Pascal
by
ABOUT the middle of the seventeenth century, two opposite views of a question, upon which neither Scripture, nor Council, nor Pope, had spoken with authority–the question as to the amount of freedom left to man by the overpowering work of divine grace upon him–had seemed likely for a moment to divide the Roman Church into two rival sects. In the diocese of Paris, however, the controversy narrowed itself into a mere personal quarrel between the Jesuit Fathers and the religious community of Port-Royal, and might have been forgotten but for the intervention of a new writer in whom French literature made more than a new step. It became at once, as if by a new creation, what it has remained–a pattern of absolutely unencumbered expressiveness.
In 1656 Pascal, then thirty-three years old, under the form of “Letters to a Provincial by one of his Friends,” put forth a series of pamphlets in which all that was vulnerable in the Jesuit Fathers was laid bare to the profit of their opponents. At the moment the quarrel turned on the proposed censure of Antoine Arnauld by the Sorbonne, by the University of Paris as a religious body. Pascal, intimate, like many another fine intellect of the day, with the Port-Royalists, was Arnauld’s friend, and it belonged to the ardour of his genius, at least as he was then, to be a very active friend. He took up the pen as other chivalrous gentlemen of the day took up the sword, and showed himself a master of the art of fence therewith. His delicate exercise of himself with that weapon was nothing less than a revelation to all the world of the capabilities, the true genius of the French language in prose.
Those who think of Pascal in his final sanctity, his detachment of soul from all but the greatest matters, may be surprised, when they turn to the “Letters,” to find him treating questions, as serious for the friends he was defending as for their adversaries, ironically, with a but half-veiled disdain for them, or an affected humility at being unskilled in them and no theologian. He does not allow us to forget that he is, after all, a layman; while he introduces us, almost avowedly, into a world of unmeaning terms, and unreal distinctions and suppositions that can never be verified. The world in general, indeed, se paye des paroles. That saying belongs to Pascal, and he uses it with reference to the Jesuits and their favourite expression of “sufficient grace.” In the earliest “Letters” he creates in us a feeling that, however orthodox one’s intention, it is scarcely possible to speak of the matters then so abundantly discussed by religious people without heresy at some unguarded point. The suspected proposition of Arnauld, it is admitted by one of his foes, “would be Catholic in the mouth of any one but M. Arnauld.” “The truth,” as it lay between Arnauld and his opponents, is a thing so delicate that “pour peu qu’on s’en retire, on tombe dans l’erreur; mais cette erreur est si deliee, que, pour peu qu’on s’en eloigne, on se trouve dans la verite.”
Some, indeed, may find in the very delicacy, the curiosity, with which such distinctions are drawn, by Pascal’s friends as well as by their foes, only the impertinence, the profanities, of the theologian by profession, all too intimate in laying down the law of the things he deals with–the things “which eye hath not seen” pressing into the secrets of God’s sublime commerce with men, in which, it may be, He differs with every single human soul, by forms of thought adapted from the poorest sort of men’s dealings with each other, from the trader, or the attorney. Pascal notes too the “impious buffooneries” of his opponents. The good Fathers, perhaps, only meant them to promote geniality of temper in the debate. But of such failures–failures of taste, of respect towards one’s own point of view–the world is ever unamiably aware; and in the “Letters” there is much to move the self-complacent smile of the worldling, as Pascal describes his experiences, while he went from one authority to another to find out what was really meant by the distinction between grace “sufficient,” grace “efficacious,” grace “active,” grace “victorious.” He heard, for instance, that all men have sufficient grace to do God’s will; but it is not always prochain, not always at hand, at the moment of temptation to do otherwise. So far, then, Pascal’s charges are those which may seem to lie ready to hand against all who study theology, a looseness of thought and language, that would pass nowhere else, in making what are professedly very fine distinctions; the insincerity with which terms are carefully chosen to cover opposite meanings; the fatuity with which opposite meanings revolve into one another, in the strange vacuous atmosphere generated by professional divines.