Grace and predestination: is the Augustinian-Jansenist doctrine of efficacious grace orthodox Catholic teaching, or does it collapse into the crypto-Calvinism the bull Unigenitus condemned?

Blaise Pascal, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

Grace is both necessary and sufficient for human good deeds, and it operates irresistibly: from the very beginning, conversion is God's act; the elect can keep the commandments as long as they have the support of grace; their meritorious acts are free, because efficacious grace works by molding the will so that it chooses God without external compulsion.12

The damned perish by their own misdeeds; the predestined are saved by grace alone. Those among the called who die in mortal sin were denied the grace of perseverance — which God was not obliged to give. God owes us nothing. The distinction from Calvinist double predestination is real: the Jansenist position is infralapsarian, predicating predestination on the Fall, not on an absolute divine decree prior to any consideration of sin.345

Sources

  1. "That is," returned I, "all have enough of grace, and all have not enough of it—that is, this grace suffices, though it does not suffice—that is, it is sufficient in name, and insufficient in effect! In good sooth, father, this is particularly subtle doctrine! Have you forgotten, since you retired to the cloister, the meaning attached, in the world you have quitted, to the word sufficient?—don't you remember that…
    The Provincial Letters
  2. And if I admit it, as you do, in the way of maintaining the necessity of efficacious grace, I sin against common sense, and am a blockhead, say the Jesuits. What must I do, thus reduced to the inevitable necessity of being a blockhead, a heretic, or a Jansenist?
    The Provincial Letters
  3. Is it not a pure question of fact, with which heresy has nothing to do? It would be heretical to say that we have not the power of resisting efficacious grace; but would it be so to doubt that Jansenius held that doctrine? Is this a revealed truth? Is it an article of faith which must be believed, on pain of damnation?
    The Provincial Letters
  4. But the great dispute being about the sense of Jansenius, the one party saying that they could see nothing in it inconsistent with the sense of St. Augustine and St. Thomas, and the other party asserting that they saw in it an heretical sense which they would not express.
    The Provincial Letters
  5. We are no longer surprised at the zeal which the popes and some bishops manifested against "the sense of Jansenius." How, indeed, could they be otherwise than zealous against it, believing as they did the declarations of those who publicly affirmed that it was identically the same with that of Calvin?
    The Provincial Letters

Where the argument is made

  • Écrits sur la Grâce (1655–1656, Mesnard critical edition) — the definitive statement of Pascal's theological position
  • Provincial Letters 1–4 on pouvoir prochain
  • Provincial Letter 18 on the formulaire
  • Pensées fr. 824 ('the law obliges us to what it has not given us
  • grace gives us what it obliges us to')

How the argument was received

The Jansenists never succeeded in convincing Rome they were not crypto-Calvinists, and Unigenitus (1713) condemned the movement posthumously. The distinction between Jansenist infralapsarian and Calvinist supralapsarian predestination was and remains technically real; whether it is theologically sufficient to mark the claimed distance from Calvinism is contested within Catholic theology. Mesnard's critical edition of the Écrits establishes the composition in 1655–1656, contemporaneous with the first Provincial Letters; the position it states is unambiguous and is mine. The Pensées offer fewer sentences on grace — the apology addressed the incredulous, not Catholic theologians — but what it contains confirms the position (fr. 824).