ETHICS nothing more highly than doing good to others and disregarding their own selfinterest, they are always perfectly courteous, gracious and obliging to everyone Moreover, they have complete command over their passions In particular they have mastery over their desires, and over jealousy and envy, because everything they think suYciently valuable to be worth pursuing is such that its acquisition depends solely on themselves (AT XI.448; CSMK I.385) Pascal against the Jesuits Descartes’ ge´ne´reux, tranquil, aloof, and self-suYcient, lives in a diVerent world from the penitents of the casuists, wallowing in a sea of sin and craving advice and absolution from their confessors But by the time of The Passions of the Soul the casuists had brought themselves into great disrepute, which came to a climax with the publication of Pascal’s Lettres Provinciales in 1655 There were three practices commended by casuists which Pascal was not alone in regarding as scandalous: equivocation, probabilism, and the direction of intention We will consider each in turn Traditional Christian teaching strictly forbade lying: Augustine and Aquinas agreed that deliberately stating a falsehood was always sinful It was not always obligatory to utter the whole truth, but even to save the life of an innocent person, one must never tell a lie This doctrine appeared harsh to many in the sixteenth century In the England of Queen Elizabeth it was a capital crime for a priest or Jesuit to enter the country, and Catholic missionaries had to move about secretly, often concealing themselves in hideaways in country mansions If government oYcials raided a house in search of priests, was it lawful for the host to deny that there was a priest in the house? In 1595 the leader of the English Jesuits, Father Henry Garnet, in an anonymous pamphlet entitled A Treatise of Equivocation or Against Lying and Fraudulent Dissimulation, answered this question in the aYrmative The master or mistress of the house should say ‘There is no priest in the house,’ and mean ‘There is no priest in the house about whom anyone is bound to tell you.’ This was not a lie, he argued, because a lie was a case of saying one thing while believing another In this case, the spoken proposition did correspond to the proposition in the mind of the speaker; it was simply that the utterance revealed only part of it But it was common ground 253