Finally, I will not mention the triumph with which the Provincialia have been received by the reader, nor of the praise which this work has received even after nearly two hundred and fifty years from its creation, nor of the sentences pronounced upon it: there is hardly anything more generally known. Moreover, "the world has become distrustful," and in such matters admiration for Voltaire or Bossuet has long since ceased to guide, awaken, or limit the freedom of our judgments. We want to look with our own eyes and make our own judgments.

But, if I am not mistaken, it is still possible to do what has always been – and today more than ever – interesting: to clarify the reasons for success; to establish the degree of Pascal's sincerity in his polemics with the Jesuits; perhaps we should also analyze the consequences of the publication of the Provincials. Although the above questions are not new, no one has yet come close enough to answering the first of them. The recent very lively discussions have revived the relevance of the second, which, moreover, it is time to finally expand and, above all, to remove from the framework of the question whether Pascal could more or less literally render the Latin of Escobar and Filiucius. As to the third, I am very far from thinking that it could be reconciled with the answer which is usually given to it.

** *

To begin with, let us discard motives that are unconvincing and insignificant, as well as those that have not been considered as motives for a long time: for example, the desire for mystery or scandal, as well as the motives proposed by Joseph de Maistre[8] — the interest of the group of conspirators "in deriving profit from the libel"; "the qualities of the people whom Pascal attacked in his book." Did not this critic invent the following audacious paradox: if the Letters to the Provincial, with all their literary merits, had been written against the Capuchins, they would not have been spoken of long ago? Only now he forgot to suggest how it is that we no longer read, for example, Shallot's accusatory speeches against the Society of Jesus, written a century later, or the verbose, though small in length, work of this flat type by d'Alembert: To the Refutation of the Jesuits. And how did it happen that the "group of conspirators", being no less interested in this case, was unable to ensure that the Frequent Communion of Artaud or the Visionaries of Nicolas is preserved to this day? [10] After all, at one time these books had a popularity not inferior to the popularity of the Provincials. It is noteworthy that the opponents of Jansenism themselves praised in Frequent Communion "the highest degree of literary skill, combined with the highest examples of eloquence." Nor should it be forgotten that the contemporaries of both thinkers did not even think that it was possible to compare "M. Pascal" and the one whom they unanimously called "the great Arnault."

But is it possible to say, after the same de Maistre, that by the time of its appearance, the Provtshchialia turned out to be "the first truly French book in the history of France, moreover, written in prose"? This is untrue of Arnault with his Frequent Communion (1643), of Descartes with his Discourse on Method (1637), of Balzac, and finally of his Letters, the first of which appeared in 1624. Voltaire is closer to the truth when he wants the Provincialinmi to be associated with the era of the "consolidation of language". He is almost right in calling them "the first book of genius to be seen <as such>." Unfortunately, he forgot to enlighten us about what the "fixation of language" is, and about the qualities by which or by virtue of which the Provincialia is a "book of genius," but this is precisely the subject of our interest. When will we end this habit of disagreement, vagueness, and pomposity? If Pascal's speech or phrases have merits that Nicolas's speech or phrases are completely devoid of, then should we not try to enumerate these merits directly? If Pascal's thought penetrates into depths that Arno's thought does not even suspect, then should we not try to measure these depths? And if we should not flatter ourselves with the hope that one day we will be able to define the concept of "genius", then should we not apply our efforts to characterize that special, individual, unique that is always present in genius?

