to number among their apologists, are the sceptical philosophers, whose
native antipathy to Jansenism, as a phase of serious religion, renders
them willing to sacrifice truth for the sake of a sneer at his
disciples. D’Alembert expresses his regret that Pascal did not lampoon
Jesuits and Jansenists alike;[65] and Voltaire, in the mere wantonness
of his cynical humor, if not from a more worthless motive, has appended
to his high panegyric on the Provincials, already quoted, the following
qualifications: “It is true that the whole of Pascal’s book is founded
upon a false principle. He has artfully charged the whole Society with
the extravagant opinions of some few Spanish and Flemish Jesuits, which
he might with equal ease have detected among the casuists of the
Dominican and Franciscan orders; but the Jesuits alone were the persons
he wanted to attack. In these Letters he endeavored to prove that they
had a settled design to corrupt the morals of mankind—a design which no
sect or society ever had, or ever could have. But his business was not
to be right, but to entertain the public.”[66] Every clause here
contains a fallacy. The charge of party-spirit, insinuated throughout,
is perfectly gratuitous. Never, perhaps, was any man more free from this
infirmity than Pascal. That it was pure zeal for the morality of the
Gospel which engaged him to take up his pen against the Jesuits, can be
doubted by none but those who make it a point to call in question the
reality of all religious conviction.[67] Equally unfounded is the
imputation of levity. Pascal was earnest in his raillery. A deep
seriousness of purpose lurked under the smile of his irony. Voltaire
describes himself, not the author of the Provincials, when he says that
“his business was not to be right, but to entertain the public.” As to
Pascal having “endeavored to prove that the Jesuits had a settled design
to corrupt the morals of mankind,” we are not surprised at Father Daniel
saying so; but it is unaccountable how any but a Jesuit, who professed
to have read the Letters, could advance a theory so distinctly
anticipated and disclaimed in the Letters themselves. “Know, then,” it
is said in letter fifth, “that their object is not the corruption of
manners—that is _not their design_. But as little is it their sole aim
to reform them—that would be bad policy.”[68] “Alas!” says the Jesuit,
in letter sixth, “our main object, no doubt, should have been to
establish no other maxims than those of the Gospel; and it is easy to
see, from our rules, that if we tolerate some degree of relaxation in
others, it is rather out of complaisance than _design_.”[69] In truth,
nothing is more clearly marked throughout the Letters than this
distinction between the design of the Society and the tendency of its
policy—a distinction which leaves very small scope for the sage
apophthegm of the philosophical historian. There is some reason to think
that Voltaire expressed himself in this manner, with the view of
procuring the recommendation of Father Latour to enter the Academy—an
object for the accomplishment of which, it is well known, he made the
most unworthy concessions to the Jesuits.[70]
Later critics, in speaking of the Provincials, have indulged in a
similar strain of vague depreciation; as a specimen of which we might
have referred to Schlegel, who talks of their being “nothing more than a
master-piece of sophistry,”[71] and repeats the charge of profaneness,
which Pascal has so triumphantly refuted in his eleventh letter. It
would be a sad waste of time to answer this ridiculous objection. Nor
will it be surprising to those who know the history of Blanco White, to
find him indulging in a sceptical vein on this as on other subjects.
“Pascal and the Jansenist party,” he says, “accused them of systematic
laxity in their moral doctrines; but the charge, I believe, though
plausible in theory, was perfectly groundless in practice. The strict,
unbending maxims of the Jansenists, by urging persons of all characters
and tempers on to an imaginary goal of perfection, bring quickly their
whole system to the decision of experience. A greater knowledge of
mankind made the Jesuits more cautious in the culture of devotional
feelings. They well knew that but few can prudently engage in open
hostility with what, in ascetic language, is called the world.”[72] The
strange mixture of truth and error in this statement leaves an
unfavorable impression on the mind, the fallacy of which we feel ere we
have time to analyze it. It is true that nothing could be more opposite
to the laxity of the Jesuits than the asceticism of Port-Royal. But it
is doing injustice to Pascal to insinuate that he measured Jesuitical
morality by “the strict, unbending maxims of the Jansenists;” and it is
flagrantly untrue that the Jesuits merely aimed at reducing monastic
enthusiasm to the standard of common sense and ordinary life. We repeat
that the real charge which Pascal substantiates against them is, not
that they softened the austerities of the cloister, but that they
sacrificed the eternal laws of morality—not that they prudently suited
their rules to men’s tempers, but that they licensed the worst passions
and propensities of our nature—not that they declined urging all to
forsake the world (which he never expected), but that they sought, for
their own politic ends, to veil its impurities, and countenance its evil
customs.
Disguising their hostility to science, under the mask of friendship to
literature, the Jesuits have succeeded in making to themselves friends
of many who are acquainted with them only through the medium of their
writings. And it is the remarkable fact of our day, that, while on the
Continent, where they are practically known, the Jesuits have enlisted
against themselves the pens of its most eminent novelists, historians,
and philosophers, in Protestant England it is quite the reverse. The
most talented of our periodical writers have exerted all their powers to
white-wash them, to paint and paper them, and set them off with
ornamental designs; and where they have not dared to defend, they have
tried to blunt the edge of censure against them. Following in the same
line of defence, a certain class of Protestant writers, fond of
historical paradox, and of appearing superior to vulgar prejudices, have
volunteered to protect the Jesuits. “No man is a stranger to the fame of
Pascal,” says Sir James Macintosh; “but those who may desire to form a
right judgment on the contents of the _Lettres Provinciales_ would do
well to cast a glance over the _Entretiens d’Ariste et d’Eugenie_, by
Bouhours, a Jesuit, who has ably vindicated his order.”[73] Sir James
had heard, perhaps, of Father Daniel’s _Entretiens de Cleandre et
d’Eudoxe_, but it is very evident that he had never even “cast a glance
over” that book; for the work of Bouhours, which he has confounded with
it, is a philological treatise, which has no reference whatever to the
Provincial Letters; and yet he could say that the Jesuit “has ably
vindicated his order!” Next to the art which the Jesuits have shown in
smuggling themselves into places of power and trust, is that by which
they have succeeded in hoodwinking the merely literary portion of
society.
But, not to dwell longer on these objections, the Provincials are liable
to another charge, seldomer advanced, and not so easily answered; which
is, that the loose casuistical morality denounced by Pascal was not
confined to the Jesuits, nor to any one of the orders of the Romish
Church, much less, as Voltaire says, to “a few Spanish and Flemish
Jesuits,” but was common to all the divines of that Church, and was, in
fact, the native offspring and inevitable growth of the practices of
confession and absolution. It is admitted that the Jesuits were mainly
responsible for its preservation and propagation; that they have been
the most zealous in reducing it to practice; that, even after it had
incurred the anathemas of popes, bishops, and divines, and after it had
been disclaimed by all the other orders of the Church, the Jesuits
pertinaciously adhered to it; and that, even to this day, they have
identified themselves with the worst tenets of the casuists. But
Protestants writers have generally alleged, not without reason, that the
corruptions of casuistical divinity may be traced from the days of
Thomas Aquinas and Cajetan, whom the Church of Rome owns as authorities;
that the “new casuists” merely carried the maxims of their predecessors
to their legitimate conclusions; and that though condemned by some
popes, the censure has been only partial, and has been more than
neutralized by the condemnation of other works written against the
morality of the Jesuits. Thus, in a work entitled “Guimenius Amadeus,”
the author, who was the Jesuit Moya, boldly claimed the sanction of the
most venerated names in favor of the modern casuists. This work, it is
true, was condemned to the flames in 1680, by Pope Innocent XI., who was
favorable to the Jansenists; but the Jesuits boast of having obtained
other papal constitutions, reversing the judgment of that pontiff, whom
they do not scruple to stigmatize with heresy.[74] It cannot be denied
that the Jesuits have all along succeeded in obtaining for their system
the sanction of the highest authorities in the Church; while those works
which undertook to advocate a purer morality were printed clandestinely,
without privilege or approbation, under fictitious names of authors and
printers; nor can it be forgotten that the Provincial Letters, the most
powerful exposure of Jesuitical morality that ever appeared, were
censured at Rome, and burnt by the hands of the executioner.[75] In
short, and without entering into the question so ingeniously handled by
Nicole and other Jansenists, whether the modern casuists were justified
in their excesses by the ancient schoolmen, it is undeniable that this
is the weakest point of the Provincials, and one on which the
thorough-going Jesuit occupies, on popish principles, the most
advantageous ground. The disciples of Loyola constitute the very soul of
the Papacy; and they must be held as the genuine exponents of that
atrocious system of morals which, engendered in the privacy of the
cloister during the dark ages, reached its maturity in the hands of a
designing priesthood, who still find it too convenient a tool for their
purposes to part with it.
There are other respects in which we cannot fail to detect, throughout
these Letters, the enfeebling and embarrassing influence of Popery over
the naturally ingenuous mind of the author. Among all the maxims
peculiar to the Jesuits, none are more pernicious than those in which
they have openly taught that disobedience to the Papal See releases
subjects from their allegiance and oaths of fidelity to their
sovereigns, and authorizes them to put heretical rulers to death, even
by assassination.[76] On this point Pascal has failed to speak out the
whole truth. Whether it may have been from genuine dread of heresy, or
from a wish to spare the dignity of the pope, it is easy to see the
timidity, the circumspection, the delicacy with which he touches on the
point of papal authority.
The Jansenists have been called the Methodists of the Church of Rome;
but the term is applicable to them rather in the wide sense in which it
has been applied, derisively, to those who have sought reformation or
aimed at superior sanctity within the pale of an established Church,
than as applied to the party now known under that designation. They
disclaimed the title of Jansenists, as a nickname applied to them by
their adversaries. They held themselves to be the true Catholics, the
representatives of the Church as it existed down, at least, to the days
of St. Bernard, whom they termed “the last of the fathers.” They
ascribed a species of semi-inspiration to the early fathers of the
Church. They reverenced the Scriptures, but received them at
second-hand, through the medium of tradition. To be a Catholic and a
Christian were with them convertible terms. Hence the horror evinced by
Pascal, in his concluding letters, at the bare thought of “heresy
existing in the Church.” “Embarrassed at every step,” it has been well
observed, “by their professed submission to the authority of the popes,
galled and oppressed by their necessary acquiescence in the flagrant
errors of their Church, these good men made profession of the great
truths of Christianity under an incomparably heavier weight of
disadvantage than has been sustained by any other class of Christians
from the apostolic to the present times. Enfeebled by the enthusiasm to
which they clung, the piety of these admirable men failed in the force
necessary to carry them through the conflict with their atrocious enemy,
‘the Society.’ They were themselves in too many points vulnerable to
close fearlessly with their adversary, and they grasped the sword of the
Spirit in too infirm a manner to drive home a deadly thrust.... The
Jansenists and the inmates of Port-Royal displayed a constancy that
would doubtless have carried them through the fires of martyrdom; but
the intellectual courage necessary to bear them fearlessly through an
examination of the errors of the papal superstition, could spring only
from a healthy form of mind, utterly incompatible with the dotings of
religious abstraction, and the petty solicitudes of sackclothed
abstinence. The Jansenists had not such courage; if they worshipped not
the Beast, they cringed before him; he placed his dragon-foot upon their
necks, and their wisdom and their virtues were lost forever to
France.”[77]
It is the policy of the Jesuits at present, as of old, to deny,
point-blank, the truthfulness of Pascal’s statements of their doctrine
and policy—to reiterate the exploded charge of his having garbled his
extracts—and, after affecting to join in the laugh at his pleasantry,
and to forgive, for the wit’s sake, his injustice to their innocent and
much-calumniated fathers, to declare that, of course, he could not
himself believe the half of what he said against them, nor comprehend
the profound questions of casuistry on which he presumed to argue. Under
this affectation of charity, they dexterously evade Pascal’s main
charges, and slyly insinuate a vindication of the heresies of which they
have been convicted. Thus, in a late publication, one of their number
actually attempts to vindicate the old Jesuitical doctrine of
_probabilism_![78] At the same time, they retain, with undiminished
tenacity, the moral maxims which Pascal condemns. The discovery lately
made of the Theology of Dens, still taught by the Jesuits in Ireland, is
a proof of this; for it is nothing more than a collection of the most
wicked and obscene maxims of casuistical morality. Matters are no better
in France. Dr. Gilly mentions a publication issued at Lyons, in 1825,
which is so bad that the reviewer says, “We cannot, we dare not copy it;
it is a book to which the cases of conscience of Dr. Sanchez were purity
itself.”[79] The disclosures made still more recently by M. Michelet and
M. Quinet, are equally startling, and will, in all probability, issue in
another expulsion of the Jesuits from France.
The policy of the Society, as hitherto exhibited in the countries where
they have settled, describes a regular cycle of changes. Commencing with
loud professions of charity, of liberal views in politics, and of an
accommodating code of morals, they succeed in gaining popularity among
the non-religious, the dissipated, and the restless portion of society.
Availing themselves of this, and carefully concealing, in a Protestant
country, the more obnoxious parts of their creed, their next step is to
plant some of the most plausible of their apostles in the principal
localities, who are instructed to establish schools and seminaries on
the most charitable footing, so as to ingratiate themselves with the
poor, while they secure the contributions of the rich; to attack the
credit of the most active and influential among the evangelical
ministry; to revive old slanders against the reformers; to disseminate
tracts of the most alluring description; and, when assailed in turn, to
deny everything and to grant nothing. Rising by these means to power and
influence, they gradually monopolize the seats of learning and the halls
of theology—they glide, with noiseless steps, into closets, cabinets,
and palaces—they become the dictators of the public press, the
persecutors of the good, and the oppressors of all public and private
liberty. At length, their treacherous designs being discovered, they
rouse against themselves the storm of natural passions, which,
descending on them first as the authors of the mischief, sweeps away
along with them, in its headlong career, everything that bears the
aspect of that active and earnest religion, under the guise of which
they had succeeded in duping mankind.
What portion of this cycle they have reached among us, it is needless to
demonstrate. They have evidently got beyond the first stage; and it is
highly probable that, in proof of it, the present publication may elicit
a more than ordinary exhibition of their skill in the science of
defamation and denial. It is far from being unlikely that, at the
present point of their revolution, they may find it their interest,
after all the mischief that Pascal has done them, and all the ill that
they have spoken against Pascal, to claim him as a good Catholic, and
take advantage of the prestige of his name to insinuate, that the Church
which could boast of such a man is not to be lightly esteemed. And, in
fact, it requires no small exercise of caution to guard ourselves
against such an illusion. It is difficult to characterize Popery as it
deserves without apparent uncharitableness to individuals, such as
Fenelon and Pascal, who, though members of a corrupt Church, possessed
much of the spirit of true religion. But, though it would be impossible
to class such eminent and pious men with an infidel cardinal or a
Spanish inquisitor, it does not follow that they are free from
condemnation. It has been justly remarked, that “their example has done
much harm, and been only the more pernicious from their eminence and
their virtues. It is difficult to calculate how much assistance their
well-merited reputation has given to prop the falling cause of Popery,
and to lengthen out the continuance of a delusion the most lasting and
the most dangerous that has ever led mankind astray from the truth.”[80]
With regard to our author, in particular, it may be well to remember,
that he was virtuous without being indebted to his Church, and
evangelical in spite of his creed; that his piety, for which he is so
much esteemed by us, was the very quality that exposed him to odium and
suspicion from his own communion; that the truths, for his adherence to
which we would claim him as a brother in Christ, were those which were
reprobated by the authorities of Rome; and that the following Letters,
for which he is so justly admired, were, by the same Church, formally
censured and ignominiously burnt, along with the Bible which Pascal
loved, and the martyrs who have suffered for “the truth as it is in
Jesus.”
-----
Footnote 1:
Non quia per nos sancti et immaculati futuri essemus, sed elegit
prædestinavitque ut essemus. (De Prædest., Aug. Op., tom. x. 815.)
Footnote 2:
De dono Persever. (Ib., 822.)
Footnote 3:
Neander, Bibl. Repos., iii. 94; Leydecker, de Jansen. Dogm., 413.
Footnote 4:
The question of the middle knowledge is learnedly handled by Voetius
(Disp. Theol., i. 264), by Hoornbeck (Socin. Confut.), and other
Protestant divines, who have shown it to be untenable, useless, and
fraught with absurdity.
Footnote 5:
Dupin, Eccl. Hist., 17th cent. 1–14.
Footnote 6:
“Well done, gentlemen; you have left me more in the dark than ever.”
Footnote 7:
He was the son of a poor artisan, whose name was Jan, or John Ottho;
hence Jansen, corresponding to our Johnson, which was Latinized into
Jansenius.
Footnote 8:
Petitot, Collect. des Mémoires, Notice sur Port-Royal, tom. xxxiii.,
p. 19. This author’s attempt to fix the charge of a conspiracy between
Jansen and St. Cyran to overturn the Church, is a piece of special
pleading, bearing on its face its own refutation.
Footnote 9:
The followers of Jansen were not more charitable than he in their
judgments of the Reformed, and showed an equal zeal with the Jesuits
to persecute them, when they had it in their power. (Benoit, Hist. de
l’Edit de Nantes, iii. 200.)
Footnote 10:
_Cæca quadam obedientia.—Ut Christum Dominum in superiore quolibet
agnoscere studeatis.—Perinde ac si cadaver essent, vel similiter atque
senis baculus.—Ad majorem Dei gloriam._ (Constit. Jesuit. pars vi.
cap. 1; Ignat. Epist., &c.)
Footnote 11:
Balde, whom the Jesuits honor in their schools as a modern Horace,
thus celebrates the longevity of the Society, in his _Carmen Seculare
de Societate Jesu_, 1640:—
“Profuit quisquis voluit nocere.
Cuncta subsident sociis; ubique
Exules vivunt, et ubique cives!
Sternimus victi, supreamus imi,
Surgimus plures toties cadendo.”
Footnote 12:
Their famous missionary, Francis Xavier, whom they canonized, was
ignorant of a single word in the languages of the Indians whom he
professed to evangelize. He employed a hand-bell to summon the natives
around him; and the poor savages, mistaking him for one of their
learned Brahmans, he baptized them until his arm was exhausted with
the task, and boasted of every one he baptized as a regenerated
convert!
Footnote 13:
Macintosh, Hist. of England, ii. 353.
Footnote 14:
Macintosh, Hist. of England, ii. 357.
Footnote 15:
Augustine himself is chargeable with having been the first to
introduce the scholastic mode of treating morality in the form of
trifling questions, more fitted to gratify curiosity, and display
acumen, than to edify or enlighten. His example was followed and
miserably abused, by the moralists of succeeding ages. (Buddei
Isagoge, vol. i. p. 568.)
Footnote 16:
Lancelot. Tour to Alet, p. 173; Leydecker, p. 122.
Footnote 17:
The whole title was: “Augustinus Cornelii Jansenii episcopi, seu
doctrina sancti Augustini de humanæ naturæ sanctitate ægritudinæ
medica, adversus Pelagianos et Massilienses.” Louvain, 1640.
Footnote 18:
Leydecker, p. 132; Lancelot, p. 180.
Footnote 19:
Ranke, Hist. of the Popes, vol. iii. 143; Abbé Du Mas, Hist. des Cinq
Propositions, p. 48.
Footnote 20:
Letter xviii. pp. 310–313.
Footnote 21:
Witsii Œconom. Fœd., lib. iii.; Turret. Theol., Elenct. xv. quest. 4;
De Moor Comment, iv. 496; Mestrezat, Serm. sur Rom., viii. 274.
Footnote 22:
I refer here particularly to Arnauld’s treatise, entitled
“Renversement de la Morale de Jesus Christ par les Calvinistes,” which
was answered by Jurieu in his “Justification de la Morale des
Reformez.” 1685, by M. Merlat, and others. Jurieu has shown at great
length, and with a severity for which he had too much provocation,
that Arnauld and his friends, in their violent tirades against the
Reformed, neither acted in good faith, nor in consistency with the
sentiments of their much admired leaders, Augustine and Jansen.
Footnote 23:
Fontaine, Mémoires, i. 200; Mosheim, Eccl. Hist., cent. xvii. 2.
Footnote 24:
Lancelot, p. 123.
Footnote 25:
Mémoires pour servir a l’Histoire de Port-Royal, vol. i. pp. 35, 57,
142.
Footnote 26:
Ib., p. 456. The title of this work was, “The Secret Chaplet of the
Holy Sacrament.”
Footnote 27:
Sacy, or Saci, was the inverted name of Isaac Le Maitre, celebrated
for his translation of the Bible.
Footnote 28:
Mosheim, Eccl. Hist., cent. xvii. §2.
Footnote 29:
We may refer particularly to Petitot in his Collection des Mémoires,
tom. xxxiii., Paris, 1824; and to a History of the Company of Jesus by
J. Cretineau-Joly, Paris, 1845. With high pretensions to impartiality,
these works abound with the most glaring specimens of special
pleading.
Footnote 30:
Voltaire, Siècle de Louis XIV, t. ii.
Footnote 31:
Mémoires de P. Royal, i. 13. Bayle insists that his father had
twenty-two children. Dict., art. _Arnauld_.
Footnote 32:
Weisman, Hist. Eccl., ii. 204.
Footnote 33:
The title under which the Letters appeared when first collected into a
volume was, “_Lettres écrites par Louis de Montalte, a un Provincial
de ses amis, et aux RR. PP. Jesuites, sur la morale et la politique de
ces Peres_.”
Father Bouhours, a Jesuit, ridicules the title of the Letters, and
says he is surprised they were not rather entitled “Letters from a
Country Bumpkin to his Friends,” and instead of “The Provincials”
called “The Bumpkins”—“_Campagnardes_.” (Remarques sur la langue
Fran., p. ii. 306. Dict. Univ., art. _Provincial_.)
Footnote 34:
Daniel, Entretiens, p. 19.
Footnote 35:
Petitot, Notices, p. 121.
Footnote 36:
Benoit, Hist. de l’Edit. de Nantes, iii. 198.
Footnote 37:
Daniel, Entretiens, p. 11.
Footnote 38:
Nicole, Notes sur la xi. Lettre iii. 332.
Footnote 39:
Recueil de Port-Royal, 278, 279; Petitot, pp. 122, 123.
Footnote 40:
Histoire des Provinciales, p. 12.
Footnote 41:
Petitot, p. 124. The eighteenth letter embraces the delicate topic of
papal authority, as well as the distinction between _faith_ and
_fact_, in stating which we can easily conceive how severely the
ingenuous mind of Pascal must have labored to find some plausible
ground for vindicating his consistency as a Roman Catholic. To the
Protestant reader, it must appear the most unsatisfactory of all the
Letters.
Footnote 42:
Prov. Let., p. 340.
Footnote 43:
Perrault, Parallele des Anc. et Mod., Bayle, art. _Pascal_.
Footnote 44:
D’Artigny, Nouveaux Mémoires iii. p. 34.
Footnote 45:
Voltaire, Siècle de Louis XIV., tom. ii. pp. 171, 274.
Footnote 46:
D’Alembert, Destruct. des Jesuites, p. 54.
Footnote 47: