Pascal's Wager (12 page)

S
aint-Cyran had been dead for four years. He had died in 1643, the same year that his disciple Antoine Arnauld published
De la fréquente communion
, the little tract that started a theological war. It was also the year that Louis XIII died of tuberculosis and the year after the death of Cardinal Richelieu, Saint-Cyran’s great enemy. Blaise Pascal received a copy of Arnauld’s pamphlet soon after it was published, and admired it greatly. It seemed to connect beautifully with the Augustinian tradition that Guillebert had been teaching him, in harmony with the music of his faith. For Pascal, the universe was becoming ever more strange, intensely mathematical and yet beyond all logic. The packed world of Descartes had given way to a world where empty spaces could be created without much struggle, where the emptiness of the cosmos seemed to go on infinitely. God, therefore, had to be equally strange, and
the human powers of reason, for all their greatness, were powerless to plumb his divine depths.

Suddenly, as if by God’s will, his new fervor was put to the test. Pascal was still living in Rouen, in his father’s house, and would not return to Paris for four more years. There came to the nearby town of Crosville-sur-Cie a forty-five-year-old cleric, a former Capuchin turned diocesan priest, by the name of Jacques Forton, sieur de Saint-Ange, a minor noble who had studied theology and held a post teaching at the University of Bourges. He taught a “new philosophy,” as Gilberte Perier put it, “that attracted all the curious.” In fact, Saint-Ange had become quite fashionable in his way, having gathered the notice of Cardinal Richelieu’s nephew, who had secured the parish for him.

Two young friends of Pascal’s, both fervent admirers of Saint-Cyran and of Antoine Arnauld, alarmed by this man’s new ideas, came to the Pascal home in Rouen and asked Blaise to accompany them to speak with the man. It didn’t take long, however, once their conversation with Saint-Ange had begun, before they decided that the man was a rampant heretic. He was in fact a blatant Pelagian who, according to Gilberte, believed “that the body of Jesus Christ was not formed out of the blood of the Blessed Virgin Mary.” Apparently, Jesus’s body was made of some special substance created just for that purpose.
³²
Moreover, he taught that reason could demonstrate the existence of the Holy Trinity, and that faith was necessary only for those incapable of rational thought. The implications of this were outrageous to any pious young Jansenist, Augustinian to the core. What need was there for revelation? Where were the mysteries of the faith? Was he saying that people could be saved without divine grace? God in heaven! It could not be borne!

The three young men swore to bring this heretic, this devil, to heel. Following the advice of St. Paul, they first privately admonished him, holding long conversations with him and, of course, keeping meticulous records of the conversations as evidence. But he would not budge, so they referred his case to the coadjutor archbishop, who was an administrator—a church bureaucrat and not a fire-eating theologian—and he promptly delayed taking action. Frustrated, the three sent the case to
the archbishop himself, an old man ready for retirement, who was not particularly interested in theological controversies on his doorstep. The three pushed and pushed, however, until they got a judgment against the priest, a judgment that pleased no one. The archbishop refused to name Saint-Ange a heretic, but he also refused to allow him to serve as a priest in Crosville-sur-Cie, which meant that the priest had to move on, which he did, and found another parish fairly quickly.

The skirmish was over, and yet Pascal, seemingly the victor, paid a price. His health declined precipitously, and his energy flagged. He had been in the midst of his debates over the vacuum, fresh from his public experiments, and the battle for orthodoxy pushed him over the edge. But the struggle was typical of Blaise Pascal, and spoke eloquently about his version of the faith. He was a theological pit bull. His Jansenism was a thing to be defended, like the vacuum. It was a set of principles, like science, and those who accepted took responsibility for the defense of those principles. In the war with Saint-Ange, Blaise took the offensive, attacking the priest’s position vigorously, as if he were a champion blowing a horn for battle. As Saint-Ange quickly learned, those who disagreed with Blaise had better move aside.

