Pascal Part 4

The mode of life of the Solitaries was simple in the highest degree.

They wore no distinctive dress. Their wants were supplied by the barest necessaries in the shape of lodging and furniture. From early morning, three A.M., to night, they were occupied in works of piety, charity, or industry. They met in the chapel after their private devotions to say matins and lauds, a service which occupied about an hour and a half, after which they kissed the earth in token of a common lowliness, and sought each his own room for a time. The round of devotion thus commenced was continued with a steady uniformity,-Prime at half-past six; Tierces at nine, and after this a daily Ma.s.s; s.e.xte at eleven; Nones at two; Vespers at four; and Compline closing the series at a quarter-past seven. {89} The Gospel and Epistles were read daily; and sometimes during or after dinner the Lives of the Saints. They dined together; and a walk thereafter formed the sole recreation of the day. Two hours in the morning, and two in the afternoon, were devoted to work in the fields or in the garden by those who were able for such tasks. Confession and communion were frequent, but no uniform rule was enforced. In this, as in fasting and austerities generally, each recluse was left to his own free will; and, as will be seen in Pascal's case, there was no need to stimulate the morbid desire for bodily mortification.

It was in the last month of 1654 that Pascal's final conversion and adhesion to Port Royal took place. His mind for some time before had been greatly agitated, as already explained-filled with disgust of the world and all its enjoyments. Then had come the accident at the Bridge of Neuilly, and about the same time, or a little later, a remarkable vision or ecstasy which he has himself described, and which has given rise to a good deal of useless speculation. During life he never spoke of this matter, unless it may have been to his confessor; {90} but after his death two copies of a brief writing were found upon him,-the one written on parchment enclosing the other written on paper, and carefully st.i.tched into the clothes that he had worn day by day. It is beyond question that Pascal must have been deeply touched by the event, whatever may have been its precise nature, the memorial of which he had thus preserved. The footnote shows the writing in the original, as printed by M. Faugere: there are some variations in the copies, but it seems most correctly given as below. It may be translated as follows:-

The year of grace 1654.

Monday 23d November, day of St Clement, pope and martyr, and others in the martyrology.

Vigil of St Chrysogone, martyr and others.

From about half-past ten o'clock in the evening till about half-past twelve.

Fire.

G.o.d of Abraham, G.o.d of Isaac, G.o.d of Jacob, Not of philosophers and of savants.

Cert.i.tude. Cert.i.tude. Sentiment. Joy. Peace.

G.o.d of Jesus Christ My G.o.d and your G.o.d.

Thy G.o.d will be my G.o.d- Oblivion of the world and of all save G.o.d.

He is found only by the ways taught in the Gospel.

Grandeur of the human soul.

Just Father, the world hath not known Thee, but I have known Thee.

Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.

I have separated myself from Him- They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living water.

My G.o.d, will you forsake me?-

Oh, may I not be separated from Him eternally!

This is life eternal, that they know Thee the only true G.o.d, and Him whom Thou hast sent, J.-C.

Jesus Christ- Jesus Christ- I have separated myself from Him; I have fled, renounced, crucified Him.

Oh that I may never be separated from Him!

He is only held fast by the ways taught in the Gospel.

Renunciation total and sweet, etc. {91}

It is difficult to make much of this doc.u.ment. Are we to suppose that Pascal, on the 23d of November 1654, thought he saw a vision, revealing to him the truth of Christianity, and the vanity of philosophy and the world? Even if Pascal did this, our estimate of the matter could hardly be much affected. But there is no evidence that he himself attached a supernatural character to the incident. He felt, no doubt, that a real revelation had come to him, that his mind had been lifted in spiritual ecstasy away from the love of all that for a time had hid from him the presence of G.o.d and of a higher world. The moment of this blessed experience had been sacred to him. He had tried to trace it in these broken characters, and in seasons of doubt or depression he may have sought to awaken a new fervour of faith and love by their contemplation.

