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- Herausgeber: IVP Academic
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
Blaise Pascal, the seventeenth-century French philosopher and scientist, is perhaps best known for his "wager," an argument about the existence of God. But there was much more to Pascal and his brilliance. In this accessible and well-documented study, philosopher Douglas Groothuis introduces readers to Pascal's life as well as the breadth of his intellectual pursuits, including his contributions to mathematics, science, ethics, and theology. Groothuis overviews the key points of Pascal's Pensées, which captures his thoughts about God, humanity, and Jesus Christ. Readers will also explore Pascal's views on a range of topics, including culture, politics, Islam, and miracles. Often quoted and often misunderstood, Pascal is a complex figure whose writings have charmed, puzzled, and inspired readers across the centuries. With guidance from a leading Christian thinker and longtime student of Pascal, Beyond the Wager takes you on a journey to discover the riches Pascal has to offer today.
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It is fitting to dedicate this book to Blaise Pascal, whose Christian brilliance has challenged, instructed, inspired, and directed me ever since I first read his work in 1977 in the Great Books edition my mother had purchased years before. I have probably referred to and quoted his work more than any other author, certainly more than any other historic philosopher.
Contents
Preface
A SMALL BOOK ON A GREAT THINKER is a tall order. In Blaise Pascal one discovers a brilliant intellect who combined scientific and philosophical acumen with an often lucid, gripping, and memorable style.1 Pascal addressed matters of ultimate concern with great urgency, cogency, and even humor. Although much of his work was left unfinished at his early death at age thirty-nine in 1662, the literary remnants have charmed, puzzled, inspired, and infuriated scores of readers over the centuries on a wide variety of subjects.
There is one important note on documentation. All quotes from Pensées (or Thoughts) are referenced by two numbers in parentheses after the quote. The first number refers to the newer Lafuma enumeration of Pascal’s fragments used in the Penguin edition (1966), translated by Alban Krailsheimer. The second number refers to the older Brunschvicg ordering of fragments used in the Harvard Classics and Great Books editions. I also give the page number reference to the most recent Penguin edition. Some editions of Pensées give the Sellier organizational scheme along with the Lafuma and provide a concordance, but I have not done so.2
This book is a revision and expansion of On Pascal, published in 2003.3 My gratitude to my late wife, Rebecca Merrill Groothuis (1954–2018), continues, since her editorial contribution to On Pascal was considerable. Becky never warmed to Pascal as I did, but if they have conversed in heaven, that must have changed.
Every chapter of this book has been revised, updated, and expanded (some more than others). There are four new chapters: “Jesus Christ: Miracles and Prophecy,” “The Excellence of Christ,” “Christianity, Muhammad, and the Jews,” and “Pascal’s Critique of Culture and Politics.” The appendix, an imagined dialogue between Pascal and Descartes, is also new. My hope is that my reader will derive a greater sense of the greatness of Pascal and that in so doing he or she will exult in the intellectual and existential richness of the Christian faith and be grateful to God for the life of this incomparable polymath.
Blaise Pascal: Known and Unknown
SCIENTIST, INVENTOR, PHILOSOPHER, MYSTIC, and theologian, Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) is more often quoted (or misquoted) than understood. Strangely, he is both well-known and largely unknown. Although he may appear in books of famous quotations more frequently than other philosophers, histories of philosophy often omit any reference to him,1 and anthologies typically feature only his famous wager fragment, in which he recommends betting on God’s existence in view of the costs and benefits involved. Consequently, some of the most invigorating and vexing of his ideas are hidden.
Many know that the computer language “Pascal” is named after the man who invented the first calculator, but few know of his revolutionary philosophy of science, his other scientific achievements, his probing reflections on ethics, his apologetic for Christianity, or his piercing reflections on the enigmas of human nature. He has been rejected as a misanthrope (Voltaire) and hailed as a universal genius by many, myself included. Few philosophers, outside Augustine and Kierkegaard, have had their writings mined for Christian devotional reading, but one can read Daily Readings with Blaise Pascal.2
Despite his notability and ongoing influence, some have taken Pascal to be an irrationalist who pitted faith against reason, a misanthrope who deemed humans to be vile and worthless, and one who in later life abandoned and condemned the scientific pursuits in which he once excelled. The truth, however, is much more complex—and much more interesting and rewarding. I hope this volume will stimulate many readers to join the ongoing conversation with this French polymath as he muses over God, the uniqueness of Christianity, the paradoxes of the human condition, and the powers and limits of science, morality, the meaning of life, and spirituality.