L
ike the Pascals, the family Arnauld came out of the Auvergne and landed in Paris, where they became lawyers at once. The father, Antoine Arnauld (1560–1619), achieved membership in the Assembly of Paris and later became a counselor of state under the soon to be assassinated Henri IV. His anti-Jesuit feelings appeared early on, in some of his short political writing, especially
Le franc et veritable discourse du roi sur le rétablissement qui lui est démandé des jésuites
, which he wrote in 1602. He also represented the Sorbonne in a lawsuit against the Society of Jesus, and pounded out a career-making speech that had them expelled from France for a short time. Years later, after the Jesuits had returned to Paris and Antoine’s children were bloodied by their theological battles
with the society, the wits of the city referred to Antoine’s lawsuit as the “original sin.”
³³

The Jesuits were not just any order of Catholic priests. Unlike Benedictines and Cistercians, they did not retreat from the world but lived in it, determined to inject Christianity into the bloodstream of modern life. They wanted to change the world. In the eyes of many, they were suspect because they were connected to the pope by ties of a special vow. They were
ultramontanists
, who supported the church on the other side of the mountains rather than the church in France, and many nationalists saw them as Papists only and not truly French in their hearts. They were the great opponents of Protestantism and of Augustinianism in almost any form, though they honored St. Augustine, the man and the tradition. Where Thomas Aquinas hedged his bets about predestination, the Jesuits did not. They were against it and any form of Calvinist extremism that it implied.

For his own part, Antoine Arnauld the elder was good at two things—arguing before the bar and procreating. He and his wife, Catherine Marion, had a total of twenty children, half of whom died young while the other half lived longer than their father, who died in 1619, seven years after his youngest son, Antoine, eventually nicknamed “The Great,” was born. They had six children who achieved notoriety, while three of these six gathered lasting fame. The first was Jacqueline Marie-Angélique Arnauld, the third child of twenty. Like all the Arnaulds, she crackled with wit and intelligence, but also like them, her greatest gifts were also her greatest flaws. Some people possess beauty—she had that, a little at least—and some possess intelligence—she had that as well—but her defining characteristic was her will. She was the kind of woman who, once set upon a path, pursued it to the end, and would not turn back. This strength of will would bring her honor, and in the end destroy her and everything she built.

As the third child of the vast Arnauld clan, a family of courtiers on the rise, she had few choices in life. She could be married to a likely man, not for love but for family gain, or she could enter the convent. Virginia Woolf had not yet been born, and the independent woman of means
was still two centuries away. Jacqueline’s grandfather Marion had decided that she was meant for the convent when she was still a child, and when presented with the idea, she agreed, but added the condition that they find a way to make her an abbess. She was eight years old in 1599 when she entered the Benedictine abbey of Saint Antoine in Paris. A year later, she moved to the abbey of Maubuisson, whose abbess was Angélique d’Estrées. Typical of the times, the abbess’s sister Gabrielle was a mistress of Henri IV and a beauty at court, a woman of great charm and grace, with a touch of infamy. She had
l’esprit
, as the ladies of the court called it, in spades. It was also typical of the times that no one thought it odd that the royal mistress had a sister who was an abbess.

Actually, the abbess was more infamous than the mistress. Gabrielle had reproached her at least once, saying that she was an embarrassment to the family, the “disgrace of our house.” A mistress can play the coquette, apparently, but not an abbess. Either way, life was not very difficult in Angélique’s monastery, for religious discipline was nearly nonexistent. The ladies, all from wealthy families, spent their days in idle pursuits, gossiping, eating delicate foods, and even engaging in secret liaisons from time to time. Jacqueline Arnauld took to the life like a fish, and on her confirmation changed her name to Angélique to mimic her heroine, her mentor, her abbess. It must have seemed like a perfect life to an independently minded young girl—no family obligations, no parental nattering, and yet all the comforts she could ask for. Jacqueline, now Angélique, spent her days reading novels and Roman history, walking in the woods, and visiting with friends in the city. She ate sweetmeats and pastries, fine delicate cheeses from the country, and drank the best wine. Her family could come and go as they pleased, and everyone thought that the arrangement was perfect.

In 1602, when Angélique Arnauld was eleven years old, her father worked a miracle of bureaucracy. Getting a papal bull for a child to become the abbess of a convent was nearly impossible, and frowned on by everyone, especially as the church was busy trying to free itself from the corruptions of the Renaissance. Nevertheless, he pulled it off. We can only speculate on how he did it, but deception definitely played a part.
Angélique then became the coadjutrix of Port-Royal, but her life changed little.

Over the years, she grew to hate the convent; she hated religious life, and she was furious with her family for forcing her into it. She rarely prayed, and God had little to do with her life at all. Gradually, by the time she was seventeen, she had sunk into a long, stretching depression that had become so much a part of her routine that she rarely noticed it. She had become the poster child for ennui. On the day of her final vows, her father placed the official document of her profession before her, and she signed it, but did so “bursting with spite.” But she was in the convent, committed to the life, and there was nothing she could do about it.