This seems all the natural meaning of the incident; but, as some have endeavoured to attach to it a supernatural importance, so others, in whom the idea not only of the supernatural but of the spiritual only excites contempt, have tried to give to it a purely superst.i.tious character. It was Condorcet who first applied to the paper the epithet of Pascal's "Amulette;" and Lelut has adopted the epithet, and written a volume more or less relating to it. He supposes the vision to have occurred to Pascal on the evening of the day when the event at Neuilly had upset his nervous system-always easily disturbed-and brought before him a frightful picture of his alienation from G.o.d, and the piety of his early manhood.

Facts mingled with the dreams of his excited imagination. He saw the horses plunging over the precipice, and an abyss seemed to open beside him-the abyss of eternity; when, lo! from the depths of the abyss there appeared a globe of fire (_un globe de feu_) encircled with the Cross; and the irresistible impulse was stirred in him to throw aside the world for ever, and embrace G.o.d,-"Not the G.o.d of philosophers or of savants,"

but "the G.o.d of Abraham, of Isaac, of Jacob-the G.o.d of Jesus Christ,"

from whom he had been severed, but from whom he felt he never more would be severed; abiding in Him in "sweet and total renunciation" of all else.

The idea, of course, is that Pascal's dream or vision was the result of physical derangement; and it may be safely granted that if the reality at all corresponded to Lelut's imaginary picture, this is its natural explanation. The story of the "vision" and the "abyss" are thus made, not without a certain appearance of probability, to fit into one another, and both into the accident at Neuilly; and a certain congruity of external and internal alarm is hence given to the great crisis of Pascal's life. Unhappily, however, there is a lack of evidence regarding the accident itself, {94} and, still more, the accompanying story of the abyss seen by Pascal at his side, which must make the reader cautious who has no theory to support. Voltaire, in his usual manner, made the most of Pascal's supposed delusions. "In the last years of his life," he said, "Pascal believed that he had seen an abyss _by the side of his chair_,-need we on that account have the same fancy? I, too, see an abyss, but it is in the very things which he believed that he had explained." He quotes also the authority of Leibnitz for the statement that Pascal's melancholy had led his intellect astray-a result, he adds, not at all wonderful in the case of a man of such delicate temperament and gloomy imagination. But Voltaire was not precise here, as in other matters about Pascal. He understood him too little to be a good judge of his mental peculiarities. All that Leibnitz really said was, that Pascal, "in wishing to fathom the depths of religion, had become scrupulous even to folly." {95}

Whatever explanation we may give of the supposed incidents attending Pascal's conversion, there never was a more absurd fancy than that Pascal's mind suffered any eclipse in the great change that came to him.

He may have been credulous, he may have been superst.i.tious. The miracle of the Holy Thorn may be an evidence of the one, and the unnatural asceticism of his later years a proof of the other. But to speak of the author of the 'Provincial Letters,' of the problems on the Cycloid, and finally of the 'Pensees,' as if his intellect had suffered from his conversion, is to use words without meaning. All his n.o.blest writings were the product of his religious experience, and he never soared so high in intellectual and literary achievement as when moving on the wings of spiritual indignation or of spiritual aspiration.

The whole interest of Pascal's life from this period is concentrated in his writings-first the 'Provincials,' and then the 'Pensees,' to which we devote separate chapters. There was only the interval of a year between his conversion and the commencement of his great controversy, and little is known of how he pa.s.sed his time during this interval. He seems to have remained chiefly at Port Royal under the guidance of M. de Saci, and to have felt an unwonted measure of happiness in his triumph over the world and in the possession of his own quiet thoughts. We have seen how he spoke of being treated "like a prince," and even his health seemed to improve, notwithstanding the regularity and severity of his religious devotions. He communicated his feelings of elation to his sister, who replied (19th January 1655) that she was delighted to find him "gay in his solitude," as she never was at his happiness in the world.

"Notwithstanding," she adds, "I do not know how M. de Saci adapts himself to so light-hearted a penitent, who professes to find compensation for the vain joys and amus.e.m.e.nts of the world in joys somewhat more reasonable, and _jeux d'esprit_ more allowable, instead of expiating them by perpetual tears."

