by Will Durant
What answer, then, does feeling give to the mysteries of life and thought? The answer is religion. Only religion can restore meaning to life, and nobility to man; without it we flounder ever more deeply into mental frustration and mortal futility. Religion gives us a Bible; the Bible tells us of man’s fall from grace; only that original sin can explain the strange union, in human nature, of hate and love, of bestial wickedness and our longing for redemption and God. If we let ourselves believe (however absurd it may seem to the philosophers) that man began with divine grace, that he forfeited this by sin, and that he can be redeemed only by divine grace through the crucified Christ, then we shall find a peace of mind never granted to philosophers. He who cannot believe is cursed, for he reveals by his unbelief that God has not chosen to give him grace.
Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? “You must wager; it is not optional. . . Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God exists . . . If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.” 64 If at first you find it difficult to believe, follow the customs and rituals of the Church as if you did believe. “Bless yourself with holy water, have Masses said, and so on; by a simple and natural process this will make you believe, and will dull you” (cela vous fera croire, et vous abêtira)—will quiet your proudly critical intellect. 65 Go to confession and communion; you will find it a relief and a strengthening. 66
We do injustice to this historic apologia by letting it end on so unheroic a note. We may be sure that Pascal, when he believed, did so not as a gambler but as a soul baffled and buffeted by life, humbly recognizing that his intellect, whose brilliance had astonished friends and foes, was no match for the universe, and finding in faith the only way to give meaning and pardon to his pain. “Pascal is sick,” said Sainte-Beuve; “we must always remember this in reading him.” 67 But Pascal would have replied: Are we not all sick? Let him who is perfectly happy reject faith. Let him reject it who is content with no more meaning in life than a helpless trajectory from a filthy birth to an agonizing death.
Picture a number of men in chains, and all condemned to death; each day some are strangled in the sight of the rest; those who remain see their own condition in that of these their fellows, looking at one another with sorrow and without hope, each awaiting his turn. This is the picture of the condition of man. 68
How shall we redeem this obscene slaughter called history except by believing, with or against the evidence, that God will right all wrongs in the end?
Pascal argued so earnestly because he had never really recovered from the doubts suggested to him by Montaigne, by the libertins of his “years in the world,” and by the merciless neutrality of nature between “evil” and “good.”
This is what I see, and what troubles me. I look on all sides, and everywhere I see nothing but obscurity. Nature offers me nothing that is not a matter of doubt and disquiet. If I saw no signs of a divinity, I would fix myself in denial. If I saw everywhere the marks of a Creator, I would repose peacefully in faith. But seeing too much to deny [Him], and too little to assure me, I am in a pitiful state, and I would wish a hundred times that if a God sustains nature it would reveal Him without ambiguity. 69
It is this profound uncertainty, the paralyzing ability to see both sides, that makes Pascal a fascination to believer and doubter alike. This man had felt the atheist’s angry resentment of evil, and the believer’s trust in the triumph of the good; he had passed through the intellectual gyrations of Montaigne and Charron to the happy humility of St. Francis of Assisi and St. Thomas à Kempis. It is this cry from the depths of doubt, this desperate forging of a faith against death, that make the Pensées the most eloquent book in French prose. Again, for the third time in the seventeenth century, philosophy became literature, not with the cool pithiness of Bacon, nor with the ingratiating intimacy of Descartes, but with the emotional power of a poet feeling philosophy, writing to his own heart in his own blood. In the apex of the classic age rose this romantic appeal, strong enough to survive Boileau and Voltaire, and to be heard across a century by Rousseau and Chateaubriand. Here, in the morning of the Age of Reason, in the very decades of Hqbbes and Spinoza, reason found a challenger in a dying man.
In his final years, said his sister Mme. Périer, Pascal suffered “continual and ever-increasing maladies.” 70 He came to think that “sickness is the natural state of Christians.” 71 Sometimes he welcomed his pains as distracting him from temptations. “One hour’s pain,” he said, “is a better teacher than all the philosophers put together.” 72 He renounced every pleasure, took to ascetic practices, flogged himself with a girdle studded with iron spikes. 73 He rebuked Mme. Périer for allowing her children to caress her. He opposed the marriage of her daughter, saying that “the marriage state is no better than paganism in the eyes of God.” 74 He would not allow anyone, in his presence, to speak of the beauty of woman.