Whatever we make of Pascal, few who know anything about him will doubt his brilliance as a mathematician, scientist, and prose stylist. I will argue he was a brilliant philosopher as well. His intellectual excellence was not vagabond, as was Nietzsche’s. Nor was it rooted in the ego that craves a philosophy worthy of one’s own name, as was Rousseau’s. No, Pascal’s brilliance was a Christian brilliance.
THE HEART OF PASCAL
Pascal’s most enduring work, Pensées, is a collection of posthumously published fragments that Pascal had intended to become part of a book defending the Christian religion. It was proposed to be a thorough apologetic. These fragments have been assembled in several arrangements, none of which provides a clearly linear or systematic development of his viewpoints. Therefore, some approach Pascal with a smorgasbord sensibility. Various memorable and arresting aphorisms and epigrams are snatched up, pondered, and even savored, but often at the expense of knowing what they mean or how they fit into the larger puzzle of Pascal’s philosophy. Consider this curiously luminous sentence: “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways” (423/277).3 Scores have been entranced by the poetic and paradoxical ring of this sentence. But what did Pascal mean by it?
Some have taken “reasons of the heart” to refer to an irrational, emotional, or otherwise arbitrary preference or orientation. If so, so much the worse for Pascal. If “reasons of the heart” are bereft of rational justification, then they cannot be subject to logical evaluation. They would be either nonrational (such as a sneeze or wheeze) or irrational (such as believing in unicorns or centaurs). This is no position for a philosopher to take. Or did Pascal have something very different in mind—something more subtle, profound, and complex? Could the same man who amazed all of Europe with his mathematical and scientific abilities disengage the head entirely for “reasons of the heart”? We will explore this later in the book.
Many think that Pascal was a fideist: one who divorces faith and reason and finds no rational support for religious belief. One might claim that in matters of mathematical calculation and scientific experimentation Pascal employed reason and observation, but in the realm of religion, he took another course. Some of his statements—taken by themselves and out of context—can indeed be read in this way. “It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by reason” (424/278).4
For Pascal, belief in God, the church, and the Christian Scriptures meant far more than assenting to the conclusion of a complex argument; faith involved submitting the core of one’s being to a supernatural being who calls one into a transformational encounter and an ongoing engagement. On the other hand, Pascal, in the last few years of his life, proposed to write a reasoned defense of the Christian religion (Apology for the Christian Religion), which would win over the skeptics and unbelievers of his day to Christian commitment. One of the fragments from that intended work was so bold as to claim, “One of the ways in which the damned will be confounded is that they will see themselves condemned by their own reason, by which they claimed to condemn the Christian religion” (175/563).5
When Pascal laid out the strategy for this defense of Christianity, he did not dispense with reason as a tool for commending faith; he did not lay aside his prodigious intellectual skills by abandoning rational argumentation. Consider his program for his proposed apology.
Order. Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it may be true. The cure for this is to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect. Next make it attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then show that it is. Worthy of reverence because it really understands human nature. Attractive because it promises true good. (12/187)6
Some of Pascal’s most memorable and oft-repeated sayings concern the strangeness and wonder of the human condition. But these were never offered as snippets of wisdom without purpose. They fit integrally into Pascal’s claim that Christianity is “worthy of reverence because it really understands human nature.” Pascal applied his considerable philosophical and rhetorical skills to that end, relying on the biblical account of human nature as his guide.
WAS PASCAL A PHILOSOPHER?
Pascal’s essentially religious or theological outlook has led some commentators to exclude his work from that of philosophy proper or to judge his work as poor philosophy. Some have argued that the title “philosopher” should be used to designate only those who speculate widely and systematically, and who appeal only to human reason apart from any consideration of divine revelation or awareness of a religious mission. But this prejudices the case against the entire stream of influential religious thinkers who have pondered reality deeply and logically in light of their spiritual convictions. It also prejudges the case against less systematic and nonreligious thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Any definition of philosophy that excludes in principle Augustine, Anselm, Kierkegaard, or Martin Buber—passionate religious believers as well as earnest, vigilant thinkers—is surely defective and should be discarded.
