect.

  In 1602, when Angélique Arnauld was eleven years old, her father worked a miracle of bureaucracy. Getting a papal bull for a child to become the abbess of a convent was nearly impossible, and frowned on by everyone, especially as the church was busy trying to free itself from the corruptions of the Renaissance. Nevertheless, he pulled it off. We can only speculate on how he did it, but deception definitely played a part. Angélique then became the coadjutrix of Port-Royal, but her life changed little.

  Over the years, she grew to hate the convent; she hated religious life, and she was furious with her family for forcing her into it. She rarely prayed, and God had little to do with her life at all. Gradually, by the time she was seventeen, she had sunk into a long, stretching depression that had become so much a part of her routine that she rarely noticed it. She had become the poster child for ennui. On the day of her final vows, her father placed the official document of her profession before her, and she signed it, but did so “bursting with spite.” But she was in the convent, committed to the life, and there was nothing she could do about it.

  In 1607, just before her vows, Angélique took sick and returned home to be nursed by her mother, where she received care, for which she was grateful, along with a great deal of parental advice about her lifestyle in the convent. She ignored that part. Then, in 1608, soon after her vow ceremony, a Franciscan priest came to the convent and preached a sermon that changed her life. No one can track how a single sermon, or even a single chance comment within a sermon, can tilt the balance of someone’s whole world, but it is not uncommon. Angélique must have been prepared for it, prepared even by her doubts, her boredom, and her emptiness. What had once been a meaningless life suddenly sparked, and she realized that she could have meaning in her religious life if she chose to create it. Choosing was something that Mère Angélique knew how to do instinctively.

  From that day on, she determined to live the life of a nun properly, to reform herself and her monastery. It must have been alarming to the sisters under her, so used to their comforts and their freedoms, to watch as their abbess suddenly got religion. Angélique began to discipline her own life, to fast, to pray in earnest, to deny herself all the little pleasures that had so filled her days before. Little by little, she reformed her house, with the help and advice of Francis de Sales. At one point in a back-handed bid for independence, she thought she might wish to surrender her abbacy and join Francis’s new Visitation order, but the bishop of Geneva had long understood whom he was dealing with, the kind of obstinacy that squatted inside the young girl, and gently demurred, so she remained at Port-Royal.

  Resistance mounted quickly, even from the best elements in the convent, because few of them saw any reason to change their way of living. Many of them had been dumped into the convent by their families and expected to live the life that their station in French society afforded them. Besides, who was this teenager to tell them to reform? Everyone knew that she held the abbacy by sleight of hand and that she had lived a life no different from their own. They all hoped that this child would outgrow her burst of adolescent enthusiasm and learn to live reasonably. What they did not realize was that la petite Madame de Port-Royal’s will outweighed her by a significant amount, and that she had set herself on the course of reform and would not be moved.

  Waving away their complaints, Mère Angélique imposed the Rule of St. Benedict in the strictest way. The sisters then had to take seriously their vow of poverty, which meant that they could no longer hold personal property and that they would begin to eat a more austere vegetarian diet, without the sweets and delicate cheeses they were used to. The sisters were required to pray and to live a life in silent contemplation, something they had not done at Port-Royal for years. With time, the complaints died down and the sisters began to see the value of the new regime. Meaning began to leak back into their lives.

  At this point, Angélique was in harmony with the rest of the Catholic revival, and those who knew her applauded her efforts, her family included. But then she carried things too far, and the whole family sat up, alarmed. The reforms finally hit them. The clan Arnauld did not mind if their daughter, their sister, put discipline into her house. She had been sent there to do her family honor by living an upright, honorable life—pious, but not too pious. Acceptably pious, of course. But good God, not saintly!

  On September 25, 1609, Angélique’s family arrived for a visit, led by papa Antoine and maman Catherine, along with a small crowd of offspring. It had been their habit until then to come and go as they pleased, for after all, their daughter was the rightful abbess of the convent, a position she owed to their efforts. Ordinarily, they picnicked on the wide lawns, played games, and gossiped with the sisters, but that day they arrived to find the gate locked. They sent word that they should be let in at once. A sister carried word to Mère Angélique that her family was at the gate, and she sent word back that they were not allowed to enter the grounds and that if they wanted to visit her, they would have to come to the parlor—a shadowy, dusty little room beside the gate that had been built long before to accommodate visitors and then abandoned as the life inside the walls loosened.