How long Pascal's pious elation continued is not said, nor have we any further details of his religious life at Port Royal. He never absolutely took up his abode there as one of the Solitaries, and could therefore say in his sixteenth Provincial Letter, without more than an innocent equivocation, that he "did not belong to Port Royal." He was still found there, however, in the beginning of the following year (1655), when the affair of M. Arnauld and the Sorbonne was approaching its crisis, and the idea of his famous letters was started in a meeting, to be afterwards mentioned, between him and Arnauld and Nicole. After this, during the publication of the 'Letters,' Pascal seems chiefly to have resided in Paris, probably with a view to the greater facilities he enjoyed there in prosecuting his a.s.saults upon the Jesuits, which continued till the spring of 1657. During the following year he was busy with the great idea of a work in defence of religion, suggested partly by his own intellectual activity, but partly also by a special incident at Port Royal which made a great impression upon him.

This was the famous "miracle" of the Holy Thorn. Madame Perier's daughter, Marguerite Perier-the same to whom we are indebted for interesting memorials of her uncle's life-had become, with her sister, a pupil at Port Royal. She suffered from an apparently incurable disease of the eye, _fistula lachrymalis_. On a sudden she was reported to be entirely cured, and the cure was attributed to the touch of a relic which had been brought to the abbey by a priest,-a supposed thorn from the crown of Christ. It is remarkable that the Mere Angelique was somewhat slow of belief as to the "miracle," and that she marvelled the world should make so much of it. But it secured the credence of Pascal, and became a great fact in the history of Port Royal, staying for a time the hand of persecution, and pointing, as its friends believed, to the visible interposition of heaven. How could the accusations against Port Royal be true, seeing what G.o.d Himself had done on its behalf? "This place, which men say is the devil's temple, G.o.d makes His house. Men declare that its children must be taken out of it, and G.o.d heals them there. They are threatened with all the furies; G.o.d loads them with His favours." This was Pascal's own language on the subject, {97} and there can be no doubt that the supposed miracle deeply affected him. He was "sensibly touched," it is said, "by such a grace, regarding it as virtually done to himself, seeing it was done to one so near to him in kindred, and who was his spiritual daughter in baptism." He was penetrated by a great joy, and much occupied by the thought of what had happened, and the general subject of miracles. There was in this manner awakened in him "the extreme desire of employing himself on a work in refutation of the principles and false reasonings of the atheists." "He had studied them," his sister continues, "with great care, and applied his whole mind to search out the means of convincing them. His last year of work was entirely occupied in collecting divers thoughts on this subject."

Unhappily, in the course of 1658 Pascal's old illness returned with redoubled severity, and the last four years of his life became in consequence years of great languor and interruption of his projected work. The practice of continuous composition failed him. Hitherto he had been wont to develop his thoughts completely,-to write them out, as it were, mentally before committing them to paper; but now he began the habit of transferring his ideas rapidly, and sometimes imperfectly, to ma.n.u.script, as they arose in his mind. In many cases, if not in all, these first sketches remained as originally made, without any revision or further reconstruction; and from the ma.s.s of papers acc.u.mulated in this manner during these years the 'Pensees' were formed-the story of whose publication will be afterwards told. Strangely, it was in this very year, during a fit of severe toothache, apparently connected with his general illness, that Pascal began his wonderful series of problems on the cycloid, showing how fresh and unimpaired his scientific genius remained under all the changes of his health and of his main intellectual interests.

