The Gospel and the Empire: When Rome Crowned Itself Christ’s Successor

Having already examined the writings of Athanasius Kircher—particularly his Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652–54), we have seen how his vast erudition was not employed in defense of the Gospel but of empire. Beneath the learned allegories of Egyptian wisdom and Christian typology lay a political theology: a vision of the Holy Roman Empire as the visible reflection of divine order, and of the papacy as the earthly center of that cosmic hierarchy. Kircher’s Egypt was a mirror for Rome; his hieroglyphs did not reveal Christ but Caesar, clothed in sacred language. For all his talk of “universal harmony,” his harmonies resolved not in the Word of God but in the authority of the papal throne.

It is in this context that we turn to The Provincial Letters of Blaise Pascal (1656–1657); a very different voice, and yet addressing the same disease. Where Kircher defended the empire of faith as an empire of obedience, Pascal exposed it as an empire of deceit. Written under the guise of correspondence from a Parisian observer, the Letters dismantled the moral and theological system of the Jesuits; the same order to which Kircher belonged, and the chief architects of Rome’s post-Reformation power. Pascal’s tone was witty, lucid, and devastating. He stripped away the ornate disguises of scholastic theology to show what lay beneath: the substitution of human authority for divine truth.

The letters caused a sensation throughout Europe. Their clarity made them dangerous; their humor made them unforgettable. Ordinary readers understood, perhaps for the first time, that theology could be a tool of domination. The Jesuits, unable to refute Pascal’s logic, appealed to the papacy for vengeance rather than vindication. Pope Alexander VII, incensed that the authority of Rome had been mocked by a layman and a mathematician, ordered the Provincial Letters to be publicly burned. Yet this very act revealed the weakness Pascal had exposed. If the papal office truly rested upon divine appointment, why should it fear the scrutiny of reason or the rebuke of conscience? If the pope’s authority were ordained by God, why should he tremble before a pen?

The answer, as Pascal understood, was simple: because the Jesuits did not defend Christ’s Gospel but the papal throne that claimed to sit in His place. Their outrage was not the indignation of faith wounded by blasphemy, but of power threatened by truth. Pascal’s letters therefore stand as a mirror opposite to Kircher’s monuments: one built temples to a visible kingdom; the other tore down the idols and reminded Christendom that His kingdom “is not of this world.”

Today we turn to these letters—not as relics of a forgotten controversy, but as windows into the perennial struggle between the Word of God and the words of men, between the living Gospel and the machinery of religious power.

The letters themselves can be read in the attached PDF.

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In the opening letter of The Provincial Letters (January 23, 1656), Pascal begins not with attack but with irony. He writes as a bemused observer, “only yesterday undeceived,” who once thought the Sorbonne’s controversies were of the utmost consequence to the Christian faith. The great assemblies, the pomp of learning, the papal condemnations, and the fierce debates over Antoine Arnauld’s writings seemed to mark a defense of orthodoxy. Yet, as Pascal quickly reveals, all the noise concealed a hollow quarrel; one motivated not by zeal for truth but by the politics of obedience and power, serving the Jesuits and the papal throne rather than Christ and His Gospel.

Arnauld, a theologian of Port-Royal and the Jansenist school, had been accused of “presumption” for saying that he had carefully read Jansenius’s Augustinus and could not find in it the five heretical propositions condemned by pope Innocent X. Still, Arnauld affirmed that if such propositions truly existed, he condemned them as well. His position was at once cautious and reasonable, founded on the principle that no man should affirm what he cannot verify. Yet such integrity was intolerable to the Jesuits, who demanded not investigation but submission. To question whether the propositions were actually in Augustinus was, to them, already heresy. The controversy ceased to be about Scripture or truth and became a test of obedience; whether one would bow to the Church’s declaration even when no evidence could be shown.

Pascal’s wit exposes the absurdity. Seventy-one doctors of the Sorbonne defended Arnauld, requesting simply that if the condemned propositions were indeed in the text, someone might point them out. None of the Jesuit-influenced theologians could; or would; do so. What was so easy, Pascal notes, was yet continually refused. The refusal betrayed the real motive: the issue was not the presence of error, but the assertion of power. Truth no longer needed to be seen; it only needed to be decreed.

With gentle irony, Pascal leads the reader from curiosity to laughter, and from laughter to indignation. He writes as if shocked to find that questions once thought central to the faith dissolve into a contest of words and factions. The question under judgment; whether Arnauld was “presumptuous”; was treated as a matter of salvation itself, while the true question; whether the condemned propositions existed; was dismissed as irrelevant. “Eighty secular doctors and forty friars,” Pascal notes with mock astonishment, “condemned Arnauld’s proposition without choosing to examine whether he had spoken truly or falsely.” The inversion is grotesque: orthodoxy becomes an act of obedience, not of understanding; conscience is made subordinate to the will of men.

This, for Pascal, was not merely the fault of individuals but the fruit of a system; the Jesuit method of power. Through the manipulation of language and the invention of elastic terms such as “proximate power,” theology was emptied of meaning and repurposed to serve authority. The Jesuits had discovered how to make religion politically useful: by turning obedience into the measure of faith. In place of the living submission of the heart to God, they substituted mechanical allegiance to human decree. The Church, designed to be the assembly of the faithful, became an administrative empire ruled not by truth but by fiat.

