Blaise Pascal
French writer, born at Clermont in 1623. In the Provincial Letters of 1656 and 1657 he defended those accused of Jansenism and attacked the moral teaching of the Jesuits. He died in 1662.
His sister Gilberte Périer, who wrote his life, says that he was born at Clermont on 19 June 1623 and died on 19 August 1662, aged thirty-nine years and two months (Périer, Life of Pascal opening and closing paragraphs).
The first of his Provincial Letters is dated from Paris on 23 January 1656. It reports the proceedings of the Sorbonne against Antoine Arnauld, who had written that he could not find the condemned propositions in the book of Cornelius Jansen, and it treats that as a question of fact that does not touch the faith (Pascal, Provincial Letters 1). In the seventeenth letter he says of himself, “I am not of Port-Royal”, and argues that those accused condemn the five propositions and differ from their accusers only on a matter of fact (Pascal, Provincial Letters 17). See Jansenism and the Bull Unigenitus.
In the timeline
- 1653 to 1713, firm dateJansenism and the Bull Unigenitus
In 1653 Rome condemns five propositions on grace. The defenders of Cornelius Jansen condemn them too but deny that they are in his book; Rome defines that they are, and in 1713 the bull Unigenitus condemns 101 propositions from Quesnel’s New Testament.