The last years of Pascal's life, in their deep suffering, and in their many traits of pious resignation and self-denial, have been fully sketched by Madame Perier. We do not think it necessary to repeat the sketch here, touching and beautiful as in some respects it is. It is impossible to read her simple and earnest narrative without emotion, and yet the emotion is apt to evaporate in translation. It is impossible, also, to avoid the feeling that, with all the tenderness and humility of Pascal's later years, there mingle a strange pride in his very austerities, and something of the nature of religious mania, which, beautiful as may be the forms it sometimes takes, is yet in its spirit, and in not a few of its excesses, essentially unlovely. Pascal's care of the poor, his love of them-"to serve the poor in a spirit of poverty" was what appeared to him "most agreeable to G.o.d"-his wish to die among them, to be carried to the Hospital for Incurables, and breathe his last there; the story of his rescue of the poor girl who asked alms from him on the streets; his unparalleled patience, and even gladness, in suffering, so that he seemed to welcome it and bind it about him as a garment; his wonderful humility and yet his n.o.ble courage at the last in the matter of the Formulary,-all this goes to the heart of the reader. It must be a cold heart that is not moved by the picture of a great soul striving "to renounce all pleasure and all superfluities,"-to copy literally, like St Francis, the portrait of his Master. But here, as everywhere, the human copy falls infinitely short of the divine Original. There is the loveliness of a true human life beneath all the picture of suffering presented to us in the Gospels. All the hues of natural feeling have gone out of the last years of Pascal. He not only bore suffering-he preferred it; and he boldly justified his preference. "Sickness," he said, "is the natural state of the Christian; it puts us in the condition in which we always ought to be." In this spirit he strove to deaden any sensation of pleasure in his food, in the attentions of his relatives and friends, even in his studies. He could not bear to see his sister caressing her children; there seemed to him harm in even saying that a woman was beautiful; the married state was a "kind of homicide or rather Deicide." He thought it wrong that any one should find pleasure in attachment to him, for he "was not the final object of any being, and had not wherewith to satisfy any." So jealous was he of any surprise of pleasure, of any thought of vanity or complacency in himself and his work, that he wore a girdle of iron next his skin, the sharp points of which he pressed closely when he thought himself in any danger, especially in such moments of intercourse with the world as he still sometimes allowed himself.

Such details are neither interesting in themselves nor do they present Pascal in his highest character. One cannot help feeling that, touching as Madame Perier's narrative is, there must have been, even in the Pascal of later years, more than she has drawn for us. One glimpse we get, but not in her pages, of a more natural temper, when he withstood his Jansenist friends in the matter of subscribing the Formulary demanded from the Port Royalists. He had himself previously been willing to subscribe, with certain restrictions, when his sister Jacqueline alone stood out in her resistance to what she deemed a treasonable betrayal of the cause. She signed at last, but against her conscience, and, so to speak, with her blood. She died immediately afterwards, the first victim of the signature, as she has been called, and bequeathing a letter to her fellow-sufferers on the subject. Whether inspired by her words or not, Pascal took a firm stand against any further concessions, and in a famous interview with Arnauld, Nicole, and Sainte-Marthe, he argued the point with such strength and vehemence that he fell fainting to the ground.

{101}

This was in the end of 1661, when his sufferings were fast drawing to a close. In the previous summer, when at Clermont, he had written to Fermat that he was so weak as to be "unable to walk without a stick, or to hold himself on horseback." His weakness had grown apace, and in June 1662 he was seized with his last illness. It was necessary that his sister should nurse him, and this could only be done by his removal to her house, for he had given up his own house to a poor family, one of whose children had taken smallpox, and he would allow neither the child to be removed nor his sister to run the risk of carrying infection to her children. He left his own home for hers, therefore, on the 27th of June, and never returned. Three days after his removal he was seized with a violent colic, which deprived him of all sleep. His physicians at first were not alarmed, as his pulse continued good, but gradually pain and sleeplessness wore him out. He confessed both to the _cure_ of the parish and to his friend Sainte-Marthe, one of the directors of the community. He wished, as we said, to die in the Hospital for Incurables amongst the poor, but in his state of weakness it was impossible to gratify this wish. After the administration of the last sacrament, which he received with tearful emotion, he thanked the _cure_, and exclaimed, "May G.o.d never leave me!" These were his last words. Convulsions having returned, he expired on the 19th of August 1662.

