Pascal's Wager (18 page)

After this, Pascal discussed his favorite author, Michel de Montaigne, whom he preferred over Epictetus because he was a Christian and in various places ably defended the Christian faith. He had used the skepticism of the day to fight the
libertins
, and “since he wished to discover what morality reason ought to prescribe independent of the light of faith, he based his principle upon that supposition…. He places all things in a universal and so general doubt that this very doubt carries itself away.”
⁶⁴
And so the doubter doubts even his reason and his own quest for knowledge, and therefore leads himself into a perpetual circle, a strange loop of doubt.

De Saci’s response was, following Augustine, that such philosophers could lead one astray, into the swamp of intellectual pride—a dangerous pleasure, a
iucundidate pestifere
, where the great mind thanks God for forgiveness while still enjoying the vanity of the world. But what is the use of such readings, if they are so very dangerous?

Pascal responded that Epictetus had the remarkable ability to disturb the complacency of those addicted to material pleasure by showing them that they were slaves to their own flesh, which eventually must die. But while Epictetus can prick us from our sleep, he can lead to pride, the pride that says that we fallen humans have the power to save ourselves, when only God has such a power. Montaigne, on the other hand, is wonderful for attacking the pride of the narrow-minded, those fools who think they can find truth outside the faith through science. But Montaigne, for all that, leads to despair, the doldrums of the intellect, which, without faith, merely bobs up and down in the water, without a breeze to carry it forth.

By the end of the conversation, the two men, priest and mathematician, had demonstrated to each other that they were perfect agreement. Pascal had finally won his spurs in the Augustinian movement, and quickly moved into the inner circle.

P
ère Vincent de Paul was not happy with this new crop of Augustinians. He’d once been friendly with the abbé de Saint-Cyran, and admired his religious sensibilities, his sense of discipline, and the depth of his commitment, but he was less impressed with Saint-Cyran’s heirs at Port-Royal. The Arnauld family was particularly contentious, and Antoine’s short tract on frequent Communion infuriated the saint no end. For Père Vincent, the Eucharist was central to Christian spirituality, the food of the saints and God’s great aid to salvation. Anyone
who kept God’s people away from Communion, even while proclaiming the terrible holiness of the sacrament, could not be representing God’s will. Moreover, he knew that the people at court were divided over the Jansenist movement. Some of the most powerful courtiers were partial to the sisters at Port-Royal, while the two cardinals—first Cardinal Richelieu, and then the less powerful, though certainly adept, Cardinal Mazarin—had little use for them. As Queen Anne’s spiritual adviser, Vincent de Paul expressed his views openly, but the saint was not alone in his concerns. Jean-Jacques Olier, the holy founder of the great seminary at Saint-Sulpice, had joined him in his protest, and nothing less than the powerful Society of Jesus backed their play.

When Antoine Arnauld published his short tract on frequent Communion in 1643, with the encouragement of the abbé de Saint-Cyran, the publication had ignited a theological firestorm. Some were sure that whenever a sinner received Communion, the sinner was polluting the sacrament, insulting God himself. Others were just as sure that the sacrament had been given to human beings as a cure for sin, not as a reward for perfection, and that postponing its reception in a misguided search for penitential perfection was a terrible risk to the soul. At the urging of the Jesuits, the pope, Urban VIII, who had tried Galileo, reviewed the Jansenist question and published a papal bull,
In eminenti
, giving the Jansenists a mild rebuke but never mentioning them by name. In 1644, Vincent de Paul encouraged the queen to ask Arnauld to take his notions before the pope, argue them there, and let him decide, and Arnauld agreed to do so, swearing his fidelity to the church and protesting his desire to remain a Catholic. He was all set to go when Urban VIII died. It took months for a successor to be elected, and so the issue was tabled.

But it did not go away. Too many Catholics saw the rigorous Jansenists as departing from the true spirit of Christianity, for they seemed more interested in sin than in salvation. Besides, for many churchmen there was an irritating single-mindedness to the Jansenist version of the faith, one that bordered on fanaticism—a single-mindedness that was as much a product of Arnauld’s personality as it was of Jansen’s theology. Arnauld had been something of a logic missile at the Sorbonne, driving his ideas
and his principles home with a precision and a fearsome ruthlessness. He was more than aware of, and embarrassingly honest about, the hypocrisy of the ruling classes in France, how they preached Christianity to the poor but then acted as if Christian principles didn’t apply to them when their own drive for power was at stake. For Arnauld, Christian principles, as interpreted by Augustine, always trumped the world’s corrupt logic.

