On the other hand, a true inner life, a constant inner orientation towards God, is recognized as superfluous. Is love for God necessary? and "how often"? Some say that it is enough to love God on major holidays, others once a year, and still others once in a lifetime, before death.

Pascal here can no longer stand the position of his attentive and naïve listening and questioning, combined with the subtlest humor, here at the end of the X "Provinciale" his indignation breaks through. How, you have abolished the Commandment of God for the sake of human tradition! The very center, the very core of all spiritual life, without which all the rest, all the podvigs, all the virtues are nothing, you have recognized the love of God as unnecessary. Woe to you, blind leaders! Where are you leading the people who trust you, where are you leading the Church of God? "That is how we can briefly sum up the meaning of this indignant concluding speech (for it ends Pascal's conversation with the casuist; the other eight provincial letters follow a different plan).

… On attaque la piete dans le coeur, on en ote Tame qui donne la vie; on dit que à amour de Dieu n'est pas necessaire au salut... Voila le mystere d’iniquite accompli [393].

"The mystery of iniquity is complete!" And in the 14th letter we read that it is possible, according to some casuists, to kill witnesses whose testimony might discredit an assembly of clergymen: "Ou en sommesnous, mes Peres? Sont–ce des religieux et des pretres qui parlent de cette sorte? Sont–ce des chretiens? Sont–ce des Turcs? Sont-ce des hommes, sont-ce des demons?" — "Where are we, O my fathers? Do the clergy say this? Priests? In general, do Christians say this? or rather demons?"

You read these Letters with excitement. It was a struggle with the weapons of truth and indignation against a strong party that had at its disposal enormous resources and the support of those in power. The quotations are accurate (many generations after Pascal checked them). They are not distorted anywhere, nowhere is their meaning changed, not replaced; In some places there are contractions and condensation. Of course, this tendency, the lowering of the moral requirement, does not characterize the activity of all the members of the Jesuit order of that time, among whom there were many righteous and saints, but it does characterize the path it followed in the middle of the seventeenth century in the person of a number of its representatives (although not all the casuists quoted by Pascal were, as the Jesuits indicated, but they set the tone) to acquire and multiply their influence. To do this, it was necessary to meet sin halfway, not by rebuking menacingly and then forgiving, demanding first of all sincere repentance and lovingly accepting the penitents, but by lowering the moral range, applying itself to the disposition of selfish and voluptuous secular people who did not want to repent or change their lives with all its sinful habits and secular prejudices. Capitulation of the preachers of the Word of God to Mammon.

The impression of "Provincial Letters" was amazing. Two years after their publication, the Paris curés condemned the practice of casuists, and 20 years later, in 1679, many of the doctrines of casuists were condemned by the Holy See.

The Provincial Letters were a severe blow to the authority and reputation of the Jesuit Order, but it was not only an act of defense of truth and moral law, but also the greatest service rendered to the entire Christian world and the Catholic Church, and indeed to the Jesuit Order itself. A severe moral upheaval, a decrease in its prestige (and in the 18th century, a number of persecutions to which it was subjected in most European countries) helped the Jesuit order to overcome the dangerous temptation that led it along the path of too much adaptation and secularization, and to purify itself spiritually. Now he often shows examples of pure and unscrupulous service of God's Truth, high Christian righteousness and true Christian podvig and service of love.

For us, 300 years after these events, "Provincial Letters" is not only a monument of subtle wit and amazing, sometimes full of humor and dialectical play, sometimes stormy eloquence breathing pathos, but also a monument to the struggle for truth. Alone or almost alone (only a group of friends stood for him), without powerful allies, without sufficient material resources, he began to fight and won: in the name of the moral law.

5

But Pascal is still much closer to us in his "Thoughts". Here he is especially close to us. This is the fruit of his entire short 39-year life, and here the seal of his genius shines especially brightly. It is not writing, it is a testimony, it is almost a shout, it is a careful and conscientious (and terrible) examination and study of what is most important to us. This is a subtle and merciless analysis of the very fabric of life, the fabric of human existence.

Man is lost. He is a small dot in the sea of infinity that envelops him, among the two infinities that surround him, infinity up and infinity down. "Tout ce monde visible n'est qu'un trait imperceptible dans l'ample sein de la nature. Nulle idee n’en approche. Nous avons beau enfler nos conceptions au dela des espaces imaginables, nous n’enfantons que des atomes, au prix de la realite des choses. C’est une sphere infinie dont le centre est partout, la circonference nulle part … Que l’homme … se regarde comme egare dans ce canton detourne de la nature; et que, de ce petit cachot ou il se trouve loge, j’entends l’univers, il apprenne a estimer la terre, les royaumes, les villes et soimeme a son juste prix. Qu’estce qu’un homme dans Finfini?  [394]

And if we look along the "descending" line, new infinite worlds are revealed in the infinitely small—"une infinite d'univers, dont chacun a son firmament, ses planetes, sa terre," "the infinity of universes, each of which has its own firmament, its own planets, its own earth"—and in every point, in every "ciron" of this new "earth," the infinite spaces of the universes and solar systems are revealed again. And the planets, the Earth, and on it again "pincers" and so on endlessly. Man's thought is lost, confused between these two abysses, "entre ces deux abimes de Tinfini et du neant, il tremblera dans la vue de ces merveilles" (between these two abysses, infinity and non-existence, he will be shocked at the sight of these miracles).

But what is more terrible, even more acute and painful to us is the universal elusiveness. Everything passes, rushes in some kind of stream, and we are with him. The very fabric of life is made up of transience. We even "lose" our thoughts, they sometimes elude us before we can formulate them. But this is even more instructive, more instructive than the thought I have "lost" itself: for it reminds me of my weakness and my insignificance. — "En ecrivant ta pensee, elle m'echappe quelquefois; mais cela me fait souvenir de ta faiblesse, que j'oublie a toute heure; ce qui m'instruit autant que ta pensee oubliee, car je ne tends qu'a connaitre mon neant". [395]

"For I seek only to know my own insignificance."