Will Morrisey Reviews

Pierre Manent: Challenging Modern Atheism and Indifference: Pascal’s Defense of the Christian Proposition. Paul Seaton translation. Introduction by Daniel J. Mahoney. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2025.

Blaise Pascal: Pensées. A. J. Krailsheimer translation. New York: Penguin Books, 1995.

 

Pascal’s famous “wager” comes to light because the rational proofs for the existence of God cannot reach very far towards the God of the Bible in answer to “the question contained in what, or whom, we call ‘God,'” a “Name [that] points toward something, or someone.” “Either we refuse it entry into the field of our awareness and attention, saying ‘no’ to the Name, or, more or less seriously, more or less sincerely, we open the door of the mind or the heart.” We cannot not choose. 

In so choosing, our human nature presents us with options. There is what the Bible calls “the flesh”—the world of kings and rich men (“let us today add; the celebrities“), the world of concupiscence (libido sentienti) and of curiosity, this last being the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, the innate and not intellectual knowledge of Good and Evil. There is the option of the life of the mind, the world of scholars. And there is the option of the will, option of those who aim at justice, the choice of ‘men of good will’—very often animated by pride and by libido dominandi. Yet the will might also direct itself to the truth, as the “eyes of the heart” lead to wisdom not of the world but of the Holy Spirit.

These several “orders” of the human soul “are indifferent and invisible to each other. “As soon as we live or enter into one of these orders, we are subject to its law, to its specific manner of acting on our faculties, of irresistibly gaining the upper hand over them—over our eyes of flesh, our mind, or our heart,” constituting our “form of life,” our soul’s regime. Hence the title of Plato’s dialogue: Politeia, Regime, traditionally translated as Republic. All of these regimes promise “splendor, luster, empire, victory.” “All are dazzled by the palaces or pageants of the ‘great,'”; Archimedes “shines to the minds,” “triumphs convincingly over every human mind with sufficient abilities”; and “the order of Jesus” “transforms in secret those for whom the ‘eyes of the heart’ are open,” open someday win the greatest victory of all, to enter the most splendid Kingdom of all, the City of God.

In one sense, only one of these regimes is universal. “All human beings belong to and participate in the order of the flesh.” We all see; we all want to be seen. And even if we fail in being seen, our contemporaries commend ‘self-esteem’ to one another. Do it yourself! The Christian “order of charity is ordered in an opposite way, being “invisible” and entered not by one’s own powers but by the grace of Jesus Christ, by “going inside oneself, concentrating and collecting oneself in this invisible place of the heart that race alone attains and reveals.” The order of the flesh, with Machiavelli, desires to acquire. It acts, as Machiavelli remarks, according to nature, according to what human nature has become, visibly. “The wellspring of charity is entirely opposite, because charity extirpates the movement-of-taking at its root,” consisting in the heart’s purity and humility, which “leaves all the room for God’s will.” As for the order of the mind, it lives “between these two opposed orders.” “Reserved for a small number,” it rests not on the will, “either one’s own or God’s,” but “on the understanding, in whose exercise it finds its triumphs.” “Such is the Pascalian tripartition of the human world.” It is instructive to compare his tripartition with Plato’s. Plato divides the regimes of the soul and the regimes of the city into logos, the reasoning mind, epithumia, appetites, and thumos, translated “spiritedness.” Thumos is natural, having nothing to do with the Holy Spirit. It is the closest Plato comes to Pascal’s will, but it is not the will but rather a natural desire for victory, rule, glory. If allied with reason, thumos can assist reason in ruling the appetites; if allied with the appetites, it overthrows reason and runs to crime and even madness. Pascal sees in thumos the perpetual ally of the epithumia. For logos to rule, it must enlist the aid of the Logos, God, or more accurately, it must consent to the aid and indeed the rule of the Logos because it is the Logos Who enlists it, by His grace, not the reverse. As Manent puts it, “certain traits of the third Pascalian order are not absent from the Greek city, or, in any case, from Athens,” as seen in Socrates, “he of a nondescript, even repulsive appearance,” “penniless, without splendor, without rule, without triumph and, as such…invisible to the ‘eyes of the flesh,’ but for those who ‘see wisdom,’ or at least love and desire it, would they not say he was invested with a certain ‘magnificence’?” The regime of Socrates’ soul “separated him from the passionate or ‘carnal’ city.” “For the Greeks,” philosophy is “the only thing [that] is really situated outside of the city.”

For his part, however, “Pascal unsparingly dismisses this figure of the philosopher,” whose “splendor is vanity in the two senses of the term, because he wants ‘to win men’s esteem’ and because his secret does not harbor any truth,” his erotic intellectual quest for the ‘ideas’ of justice, truth, and all else undertaken ‘in vain.’ “Political philosophy as it was conceived by the Socratics, that critical dialectics that never tires of scrutinizing the opinions and speeches of the city, is dismissed by Pascal” because “the mind [that] emancipates itself and becomes an entirely separate order” from the city has no “criterion beyond its own clarity and fecundity,” resulting often enough in conceiving of truth as zeteticism about the things of the heavens, let alone the things of the Kingdom of Heaven. “The Pascalian tripartition…breaks with the civic synthesis” of the ancients “by emancipating and separating the mind”—this much, as philosophers do—but then “add[ing] a new order, the order of humility and charity, in such a way that human life can no longer be seen in a synoptic way, brought together in the same view,” within the rubric of nature, of the cosmic order or regime. The Creator-God is a holy, a separate Being, “ontologically and epistemologically separated from the other two lives and orders.” It too is comprehensive, but it is not homogenous, merely a variegated but integral ‘one,’ but radically heterogeneous, consisting of Creator and His Creation. 

Further, the Creator rules His Creation, commands it, makes just demands on it. Accordingly, Pascal “constantly exposes himself and exposes us to the force of the question that is the wellspring common to the three separate orders,” the “question ‘How should I live?'” If I live according to the ‘Flesh,’ I must pay “respect and obedience” to kings and oligarchs, “in short, to ‘force,’ because there is no real human order except by a certain arrange of force.” If I live according to the mind, I must pay respect to “established facts” and to “indemonstrable but evident principles” and to “demonstrated propositions—in short, to ‘geometry’.” If I live according to Christ, I must pay respect to “the order of wisdom or charity [that] provides access to the proposition and its power of illuminating the greatness and misery that define human life.” These separate orders or regimes nonetheless “encounter one another, jostle and mingle, struggle for preeminence, claim victory in the battlefield that is each human life,” not unlike rival countries ruled by regimes whose principles contradict one another do. But in the soul-struggle, “the order that is constantly on the offensive, that never stops or grows tired, is the order of the flesh.” The life of the flesh has received extraordinary enhancement in modernity from the life of the mind, as modern science aims at the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate, and beyond relief, ever more extensive and exquisite physical pleasures. What, Manent asks, “should we say about the way in which these two unlimited desires”—the desire to know and the desire to acquire—were “tied together in the West to form a single passion, the vector of a unique project, a bond that should have remained eternally ruled out because, according to Pascal, the mind and the flesh are separated by an ‘infinite distance’?” 

Christianity teaches that “the will is capable of entering into the secret of charity”—of agape not eros—as soon as “it renounces itself.” “God wishes to move the will rather than the mind” (#234). Unfortunately, in Roman Catholic Christendom the alliance of mind and will forged by Aquinas led the Church to deny the further discoveries of the mind achieved by Galileo and others. This led to abuses of Church authority—the Inquisition, Jesuit maneuverings. “Pascal intervenes at this moment of extreme spiritual tension” among “the three orders of human life.” In this “drama,” the Church “pays for the power that it retains over consciences by renouncing proposing the Christian truth in its integrity and by refusing to grant their due to the truths of an unprecedented sort brought by the new physics”; additionally, as “the order of the mind and the order of the flesh encourage and stimulate one another, drawing humanity—in any case, Christendom—into a ‘progress’ that continually incites and disappoints the desire for a collective ‘order’ that satisfies all the needs of the body, or even for an entirely renewed human condition”—the results of the Second Coming without the Second Coming. But, as Pascal puts it with polite irony, “the ungodly who propose to follow reason must be singularly strong in reason.” Having addressed the challenge of Jesuit Machiavellianism in the Provincial Letters, Pascal turns to the challenge of modernity in the Pensées. 

Pascal acknowledges the truths discovered by modern science, with its combination of reasoning and physical experimentation. But those discoveries do not help us to understand how to live. And, being part of nature ourselves and given the vastness of nature as discovered by modern science, we will never really conquer it, although we will better understand our place in it as modern science progresses. Pascal, Manent observes, “is the only one, as it were, to take seriously geometry’s character as an order—that is, as a separate, and even infinitely distant order from the other orders.” The strength of geometry is its clarity; the limit of geometry it is that it does not, cannot, clarify everything.” On the contrary, and thankfully, “geometry causes humanity to encounter its limits, revealing to humans the weakness of their strength,” because geometry runs our minds up against infinity, showing the mind the limits of the mind.” As a result of our scientific inquiries, “we never arrive at the ultimate principles, but only at the ‘last that seems so to our reason.” So, for example, a physicist might postulate a ‘big bang’ as the origin of the cosmos, but if that explosion destroyed evidence of what caused it, we remain in the position of Socrates after he had studied the natural philosophy of his time: we will know that we do not know. “In accepting our ‘being’—that is, our ‘middling’, thus fluctuating condition—we reconcile ourselves to the contingent character of the human establishment and we understand that the communities in which we live cannot be founded on reason.” Pascal throws into question the ‘certainties’ Descartes had supposed himself to have based his geometry upon. “In radically detaching our knowledge from our being, Descartes had ruled out putting any limit to human desire,” Pascal sees that the limits of the human mind must limit the human desires Descartes has allied with the mind. “Whatever the new possibilities opened by the science of ‘figure’ and of ‘motion’…its developments will be without power or effect on the essentials of our condition” because “what we are is stronger than all our knowledge, our concrete and contingent being is stronger than all our abstracts sciences,” a truth we might not otherwise glimpse because “the smallness of our being hides infinity,” the vastness of the cosmos, “from our sight.” The “abstract sciences” “permit us to dispel countless errors about physical nature,” while having “nothing to say about what is proper to us.” If at least one proper study of mankind is man, modern science can explain him analytically, break him down into his elements, describe the relations of those physical elements among themselves; that is much, but it is not all. Modern science “multiplies indefinitely the types of knowledge that separate us from the knowledge of ourselves.” But “one must know oneself. Even if that does not help in finding truth, at least it helps in running one’s life, and nothing is more proper” (#72). [1]

In modernity, “experimental physics and the Christian religion form the two poles of human life insofar as it ‘knows what it is doing.'” The scientific experimenter “knows how to apply reason to experience”; the Christian can know “how to subject reason to faith” in “a domain of experience that has its own criteria.” Manent quotes a letter Pascal wrote to his sister, Gilberte, saying (along with the mystics of the early centuries of the Church, that “attention to ‘the interior movement of God’ cannot be effectively preserved except by ‘the continuation of the infusion of grace,’ so much so that ‘one must continually make new effort to acquire this constant newness of spirit, because one does not preserve the old grace except by the acquisition of a new grace'”—a conviction that Roman Catholic Pascal shares with Orthodox Christians. Admittedly, it is true that neither the regime of geometry nor the regime of Christianity knows (very much in the so-called ‘Biblical sense’) “the irregularities, lacunae, and disorders of the third order, the order of the flesh, the properly ‘human’ order”—the regime of postlapsarian humans, a regime that renders them “equally indifferent to human reason and to the grace of God.” “It is perhaps not superfluous to add that” this third order “is a factor that Europeans today refuse to consider soberly and impartially,” the factor of force. “Concupiscence and force are the source of all our actions. Concupiscence causes voluntary, force involuntary actions.” (#97).

