The Provincial Letters
Eighteen letters, with a fragment of a nineteenth, that Blaise Pascal wrote in 1656 and 1657 against the Jesuits and for those they accused of Jansenism. The first and the last two turn on the distinction between the question of right and the question of fact.
The first letter is dated from Paris on 23 January 1656 and reports the proceedings of the Sorbonne against Antoine Arnauld. It separates a question of fact, whether Arnauld was rash to say that he had not found the condemned propositions in Jansen’s book, from a question of right about a statement of his on grace. The seventeenth, dated 23 January 1657 and addressed to the Jesuit Annat, says that those accused of heresy condemn the five propositions and deny only that Jansen taught them, and it argues that whether a doctrine is in a given book is a matter of fact, on which a denial cannot be heresy. In the same letter Pascal says that he is not of Port-Royal.
The letters are polemic by a partisan of one side; from the fifth, dated 20 March 1656, they turn to what Pascal calls the morals taught by the Jesuits. The eighteenth is dated 24 March 1657. They are cited here for the Jansenist position as its ablest defender put it. Rome’s answer is in Ad sanctam beati Petri sedem.
Cited in
- 1653 to 1713, firm date