Language and Morals in the 17th Century: The Jansenist-Jesuit Controversy

Abstract

Combining an emic and a long term approach, the present article examines an important issue of the history of religious ideas: the controversy on morals held by Jansenists and Jesuits in the 17^th century. With this aim in view, it considers three works of the Port-Royal circle. First, it reflects upon the significance of the campaign of the Provinciales, a series of letters in which Pascal satirizes the moral laxism that some 17^th century Jesuits defended in their writings. It also studies the close link between language and morals in Port-Royal’s Logic and Grammar. This study shows that the open and bitter controversy kept by Jansenists and Jesuits regarding their two conflicting theological, moral and linguistic doctrines, and which ended up at the final defeat of the former, is the historical drama —and the symbol as well— of the substitution of an old order by a new one, and foreshadows the phenomenon known as crisis of modernity.