It is unnecessary to attempt any estimate of Pascal's character. The reader must draw it for himself in the light of these pages. With all enthusiasm for its grandeur and unity of purpose, and that moral and intellectual elevation which it everywhere shows, it may be found lacking in breadth and variety, and that familiar interest and charm which strangely often come from the contemplation of human weakness rather than of human strength. There is certainly less to love in him than to admire-less to call forth delight than respect. The play of natural individuality is hidden behind lines of lofty distance, and latterly of Jansenist severity. A proud, ascetic, and worn figure seems to rise before us; but strangely Pascal's portrait, as known to us, conveys no idea of asceticism. The face is full-fleshed and expressive, like the face of a child, with large ripe lips and open eyes of wonder,-a portrait which suggests the companion of the Duc de Roannez in his years of pleasure, rather than the weary and pain-worn penitent of Port Royal.

{102}

CHAPTER V.

THE 'PROVINCIAL LETTERS.'

Pascal's 'Letters to a Provincial' represent a great controversy, the nature of which it is necessary to explain. They are, at the same time, the most perfect expression of his literary genius, and touch theological questions with such an inimitable grace and felicity of expression as to have awakened a universal intellectual interest. It may be hard to justify this interest by any a.n.a.lysis of their contents, or by such extracts as can be given from them. No English can convey the exquisite fitness of French polemical expression in its highest form, its mingled force and delicacy, its keenness and yet its lightness. We shall, however, endeavour to give as clearly as we can an account, first, of the controversy out of which the 'Letters' originated, and then of the consummate skill with which Pascal conducted it.

M. de St Cyran is not merely one of the chief figures connected with Port Royal: he was the fountain-head of its special power. To his influence and teaching it was indebted for its chief glory and its most terrible sufferings. Jean Baptist du Vergier d'Hauranne, better known by the above official designation, was of n.o.ble family. He was born at Bayonne in 1581, and early devoted himself to the study of theology at Louvain and Paris. While a student, he is supposed to have first made the acquaintance of Cornelius Jansen, and to have begun with him that co-operation which was destined to bear such remarkable fruits. Their intimacy was one based on spiritual affinity and a common enthusiasm.

For Jansen was the son of poor peasants, without even a surname. His father is only known as Jan Ottosen, or John the son of Otto; as the son in his turn was Cornelius Jansen, or the son of John. Jansen was the younger of the two friends, having been born in 1585; but he appears to have exercised a powerful influence over his older companion. The great bond of their union and common enthusiasm was the study of St Augustine.

For the purpose of pursuing this study undisturbed, they retired to the seaside near Bayonne, and here they established themselves in scholastic seclusion. Smitten with the desire of attaining theological truth, they found the Schoolmen constantly appealing to St Augustine as their authority, and they consequently resolved to examine this authority for themselves, and so ascend to what they believed to be the source of their favourite science. Had they taken only one step further, they would have approached Protestantism; and as it was, the favourite charge which the Jesuits afterwards made against them was, that they were Calvinists in disguise. Unconsciously they were so, notwithstanding all their disclaimers. The Jesuits were unscrupulous; but their penetration here, as in many other cases, was not at fault. The doctrines so warmly espoused by Jansen and St Cyran were the old doctrines of _grace_, which Calvin and they alike borrowed from St Augustine, and he in his turn found in the Epistles of St Paul. {105} And the controversy which their labours were destined once more to awaken in the bosom of the Catholic Church was nothing else than the old dispute which, since the days of Augustine and Pelagius, had more than once already agitated it.

The fellow-students continued their studies near Bayonne for five years.

So closely did they work, that Jansen is said to have spent days and nights in the same chair, s.n.a.t.c.hing only brief intervals of rest. A game at battledore and shuttlec.o.c.k occasionally relieved their vigils; but no serious employment divided their attention with the arduous task upon which they had entered, of mastering and digesting the principles of the Augustinian theology. The Bishop of Bayonne offered preferment to D'Hauranne, and there were projects of settling Jansen also at the head of a college; but it was not till some time afterwards that either of them entered upon official labours. They were left during those years to the uninterrupted studies which subsequently resulted in the great work of Jansen. The system of theological thought a.s.sociated with his name was then definitely matured.