Cardinal Richelieu had been furious over Arnauld’s pamphlet, but he had already thrown the abbé de Saint-Cyran into prison. There was little else he could do except hang the man, but the abbot had too many powerful friends for that. Besides, it wouldn’t look good for one prince of the church to hang another. Disturbs the good people at their breakfast. After Richelieu died in 1642 and Mazarin took over, things seemed to get better for the Jansenists, because Cardinal Mazarin was less interested in matters of religion than his predecessor. But that didn’t last long, because there was no such thing as even the smallest crack of a separation between church and state; troubles that affected the church immediately affected the state, and vice versa. No one had forgotten the horrors of the religious wars, and no one wanted them to come back. The answer was to build a united front between church and state. The dangers of theological disputes throughout Europe had been etched on people’s souls. In France, therefore, there was one king, one faith, one law.

By 1655, Antoine Arnauld had become the premier spokesman for the Jansenist movement. He had aged into a short, thick, balding man with a penetrating gaze and the manner of a badger, for he had never lost the relentless fire he had possessed at the Sorbonne. Those who disagreed with him were more than mistaken; they were heretics. Seemingly, there were plenty of those, because the Jansenist movement had not spread much in France and was limited to a small number of converts, and a good portion of them were Antoine’s relatives. His older brother, Henri, was the bishop of Angers, and he was a violently outspoken Jansenist. Many of the other converts, however, were members of the upper class—dukes and countesses, a part of the old aristocracy—joined by a clutch of middle-class lawyers and bureaucrats who had decided to abandon their portfolios to save their souls. The ordained clergy who belonged to the
movement were all diocesan priests and not members of religious orders, and so much of the pressure against the Jansenists came from the religious orders, especially the Jesuits.

Though they would not admit it, the Jesuits disagreed with Saint Augustine and his theory of original sin. They were Molinists to a man, and believed that human beings were radically free, though wounded in their ability to exercise that freedom. God’s knowledge of the future, they argued, is not absolute, and they posited a “middle knowledge,” a
scientia media
, whereby God knows how any rational person would act under any condition. While God knows what people are likely to choose, that knowledge does not determine what they do choose. Therefore, human beings share in, and in some small way limit, the power of God, for by creating humanity in his own image and likeness, God bestowed upon them the power to bring new things into the world through their freedom. God’s grace does not subvert human freedom, but acts with it. It is not “efficacious,” in the sense that it does not force the person who receives it to convert, but aids them in their free choice. It is therefore “sufficient” in the sense that it is enough to affect a change when working in concord with human free will. In a very real way, this is the position that has survived, the one that has come down to us in our own time. It is the position that may well be the root of the modern idea of liberty, for how can freedom from government control mean anything if people are not metaphysically capable of free acts?

The Molinists opposed Augustinians of all types, especially the disciples of Michael Baius and Cornelis Jansen. Following the ideas of Augustine, the Augustinians believed that after the Fall, human will was so polluted that human beings could not choose to do good but could choose only to do evil, for sin had become an essential part of human nature, called concupiscence. Those whom God saved were saved by “efficacious grace,” grace that always carried out its effect, regardless of the will of the recipient. Those who are saved, therefore, are saved in spite of themselves.

The Molinists, by which we can read the Jesuits, accused the Jansenists of being crypto-Calvinists. What was really happening, however, was that the old war that had taken place between Augustine and Pelagius over
human freedom was being revisited, and the church, by siding with the Jesuits, was slyly condemning one of its greatest theologians. To be sure, theologians of all stripes had chafed for a thousand years at the muscular theology of redemption that Augustine had set down. During the high Middle Ages, they had invented such notions as purgatory and limbo to soften Augustine’s blow. Augustine had declared that all the unbaptized, even the innocent, would be burning forever in hell. He also proclaimed that all the imperfect, those who had failed to cut out the final traces of sin through the grace of God, would be burning right beside them. He also believed that even the righteous who were culled from the elect would burn along with the others, to pay for the sin of Adam. This was too harsh, even for the Middle Ages.

The war was joined in earnest in 1649, when Nicolas Cornet, the widely respected syndic, or censor, for the Sorbonne, appeared before the theology faculty and presented them with seven propositions for condemnation. The first five of these were drawn from the
Augustinus
by Cornelis Jansen, while the last two were drawn from Antoine Arnauld’s little tract on frequent Communion. By this time, Cornet was a seventy-year-old man, and was well known to both Cardinal Richelieu and Cardinal Mazarin. Whether Mazarin had anything to do with Cornet’s proposals is uncertain, but the content was taken directly out of the Jesuit playbook, for these five propositions were at the heart of the conflict, and the Jesuits would have known that better than anyone. The very next year, an assembly of the French clergy gathered and offered their support of Cornet’s condemnation of the
Augustinus
, but refused to do likewise for the two propositions taken from Antoine Arnauld’s tract. Perhaps this was because Jansen was already dead, whereas Arnauld was very much alive. And writing.