  Papa was furious. He was not accustomed to being treated like a servant, like a stranger! He would not have it. In the parlor, he told her so. He demanded entrance, and when he was denied again, he demanded again, until it became clear to him that his daughter’s will was more than a match for his own. After that, he entreated her, pleaded with her, raged at her, but Angélique would not bend. Meanwhile, her mother wept epic tears, and her older brother, Robert Arnauld d’Andilly, the eldest child, screamed at her, calling her a “monster of ingratitude and a parricide!” It did them no good at all. Angélique was just as upset as they were. She sweated; her heart pounded; she nearly cried several times; but she would not bend. And so the clan Arnauld had to gather up the shreds of their dignity and storm off, their carriage flouncing on the rutted roads. Thus ended “la journée du guichet,” the “day of the wicket gate,” spoken of by Jansenists for the next few centuries as if it had been a battle between empires.

  [1643]

  The Great Arnauld

  Common sense is not really so common.

  —ANTOINE ARNAULD, The Art of Thinking: Port-Royal Logic

  The youngest of the Arnauld clan was named after his father, Antoine, and was born in 1612. His father died in 1619, when he was only seven. And so, like Blaise Pascal, he too had lost a parent in childhood. He was, by almost every account, the most intelligent member of that family, and in the end he turned out to be the most ardent defender of Jansenism. He attended the Sorbonne in the 1630s, where he became friends with Jean Guillebert, the man who ended up as the priest in Rouville and who converted the bonesetters, who in turn converted the Pascals, who in turn supported Antoine Arnauld throughout all the long years of controversy. The young Arnauld was an intellectual meteor who had earned the best g
rades in everything and was the talk of the faculty of theology. But he was also a great deal of trouble.

  The clan Arnauld shared several abiding traits: they all had wills of iron, they all possessed a deadly intelligence, and they were all born lawyers. Antoine Arnauld had all three of these traits in extra-large amounts. He was known at the Sorbonne not only for his intelligence but also for his scrappy personality. It is likely that he was one of those people who take the most radical position on everything just so they can have the greatest triumph on the rhetorical battlefield. Arnauld would argue over anything and everything, and it’s not surprising that he annoyed quite a few of the faculty. While still in school, in 1638, he wrote a letter to the abbé de Saint-Cyran, who had become the imprisoned martyr at Vincennes, famously oppressed at the hands of the notorious Richelieu, and asked him to become his spiritual director. Saint-Cyran had already become involved with Port-Royal several years earlier and knew Antoine’s sisters quite well. He fully understood how valuable this young man would be. In 1641, young Arnauld received his doctorate of divinity, and there were probably more than a few sighs of relief when he was gone. In 1643, following Saint-Cyran’s instruction, Arnauld threw his hat into the Jansenist ring by writing a short tract on the sacraments entitled De la fréquente communion (On Frequent Communion). The tract created a stir almost at once.

  In essence, Arnauld argued that because the Eucharist was the body and blood of Christ, no ordinary sinner dared receive it. One should undergo a strict regimen of penance in order to purify the soul and to avoid the sin of sacrilege each time before receiving Communion. This flew in the face of Jesuit teaching, which taught that Communion was not a reward for perfect moral behavior but a medicine for the soul and a vital pathway to God. Arnauld saw the thrice-damned Jesuit teaching as a species of laxity, soft on sin and soft on sinners, allowing insults to the divine presence to occur by the polluting presence of sinners who dared approach the altar of God. Within two heartbeats, the friction between these two camps sparked a nuclear fire.

  The explosion happened this way: There was a lady at court, a fine and cultured noblewoman who had had her life changed by the preaching and counsel of Saint-Cyran, who had become her spiritual director. She had once lived a life of easy virtue, and the abbot had confronted her with her sins. She tried to do the same thing with her friends and told them not to receive Communion unless they were in a state of near perfect grace, that they could not approach the altar of God without first confessing all of their venial sins as well as their mortal sins, all of their faults and foibles, and converting themselves from living a frivolous life. Moreover, they could not be forgiven their sins unless their penitence was perfect—that is, unless their intentions were pure, done utterly for the love of God rather than out of fear of the fire.

  Her friends responded, following their own Jesuit spiritual directors, that the Eucharist had been given to the world as an aid to salvation and should not be denied people unless they had cut themselves off from God through mortal sin. Arnauld exploded. He could not abide this, for such a positive view of human beings, such a comfortable understanding of humanity’s relationship with God, did not take into account the monstrosity of sin and the depths of the wound that Adam’s transgression had cut into the world. To reject the world-bestriding power of concupiscence was to reject Augustine himself, to fall into the grave error of Pelagianism. No true believer could ever approach the sacred altar of God while still immersed in the ocean of sin that was ordinary human life.

  And so the war between Arnauld and the Jesuits was on, and would rage for the rest of his life and beyond.

