Determinación del comportamiento de la madurez de la guanábana en

2.3.1 Data from the primary sources

Our investigation begins with a loose collection of papers known as the Écrits sur la grâce. These writings were unpublished as of Pascal’s death, and it seems unclear whether they were ever intended to be published or even necessarily intended to form a single manuscript.24 Found among Pascal’s papers by his nephew, the originals were donated to the library at Saint-Ger- main-de-Prés and destroyed by fire in 1794. Thankfully, a 1779 version of Pascal’s Oeuvres included a partial version of the Écrits sur la grâce, which is what we work with today, uncer- tain about how much of the originals has been permanently lost.

The Écrits sur la grâce are united by their theme—as the title suggests—but the question of grace around which they are united is meant in a rather more technical, theological sense. They are very consciously situated within the defense of Jansenism, and as such are an attempt to differentiate Pascal’s understanding of grace from that advanced by the papal opinion of Cum

occasione. At the same time, intending to remain faithfully Catholic, Pascal is careful to dis-

tinguish his position from that of the Reformers. Taken as a whole, Pascal’s intention is to be faithfully Augustinian,25 and thus faithful to the tradition, while demonstrating that, in fact, “Calvin lacked conformity to Saint Augustine.”26 _{This section will focus quite narrowly on the} way in which Pascal forms this middle ground.

The angle from which Pascal approaches the nature of grace is not only framed by the Jansenist controversy, but is even more specifically focused on a technical question within that debate. That question is about how one interprets the Council of Trent’s insistence “that the command- ments are not impossible for the justified.”27 _{In its sixth session, the council had anathematized} “that rash saying . . . that the observance of the commandments of God is impossible for one that is justified.”28 God does not command impossibilities, the decree continues, and so:

24 _{This brief history of the Écrits sur la grâce is a summary drawn from the critical commentary supplied by}

Michel Le Guern. See POC 2, 1210.

25 _{POC 2, 287ff.} 26 _{POC 2, 292.} 27 _{POC 2, 211.}

28 _{Council of Trent, The canons and decrees of the sacred and oecumenical Council of Trent, ed. and trans. J.}

“the just themselves ought to feel themselves the more obligated to walk in the way of justice, in that, being already freed from sins, but made servants of God, they are able, living soberly, justly, and godly, to proceed onwards through Je- sus Christ, by whom they have had access unto this grace.”29

Pascal wants to affirm this statement, but believes it requires nuance to do so correctly, lest one interpret the council to be advocating a semi-pelagian position. The proposition “‘the com- mandments are possible for the justified’ has two completely different meanings, each distant from the other.”30 The first sense in which the proposition can be understood “is that the justi- fied, considered at one moment of his justification, always has the proximate power to fulfill the commandments in the following moment.”31 This, Pascal argues, is the pelagian interpre- tation, “which the Church has always fought.”32 The second sense in which the proposition can be understood is that “the justified, acting as justified and through un mouvement de charité, can fulfill the commandments in the action that they do by charity.”33

A great deal depends on what Pascal means by the ‘movement of charity,’ or, as we might say in more contemporary language, this ‘movement of love.’ Pascal does not offer an explicit definition, but he does contrast this second possibility—that it is indeed possible to obey com- mandments through a participation in the movement of love—with a Protestant understanding of grace:

The Lutherans formally maintained that the actions of the righteous, even those done by love, are always necessarily sinful, and that concupiscence, which al- ways reigns in this life, so strongly corrupts the effect of love that, no matter how righteous men are and by what movements of love they act, covetousness is always so much a part of them that they not only fail to fulfill the commands, but violate them, and are therefore absolutely incapable of keeping them.34

29 _{Council of Trent, Canons and decrees, 38.} 30 _{POC 2, 211.}

31 _{POC 2, 211.} 32 _{POC 2, 211.} 33 _{POC 2, 211.} 34 _{POC 2, 212.}

This is the middle ground which Pascal hopes to occupy. The “Pelagians maintain that the commandments are always possible for the justified, in the first sense.”35 Meanwhile, “the Lu- therans maintain that the commandments are always impossible, even in the second sense.”36 The Council of Trent, in Pascal’s reading, rejects both positions, albeit while “refusing to sep- arate them.” While this leads to a possible confusion, it also opens up for Pascal the possibility that a Jansenist reading of Trent could play in this middle space.

2.3.2 Observations

As a preliminary observation, Pascal clearly reads the Protestants—perhaps unfairly—as sug- gesting that no action can ever be considered righteous, that all deeds are spoiled by the pres- ence of sin in human nature. In opposition, Pascal advocates for the idea that righteous deeds can be done in a kind of participation with the movement of love. How one understands this movement of love is important but not entirely clear. At minimum, however, it suggests a kind of overflow or outpouring of divine-initiated activity which does not properly belong to the righteous person at any point, and yet is credited to the righteous person to the extent that they join with this work. Hervé Pasqua puts it best when he writes that, “The graced action in the soul does not occur without aide . . . This aide consists in wanting what God wants and seeing how God sees without identifying human will and intelligence with God . . . The union is not fusion.”37

What is perhaps even more intriguing, however, is the distinction Pascal draws with the main line of Catholic thought. He reads into the tradition what we might call a ‘mechanistic’ under- standing of human behavior. The traditional understanding breaks the actions and decisions of the human being down into very discrete moments. Since each moment is independent, the grace imparted to the righteous person at one moment is preparatory. It invades the person’s life at one moment and, in order to be efficacious for future moments, alters the righteous person such that the person is now empowered to choose correctly. The alternative would be a discrete act of God’s grace at each individual moment, a doctrine which would sound plainly Protestant for Pascal. What makes the Catholic position sound semi-pelagian to Pascal is not a sequencing of events, not a suggestion that human effort in any way precedes divine effort. It

35 _{POC 2, 212.}

36 _{POC 2, 212.}

is instead the suggestion that grace must be imparted and then withdraw, thereby properly be- longing to the righteous person in the next moment, freeing them to choose rightly as they turn to meet the flow of oncoming moments. In that sense, the real issue is a notion of human ac- tivity broken into such discrete, independent moments. This contrast is all the stronger when Pascal compares it to the ‘movement of love,’ which suggests a more organic relation of the person to the flow of time. Grace is operative, in Pascal’s view, but not properly imparted, because it continues to be operative in one continuous action across time. It creates—from a Jansenist perspective—neither the absurdity of the Protestant God’s repetitive, staccato initia- tion of grace in discrete times, nor the semi-pelagian problem of grace being deposited in the human life and left for the human’s free use apart from divine effort.

For now, this notion of the organic movement of love in which the righteous person is capable of participating simply serves as an indicator of Pascal’s interests. It presages, in small ways, the argument of the Pensées. Before moving directly into that work, however, we will consider more closely the argument of the Lettres provinciales.