Hobbes is the preeminent philosopher of force. Hobbes took Descartes’ method into the human/political realm, elaborating an anti-Aristotelian, geometric political science, “the first rigorous science of obedience.” We only really know what we make. Let us then set about to making our regimes, founding them on “the most constant and powerful passion,” the “fear of violent death at the hands of others.” For Hobbes the political order can be, should be, “the methodical fabrication of the human world by man himself.” in the form of “the modern state—the great machine of rational obedience.”  But for Pascal, to a substantial extent “the components of human life are given.” Pascal agrees with Hobbes that men naturally hate each other and want to tyrannize one another. The human ‘self’ “has two characteristics. It is unjust in itself for making itself center of everything; it is a nuisance to others in that it tries to subjugate them, for each self is the enemy of all the others and would like to tyrannize them.” Well-designed political institutions may “take away the nuisance, but not the injustice.” (#597). Geometrical abstractions can only take us so far. 

With Hobbes and his more genial predecessor, Montaigne, Pascal fully recognizes the varieties of human life, the rule of custom as our “second nature that destroys the first” (#126). (“I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.”) [2] But he interprets that diversity in a way unlike that of modern social sciences and the public opinion it has shaped. “For the moderns, this cultural diversity is the sign and expression of the power of humans over their condition, the sign and expression of the unlimited plasticity of their being—in short, of their freedom.” Not so, Pascal counters. Cultural diversity betrays our “servitude,” for “if people were actually free, they would have access to universal and stable criteria of justice, which would allow them to judge and order human things in full assurance.” Natural and divine laws exist; we violate them because we are ‘fallen.’ As far as “true justice” is concerned, “we no longer have any”—not since Eden (#86). Hobbes believes that human reason, in the form of his new and, he claims, first genuinely scientific political science, can provide access to natural laws while eschewing what he dismisses as mythological divine laws. On the contrary, Pascal rejoins, human reason cannot provide human beings with “adequate support.” Man “does not know” what justice is (#60). “Larceny, incest, infanticide, parricide, everything has at some time been accounted a virtuous action”; “it is by virtue of senatorial decrees and votes of the people that crimes are committed” (#60). And if we did have a sure knowledge of it, it would “be dangerous to tell the people that laws are not just, because they obey them only when they believe them to be just. “That is why they must be told at the same time that laws are to be obeyed because they are laws, just as superiors must be obeyed because they are superior. That is how to forestall any sedition, if people can be made to understand that, and that is the proper definition of justice,” as least on ‘this earth’ (#66). When they wish to “dislodge established customs,” to revolutionize, to change a political regime, men ‘question authority,’ refute the prevailing customs, demand “a return to the basic and primitive laws of the state which unjust custom has abolished. There is no surer way to lose everything.” (#160).  This is why that “the wisest of legislators” commend that “men must be deceived for their own good”—the “noble lie” Socrates finds in the best founding, the others being less than noble (#160). “The truth about the usurpation must not be made apparent; it came about originally without reason and has become reasonable” because at least it makes men less irritating and dangerous to one another; “the greatest of evils is civil war” (#94). Pascal even pays a sort of tribute to the Hobbesian effort: It is “man’s greatness even in his concupiscence” to have “managed to produce such a remarkable system from it and make it the image of true charity” (#118). Because, alas, “the name of right goes to the dictates of might” (#85); “it is necessary to follow the mighty” (#103). For example, “equality of possessions is no doubt right,” and it even finds shaky fulfillment in some monasteries, “but, as men could not make might obey right, they have made right obey might. As they could not fortify justice they have justified force, so that right and might live together and peace reigns, the sovereign good” (#81).   “It is not the same thing with the Church, because there genuine justice exists without any violence,” at least insofar as Jesuitism does not prevail in its precincts (#85). “The way of God, who disposes all things with gentleness, is to instill religion in our minds with reasoned arguments and into our hearts with grace, but attempting to instill it into hearts and minds with force and threat is to instill not religion but terror,” Manent adds. [3] Or, as Pascal has it (prefiguring an argument of the American Founders), “Multiplicity which is not reduced to union is confusion. Unity which does not depend on multiplicity is tyranny” (#604).  

It would be far better to “combine right and might, and to that end make right into might or might into right.” Thus far, however, “unable to make right into might,” we have “made might into right.” (#103). Hobbes’s attempt to found political science on geometric abstraction must fail. “How can people who are morally undetermined by nature receive rules of justice, not to mention produce them?” The “regime of the modern state” that Hobbes propounds, following the Baconian science derived from Machiavellian ambition, “can be called just because in principle it produces a peace advantageous to all, but no one in this regime, governing or governed, can be called just.” Hobbes attempts a geometrical solution to the problem of the flesh, an attempt to conquer human nature. Because “natural hatred among men” is an “interior cause,” its “core” being “an intention of the human being as such,” it cannot truly be remediated by any political science. At best, human cooperation can occur when these other-hating human beings that they need to cooperate with one another in order to satisfy their concupiscent desires more fully—when they consent to rule and to be ruled within a commercial regime. Nonetheless, “Montesquieu himself,” the “most determined and subtle promoter” of that regime, “will not fail to point out that a certain moral degradation accompanies the exclusive reign of the commercial spirit.” But “anyone who does not hate the self-love within him and the instinct which leads him to make himself into a God must be really blind” (#617). 

Catholic tradition adapted Aristotelian political science to the European circumstance, “placing in a law oriented to the common good the principal instrument of the good life,” concurring with Aristotle’s judgment that politics is the architectonic art, that political science is the architectonic discipline, while “formulating the new exigencies that the concern for salvation added to the political and social obligations arising from our nature.” That proved too heavy a burden for political communities to bear, even with the Church as their guide. In the respublica christiana, “the law directly attacked concupiscence and claimed, if not to defeat it, at least to control it,” albeit with “little success.” Pascal eschewed the failed attempt to control concupiscence directly by civil law. There was no sense in “claim[ing] to act ‘as if’ the kingdom of charity had arrived.” “Despite the meritorious virtues of sincere Christians, despite even the heroic virtues of the saints, the kingdoms of the world will remain kingdoms of concupiscence until the day of judgment.” Justice is invisible, force visible. Concupiscent human beings incline to ‘think’ with their eyes, claiming as justice what is really nothing more than some arrangement of their desires. Concupiscence defeats the unworldly commands of the Church, as Machiavelli and Hobbes understand, but it also defeats their own systems. At best, in order “to render their victory sure and, for that purpose, to exit from the state of war,” strong men “must convert their military victory into a peaceful order,” a “new regime” that will be “accepted by all, including the defeated party” by including members of that party in its ‘power structure.’ Now, “the bonds securing men’s mutual respect are generally bonds of necessity, for there must be differences of degree, since all men want to be on top and all cannot be, but some can” (#828). “The masters, who do not want the war to go on, ordain that the power which is in their hands shall pass down by whatever means they like; some entrust it to popular suffrage, others to hereditary succession, etc. And that is where imagination begins to play its part,” the possibly and passably noble lie. “These bonds securing respect for a particular person are bonds of imagination.” (#828). The one, the few, the many: whoever rules must invest itself with imagined majesty and authority, if not mystery. “The imagination, formed by the legislator…fixes the perspective on the human world.”

Despite all this, Pascal is no ‘perspectivist’ or ‘relativist.’ “He intends to preserve the universal validity of the moral code.” The pagans of antiquity built “disagreement over justice” into their regimes—Aristotle’s ‘mixed regime’ in which neither the few who are rich nor the many who are poor can get anything done without the others’ consent being an excellent example. This “struggle of the parties does not know any truce” because the imagination of the partisans focuses not on the known, the self-interest of all the parties, but on “the city itself, which is the object of the citizens’ eros. In Pascal’s France, however, where the monarchic-aristocratic regime “has been established for a very long time,” it is “a question of preventing, rather than explicating, the dialectical debate, the conflict of opinions concerning justice.” Imagination and force combine to prevent faction: “The chancellor is a grave man, dressed in fine robes because his position is false; not so the king. He enjoys power, and has no use for imagination. Judges, doctors, etc., enjoy nothing but imagination.” (#87). “Thinking too little about things or thinking too much both make us obstinate and fanatical,” the first out of piety, the second out of ideology (#21). But in this world, it is imagination “that decides everything: it creates beauty, justice and happiness, which is the world’s supreme good” (#44). In Pascal’s more measured view, “the world is a good judge of things, because it is in the state of natural ignorance where man really belongs. Knowledge has two extremes which meet; one is the pure natural ignorance of every man at birth, the other is the extreme reached by great minds who run through the whole range of human knowledge, only to find that they know nothing and come lack the same ignorance from which they set out, but it is a wise ignorance which knows itself. Those who stand half-way have put their natural ignorance behind them without yet attaining the other; they have some smattering of adequate knowledge and pretend to understand everything. They upset the world and get everything wrong.” Crucially, the imagination is “quite visible,” thus obeyable by worldlings. “Ordinary people honor those who are highly born, the half-clever ones despise them, saying that birth is a matter of chance, not personal merit. Really clever men honor them, not for the same reason as ordinary people, but for deeper motives. Pious folk with more zeal than knowledge despise them regardless of the reason which makes clever men honor them, because they judge men in the new light of piety, but perfect Christians honor them because they are guided by a still higher light,” the light that brings the Apostle Paul to adjure Christians to respect the one who does not bear the sword in vain, the light of Christ who tells Christians to pay their taxes in the coin that has the stamp of Caesar on it. 