Pascal’s immediate target is the Sorbonne, but his deeper critique reaches Rome itself. The Jesuits were the pope’s most devoted instruments, the engineers of a system built to defend the papal monarchy against the independence of Scripture and conscience. They transformed the Gospel into an apparatus of control, where questioning a decree was indistinguishable from questioning God. Pascal’s portrait of this theological theater in Paris becomes an image of the wider struggle within Christendom: the attempt to replace Christ’s invisible kingdom of faith with an earthly hierarchy of command. Even Arnauld’s modest declaration; “I have not found these propositions, but if they are there, I condemn them”; was treated as rebellion because it implied that truth must be seen and examined, not simply imposed.

Here lies Pascal’s central insight: that the Jesuits had introduced into religion a new heresy; the heresy of power. They replaced the inward conviction wrought by the Holy Spirit with an external conformity sustained by threat and decree. By making obedience to Rome easier than obedience to Christ, and by redefining truth to suit political necessity, they created not a Church of faith but an empire of compliance.

When Pascal turns from the “question of fact” to the “question of right,” he expects, at last, a serious theological discussion. The matter under dispute was Arnauld’s statement that “the grace without which we can do nothing was wanting to St. Peter at his fall.” One might suppose that this would provoke debate on the nature of grace; whether it is given to all men, whether it acts irresistibly, whether it works with or against the will. Instead, Pascal finds a spectacle of confusion. Seeking to understand the quarrel, he consults doctors of both parties. To his astonishment, they cannot even agree on what the heresy is. When he asks a Molinist whether grace is given to all men, the man scolds him; some in his own camp deny it. When he asks whether the claim that grace is efficacious of itself is heretical, the same doctor replies that it is perfectly orthodox, defended by the Thomists.

Pascal soon discovers that both sides; Jesuits, Thomists, and Jansenists alike; affirm the same core truths: that all the righteous possess the ability to obey God’s commandments; that obedience nevertheless requires God’s efficacious grace, which alone moves the will; and that this grace is not given to all, but according to God’s mercy. In other words, there is no real doctrinal difference at all. What divides them is not Scripture, nor the Fathers, but a single word: proximate power.

The phrase, Pascal notes, is found neither in Scripture nor in the Councils, neither in the Fathers nor in Aquinas himself. It is an invention; a term without origin or definition, now made the shibboleth of orthodoxy. To be Catholic, one must confess that “the righteous have the proximate power to obey God’s commandments.” Yet when Pascal asks what this means, no one can say. A Molinist defines it as having everything necessary to act; nothing lacking but the will. The Thomists insist it means the opposite: that one can have “proximate power” even when something necessary is lacking, just as a man in darkness, though unable to see, still has eyes. The contradiction is open and absurd, yet both parties insist they agree. Why? Because they have agreed to use the same word without explaining it. This, Pascal says, is “the secret of their plot”: by employing a meaningless term, they can appear united in condemning Arnauld, while each privately interprets it to suit his side.

Pascal’s humor at this discovery is merciless. To require belief in a word “abstracted from all sense,” he writes, is to demand not faith in truth but repetition of a syllable. When he presses the theologians—Is this word biblical? patristic? conciliar?—they answer “no” each time, yet still insist that whoever refuses to pronounce it is a heretic. Their final argument is not theology but force: “We are the majority.” Pascal’s conclusion is cutting: theology has been reduced to the politics of numbers.

By the end of the letter, Pascal’s judgment is devastating. The doctrines of grace remain untouched, but the language of theology has been corrupted. “Nothing runs any risk,” he writes, “but that word without the sense, proximate.” The real danger is not heresy but the degradation of truth into jargon. When words lose meaning, faith loses substance, and authority becomes self-referential; sustaining itself by its own decrees.

The deeper meaning of Pascal’s satire extends beyond the Sorbonne. It exposes the method by which Rome’s power perpetuates itself: by substituting words for reality. The phrase proximate power serves the same function as the forged traditions once used to prop up papal supremacy. Just as the writings attributed to “Dionysius the Areopagite”; later shown to be pseudonymous; were used to build the Church’s mystical hierarchy and found their way into Aquinas’s system, so too does the Jesuit vocabulary of undefined terms lend false antiquity to its claims. A hierarchy born from forgeries must defend itself by invention. If its kingdom were truly of God, it would not need fictions to prove its legitimacy.

Thus, Pascal sees that the same spirit that produced the pseudo-Dionysian corpus now governs Jesuit theology: the creation of a language that binds conscience through obscurity, replacing the authority of Scripture with the authority of words. The Church that should have been ruled by the Word of God becomes, in his portrayal, an empire of language; an earthly kingdom of rhetoric serving the throne of Rome.

By the close of Letter I, Pascal has done more than narrate a controversy. He has revealed the principle that will guide all his subsequent letters: that the Jesuit order, and by extension the Roman Church under its influence, maintains its empire by manufacturing ambiguity; by inventing terminology to mask disagreement, by fabricating consensus to silence dissent, and by exalting obedience to men over obedience to Christ. The tragedy, Pascal shows, is that an institution claiming to defend the Gospel has bound itself to its own inventions. In defending its authority, it has ceased to defend the truth. The “empire of faith” has become, in his words and by his witness, an empire of control.

