Blaise Pascal's Provincial Letters (Lettres provinciales, 1656-57) are eighteen letters written pseudonymously - under the name 'Louis de Montalte' - in defense of the Jansenist theologians of Port-Royal against the attacks of the Jesuits and the condemnations of the Sorbonne. They are among the most remarkable examples of polemical literature in any language: technically accomplished, theologically precise, and devastatingly funny. Voltaire, no friend to Christianity, called them the first masterpiece of French prose. They shaped the style of French intellectual polemics for the next two centuries.
The controversy they addressed was intensely theological. The Jansenists - followers of the late Bishop Cornelius Jansen, whose posthumous Augustinus (1640) argued for a doctrine of divine grace closer to Calvin's than to the Tridentine Catholic consensus - were under attack for allegedly teaching heretical doctrines about grace and free will. Pascal, a mathematical genius and Christian convert who had been associated with the Port-Royal community since 1646, took up their defense in letters ostensibly written by a curious Parisian to a friend in the provinces explaining what all the fuss was about.
The early letters engage the technical theological debate with elegant clarity, making the abstruse disputes about 'sufficient' and 'efficacious' grace comprehensible to a lay audience. But the letters quickly become something more pointed: an exposure of the Jesuit system of casuistry - the practice of resolving moral dilemmas by finding the most permissive interpretation available among competing theological authorities. Pascal's systematic dismantling of this system is accomplished through quotation from Jesuit moral theologians themselves, allowing their own words to make the case against them.
Galatians 1:10 - 'For am I now seeking the approval of man, or of God? Or am I trying to please man? If I were still trying to please man, I would not be a servant of Christ' - is the Pauline standard that Pascal implicitly holds against the Jesuit accommodations. The Jesuit casuists had developed sophisticated techniques for allowing penitents to satisfy spiritual obligations while maintaining worldly comfort and social reputation: directing the intention (sin is sin only if you intend to sin), probabilism (you may follow a permissive interpretation if any reputable theologian has endorsed it), and mental reservation (you may mislead with technically true statements). Pascal's devastation of these techniques draws on the contrast between Paul's uncompromising demand and the Jesuit system's infinite flexibility.
Matthew 5:48 - 'You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect' - and Matthew 23:23 - 'You have neglected the weightier matters of the law: justice and mercy and faithfulness' - are the Gospel standards against which the Jesuit system of minimal compliance appears as pharisaism in a new form. Romans 3:8 - 'And why not do evil that good may come? - as some people slanderously charge us with saying' - is Paul's rejection of the very logic that casuistry tends toward: the use of clever argument to justify what conscience condemns.
Pascal's method in the letters was new: instead of addressing an educated theological audience in Latin, he wrote for the general educated public in French, using humor, irony, and dramatic dialogue to make technical theology vivid and accessible. The letters were published individually, each one eagerly awaited, and read throughout France and Europe. They established a template for the learned popular pamphlet - politically engaged, theologically informed, rhetorically entertaining - that influenced Voltaire, Rousseau, and the entire tradition of French public intellectual discourse.
The Jesuits were not without resources, and they eventually succeeded in having the letters placed on the Index of Forbidden Books (1657). But the damage to the Jesuit reputation for moral seriousness was lasting, and the letters contributed to the eventual suppression of the Jesuit order by Pope Clement XIV in 1773. Pascal's attack on casuistry also had lasting effects on Catholic moral theology, pushing it toward more rigorous standards of moral reasoning.
The Provincial Letters also made a lasting contribution to the French language. Pascal's prose - ironic, elegant, precisely calibrated - became a model for subsequent French writers in a way that the more learned Latin of the Jesuits' respondents could not. Voltaire, who disagreed with almost everything Pascal believed, acknowledged that the Letters had established the standard for French polemical writing. The combination of satirical wit and theological seriousness that Pascal achieved in the Letters was unprecedented in French religious writing and has rarely been matched since. The reader who picks them up expecting dry theological controversy finds instead some of the most entertaining prose in the French tradition.
The theological issues at stake in the Letters - the relationship between grace and freedom, the nature of contrition, the casuistry of moral obligation - are not merely historical curiosities. The Jesuit accommodation to worldly morality that Pascal attacked was a version of a perennial temptation in Christian ethics: to make the Gospel requirements sufficiently flexible that they do not actually require anything. Pascal's counterargument - that genuine moral seriousness requires genuine standards, and that casuistical cleverness is not pastoral wisdom but pastoral cowardice - remains relevant to every generation that faces the question of how demanding Christian ethics should be in practice.