In 1662, as one of many charitable acts, he took a poor family into his home. When one of the children developed smallpox Pascal, instead of asking the family to leave, moved to the house of his sister. Soon afterward he took to his bed, racked with colic pains. He drew up his will, leaving nearly half his fortune to the poor. He confessed to a priest, and received viaticum. He died after a violent convulsion, August 19, 1662, in the fortieth year of his age. Upon opening his body it was found that his stomach and liver were diseased, and his intestines gangrened. 75 His brain, reported the doctors, “was of prodigious abundance, its substance solid and condensed,” but only one of the cranial sutures had properly closed; hence, perhaps, his terrible headaches. On the cortex were two depressions, “as large as if made by fingers laid in wax.” 76 He was buried in the church of his parish, St.-Étienne-du-Mont.
V. PORT-ROYAL; 1656–1715
The Provincial Letters intensified the resolution of the Jesuits and the bishops to suppress Jansenism as Protestantism in disguise. At the urging of French bishops, Pope Alexander VII issued (October 6, 1656) a bull requiring all French ecclesiastics to subscribe to the following formulary:
I submit myself sincerely to the constitution of Pope Innocent X, dated May 31, 1653, according to its true sense, which has been determined by the constitution of our Holy Father, Pope Alexander VII, dated October 6, 1656. And I acknowledge that I am bound in conscience to obey these constitutions; and I condemn with heart and mouth the doctrine of the Five Propositions of Cornelis Jansen, contained in his book entitled Augustinus.
Mazarin refrained from enforcing signatures to this formulary, but on April 13, 1661, soon after Mazarin’s death, Louis XIV promulgated the order. A friendly diocesan vicar prefaced the formulary with a conciliatory statement. In this form Arnauld and the Solitaries signed it, and advised the nuns of Port-Royal to do likewise. Mère Angélique, bedridden with dropsy, refused, and persisted till her death on August 6, 1661, aged seventy. Pascal and his sister Jacqueline, now subprioress, also refused. “Since the bishops have the courage only of girls,” said Jacqueline, “girls must have the courage of bishops.” 77 Finally all the surviving nuns signed; but Jacqueline, exhausted by her long resistance, died on October 4, aged thirty-six; and Pascal followed her within a year.
Meanwhile the King repudiated the conciliatory preamble, and insisted that the nuns should sign the formulary without any addition or change. Those few who did this were transferred to Port-Royal in Paris. The great majority of the nuns, led by Mère Agnès, announced that they could not in conscience sign a document so contrary to their beliefs. In August, 1665, the archbishop disqualified the seventy nuns and their fourteen lay sisters from receiving the sacraments, and forbade them to have any communication with the outside world. During the next three years a sympathetic priest scaled the walls of Port-Royal-des-Champs to give viaticum to dying nuns. In 1666 Sacy, Lemaître, and three other Solitaries were arrested by order of the King. Arnauld, disguised
with wig and sword, was sheltered by the Duchesse de Longueville, who waited upon him in person during his concealment. 78 She and other titled ladies took up the cause of the nuns; they prevailed upon Louis to relent; and in 1668 Pope Clement IX issued a new bull, so wisely ambiguous as to allow all parties to accept it. The prisoners were released, the dispersed nuns were restored to Port-Royal-des-Champs; once again the bells tolled there, which had been silent for three years. Arnauld was received amicably by the King, and wrote a book against the Calvinists. Nicole, however, wrote another book against the Jesuits.
