"The Provencial Letters" - читать интересную книгу автора (Pascal Blaise)

1657
THE PROVINCIAL LETTERS
by Blaise Pascal
translated by Thomas M'Crie
LETTER I

Paris, January 23, 1656
SIR,
We were entirely mistaken. It was only yesterday that I was
undeceived. Until that time I had laboured under the impression that
the disputes in the Sorbonne were vastly important, and deeply
affected the interests of religion. The frequent convocations of an
assembly so illustrious as that of the Theological Faculty of Paris,
attended by so many extraordinary and unprecedented circumstances, led
one to form such high expectations that it was impossible to help
coming to the conclusion that the subject was most extraordinary.
You will be greatly surprised, however, when you learn from the
following account the issue of this grand demonstration, which, having
made myself perfectly master of the subject, I shall be able to tell
you in very few words.
Two questions, then, were brought under examination; the one a
question of fact, the other a question of right.
The question of fact consisted in ascertaining whether M.
Arnauld was guilty of presumption, for having asserted in his second
letter that he had carefully perused the book of Jansenius, and that
he had not discovered the propositions condemned by the late pope; but
that, nevertheless, as he condemned these propositions wherever they
might occur, he condemned them in Jansenius, if they were really
contained in that work.
The question here was, if he could, without presumption, entertain
a doubt that these propositions were in Jansenius, after the bishops
had declared that they were.
The matter having been brought before the Sorbonne, seventy-one
doctors undertook his defence, maintaining that the only reply he
could possibly give to the demands made upon him in so many
publications, calling on him to say if he held that these propositions
were in that book, was that he had not been able to find them, but
that if they were in the book, he condemned them in the book.
Some even went a step farther and protested that, after all the
search they had made into the book, they had never stumbled upon these
propositions, and that they had, on the contrary, found sentiments
entirely at variance with them. They then earnestly begged that, if
any doctor present had discovered them, he would have the goodness
to point them out; adding that what was so easy could not reasonably
be refused, as this would be the surest way to silence the whole of
them, M. Arnauld included; but this proposal has been uniformly
declined. So much for the one side.
On the other side are eighty secular doctors and some forty
mendicant friars, who have condemned M. Arnauld's proposition, without
choosing to examine whether he has spoken truly or falsely- who, in