Manent asks, “Does not modern democracy rest on the close alliance of the people and the half-clever?” It has not been a fatal alliance, in the long run, but it remains fragile, as one set of men can turn on the other. “Pascal perhaps invites us to put the half-clever back in their place.” It might be far more strenuous and bloodier to attempt to put the people in their place. And as for “the devout” and “the perfect Christian,” the devout has more zeal than knowledge, attempting to make the Christian light prevail in politics. The perfect Christian has the “knowledge” the devout lacks, or perhaps even more the prudence of the serpent that Jesus commends to His disciples. “One must obey in conscience—in conscience—the established order, while keeping in mind that this order—force and justice mixed together—is contingent and that, if it is not simply ‘just,’ it is not simply ‘unjust’ either.” That is, “there is a just way of comporting oneself in a world without justice, and of relating to it.” 

This makes the Christian proposition, as understood by Pascal, “incomparably more concrete and determinate than any human proposition, whose binding element, as we have emphasized, resides in the imagination.” The Christian proposition demands a choice: my self against all the other human ‘selves’ or the Person who is God, who is ‘for’ all human selves? Egocentricity or theocentricity? “As the clever knows that it is not possible to separate human justice from the force without which it is only an insubstantial ‘quality,’ the ‘perfect Christian’ knows that the good wheat and the chaff grow together and that it is at the very least imprudent, and probably impious, to give to social man the mandate to perform this discrimination reserved to divine justice.” As Pascal has it, “justice and truth are two points so fine that our instruments are too blunt to touch them exactly.” (#45). 

 

Notes

1. “Unless we know ourselves to be full of pride, ambition, concupiscence, weakness, wretchedness, and unrighteousness, we are truly blind” (#595). It is also true than man is “made for thinking,” which means that our “whole duty is to think as [we] ought,” beginning with what we ought to think of ourselves” (#620). There being a “civil war in man between reason and passions” (#621), we find, upon self-examination, that “man is neither angel nor beast” and, moreover, “anyone trying to act the angel acts the beast” (#678). To win the civil war, to do that as a self-knowing man, “we must treat [the passions] like slaves, and give them food but prevent the soul feeding on it” (#603). Since this is humanly impossible, we need, first, to learn to “hate ourselves” and to love God, who is the only Person who can effectively strengthen our reason, our distinctively human nature, against the bestial passions (#220). “The true and only virtue is…to hate ourselves, for our concupiscence makes us hateful” (#564). However, “we cannot love what is outside us,” given our self-love, so “we must love a being who is within us but is not our own self” (#564).  That being is the God of the Bible. “Not only do we only know God through Jesus Christ, but we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ; we only know life and death through Jesus Christ. Apart from Jesus Christ we cannot know the meaning of our life or our death, of God or of ourselves.” (#417). It is “the sign of the true religion…that it obliges men to love God,” a love expressed through prayer; “no other religion has asked God to make us love and follow him” (#214). “How then can we have anything but respect for a religion which knows man’s faults so well? What desire but that a religion which promises such desirable remedies should be true?” (#595). Thus, “I marvel at an original and august religion, wholly divine in its authority, its longevity, its perpetuity, its morality, its conduct, its doctrine, its effects. Thus I stretch out my arms to my Savior, who, after being foretold for four thousand years, came on earth to die and suffer for me at the time and in the circumstances foretold. By his grace I peaceably await death, in the hope of being eternally united to him, and meanwhile I live joyfully, whether in the blessings which he is pleased to bestow on me or in the afflictions he sends me for my own good and taught me how to endure by his example.” (#792).
2. “Montaigne is wrong. The only reason for following custom is that it is custom, not that it is reasonable or just, but the people follow it because they think it just. Otherwise they would not follow it any more….” (#525).
3. “It is false piety to preserve peace at the expense of truth,” just as “it is also false zeal to preserve truth at the expense of charity” (#949). Pride and sloth are “the twin causes of all vice”; “the Christian religion alone has been able to cure these twin vices, not by using one to expel the other according to worldly wisdom, but by expelling both through the simplicity of the Gospel” (#208). “States would perish if their laws were not stretched to meet necessity, but religion has never tolerated or practiced such a thing. So either compromises or miracles are needed.” (#280). “Two laws are enough to rule the whole Christian republic better than all political laws”: love God, love your neighbor (#376). For states, more laws are necessary, and Christians should obey them.

 

Pierre Manent: Challenging Modern Atheism and Indifference: Pascal’s Defense of the Christian Proposition. Author’s Preface, chapters 1-3. Paul Seaton translation. Introduction by Daniel Mahoney. South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2025.

Blaise Pascal: Pensées. A.J. Krailsheimer translation. London: Penguin Books, 1995.

 

Why Pascal?

If you want to be challenged by a writer, put your money on Blaise Pascal. Pierre Manent has, and the payout is substantial.

He writes primarily to his fellow Europeans, whom he describes as perplexed and doubtful: “Who are we?” Once understanding themselves as Christians, yet also pulled toward “the attraction of strength, the desire for glory, and the affirmation of human will and freedom,” Europeans now “do not know what to think or do with Christianity” and, perhaps, do not know what to do with power freedom, now a bit embarrassed by glory. When Europe was Christendom, “nowhere else but in Europe was human liberty exposed to such a breadth of possibilities, the human will to an alternative of such profundity.” But now? A choice between two mighty alternatives, both gone lukewarm? A condition of hesitation worthy only of the Last Man?

“Europe is not Christian, it does not want to be Christian.” It re-baptized itself in “a baptism of erasure” that rendered it “impermeable to its historical religion, and consequently incapable of conducting itself judiciously vis-à-vis the other religions that it agrees to receive, most often favorably, because they at least are not Christian”—in the dubious hope that it can somehow neutralize them, too, in its “condition of untroubled incomprehension of the religious question.” The problem is not only that it thereby leaves itself vulnerable to religious militants who refuse to tolerate toleration, but that Christianity (rather like the Holy Spirit) doesn’t go away. It is “the only religious that is entirely independent of every existing human association—people, city, empire.” It leaves itself room for adaptation to circumstances in a way that old and new civil religions do not. In this way, it resembles Aristotle’s prudential man while following Jesus’ command to be prudent as serpents while remaining (or, in light of stubborn old sin, aspiring to be) innocent as doves.

Christianity declared its independence with “a radically new word,” the Word of God, Logos, with “a radically new action,” the work of the Cross, and with “a radically new bond between word and action,” the Ecclesia, the Assembly of Christians; “there is no ‘Christianity’ without the Christian church,” “an unprecedented human association.” This radically new regime, this Kingdom of God, in but not of the many cities of Man, posited a new purpose for human beings as such: “to arrive at God.” To put it Greekly, theosis is not eudaimonia, although it encompasses and elevates eudaimonia.  It is not human or, like the incarnate God, not exclusively or even primarily human. This regime requires, as all regimes do, a purpose (salvation of the souls of individual persons), a Ruler and a set of vicegerents, a set of ruling offices, institutions, and a way of life (“My way” and no one else’s, as God told, first, the Israelites and then the nations). Such authority could not but inflect the thoughts and actions of “princes and peoples” in an extraordinary manner, making itself “an axial question of the political, moral, and spiritual history of Europe.” 

Christianity troubled Europe, as it had troubled Rome before. The European princes attempted to use it for their own purposes, as Machiavelli recommended, or to make a truce with it by separating their states from the Church. But “today, we no longer have separation, properly speaking, because the state has drawn to itself all authority,” since “the state cannot simultaneously be superior and really separate.” The modern state has elevated itself above all religions and, its partisans suppose, above “human passions and opinions,” being ‘impersonal’ in a way that no previous ruling body had been. At the same time, it makes itself into a sort of church, not only “the guardian of external order” but “the guardian of ‘values.'” Values are a matter of mere opinion, ‘relative’ to one another, but in practice they must ultimately be relative to the purposes of the state. “The neutral state went in search of each member of society in the intimacy of his will, in order that he agree to obey it before giving his faith and eventually his obedience to the church; in this way the first act of the human will was for the state and not for God.” Such a priority, consent to the sovereign state, cannot but conflict with the authority of God and cannot consistently uphold any purpose, even a ‘secular’ purpose, inasmuch as a “church of separated wills,” consenting to nothing more than hanging out together, finally can neither govern itself nor sustain itself against those whose purposes are firmer.

Machiavellianism didn’t take hold politically until the middle of the seventeenth century. That, Manent remarks, is when Pascal thought and wrote, rethinking the Christian regime or, as Manent more politely puts it, the Christian proposition, “the connected series of Christian doctrines or mysteries” offered to human beings for their consent and accompanied by a “specific form of life.” “I sought the aid and assurance of Pascal to rediscover the exact terms, and to grasp the gravity and urgency, of the Christian question—that of the Christian faith, of the possibility of the Christian faith.” The middle of the seventeenth century saw horrendous civil wars fought over the Christian faith, along with the sovereign state’s answer to those wars. Pascal thus confronted challenges to Christianity from within and from without. Now that the modern state is so sure of itself, while the demi-citizens of modern European states are so perplexed, Manent poses Christianity as a question, a question that it may also provide an answer to perplexity. Are you sure that all values are relative?

Modern Atheism

In a way, Christianity lends itself to atheism. Human beings tend to believe what they want to believe. God tells them things they don’t want to believe: love your enemies, don’t fornicate. His religion “find[s] support in none of the wellsprings of human nature.” As a result, in Pascal’s words, “men despise religion”; “they hate it and are afraid it may be true” (#12). Why, Manent asks, did the Roman Empire, so intent on ruling the world, “associat[e] itself with the religious proposition the least suited to the motives of the commanding and conquering animal”? It may have needed to. Christians had grown to numerous either to persecute or to ignore; they had to be ‘let in.’ As Pascal writes “What is wonderful, incomparable and wholly divine is that this religion which has always survived has always been under attack,” continuing “without bending and bowing to the will of tyrants ” (#281). And again: “The only religion which is against nature, against common sense, and against our pleasures is the only one that has always existed” since the Garden of Eden and before (#284). Such a phenomenon had to be accommodated, somehow, and it was.

