Pascal's Wager (13 page)

T
he youngest of the Arnauld clan was named after his father, Antoine, and was born in 1612. His father died in 1619, when he was only seven. And so, like Blaise Pascal, he too had lost a parent in childhood. He was, by almost every account, the most intelligent member of that family, and in the end he turned out to be the most ardent defender of Jansenism. He attended the Sorbonne in the 1630s, where he became friends with Jean Guillebert, the man who ended up as the priest in Rouville and who converted the bonesetters, who in turn converted the Pascals, who in turn supported Antoine Arnauld throughout all the long years of controversy. The young Arnauld was an intellectual meteor who had earned the best grades in everything and was the talk of the faculty of theology. But he was also a great deal of trouble.

The clan Arnauld shared several abiding traits: they all had wills of iron, they all possessed a deadly intelligence, and they were all born lawyers. Antoine Arnauld had all three of these traits in extra-large amounts. He was known at the Sorbonne not only for his intelligence but also for his scrappy personality. It is likely that he was one of those people who take the most radical position on everything just so they can have the greatest
triumph on the rhetorical battlefield. Arnauld would argue over anything and everything, and it’s not surprising that he annoyed quite a few of the faculty. While still in school, in 1638, he wrote a letter to the abbé de Saint-Cyran, who had become the imprisoned martyr at Vincennes, famously oppressed at the hands of the notorious Richelieu, and asked him to become his spiritual director. Saint-Cyran had already become involved with Port-Royal several years earlier and knew Antoine’s sisters quite well. He fully understood how valuable this young man would be. In 1641, young Arnauld received his doctorate of divinity, and there were probably more than a few sighs of relief when he was gone. In 1643, following Saint-Cyran’s instruction, Arnauld threw his hat into the Jansenist ring by writing a short tract on the sacraments entitled
De la fréquente communion
(On Frequent Communion). The tract created a stir almost at once.

In essence, Arnauld argued that because the Eucharist was the body and blood of Christ, no ordinary sinner dared receive it. One should undergo a strict regimen of penance in order to purify the soul and to avoid the sin of sacrilege each time before receiving Communion. This flew in the face of Jesuit teaching, which taught that Communion was not a reward for perfect moral behavior but a medicine for the soul and a vital pathway to God. Arnauld saw the thrice-damned Jesuit teaching as a species of laxity, soft on sin and soft on sinners, allowing insults to the divine presence to occur by the polluting presence of sinners who dared approach the altar of God. Within two heartbeats, the friction between these two camps sparked a nuclear fire.

The explosion happened this way: There was a lady at court, a fine and cultured noblewoman who had had her life changed by the preaching and counsel of Saint-Cyran, who had become her spiritual director. She had once lived a life of easy virtue, and the abbot had confronted her with her sins. She tried to do the same thing with her friends and told them not to receive Communion unless they were in a state of near perfect grace, that they could not approach the altar of God without first confessing all of their venial sins as well as their mortal sins, all of their faults and foibles, and converting themselves from living a frivolous life. Moreover, they
could not be forgiven their sins unless their penitence was perfect—that is, unless their intentions were pure, done utterly for the love of God rather than out of fear of the fire.

Her friends responded, following their own Jesuit spiritual directors, that the Eucharist had been given to the world as an aid to salvation and should not be denied people unless they had cut themselves off from God through mortal sin. Arnauld exploded. He could not abide this, for such a positive view of human beings, such a comfortable understanding of humanity’s relationship with God, did not take into account the monstrosity of sin and the depths of the wound that Adam’s transgression had cut into the world. To reject the world-bestriding power of concupiscence was to reject Augustine himself, to fall into the grave error of Pelagianism. No true believer could ever approach the sacred altar of God while still immersed in the ocean of sin that was ordinary human life.

And so the war between Arnauld and the Jesuits was on, and would rage for the rest of his life and beyond.

