The provincial letters of Blaise Pascal A new translation, with historical intro
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~150,000 words · 736 passages
Cite this work
- APAPascal. (n.d.). The provincial letters of Blaise Pascal A new translation, with historical intro. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/blaise-pascal/the-provincial-letters-of-blaise-pascal-a-new-translation-with-historical-intro
- MLAPascal. "The provincial letters of Blaise Pascal A new translation, with historical intro." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/blaise-pascal/the-provincial-letters-of-blaise-pascal-a-new-translation-with-historical-intro.
- ChicagoPascal. The provincial letters of Blaise Pascal A new translation, with historical intro. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/blaise-pascal/the-provincial-letters-of-blaise-pascal-a-new-translation-with-historical-intro.
What it is about
The eighteen anonymous letters with which Pascal defended the Jansenists of Port-Royal by attacking the casuistical morality of the Jesuits, in 1656 and 1657.
Context and history
They appeared clandestinely, one at a time, and were an immediate success because Pascal did what nobody had done: he took a theological dispute out of academic Latin and put it into ordinary French, with irony and in dialogue. The first letters argue about grace; from the fourth on he attacks casuistry, the technique of finding for every act some authority that permits it, and he quotes the Jesuit manuals themselves so that they convict themselves. The letters were condemned and burnt by royal order, and in 1660 the pope placed them on the Index. This is the text in which modern French prose begins: Voltaire called it the first book of genius written in French prose.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
PREFACE, vii HISTORICAL INTRODUCTION, ix LETTER I. Disputes in the Sorbonne, and the invention of proximate power—a term employed by the Jesuits to procure the censure of M. Arnauld, 63 LETTER II. Of sufficient grace, which turns out to be not sufficient—Concert between the Jesuits and the Dominicans—A parable, 76 Reply of “the Provincial” to the first two Letters, 88 LETTER III. Injustice, absurdity, and nullity of the censure on M. Arnauld—A personal heresy, 90 LETTER IV. Actual grace and sins of ignorance—Father Bauny’s Summary of sins, 100 LETTER V. Design of the Jesuits in establishing a new system of moral