True, both sides saw “the distinction between God and Caesar,” but the Church was itself “a great legal or juridical fact, an immense teaching and commanding association, which cannot convey the gospel message if it does not have the strength to make its absolute independence respected.” Manent locates the crucial break in that association not so much in the Great Schism but in the Reformation, the schism within the Western Church. It was the Reformation that “open[ed] an unprecedented career to the state” by “giving rise to separate churches,” each seeking state protection. With this, “the state became the principle of order par excellence, not only of external order but also of a certain internal order,” its “peace and justice” acquiring “a spiritual quality that until then had eluded the profane powers” of Christendom.” This “spiritual quality…was different from the civic sacredness of paganism” because it “brought the members of society together in an unprecedented sentiment of unity and strength,” consent to state sovereignty often confirmed by what would come to be called nationalism, the valorization of the new cult of national culture. At the heart of those exercising the sovereignty of the state was the decidedly anti-Christian, Machiavellian passion, libido dominandi —the sort of thing that got Satan in trouble with God, much to Adam’s eventual disadvantage. Pascal’s critique of the Jesuits in the Provincial Letters centers on the Jesuits’ fall into Machiavellianism, their surreptitious departure from the principles of their founder, Ignatius of Loyola. The Jesuits have become far too eager “to keep on good terms with all the world,” as Pascal puts it. They would rule souls at the cost of departing from Christianity. But under modern conditions of Machiavellian statism, coming as it does after a way of life governed by doctrines, does not bring back paganism but the manipulation of rival doctrines, eventually called ‘ideologies,’ convenient deceptions, not-so-noble lies, at the service of libido dominandi. [1] 

Against this, Pascal sought to reestablish Christian doctrine, and especially the doctrine of grace “in its clarity and authority and to bring to light the way in which the Christian religion presents itself to the acting person and the way the acting human being relates to the Christian religion.” The way to grace is repentance, animated by humility—the opposite of the natural human propensity to make ruling an ‘end in itself,’ really a means to satisfying human pride in opposition to God. Once human pride establishes itself as the purpose of human life, human life imagines itself to progress by successive conquests—conquests of other men, of fortune, of nature. “We therefore run endlessly toward a horizon that constantly recedes,” a supposed ‘progress’ that actually goes in circles because it has no limit. The Jesuits “contribute to the encouragement and acceleration of a transfer of moral and spiritual allegiance from the church to the state.” 

Manent raises a doubt about Pascal’s preferred Christian sect, the Jansenists. The Jansenists wanted “a sort of ‘direct government’ by God over his church.” God demurred, preferring to allow human beings to choose Him or not. It is to the question of that choice that Pascal addresses himself in the fragments of a book that have come down to us as the Pensées. There is an “atheist in every human being,” including Pascal; in the Pensées, he addresses him. With serpentine prudence, as the editor of Pascal’s Oeuvres Complète observes, “he never began with a dispute, or by establishing the principles that he wished to articulate, but he wanted to know beforehand if they sought the truth with their whole hear; and he acted accordingly with them.” Manent takes up that challenge, engages in that dialogue.

The ‘Wager’

In pagan antiquity, there were three kinds of gods: those of the poets, conjured in imagination; those of the philosophers, who reasoned their way into several theologies; and those of the rulers, the civil religions of Rome and Israel. It is the latter civil religion that Pascal takes seriously. The “Holy One of Israel educate[s] his people by teaching to understand, by tirelessly attempting to make it understand, that he alone is the source of the salvation of the children of Israel.” He commands war against the Amalekites; victory only comes so long as Moses holds the rod of God aloft. “Politics and religion, which we love to separate, are here inseparably mixed,” Manent remarks; “in truth, they are indistinguishable,” and the Israelites’ many attempts to weaken or sever their Covenant with God only led to their punishment by God. God does so because he intends to use Israel to destroy His enemies. “In order to make himself known to the political animal, what is more appropriate than this direct government of Yahweh, with all the consequences for the soul and body of the children of Israel?” Yet the Israelites, like all humans, grew restive under the unnatural (because divine, holy, separate from Creation) divine yoke, demanding a king in order to be “like all the nations.” My way is not your way, My thoughts are not your thoughts. So much the worse for you, unless you align yourself with Me, with My regime, My “way.” 

If you do, you will accept the only really convincing proofs of the God of the Bible, particularly as He manifests Himself in the New Testament. Pascal tells us that “We know God only through Jesus Christ. Without this mediator all communication with God is broken off. Through Jesus we know God.” But how do we know Jesus is the Christ? “To prove Christ we have the prophecies” of the Old Testament” which are solid and palpable truths,” prophecies “fulfilled and proved by the event.” “Without Scripture, without original sin without the necessary mediator who was promised and came it is impossible to prove absolutely that God exists, or to teach sound doctrine and sound morality. But through and in Christ we can prove God’s existence, and teach both doctrine and morality. Therefore Jesus is the true God of men.” (#189). Yes, but to prove God’s existence this way, one must first open our souls to the revelations of Scripture. Proofs of the sort Thomas Aquinas and others offer, amalgamations of Scripture and reasoning, won’t do if Scripture is no authority. “Pascal seeks to free us from the hold of the ‘metaphysical proofs of God’ that presuppose that the same procedure of reason can simultaneously validate the ‘ascending ‘ movement of Greek philosophy and the ‘descending’ movement of Jewish and Christian revelation, in such a way that the God of philosophers can also be the God of Jews and Christians.” As Pascal writes, “the metaphysical proofs for the existence of God are so remote from human reasoning and so involved that they make little impact, and, even if they did help some people, it would only be for the moment during which they watched the demonstration, because an hour later they would be afraid they had made a mistake,” losing “through pride” what they “gained by curiosity” (#190). Given his corrupt nature, “man does no act according to the reason which constitutes his nature” (#491). To proceed more effectively, Pascal intends to induce his readers, in Manent’s words, to “step outside their condition of atheism,” their “practical indifference to the possibility of God,” by “engaging the active faculties of our being, and first of all the one that is the principle of every movement of the soul, the will.” Reasoning, whether that of the classical or of the modern philosophers, has “captured the mind” for atheism, very much in accordance with (sinful) human nature. To recapture the mind for God, the will needs to be redirected, not (initially) the mind itself because the mind by itself does not aim in God’s direction but in the direction of human things or, at most, of the nature that encompasses human things. “The cure for this is first to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect,” Pascal contends. “Next, make it attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then,” and only then, “show that it is.” Show that it is “worthy of reverence because it really understands human nature,” better than reasoning can. Show that it is “attractive because it promises true good,” not the false or at best partial goods we perceive by reasoning (#12). [2]

Here the wager comes in. Pascal elaborates it in his fragment #418. “We do not know the existence or the nature of God, because he has neither extension nor limits.” Or, as Orthodox Christians say, we cannot know God’s “essence”; to see it would overwhelm our finite capacities and indeed kill us. “We are therefore incapable of knowing either what he is or whether he is” according to the usual proofs. However, “it is quite possible to know that something exists without knowing its nature.” Reason, which requires the finitude of nature seen in its animating principle, the principle of non-contradiction first enunciated by Socrates in Plato’s Republic, “cannot decide this question.” In acknowledging that they have no real rational, demonstrative proof of God’s existence, by admitting the “folly” of their faith, Christians “show that they are not without sense.” “Either God is or he is not”; “reason cannot make you choose either, reason cannot prove either wrong.” Very well then, if not atheism, then reason brings us to agnosticism, advising us that “the right thing is not to wager at all.” As Manent puts it, while the agnostic does not deny God’s existence, he “he does not will to go toward God.” 

“Yes, but you must wager,” Pascal rejoins. And here reason enters back in, not ‘pure’ or ‘metaphysical’ reason but ‘practical’ reason. “You have two things to lose: the true and the good; and two things to stake: your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to avoid: error and wretchedness.” Your reason “cannot be affronted” by either choice, “since you must necessarily choose,” exercise your will. Your happiness is another matter. If you wager that God exists and you are right, “you win everything.” If you wager that God exists and you are wrong, “you lose nothing,” shuffling off this mortal coil to an unavoidable oblivion. What is more (very much more!), you are not betting, say, your one life in the hope of getting two lives, or three. You are betting on “an eternity of life and happiness.” And so, “wherever there is infinity, and where there are not infinite chances of losing against that of winning, there is no room for hesitation, you must give everything”; “you must be renouncing reason if you hoard your life rather than risk it for an infinite gain, just as likely to occur as a loss amounting to nothing.”

And if you reply, “I am so made that I cannot believe,” then blame “your passions,” not reason. “Concentrate then not on convincing yourself by multiplying proofs of God’s existence but by diminishing your passions”—what the Bible calls spiritual warfare. “What harm will come to you from choosing this course? You will be faithful, honest, humble, grateful, full of good works, a sincere, true friend, “eschewing enjoyment of “noxious pleasures, glory and good living”—good according to your passions—but “will you not have others?” Thus, “you will gain even in this life,” although the greatest potential gain is in the ‘next’ life.

Manent writes, “One sees that Pascal takes into account the whole of the human soul with its two great faculties of reason and will and their two great objects, the true and the good.” Our reason alone can bring us to know God, but it “does retain the role of indicating to the will the terms of the choice, without being in the least able to determine the choice.” That choice is a “blind choice.” Once we fully see our blindness, “the more it becomes irresistibly evident that there is only one possible choice,” not on the basis of rational calculation, not on probabilities, for the infinite is by definition incalculable. Rather, “our capacity for choice, activated by our will for happiness…is irresistibly carried away by the disproportion between the terms of the alternative,” all or nothing. Manent does not “justify the wager for God” but responds “to the objections of calculating reason” by the very means of an analogy to wagering, which exercises calculating reasoning. “Because the interlocutor allowed himself to be troubled by the questions of calculating reason, Pascal,” one of the great mathematicians, “is going to teach him how to calculate.” By then introducing the incalulable, the infinite, making the equation radically un-‘equal,’ he “does not want to prove anything” but rather intends to “set us in motion,” to teach us not to confuse the probable with the possible. Winning the infinite reward may not be probable, but so long as it is possible it is the best bet. He does not attempt to prove anything “to calculating reason, but to make practical reason feel that the choice of the Infinite is a very natural way of proceeding.” He wants his readers “to remain open, or to open themselves, to the possibility of infinite life.” What is our finite, natural life, lived within the limits of “self-love,” in contrast with “a good that is infinite”? “Only the ‘heart,'” not reason, “has the breadth and flexibility to make the same being capable of making two absolutely opposed choices”: that “the choice of the Infinite imposes itself on us in a way that overturns the ordinary conditions of human choices” while at the same time “the choice of the Infinite ought to be as easy and natural as our most ordinary choices.” Limited reason needs to recognize its limitations, exercise itself within them; it “must be reasonable enough to recognize that it does not make the great decision of life.” [3] The heart “either gives, or hardens, itself as it chooses.” “By understanding that ‘our life’ is not that solid and sure thing on the basis of which we can decide the just and the reasonable, but rather the deceptive fruit of a choice of the heart, our heart, which is indeed great and capable of infinity, but which our vicious will attaches to this finite life, a movement of the will that immediately shuts us off from the possible Infinite.” Such an attachment is unreasonable, yet it can only be seen as unreasonable once the “heart” opens itself to Logos, to reason. [4]