The connection between Jansenism and the Arnauld family had been there for some time, however, and could be traced back to Port-Royal. In 1635, Mère Angélique invited Saint-Cyran to give a series of sermons during Lent. By 1637, the entire community was under his direction. For what the sisters of Port-Royal and their devoted followers had already learned to practice, Saint-Cyran provided a theological superstructure. Once, he told them, Adam and Eve lived in moral and spiritual perfection, but that time had passed and was gone forever because of their sin, and so we sinners live under the influence of concupiscence, that terrible draw toward wickedness. If we die in our sin, it is because we choose to do so. But even our choice is created by the all-powerful God, and therefore we can claim nothing for ourselves. All we can do is seek the kind of humility that edges on humiliation, and spend a life in penitence for our sins and for the sin of Adam. Though most people are predestined for eternal damnation, there are those who, through the saving power of Jesus Christ, are predestined for salvation. No one can know just who is damned and who is saved, but
we can read the signs, for there are “signposts in the predestined soul” that are not there in the damned. These are: a perfect surrender to God’s will; the practice of sincere piety; sacramental and personal penance; the acceptance of God’s grace in all humility; and, of course, submission to a spiritual director.

And there was the rub, the turning point, the place where Jansenism crossed the line from Christian spirituality to cult. Submission to a spiritual director, namely to himself—and he pulled no punches on this—was no longer merely a wise act, an advisable thing to do, a part of a spiritual program. Suddenly it was an essential dimension of salvation. Not even the Jesuits claimed this. Obedience to the charismatic leader, to the concrete will of the director, became the main signpost of God’s saving power in their midst.

There have been other charismatic spiritual directors. Some, like St. Francis of Assisi, St. Benedict of Nursia, and St. Ignatius of Loyola, have changed the world. Others have led their hapless followers into the jungle and the draft of Kool-Aid. Charisma cuts both ways, and that is the problem. Saint-Cyran and Mère Angélique were two strong-willed people whose own unseen will to power had become tangled in their desire for spiritual perfection, who were unable to see that such a demand for submission was little more than hubris. It was inevitable that they would sooner or later come to loggerheads with other powerful people, religious and secular both, who suffered from the same hubris. The two of them were powerful personalities indeed, but could they compete with Cardinal Richelieu, and later with Cardinal Mazarin? Perhaps, in their spiritual certainty, they did not see the storm on the horizon.

That storm hit in 1638, when Richelieu had Saint-Cyran thrown into prison. “The judgments of God are a terrible thing,” Angélique later told Jacqueline Pascal. “We don’t think enough about them. We don’t dread them enough.”
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The judgment of God was falling upon them, or at least the judgment of Richelieu. But the cardinal’s imprisonment of Saint-Cyran was only the first salvo by forces that were beginning to coalesce around the Jesuits. Perhaps the Jansenists were doomed from the
moment that Francis de Sales and Vincent de Paul rejected them, but the tides were turning against the Augustinians. The modern age would reject them and their negative evaluation of humanity as a failed experiment and move on.

As for Port-Royal, a replacement for the abbot soon filled his spot, a man of different character and learning, Antoine Singlin, a former Parisian linen draper turned priest, a holy man who had once been the disciple of Vincent de Paul and later turned to Saint-Cyran. He would later engage Blaise Pascal in long conversations about the world, about science, and about serving God—conversations that would change the young man’s life forever.

C
ardinal Richelieu died on December 4, 1642, after years of declining health. The vultures circled, and the lions gathered to pick the bones. Louis XIII was overjoyed—he was free at last—but put on a good face and observed all the conventions at the cardinal’s funeral.
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He took care of Richelieu’s family, reaffirmed his will, and defended his reputation at court, to the point of frowning on all of Richelieu’s old enemies. One exception was Jean François Paul de Gondi, the future Cardinal de Retz, a born conspirator, who was busy politicking for the job of coadjuter bishop of Paris, under his own uncle, the archbishop. Though he and Richelieu had circled each other like wrestlers for years, Retz got the job after gallantly sparing the life of Captain Coutenau, of the king’s light horse, during a duel. The man slipped in the mud and dropped his sword, and Retz, who still had his in hand, stood back with a salute to allow Coutenau a chance to redeem his sword from the mud. Instead, the captain bowed low to Gondi and offered his apology, which was graciously accepted. Suddenly Retz was in the king’s favor.

