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Blaise Pascal: Provincial Letters
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Beginning in 1656, Pascal published his memorable attack on casuistry, a popular ethical method used by Catholic thinkers in the early modern period (especially the Jesuits, and in particular Antonio Escobar). Pascal denounced casuistry as the mere use of complex reasoning to justify moral laxity and all sorts of sins. His method of framing his arguments was clever: the Provincial Letters pretended to be the report of a Parisian to a friend in the provinces on the moral and theological issues then exciting the intellectual and religious circles in the capital. Pascal, combining the fervor of a convert with the wit and polish of a man of the world, reached a new level of style in French prose. The 18-letter series was published between 1656 and 1657 under the pseudonym Louis de Montalte and incensed Louis XIV. The king ordered that the book be shredded and burnt in 1660.
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In 1655 Antoine Arnauld, a prolific writer in defense of Jansen, was formally condemned by the Sorbonne for heretical teaching, and Pascal took up his defense in the first part of the famous Provincial Letters. Their framework is that of a correspondence between a Parisian and a friend in the provinces from Jan. 13, 1656, to March 24, 1657. They were circulated in the thousands through Paris under a pseudonym (Louis de Montalte), and the Jesuits tried to discover the author, whose wit, reason, eloquence, and humor made the order a laughingstock.
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Pascal's last mathematical gesture (1658), like his first, was geometrical: the offering of a prize for the solution of two problems connected with the curve called the cycloid. He recorded his own solutions in letters to Carcavi. His last years were given wholly to religion. He died in agony from cancer which by that time had spread to the brain.
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Born in 1623 at Clermont-Ferrand, Pascal showed an exceptional aptitude formathematics while still a boy. Pascal became involved in a religious movement called Jansenism. He became a monk in 1654 in a Jansenist convent at Port-Royal. At around this time, the Jesuit religious order condemned the Jansenist leader Antoine Arnauld for heterodoxy (a deviation from conventional, acknowledged or standard beliefs of a church). This prompted Pascal to publish a series of eighteen popular satirical pamphlets called the Provincial Letters in 1656 and 1657.
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From about this time Pascal began a series of experiments on atmospheric pressure. By 1647 he had proved to his satisfaction that a vacuum existed. Descartes visited Pascal on 23 September. His visit only lasted two days and the two argued about the vacuum which Descartes did not believe in. Descartes wrote, rather cruelly, in a letter to Huygens after this visit that Pascal ...has too much vacuum in his head.
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After the censure, Pascal went on the offensive and began an assault on the Jesuits’ casuistry. He was forced to deal ... with the constant slander of the Jesuits against the Jansenists. The last two letters defend Jansen’s Augustinus as deliberately misrepresented to Rome by the Jesuits and vindicate the Jansenists’ approach to that book as orthodox.
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Provincial Letters