Talk:proximate

In the "Provincial Letters", Pascal discusses at very very great length a scandal where the Society of Jesus used this word to advance bizarre theology, and yet purposefully had no actual definition for it. Eg., they spoke of "the proximate power", which term was meaningless and just a hidden way to justify very strange maxims. But the Letters were originally written in French, and I'm reading a translated version, so I'm not sure how well the word survived translation.