Lettres provinciales

Being quickly forced underground while writing the Provincial Letters, Pascal pretended they were reports from a Parisian to a friend in the provinces, on the moral and theological issues then exciting the intellectual and religious circles in the capital.

Pascal's main source on Jesuit casuistry was Antonio Escobar's Summula casuum conscientiae (1627), several propositions of which would be later condemned by Pope Innocent XI.

The Fourth Letter deals with the question of "actual grace", the Jesuits claiming that sin could only be committed if people had knowledge of the evil inherent to the planned action.

On the one hand, God sheds abroad on the soul some measure of love, which gives it a bias toward the thing commanded; and on the other, a rebellious concupiscence solicits it in the opposite direction.

"And unless all these things occur and pass through the soul," added the Jesuit, "the action is not properly a sin, and cannot be imputed, as M. le Moine shows in the same place and in what follows."

Pascal replied, that this meant that all those whose "vices have got the better of their reason" and who indulge in "a perpetual round of all sorts of pleasures", so long as they are ignorant of the immorality of their actions, were excused by this doctrine.

[7] Pascal relied heavily on witty attack, composed of quotes from various books written by Jesuit casuists, in particular by Antonio Escobar y Mendoza's Summula casuum conscientiae (1627), which had enjoyed a great success,[8] and also Thomas Sanchez, Vincenzo Filliucci (Jesuit and penitentiary at St Peter's), Antonino Diana, Paul Laymann, Etienne Bauny, Louis Cellot, Valerius Reginaldus, Bernard Lamy (censored on 8 October 1649 by the Faculty of Leuven for his defense of homicide), etc.

In the Fifth Letter, he evoked in passing the Chinese Rites controversy which ended with the Jesuits' condemnation and the Congregatio de Propaganda Fide's decision to prohibit idolatry under any pretexts.

[10] Starting at Letter VI, dated 10 April 1656, Pascal gives a number of examples of Jesuit casuistry and of its "relaxed morality", citing abundant sources (many of which came from Escobar).

He illustrated casuistry by citing mostly Jesuitical texts allowing excuses to abstain from fasting (citing Vincenzo Filliucci's Moralium quaestionum de christianis officiis et casibus conscientiae... tomus, Lyon, 1622; often cited by Escobar); from giving to the poor (indirectly citing Gabriel Vasquez from Diana; for a monk temporarily defrocking himself to go to the brothel (citing an exact quote of Sanchez from Escobar, who was evading Pius IV's Contra sollicitantes and Pius V's Contra clericos papal bulls, the latter directed against sodomite clergy[11])); in the Seventh Letter, propositions allowing homicides (even to the clergy) and duels as long as the intention is not directed for revenge; others permitting corruption of judges as long as it is not intended as corruption; others allowing usury or Mohatra contracts; casuistic propositions allowing robbery and stealing from one's master; others allowing lying through the use of rhetorical "mental reservation" (restrictio mentalis; for instance: saying, loudly "I swear that...", silently "I said that...", and loudly again the object of the pledge) and equivocations.

In the Ninth Letter, the Jesuit explains to the narrator easy ways to enter Heaven, citing a book called "Paradise opened to Philagio, in a Hundred Devotions to the Mother of God, easily practiced."

The Tenth Letter is dedicated to casuistic procedures to lighten the ritual of confession and to the debate between the respective roles of attrition and contrition; the Jesuit character claiming that simply attrition combined with the sacrament of penance is sufficient for man's salvation, while the narrator insists on the necessity of contrition and of the love of God, citing extracts of the Bible often quoted by the Jansenists, the abbé de Saint-Cyran and Jansenius.

[13] He defended the style in which he wrote the letters, explaining that "if I had written dogmatically, my papers would have been only read by the learned, and those who had no need of the information I furnished".

[14] Rufus Suter has stated that the letters became "the model for the satirical essay in French" and have become "the only legacy of Jansenism that continue to inspire the religious imagination".

[18] They were first translated into Latin by Antoine Arnauld, and then into many other languages, including English in 1657 (Les Provinciales, or the Mystery of Jesuitisme, discovered in certain letters written upon occasion of the present differences at Sorbonne between the jansenists and the molinists, London, Royston, 1657) by the Anglican theologian Henry Hammond, while in 1684 a polyglot translation (in French, Latin, Spanish and Italian) was published by Balthasar Winfelt.