the provincial letters and the lesson of althusser

 


both blaise pascal and his sister jacqueline were jansenists attending services at the port-royal de paris convent from 1647. blaise certainly after his nuit de feu in 1654, his sister had become a nun at port-royal de paris in 1652 despite blaise’s opposition.

the jansenists were defeated and their enemies got to write history (though for a long time it was touch and go whether the jesuits would survive). wikipedia reports the jansenists as a protestant-type sect concerned with the vastly unfashionable doctrine of predestination - we are granted grace by god, some have enough grace to be saved and, for the rest, some for the fire, some for the ice. in these days of freewill you can hardly expect that to go down well.

what pascal’s the provincial letters does is take us back into this extinct debate and show us what the issues being debated meant then (it is in this regard that it resembles ranciere’s the lesson of althusser). the jansenists were beset on one side by the jesuits and on the other by the dominicans who could not themselves agree on the issue of grace - they modified the term until it was essentially meaningless (prevenient grace, effective grace, and sufficient grace - by which the jesuits held that the grace given you by god was enough to save you (it was just your decision not to be saved) and the dominicans held that it was not (without extra grace given you by god)). these differences were covered up to permit a unified front in attacking the jansenists.

arnauld (head jansenist) produced the quotations that he had relied upon from st. augustine - but that was not enough - the statements were only heretical in his mouth.

pascal undermines, confronts, juxtaposes, lays things out clearly, exposes the distortions of language and logic involved and above all does not succumb to anger but writes with an ironic distance. but it cannot prevent the jansenist’s defeat.

there are somethings, however,  lost to us in this tactic, for both blaise and jacqueline (and jansenism’s other adherents) 

 ‘ it meant for them a way of life, a set of people, a system of principles moral and spiritual... port-royal... (was)... a place where the catholic religion was lived out with exemplary piety by nuns who had forsaken the world in order to pray, not to argue, and by solitaries who only left their meditations to help in the school or to tend their garden.’ - introduction to the provincial letters by a.j. krailsheimer.

jacqueline was (like blaise) a prodigy - writing on the philosophy of education, the rights of women to that education, and freedom of conscience. she died after the defeat of the jansenists in 1661.