The Provincial Letters

Summary

The Provincial Letters are eighteen open letters, with a fragment of a nineteenth, published as anonymous pamphlets in Paris between January 1656 and March 1657 under the pen name Louis de Montalte. They began as a rescue operation. Antoine Arnauld, the leading theologian of Port-Royal, faced censure by the theology faculty of the Sorbonne for writing that the five propositions on grace condemned by Rome were not to be found in Cornelius Jansen's Augustinus, and that grace had failed St Peter when he denied Christ. Pascal, a layman known as a mathematician, took up the case in the voice of a sensible man of the world writing to a friend in the provinces. In Letters I–III he visits doctors of the Sorbonne, a Jansenist, a Jesuit sympathizer and a Dominican, and shows that the parties uniting against Arnauld agree on a word, 'proximate power', and on 'sufficient grace', while meaning contradictory things by them. The condemnation, he argues, is a political alliance disguised as doctrine. Letter IV turns to the Jesuit teaching that no act is sinful unless God gives actual grace to know its evil. With Letter V the work changes target and becomes famous. The narrator interviews an affable, learned Jesuit father who, with real pride, explains his order's moral theology: the doctrine of probable opinions, by which a confessor may follow any view held by a single grave doctor even against a safer one; the 'direction of intention', by which a duelist or a servant aiding a crime may act with a good conscience by fixing his mind on an allowable end; and relaxations on usury, simony, fasting, alms, mental reservation, confession and even the duty to love God. Pascal quotes chapter and page from Escobar, Bauny, Sanchez, Lessius, Molina and others, and lets the good father's enthusiasm do the damage. After the Jesuits replied, Letters XI–XVI drop the comic frame and address the Jesuit fathers directly: Pascal defends ridicule as a fit weapon against absurd error, sets Scripture and the councils against casuist teaching on alms, homicide and calumny, and defends the nuns of Port-Royal. Letters XVII and XVIII, written to Father François Annat, Louis XIV's confessor, return to grace and argue that the Church may decide what is true doctrine but that whether a proposition is in a given book is a question of fact, settled by reading rather than authority. Pascal's argument is partisan and sometimes unfair to the casuists' purposes, yet the letters remain a model of clear French prose and a lasting warning about the corruption of moral reasoning by convenience.

Plot or Argument

• Letters I–III: the vocabulary of a censure

  The narrator questions Sorbonne doctors, Jesuit allies and Dominicans about 'proximate power' and 'sufficient grace', finds that the words unite opponents only by meaning nothing, tells the parable of the wounded traveller and three physicians, and argues that the censure of Arnauld condemns a person rather than a heresy.

• Letter IV: actual grace and sins of ignorance

  A Jesuit explains, citing Father Bauny and Le Moine, that sin requires an actual grace showing the evil of the act; the narrator and a Jansenist friend answer that hardened sinners would then be the most innocent.

• Letters V–X: the good father's library

  The Jesuit father expounds probabilism, the authority of modern casuists over the Fathers, the direction of intention applied to duels and homicide, the Mohatra contract and other evasions of usury law, easy devotions, mental reservations, and the softening of penance, ending with the claim that love of God is barely required.

• Letters XI–XVI: to the Reverend Fathers

  Writing openly to the Jesuits, Pascal justifies satire from Scripture and the Fathers, defends the accuracy of his citations, contrasts the law of God and of states on homicide with casuist permissions, exposes calumny as a method, and defends Port-Royal and the miracle of the Holy Thorn.

• Letters XVII–XIX: to Father Annat

  Pascal denies belonging to Port-Royal or holding heresy, distinguishes the right of the Church to judge doctrine from the question of fact whether Jansen's book contains the propositions, invokes the senses and the Galileo case, and leaves a fragment of a nineteenth letter.

Characters

• The narrator (Louis de Montalte), letter-writer

  Pascal's persona: a curious, polite layman who asks simple questions and lets the experts expose themselves; in the later letters he drops the mask of naivety.

• The Provincial, recipient

  The friend in the country to whom the first ten letters are addressed; a reply from him is printed after Letter II.

• The Jesuit father, interlocutor in Letters V–X

  A genial, well-read casuist who explains his order's maxims with pride and good faith, unaware of how they sound.

• The Jansenist friend, guide

  Accompanies the narrator in the early letters, explains the theology of grace, and supplies the parable of the three physicians.

• M. N., doctor of Navarre, Sorbonne doctor

  Opponent of the Jansenists who explains the meaning of 'proximate power' in Letter I.

• The Dominican (Jacobin), Thomist theologian

  Admits that his order uses 'sufficient grace' in a sense opposed to the Jesuits' and accepts the word for the sake of alliance.

• Antoine Arnauld, theologian of Port-Royal

  The doctor whose censure occasions the letters; not a speaker but the cause defended.

• Father François Annat, Jesuit, royal confessor

  Addressee of Letters XVII–XVIII and the fragment XIX.

• Antonio Escobar y Mendoza, Jesuit casuist

  Spanish author of a manual of moral theology drawn from twenty-four Jesuit doctors, quoted throughout Letters V–X.

Lessons

• Words that unite enemies by meaning nothing

  Letter I shows two parties who disagree about grace agreeing to condemn Arnauld by both affirming a term, 'proximate power', which each defines differently. Pascal's narrator asks where the word comes from and is told only that he must say it or be a heretic. The lesson concerns honest language: a creed or slogan that hides contradiction is a political instrument, not a statement of truth.

  • Why does the narrator keep asking for a definition, and why do the doctors refuse to give one?
  • What modern examples can you find of a phrase that holds a coalition together because people read it differently?
  • Is it ever right to accept a word in order to keep peace? Where does Pascal draw the line?

• Probability as a road around conscience

  The Jesuit father explains that any opinion supported by one grave doctor is probable and may be followed, even when the opposite is more probable and safer. Pascal presents this as making the confessor's library, not God's law, the judge of action. Readers should know that probabilism had serious defenders as a way to guide doubtful consciences; the letters attack its abuse, and their summary of the casuists is polemical.

  • How does the father's rule change the question from 'What is right?' to 'What may I defend?'
  • Why does Pascal let the Jesuit speak for himself at such length instead of refuting him directly?
  • Is there a fair version of the casuists' purpose that Pascal does not represent? What would it be?

• Intention cannot launder an act

  In Letter VII the father explains that one may kill to defend honour if one directs the intention not to revenge but to preserving reputation. Pascal's satire depends on the reader seeing that a good end chosen in the mind does not change what the hands do. The point bears on the classical and Christian teaching that the object of an act, and not the agent's private aim alone, determines its moral character.

  • Restate the 'direction of intention' in your own words. Why does it sound plausible at first?
  • Where in ordinary life do people excuse an act by naming a better motive for it?
  • How does Letter XIV answer the father by appealing to Scripture and the laws of states?

• When laughter serves the truth

  Accused of mocking holy things, Pascal argues in Letter XI that the Fathers and Scripture itself treat foolish error with irony, and that ridicule is fitting for opinions that would gain weight from solemn refutation. He also sets limits: the mockery must be true, must not touch sacred things themselves, and must come from charity toward the persons attacked. Students can test the letters against Pascal's own rules.

  • List Pascal's conditions for legitimate ridicule. Do Letters V–X meet them?
  • Why might satire succeed where a treatise would not?
  • When does ridicule become uncharitable, and how would you know?

• Authority, evidence and matters of fact

  Letter XVIII accepts that the Church may judge whether a doctrine is heretical but argues that whether certain words stand in a book is a question of fact, known by reading and by the senses. Pascal adds the cases of the relics of St Denis and of Galileo: authority cannot make a fact false. The argument is a careful distinction, not a rejection of authority, and it shaped later debates over obedience and conscience.

  • What is the difference between a 'question of right' and a 'question of fact' in Letter XVIII?
  • Why does Pascal mention Galileo, and what does he claim and not claim about the motion of the earth?
  • Can a person be obedient and still refuse to say he has seen what he has not seen?

Context

The letters belong to the long French quarrel over grace between the Jesuits, who followed Luis de Molina in stressing human cooperation with grace, and the Augustinian party around the convent of Port-Royal, inspired by Cornelius Jansen's Augustinus (1640) and led by Saint-Cyran and Antoine Arnauld. In 1653 Innocent X's bull Cum occasione condemned five propositions said to be in Jansen's book. Arnauld's Second Letter to a Duke and Peer (1655) accepted the condemnation but questioned whether the propositions were in the book, and the Sorbonne censured him in January–February 1656. Pascal's campaign widened from that censure to Jesuit moral theology, which already had critics inside the Church.

Composition

Letter I is dated 23 January 1656 and Letter XVIII 24 March 1657; the fragment of a nineteenth letter was left unfinished. The letters appeared as separate quarto pamphlets, printed clandestinely, under the general title Letters Written to a Provincial by One of His Friends, and were collected in 1657 under the name Louis de Montalte. Arnauld and Pierre Nicole supplied theological material and many of the casuist citations, which Pascal checked and shaped. The library's text is Thomas M'Crie's English translation with historical introduction and notes (Edinburgh, 1847; New York, 1856), whose introduction and footnotes are strongly anti-Jesuit and Protestant in perspective and should be read as nineteenth-century commentary.

