God Owes Us Nothing: A Brief Remark on Pascal's Religion and on the Spirit of Jansenism.

God Owes Us Nothing: A Brief Remark on Pascal's Religion and on the Spirit of Jansenism, by Leszek Kolakowski (Chicago, 238 pp., $22.50)

Fr. Dulles is the Laurence J. McGinley Professor of Religion and Society at Fordham University and author, most recently, of The Assurance of Things Hoped For: A Theology of Christian Faith (Oxford).

THIS book falls into two parts, the first dealing with seventeenth-century Jansenism, the second with Blaise Pascal. The two parts are connected inasmuch as Pascal was a Jansenist, but Kolakowski's treatment of Pascal deals mainly with the Pensees, a work that he finds free of Jansenist theology except in a few details. He regards it as an apology for the Christian religion, not an apology for Jansenius's theology.

The book can be recommended up to a point for two reasons. First, it gives a detailed exegesis of the five condemned propositions of Jansenius and a readable account of his followers in France, notably the Abbe de Saint-Cyran, Antoine Arnauld, and Pierre Nicole. Kolakowski makes the history come alive because he sees how, in the view of the Jansenists, the Jesuits were sanctioning a disastrous attenuation of Christian faith and morals. Kolakowski is not personally attracted to Jansenism, with its utter pessimism about human nature, but as an empathetic historian he enables the reader to look at reality through Jansenist eyes.

The second merit of this book is in its analysis of the apologetics of Pascal. Drawing on his broad knowledge of the corpus of Pascal's writing, Kolakowski is able to shed valuable light on the true meaning of Pascal's famous "wager" and to illuminate some of the more puzzling and paradoxical aphorisms in the Pensees. For this reader Kolakowski clarifies Pascal's empirical - mathematical concept of reason, contrasting it with the metaphysical concept of reason found in Scholastic theologians such as Thomas Aquinas. Unfortunately the author does not take the occasion to show how far the Jansenists, and Pascal in particular, departed from Augustine's concept of reason and from the view that reason could be healed and elevated by grace. Kolakowski in fact gives the impression that Augustine himself was locked into a kind of Jansenistic pessimism about the human condition.

A controversial point in this book is the contention: "There is no doubt that the entire heretical doctrine of Jansenism is faultlessly derived from Augustine's theology." This assertion, and the corollary that in condemning Jansenism the Church condemned Augustine, run counter to a large body of Augustine scholarship. Even if passages can be found in which Augustine seems to support what Jansenius later taught, he moves in a different intellectual universe in which the key terms take on a different meaning. Augustine's conceptions of nature and reason, grace and freedom, are not the same as those professed in Jansenism.

Under the influence of Jansenist authors, Kolakowski repeatedly states that efficacious grace (gratia efficax, which he translates "efficient grace") must be irresistible, in the sense that the recipient lacks the proximate power to refuse it. He maintains that if we were free to resist God's grace, we, rather than God, would determine which graces would be effective.

From this perspective Kolakowski seriously misunderstands the positions of the seventeenth-century Jesuits, to whom he attributes the view that our salvation depends ultimately on ourselves and not on God. In point of fact these theologians all rejected this semi- Pelagian position. They were convinced that the efficacy of grace is itself God's gift. Without documenting his statements from original sources, Kolakowski attributes to the Molinists the views that we can compel God to save us and that we can obtain salvation without loving God, by merely complying with God's external commandments.

The author's charges against the Jesuits are not restricted to the doctrine of grace. Influenced by French Jansenists, he portrays the Jesuits as supporting a theocratic despotism in which the Pope would hold sway over the entire domain of politics. In point of fact the leading Jesuits promoted popular sovereignty and constitutional government. They were sometimes in trouble for opposing the direct power of the papacy over temporal matters.

Kolakowski's assertions about the Jesuit attitude toward science seem to indicate a fixation on the condemnation of Galileo, which was by no means the work of Jesuits alone. He gives no indications regarding Galileo's close relationships with Clavius and the mathematicians of the Roman College, who displayed a keen interest in astronomy.

The critique in this book is not limited to Molinists or Jesuits. Having set up a strict dichotomy between Jansenism and semi-Pelagianism, the author finds himself driven to hold that the Catholic Church, in rejecting the former, embraced the latter heresy. Noting that the recent Catechism of the Catholic Church rejects all five of the condemned propositions of Jansenius, he characterizes the book as semi-Pelagian.

Kolakowski's failure to distinguish between Catholic orthodoxy and semi-Pelagianism stems, in my judgment, from insufficient familiarity with the theology of actual grace. No one trained in that field would translate "gr"ce prochainement suffisante" as "grace sufficient in the future." It is a pity that a thinker of high philosophical competence, with a keen interest in the history of ideas, should have overextended himself in areas where he is clearly not at home.

The basic problem that I have with the book is the assumption that one cannot simultaneously affirm the full dominion of God in conferring grace and the responsible freedom of the creature in accepting it. If this were the case, the only Christian alternatives would indeed be Jansenism (which sacrifices human freedom) and some form of Pelagianism (which curtails God's dominion). But at one point Mr. Kolakowski himself indicates a wiser course. He acknowledges that it is intellectually more fruitful to accept the mystery, affirming both providence and free will, even though we cannot combine both in a consistent theory. That is exactly what the Catholic Church has done in refusing either to endorse or to condemn any of the several theories (including those of the Molinists) that respect both the full sovereignty of God and the freedom of human beings under grace. None of the orthodox theories successfully explains how human freedom can be reconciled with God's full dominion, but neither do they claim to dispel the mystery.