Neither Rabelais nor Montaigne should be discussed in this context. Their language is still too mixed with Latin, their phrases are "inorganic". And even the most individual features of their style, for example, repetitions, enumerations, abounding in Rabelais, as well as Montaigne's metaphors or comparisons, which look as if they come from under his pen, all this, in truth, reflects only the first steps in mastering the element of language. They look for the specificity (ρΓορπέίέ) of the word and, not finding it, leave us as a field of study those various forms which seem to them to convey their own thought almost adequately. Let us confine ourselves to considering Arnaud. Always spacious, always impeccably constructed and, usually, understandable, his phrase often turns out to be ponderous, as a rule, dull and always monotonous. I'm not even talking about its length. Pascal's phrase is by no means shorter than Arnault's. Critics have repeatedly reproached Pascal – and not entirely unjustifiably – that it is often cluttered with parentheses, introductory or subordinate sentences, as well as subordinates who are part of other subordinates. Here is one example of this, noted by Fr. Daniel in his Discourses of Cleander and Eudoxus[13]: "But if I were not afraid of being just as impudent," says Pascal, "I think I would follow the opinion of the majority of the people I see; believing that what had been made public was authentic, they had hitherto believed that these propositions were in the possession of Jansenius, and now they are beginning to suspect the opposite, owing to a strange refusal to show them, which goes so far as to say that I have not yet seen a single person who would tell me that he had seen them there." The above phrase is extracted from the first Provincialia; Perhaps this physicist, this geometer, who had written almost nothing before, was still constrained by the limits of the new application which he had given to his pen here? Here is a sentence from the thirteenth Letter, one of those which, according to Nicolas, was altered by the author seven or eight times: "And so, my fathers, let us conclude: since your doctrine of probability makes the good opinions of some of your authors useless to the Church, and useful only to your policy, they only point out to us by their contradiction your double-mindedness, which you have fully revealed, declaring, on the one hand, that Vázquez and Suárez are against murder, and, on the other hand, that many famous authors are in favor of murder, in order to give people two paths, thus destroying the simplicity of the spirit of God, which curses those who double-mindedness and prepares for themselves two paths: vae duplici corde et ingredienti duahus viis"[15].

But if Pascal's phrase is not short, and if its length is commensurate with the importance, or so to speak, with the nature of the thought it expresses, it is nevertheless always intelligible, more than intelligible, and clear, as follows from the above examples. And it becomes so due to the fact that it is unevenly illuminated. It is in this invention that Pascal's contribution to the history of French prose lies, and it must be said, a significant contribution. Whereas before him, in Arnault as well as in Descartes, the phrase was illuminated only by a white and cold light, everywhere even and somehow evenly diffused, Pascal's phrase is filled with frolicking and playful air, and with the air flame, movement, and life penetrate into it. Pascal is brief when necessary, and extended only insofar as he wants to. Or rather, it is neither extended nor concise, but its phrase, without losing anything in the precision of its contour, becomes elastic, bends, crushes and contracts or lengthens whenever and however it pleases, revealing exceptional pliability, lightness, and liveliness. If naturalness in our language has never gone beyond the level reached by Pascal, it is only because of the lack of further progress in the art of writing, for the essence of the latter does not consist in the striving for external brilliance at the expense of content, but in the search for and acquisition of utterances from all variants capable of being provided by language for one and the same thought, that only which corresponds to it, which is proportional to it, and that single figure of speech which follows it, which copies it, which reproduces, so to speak, all its accidents. I know of only one style, which, in this sense, would be comparable to Pascal's. It may also be called Port-Royal, since I have in mind the style of Racine.

It is quite clear that in this way a certain indicated dignity is not limited to a phrase, but extends from a phrase to an integral fragment of the text, and from this fragment to the entire Letter, and from one Letter to all the others. Light, secular and cheerful irony; deep and not devoid of bitterness jokes; light and elegant narration; sometimes alternately, and sometimes at the same time, a shrewd and ardent dialectic; the liveliness of the stroke; the impetuosity of the reciprocal attack (riposte), the breadth and freedom of the spiritual impulse; holy indignation: if for Molière there was not, as they say, a reading more beloved than the first Provincials, and for Bossuet more sublime than the last of them, and if in a small volume all varieties of eloquence and intelligence have thus found a place, all these are the consequences of the above-mentioned fundamental virtue. Other writers had other qualities, such as great eloquence, like Bossuet, or great wit, like Voltaire. Both of these authors, like Pascal, are recognized as masters of French prose, but one gets the impression that their manner of writing is less diverse than Pascal's. Neither Bossuet nor Voltaire were able to fill the entire gap between the tone of everyday conversation and the tone by which it is customary to sing the praises of Henriette and Condé. [18] In the arsenal of means of their art, unlike Pascal, they did not have that special accuracy of drawing or, rather, an immutable sense of proportion. It is not characteristic of Pascal to lack the latter, except perhaps on a single occasion in the sixteenth Letter, "which he did not have time to make shorter" <see pp. 342-343 of the present Letter. t. — OH>. On this day, December 4, 1656, he was deceived as to the interest which the public might have in the method which enabled the Jesuits to distort Arno's views on transubstantiation. But the Sixteenth Letter stands apart, and if there is any originality in the Provincials, it is in this unpretentious stern taste, which directs the choice of words and figures of speech, the choice of humorous tone and the passionate desire for genuine significance of thought, which mark this work. One can laugh at the "Compiègne slap in the face" and amuse oneself at the quarrel between the cook Guille and the Jesuit Borin. However, this question is related to another, the question of knowing what we have the right to do to avenge our offended "honor." And when someone declares, like Lessius or Escobar, that murder is excusable for us in such a case, who is a secret to say that next to the question of the right to administer justice there arises the question of murder, of the right to punish, of the basis of human justice? And as one question arises after another, the tone of the polemics becomes heated, irritated, heightened; the joke acquires greater sharpness; oratorical devices are somehow ordered by themselves under the pen of Pascal. And so, in the absence of a visible transition, the discussion, which began with jokes, ends with blows of the highest eloquence.