Nevertheless, Pascal did not approach philosophy as a vocation. His renown in his day came from his genius as mathematician, physicist, and inventor. His religious writings concerned theological disputes (with the Jesuits over morality) and apologetics (the defense of the Christian faith as objectively true and rationally credible). Nevertheless, there was no little philosophizing in Pascal’s writings, especially throughout Pensées. Although he did not develop a systematic philosophy (as did Descartes, for example), it is unfair to rank him as merely a minor philosopher. In Pascal, one finds a developed philosophy of religion and philosophy of science. His thoughts are too large and penetrating for dismissing him as a non-philosopher or as a minor one.7
Since Pascal did not leave us with a final systematic statement of his philosophy, we must reconstruct his views from a set of published polemical letters on theology (The Provincial Letters), personal correspondence, several works on science, some scattered essays, and Pensées. Although many have wondered what sort of finished work of philosophy Pascal would have left us, the lack of a well-organized, detailed philosophy affords the earnest reader some advantages.
As they stand, the many absorbing and arresting fragments of the Pensées furnish us with raw materials for an intellectual adventure concerning our uneasy place in an often-perplexing cosmos, self, and culture. Unlike the more methodical philosophers, such as Descartes, Pascal in many cases does not finish a line of thought for us. Instead, he initiates an intellectual pursuit that we are left to follow up on—or ignore. Some of the fragments of Pensées are not arguments at all but evocative parables meant to trigger a new kind of awareness.
Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of the others; those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows, and looking at each other with grief and despair await their turn. This is an image of the human condition. (434/199)8
Discerning the meaning of passages such as this in light of Pascal’s other writings requires an active and imaginative engagement of one’s philosophical prowess. This fragment was meant to spark a fear of death that would be conducive to truth seeking and would be a strike against indifference. A pattern can be found by thoughtfully assembling the varied fragments; although the search is not simple, it is, however, supremely rewarding.
Pascal entered deeply into human experience and left little that is distinctly human unobserved or unexamined. That is one reason we often find ourselves in his ruminations. He did not paint the human condition in lifeless, predictable, or untroubled hues. His portrait was disturbingly lifelike and vividly articulated across the full spectrum of humanity. There is a poetic and authentic quality to much of his writing; it is not detached, speculative, or pedantic.
WAS PASCAL AN EXISTENTIALIST?
Pascal’s emphasis on the lived experience of Christian faith and its pertinence to the individual believer has inclined some to classify him as an early existentialist, even as a precursor to Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855), the prolific Danish Christian writer and “father of existentialism.”9 Although we do find some existentialist themes in Pascal—the vexing nature of existence, anxiety, the follies of culture, distrust of impersonal and abstract systems of thought, and a rejection of traditional proofs for God’s existence—he is better studied in his own right than pigeonholed by a term only coined in the mid-twentieth century to describe quite different kinds of thinkers. None of the existentialists, for example, were accomplished scientists (many pitted their philosophies against science), nor did any develop a philosophy of science that was theologically informed. Pascal regarded reason more highly than most existentialists, although he highlighted the effects of sin on human thought. In any event, we should let Pascal speak in his own genuine voice, whatever loose affinities he may have had with existentialism.10
THE WAGER ON GOD
Pascal’s famed wager argument that has probably done the most to obscure and overshadow other crucial aspects of his reflections and provocations. Those who know little about Pascal have usually heard of his claim that one would be better off if one were to believe in God even if God does not exist than if one were to disbelieve in God if God does exist. Pascal’s essential insight is found in a shorter fragment from Pensées: “I should be much more afraid of being mistaken and then finding out that Christianity is true than of being mistaken in believing it to be true” (387/241).11
This fascinating argument, closely connected to his investigation of probability theory, has perhaps received more philosophical attention in recent years than any other aspect of Pascal’s writings. Yet these discussions are usually divorced from key elements of Pascal’s overall approach to religious belief, thus giving a distorted picture of the role the wager plays in Pascal’s thought. Until recently, most academic articles ridiculed the wager. However, contemporary philosophers have been finding more charitable and credible ways to defend it or a revised form of it. It is a puzzling, easily misunderstood, but intellectually fertile piece of philosophical reasoning, as we will see.12
CAUGHT BETWEEN TWO AGES
One fruitful way to disclose the meaning, significance, and ongoing importance of Pascal—and to move beyond ignorance and clichés—is to conceive of him as a thinker caught between two ages. He was one of the first modern Christian intellectuals who was neither medieval nor a figure of the Enlightenment.13 Despite his strong sympathies with Jansenism, an Augustinian reform movement within Catholicism, he was a loyal son of the Catholic Church and did not want to adjust its theology to the spirit of the times. Yet because he lived after the Reformation—an event that dislodged the papacy’s medieval hegemony over Europe and divided Christendom theologically and politically—he could not assume or address a unified body of Christians. Because of his bitter disputes with the Jesuits, recorded in his Provincial Letters (Lettres Provinciales), he was sometimes accused of having sympathies with Protestants, a claim he vehemently and rightly denied.
