SOURCE: "The Provincial Letters," in Blaise Pascal: Mathematician, Physicist and Thinker about God, St. Martin's Press, 1995, pp. 85-114.

In the following essay, Adamson analyzes the various structural and stylistic methods Pascal used in the Provincial Letters to attack the Jesuits' beliefs about casuistry.

'If the Provincial Letters were serious, nobody would read them any more', Gide has written.¹ The Letters are in fact profoundly—even, at times, desperately—serious, but Pascal does not become pompously solemn or tediously earnest: he is never boring. Yet to many, if not most, people the subjects he is basically canvassing could rapidly induce boredom! In the first three, or even four, out of eighteen letters, he is concerned with the question of divine grace, a very intangible and metaphysical concept. Is God's grace freely given to all, as the Pelagians and those semi-Pelagians, the Jesuits, maintain? or is it restricted to the...