Pascal's Wager

by James A. Connor

  Then Arnauld made a mistake. He quickly sat down and wrote a book, Seconde lettre à un duc et pair, two hundred pages long, where he stated his case in meticulous detail, using an old chestnut out of the Jansenists’ playbook that immediately set everyone’s hair on fire: St. Peter denied Jesus as Our Lord was being taken off the cross, and he did so because the “interior grace” was denied him. Therefore, he denied Jesus not by his own choice but by the hand of God. Hang on, Arnauld’s enemies said. Peter denied Jesus because of his cowardice. We say that this was his choice, not God’s. You say it was God’s because God had denied him the grace. But that is what the Calvinists teach, which makes you closet Calvinists and not Catholics, for you deny all free will, which leaves only predestination.

  Now the battle was joined. The French bishops finally acted in May, under the influence of Mazarin, of course, and wrote up a formulary that stated that the five propositions condemned by the Apostolic Constitution were indeed heretical and that they were indeed found in Jansen’s theology—no ifs, no ands, no buts. Accusations of heresy arced over Paris like missiles over the North Pole, and everyone was in deadly earnest, for the loser could well be hanged or find himself running for his life to the Netherlands or, worse, England! All the priests, both diocesan and religious, had to sign the formulary, a statement of approved belief, and swear to it. But this wasn’t enough. In November, the faculty of the Sorbonne denounced Arnauld’s Seconde lettre. Not to be outdone by the pope, the faculty set up a commission of their own, this time with six doctors of theology, to study the questions both of fact and of law. Were those propositions indeed in Jansen’s book, and was Arnauld indeed holding to those same propositions? Finally, were those beliefs heretical? This commission lasted about a month. Arnauld tried to get a hearing, but they turned him away, and so the only thing he could do was to condemn the entire affair as illegal. He had his own supporters, however, and they strove to argue his case. But the game was rigged. Everyone knew what the outcome would be before it started, and on January 14, 1656, the faculty voted 130 to 71 to declare that Arnauld’s Seconde lettre was indeed heretical. Arnauld’s teeth had been pulled, at least for the time, and the best he could do was to make a public statement that they had misused his terminology, for his ideas could be found in the fathers of the church, from St. John Chrysostom to St. Augustine.

  From this point on, Arnauld could not walk around freely for fear of being snatched by Mazarin’s police. He left Paris quietly and moved to Port-Royal des Champs, out of the spotlight for a time. At this point, one of those great moments of history occurred: Arnauld, the dour theologian of Augustinianism, traveled back and forth to Paris not in his familiar black soutane, but in ruffles and laces, all fashionable, with silks and a wig, with shirts sporting “cuffs and tassels.”

  At Port-Royal des Champs, the faithful gentlemen gathered daily to discuss their options, which seemed to be thinning by the day. In the middle of January, Blaise Pascal, on his second retreat, joined them. They were not a happy gathering, for they were stumped. Arnauld tried to write another defense of their position, learned and lawyerlike, but none of the other gentlemen thought it was worth doing one more time. “I see that you find this text inadequate,” Arnauld said, “and I agree with you.” Then he turned to Blaise and said, “But you are young. You ought to do something.”66 Blaise agreed. Several days later, the group gathered again to listen to the opening lines of Blaise’s Provincial Letters.

  Sir:

  We have been duped. Only yesterday, my eyes were opened; I had thought until then that the subject under dispute at the Sorbonne really mattered, and would have extreme consequences for our religion. All those assemblies of such a famous group as the theology faculty of the University of Paris, all those meetings which have given rise to such extraordinary and unparalleled events, give you an elevated impression of the proceedings, such that one can only believe that these men are dealing with an extraordinary subject.67

  Now the theological argument had moved on to new ground, one that would later be trod by Voltaire. The debate was no longer a matter of careful theological reasoning, but of mockery. The modern age had truly begun.

  [1656–1657]

  The Jesuit Menace, Part 2

  As your scurrilities are daily increasing, and as you are employing them in the merciless abuse of all pious persons opposed to your errors, I feel obliged for their sake and that of the Church, to bring out that grand secret of your policy, which I promised to disclose some time ago, in order that you may all know, through means of your own maxims, what degree of credit is due to your calumnious accusations.