In the second of The Provincial Letters (January 29, 1656), Pascal continues his dissection of Jesuit theology with renewed irony and precision. Having exposed in the first letter the absurd invention of “proximate power,” he now turns to another of their contrivances; sufficient grace.  Once again, he presents himself as the curious observer, still following the logic of the Sorbonne’s disputes, but now encountering a doctrine even more subtle in words and more hollow in meaning. The question of sufficient grace, he finds, revolves not around the mystery of divine assistance but around the manipulation of language to preserve appearances, silence conscience, and sustain the authority of Rome.

At the outset, Pascal consults a well-connected friend who frequents the Jesuit houses. From him he learns that the two great controversies are about proximate power and sufficient grace; the latter being the more delicate. The Jesuits, he is told, maintain that there is a grace given generally to all men, dependent entirely on human free will, and rendered either efficacious or ineffectual by man’s own choice. This, they call “sufficient” because, in their scheme, it supposedly suffices for salvation if only the will cooperates. The Jansenists, by contrast, hold that no grace is truly sufficient unless it is efficacious; that is, unless it actually produces the good it commands. For them, grace that does not move the will to act cannot be called sufficient at all. The debate, then, appears to turn on whether divine grace is a mere opportunity or a living power.

When Pascal seeks to understand the “New Thomists” (the Dominican theologians), the comedy of contradiction begins anew. The Dominicans, he is told, agree with the Jesuits in admitting a “sufficient grace” given to all men, but they add that no one can act by this grace alone unless God gives an additional “efficacious grace” that actually determines the will. This grace, however, God does not give to all. Pascal immediately perceives the absurdity: a grace that is sufficient but insufficient; a gift that suffices in name but not in effect. His friend confirms the irony: “Exactly so,” he says, “for if it suffices, nothing more is needed; and if more is needed, then it is not sufficient.” The Dominicans, Pascal realizes, share the Jesuits’ vocabulary but not their meaning, while sharing the Jansenists’ substance but not their courage. They have chosen to keep the name and lose the truth.

Ever the satirist, Pascal presses further. Why, he asks, do the Jesuits not attack the Dominicans as they do the Jansenists, since both in fact deny that grace is self-sufficient? The answer exposes the politics beneath theology: the Dominicans are too powerful, and the Jesuits too shrewd. They have learned that language is more useful than truth. It is enough that the Dominicans use the term “sufficient grace.” The Jesuits can let them keep their private interpretation, knowing that the public, hearing the word, will assume that the Dominicans share the Jesuit meaning. Once the expression gains currency, the meaning can be imposed later. “The world,” Pascal’s friend says, “is content with words; few think of searching into the nature of things.” It is one of Pascal’s most penetrating observations on human credulity and ecclesiastical politics: words control minds because most men do not look beyond them.

This verbal compromise between the Dominicans and Jesuits allows both to save face while the truth of St. Augustine is buried beneath terminology. Pascal, eager to see the contradictions with his own eyes, visits a Dominican himself. The scene that follows is classic Pascalian comedy; a conversation in which simple reason demolishes scholastic subtlety. He asks the monk if all men have this sufficient grace. “Yes.” And yet it has no effect without efficacious grace? “None whatever.” So, Pascal replies, “all have enough of grace, and yet all have not enough of it; that is, it suffices though it does not suffice.” The monk, earnest but absurd, can only nod. Pascal ridicules the contradiction with a homely parable: if a prior gave his monks only two ounces of bread and a glass of water per day, would he be justified in calling it sufficient nourishment merely because, with something else not given, it might suffice? So too, how can a grace be called sufficient when something else is still required before it can act?

When Pascal presses him on whether it is indifferent to deny the necessity of efficacious grace, the monk cries out that it is “formal heresy” to do so. Here Pascal drives home the impasse: if he denies sufficient grace, he is a Jansenist; if he admits it in the Jesuit sense, he is a heretic; and if he admits it in the Dominican sense, he is a fool. “What must I do,” he asks with mock despair, “thus reduced to the inevitable necessity of being a blockhead, a heretic, or a Jansenist?” The comedy hides a tragic truth; the corruption of theology by power. Only the Jansenists, Pascal suggests, preserve both faith and reason; they alone affirm what Scripture and experience attest, that man cannot turn to God except by grace that truly works.

The satire grows sharper as Pascal’s Jansenist companion joins the dialogue, exposing the Dominican for agreeing with the Jesuits “in sound but not in sense.” By retaining the term “sufficient grace” while rejecting its meaning, they deceive the world. Everyone else understands “sufficient” to mean “enough”; only the Dominicans use it to mean “not enough.” Because they use the same term as the Jesuits, the public naturally assumes they are of one mind, and thus the Jesuits gain the appearance of theological unanimity. Pascal compares this deception to a doctor who, called to treat a wounded man, assures him he has sufficient strength to walk home because he still has legs, though without divine aid he will never take a step. Such are the Dominicans, who claim man has “sufficient grace” to act, though in practice they admit that without further help from God he cannot act at all. The patient, like the faithful, sees through the contradiction and returns to the first physician; St. Augustine; whose teaching alone restores health.