Pascal’s Wager, Anselm’s Proof

Manent has observed that Pascal’s departs from the proofs confirming the validity of Christian revelation advanced by Aquinas, who “proceed[s] from ‘effects’ that the senses observe in nature, the ‘argument from design,’ or by Descartes, who proceeds “from ‘ideas.'” These proofs “leave us cold because they are too ‘remote from the reasonings of human beings,'” that is, “from the way human beings reason in the ordinary circumstances of life.” And they don’t prove the existence of what so many want to know: the existence of the God of the Bible. Wagering is closer to home. Yet he “seems to ignore a particularly famous argument in the history of philosophical and theological reflection, which is quite different from proofs by ideas or effects” and at the same bases itself on ground shared by everyone. Anselm takes up the condition “where we already find ourselves.” We all say ‘God,’ but we seldom reflect upon the implications of saying ‘God.’ In his Proslogicon, Anselm does so reflect. In saying ‘God,’ both believers and unbelievers think of “that than which no greater can be conceived”; a being that exists in reality is greater than one that exists only in the mind; if God exists as an idea (and He does) but does not exist in reality, then we can imagine something greater than God; that being impossible (by the definition of ‘God’), if God exists in the mind as an idea, then God exists in reality. He does, so he does.

Manent proposes a new understanding of Anselm’s argument, which is usually understood as a logical proof based upon the idea of ‘God.’ Manent proposes that Anselm does not start with an idea, “a thing that is thought, a cogitatum, but a cogitans, a person who thinks,” a person who seeks, who “strain[s] toward something of which one is ignorant and that one desires to know.” In this, he is much closer to Pascal than to Descartes. In “open[ing] up the immensity of what is to be thought, the one who thinks becomes aware of his inability to think it, experiencing simultaneously the greatness of the object of his desire”—the ‘essence’ of God, in Orthodox Christian terms—and “his own littleness.” If, as the Bible says, the fool has said in his heart that there is no God, “when he hears what Anselm says, when he hears the formula, grasps what he hears”; he then cannot “say that he does not grasp what he himself says when he pronounces his denial.” In “comprehending the definition of what he denies, [he] is obliged to understand that in reality he affirms it.” Put another way, “what he thinks in order to deny it is necessarily stronger than his denial.” Any fool might be right to deny an alleged ‘fact.’ But ‘God’ isn’t a fact, is not reducible “to the ordinary condition of things that [the human mind] understands.” A human being can understand Aristotle’s god, the ‘First Mover.’ But Aristotle simply never heard of the God of the Bible, and so did not have to confront the assertion of the Bible, to affirm or to question it. The fool who denies the existence of the Biblical God “considers himself greater than the greatest being and quite competent to decide that about God there is nothing to think and that one can think man without thinking God.” Caught you, you nihilist: you have already thought ‘God.’ But you have not understood the implication of so thinking. 

Pascal demurs. For him, “it is not a question of inciting the unbeliever to better understand, to really understand what the believer intends when he says ‘God,’ but of persuading him to change radically—to invert as it were—the direction of his being.” That is what the wager does; it “engages the unbeliever in a radical change of life,” a change in direction of the will necessary to any genuine change of mind—what Christians call a conversion. Whereas both Anselm and Pascal “endeavor by their argument to provoke in us an active and continuous relation to him who is designated by the word ‘God,'” Anselm addresses how we think whereas Pascal addresses how we choose. “God is not properly an object of the science or art of proving. If he exists, he is without any proportion to the machinery of any proof there might be.” It is God who proposes, reveals Himself, to man. Man’s rational eros, his desire to know, won’t get him to God, no matter how intelligent his efforts may be. For man, “it is a matter of responding to a proposition.” Pace Machiavelli, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, but “whoever desires to enter into the understanding of the Christian proposition,” which is the proposition of a God Who proposes, “must begin by accepting the condition in which it places human beings when it addresses them—the condition of one who listens.” Pascal elaborates, “those to whom God has given religious faith by moving their hearts are very fortunate, and feel quite legitimately convinced, but to those who do not have it we can only give such faith through reasoning, until God gives it by moving their heart, without which faith is only human and useless for salvation” (#110).

 

Note

1. For a fuller discussion of the Provincial Letters and of Manent’s commentary on them, see “Pascal Against the Jesuits,” on this website under the category, “Bible Notes.”
2. “The mind naturally believes and the will naturally loves, so that when there are no true objects for them, they necessarily become attached to false ones” (#661). “The will is one of the chief organs of belief, not because it creates belief, but because things are true or false according to the aspect by which we judge them. When the will likes one aspect more than another, it deflects the mind from considering the qualities of the one it does not care to see,” leading the mind in the direction it “likes” (#539). That is, “all our reasoning comes down to surrendering to feeling” (#530). Indeed, “How absurd is reason, the sport of every wind!” (#44). Therefore, “God wishes to move the will rather than the mind” (#234).
3. See Richard Hooker: The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, discussed on this website in a review titled, “Reason Within the Limits of Religion Alone,” under the category, “Bible Notes.”
4. “Faith is different from proof,” Pascal observes. “One is human and the other a gift from God…. This is the faith that God himself puts in our hearts.” (#7). 

Blaise Pascal: The Provincial Letters. Thomas M’Crie translation. Veritatis Splendor Publications, 2012.

Pierre Manent: Pascal’s Defense of the Christian Proposition. Paul Seaton translation. Introduction by Daniel J. Mahoney. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2025.

 

In the sixteenth century, Thomist Roman Catholicism found itself embroiled in controversy. Martin Luther’s challenge to papal authority, including the issuance of indulgences, and his critique of Erasmus’ teaching on the freedom of the will had shaken Christendom. Luther had been a member of the Church’s Order of St. Augustine, and he inclined to prefer Augustinian emphasis on Scriptural interpretation to the regnant Thomism, centered in the Dominican Order, and well enunciated by Francisco de Vitoria, a school of interpretation which gave scope to rational deduction from Scripture as a supplement to Scripture itself. This valorization of human reason in turn gave credit to the doctrine of free will, as defended by Erasmus, who in turn inspired that humane Thomist and contemporary of Luther, Francisco Vitoria. Luther’s strict Augustinianism may be said to have inclined him to his famous doctrines of justification by faith alone and faith by divine grace alone, staples of the Protestant Reformation. 

A somewhat similar controversy arose within the Catholic Church itself. Ignatius of Loyola founded the Society of Jesus or ‘Jesuits’ in 1541. Although the Dominicans by no means eschewed evangelical work (Vitoria wrote extensively on the right treatment of the Indians in the New World, ‘discovered’ by Spanish explorers), they inclined to scholarly study in a communal setting. The Jesuits were activists, and this commended them to the Vatican, always alert to ways of extending its spiritual empire. Doctrinally, the two orders differed on the vexed question of free will and determinism. Thomists advocated proemotio physica, physical premotion, holding that God directly causes the motions of the human will, especially with respect to its consent to faithful adherence to Christian doctrine. Jesuits (as seen in the writings of Luis de Molina) advocated scientifia media, middle knowledge, holding that God has foreknowledge of what men will freely will in any given circumstance, then ordains the circumstance. Thomists charged the Jesuits with inclining toward the Pelagianism Augustine had opposed and the Church had condemned; Jesuits charged the neo-Thomists with inclining toward Lutheranism.

Cornelius Jansen (“Jansenius”) entered the controversy in the 1630s. He attacked de Molina’s views, weighing in on the Augustinian side of the question; his magnum opus, published posthumously, was titled Augustinus. But his insistence on the irresistibility of God’s race, his denial of free will regarding matters of salvation, did not prevent him, as the Bishop of Ypres, from yearning for Dutch liberty against Spanish or French domination. His 1635 polemic, the Mars Gallicus, inveighs against the ambitions of Cardinal Richelieu, a careful student of Machiavelli and organizer of the centralized Bourbon state, an institution very much in line with Machiavelli’s precepts. This made Jansenism suspect indeed in France; as evidence against their rivals, the Jesuits extracted five propositions from Augustinus and arranged to have it condemned by two popes.

By the 1650s, when Pascal wrote the Provincial Letters, the Jansenist side of the controversy had been carried on by Antoine Arnauld, who maintained that Jansen’s book contained none of the propositions that had been condemned. The first ten of Pascal’s letters, published pseudonymously, consist of letters written by “the Provincial,” now living in Paris, to a friend who still lives in the countryside; letters eleven to sixteen are addressed directly to the Jesuits and the final three letters are addressed to François Annat, a Jesuit who had written against Jansenism. Like many young men, Pascal delighted in satirizing his elders and betters; unlike most of them, he was exceptionally good at it.

“We were entirely mistaken,” when we were living in the provinces, viewing academia from afar, the Provincial writes to his friend. “It was only yesterday that I was undeceived. Until that time I had labored under the impression that the disputes in the Sorbonne” amongst the theology professors “were vastly important and deeply affected the interests of religion.” No, and no.

Two questions are debated. The first is a question of fact. Was Arnauld correct when he asserted that Jansenius’ book had none of the propositions condemned by “the late pope”? To that, the Provincial replies that one can read the book for himself—a wise strategy, regarding most books. Not one of his accusers has found any of the alleged propositions, and “the truth is that the world has become skeptical of late”—consider Descartes—and “will not believe things till it sees them.” 