  —BLAISE PASCAL, Provincial Letters

  Blaise Pascal single-handedly invented the myth of the crafty Jesuit, a myth that has persisted to this day. He invented the word Jesuitical, meaning “crafty,” “sly,” “devious,” and one could trace Pascal’s hatred of the Jesuits on through Voltaire, up to the day when Thomas Jefferson fretted with John Adams in his old age as John Carroll imported a number of Jesuits to begin colleges across the country. Jefferson said that with the coming of the Jesuits, the United States would be beset by priests wearing disguises that “only the King of the Gypsies could assume.”

  Not that the Jesuits didn’t have their bad eggs. Indeed, they did, but far fewer than the myth would indicate. In truth, what Pascal did was to take an already existing prejudice against the Jesuits and give it a new spin. The Jesuits were unlike most of the existing old religious orders, for they had a special relationship with the pope through their fourth vow of obedience, and this set the teeth of French nationalists on edge. The Jesuits were “ultramontanists,” those who looked over the mountains to Rome for their instructions. Nationalism is a powerful force, and the French saw themselves as holding a unique position within the history of Catholicism. They had special privileges and special freedoms, and any attempt by the pope or his agents to undercut those privileges seemed to be an attack on the nation itself. Moreover, the Jesuits didn’t act like most religious orders, for they were humanists through and through, children of the Renaissance and not of the Middle Ages. Ironically, had he known what the hubbub was about and not dealt with the Jesuits out of the myth, Jefferson would have agreed with them far more than he would have agreed with Pascal.

  There are two basic impulses in the history of religious life in the Catholic Church. The first is the most ancient and sees the world as a shipwreck, as a place of sin and evil, so that the pious Christian would best serve the faith by withdrawing from the world to a place of safety, like the deep deserts of Egypt or monasteries like Port-Royal des Champs. The other impulse is based on the belief that the world is God’s creation and that it is the Christian’s duty to help in the conversion of that world. This was the view first of the Benedictines, then later of the Franciscans and Dominicans, and finally of the Jesuits. Didn’t Jesus himself send his apostles out among the nations to convert the whole world? For this kind of religious, the act of hiding in the desert, working on your own spiritual perfection, seems like the act of the man who buried his talent in the ground because he was afraid of his strict master. The Jesuits believed that one could “find God in all things” and that the world was not a place to be abandoned in some introverted drive for self-perfection, but a place to be acted upon, a place to change the hearts and minds of the wavering masses through action.

  In this sense, the Jesuits and the Jansenists were speaking two different languages. The Jesuits were born Molinists, not just because Molina was one of their own people, but because the exercises of St. Ignatius had set them up to be such. In the exercises, there is a meditation on the Two Standards, where the retreatant arrives at a decision—whether to stand under the banner of Christ or under the banner of the devil. This decision was always a freely chosen one, one that assumed that a person had free will, and that that free will was radical. The individual soul was not a puppet dangling on a string held by her Almighty Creator, but was a free person making a fre
e choice. Indeed, the entire spiritual exercises are designed to lead a person to that moment of decision. What could be more different from Jansenist Augustinianism? If there was a beef between the Jesuits and the Jansenists, it was because the Jesuits were not Augustinians and because, though they admired Augustine from a distance, they did not accept his evaluation of human nature any more than they accepted the same evaluation from Luther and Calvin.

  Pascal vigorously attacked the “casuistry” of the Jesuits, by which he meant the application of general moral principles to individual cases. Most of these cases were hypothetical, and books on casuistry, which were common in the seventeenth century, were simply instructors’ manuals for confessors, Zagat’s guides to the restaurants of sin.

  What Pascal objected to was an attitude that he called “laxity,” whereby Jesuit confessors would use reason to excuse the worst sins. Often the Jesuits did this as a tactic to demonstrate to the sinner that God’s love was in their lives, that they had “sufficient” grace for penitence, and that God would supply them with the grace they needed for conversion. Jesuits were not above scaring the wits out of sinners, as the tradition of Jesuit theater in Rome suggests, but they did believe that God was on the side of everyone, even the worst sinner, and not just on the side of the elect.

