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Updated: June 28, 2025
Blaise Pascal, mathematician, theologian, and one of the greatest writers of French prose, was born on June 19, 1623, at Clermont-Ferrand, and died on August 19, 1662. His mother died in his fourth year, and the father, an eminent lawyer, took the boy with his two sisters to Paris. Pascal showed the most astonishing mathematical genius; he produced at the age of seventeen a profound work on conic sections, and devoted the following years to physical researches and to investigations in the higher mathematics. In 1654, Pascal, having experienced a remarkable vision, which he recorded on a parchment known as his "amulet," renounced the world and entered on the ascetic life, in close relations with the Jansenist community. Hence, in the interests of Arnauld, the Jansenist leader, Pascal issued the famous "Letters Written to a Provincial" ("Lettres Écrites par Louis de Montalte
The Jansenist Abbe Barral, in his Dictionnaire Historique, Litteraire, et Critique, des Hommes Celebres, thus speaks of our author and his work: "He composed for the instruction of the Dukes of Burgundy, Anjou, and Berri several works; amongst others, the Telemachus a singular book, which partakes at once of the character of a romance and of a poem, and which substitutes a prosaic cadence for versification.
In the morning of this day we had been to see an aged Catholic woman of the Jansenist persuasion: she appeared to have no dependence but on her Saviour, and, full of faith and love, to have her conversation in heaven; she gave us a sweet benediction at parting.
"To the monarch alone," he repeated, "belongs the legislative power, without dependence and without partition." This was throwing down the gauntlet to the whole assembly as well as to public opinion. Abbe Sabatier and Councillor Freteau had already spoken, when Robert de St. Vincent rose, an old Jansenist and an old member of Parliament, accustomed to express his thoughts roughly.
There surely never was a greater number of miracles ascribed to one person, than those, which were lately said to have been wrought in France upon the tomb of Abbe Paris, the famous Jansenist, with whose sanctity the people were so long deluded. The curing of the sick, giving hearing to the deaf, and sight to the blind, were every where talked of as the usual effects of that holy sepulchre.
The inquirer is confounded, and ventures to ask then in what M. Arnauld’s heresy consisted? “In this,” replies his friend, “that he does not acknowledge that the just have the power of obeying the commandments of God in the way in which we understand it.” Having got to what he supposes the “heart of the affair,” he posts off to a Jansenist acquaintance, “a very decent man notwithstanding.” But if he was puzzled before, he is still more puzzled when he hears the worthy Jansenist declare that it is no heresy to hold that “all the just have always the power of obeying the Divine commandments.” Confounded by such a reply, he felt that he had been too plain-spoken with both Jansenist and Molinist.
The necessity of efficacious grace for effective action is a point of faith. It is heresy to deny this.’ ‘Where, then, are we now? and what side must I take? If I deny sufficient grace, I am a Jansenist. If I admit it, like the Jesuits, so that efficacious grace is no longer necessary, I shall be a heretic, you say.
We had both ill-treated Love; she had treated him like a child, I had adored him after the fashion of a Jansenist. But where could we have found the proper language for the excuses we had to address to each other for the mutual forgiveness we had to entreat and to grant?
In 1709, Le Tellier induced his royal penitent to decree the destruction of one of the two Jansenist establishments, and Port Royal des Champs, between Versailles and Chevreuse, rendered famous by the piety and learning of Arnault, Pascal and Nicolle, was doomed.
No more ensemble, no more unity, no more beauty. "The woman who comes into the house of a widower, the minister who steps into the place of a statesman in disgrace, the molinist bishop who gets hold of the diocese of a jansenist bishop none of these people cause more trouble than the intruding scarlet has caused to me. "I can bear without disgust the sight of a peasant-woman.
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