And then there is the question of right doctrine. In this instance, “it is of as little consequence” as the question of fact. Is God’s grace “efficacious of itself,” determining the will of the person upon whom it is bestowed? Or is it “given to all men”? Both sides agree that the righteous have the power to obey God’s commands, but to what extent does God grant them all the power needed to obey them? A series of comical dialogues ensues, wherein the Provincial goes from one party in the dispute to another and another, asking each what he means by the term “proximate” power, that is, the direct, intimate power God exercises on the human soul. One of them tells him, if a man “calls that power proximate power, he will be a Thomist, and therefore a Catholic, if not, he will be a Jansenist and, therefore, a heretic.” That is, it is only a matter of how they use the word. Under the pope’s edict, both sides have agreed use the word “without saying what it signifies.” Ah, “I was thus let into the whole secret of their plot,” which is “nothing better than pure chicanery,” since whichever definition a disputant holds, he can “claim the victory.” Only semi-disabused, he is reduced to begging: “I entreat you, for the last time, what is necessary to be believed in order to be a good Catholic.” Why, go along with the game, my boy: “‘You must say,” they all vociferated simultaneously, “that all the righteous have the proximate power, abstracting from it all sense” intended by the parties involved. But (he persists) is “proximate” a “Scripture word”? No. Then why use it? Because if you don’t use it, you will be like the heretical Arnaud, “for we are the majority.” The majority of theologians thus trumps the Word of God. “Upon hearing this solid argument, I took my leave of them.” The argument’s solidity is a matter of Church politics, a conflict upon which the pope, the monarch, has imposed a limit, rather as a Bourbon monarch might.

On a more strictly theological, as distinguished from majoritarian, note, several points “remain undisputed and uncondemned by either party”: “grace is not given to all men”; “all the righteous have always the power of obeying the divine commandments”; all the righteous nevertheless require, “in order to obey them, and even to pray, an efficacious grace, which invincibly determines their will”; and finally, “this efficacious grace is not always granted to all the righteous,” depending as it does “on the pure mercy of God” and not on human virtue, however impressive. Since “nothing runs any risk but that word without sense,” proximate, “happy the people who are ignorant of its existence!”

In Letter II, the Provincial considers another debatable term, “sufficient grace.” The definitions here really do differ, with the ‘activist’ Jesuits maintaining that “there is a grace given generally to all men, subject in such a way to free will that the will renders it efficacious or inefficacious at its pleasure, without any additional aid from God”; this “suffices of itself for action,” which is what their mission largely consists of. The Jansenists deny that “any grace is actually sufficient which is not also efficacious; that is, that all those kinds of grace which do not determine the will to act effectively are insufficient for action.” For their part, a third faction, the “New Thomists”—Dominicans who follow the teachings of Vitoria and Francisco Suarez—hold that the Jesuits are right to say that God gives all men sufficient grace to act but that no one can act without also receiving God’s “efficacious” grace, “which really determines his will to the action, and which God does not grant to all men.” Applying Ockham’s razor to this doctrinal beard, the Provincial exclaims, “this grace is sufficient without being sufficient,” rewarded by his interlocutor with a hearty, “Exactly so.” Again, human politics determines the thing. The Jesuits, who are indeed “politic,” will not dispute the powerful Dominicans. Indeed, a friend tells him, “The world is content with wors; few think of searching into the nature of things,” and when the Dominicans (also known as the “Jacobins”) leave matters with the Jesuits’ ploy, they are “the greatest dupes.” [1] “I acknowledged that they were a shrewd class of people, these Jesuits.”

What now? the Provincial asks. Deny sufficient grace and I am a Jansenist; admit it, I am a heretic, say the New Thomists; but then I contradict myself. “What must I do, thus reduced to the inevitable necessity of being a blockhead, a heretic, or a Jansenist?” His friend the Dominican monk patiently explains the politics. The Dominican-Jesuit coalition, although depending upon the deception of the most Dominicans by the Jesuits, nonetheless outnumbers the Jansenists, and “by this coalition they make up a majority.” The “stronger party” wins. To the Provincial’s counter-parable, whereby a severely wounded man consults three physicians without receiving the diagnosis he desperately needs, the monk explains, “You are an independent and private man; I am a monk and in a community”—community being the Dominican vocation. “Can you not estimate the difference between the two cases? We depend on superiors; they depend on others. They have promised our votes—what would you have to become of me?” The young, ardent, Provincial exclaims, “Had I any influence in France, I should have it proclaimed, by sound of trumpet: ‘BE IT KNOWN TO ALL MEN, that when the Jacobins SAY that sufficient grace is given to all, they MEAN that all have not the grace which actually suffices!” Not for salvation, at any rate. What “we have here” is rather “a politics sufficiency somewhat similar to proximate power.” 

In this exchange, Pascal brings out an ancient theme of political philosophy. The inquirer after truth can go ahead and inquire, but his inquiries must be tempered by his understanding that he lives in a political community upon which he depends, however modest he may have made his material desires. If you offend the moral sensibilities of those devoted to the gods of the city, you may end up with a cup of hemlock in your hand. At the same time, the political character of the community, its necessity to have rulers and those who are ruled (by majorities, if the regime is a democracy, or by the majority of the minority, if it is not), provides an excellent window into the nature the philosopher seeks, insofar as man is a political animal. Pascal’s Provincial responds on behalf of another regime, a regime not of this world, the regime ruled by a majority of One. That regime is captive and stranger in the earthly city, and that the Church or ecclesia, that assembly of God or rightly ruling Body of Christ, is seldom pure. It encompasses a lot of ‘of the earth, earthiness,’ very much to the dismay of young, ardent, and sincere Christians. Pascal’s satire, his making known to all men what the regnant Dominicans are doing (some of them somewhat guiltily), amounts to an attempt to purge the Church without departing from it, as Luther and the other Reformers did.

And underlying all of these tensions is the enemy the New Thomists addressed, from Vitoria onward: Machiavellianism, later its follow-on Spinozism, with its redefinition of what ‘politic’ means. For the new, decidedly anti-Thomistic philosophers, Aristotelian prudence, not entirely unlike the prudence invoked by Jesus, the practical wisdom exercised by rulers and citizens who intend to bring such measure of justice as is possible in this world, must be replaced by a sort of canniness—can-do-it-edness—that aims not at aligning itself with natural or divine justice but in conquering fortune and indeed nature itself. It will be Pascal’s argument that the Jesuits have gone over to the Machiavellian side, and to imply that the Dominicans’ better ally would be the Jansenists. But in this, they would run up against Cardinal Richelieu’s equally Machiavellian successor, Cardinal Mazarin.

The third Letter contains the Provincial’s report on Arnauld’s book, which he has indeed now read for himself. Arnauld argues that the example of Peter the Apostle shows that “without God we can do nothing,” even if we are righteous, as Peter surely. Peter disowned Jesus just before His crucifixion because God had temporarily withdrawn His grace from him, not because Peter lacked virtue. The Provincial notes that “in vain did people attempt to discover how it could possibly be that M. Arnauld’s expression differed from those of the [Church] fathers as much as the truth from error and faith from heresy”; Arnauld committed “an imperceptible heresy” which the Jesuits themselves, those masters of hairsplitting distinctions, cannot define. True enough, his informant at the Sorbonne tells him: in time, the “invalidity” of the Jesuits’ condemnation “will be made apparent,” but for now, “it will tell as effectually on the minds of most people as if it had been the most righteous sentence in the world.” “Effectual” truth: a theme of Machiavelli. “Mark how much advantage this gives to the enemies of the Jansenists.” In the “exquisite” words of the Jesuit apologist Pierre Le Moine, “This proposition would be orthodox in the mouth of any other—it is only as coming from M. Arnauld that the Sorbonne has condemned it!” This, the Provincial observes, is a heresy of “an entirely new species,” inasmuch as Arnauld’s “sentiments” are not heretical; “it is only his person.” “The grace of St. Augustine will never be the true grace, so long as he continues to defend it.” The Provincial judges such disputes as between theologians, not theology.

He decides to interview a Jesuit, “wanting to complete my knowledge of mankind.” In Letter IV, he recounts that he began by asking the definition of still another theological term, “actual grace.” According to the Jesuit, actual grace is “an inspiration of God, whereby He makes us to know His will and excites within us a desire to perform it.” In every circumstance in which a man is tempted to sin, he can only be said to sin if God had provided him with grace adequate to keep him from sinning. That is, “an action cannot be imputed as a sin unless God bestow on us, before committing it, the knowledge of the evil that is in the action, and an inspiration inciting us to avoid it.” This prompts an ironic exclamation from the Provincial: “I see more people, beyond all comparison, justified by this ignorance and forgetfulness of God, than by grace and the sacraments!” He is reminded of “that sufficiency which suffices not” that he had described in Letter II. “What a blessing this will be to some persons of my acquaintance,” the ones who “never think of God at all” because “their vices have got the better of their reason”; “their life is spent in a perpetual round of all sorts of pleasures, in the course of which they have not been interrupted by the slightest remorse”—excesses that, according to M. le Moine and his Jesuit colleagues, “secure their salvation.” Indeed, such men have “cheated the devil, purely by virtue of their devotion to his service!” Centuries later, Hugh Hefner invented the ‘playboy philosophy,’; le Moine invented the playboy theology. Unfortunately, as a Jansenist friend who accompanied him to the interview points out, Jesus on the Cross pardoned criminals, strongly suggesting that they had need of it. Rather, we should “join with St. Augustine and the ancient fathers in saying that it is impossible not to sin, when we do not know righteousness.” Having given up on Scriptural proofs, the Jesuit next cites Aristotle, who considers involuntary actions not to be blameworthy. Again displaying his pesky habit of referring to original texts, the Provincial shows him the beginning of Book III of the Nicomachean Ethics (“You should read him for yourself”), in which the Philosopher explains that a voluntary action is one in which knows “the circumstances of the action,” what theologians call “ignorance of the fact.” That is hardly the same as “ignorance of the good or evil in an action.” Aristotle goes on to say, “All wicked men are ignorant of what they ought to do, and what they ought to avoid; and it is this very ignorance which makes them wicked and vicious.” Showing no mercy, the Provincial expresses his astonishment that on can find “a Pagan philosopher” who “had more enlightened views than your doctors.” He adds, for his readers, that “the Jesuit seemed to be confounded more with the passage from Aristotle…than that from St. Augustine.” The cornered man happily receives an invitation from a pair of aristocratic ladies to escape his cross-examiner. 

Afterwards, as recounted in Letter V, his Jansenist friend begins to explain Jesuit policy in greater depth. They do not intend either to corrupt or to reform moeurs. Their ambition is rather to extend their influence as widely as possible. Since few people can be persuaded to act according to the Gospel commands, Jesuits seek “to keep in good terms with all the world,” supporting casuists who “match this diversity.” That is, they are duplicitous, reserving a few theologians for the righteous few, multitudes of “lax casuists” for “the multitudes that prefer laxity.” Like smart marketers, they “suit the supply to the demand.” In the Indies and China, “where the doctrine of a crucified God is accounted foolishness,” they “preach only a glorious and not a suffering Christ” and moreover permit converts to continue practicing their customary idolatry. That is, “they conceal their carnal and worldly policy under the garb of divine and Christian prudence,” recognizable to readers of Machiavelli as princely calculation. They are not thoroughly Machiavellian, according to the Jansenist, but rather practice an “entirely Pagan” morality; “nature is quite competent to its observance.” They are Machiavellians of the sort perceived by readers who see only his praise of the Romans, deployed to undercut Christianity. The Provincial seeks out still another Jesuit, to see if he conforms to his friend’s low opinion.