  Pascal and his crowd saw the sinners as already abandoned, unless of course some wondrous infusion of efficacious grace popped into the sinner’s life, as it had in the life of the apostle Paul and even in the life of Augustine. For a Jansenist, sin was everywhere, and the life of penance required that one seek it out, not excuse it, for even the best of us live our lives in the red, in debt for the sin of Adam. The whole idea of taking a universal moral principle and applying it creatively to individual cases was suspect in its creativity.

  There are eighteen letters in Pascal’s Lettres provinciales, written under the pseudonym Louis de Montalte. The volume is a masterpiece of mockery and was understandably among Voltaire’s favorite bedtime books. He always carried a copy with him wherever he went, even though he couldn’t stand Pascal in any other costume. The first few of these letters take on the persona of a confused man about town, writing to his friend in the provinces about the odd theological goings-on in the capital. There are no villains, just silly people, holding silly ideas. Naturally, the Jansenists come off as the only rational bunch in the barrel. Pascal makes great sport of intellectuals, especially the doctors of the great Sorbonne who were about to evict his friend Arnauld. In his first letter, Pascal puts words into the mouth of an unnamed theologian: “‘Hold there!’ said he. ‘One must be a theologian to understand this question. The difference between the two parties [the Sorbonne-istas and the Jansenists] is so subtle, so excruciatingly complex that we can barely tell the difference ourselves—you will find it too much for your limited powers.’”68

  These excruciatingly complex and subtle differences, Pascal argues, are creating a war within the church. “What picture can I present you of the Church batted back and forth between these conflicting sentiments?” Pascal said in the second letter, written on January 29, 1656. “Just like the man who, leaving his native country on a journey, is encountered by robbers, who inflict many wounds on him and leave him for dead. He sends for three physicians who live in the neighboring towns. The first, on probing his wounds, announces them mortal and assures him that none but God can restore his life to him. The second, coming after the other, chooses to flatter the man, tells him that he still has sufficient strength to reach his home and, abusing the first physician who opposed his advice, decides to ruin him.”69 The third physician, after being entreated by the wounded traveler, merely sides with the second and attacks the first. The barely disguised allusion to the Parable of the Good Samaritan is classic Pascal, as is his oversimplification of the problem.

  By letter three, published on February 9, 1656, Pascal is still trying to “understand the whole affair in a pleasant way” in the beginning, but by the end of that letter, his fangs come out. By that time, the pressure on the Jansenists was becoming a crisis, and the Jansenists were running scared. From that point on, the rest of the Provincial Letters becomes a direct assault on the casuistry of the Jesuits, often taking examples, out of context, from manuals written by Spanish Jesuits.

  “Casuistry” simply means making moral judgments from individual cases, and it has its roots in Jewish moral thought. In Catholicism, when the sacrament of Penance moved from the forum externum—that is, from a public judgment of actions and a public assignation of penances—to the forum internum—that is, private confession—the confessor was no longer merely the judge and jury, but also the spiritual adviser, whose job it was to guide the penitent back to the fold. It was at this point that the professional spiritual counselor was born, a job that has come down to us in its medical form as the psychiatrist and psychologist. One of the greater tasks of such counselors was to fight scrupulosity, the unreasoning sense of one’s inherent evil and the unreasoning fear of damnation. In doing so, the spiritual father, or adviser, became the understanding guide, the one who took intent into account, who defined sin along narrow lines, who tried to show the penitent the place where God lived in their hearts.

  By the sixteenth century, casuistry had become a recognized science, one that was nearly destroyed by the controversies with the Jansenists. The heart of this controversy was over the doctrine of probabilism, which held that when there is question solely of the lawfulness or unlawfulness of an action, the confessor can opt to follow a probable opinion in favor of liberty, even when the other opinion might be more likely. In other words, the Catholic Church rigged the game and leaned in the direction of moral liberty, which drove the Jansenists mad. This tendency—among Jesuit confessors, especially—they called “laxity.” Jansenists, therefore, were “rigorists,” whereas the Jesuits were “laxists.” Needless to say, eventually the pope condemned extremes on both sides.

