Les Provinciales purports to be a series of letters about religious topics, such as grace and law, written by an anonymous, well-meaning, curious theologian to a "provincial" friend. In reality, it is a series of viciously sarcastic diatribes against the Jesuits written by Blaise Pascal in 1656, at the height of the controversy regarding a religious group called the Jansenists.

Now, if I had stumbled across those two introductory sentences in a node here on e2, say, a month ago, I probably would have ignored it to click on some interesting-sounding softlink, never to return. I know very little about the seventeenth century, and have always found it uninteresting. Nitpicky arguments about the finer points of Christian theology bore me even in the period that I study professionally; by the seventeenth century, I figured, there would be even less left to be said about faith and the sacraments than there had been a millennium earlier.

But Fate conspired to make me read this book, and for once, I am grateful to her for her nudgings.

Encountering Blaise in Paris

About a week ago I found a brand-new copy of Les Provinciales in a librairie in Paris for two euros -- about three and a half dollars. One of the things that drew me to the book was the cover: it appears to be a nineteenth-century painting of Pascal, who looks much softer-featured and handsomer than he does in the severe woodcuts of him that are his most famous portraits. He is leaning his head on his right hand, gazing out at the viewer, holding a folded sheet of paper in his left hand as a series of wax puddles before him await the press of the seal. He looks resigned, maybe vaguely irritated, but beneath the veneer of melancholy annoyance there's an aura of playfulness too. None of these are qualities I ever would have dreamed of ascribing to Pascal, whom I knew only as "that mathematician guy who noisily converted to Christianity and wrote something or other about gambling with God over your soul."

As it happens, I had just visited Pascal's tomb mere hours beforehand. The tomb, marked only with a pillar, lies beneath the church of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont -- which had become on that, my very first visit, one of my favourite churches in Paris. Thus the appearance of a cheap, attractive copy of Pascal's book seemed like destiny.

I bought it and have been carrying it around with me ever since. I have been reading it on the train, in cafés, in the laundromat, standing in queues, waiting in the metro station. The French is generally simple enough for me to follow, but there are no footnotes, which means that I often don't know the historical details behind an argument that Pascal is making at any given time. (This is not a feeling I'm used to, since I tend to read mostly within a comfortable range of three or four centuries; I guess I'm proud enough to avoid reading about things I don't know a lot about already.) Pascal makes fun of figures I've never heard of -- and which in many cases I suspect he's making up -- and he casually alludes to "well-known" events in recent history that mean nothing to me.

And yet I keep reading, and the reason for this is that the book is, quite simply, fucking hilarious. I have literally laughed out loud in innumerable Parisian bistros while reading this book, making quite a fool of myself as the force of Pascal's bitter sarcasm hits me full-on. Who knew that the Enlightenment could be so... so... funny?

What's at stake?

Pascal's alter ego, the anonymous author of the "provincial letters," writes with what looks on first glance like genuine curiosity about questions of salvation. He wonders, as so many Christians do, whether God's grace is freely given to all human beings (as the Jesuits maintain), or whether it is reserved only for those chosen by God beforehand (as the Jansenists argue). In search of the answers to these questions, he seeks out conversation partners among both the Jesuits and the Jansenists, and asks them naive questions about what it would take for a soul to be damned.

It does not take long for the Jesuits to come off looking very, very bad. But what may come as a surprise to the modern reader, particularly to the sorts of folks that I imagine making up much of the population of e2, is that Pascal paints the Jesuits as liberals. These days the Jesuits seem to have a reputation as militant, intolerant, hyper-conservative ultra-Catholics, but Pascal sees them as wishy-washy flip-floppers, making up their rules as they go along, ignoring scripture and tradition in favour of massive tomes of wankery that they churn out year after year.

In order to understand why this is the case (and why it's so funny), it's necessary to understand the roots of this theological debate. Though Christians were in agreement relatively early on in their history that Jesus died "for" humanity, the mechanics of that process have been understood in many conflicting ways. On the one hand, Christians understand their God as loving and forgiving, using the willing death of an innocent victim to "pay" for the accumulated crimes of the human race. On the other hand, the Biblical tradition has many strong opinions on evil, which neither human beings nor God are expected to abide.

How does one balance justice with forgiveness? When must one punish and avenge, and when must one write off debts in order to give the desperate another chance? These questions matter to many people, not just Christians; and Pascal, as a recent convert, may well have felt their urgency even more acutely than his brethren.