Which he does. Citing Antonio Escobar y Mendoza, author of the 1627 treatise Summum casuum concientia, and Étienne Baunay, friend of the cynical aphorist La Rochefoucauld and the source of the distorted interpretation of Aristotle cited earlier, the Jesuit accounts it sinful to allow oneself to become “the common talk of the world or subjecting themselves to personal inconvenience.” The Provincial ripostes, “I am glad to hear it, father, and now that we are not obliged to avoid the occasions of sin, nothing more remains but to say that we may deliberately court them.” At this, the Jesuit introduces him to the doctrine of “probable opinions,” the “very A, B, C of our whole moral philosophy.” A probable opinion is one “founded upon reasons of some consideration,” enough to render one’s “own opinion probable and safe.” Thus, one need “only to follow the opinion which suits him best,” selecting a favored theologian here, a historical example there. This, the Provincial notices, gives us “liberty of conscience with a witness,” an “uncommonly comfortable” and indeed Ovidian stance, following the poet’s adjuration, “If pressed by one god, we will be delivered by another.” A reader might be reminded of Montaigne, and indeed the Jesuit speaks very much like what latterly has been called moral relativism: “The Fathers were good enough for the morality of their own times; but they lived too far back for that of the present age, which is no longer regulated by them, but by the modern casuists.” Whereas the New Thomists attempt to counter Machiavelli and his followers, the Jesuits prefer to accommodate them. And they evangelize on their behalf. “We are anxious that others besides the Jesuits would render their opinions probable, to prevent people from ascribing them all to us.” The Jesuit assures him that Holy Scripture, the popes, and Church councils all agree with these claims, although he does not recommend reading Scripture, the writings of the popes, or the edicts of the Church councils themselves. In the words of Pierre Manent, the Society of Jesus “install[s] itself in the interface between the church and the ‘world.'” This rather liberal, not to say lax approach to absolution undermines repentance, which is “both the beginning and the foundation of the Christian life.” [2]

But how to reconcile the contradictions one finds in the many sources of “probable opinions”? Simple: the art of interpretation. If Pope Gregory XIV rules that assassins are not entitled to sanctuary in the churches, well, define the word “assassins” to mean those who kill for money; “such as kill without taking any regard for the deed, but merely to oblige their friends, do not come under the category of assassins.” Such equivocations have “utility,” he remarks, as does “the nicest possible application of probability”—thinking that even if a pope makes a well-defined ruling, it is only probable that he is right. Another person’s opinion may also be probable. Go with the one you want. The Provincial observes that this means “one may may choose any side one pleases, even though he does not believe it to be the right side, and all with such a safe conscience, that the confessor who should refuse him absolution on the faith of the casuists would be in a state of damnation.” One casuist “may make new rules at his discretion.” Not exactly, the Jesuit hastens to reply, since the contrary opinion will be “sanctioned by the tacit approval of the Church,” and so “when time has thus matured an opinion, it thenceforth becomes completely probable and safe.” Admittedly, it would have been better “to establish no other maxims than those of the Gospel in all their strictness,” but what can we do? “Men have arrived at such a pitch of corruption nowadays that, enable to make them come to us, we must go to them, otherwise they would cut us off altogether.” “The grand project of our Society, for the good of religion,” he piously intones, “is never to repulse anyone, let him be what he may, and so avoid driving people to despair.” And so does the Jesuit anticipate American Episcopalianism. What is more, he continues, “a multitude of masses brings such a revenue of glory to God” (and perhaps such a revenue to the priests who organize them?) that it would be positively un-evangelical to exclude anyone from them.

To the Provincial’s ironic suggestion that Jesuits really should propound this doctrine to judges, as this would bring them “to acquit all criminals who act on probable opinion,” on the grounds that otherwise “those you render innocent in theory may be whipped or hanged in practice”—a decided discouragement to potential disciples—the Jesuit accommodatingly allows that “the matter deserves consideration.” One begins to suspect that Jesuits seldom read the Book of Jeremiah or, if they do, subject it to rigorous ‘interpretation.’

Jesuits do propound their doctrines to the aristocrats. “The ruling passion of persons in that rank of life is ‘the point of honor,'” the Jesuit remarks, a code that “is perpetually driving them into acts of violence apparently quite at variance with Christian piety.” They would be “excluded from our confessionals” altogether “had not our fathers relaxed a little from the strictness of religion, to accommodate themselves to the weakness of humanity.” To do this, Jesuits have devised “the grand method of directing the intention,” whereby consists of having a man “propos[e] to himself, as the end of his actions, some allowable object.” This “correct[s] the viciousness of the means by the goodness of the end.” The point d’honneur exemplifies this, redirecting the intention of violent acts way from vengeance. “By permitting the action,” Jesuits “gratify the world; and by purifying the intention, they give satisfaction to the Gospel. This is a secret, sir, which was entirely unknown to the ancients; the world is indebted for the discovery entirely to our doctors.” No doubt, and the method works just as well in justifying the aristocratic practice of dueling. The Provincial recalls to his reader that the French king has outlawed it, “but the good father was in such an excellent key for talking that it would have been cruel to have interrupted him,” contenting himself with exclaiming that Jesuits have turned killing a man in a duel “a most pious assassination”—perhaps thinking of Machiavelli’s commendation of “pious cruelty.” Yes, the Jesuit agrees, since “otherwise the honor of the innocent would be constantly exposed to the malice of the insolent.” Admittedly, “were we to kill all the defamers, we would very shortly depopulate the country,” and this would be “hurtful to the State.” Still, even monks are “permitted to kill, for the purpose of defending not only their lives but their property, and that of their community.” Does this mean Jesuits are entitled to kill Jansenists, the Provincial want to know. No, because “it is not in the power of the Jansenists to injure our reputation”; the Jansenists can no more obscure the glory of the Society than an owl can eclipse that of the sun.” [3]

Similar relaxed teachings apply to judges, who may take bribes if no law forbids it, and lenders, for whom usury is allowed on the grounds that they are simply securing a part of the profit anticipated by the person to whom they lend money. Theft, adultery, and sorcery are similarly ‘justified.’ The Provincial is so uncharitable as to call the arguments in favor of such violations of Scriptural commands as “sophism,” but a mere wet blanket cannot extinguish the fire of Jesuit zealotry, and his instructive interlocutor continues on to “an account of the comforts and indulgences which our fathers allow, with the view of rendering salvation easy and devotion agreeable” to “genteel saints and well-bred devotees,” who differ from the more austere types only because their body chemistry inclines them to such latitudinarian moeurs. Our fathers uphold piety but “have disencumbered it of its toils and troubles,” enabling ambitieux “to learn that they may maintain genuine devotion along with an inordinate love of greatness.” After all, “God, who is infinitely just, has given even to frogs a certain complacency in their own croaking.”

Not only “vanity, ambition, and avarice” find their place in Christendom but so does envy. This can be done by recurring again to “defin[ing] things properly,” that is, in accordance with “our doctrine of equivocations,” the practice of using “ambiguous terms, leading people to understand them in another sense from that in which we understand them ourselves.” And if we cannot think of an effective way of equivocating, “the doctrine of mental reservations” comes to the rescue. According to the Jesuit theologian Thomas Sanchez, one may say that he hasn’t done something that he did, so long as he “mean[s] within himself that he did not do so on a certain day, or before he was born.” But, but, “Is that not a lie, and perjury to boot?” Not at all, young fellow, for “it is the intention that determines the quality of the action,” and if mute reservation disturbs you, then simply voice the truth inaudibly—a practice that the Provincial describes as “telling the truth in a low key, and a falsehood in a loud one.” Concluding the examples, Jesuit ingenuity has even found a way to get around the Scriptural denunciation of women’s immodest attire. “These passages of Scripture have the force of precepts only in regard to the women of that period,” who needed to “exhibit, by their modest demeanor, an example of edification to the Pagans.” It was not Montesquieu who first formulated cultural and historical relativism.

The Provincial concludes his series of ten letters to his friend in the provinces with an account of the “palliatives which [the Jesuits] have applied to confession,” which numbers among the cleverest of the policies they have designed in their evangelical mission to “attract all and repel none.” While “a great many things, formerly”—i.e., back in superannuated Biblical times—regarded as “forbidden, are innocent and allowable,” some things remain illicit; for these, “there is no remedy but confession.” There too, Jesuits have eased widened the strait gait by “relieving people from troublesome scruples of conscience by showing them that what they believed to be sinful was indeed quite innocent.” To the Provincial’s ingenuous thought that a “genuine penitent” should intend “to discover the whole state of his conscience to his confessor,” the Jesuit explains that a priest may absolve a sinner of his sins by asking him “if he does not detest the sin in his heart”; “if he answers that he does, [the] priest is bound to believe it.” Does this not impose “a great hardship” on the priest, “by thus obliging them to believe the very reverse of what they see”? No, because the priests are merely obliged to absolve as if “they believed that their penitents would be true to their engagements”—the doctrine of equivocation applied to actions rather than to words. The Provincial notes that this must “draw people to your confessionals,” and the Jesuit happily reports that it does, indeed.

The “most important of all” Jesuit doctrines concerns the love of God. For salvation, Jesuits offer diverse teachings on when and how one must love God. At the point of death, say some; upon receiving baptism, say others; or “on festival days,” still others maintain. This Jesuit prefers the teaching of Hurtado de Mendoza, who “insists that we are obliged to love God once a year,” and that “we ought to regard it as a great favor that we are not bound to do it oftener.” Still others put the time limit as five years or more. “We are commanded, not so much to love Him, as not to hate Him.” Finally exasperated at this defense of the lukewarm, the Provincial spits it out of his mouth, denouncing all these doctrines and walking out.

