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Silvia Berti Port-Royal at Grips with Its Own Casuistry and Pascal's Stand A

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Silvia Berti Port-Royal at Grips with Its Own Casuistry and Pascal's Stand A Silvia Berti Port-Royal at grips with its own casuistry and Pascal’s stand Je ne crains pas même vos censures Pascal, Pensées (La. 830 - Br. 920) A century before the Marquis of Pombal drove the Jesuits from Portugal (1759), and d’Alembert endorsed their expulsion from France in both historiographic and moral terms (1763), Pascal had already routed them. I’m referring of course to his literary masterpiece, the Provinciales (written and published between 1656 and 1657), his unsurpassed denunciation of the dual standards, extreme casuistry, ‘grâce suffisante’ and ‘pouvoir prochain’ they confidently theorized*. As d’Alembert wrote, “this masterpiece of pleasantry and eloquence delighted and appalled the whole of Europe at their expense … Their replies, ill written and full of bile, were never read yet all the world knew the Provinciales by heart”.1 An unequivocal statement of the solid conjunction in eighteenth-century French intelligentsia (beginning with the attraction-repulsion which yoked Voltaire to Pascal throughout his lifetime) of a strenuously anti- papal Jansenism with a spirit of secularism.2 This awareness is now lost, but was * In this essay, we often refer to terms at the core of the theological dispute between the Jansenists and the Sorbonne, which caused the condemnation by the latter of Antoine Arnauld’s most relevant text, De la fréquente communion (1643). The notions of ‘sufficient grace’ and ‘proximate power’ were at the heart of this conflict, and widely ridiculised by Pascal (mainly in his I and II Provinciale). The disagreements about sufficient grace may be summed up as follows. The Jesuits maintained that there is a grace given generally to all men, subjected in such a way to free-will that it is precisely the will that can render it efficacious or inefficacious at its pleasure, without any additional aid from God, and without wanting anything on his part in order to act effectively; and that is the reason why they term this grace sufficient, because it suffices of itself for action. The Jansenists, on the other hand, claim that no acting grace is sufficient without also being efficacious; that is, that all those kinds of grace which do not determine the will to act effectively are insufficient for action, as they hold that a man can never act without efficacious grace. 1 ‘Ce chef-d’œuvre de plaisanterie et d’éloquence divertit et indigna toute l’Europe à leurs dépens … Leurs réponses, mal écrites et pleines de fiel, n’étaient point lues, et tout le monde savait les Provinciales par cœur’. See Jean Le Rond d’Alembert, Sur la destruction des Jésuites en France (Paris, 1765), 45-6. 2 Carlo Ginzburg’s study of casuistry and the Provinciales departs from a number of considerations by Francesco Orlando on the destiny of irreligiosity and its connection with the posthumous reception 1 consolidated in the French esprit public down to the last generation to grow up during the Third Republic.3 To illustrate my point, let me briefly cite a personal experience and a wonderfully apposite visual icon which represented it. Several years ago I became relatively well acquainted with an important exponent of the Front Populaire, a man with a solid legal training. In his bookcase was the Condorcet edition of the complete works of Voltaire, carefully placed next to a copy of Pascal’s death mask. At another, more dramatic juncture, at some distance from the astonishing case of the Provinciales, Pascal again found himself wrestling with a casuistic expedient, although this time it was handed him by his Port-Royal friends and teachers. I refer to the famous différend as regards the formulary. Drawing on the Schmittian ‘norms and exceptions’ opposition,4 which defines the general frame of our volume, it could be roundly stated that Pascal represents both the exception and simultaneously the anomaly, the breaking point in what we might define a port-royalist vulgate. Carlo Ginzburg recently reminded us how it is precisely the anomaly which can define the norm, which it necessarily includes (while the opposite is most definitely not true).5 In the present case, and marking a painful distance from the “docteurs”, Pascal, in full Adorno fashion, represents the subjectivity which opposes any reduction to the whole, and incarnates the promise of another Port-Royal. The salient points of the querelle could usefully be given an airing here. After the request to censure seven unorthodox propositions by unnamed authors, put to the Sorbonne by Nicolas Cornet in July 1649, French bishops appeared to rediscover theological analysis and dispute. Towards the mid 1650s, eighty-five of them wrote to of Pascal’s writings, but developing the theme of “interaction (and often divergence) between the production of a literary work and its long term impact”. See his chapter in this volume. For the question as to how much an attitude predicated on Augustinian rigour, whether Protestant or Jansenist, inspired the antireligious literature of the early eighteenth century, I refer the reader to my Anticristianesimo e libertà. Studi sull’illuminismo radicale europeo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2012). For an in-depth account of the reception/success of Pascal in the early Enlightenment see Anthony Mc Kenna, De Pascal à Voltaire. Le rôle des “Pensées” de Pascal dans l'histoire des idées entre 1670 et 1734 (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1990), 2 vols. 3 Vividly portrayed in the (no longer read) book by Félix Rocquain, L’Esprit révolutionnaire avant la Révolution (Paris: Plon, 1878). 4 Carl Schmitt, Politische heolo ie Vier apitel ur Lehre von der Souveranit t (Munich and Leipzig: Humblot & Duncker, 1922), 36-44. On the ‘norms and exceptions’ opposition, see Carlo Ginzburg’s observations in his introduction to this volume. 5 See Carlo Ginzburg, ‘Our Words, and Theirs : A Reflection on the Historian’s Craft, Today’, in Historical Knowledge: In Quest of Theory, Method and Evidence, ed. Susanna Fellman and Marjatta Rahikainen (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012), 97-119. 2 Pope Innocent X asking him to condemn five de gratia propositions sustained, in their opinion, by Cornélius Jansen. The Pope duly pronounced them heretical in a Bull of 31 May, 1653, without, however, explicitly stating that they appeared in the Augustinus, Jansen’s most important work. The Jansenists considered St. Augustine’s doctrine of grace completely safe and protected, and accepted the Bull without demurring. The real objective of these démarches however was Jansen and his condemnation as a heretic, which meant that matters could hardly rest here. The following year, on March 28, 1654, the Assembly of the Clergy sent the Pope a letter which, besides approving his ban on the five propositions, added that they were to be found in Jansen’s book, a thesis which the Pope accepted in his Brief of 29 September. After the initiative of thirteen bishops (1655), determined to have the attribution to Jansen of the five censured propositions underwritten by the whole clergy of all the dioceses, Alexander VII, the newly-elected Pope Chigi, signed the Ad sacram Bull (October 16, 1656), condemning the inconveniently famous propositions as both heretical and the work of Jansen. The condemnation implied accepting the Bull’s contents by way of a signature on a formulary: a signature which it was the business of every bishop to procure in his diocese. On March 17, 1657, a revised text was produced demanding submission to the Constitution of Innocence X according to the sense determined by the Bull of Alexander VII. At the same time the eighteenth Provinciale came out, to the public acclaim of its predecessors – certainly not the least of the reasons the formulary was postponed; yet for all the polemics and various interventions which followed, it remained a dead letter until 1661. After Cardinal Mazarin’s death, Louis XIV asked the Vicaires généraux of the Paris diocese to proceed with exacting signatures on the much-feared document; M. de Contes and M. de Hodencq, however, declared enemies of the Jesuits and inclined towards some accommodation which would have allowed tempers to cool and produce a religious truce, presented not only the formulary but, in agreement with Port-Royal, a mandement (to the first draft of which Pascal apparently contributed)6 utilizing the celebrated distinction between right and fact (already present, of course, in Provinciale XVIII). Signing this would have implied accepting to condemn the five propositions as heretical at the level of faith and dogma, but simply a “silence respectueux” on the question of fact, which regarded Jansen’s text and drift. It was hoped, by so doing, to salvage both the purity of the faith and obedience to papal decisions. The plan’s most 6 See Recueil de plusieurs pièces pour servir à l’histoire de Port-Royal (Utrecht: Aux dépens de la Compagnie, 1740), 311 (henceforth Recueil d’Utrecht). 3 fervent supporters were Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, the leading figures of the Jansenist movement; its most intransigent, Guillaume Le Roy, the abbot of Haute- Fontaine, Claude de Sainte-Marthe, the successor of Arnauld as confessor at Port- Royal, and, most of all, the nuns who, while insensitive to the legal-juridical subtleties, were in dread of betraying their conscience by signing the terrible formulary, for all the let-out clauses of the mandement. In the end those of Port-Royal, Paris, signed on June 22, followed a few days later by the sisters of Port-Royal-des-Champs, where resistance, led by Sister Sainte-Euphémie (Jacqueline Pascal, younger sister of Blaise) had been particularly strong. In the end, however, little came of the general turbulence: the mandement was revoked by an arrêt on the part of the Conseil du Roi, and condemned in a papal brief of August 1.
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