  The connection between Jansenism and the Arnauld family had been there for some time, however, and could be traced back to Port-Royal. In 1635, Mère Angélique invited Saint-Cyran to give a series of sermons during Lent. By 1637, the entire community was under his direction. For what the sisters of Port-Royal and their devoted followers had already learned to practice, Saint-Cyran provided a theological superstructure. Once, he told them, Adam and Eve lived in moral and spiritual perfection, but that time had passed and was gone forever because of their sin, and so we sinners live under the influence of concupiscence, that terrible draw toward wickedness. If we die in our sin, it is because we choose to do so. But even our choice is created by the all-powerful God, and therefore we can claim nothing for ourselves. All we can do is seek the kind of humility that edges on humiliation, and spend a life in penitence for our sins and for the sin of Adam. Though most people are predestined for eternal damnation, there are those who, through the saving power of Jesus Christ, are predestined for salvation. No one can know just who is damned and who is saved, but we can read the signs, for there are “signposts in the predestined soul” that are not there in the damned. These are: a perfect surrender to God’s will; the practice of sincere piety; sacramental and personal penance; the acceptance of God’s grace in all humility; and, of course, submission to a spiritual director.

  And there was the rub, the turning point, the place where Jansenism crossed the line from Christian spirituality to cult. Submission to a spiritual director, namely to himself—and he pulled no punches on this—was no longer merely a wise act, an advisable thing to do, a part of a spiritual program. Suddenly it was an essential dimension of salvation. Not even the Jesuits claimed this. Obedience to the charismatic leader, to the concrete will of the director, became the main signpost of God’s saving power in their midst.

  There have been other charismatic spiritual directors. Some, like St. Francis of Assisi, St. Benedict of Nursia, and St. Ignatius of Loyola, have changed the world. Others have led their hapless followers into the jungle and the draft of Kool-Aid. Charisma cuts both ways, and that is the problem. Saint-Cyran and Mère Angélique were two strong-willed people whose own unseen will to power had become tangled in their desire for spiritual perfection, who were unable to see that such a demand for submission was little more than hubris. It was inevitable that they would sooner or later come to loggerheads with other powerful people, religious and secular both, who suffered from the same hubris. The two of them were powerful personalities indeed, but could they compete with Cardinal Richelieu, and later with Cardinal Mazarin? Perhaps, in their spiritual certainty, they did not see the storm on the horizon.

  That storm hit in 1638, when Richelieu had Saint-Cyran thrown into prison. “The judgments of God are a terrible thing,” Angélique later told Jacqueline Pascal. “We don’t think enough about them. We don’t dread them enough.”34 The judgment of God was falling upon them, or at least the judgment of Richelieu. But the cardinal’s imprisonment of Saint-Cyran was only the first salvo by forces that were beginning to coalesce around the Jesuits. Perhaps the Jansenists were doomed from the moment that Francis de Sales and Vincent de Paul rejected them, but the tides were turning against the Augustinians. The modern age would reject them and their negative evaluation of humanity as a failed experiment and move on.

  As for Port-Royal, a replacement for the abbot soon filled his spot, a man of different character and learning, Antoine Singlin, a former Parisian linen draper turned priest, a holy man who had once been the disciple of Vincent de Paul and later turned to Saint-Cyran. He would later engage Blaise Pascal in long conversations about the world, about science, and about serving God—conversations that would change the young man’s life forever.

  [1643, 1648–1653]

  The Fronde of the Parlement

  If an injury has to be done to a man it should be so severe that his vengeance need not be feared.

  —NICCOLÒ MACHIAVELLI

  The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it.

  —ABBIE HOFFMAN

  Cardinal Richelieu died on December 4, 1642, after years of declining health. The vultures circled, and the lions gathered to pick the bones. Louis XIII was overjoyed—he was free at last—but put on a good face and observed all the conventions at the cardinal’s funeral.35 He took care of Richelieu’s family, reaf
firmed his will, and defended his reputation at court, to the point of frowning on all of Richelieu’s old enemies. One exception was Jean François Paul de Gondi, the future Cardinal de Retz, a born conspirator, who was busy politicking for the job of coadjuter bishop of Paris, under his own uncle, the archbishop. Though he and Richelieu had circled each other like wrestlers for years, Retz got the job after gallantly sparing the life of Captain Coutenau, of the king’s light horse, during a duel. The man slipped in the mud and dropped his sword, and Retz, who still had his in hand, stood back with a salute to allow Coutenau a chance to redeem his sword from the mud. Instead, the captain bowed low to Gondi and offered his apology, which was graciously accepted. Suddenly Retz was in the king’s favor.

  But this didn’t last long, for Louis XIII died on May 15, 1643, but not before appointing Retz coadjuter bishop on his deathbed. When Louis XIII died, there were no signs or portents, though France was in serious danger of civil war. At the moment of the king’s death, his heir, Louis, took his place on the throne and became Louis XIV, the Sun King. The next day, the entire royal household packed their possessions onto carts and, with all of their servants and all of their guards, moved to the Queen’s palace at the Louvre. This was a tradition among French royalty; the new king, they believed, should not have to live in the house where his father had died. Were they afraid of ghosts?