But that's not all. Form in Pascal is much more inseparable from content than in Bossuet, and this is the main reason for the success of the Provincials. By quickness and fidelity of sight, by agility and flexibility, by the art of attaching things to their true value and of measuring their efforts accordingly, the Provincialia suddenly threw light on the darkest and most important question which at that time touched the very essence of Christianity. Not that they dispelled any shadow in this case (on the contrary, I would gladly say that some of these shadows were even condensed by them), but from the center of the obscured they extracted that which is the only thing we need to know. It is a question of what neither the profound and learned author of Augustine, who still belongs entirely to scholastic science, nor the author of the Frequent Communion, whom the old Sorbonne so short-sightedly excluded from the number of its doctors, have been able to do, for I doubt whether it has ever had a more glorious representative. To the very morality which in the writings of these authors was hidden under the principles of the dogma of grace, inaccessible in their depth (as if human behavior could depend on a rule incomprehensible to reason!), the Provincials reduced the whole of Jansenism. And at once, everything that was incomprehensible before the publication of this book became clear, clarified, seen with one's own eyes, brought into contact with real life. I am not too surprised, therefore, when Sainte-Beuve, comparing parts of the Provincialia with the Philippines, ventured to say that Demosthenes "was always in a better position than Pascal, since he did not need such an effort to distance himself from popular stereotypes, and he lived in a healthier and more naturally organized society. Oh, this worship of antiquity! If we have a duty to our country, do we not feel a duty to ourselves and, in our hearts, to humanity? What do they want to say with this "distancing effort" that we need in order to interest our whole being in the questions discussed by Pascal: do we, for example, have the right to administer justice for ourselves in our own affairs; whether our "well-being" is worth a person's death; Can we take a false oath to save our lives? But what others, like Descartes, did for philosophy, Pascal, through the Provincials, did for moral theology. He extracted the latter from the darkness of the monastery, from the realm of mystery revealed in confession. He proposes to examine it in the bright light of day. And, without any desire to waste any further time in speculating on the proximate cause and oppressive grace, he, enlarging the field of investigation, appeals to all those who do not see any benefit in such subjects, or, rather, passionately cry out: "This is the consequence of this: now look and pass judgment."

Incidentally, one of the great crimes imputed to the author of the Provincialia is his attempt, without being a theologian, to take up the treatment of questions that are under the exclusive jurisdiction of theologians, and his own example, which provokes the "light" for debates around these questions. But since such an opportunity has presented itself, it is necessary that someone finally take the liberty to say: "light" has the right to do so, and even the obligation to pay attention to it. "Light" has the right to test the principles in whose name it is sought to be guided. And if theologians needlessly conceal these principles from outsiders, or often entangle them in a web of their subtleties, then "light" has the right to purify this subject of impurities. And if the exercise of such a right is beyond his power, he has at least the right to judge of the principles in question by the consequences derived from them. Theology is not a science that can exist independently of its consequences, in the manner of algebra or physics, in respect of which the consequences are in some way antecedent or beyond the field of investigation. For in theology it is not a question of "emptiness," nor of "fullness," nor of "fullness of emptiness"[22], but of human action, of the determination to act in one way or another, and of the motives that guide us. Is grace "preliminary," "concomitant," or "arising as a consequence"? I am not going to call for underestimating this problem, and I hope to be able to show its urgency. But what I really demand (I have the right to demand information about this first of all) is to show the consequences to which the adoption of one or another solution of these problems I propose can lead me. My intellect is quite capable of comprehending them, for it is given to me for such a purpose. Pascal believed in this, and we believe in the same thing, following Pascal. Without separating himself from the Church, and even continuing to form a single whole with it, almost against its own will, the author Provincialius demanded for the "light" those explanations which, as it seemed to him, were denied to the "light." Pascal did more: he himself gave these explanations. And therefore, if the Provincials had been written against the Capuchins, whatever de Maistre had said, they would still be spoken of today, and they would be spoken of in the same way. I have just tried to show the motives under which Pascal entered into a polemic with the Jesuits, and also to emphasize the fact that he could and should have polemicized with them.