This “Peace of the Church” lasted eleven years. Then Mme. de Longueville died, and the peace died with her. As the King aged, and his victories turned into defeats, his religion became a mess of bigotry and fear. Was God punishing him for tolerating heresy? His dislike of Jansenism took on a personal tinge. When a M. Fontpertuis was recommended for office Louis rejected him as suspected of Jansenism, but when he was assured that the man was merely an atheist he confirmed the nomination. 79 He could never forgive the nuns for defying his order to sign the undiluted formulary. To ensure the early disappearance of this center of disaffection, he forbade it to accept new members. He appealed to Clement XI to issue an unmistakable condemnation of Jansenism; after two years of prodding, the Pope fulminated the bull Vineam Domini (1705). By that time only twenty-five nuns survived at Port-Royal, the youngest sixty years old. The King impatiently awaited their death.
In 1709 the Jesuit Michel Tellier, aged sixty-six, succeeded Père La Chaise as the royal confessor. He urged upon Louis, now seventy-one, that the eternal fate of his soul depended upon the immediate and outright extermination of Port-Royal. Many of the secular clergy, including Louis Antoine de Noailles, Archbishop of Paris, protested against such haste, but the King overruled them. On August 29, 1709, the abbey was surrounded by troops; the nuns were shown a lettre de cachet ordering their dispersal without delay; they were given fifteen minutes to gather up their belongings. Their cries and tears availed nothing. They were loaded into coaches, and were scattered among various conformist convents sixty to 150 miles away. In 1710 the buildings of the famous nunnery were razed to the ground.
Jansenism survived, Arnauld and Nicole died in Flanders exile (1694–95), but in 1687 Pasquier Quesnel, a priest of the Paris Oratory, defended the Jansenist theology in Réflexions morales sur le Nouveau Testament. Imprisoned (1703), he escaped to Amsterdam, where he established a Jansenist church. As his book won much support among the French secular clergy, Louis induced Clement XI to issue the bull Unigenitus (September 8, 1713), which condemned 104 propositions ascribed to Quesnel. Many French prelates resented the bull as a papal interference with the Gallican Church, and Jansenism merged with a revival of the Gallican movement. When Louis XIV died, there were more Jansenists in France than ever before. 80
Today we find it hard to understand why a nation should have been divided, and a king so excited, about abstruse problems of divine grace, predestination, and free will; we forget that religion was then as important as politics seem now. Jansenism was the final effort of the Reformation in France, and the last flare of the Middle Ages. In the perspective of history it appears as a reaction rather than an advance. But in several aspects its influence was progressive. For a while it fought for a measure of religious freedom—though we shall find it in Voltaire’s days more intolerant than the papacy. 81 It checked the excesses of casuistry. Its moral fervor was a wholesome counterweight to a policy of confessional lenience that may have shared in the deterioration of French morality. Its educational influence was good; the petites écoles were the best of their time. Its literary influence emerged not only in Pascal but moderately in Corneille, vividly in Racine, pupil and historian of Port-Royal. Its philosophical influence was indirect and unintentional: its concept of God as damning to everlasting torture the larger part of the human race—including all unbaptized children, all Mohammedans, and all Jews—may have had some part in leading the Voltaires and the Diderots into rebellion against the entire Christian theology.
VI. THE KING AND THE HUGUENOTS: 1643–1715
The King had not yet saved his soul, for there were 1,500,000 Protestants in France. Mazarin had continued and developed Richelieu’s policy of protecting the religious freedom of the Huguenots so long as they remained politically obedient. Colbert recognized how valuable they were in the commerce and industry of France. In 1652 Louis confirmed the Edict of Nantes (1598) of his grandfather Henry IV; and in 1666 he expressed his appreciation of Huguenot loyalty during the Fronde. But it grieved him that the unity of France could not be religious as well as political; and about 1670 he wrote an ominous passage in his memoirs:
As to that great number of my subjects of the so-called Reformed religion, an evil. . . that I regard with sorrow . . . , it seems to me that those who wished to employ violent remedies did not know the nature of this evil, caused in part by the warmth of minds, which must be left to pass away and to die out insensibly, instead of exciting it anew by such strong contradictions. . . . I believed that the best means, in order to reduce the Huguenots of my kingdom by degrees, was, in the first place, not to constrain them at all by any new rigor, to cause that to be observed toward them that they had obtained from my predecessors, but to accord them nothing beyond this, and even to confine its execution within the narrowest limits which justice and propriety could permit. 82
This has an air of sincere intolerance. It is the view of an absolute king who has taken from Bossuet the motto Un roi, une loi, une foi—“One king, one law, one faith.” It is no longer the tolerance of Richelieu, who appointed to office able men of any creed; Louis goes on to say that he would appoint only good Catholics to office, and trust thereby to encourage conversions.