  Pascal was one of the worst practitioners of rigorism, even to his death. People had to behave as close to perfectly as possible. Moreover, his attacks on the Jesuits in the remaining fifteen letters became ever more vicious, and ever less honest in his association of all casuistry, even Jesuit casuistry, with the worst abuses of the science. Certainly there were abuses, but those abuses were not typical of the practice. But the success of the Provincial Letters, success that derived mainly from its mockery, created the myth of the clever Jesuit and associated all casuistry with a cynical practice of making excuses for sinners. Jesuits were even willing to wave off homicide, Pascal argued. They were willing to do this in order to purchase political might, to buy their way into the halls of the powerful. “Because of the fame they have acquired in the world,” Pascal wrote in the fifteenth letter, written on November 25, 1656, “they can defame people without degrading the justice of mortals; and, on the strength of their self-assumed authority in matters of conscience, they have assembled maxims for themselves that enable them to act without any fear of the justice of God. This, fathers, is the fertile source of your base slanders.”70

  The last letter appeared on March 24, 1657. Only a year later, the true identity of the author came out, and François Annat, the Jesuit spiritual adviser to the king, declared that Pascal was a heretic. By this time, however, Pascal’s health was fading, and he had become a frail shadow of the man who had so ferociously written the Letter to a Friend in the Provinces. Nevertheless, the letters had already become the literary hit of the decade and the new voice of the Paris underground press, the same press that would feed the fires of revolution in a later age. Louis XIV banned the Provincial Letters in 1660, and it was put on the list of forbidden books by the Inquisition. The king quickly ordered all copies gathered and burned.

  But the Provincial Letters did survive and became a rallying point for a later generation of libertins érudits, the French Deists of the next century. In spite of all his good intentions, Blaise Pascal the über-Catholic had handed a terrible weapon to the enemies of the ch
urch: the grinning face of mockery, to be used not against the spoiler Jesuits, but against the faith itself.

  [1656]

  The Miracle of the Holy Thorn

  The Age of Miracles is forever here!

  —THOMAS CARLYLE

  To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, Every cubic inch of space is a miracle.

  —WALT WHITMAN

  Men reject their prophets and slay them, but they love their martyrs and honor those whom they have slain.

  —FYODOR MIKHAYLOVICH DOSTOYEVSKY

  The rapid publication of the Provincial Letters on January 27, February 5, and February 12, 1656, was an underground sensation. The letters were a hit among the educated middle class, and the fact that they sent Cardinal Mazarin’s secret police scurrying around looking for the author, or at least the printers who had printed them, did not harm their popularity in the slightest. The Fronde was still bubbling along, and the queen and the cardinal were far from popular. The police found the printers from time to time, wrecked the print shops, and harassed the printers, so that they had to move their operations to more secret locations. They did not find out the true identity of the author of the letters until much later, though the Jesuits had their suspicions.

  Pressure on Port-Royal increased so that in mid-March the crown issued an edict ordering the solitaries to leave Port-Royal des Champs at once. According to Mère Angélique, the valley had become a vale of tears. The gentlemen, some of whom had lived there for twenty years, and the fifteen young students in the petites écoles left the old monastery with great sadness. Suddenly, two miracles occurred, one worked by Mère Angélique and the other, according to the Jansenists, worked by God. Mère Angélique’s miracle was far more mundane, though quite miraculous in its own right. On March 20, her agents within the royal palace informed her that the nuns would soon be expelled from Port-Royal, not only the facility in the country, but the one in Paris as well. Somehow, her agents had seen a copy of the document sitting on the Queen Mother’s dressing table. What else could she do? Mère Angélique’s political resources had been stretched to the limit, and the forces arrayed against Saint-Cyran’s spiritual children were growing more powerful each day. And it wasn’t just the Jesuits. In fact, it wasn’t mainly the Jesuits, though one would think that from the Provincial Letters. By that point, the Jansenists could count among their enemies the young king, the Queen Mother, Cardinal Mazarin, the majority of the diocesan clergy in France, Vincent de Paul, Jean-Jacques Olier, and finally the pope. So Mère Angélique took her woes to God, and for the next three days and three nights she prayed before the Blessed Sacrament in the chapel of Port-Royal des Champs.