Having concluding and publishing his correspondence with his friend, the Provincial addresses his next six letters to the Jesuits themselves—open letters in response to Jesuits’ replies to the first ten. They have not appreciated his irony; you stand guilty, they say, “of turning sacred things into ridicule.” To this defense, which amounts to claiming sanctity for practices the Provincial has exposed as very dubiously holy, he effectively says, very well, you want me to get serious, I shall. Accordingly, his tone shifts from satire to ‘J’accuse.’ Justifying his satire, he admits that “while the saints have ever cherished toward the truth the twofold sentiment of love and fear…they have, at the same time, entertained towards error the twofold feeling of hatred and contempt, and their zeal has been at once employed to repel, by force of reasoning, the malice of the wicked, and to chastise, by the aid of ridicule, their extravagance and folly.” As Augustine writes, “The wise laugh at the foolish because they are wise, not after their own wisdom, but after that divine wisdom which shall laugh at the death of the wicked.” Nothing deflates vanity like laughter, and Truth “has a right to laugh, because she is cheerful and to make sport of her enemies, because she is sure of the victory.” Even Tertullian, no habitual jokester, thinks that to treat errors seriously “would be to sanction them.” Therefore, direct prayers for your enemy’s salvation to God, direct your accusations to the men guilty of error. And, by the way, “What is more common in your writings than calumny?”

Proceeding then to Jesuitical errors, the Provincial first considers their inclination to cozy up to the rich by telling them that they can more or less ignore the obligation to offer alms to the poor. Augustine teaches that one should keep what is necessary for doing “the work of God,” which the Provincial defines as sustaining one’s nature, giving the superfluity to those who need it, since “if we seek after vanities, we will never have enough.” Nor is there any excuse for simony, the sale of holy offices and the like. These are only specific instances of the Jesuits’ general disregard of divine and human law, and “you only scruple to approve of them in practice from bodily fear of the civil magistrate.” You seek to evade such punishment by the abuse of language—the aforementioned practice of equivocation and also with jargon, the “peculiar dialect of the Jesuitical school.” Crucially, your teachings contradict the orders of St. Ignatius himself, the founder of the Society of Jesus; the Provincial evidently has read his Spiritual Exercises, in another example of his practice of consulting the original texts. “It will astonish many to see how far you have degenerated from the original spirit of your institution,” as enunciated by Ignatius of Loyola. Instead, “you have forgotten the law of God and quenched the light of nature,” thereby deserving “to be remanded to the simplest principles of religion and common sense.” If you eventually incur the wrath of human rulers, you have no defense, “as it is God who has put” the power of the sword “into their hands,” while “requir[ing] them to exercise it in the same manner as He does Himself,” terrorizing the evil, not the good.

True, human rulers lack the perfect wisdom and justice of God, which is why they must “delegate their power” to magistrates who will judge the accused dispassionately. “Even Heathens” have taken such precautions, as seen in Rome’s Twelve Tables. “What, fathers! Has Jesus Christ come to destroy the law, and not to fulfill it?” Criminals always find ways to excuse themselves to themselves; Churchmen should not lend them additional excuses. Political rebels behave the same way. “The spirit of the Church is diametrically opposite to these seditious maxims, opening the door to insurrections to which the mob is naturally prone enough already.” Both criminals and insurrectionists kill first, ask questions later—if at all. And so do proud aristocrats, with their point d’honneur, killing “for the sake of avoiding a blow on the cheek, or a slander, or an offensive word.” Jesuits, “whom do you wish to be taken for? for the children of the Gospel, or for the enemies of the Gospel?” Are you with Him or are you against Him?

“The grand secret of your policy” is your deployment of calumny. “It is your deliberate intention to tell lies,” to “knowingly and purposely…load your opponents with crimes of which you know them to be innocent, because you believe that you may do so without falling from a state of grace.” It is, one of your brothers said in a talk at Louvain in 1645, “but a venial sin to calumniate and forge false accusations to ruin the credit of those who speak evil of us.” Because Jesuits have acquired credit in the world, they escape human punishment for defamation and, “on the strength of their self-assumed authority in matters of conscience, they have invented maxims for enabling them to do it without any fear of the justice of God.” Principle among these maxims is the claim that “to attack your Society and to be a heretic are, in your language, convertible terms.” The Provincial does not hesitate to call this “despotism.” But “if you have got no common sense, I am not able to furnish you with it.” 

The Provincial addresses his final three letters to an individual Jesuit, Father François Annat, who had written “a volley of pamphlets” against the Jansenists, including the Provincial, who wastes no irony on him. “You are ruining Christian morality by divorcing it from the love of God and dispensing with its obligation.” Annat has charged that God’s commandments cannot be acted upon by mere humans, who have no free will. On the contrary, “our salvation is attached to the faith which has been revealed to us,” and revelation commands us to refrain from injuring others but rather to love them—neither being impracticable. While “God guides the Church by the aid of His unerring Spirit,” in “matters of fact He leaves her to the direction of reason and the senses, which are the natural judges in such matters.” If the Churchmen stray from reason, it is no heresy to oppose them. Even if they are Jesuits. “The sole purpose of my writing is to discover your designs, and, by discovering to frustrate them.” So, for example, you have persuaded the pope to condemn five propositions you have falsely ascribed to Jansenius, but since the senses and reason can find those propositions nowhere in his book, a Catholic may rightly assent to the pope’s condemnation while noticing your deception. 

As to the matter of free will and predestination, the Provincial cites Augustine. God “makes the soul do what He wills, and in the manner He wills it to be done, while, at the same time, the infallibility of the divine operation does not in any way destroy the natural liberty of man, in consequence of the secret and wonderful ways by which God operates this change,” transforming “the heart of man” and thereby surmounting “the desires of the flesh,” which otherwise would enslave him. “Finding his chiefest joy in the God who charms him, his soul is drawn towards Him infallibly, but of its own accord, by a motion perfectly free, spontaneous, love-propelled.” He still could forsake God, but “how could he choose such a course, seeing that the will always inclines to that which is most agreeable to it,” and that will no longer no longer finds fleshly pleasures so agreeable. That is how divine grace works in the human soul. Contra John Calvin, human souls do “have merits which are truly and properly ours”—ours, because God gave them to us. Quoting Augustine, the Provincial writes, “Our actions are ours in respect of the free will which produces them; but they are also of God, in respect of His grace which enables our free will to produce them.” Both Augustine and the Church Council maintain that “we have always the power of withholding our consent if we choose.” [4]

The senses, reason, and faith each have “their separate objects and their own degrees of certainty.” God “employs the intervention of the senses,” especially hearing, “to give entrance to the faith”: “Hear, O Israel.” “So far from faith destroying the certainty of the senses, to call in question the faithful report of the senses would lead to the destruction of faith.” Reason detects contradictions in what he hear, inasmuch as one obviously cannot have knowledge of nature if we hold conflicting opinions of it. If, however, we consider “a supernatural truth, we must judge of it neither by the senses nor by reason, but by Scripture and the decisions of the Church.” Senses perceive facts; reason understands nature; faith concurs with “Scripture and the decisions of the Church.” And even with Scripture, reasoning has its place. As both Augustine and Aquinas teach, “when we meet with a passage even in the Scripture, the literal meaning of which, at first sight appears contrary to what the senses of reason are certainly persuaded of, we must not attempt to reject their testimony in this case, and yield them up to the authority of that apparent sense of the Scripture, but we must interpret the Scripture, and seek out therein another sense agreeable to that sensible truth.” If we discover a meaning in Scripture “which reason plainly teaches to be false, we must not persist in maintaining that this is the natural sense but search out another with which reason will agree.” And so, for example, when we read in the Book of Genesis that the moon is one of the two great lights, greater than the stars, this cannot mean that the moon is really bigger and brighter than the stars but rather that it means that it appears bigger and (sometimes) brighter in our eyes. 

The Provincial ends with a personal testimony respecting the Christian integrity of the Jansenists, defamed by the Jesuits. They are humble before God and His Church, loving, zealous to learn and obey true doctrine, examples of genuine “Christian piety.” They do not smuggle Machiavelli into the Church.

 

Note

1. Later readers are likely to be confused by another word-puzzle: why “Jacobins,” and what could they possibly have to do with the later guillotining Jacobins, who were no friends of Dominicans, Jansenists, or Jesuits? The answer is that the headquarters of the Dominicans in Paris was the rue de St. Jacques; the Dominicans were therefore sometimes called ‘Jacobins.’ The later Jacobins rented a room for their meetings from the Dominicans (albeit on another street), so their political enemies called them Jacobins in derision—an especially derogatory term during the Revolution, when most of the revolutionary factions were firm advocates of the unreligious, decidedly un-Dominican ‘Enlightenment.’
2. Manent, p.5.
3. As Manent remarks, the ‘directed’ intention “is not a real intention, but an arbitrary interpretation” of one’s action. Such a mental operation “ruins the coherence and gravity of the human act. By separating honor from God’s law, His command, one is directed away from the command to an idea—indeed to an “arbitrary idea” (14). Connecting this to later tergiversations of political-philosophic thought, Manent writes: “The consistency and integrity of practical life will increasingly be obscured by the multiplication of ‘ideas’ to which we will be encouraged to direct our attention and our intention, the rise of these ‘ideologies’ undermining the elementary rules of the practical life of human beings, even the command not to kill,” a command that tyrants came not only to ignore but to justify their killings on the basis of certain ideas, including ‘race science’ and ‘class enemies.’ The problem, Manent argues, resides not only in tyrants but in such philosophic friends of liberty as John Locke, who classed murder as an “arbitrary idea” (“an expression that he himself employed”) on the grounds that idea of killing does not have any more relationship with the idea of man than with the idea of sheep.” Having “decomposed” murder into its different elements, he observes that the ideas of these elements do not contain any natural and necessary relationship among themselves.” Here, Manent refers to Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Having distinguished what he calls “simple ideas” or sense impressions from “complex ideas” or combinations of such impressions, Locke calls the latter matters of the human capacity to understand—the topic of his book. Such ideas as sacrilege and adultery are “creatures of the understanding”; the mind “combines several scattered independent ideas” or sense impressions “into one complex one,” a combination with no connection in nature itself, in physical objects and actions. The mind does this because it finds such combining convenient. They are not done “without reason,” as the mind pursues its own ends. To be fair, Locke does proceed to offer rules by which the understanding can be accurate—arbitrary in the sense that it willingly combines sense perceptions but ‘true to the facts.’ He would thereby deny the validity of ‘ideologies’ not based on accurate sense perceptions or drawing false, illogical conclusions from accurate sense perceptions. The underlying attack on Christianity in Locke is not so much his endorsement of “arbitrary ideas” but his claim that human understanding can only occur if based on perceptions of matter. Locke’s materialism obviously leaves no room in human understanding for the teachings of the Holy Spirit and the commands of God. 
4. On this point, see also Manent, p.7.