Reception

The letters were an immediate public success and were answered by Jesuit writers, including Father Annat. They were placed on the Index of Forbidden Books in September 1657, and a Latin translation by Nicole (under the name Wendrock, 1658) was condemned and burned by order of the royal council in 1660. Rome itself later condemned a number of laxist propositions under Alexander VII (1665–1666) and Innocent XI (1679). Voltaire and Boileau praised the letters as a landmark of French prose, and they shaped the reputation of the word 'casuistry' in English and French. Modern historians of moral theology, notably Albert Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin, have argued that Pascal's satire treated a serious method of case reasoning unfairly.

Comparisons

• Pensees

  The Pensées were drafted in the years after the letters and share their Augustinian account of grace and fallen reason, but address the unbeliever rather than the casuist. Some fragments in the Pensées continue the polemic against the Jesuits and the 'probable'; the tone, however, moves from satire to apology.

• Scientific and Mathematical Treatises

  Pascal's treatises on the vacuum insist that experiment and the senses, not ancient authority, settle questions of nature. Letter XVIII applies the same principle to theology's questions of fact, and its appeal to the Galileo case links the two halves of his career.

• The Praise of Folly

  Erasmus also mocked scholastic theologians and the abuses of religious orders from inside the Church. Folly speaks in a playful, ambiguous voice that leaves the reader unsure of the author's position; Pascal's ridicule is precise, documented and aimed at a single doctrinal target.

• On Free Will (De Libero Arbitrio)

  Erasmus' debate with Luther over free will is an earlier round of the question behind Letters I–IV and XVII–XVIII: how divine grace and human choice relate. Pascal stands with the Augustinian side while insisting, against his critics, that Jansen's doctrine is not Calvin's.

• The School for Wives, The Critique of The School for Wives and Don Juan

  Molière's Don Juan (1665) ends with the libertine putting on a mask of devotion because pious pretence has become fashionable, a comic portrait of the same worldly accommodation of religion that Pascal's good father represents. Both works provoked charges of mocking religion and both answered that they mocked its counterfeits.

• Phaedra

  Racine was educated at Port-Royal and later broke with it over the theatre; Phèdre (1677) is often read as a drama of the Augustinian will Pascal defends. The letters show the community and theology Racine grew up within.

Quotes

Medical Lens

The letters are not about medicine, but two passages are useful for the history of medicine and religion. In Letter II the Jansenist friend's parable compares the Church to a wounded traveller attended by three physicians who disagree about whether his legs 'suffice' for walking, a satire on ambiguous diagnosis that turns medical consultation into a figure for the theology of grace. Letter XVI's defence of Port-Royal touches the miracle of the Holy Thorn (March 1656), the cure of Pascal's niece Marguerite Périer of a lachrymal fistula, which M'Crie's footnote describes as attested by Paris physicians; it is a well-documented case of early modern medical testimony in a contested miracle claim.

• Letter II

  Parable of the wounded traveller, the three physicians, and the dispute over whether strength that cannot be used is 'sufficient'.

  Physicians Doctors
• Letter XVI and M'Crie's note 310

  Allusion to the Holy Thorn miracle at Port-Royal; the translator's note describes Marguerite Périer's eye disease, the failure of physicians to cure it, and their certificate of the cure.

  Physicians Doctors

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Write a nineteenth Provincial Letter in Pascal's early manner: the polite narrator interviews an expert who explains, with pride, a modern method for making a doubtful practice respectable.

• Essay

  Pascal says ridicule is fitting for error that would gain weight from serious refutation. Choose one of Letters V–X and judge whether its satire meets the conditions he sets in Letter XI.

• Classroom

  Divide the class into casuists and critics. Give each side a case from Letter VII or VIII (a duel of honour, a disguised loan) and have them argue whether the 'direction of intention' changes the act.

• Essay

  Compare Pascal's distinction between questions of right and questions of fact in Letter XVIII with the way scientists and courts distinguish evidence from authority today.

• Fiction

  Retell the parable of the three physicians from Letter II from the patient's point of view, as a short story set in a seventeenth-century inn.

Further Reading

• Pensées, Blaise Pascal

  Pascal's unfinished apology for Christianity.

• The Provincial Letters (translation), A. J. Krailsheimer

  Modern English translation with a concise introduction.

• The Abuse of Casuistry: A History of Moral Reasoning, Albert R. Jonsen and Stephen Toulmin

  Defends the casuists' method and examines Pascal's attack.

• The Life of Monsieur Pascal, Gilberte Périer

  The memoir by Pascal's sister.

• Port-Royal, Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beuve

  The classic nineteenth-century history of the community.

• The Hidden God, Lucien Goldmann

  Reads Pascal and Racine together.