But this didn’t last long, for Louis XIII died on May 15, 1643, but not before appointing Retz coadjuter bishop on his deathbed. When Louis XIII died, there were no signs or portents, though France was in serious danger of civil war. At the moment of the king’s death, his heir, Louis, took his place on the throne and became Louis XIV, the Sun King. The next day, the entire royal household packed their possessions onto carts and, with all of their servants and all of their guards, moved to the Queen’s palace at the Louvre. This was a tradition among French royalty; the new king, they believed, should not have to live in the house where his father had died. Were they afraid of ghosts?

The people loved the young king for his youth, and they loved his mother, Anne, mainly for her suffering. No one likes a monarch who has a good time, but one who suffers delicately has everyone’s goodwill. As they traveled toward Paris, the people lined the streets and cheered them, calling the young king the
Dieudonné
, the gift of God, and praying down blessings on the Queen Mother. At the gates of the city, the procession stopped to listen to speeches given by local government officials and by prominent merchants, and this went on and on. More than likely, the four-year-old king was bored.

Because of his youth, his mother quickly became the regent and ruled in his stead, an unstable business because both the queen and her first minister were foreigners, and though the people loved them for the moment, that could quickly change. French nationalists like the prince de Condé resented their coming to power and schemed voraciously in the background. The duc d’Orléans pretended to be upset by the regency and was ready to go to war over it, but then the queen made him the lieutenant general of France, and he went away happy. The prince de Condé became the president of the King’s Council, and even he stopped grumbling for a time.

On Monday, May 18, the Parlement de Paris assembled to register Anne’s regency, which they did quickly, with pomp and flourishes and plenty of references to the will of God. The queen immediately called the exiles home, freed the political prisoners, and even pardoned many criminals. Those who had lost their jobs under Richelieu were soon given new employment, and all requests were granted.
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Three days later, Anne
named Cardinal Mazarin to be her chief minister, and no one was surprised, though everyone at court and out of court knew him for what he was—Richelieu’s creature—and hated him.

At first, painfully aware of her dead husband’s shortcomings, especially his constant deferral to Richelieu, the queen tried to rule in her own right, and rule by Christian principles. Not being a holy man himself, Cardinal Mazarin couldn’t allow that. He had other ideas, and immediately set clandestine schemes running through the palace to undermine the queen and to maneuver her power away from her. Like his predecessor, Richelieu, he wanted no restrictions on his own power, but unlike Richelieu, he had little conscience, and sought his own glory over the welfare of the nation.

By that time, Richelieu’s taxes had bled the people white, a fact that many pious people, even the queen’s favorite Vincent de Paul, had taken great pains to tell her. However, she was no longer in control of the regency and was further hampered by her vision of royal power. Life at court was spent mostly in the search of pleasure—frivolous conversation, rich banquets, plays and concerts, coquetry. Mazarin, to entertain the queen, brought an Italian acting troupe to Paris to stage a musical comedy,
Orfeo
, which the boy king loved and demanded to see again and again, though it cost four hundred thousand livres just to purchase the set and the machinery for the special effects. This did not include the salaries of the players or the cost of transporting them from Italy. The amount of money the court spent on a daily basis was outrageous, and it is telling that the court was oblivious to the effects that their pleasures were having on the populace. While the courtiers tittered over the latest intrigue, the most recent scandal, the people languished in poverty, and the French Revolution inched closer.