Pascal's Silly Jesuits

Pascal found himself profoundly unsatisfied with the liberal answers that the Jesuits provided to these questions. In the earlier letters in Les Provinciales, Jesuit characters promote arguments that their nameless interlocutor finds puzzling. He politely expresses doubts, but does not press the good monks at first, since he assumes they must know best. For instance, Pascal quotes a Jesuit father as saying:

We hold as an undeniable principle that an action cannot be considered to be a sin, unless God bestow on us, before committing it, the knowledge of the evil that is in it, and an inspiration driving us to avoid that evil. Do you understand me now? (Letter IV, emphasis original.)

At first glance, this Jesuit-style argument may seem logical enough: God will not punish someone for doing something that she does not know is a sin, since that seems petty and cruel of Him. If a person feels a prick of conscience which she then ignores, well, then she is clearly responsible for whatever evil may arise from her action.

When asked for proof of this philosophical assertion, the Jesuit pulls out a book written by another Jesuit -- Pascal consistently portrays the Jesuits as blithely ignoring actual scripture, basing their opinions only upon what their friends have written. ("It's in its fifth edition," the monk says solemnly, "so you know it's a good book.") The "clarification" of the Jesuit position reads:

In order to sin and become culpable in the sight of God, one must know that the thing one is about to do is bad, or at least to feel doubts about it, or to fear [...] that God [...] forbids the act we are considering; and in spite of this, to commit the deed, to make the jump, and to transgress." (Ibid.)

Pascal deftly twists this argument into absurdity. He has his letter-writer declare:

I had always supposed that one sinned more and more as one thought about God less and less. But from what I see here, if one manages not to think about God at all, everything is purified from that point on. We'll have none of those halfway-sinners who retain some love for virtue; they'll all be damned, those half-sinners. But as for your straight-up sinners -- hardened, unadulterated, full-on, professional sinners -- Hell can't hold them. They have cheated the devil by giving themselves into his hands. (Ibid.)

As the book progresses, the Jesuits' arguments become more and more absurd, even as the letter-writer becomes more and more indulgent toward their lunacy. Here the Jesuit father argues with himself, simultaneously taking both idiotic sides in an idiotic argument:

Is someone who's exhausted because of doing something -- chasing a girl, say -- required to fast?
By no means.
Well, what if he tired himself out specifically to earn a dispensation?
He shouldn't have had that plan, but he is still not obliged to fast. (Letter V.)

And worse still:

In order to prevent a blow, you are allowed to kill the person who wants to hit you, if that's the only way to avoid it. This is a common opinion among our fathers. For example, Azor, yet another of our twenty-four elders, writes: "Is a man of honour permitted to kill another who threatens to slap him, or to hit him with a stick? Some say no, giving the reason that the life of a fellow man is more precious than our honour, and besides, it is cruel to kill a man merely to avoid a slap. Others, however, think that it is permitted, and I certainly find it probable, when there is no other way to avoid the blow. Otherwise, the honour of the innocent would be constantly exposed to the malice of the insolent. (Letter VII.)

Deep within the absurdity of this faux-Jesuit position, the reader might be able to uncover a trace of its original logic. After all, the New Testament itself teaches that setting a good example for others is sometimes more important than the specific details of God's law (at least that's what Paul says). Surely we all want to live in a world where calumnies are not left to hang in the air unchallenged. And yet, answering insults with insults so often leads to blows, and blows to blood-feuds, and blood-feuds to war. This constant escalation seems like pretty much the exact opposite of what Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount. How on earth did Jesuit permissiveness get so perverse? How did the desire to avoid hurtful words somehow turn into religious laws that permit ambushes and assassinations?

The reason Les Provinciales is so successful -- both as polemic and as humour -- is that the character of the letter-writer is so well-meaning, and his conversation partners so earnest, that when Pascal (as author) twists the Jesuits' words to ridicule them, the whole process feels almost affectionate. Les Provinciales is a very mean book, and it never claims to present the Jesuit/liberal viewpoint fairly. But I detect (and I speak as a naive reader here, coming to this book without the crutch of footnotes or any knowledge of the "real" debate) some sympathy on Pascal's part too. In being "permissive," Pascal's Jesuits are simply erring too much on the side of forgiveness -- what in our culture might be called moral relativism. In and of itself, forgiveness is not a bad thing; on the contrary, it could be seen as the bedrock of the Christian tradition. But of course when the use of "circumstances" to excuse all behaviours leads to priests taking bribes, or mild insults leading to bloodshed -- when, in other words, we are unwilling to dig in our heels and call something actually evil -- then something seems to have gone badly, badly wrong with our culture. Though the Jansenist controversy is long concluded, Pascal's thought-experiments with its logic are still well, well worth reading.

Notes