The Church herself had never approved the toleration guaranteed by the Edict of Nantes. An assembly of the clergy in 1655 called for a stricter interpretation of the edict; their assembly of 1660 asked the King to close all Huguenot colleges and hospitals, and to exclude Huguenots from public office; their assembly of 1670 recommended that children who had reached their seventh birthday should be deemed legally capable of abjuring the Huguenot heresy, and that those who so abjured should be removed from their parents; in 1675 their assembly demanded that mixed marriages be declared null, and that the offspring of such marriages be classed as illegitimate. 83 Pious and kindly priests like Cardinal de Bérulle contended that forcible repression by the state was the only practical way of dealing with Protestantism. 84 One prelate after another urged upon the King the argument that the stability of his government rested on social order, which rested on morality, which would collapse without the support of the state religion. Catholic laymen joined in the argument. Magistrates reported troublesome conflicts between the rival creeds in the towns—Catholic attacks upon Protestant churches, funerals, and homes, and Protestant reprisals in kind.
Louis, against his better nature, yielded bit by bit to this campaign. Perpetually in need of money for war and elegance, he found the clergy offering him substantial grants on condition of accepting their views. Other factors drove him in the same direction. He was encouraging—bribing—Charles II to turn England toward Catholicism; how could he meanwhile allow Protestantism in France? Had not the Protestants, in the Peace of Augsburg (1555) and later, agreed to the principle Cuius regio eius religio—that the religion of the ruler should be made obligatory upon his subjects? Were not Protestant rulers in Germany and the United Provinces banishing families that rejected the religion of the prince?
From the beginning of his active reign Louis—or his ministers with his consent—issued a succession of decrees that moved toward full revocation of the toleration edict. In 1661 he outlawed Protestant worship in most of the province of Gex, near the Swiss border, on the ground that Gex had been added to France since the edict; however, there were seventeen thousand Protestants in that province, and only four hundred Catholics. 85 In 1664 advancement to mastership in the guilds was made espe
cially difficult for any but Catholics. 86 In 1665 boys of fourteen and girls of twelve were authorized to accept conversion to Catholicism and to leave their parents, who were thereafter required to pay them an annuity for their support. 87 In 1666 the Huguenots were forbidden to establish new colleges, or to maintain academies for the education of the young nobility. In 1669 the emigration of Huguenots was made punishable with arrest if they were captured, and confiscation of goods; 88 and anyone who aided a Huguenot to emigrate was subject to condemnation to the galleys for life. 89 In 1677 Louis permitted the endowment of a “treasury of conversions,” from which sums averaging six livres per head were given to Huguenots accepting conversion to the Catholic faith. To ensure durability of conversions Louis decreed (1679) the banishment of all relapsed converts, and the confiscation of their property. 90 A protest from the Elector of Brandenburg, complaints from Colbert that these measures were depressing trade, and the King’s absorption in campaigns interrupted the stream of prohibitions. But his reconciliation with monogamous Catholicism in 1681 turned him again to the holy war against the Huguenots. Now he told an aide that he felt himself “indispensably bound to effect the conversion of all his subjects and the extirpation of heresy.” 91 In 1682 he issued—and ordered all Protestant ministers to read to their congregations—an address threatening Huguenots “with evils incomparably more terrible and deadly than before.” 92 Within the next three years 570 of the 815 Huguenot churches were closed; many were torn down; and when the Huguenots tried to worship on the site of their ruined temples they were punished as rebels against the state.