In the end, all of her good intentions fell apart in May 1648. The war that was impoverishing the nation seemed to go on and on, while the court spent more money every year on frivolities. D’Emery, Mazarin’s superintendent of finance, widely known as one of the most corrupt men of the time, was foraging for new tax schemes. He issued edicts announcing new taxes as fast as he could name them

Up until this point, there had been no popular uprising in Paris as there had been in the provinces. The streets had been clear, the people quiet.
The only thing that had happened was that the tax officers had refused to do their jobs under protest of the new strictures to tax more and receive less, and some members of the Parlement had made speeches against the regent’s policies. But Anne would not let this go; she insisted on seeing these protests as the start of an insurrection. And by doing so, she incited the very rebellion she feared. What neither the queen, nor Mazarin, nor anyone else in court realized was that the rebellion had been brewing since Richelieu’s day, and that the violent tax revolts that had become commonplace in the provinces were about to visit the capital.

Meanwhile, Cardinal de Retz, who was out of favor at court because of his opposition to Mazarin, used his position as coadjutor of Paris to win the love of the people. From February 25 to March 26, 1648, he distributed thirty-six thousand crowns among the poor. Seeing what was going on, he informed the queen and Cardinal Mazarin of the people’s disaffection, and then quietly told the queen of Mazarin’s cunning, which earned him no love from the cardinal and no gratitude from the queen.

All of a sudden, news came to the court that the young prince de Condé, the son of the old grumpy lion of Louis XIII’s day, had achieved a great military victory in the town of Lens. The court was jubilant. The queen ordered a Te Deum to be sung at Notre Dame. Then she called her council together, and they decided that the celebration would be a perfect opportunity to crush the rebellion in the Parlement. The people would be too busy celebrating to notice that their leaders had been quietly arrested. Just before leaving for the cathedral, she called Comminges, a lieutenant of the royal guard, to her side, quietly informed him of her plans, and placed him in charge of the detachment making the arrests. This decision was the beginning of the Fronde of the Parlement, a rebellion that ultimately failed and merely strengthened the power of the crown, for France was not quite ripe for revolution.
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Comminges packed his carriage with four of his guards and one other officer, and together they drove to the street of Monsieur Broussel. Broussel, an old army officer who suffered from gout, was the most vociferous opponent of the king’s taxes, and the people claimed him as their great protector. Comminges ordered the carriage to the end of the street, with orders
to come at once as soon as he had entered the counselor’s house. Then he marched up on foot and knocked on the door. A young boy answered and opened the door for him, and once it was open Comminges leaped inside, holding the door until the carriage arrived. Then, leaving two men at the door, he took the other two guards up to Broussel’s apartment and barged into the room, where the man was finishing his dinner with his family. Comminges announced that he had an order from the king to arrest him and take him to prison. Broussel, who had shown great courage in the Parlement in denouncing Mazarin and his policies, was over sixty years old, and trembled at the sight of the lieutenant and his men. He told them that he had taken medicine that morning and that he was in no state to travel, but they would not listen. They grabbed the old man, and at that one of the servants, Broussel’s old nurse, ran down the street screaming to the people for help, saying that their protector was being carried off to prison. Suddenly the street was filled with an angry mob. When they heard that Broussel had been arrested, they snatched at the reins, scrambled for the carriage, pulled at the guards. Inside the house, Comminges looked out the window and saw that a riot was beginning. He told Broussel that if he tried to delay any longer he would kill him. Seizing him, he dragged him from the apartment and down the stairs, and threw him into the carriage, while the guards pushed back the people.

With that, the crowd grew more violent and angrier than before; the people pushed and shoved and cursed and threw rocks. The mob teemed all around them even as Comminges and his men tried to escape with their prisoner. He and his men, especially a young page, fought back, but the crowd managed to lay hold of the carriage and overturn it. They would have beaten the men to death had there not been soldiers from the guards standing nearby. Leaping out of the carriage, Comminges pulled his prisoner out the door and fought his way through the crowd. “To arms! Comrades! Help us!” he shouted to the soldiers, and they fought with the people in the streets until the guards brought up another carriage and Comminges escaped with his prisoner. Suddenly, all of Paris boiled with sedition. When the queen heard about the riot, she sent troops through the streets to pacify the people. It didn’t work.