And if I have succeeded here, it is time to proceed to show how passionately and at the same time sincerely the author of the Provincials conducted his polemics.

* * *

Let us say in general: even if the author of the Provincials did not always force himself to translate or reproduce the texts he quoted literally,24 nevertheless, at best, he can be caught no more than two or three times in an oversight or a serious omission, and in slander not at all. Father Noué, with the support of Father Anne and Father Brizacier, had once lost time in trying to prove the opposite. And our contemporary, the Abbé Maynard, the author of the Refutation of the Letters to a Provincial (a prelate has lately tried to refer us to this book), has by no means done a better job in this task than his predecessors. If, however, any one should object that even two or three inaccuracies are too many for a work in which Escrbar alone, by his own reckoning, has been quoted no less than sixty-seven times, we will agree, but then we ask it not to be forgotten that if Pascal had wished to make the Provincialia still "stronger," as he put it, "stronger," Escobar and others would have given all the necessary reasons for doing so. The casuists in question do indeed sometimes make harsh decisions, for example, when they teach that a doctor commits a mortal sin by offering his services to so many patients that he is no longer able to take care of all of them. Escobar {Tract. Ill, Ex. IX, 34). There are funny ones among their solutions. Are repressions permissible? — the question asked by the same Escobar. Without a doubt: ita plane[25]. However, subject to six conditions, the first of which is not to take repressive measures against ecclesiastical persons (ibid. Tract. I, Ex. VII, 115). The same is true of the decision relating to the mortal sins of booksellers: "A bookseller commits a mortal sin by selling foreign books if they compete with the books of a compatriot author" (Ibid. Tract. II, Ex. Ill, 2). And, finally, they make scandalous decisions, the necessity of which it would be very desirable to save us from the need to expound in detail. Pascal does not deny and even directly declares that Escobar did have strict instructions, but as for the scandalous and amusing ones, he considered it necessary to choose only those that corresponded to the significance of the plan being implemented.

However, Pascal is also accused of another, more significant and more gross error than the omission or alteration of words in the text of Escobar or Fr. Boni. The reproaches boil down to the fact that the author of the Provincialia speaks of the Moral Theologies of the casuists, written in Latin and intended exclusively for the use of confessors, as if these "theologies" were offered by their authors as reading to any believer; and, secondly, that he depicts the casuists as admitting, or expressly permitting, by their decisions, what in fact is not in the least defended by the authors indicated. In order to fully justify Pascal, it would be necessary to cite here a lot of various details, both about the casuists themselves and about casuistry in general, which is impossible for us. Such a topic would require considerable work, since it is a good book on the history of casuistry that we lack today. However, in anticipation of such a text, it is forgotten that if the author wrote in Latin, this is not at all a reason for Moral Theology not to acquire a large number of readers in the seventeenth century. And is not this thesis proved by the following observation: the success of the Provincials themselves became, so to speak, European only after their translation into Latin by Nicoles? At this very moment, however, I have before my eyes the forty-second edition of Escobar's Moral Theology, dated 1656. However naïve this author may have seem—and he seemed to be terribly naïve—it is unlikely that he could have believed that forty-one previous editions of his book had been used only by confessors. However, in order to be convinced of this, it is enough for us to listen to him himself. He raises questions such as, for example, the following, which I quote in the Latin original: