Footnote 299:
_John Mestrezat_, Protestant minister of Paris, was born at Geneva in
1592 and died in May 1657. His Sermons on the Epistle to the Hebrews
and other discourses, published after his death, are truly excellent.
This learned and eloquent divine frequently engaged in controversy
with the Romanists, and on one occasion managed the debate with such
spirit that Cardinal Richelieu, taking hold of his shoulder,
exclaimed: “This is the boldest minister in France.” (Bayle, Dict.,
art. _Mestrezat_.)
Footnote 300:
The statement of the Protestant faith, given in a preceding note, may
suffice to show that it differs, _toto cœlo_, from that of Rome, as
this is explained in the text. The leading fallacy of the Romish creed
on this subject is the monstrous dogma of transubstantiation; the
adoration of the host is merely a corollary. Calvinists and Lutherans
though differing in their views of the ordinance, always agreed in
acknowledging the _real_ presence of Christ in the eucharist, though
they consider the sense in which Romanists interpret that term to be
chargeable with blasphemy and absurdity.
Footnote 301:
Mascar., tr. 4, disp. 5, n. 284.
Footnote 302:
Ecclesiasticus (Apocrypha).
Footnote 303:
Freq. Com., 3 part, ch. 11.
Footnote 304:
Eccles. iv. 25 (Apocrypha).
Footnote 305:
_Jean du Verger de Hauranne, the Abbé de Saint Cyran_ was born at
Bayonne in 1581. He was the intimate friend of Jansenius and a man of
great piety and talents, but was seized as a heretic, and thrown by
Cardinal Richelieu into the dungeon of Vincennes. After five years’
imprisonment he was released, but died shortly after, October, 11,
1643. By his followers, M. de Saint Cyran was reverenced as a saint
and a martyr.
Footnote 306:
This Father Jarrige was a famous Jesuit, who became a Protestant, and
published, after his separation from Rome, a book, entitled “_Le
Jesuite sur l’Echaffaut_—The Jesuit on the Scaffold,” in which he
treats his old friends with no mercy.
Footnote 307:
_Misérables que vous êtes_—one of the bitterest expressions which
Pascal has applied to his opponents and one which they have deeply
felt, but the full force of which can hardly be rendered into English.
Footnote 308:
With regard to this famous assembly at Bourg-Fontaine, in which it was
alleged a conspiracy was formed by the Jansenists against the
Christian religion, the curious reader may consult the work of M.
Arnauld entitled _Morale Pratique des Jesuites_, vol. viii., where
there is a detailed account of the whole proceedings. (Nicole, iv.
283.)
Footnote 309:
_The Secret Chaplet of the most Holy Sacrament._—Such was the title of
a very harmless piece of mystic devotion of three or four pages, the
production of a nun of Port-Royal, called Sister Agnès de Saint Paul,
which appeared in 1628. It excited the jealousy of the Archbishop of
Sens—set the doctors of Paris and those of Louvain by the
ears—occasioned a war of pamphlets and was finally carried by appeal
to the Court of Rome, by which it was suppressed. (Nicole, iv. 302.)
Agnès de St. Paul was the younger sister of the Mère Angélique
Arnauld, and both of them were sisters of the celebrated M. Arnauld.
Footnote 310:
This refers to the celebrated miracles of “the Holy Thorn,” the first
of which, said to have lately taken place in Port-Royal, was then
creating much sensation. The facts are briefly these: A thorn, said to
have belonged to the crown of thorns worn by our Saviour, having been
presented, in March 1656, to the Monastery of Port-Royal, the nuns and
their young pupils were permitted, each in turn, to kiss the relic.
One of the latter, Margaret Perier, the niece of Pascal, a girl of
about ten or eleven years of age, had been long troubled with a
disease in the eye (_fistula lachrymalis_), which had baffled the
skill of all the physicians of Paris. On approaching the holy thorn,
she applied it to the diseased organ, and shortly thereafter
exclaimed, to the surprise and delight of all the sisters, that her
eye was completely cured. A certificate, signed by some of the most
celebrated physicians, attested the cure as, in their opinion a
miraculous one. The friends of Port-Royal, and none more than Pascal,
were overjoyed at this interposition, which, being followed by other
extraordinary cures, they regarded as a voice from heaven in favor of
that institution. The Jesuits alone rejected it with ridicule, and
published a piece, entitled “_Rabat-joie_, &c.—A Damper: or,
Observations on what has lately happened at Port-Royal as to the
affair of the Holy Thorn.” This was answered in November 1656, in a
tract supposed to have been written by M. de Pont Château, who was
called “the Clerk of the Holy Thorn,” assisted by Pascal. (Recueil de
Pieces, &c. de Port-Royal, pp. 283–448.) It has been well observed,
“that many laborious and voluminous discussions might have been saved,
if the simple and very reasonable rule had been adopted of waiving
investigation into the credibility of any narrative of supernatural or
pretended supernatural events said to have taken place _upon
consecrated ground, or under sacred roofs_.” (Natural Hist. of
Enthusiasm, p. 236.) “It is well known,” says Mosheim, “that the
Jansenists and Augustinians have long pretended to confirm their
doctrine by miracles; and they even acknowledge that these miracles
have saved them when their affairs have been reduced to a desperate
situation.” (Mosh. Eccl. Hist., cent. xvii., sect. 2.)
Footnote 311:
Isa. xxviii. 15.
Footnote 312:
Isa. xxx. 12–14.
Footnote 313:
Ezek. xiii. 23. Pascal does not, either here or elsewhere, when
quoting from Scripture, adhere very closely to the original, nor even
to the Vulgate version.
Footnote 314:
This was the name given to St. Francis de Sales, bishop and prince of
Geneva, previously to his canonization, which took place in 1665.
Footnote 315:
Serm. 24 in Cantic.
Footnote 316:
These two postscripts have been often admired—the former for the
author’s elegant excuse for the length of his letter; the latter for
the adroitness with which he turns his apology for an undesigned
mistake into a stroke at the disingenuousness of his opponents.
LETTER XVII.[317]
TO THE REVEREND FATHER ANNAT, JESUIT.[318]
THE AUTHOR OF THE LETTERS VINDICATED FROM THE CHARGE OF HERESY—AN
HERETICAL PHANTOM—POPES AND GENERAL COUNCILS NOT INFALLIBLE IN
QUESTIONS OF FACT.
_January 23, 1657._
REVEREND FATHER,—Your former behavior had induced me to believe that you
were anxious for a truce in our hostilities; and I was quite disposed to
agree that it should be so. Of late, however, you have poured forth such
a volley of pamphlets, in such rapid succession, as to make it apparent
that peace rests on a very precarious footing when it depends on the
silence of Jesuits. I know not if this rupture will prove very
advantageous to you; but, for my part, I am far from regretting the
opportunity which it affords me of rebutting that stale charge of heresy
with which your writings abound.
It is full time, indeed, that I should, once for all, put a stop to the
liberty you have taken to treat me as a heretic—a piece of gratuitous
impertinence which seems to increase by indulgence, and which is
exhibited in your last book in a style of such intolerable assurance,
that were I not to answer the charge as it deserves, I might lay myself
open to the suspicion of being actually guilty. So long as the insult
was confined to your associates I despised it, as I did a thousand
others with which they interlarded their productions. To these my
fifteenth letter was a sufficient reply. But you now repeat the charge
with a different air: you make it the main point of your vindication. It
is, in fact, almost the only thing in the shape of argument that you
employ. You say that, “as a complete answer to my fifteen letters, it is
enough to say fifteen times that I am a heretic; and having been
pronounced such, I deserve no credit.” In short, you make no question of
my apostasy, but assume it as a settled point, on which you may build
with all confidence. You are serious then, father, it would seem, in
deeming me a heretic. I shall be equally serious in replying to the
charge.
You are well aware, sir, that heresy is a charge of so grave a
character, that it is an act of high presumption to advance, without
being prepared to substantiate it. I now demand your proofs. When was I
seen at Charenton? When did I fail in my presence at mass, or in my
Christian duty to my parish church? What act of union with heretics, or
of schism with the Church, can you lay to my charge? What council have I
contradicted? What papal constitution have I violated? You _must_
answer, father, else——You know what I mean.[319] And what _do_ you
answer? I beseech all to observe it: First of all, you assume “that the
author of the letters is a Port-Royalist;” then you tell us “that
Port-Royal is declared to be heretical;” and, therefore, you conclude,
“the author of the letters must be a heretic.” It is not on me, then,
father, that the weight of this indictment falls, but on Port-Royal; and
I am only involved in the crime because you suppose me to belong to that
establishment; so that it will be no difficult matter for me to
exculpate myself from the charge. I have no more to say than that I am
not a member of that community; and to refer you to my letters, in which
I have declared that “I am a private individual;” and again in so many
words, that “I am not of Port-Royal,” as I said in my sixteenth letter,
which preceded your publication.
You must fall on some other way, then, to prove me a heretic, otherwise
the whole world will be convinced that it is beyond your power to make
good your accusation. Prove from my writings that I do not receive the
constitution.[320] My letters are not very voluminous—there are but
sixteen of them—and I defy you or anybody else to detect in them the
slightest foundation for such a charge. I shall, however, with your
permission, produce something out of them to prove the reverse. When,
for example, I say in the fourteenth that, “by killing our brethren in
mortal sin, according to your maxims, we are damning those for whom
Jesus Christ died,” do I not plainly acknowledge that Jesus Christ died
for those who may be damned, and, consequently, declare it to be false
“that he died only for the predestinated,” which is the error condemned
in the fifth proposition? Certain it is, father, that I have not said a
word in behalf of these impious propositions, which I detest with all my
heart.[321] And even though Port-Royal should hold them, I protest
against your drawing any conclusion from this against me, as, thank God,
I have no sort of connection with any community except the Catholic,
Apostolic and Roman Church, in the bosom of which I desire to live and
die, in communion with the pope, the head of the Church, and beyond the
pale of which I am persuaded there is no salvation.
How are you to get at a person who talks in this way, father? On what
quarter will you assail me, since neither my words nor my writings
afford the slightest handle to your accusations, and the obscurity in
which my person is enveloped forms my protection against your
threatenings? You feel yourselves smitten by an invisible hand—a hand,
however, which makes your delinquencies visible to all; and in vain do
you try to strike at me in the dark, through the sides of those with
whom you suppose me to be associated. I fear you not, either on my own
account or on that of any other, being bound by no tie either to a
community or to any individual whatsoever.[322] All the influence which
your Society possesses can be of no avail in my case. From this world I
have nothing to hope, nothing to dread, nothing to desire. Through the
goodness of God, I have no need of any man’s money or any man’s
patronage. Thus, father, I elude all your attempts to catch hold of me.
You may touch Port-Royal if you choose, but you shall not touch me. You
may turn people out of the Sorbonne, but that will not turn me out of my
domicile. You may hatch plots against priests and doctors, but not
against me, for I am neither the one nor the other. And thus, father,
you never perhaps had to do, in the whole course of your experience,
with a person so completely beyond your reach, and therefore so
admirably qualified for dealing with your errors—one perfectly free—one
without engagement, entanglement, relationship, or business of any
kind—one, too, who is pretty well versed in your maxims, and determined,
as God shall give him light, to discuss them, without permitting any
earthly consideration to arrest or slacken his endeavors.
Since, then, you can do nothing against me, what good purpose can it
serve to publish so many calumnies, as you and your brethren are doing,
against a class of persons who are in no way implicated in our disputes?
You shall not escape under these subterfuges: you shall be made to feel
the force of the truth in spite of them. How does the case stand? I tell
you that you are ruining Christian morality by divorcing it from the
love of God, and dispensing with its obligation; and you talk about “the
death of Father Mester”—a person whom I never saw in my life. I tell you
that your authors permit a man to kill another for the sake of an apple,
when it would be dishonorable to lose it; and you reply by informing me
that somebody “has broken into the poor’s box at St. Merri!” Again, what
can you possibly mean by mixing me up perpetually with the book “On the
Holy Virginity,” written by some father of the Oratory, whom I never
saw, any more than his book?[323] It is rather extraordinary, father,
that you should thus regard all that are opposed to you as if they were
one person. Your hatred would grasp them all at once, and would hold
them as a body of reprobates, every one of whom is responsible for all
the rest.
There is a vast difference between Jesuits and all their opponents.
There can be no doubt that you compose one body, united under one head;
and your regulations, as I have shown, prohibit you from printing
anything without the approbation of your superiors, who are responsible
for all the errors of individual writers, and who “cannot excuse
themselves by saying that they did not observe the errors in any
publication, for they ought to have observed them.” So say your
ordinances, and so say the letters of your generals, Aquaviva,
Vitelleschi, &c. We have good reason, therefore, for charging upon you
the errors of your associates, when we find they are sanctioned by your
superiors and the divines of your Society. With me, however, father, the
case stands otherwise. I have not subscribed the book of the Holy
Virginity. All the alms-boxes in Paris may be broken into, and yet I am
not the less a good Catholic for all that. In short, I beg to inform
you, in the plainest terms, that nobody is responsible for my letters
but myself, and that I am responsible for nothing but my letters.
Here, father, I might fairly enough have brought our dispute to an
issue, without saying a word about those other persons whom you
stigmatize as heretics, in order to comprehend me under that
condemnation. But as I have been the occasion of their ill treatment, I
consider myself bound in some sort to improve the occasion, and I shall
take advantage of it in three particulars. One advantage, not
inconsiderable in its way, is that it will enable me to vindicate the
innocence of so many calumniated individuals. Another, not inappropriate
to my subject, will be to disclose, at the same time, the artifices of
your policy in this accusation. But the advantage which I prize most of
all this, that it affords me an opportunity of apprizing the world of
the falsehood of that scandalous report which you have been so busily
disseminating, namely, “that the Church is divided by a new heresy.” And
as you are deceiving multitudes into the belief that the points on which
you are raising such a storm are essential to the faith, I consider it
of the last importance to quash these unfounded impressions, and
distinctly to explain here what these points are, so as to show that, in
point of fact, there are no heretics in the Church.
I presume, then, that were the question to be asked, Wherein consists
the heresy of those called Jansenists? the immediate reply would be,
“These people hold that the commandments of God are impracticable to
men—that grace is irresistible—that we have not free will to do either
good or evil—that Jesus Christ did not die for all men, but only for the
elect; in short, they maintain the five propositions condemned by the
pope.” Do you not give it out to all that this is the ground on which
you persecute your opponents? Have you not said as much in your books,
in your conversations, in your catechisms? A specimen of this you gave
at the late Christmas festival at St. Louis. One of your little
shepherdesses was questioned thus:—
“For whom did Jesus Christ come into the world, my dear?”
“For all men, father.”
“Indeed, my child; so you are not one of those new heretics who say that
he came only for the elect?”
Thus children are led to believe you, and many others beside children;
for you entertain people with the same stuff in your sermons, as Father
Crasset did at Orleans, before he was laid under an interdict. And I
frankly own that, at one time, I believed you myself. You had given me
precisely the same idea of these good people; so that when you pressed
them on these propositions, I narrowly watched their answer, determined
never to see them more, if they did not renounce them as palpable
impieties.
This, however, they have done in the most unequivocal way. M. de
Sainte-Beuve,[324] king’s professor in the Sorbonne, censured these
propositions in his published writings long before the pope; and other
Augustinian doctors, in various publications, and, among others, in a
work “On Victorious Grace,”[325] reject the same articles as both
heretical and strange doctrines. In the preface to that work they say
that these propositions are “heretical and Lutheran, forged and
fabricated at pleasure, and are neither to be found in Jansenius, nor in
his defenders.” They complain of being charged with such sentiments, and
address you in the words of St. Prosper, the first disciple of St.
Augustine their master, to whom the semi-Pelagians of France had
ascribed similar opinions, with the view of bringing him into disgrace:
“There are persons who denounce us, so blinded by passion that they have
adopted means for doing so which ruin their own reputation. They have,
for this purpose, fabricated propositions of the most impious and
blasphemous character, which they industriously circulate, to make
people believe that we maintain them in the wicked sense which they are
pleased to attach to them. But our reply will show at once our
innocence, and the malignity of these persons who have ascribed to us a
set of impious tenets, of which they are themselves the sole inventors.”
Truly, father, when I found that they had spoken in this way before the
appearance of the papal constitution—when I saw that they afterwards
received that decree with all possible respect, that they offered to
subscribe it, and that M. Arnauld had declared all this in his second
letter, in stronger terms than I can report him, I should have
considered it a sin to doubt their soundness in the faith. And, in fact,
those who were formerly disposed to refuse absolution to M. Arnauld’s
friends, have since declared, that after his explicit disclaimer of the
errors imputed to him, there was no reason left for cutting off either
him or them from the communion of the Church. Your associates, however,
have acted very differently; and it was this that made me begin to
suspect that you were actuated by prejudice.
You threatened first to compel them to sign that constitution, so long
as you thought they would resist it; but no sooner did you see them
quite ready of their own accord to submit to it, than we heard no more
about this. Still, however, though one might suppose this ought to have
satisfied you, you persisted in calling them heretics, “because,” said
you, “their heart belies their hand; they are Catholics outwardly, but
inwardly they are heretics.”[326]
This, father, struck me as very strange reasoning; for where is the
person of whom as much may not be said at any time? And what endless
trouble and confusion would ensue, were it allowed to go on! “If,” says
Pope St. Gregory, “we refuse to believe a confession of faith made in
conformity to the sentiments of the Church, we cast a doubt over the
faith of all Catholics whatsoever.” I am afraid, father, to use the
words of the same pontiff, when speaking of a similar dispute in his
time, “that your object is to make these persons heretics in spite of
themselves; because to refuse to credit those who testify by their
confession that they are in the true faith, is not to purge heresy, but
to create it—_hoc non est hæresim purgare, sed facere_”. But what
confirmed me in my persuasion that there was indeed no heretic in the
Church, was finding that our so-called heretics had vindicated
themselves so successfully, that you were unable to accuse them of a
single error in the faith, and that you were reduced to the necessity of
assailing them on questions of _fact_ only, touching Jansenius, which
could not possibly be construed into heresy. You insist, it now appears,
on their being compelled to acknowledge “that these propositions are
contained in Jansenius, word for word, every one of them, in so many
terms,” or, as you express it, _Singulares, individuæ, totidem verbis
apud Jansenium contentæ_.
Thenceforth your dispute became, in my eyes, perfectly indifferent. So
long as I believed that you were debating the truth or falsehood of the
propositions, I was all attention, for that quarrel touched the faith;
but when I discovered that the bone of contention was whether they were
to be found, word for word, in Jansenius or not, as religion ceased to
be interested in the controversy, I ceased to be interested in it also.
Not but that there was some presumption that you were speaking the
truth; because to say that such and such expressions are to be found,
word for word, in an author, is a matter in which there can be no
mistake. I do not wonder, therefore, that so many people, both in France
and at Rome, should have been led to believe, on the authority of a
phrase so little liable to suspicion, that Jansenius has actually taught
these obnoxious tenets. And for the same reason, I was not a little
surprised to learn that this same point of fact, which you had
propounded as so certain and so important, was false; and that after
being challenged to quote the pages of Jansenius, in which you had found
these propositions “word for word,” you have not been able to point them
out to this day.
I am the more particular in giving this statement, because, in my
opinion, it discovers, in a very striking light, the spirit of your
Society in the whole of this affair; and because some people will be
astonished to find that, notwithstanding all the facts above mentioned,
you have not ceased to publish that they are heretics still. But you
have only altered the heresy to suit the time; for no sooner had they
freed themselves from one charge than your fathers, determined that they
should never want an accusation, substituted another in its place. Thus,
in 1653, their heresy lay in the _quality_ of the propositions; then
came the _word for word_ heresy; after that, we had the _heart_ heresy.
And now we hear nothing of any of these, and they must be heretics,
forsooth, unless they sign a declaration to the effect, “_that the sense
of the doctrine of Jansenius is contained in the sense of the five
propositions_.”