The queen’s counsel, meanwhile, met in the Palais-Royal to discuss the problem, trying to ignore the sounds of rough singing from the streets below. They laughed, they talked about frivolous things, but not one of them was willing to show what they really felt, what the queen felt—that they were all deeply afraid and had no idea how to solve the problem. Anne, meanwhile, ridiculed the people’s anger and told the court that she was not afraid of the people, that she was certain they would do her no harm.

Later that evening, Retz appeared before the queen as an intermediary for the people. On their behalf, he requested once again that they release Broussel and warned her that if she did not do so, the people would recover him by force. But the queen would not bend and ridiculed the idea, sending the coadjutor of Paris back to the people empty-handed. At that point, many in the court could see that the queen’s inflexibility would likely get them all killed.

It was in the middle of all this that the Pascal family decided that a visit to the country, to Clermont, was a good idea. They were not attending the queen at that time, because it was Étienne’s own class of men who had rebelled. Étienne had returned to Paris after finishing his term of office in Rouen, and when the rioting broke out, his position as a tax judge made him vulnerable to the whims of the mob, though his fellow tax judges were the darlings of the crowd for the moment. But, while the rebellion had been started by men like him, the people had become a force of their own, and their fury could easily turn on the Pascal family as representatives of the system that had held them down for so long. As the riots worsened in the city, Étienne packed his bags once again and, with Blaise and Jacqueline in tow, fled the city for Clermont, their ancestral home. Life at court was not worth this.

As the night deepened, the crowds gradually dispersed and the queen took heart, reassuring herself that there was nothing to fear. She was wrong.

The next day wasn’t much better, nor the day after that. What had started out as a strike by government employees ended as a popular uprising. What no one had the foresight to see, neither the members of the
Parlement nor the members of the royal court, was that this was only the first shot, the prologue to a general revolution a hundred years later that would topple the monarchy and set Europe on fire.

The Paris that the members of the royal court imagined as a city of beauty and pleasure had revealed its truest heart. Among the lower classes, it was a city that yearned for revenge; a blood feud was building between the rich, entombed in their privileges, and the poor, desperate and hungry, and there was no solution for it, no solution other than blood. Meanwhile, the queen kept court as best she could, and in the city, the Parlement met and deliberated about the queen. By the end of the next day, they sent representatives to the queen, who met them without pomp in the little gallery. The chief president promised not to deliberate on taxes until after St. Martin’s Day, but that was the best they could offer. The queen was not happy, for it was not the solution she desired; she could see that this was only a reprieve. Nevertheless, she recognized that the Parlement was seeking a compromise, and so she ordered the release of Broussel. Vengeance would come in its own time.

Once outside the Palais-Royal, the representatives of the Parlement approached the people gathered on the street and told them that they had secured the release of Broussel. Not everyone believed them. Some announced that if this was a deception, the people would storm the Palais-Royal and pillage it, and then throw the foreigner out!

When the rules of civilization crumble, even for a short time, what is left is the mob. The populace takes on a new personality, darker than its everyday personality, driven more by paranoia than by reason, or even by self-interest. Paris did not settle down after Broussel’s return, because the people did not trust the queen, even when she returned their great protector to them. Though their fear was well founded, as it turned out, the driving force of the rebellion was no longer the freedom of Broussel but their mistrust and hatred of the queen. The burghers refused to tear down the barricades and to lay down their arms. The people refused to return to their homes until the Parlement sounded the all-clear. They were all too afraid that the queen meant what she said—that she would avenge herself and her son upon them and their city for their disobedi
ence. Finally, late on the morning of August 28, 1648, with Broussel attending, the assembly published a decree enjoining the people to obey the will of the king and to return to their homes. The decree was passed later that day.