“The Jansenists tell men to love God; the Jesuits make men love him. The
doctrine of these last is full of loosenesses, or, if you will, of
errors; still,—singular as it may seem, it is undeniable,—they are the
better directors of souls.
“The Jansenists have carried into religion more thought than the
Jesuits, and they go deeper; they are faster bound with its sacred
bonds. They have in their way of thinking an austerity which incessantly
constrains the will to keep the path of duty; all the habits of their
understanding, in short, are more Christian. But they seem to love God
without affection, and solely from reason, from duty, from justice. The
Jesuits, on the other hand, seem to love him from pure inclination; out
of admiration, gratitude, tenderness; for the pleasure of loving him, in
short. In their books of devotion you find joy, because with the Jesuits
nature and religion go hand in hand. In the books of the Jansenists
there is a sadness and a moral constraint, because with the Jansenists
religion is forever trying to put nature in bonds.”
The Jesuits have suffered, and deservedly suffered, plenty of discredit
from what Joubert gently calls their “loosenesses;” let them have the
merit of their amiability.
The most characteristic thoughts one can quote from any writer are
always his thoughts on matters like these; but the maxims of Joubert are
purely literary subjects also, have the same purged and subtle delicacy;
they show the same sedulousness in him to preserve perfectly true the
balance of his soul. Let me begin with this, which contains a truth too
many people fail to perceive:—
“Ignorance, which in matters of morals extenuates the crime, is itself,
in matters of literature, a crime of the first order.”
And here is another sentence, worthy of Goethe, to clear the air at
one’s entrance into the region of literature:—
“With the fever of the senses, the delirium of the passions, the
weakness of the spirit; with the storms of the passing time and with the
great scourges of human life,—hunger, thirst, dishonor, diseases, and
death,—authors may as long as they like go on making novels which shall
harrow our hearts; but the soul says all the while, ‘You hurt me.’”