At last Pascal’s conversation turns somber. The Dominican, weary and embarrassed, admits that his order once defended efficacious grace with zeal, opposing the Jesuits’ doctrine of free-will in the days of popes Clement VIII and Paul V. But over time, pressed by political necessity and fear of suspicion, they consented to use the term “sufficient grace” to preserve their reputation and avoid persecution. They had, he confesses, taken refuge in a word. Pascal’s irony softens into pity: the poor monk has traded truth for safety. Yet Pascal’s Jansenist companion is merciless. By allowing the term, he says, the Dominicans have betrayed the doctrine they were meant to guard. “Names are inseparable from things,” he warns; once the name of the enemy is accepted, the enemy himself enters. The Jesuits, he predicts, will win, for it is their grace that is sufficient in fact which will be remembered, and not the Dominicans’ grace, sufficient only in name.

The monk protests that his order would rather suffer martyrdom than yield the truth, invoking St. Thomas as their master. But Pascal’s companion replies with righteous fire, reminding him of the heritage they have forsaken: the grace of Christ proclaimed by Paul, explained by Augustine, defended by Bernard, codified by Aquinas, preserved for centuries by their order. This “victorious grace,” entrusted to their keeping, has been abandoned for convenience. If they do not repent, he warns, God may remove their candlestick from its place, leaving them in darkness.

The letter closes with Pascal’s characteristic blend of satire and solemnity. He jokes that if he had any power in France, he would proclaim publicly: “Be it known to all men that when the Jacobins say sufficient grace is given to all, they mean that all have not the grace which actually suffices.” Beneath the laughter lies a grave judgment. What began as theology has become politics. The Dominicans’ “sufficient grace,” like the Jesuits’ “proximate power,” is an invention of words to disguise the surrender of truth to power.

Pascal’s purpose, however, is not only to ridicule but to reveal the moral mechanism of empire. By showing how men can be made to repeat formulas that have lost their meaning, he uncovers the essence of Jesuit domination: the rule of consciences through language. Words become instruments of obedience; ambiguity becomes a form of control. The same pattern he exposed in the Sorbonne reappears here; unity in appearance, division in substance, and the triumph of authority through confusion. As with the pseudo-Dionysian forgeries that once upheld the Church’s hierarchy and shaped Aquinas’s theology, so now the invention of “sufficient grace” sustains the fiction of harmony while concealing decay.

For Pascal, the moral is clear. The Church, once founded on the living Word of God, has become an empire of terms. Its theologians argue over names while abandoning the reality of grace. Yet truth, he insists, does not perish. When cowardly orders compromise it, God raises up new defenders. Grace, victorious in itself, will find her champions.

Reply of the Provincial to the First Two Letters

(February 2, 1656)

Having traced the Jesuits’ verbal artifices in the disputes over “proximate power” and “sufficient grace,” we now come to Pascal’s third installment — the “Reply of the Provincial.” This letter is not a theological skirmish but a moment of triumph and exposure. Here, Pascal steps back to reveal what his satire has already achieved: the unmasking of Jesuit pretensions not only before theologians but before the wider world. His correspondent; the fictional “Provincial”; writes to report the astonishment and delight with which the earlier letters were received across French society. Pascal’s attack, though dressed as mere correspondence, had become a public event.

In this reply, the success of Pascal’s method becomes its own commentary on the moral state of the Church. The very accessibility of his letters; their clarity, humor, and restraint; stood in sharp contrast to the pompous obscurity of Jesuit and Sorbonne theology. What had been the private language of power was suddenly translated into the tongue of the people, and it lost its spell. In the salons of Paris, in the academies, even among women who were barred from the faculties of theology, Pascal’s irony had succeeded where polemic failed: it made corruption laughable.

The “Provincial” begins by noting that Pascal’s first two letters “have not been confined to me. Everybody has seen them, everybody understands them, and everybody believes them.” This threefold declaration is more than flattery. It is Pascal’s assertion that truth, once spoken plainly, is irresistible; that reason and conscience still possess a kind of proximate power of their own, one not defined by Jesuits but inherent in human understanding. In a subtle inversion, Pascal demonstrates that genuine power lies not in scholastic decree but in intelligibility. The Gospel’s clarity proves stronger than the empire’s ambiguity.

The letter’s quotations from public admirers; an Academician and a lady; are not incidental. They serve as social proof that the Jesuits’ monopoly on theological authority has been broken. The first, a scholar, declares mockingly that if the French Academy had jurisdiction over the Sorbonne, he would “banish and proscribe this proximate power which makes so much noise about nothing.” His jest underlines Pascal’s central argument: that the Church’s greatest controversies had degenerated into word games. The second testimony, from a noblewoman, is even more telling. She praises Pascal’s letter as both “ingenious” and “clear,” noting that it “narrates and yet is not a narrative,” and that it delights both the learned and the ignorant alike. In a few sentences, Pascal demonstrates how his writing embodies what the Church had lost; simplicity joined with truth.

This appeal to “the ladies” was no accident. In seventeenth-century France, women of rank wielded immense cultural influence through salons and correspondence. By making theology intelligible to them, Pascal liberated it from clerical monopoly. The Jesuits’ labyrinthine dialectic was meant to exclude; Pascal’s wit was an act of reform. He returned religion to the realm of conscience, to that inner clarity Christ promised when He said, “The truth shall make you free.”

Beyond its elegance, this letter marks a deeper shift: Pascal is no longer merely exposing sophistry — he is showing that the public now sees it for what it is. Jesuit control depends on mystification; laughter is its undoing. When “proximate power” becomes a joke in Parisian drawing rooms, the edifice of authority trembles. The empire of fear, as you observed earlier, is replaced by the empire of ridicule; a far more fatal blow.

Yet even in victory, Pascal’s humility remains part of his art. He closes by urging his correspondent to continue the letters, unafraid of coming censures or papal decrees. “Let the censure come when it may,” he writes; “we are quite prepared for receiving it.” Here he anticipates what will soon follow; the condemnation of the Provincial Letters by Rome, and pope Alexander VII’s order to burn them. That act of destruction, like every burning before it, revealed not strength but insecurity. For if the papacy’s authority were truly divine, why would it need to silence inquiry or incinerate words? The truth of God has never feared the test of reason; only the inventions of men demand such defense.

In this “Reply,” therefore, Pascal achieves three things at once. He celebrates the exposure of Jesuit deceit, he confirms that the people of France have begun to see through the mask of scholastic tyranny, and he foreshadows the inevitable reaction of Rome; not repentance, but rage. What began as a letter now moves as a revolution of conscience.

And beneath Pascal’s laughter there runs a quiet theology: that the Gospel needs no worldly hierarchy to defend it. Its power is self-evident, its grace is truly sufficient, and its kingdom, unlike that of the Jesuits or the Caesars they served, does not depend on smoke, jargon, or decree.

Letter III: Injustice, Absurdity, and Nullity of the Censure on M. Arnauld

(February 9, 1656)

Having witnessed in the earlier letters how Jesuit theology could turn faith into a vocabulary of control; inventing phrases like proximate power and sufficient grace to maintain the illusion of orthodoxy; Pascal now exposes the next stage of the process: the transformation of judgment itself into an instrument of policy. In Letter III, the “Provincial” receives news of the long-awaited censure of M. Antoine Arnauld, the Jansenist theologian of Port-Royal. What was expected to be a monumental act of doctrinal condemnation turns out to be, in Pascal’s account, a masterpiece of absurdity: a “sentence” without argument, a “heresy” without heresy.

The irony begins at once. Pascal opens by contrasting his own undeserved praise with Arnauld’s undeserved censure; “I am as well treated in your letter as M. Arnauld is ill-treated in the censure.” The jest conceals a deadly thrust: the arbiters of truth in the Sorbonne reward ignorance and punish integrity. “If we were better known,” he writes, “M. Arnauld would merit their approval, and I their censure.” Thus, with one line, Pascal declares what the letter will prove; that in a corrupt system, merit itself becomes guilt, and orthodoxy depends not on doctrine but on identity.

Pascal recounts the spectacle that had been prepared: the long campaign of slander against the Jansenists, accused of heresy, schism, even apostasy; men said to have “renounced Jesus Christ and the Gospel.” The entire weight of ecclesiastical authority was mobilized to destroy them. And yet, after months of deliberation, what did the Sorbonne produce? A condemnation not of impiety, but of a sentence taken directly from the Fathers themselves. Arnauld’s supposedly “heretical” proposition; that “in the person of St. Peter we see a righteous man to whom the grace without which we can do nothing was wanting”; was nothing other than a paraphrase of St. Augustine and St. Chrysostom. The evidence was so clear that Pascal observes, with biting irony, that “no one could discover how it could differ from the Fathers as much as truth from error and faith from heresy.”

The mockery cuts deep. The entire apparatus of theological inquiry; councils, commissions, votes, and decrees; collapses into farce. When the censure is finally announced, it contains no reasoning, no citation, no proof. The Sorbonne simply declares the proposition to be “rash, impious, blasphemous, accursed, and heretical.” It is the triumph of authority without reason; and thus, Pascal suggests, the clearest sign of Rome’s intellectual bankruptcy. “Would you believe it,” he writes, “that all these alarming preparations have ended in smoke?” The smoke, of course, is the smoke of the pyre; the same kind that would later consume Pascal’s own letters at the pope’s command.

Through his irony, Pascal transforms the Sorbonne’s solemn decree into a public humiliation. Those who expected to witness the exposure of a heretic discover instead the exposure of their judges. By juxtaposing Arnauld’s proposition with the words of the Fathers, Pascal turns the accusation back upon the accusers. If the proposition is heretical, then Augustine and Chrysostom must be heretics; if it is orthodox in them, it must be orthodox in Arnauld. The Sorbonne, in condemning Arnauld, has condemned the tradition of the Church itself.

Pascal’s analysis now widens from the immediate injustice to the deeper absurdity; the corruption of judgment as such. He points out that the censure’s purpose was never to define doctrine but to destroy a man. The condemnation was predetermined; the proposition was merely the pretext. His interlocutor, the neutral “doctor,” confirms this plainly: Arnauld, he says, has taken such care to ground his opinions in the Fathers that “his enemies, unable to refute him, have been forced to condemn him without telling why or wherefore.” Their goal, he explains, is not theological clarity but political effect. “It is much easier,” he says, “to find monks than reasons.” This single sentence captures the entire method of Jesuit power: to manufacture the appearance of unity through sheer numbers and noise, not through truth.

Pascal’s wit now ascends to moral vision. The false censure, he observes, will succeed; for a time. “Let it only be cried through the streets, ‘Here you have the condemnation of the Jansenists!’ and the Jesuits will find their account in it.” Most people will never read it; fewer will understand it. The victory will be short-lived but sufficient for propaganda. The same pattern, Pascal notes, has sustained them for years — “they live from hand to mouth,” by processions, catechisms, and spectacles, “sometimes by a comedy, sometimes by an almanac.” Thus the machinery of the Counter-Reformation is reduced to theater: doctrine becomes pageantry; faith becomes a public performance.

When Pascal reports the words of M. le Moine, one of the examiners; “This proposition would be orthodox in the mouth of any other; it is only as coming from M. Arnauld that we have condemned it”; the hypocrisy is complete. Here is the logical endpoint of Jesuit policy: heresy is no longer a matter of belief, but of person. “It is not the sentiment that is heretical,” Pascal concludes, “it is only the man.” This “personal heresy” ; a phrase he coins with deadly precision; exposes the final inversion of Christianity. The Church, once the body of Christ, becomes the court of Caesar, where men are judged not for what they teach, but for whom they offend.

At the close, Pascal rises from irony to prophecy. “Let us leave them,” he writes, “to settle their own differences. These are the disputes of theologians, not of theology.” The distinction is decisive. Theology, the knowledge of divine truth, cannot perish; it is eternal. But theologians; men who have made religion their profession and power their purpose; can be corrupt, absurd, and vain. The true faith, Pascal insists, remains untouched by their machinations, just as the Word of God survived the forgeries of pseudo-Dionysius and the sophistries of Aquinas’s successors. It is not the Church that is in danger, but the empire masquerading as the Church.

Letter III, therefore, stands as one of Pascal’s greatest achievements. It exposes the mechanism of ecclesiastical tyranny with the precision of logic and the lightness of satire. In proximate power and sufficient grace, he had revealed how the Jesuits corrupted language; in the Censure of Arnauld, he shows how they corrupted judgment itself. Words became weapons; now verdicts become instruments of vengeance. It is the same spirit that animated Kircher’s Egypt; the transmutation of faith into system.

And through it all, Pascal’s question resounds beneath the laughter: if the authority of Rome truly rests on the divine mandate of Christ, why must it depend on contradiction, concealment, and censorship? Why must it condemn what the Fathers taught, and burn the writings that reveal it? The answer, as ever, is that the Jesuits do not defend the Gospel of Christ, but the throne of a man.

With Letter IV (February 25, 1656), Pascal shifts from the Sorbonne’s doctrinal theater to the Jesuits’ moral machinery. If “proximate power” and “sufficient grace” showed how words could be bent to make obedience easier than faith, this letter shows how conscience itself can be emptied; how sin can be explained away by redefining what it means to act. The topic is “actual grace” and, bound up with it, “sins of ignorance.” In Pascal’s hands the scene is almost comic: he and his “trusty Jansenist” seek instruction from an accomplished Jesuit, and what unfolds is a tour through a moral system designed to absolve the unrepentant by formula.

Pascal begins by playing the learner. “Actual grace,” says the Jesuit, is the divine inspiration by which God makes us know His will and stirs a desire to do it. On that definition, the Jesuit stakes out a sweeping claim: God bestows actual grace on all men in every temptation. Therefore; this is the keystone; no deed can be imputed as sin unless, beforehand, the sinner received both knowledge of the evil and an inward prompting to avoid it. Without that prior illumination and nudge, the act is not a sin; at most it is an involuntary misstep. In other words, guilt requires a synchronized checklist of interior elements. If any box is unchecked; no conscious knowledge, no felt prompting; culpability vanishes. Pascal senses immediately the consequence: all “sins of surprise,” all those committed in godless distraction, all those done in habitual forgetfulness, would fall outside blame.

To prove the point the Jesuit piles up authorities; but not Scripture, councils, or the Fathers. He brings the modern casuists. Father Bauny’s Somme des péchés supplies the first move: sin requires that one know the act displeases God or at least doubt that it does, and then freely “leap the fence.” Father Annat goes further: the man who has “no thought of God, nor of his sins, nor any apprehension of his obligation” to love or repent has, by definition, no actual grace for those acts; yet his omission is not imputed as sin, and if he is damned, it is not for that omission. The same, Annat adds, applies to commissions. Then comes Le Moine, who anatomizes the inward process required to make an act imputable: the soul must, prior to acting, pass through a whole suite of perceptions—its weakness, the physician who can heal it, the desire to be healed, the resolve to pray for help—only then can a sinful act be charged as voluntary. If any link is missing, the Jesuit implies, the chain of guilt snaps.