It is beyond our province to sketch the career of these fellow-students, one of whom became the chief spiritual director of Port Royal, and the other its great theological centre. The abbey of St Cyran was the only preferment which D'Hauranne ever accepted, notwithstanding Richelieu's repeated offers of a bishopric. He was content to exercise from his monastic seclusion an influence far more powerful than that of any bishop of his day. And so penetrating and dangerous did this influence seem to the great Minister whose efforts to bind him to his side had so often failed, that he at length shut him up in Vincennes (May 1638). Here he remained in close confinement for more than four years; but even from this gloomy retreat the impression of his great personal power was spread abroad, and felt in many quarters as steadily as before. He survived his release only a few months. His long imprisonment had broken down his health; and although the enthusiasm of his spirit was strong as ever, his weakened body was no longer able to answer to its demands. He could hardly "hold himself up," and a slight attack of illness carried him off.

St Cyran's chief strength seems to have lain in a concentrated enthusiasm and quiet strength of will which enabled him to hold his own against all opposition, and to subdue other minds larger than his own to his purposes. When the Prince de Conde interceded for him after his arrest, Richelieu's reply was: "Do you know of whom you are speaking? That man is more dangerous than six armies. _I_ say that attrition with confession is necessary: _he_ believes that contrition is necessary.

{106} And in the affair of Monsieur's marriage all France has given way to me, and he alone has the hardihood to oppose it." Against all enticements and a.s.saults alike he set a proud and firm faith in his own mission-a patience sublime in its calmness, and in the unwavering consciousness of Divine right on his side. "I am careful to complain of nothing," he said in his imprisonment. "I am ready to remain here a hundred years; to die here, if G.o.d will. I am ready for whatever He designs-for action or for suffering." The same faith and quiet a.s.surance gave him his marvellous influence over others, and that fascination which made him a power in the cultivated society of Paris. All the Arnauld family more or less owned his influence; and it was his teaching mainly that peopled Port Royal with the Solitaries who have made it so ill.u.s.trious.

The life and work of Jansen seem at first far removed from Port Royal.

He returned to Louvain after his sojourn at Bayonne, and became a professor of theology in its famous university, on whose behalf he was employed in several political negotiations with the Spanish Court.

Finally he was appointed Bishop of Ypres, in which capacity he is chiefly known in the ecclesiastical world. His fame, however, rests not on any political or ecclesiastical labours, but on the results flowing from his original studies at Bayonne. He never forgot his devotion to St Augustine. He is said to have read the whole of his writings ten times, and the treatises against the Pelagians not less than thirty times. The fruit of all this studious devotion was his work known briefly as the 'Augustinus,' {107} published two years after his death (in 1640).

Nothing could have seemed more innocent or laudable than the attempt by a bishop of the Church to set forth the doctrine of St Augustine. The book professed to have been undertaken in a humble spirit.

"I have avoided error where I could," says the author; "for the cases in which I could not, I implore the reader's pardon. . . . Let the knowledge of my sincerity make amends for the simplicity of my error.

I know that if I have erred, it is not in the a.s.sertion of Catholic truth, but in the statement of the opinion of St Augustine; for I have not laid down what is true or false, what is to be held or rejected according to the faith of the Catholic Church, but only what Augustine taught and declared was to be held."

A task of such a character, carried out in such a spirit, might have seemed a harmless one.

But the Jesuits had long marked both St Cyran and Jansen as theological foes, opposed to their special doctrines. They endeavoured therefore, first of all, to prevent the publication of Jansen's work; and failing in this, they directed all their efforts to procure a condemnation of the book from the Court of Rome. "Never," it has been said, "did any book receive a more stormy welcome. Within a few weeks of its appearance the University, the Jesuits, the executors of Jansen, the printer of the 'Augustinus,' the Spanish governor of the Low Countries, and the Papal Nuncio were engaged in a warfare of pamphlets, treatises, pasquinades, pleadings, synods, audiences, which it would be impossible to set forth in historical sequence." {108} In the midst of all this, Jansen's old fellow-student received the book, in the preparation of which he also had had some share, in his prison at Vincennes, as if an echo of his own thoughts. "It would last as long as the Church," he said. "After St Paul and St Augustine, no one had written concerning grace like Jansen."