In 1607, just before her vows, Angélique took sick and returned home to be nursed by her mother, where she received care, for which she was grateful, along with a great deal of parental advice about her lifestyle in the convent. She ignored that part. Then, in 1608, soon after her vow ceremony, a Franciscan priest came to the convent and preached a sermon that changed her life. No one can track how a single sermon, or even a single chance comment within a sermon, can tilt the balance of someone’s whole world, but it is not uncommon. Angélique must have been prepared for it, prepared even by her doubts, her boredom, and her emptiness. What had once been a meaningless life suddenly sparked, and she realized that she could have meaning in her religious life if she chose to create it. Choosing was something that Mère Angélique knew how to do instinctively.

From that day on, she determined to live the life of a nun properly, to reform herself and her monastery. It must have been alarming to the sisters under her, so used to their comforts and their freedoms, to watch as their abbess suddenly got religion. Angélique began to discipline her own life, to fast, to pray in earnest, to deny herself all the little pleasures that had so filled her days before. Little by little, she reformed her house, with the help and advice of Francis de Sales. At one point in a back-handed bid for independence, she thought she might wish to surrender her abbacy and join Francis’s new Visitation order, but the bishop of Geneva had long understood whom he was dealing with, the kind of obstinacy that
squatted inside the young girl, and gently demurred, so she remained at Port-Royal.

Resistance mounted quickly, even from the best elements in the convent, because few of them saw any reason to change their way of living. Many of them had been dumped into the convent by their families and expected to live the life that their station in French society afforded them. Besides, who was this teenager to tell them to reform? Everyone knew that she held the abbacy by sleight of hand and that she had lived a life no different from their own. They all hoped that this child would outgrow her burst of adolescent enthusiasm and learn to live reasonably. What they did not realize was that
la petite Madame de Port-Royal
’s will outweighed her by a significant amount, and that she had set herself on the course of reform and would not be moved.

Waving away their complaints, Mère Angélique imposed the Rule of St. Benedict in the strictest way. The sisters then had to take seriously their vow of poverty, which meant that they could no longer hold personal property and that they would begin to eat a more austere vegetarian diet, without the sweets and delicate cheeses they were used to. The sisters were required to pray and to live a life in silent contemplation, something they had not done at Port-Royal for years. With time, the complaints died down and the sisters began to see the value of the new regime. Meaning began to leak back into their lives.

At this point, Angélique was in harmony with the rest of the Catholic revival, and those who knew her applauded her efforts, her family included. But then she carried things too far, and the whole family sat up, alarmed. The reforms finally hit
them
. The clan Arnauld did not mind if their daughter, their sister, put discipline into her house. She had been sent there to do her family honor by living an upright, honorable life—pious, but not too pious. Acceptably pious, of course. But good God, not saintly!

On September 25, 1609, Angélique’s family arrived for a visit, led by papa Antoine and
maman
Catherine, along with a small crowd of offspring. It had been their habit until then to come and go as they pleased, for after all, their daughter was the rightful abbess of the convent, a po
sition she owed to their efforts. Ordinarily, they picnicked on the wide lawns, played games, and gossiped with the sisters, but that day they arrived to find the gate locked. They sent word that they should be let in at once. A sister carried word to Mère Angélique that her family was at the gate, and she sent word back that they were not allowed to enter the grounds and that if they wanted to visit her, they would have to come to the parlor—a shadowy, dusty little room beside the gate that had been built long before to accommodate visitors and then abandoned as the life inside the walls loosened.

Papa was furious. He was not accustomed to being treated like a servant, like a
stranger!
He would not have it. In the parlor, he told her so. He demanded entrance, and when he was denied again, he demanded again, until it became clear to him that his daughter’s will was more than a match for his own. After that, he entreated her, pleaded with her, raged at her, but Angélique would not bend. Meanwhile, her mother wept epic tears, and her older brother, Robert Arnauld d’Andilly, the eldest child, screamed at her, calling her a “monster of ingratitude and a parricide!” It did them no good at all. Angélique was just as upset as they were. She sweated; her heart pounded; she nearly cried several times; but she would not bend. And so the clan Arnauld had to gather up the shreds of their dignity and storm off, their carriage flouncing on the rutted roads. Thus ended
“la journée du guichet,”
the “day of the wicket gate,” spoken of by Jansenists for the next few centuries as if it had been a battle between empires.