Pascal lets the implication bloom in a burst of deadpan enthusiasm. What a happy doctrine for the court libertine! Those who never think of God, never sense their spiritual weakness, never desire a cure, never pray; under this scheme; have scarcely sinned at all, because they have never had the inward motions that would make their actions voluntary sins. In this upside-down world, the half-penitent “semi-sinner” who still hears conscience is damned by intention, while the hardened sensualist glides through life “in baptismal innocence.” The satire bites because it reveals a system that rewards the most thorough forgetfulness of God with the widest immunity from blame. It is moral theology engineered for the powerful.

Sensing the danger, the Jesuit backpedals; not on principle but on fact. He says the reprobate do receive these inner motions every time; God never permits a sin without prior knowledge-and-desire. That assertion, Pascal answers, is not an article of faith but a denial of common experience. His Jansenist companion then insists on Scripture. Paul calls himself chief of sinners for ignorance; those who crucified Christ “knew not what they did” and yet needed pardon; Christ Himself foretells persecutors who will think they serve God while murdering His people; and He distinguishes plainly between servants who sin “knowing” and “not knowing” their master’s will—both punished, but differently. The Jesuit, pressed, narrows his claim again: perhaps the wicked lack such motions, but surely the righteous never sin without them. Yet even this refuge collapses. The saints themselves testify to secret faults, to sins of surprise, to the subtle snares of concupiscence that steal past watchfulness; Augustine confesses how often he gave to pleasure what he meant to give to necessity; the holiest, says Paul, stand in “fear and trembling,” not because they hourly choose evil with a fully lit interior checklist, but because they do not see the whole moral field at once. If the best often sin unknowingly, the Jesuit thesis is not merely uncharitable—it is untrue.

Cornered, the Jesuit appeals to Aristotle, via Bauny: a voluntary act requires not only doing what one wills, but doing so with prior discernment of the good and evil in the act; without that reflective appraisal, the deed is neither good nor bad. Pascal’s friend opens the Ethics and reveals the misquote by context. Aristotle teaches that ignorance of particular facts; not recognizing the bystander before you fire, not knowing Merope is your son; can render an act involuntary and excusable. But ignorance of right and wrong does not excuse; it makes the man vicious. “All wicked men,” Aristotle says, “are ignorant of what they ought to do,” and that ignorance is precisely what makes their acts voluntary and blameworthy. The Pagan philosopher stands with Augustine, not Bauny. Augustine’s own rule is crisp: even sins of ignorance are willed in the act (though not as sins), because the will chooses the deed it ought not to do; ignorance removes malice, not fault. Thus the Jesuit alliance of “no prior inner light, no sin” is shattered by both Scripture and sound philosophy.

What Pascal exposes in this letter is not a scholastic quibble but a moral regime. The Jesuit notion of “actual grace” turns into a device for laundering sin: by requiring a prior, conscious, devotional prelude to every imputable fault, it gives the greatest advantage to those most practiced in living without God. It also flattens the texture of the moral life into a series of explicit inner acts most people do not, and cannot, constantly perform. The result is a twin corruption: the wicked are excused by their godlessness, and the righteous are haunted by a psychology of boxes to tick rather than a life of humble repentance. As in the earlier letters, language does the heavy lifting: redefine “actual grace,” then redefine “voluntary,” and an empire of impunity appears.

Behind the comedy, Pascal’s diagnosis of power grows darker. This moral system exists to protect a class—those “persons of rank” whom confessors dare not offend, those whose alms and influence sustain the order’s standing. A doctrine that excuses sin by perpetual distraction is empire-friendly theology. It steadies the papal court, oils the social machinery, and keeps consciences quiet so long as they remain empty. The same logic that demanded “proximate power” and “sufficient grace” as verbal shibboleths now demands a conscience that cannot indict until it has staged an interior retreat and prayer. Where Scripture convicts, casuistry cushions; where Augustine demands contrition, Bauny asks whether the sinner had paused to think.

Pascal’s ending, with the Jesuit suddenly summoned to noble patrons and promising that “our fathers will find an answer,” is the perfect curtain line. The scene makes plain that we are in the realm of clientele and salons, not desert fathers and apostles. And the promise of further “answers” simply extends the pattern: when truth cannot be faced, ingenuity will be supplied. Pascal leaves us with the ominous note that he has only begun to see how far Jesuit moral doctrine descends; worse examples are coming. But even here the essential point has been made. The Gospel calls men to repent because they sin indeed—often without reflective self-accusation, often in ignorance, yet truly and voluntarily. The Jesuit system calls men innocent because they feel little—and so it sanctifies the very forgetfulness that Scripture names as judgment. In Letter IV, as in those before it, Pascal unmasks not merely an error but an order: a church that has traded the light that exposes sin for a vocabulary that dissolves it, and thereby exchanged the medicine of grace for the anesthesia of power.

With Letter V (March 20, 1656) Pascal stops merely exposing Jesuit word-games and begins to map the engine room of their moral system. He sketches the Society’s self-applause; “angels,” “eagles,” “phoenixes,” the order that “changed the face of Christendom”; only to show what, in fact, changed: not hearts, but the rulebook. The governing idea, he says, is not a simple plot to corrupt manners nor a pure zeal to reform them; it is a policy to govern every conscience. To do that, one must be all things to all men; not in Paul’s sense of suffering for the Gospel, but in the diplomat’s sense of supplying a director to match every desire. Hence the famous two racks of casuists: a small, exhibition shelf of “severe” divines for the few who want rigor, and a warehouse of lax confessors for the multitude who do not. The superiors approve them all, not because they agree, but because together they capture the market.

