Alberto Frigo: "Blaise Pascal and the Jesuits "

"You think you have strength and impunity, but I think I have truth and innocence. It is a strange and long war when violence tries to suppress truth. All the efforts of violence cannot weaken the truth and only serve to raise it higher". In this extract from the Provinciales, Pascal puts the debate with the Jesuits on philosophical and political grounds.

Blaise Pascal became close to the Port-Royal community known as the Jansenists (although they did not call themselves Jansenists). The Jesuits and the secular authorities wanted to put an end to Port-Royal's ideas, which they considered to be heresy. Port-Royal wanted to bring the theological debate into the public arena: Pascal became their spokesman and in 1656, under the pseudonym of Montalte, he wrote his first "literary" work, the first Provincial, which was followed by seventeen other letters. This first "Provinciale" is a public health text about the distorted use of words by those in power. It is a text of logic and reason - more than a theological text. The Provinciales is a magnificent meditation on the tricks of power. In this debate against royal power and the Jesuits, Pascal argues that to lead the faithful against reality is to deceive them in their very faith: "Where will we learn the truth of the facts? It will be from the eyes, Father [addressing the king's Jesuit confessor], which are the legitimate judges, just as reason is of natural and intelligible things, and faith is of supernatural and revealed things [...] On the contrary, it would destroy faith to try to cast doubt on the faithful report of the senses". - Pascal even went so far as to use the example of Galileo against the Church in this debate.

A former student of the École Normale Supérieure in Pisa, Alberto Frigo is Professor of the History of Modern Philosophy at the Università degli Studi di Milano.

"Bibliothèques Municipales de Lyon" website