The war gathered force as four French bishops sent a letter to Rome asking for the pope’s condemnation, while at the same time eleven other French bishops met at Port-Royal and sent another letter to Rome asking for the pope’s approval. From the beginning, the popes were wary about getting involved in French politics, for that was a murky swamp that could trap the unseasoned traveler. Urban VIII’s weak condemnation of the Jansenists set the pace for the papal response, and when all of
these letters attacking and defending the theology of Port-Royal landed on his desk, Pope Innocent X had no desire to spend political capital on a theological battle that seemed to have no end and that was so subtle that even professional theologians were confused. However, France was one of the most important Catholic nations, and the French church was a church he could not ignore. He knew how touchy the French were about their “Gallican liberties” and their fear of papal interference. But at that moment, all hell was breaking loose in the first daughter of the church, for the people were rising up against their queen and cardinal, and, after the Reformation and the following wars of religion, the pope knew he needed to act, but to act very carefully.

In April 1651, he gathered five cardinals and appointed them to a committee to study the question. The Cardinals then assembled another staff of thirteen theologians and lawyers to assist them. Over the next two years, this group, the Assembly of the Clergy, met fifty-one times. Lobbyists from all over Europe, representing every point of view and every small constituency, gave fiery speeches and then met privately with one or two of the cardinals and offered favors. On May 31, 1653, the committee produced an ecclesiastical constitution entitled
Cum occasione: Errors Said to Have Been Extracted from the “Augustinus” of Cornelius Jansen
, siding with the faculty of the Sorbonne and condemning the first five propositions that Cornet had taken from the
Augustinus
. In high ecclesiastical language, the five propositions read like this:

• 1. Some of God’s precepts are impossible to the righteous, who desire them and endeavor to keep them, according to the present powers which they have because the grace by which they are made possible is wanting.
  

• 2. In the state of fallen nature one never resists interior grace.
  

• 3. In order to win or lose merit in the state of fallen nature, it is not required that men be free from necessity, but freedom from external compulsion is sufficient.
  

• 4. The Semipelagians admitted the necessity of a prevenient interior grace for each act, even for the beginning of faith; in this they were heretics, because they desired to define this grace as one that the human will could either resist or obey.
  

• 5. It is Semipelagian to say that Christ died or shed his blood for all men without exception.
  

The first part of each of the five points is a statement taken from the
Augustinus
—that is, something that the Jansenists held to be true—while underneath it is the official church condemnation of that very statement, calling it heretical and so forth.
⁶⁵
The gist of the five points in contention is that Augustinians denied human beings the power of full moral agency. People could commit evil on their own but not good, for doing good requires a special “efficacious” grace from God, and, once given, that grace could not be denied. With it, one could not do evil; without it, one could not do good. The question was whether people were puppets in the hand of an all-powerful God, thereby making God’s power absolute, or whether they were moral agents capable of free actions, thus in some small way limiting the power of God.

Antoine Arnauld set off for Rome to plead his case. While doing this, he came up with an almost Jesuitical distinction that would keep the Jansenist issue alive for centuries. In order to keep his Catholic standing,
Arnauld declared that the statements in the pope’s Apostolic Constitution were correct in every part, but that Jansen had not actually held them. He acknowledged the right of the pope to teach in matters of law and morality (
droit
), which every Catholic acknowledged as the pope ‘s right as the Vicar of Christ. However, the pope did not have the power to teach on questions of fact (
fait
). This meant that the pope was right and just in proclaiming that those ideas embodied in the five points in the ecclesiastical constitution were morally and theologically unjust, and that anyone who held those ideas would be a heretic. However, the pope had no authority when he spoke on questions of fact. If the pope said that Rouen was the capital of France, no one had to believe it because of papal authority. Likewise, if the pope said that Jansen had actually taught the ideas embodied in those five points, then the average Catholic would not have to pay attention to this, for it would be a question of fact and not of faith and morals. Arnauld essentially lobbed the ball back into his enemy’s court by claiming that Jansen had been falsely and maliciously accused of teaching heresy when he was doing no such thing, and that it was his accusers themselves who were the heretics.