theological struggles had as their most famous result the secular philosophies
associated with their retreat at Port-Royal. Jansen died in 1638 as a Louvain
theologian, just as he finished his treatise on Augustine. Casting the Jesuits, as
followers of Molina, in the role of the Pelagians, Jansen repudiated the role of
free will and stressed man’s intrinsic sinfulness and the irresistibility of interior
grace. This was treading on dangerous ground, close to Calvinist predestina-
tion, which was the flash point for so many conflicts; it also provided a rallying
point for Catholic opposition to the power of the Jesuits (Heer, [1953] 1968:
133–134, 194–195). Jansen’s work was immediately banned by the Inquisition
and the pope but acquired a following in France. Antoine Arnauld became
famous in 1643 for his Jansenist arguments. Arnauld accused the Jesuits of
excessive worldliness; they in turn had him expelled from the Sorbonne in
1655.
Arnauld withdrew to Port-Royal in the Parisian countryside, a convent
which had been under the control of Arnauld’s family for 50 years; his older
sister Angelique had been appointed abbess there in 1602, at the age of 11.
His father, too, was a long-term enemy of the Jesuits; as attorney general of
France he had led the legal defense of the University of Paris against them in
1594, a trial culminating in the temporary expulsion of the Jesuits from France.
The lovely estate at Port-Royal now became a retreat for Paris intellectuals.
Pascal went there in 1655, repudiating his worldly life and turning from
mathematics to the defense of religion. Nevertheless, the ties with secular
intellectual life were not broken; Arnauld and Nicole wrote their Port-Royal
Logic in this period, following Cartesian methods. Like the rivals to the Jesuits
that they were, the Port-Royal intellectuals adapted religious institutions to
secular opportunities. The visiting “Solitaires” opened a school outside the
walls of the abbey, which soon propagated its intellectual energy; one of the
pupils whose career it launched was Racine, whose worldliness as a dramatist
in the 1660s and 1670s offended the puritanism of his former teachers.
The philosophical contributions of Pascal were a precipitate of these con-
ditions. For several years he was a roué and a gambler, the latter providing the
materials on which he invented the mathematics of probability. This period
came to an end with an emotional conversion in 1654, whereupon he joined
his family members at Port-Royal. His famous defenses of religion are invest-
ments of a worldly cultural capital. “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces
frightens me”: this is the human dimension of the new scientist’s worldview,
looking outward toward its boundaries (Pensées 206). And Pascal’s famous
wager over the existence of God—a minimax solution of the costs of nonbelief
together with the possible benefits of belief—is scandalously secular in tone.
There is much human pathos in the attacks and retreats, the weariness and
the side-switching of this time. We associate enthusiasm with creativity and
586 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Western Paths