Book · 19 chapters · 8 hr 57 min read

The Provincial Letters

Translated by Thomas M'Crie

Blaise Pascal · 1623–1662

Reading difficulty: Moderate Read in your language: Français

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Disputes in the Sorbonne and Proximate Power

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About this book

In January 1656 the Sorbonne was about to condemn Antoine Arnauld, Pascal's friend at Port-Royal, and Pascal came to his defence in an anonymous letter “to a provincial,” a friend in the country. Seventeen more followed over the next fourteen months, passed hand to hand through Paris while the police hunted the printers. They begin as a comedy, with a puzzled outsider interviewing theologians who cannot say what their own words mean, and they grow into a fierce and serious attack on a morality that had learned to excuse almost anything. Pascal's charge is that the Jesuit casuists had made the gospel easy by emptying it, and his letters on murder, calumny and the love of God still ask what it costs to be honest before God. They are also the book that fixed modern French prose.

Paris, January 23, 1656. Sir,—We were entirely mistaken. It was only yesterday that I was undeceived. Until that time I had labored under the impression that the disputes in the Sorbonne were vastly important, and deeply affected the interests of religion.
From Disputes in the Sorbonne and Proximate Power

Contents · 19 chapters · 8 hr 57 min read

  1. 1 Disputes in the Sorbonne and Proximate Power 19 min
  2. 2 Of Sufficient Grace 22 min
  3. 3 The Censure on M. Arnauld 16 min
  4. 4 On Actual Grace and Sins of Ignorance 25 min
  5. 5 The Jesuits' New System of Morals 27 min
  7. 19 Fragment of a Nineteenth Letter 2 min

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This book is also available in: Français

Public domain. Source text from the original edition.

Jean-François Rafaëlli, “Notre Dame de Paris” (c. 1890). The Art Institute of Chicago, CC0.