This “accommodating conduct,” as Father Petau called it, shows its range at the extremes. When a penitent arrives resolved to make restitution, Jesuit rigor nods. When he arrives resolved to avoid restitution, Jesuit leniency opens a side door. The same flexibility travels overseas. Pascal cites Dominican and Propaganda Fide complaints from the 1640s: in parts of India and China, Jesuit missionaries permitted converts to keep bowing before local idols while tucking a small image of Christ under the robe and “mentally transferring” the adoration. The decree of July 9, 1646, had to forbid such camouflage expressly, order the crucifix to be displayed, and bar baptism without teaching the cross. For Pascal, this is not missionary prudence but the method writ large: suppress the offense of the cross where it hinders numbers; supply a moral varnish that leaves the world intact.

The intellectual key that makes this system run is the doctrine of “probable opinions.” Here is the principle, as Pascal draws it from Escobar, Sanchez, Filiutius, Emanuel Sa, and the rest: an opinion is morally safe to follow if it has “reasons of some consideration,” and the authority of even a single “grave doctor” can suffice to make it probable. Once probable, it may be chosen over a contrary view that is more probable—and even less safe may be chosen over more safe. The penitent is free to pick the lenient opinion; the confessor is bound, under pain of mortal sin, to absolve him for following it; and the director may even counsel a judgment he personally believes false, provided some learned writer has made it “probable” and it suits the inquirer better. The effect is breathtaking. Moral authority is no longer Scripture illumined by tradition; it is a card index of modern names, any one of which can neutralize a command of Christ if the penitent prefers another path.

Pascal’s scene at the library makes the mechanism visible. Escobar; presented with apocalyptic flourish as the compiler of twenty-four Jesuit worthies; dispenses fast-day relief like a notary of exceptions: if you cannot sleep without supper, you are not bound to fast; even if you could swap your meals, you are not bound to change the order of your meals; you may take wine “at any hour,” even in quantity, and a dram of hippocras besides. Filiutius absolves the man “exhausted by profligacy” from fasting; Bauny relieves you of the duty to avoid proximate occasions of sin if avoiding them would cause “inconvenience” or talk; Basil Ponce; approved by Bauny; permits seeking an occasion of sin “directly and designedly” for your own or your neighbor’s advantage. When Pascal balks, the reply is never Scripture or Augustine; it is always the same talisman: “probable.” Once a single modern has printed it, it can be followed—and must be absolved.

At this point Pascal presses the deeper swap: who, now, are the Fathers? Not Augustine, Chrysostom, Ambrose, Jerome. Those men, says Father Cellot following Reginald, belong to “positive divinity.” Directors of conscience read “the modern casuists.” Diana (Antonio Diana (1586–1663), a famous Italian casuist. He wasn’t a Jesuit, but Jesuit confessors loved and cited him), with his two hundred and ninety-six authorities; many of them barely eighty years old; is the new patrology. The maxim is bald: “In questions of morals, the modern casuists are to be preferred to the ancient fathers.” Hence judgments like this: “The ancients would say beneficiaries must restore misused revenues; the moderns say no; let us follow the moderns.” What looks like mere bibliographical fashion is in fact a transfer of sovereignty. Tradition is displaced by an index, the canon by a catalog, the Gospel by a guild.

Through it all Pascal keeps his satire cool and his logic tight. If contrary opinions abound and each “renders his own view probable,” then the very diversity is functional: one doctor says yes, another says no; therefore you may always do as you please; and your confessor must ratify it on pain of mortal sin. The order’s internal pluralism, far from being a sign of freedom, is a technology of control; with one hand it produces rigor for defense, with the other it supplies leniency for practice. Even missionary “accommodations” fall into place: where Christ crucified is a stumbling block, install probability, hide the cross, and let a mental reservation do the rest.

The theological sting returns at the end. If this is morality, then of course “all men always have enough grace” to live by it; nature can keep such a code. But to “tear the soul from what it holds most dear,” to make a man die to himself and be bound wholly to God; that is another thing, and it requires the efficacious grace Pascal has defended since Letter I. Jesuit probability, he suggests, is not merely a lax method; it is a rival soteriology. It saves by lowering the mountain.

The letter closes with a promise from the Jesuit to reconcile all this with Scripture, popes, and councils. Pascal lets the promise hang, because the point has landed: a new moral magisterium has been erected; modern, anonymous, prolific, and portable; and it governs not by preaching the cross but by dispersing the force of command into a spray of permissible opinions. The Fathers are replaced, the law is made pliable, and absolution is guaranteed in advance. That is how an empire of obedience is built: by giving every conscience a tailor and every desire a doctor.

Do not take my word for it; read their works for yourself, and then lay their theology beside the Gospel, for which Christ poured out His life in agony. He did not suffer on the cross to preserve the pomp of a new empire draped in sacred names, nor to secure for Rome; old or new; an unquestioned dominion over His Church. He died to redeem souls, not to enthrone institutions.