It was Pascal—the physicist, mathematician, inventor, and philosopher of science—who also helped instigate the scientific revolution, which would begin to challenge many of the received truths of Christian Europe. Descartes reconceptualized nature as a grand mechanism, thus driving a wedge between mind (or spirit) and body and bringing into question the traditional accounts of nature and its relationship to its creator. If the universe is a vast machine, could it run on its own? How could God relate to it? Pascal endorsed much of the new Cartesian picture, but unlike his fellow Frenchman, he was as passionate about his religious convictions as he was about his scientific pursuits. In later life, Pascal would warn of “those who probe science too deeply. Descartes” (553/76; see also 23/67).14
Besides charting a new, but theistic, conception of nature with respect to science, Pascal also broke from the medieval conception of natural theology, by which philosophers attempted to prove logically God’s existence through logical premises and evidence derived from the natural world apart from biblical revelation. Pascal dispensed with these theistic arguments for several reasons, although he did advance another kind of philosophical apologetic in Pensées.
Before we outline the basic lineaments of Pascal’s philosophy and move beyond the many stereotypes based on ignorance, we need to learn more about this remarkable man and his fascinating times, a man who, according to Hugh Davidson, has “influenced every generation of reader since his work first appeared, down to the present time.”15
A Short Life of Pascal
Blaise Pascal, the son of A FRENCH governmental official and lawyer, was born into a century of philosophical and scientific genius in Europe, often called (not without warrant) the Age of Reason. At the time of Pascal’s birth on June 19, 1623, in Clermont (now Clermont-Ferrard) in Auvergne, France, René Descartes (1596–1650) was in his midtwenties. Descartes was then working on his revolutionary philosophical treatise, The Rules for the Direction of the Mind, while traveling through Europe in order, he claimed, to discover truth.
Scientist Isaac Newton (1642–1727) and philosopher Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716) would be born not long after and would go on to develop several of Pascal’s mathematical insights. Galileo Galilei (1564–1642) began writing his seminal Dialogue on the Two Principal World Systems the year of Pascal’s birth. The seventeenth century was also that of the Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677), who would take the rationalistic Cartesian method of philosophizing to the extreme in his deductive and geometrically oriented works. Voltaire (1694–1778), the French skeptic and a critic of Pascal, was born near the end of this century of intellectual discovery and controversy.
Pascal made his mark on this great century—and beyond it to our day—although he never held an academic or governmental position, never went to college, and was in ill health most of his short life. His devout mother died in 1626, leaving young Blaise and his two living sisters—one younger (Jacqueline) and one older (Gilberte)—to be raised by his father, Étienne. (The first daughter had died in infancy.) Étienne was a Latinist, an excellent mathematician, and had a keen interest in natural science. Étienne was, and wanted his son to become, what was known in seventeenth-century France as an honnête homme (“honest man”): an aristocratic man of culture, civility, self-sufficiency, and discernment.
HOW TO EDUCATE A GENIUS
After his wife’s death, the elder Pascal took an early retirement and moved his family to Paris in 1631 in order to participate in its exemplary intellectual culture. Étienne broke with tradition and educated his sickly and high-strung son entirely at home, as he did his daughters. In our terms, he was a stay-at-home father and a homeschooler. His teaching emphasized problem-solving rather than offering material to memorize. This instilled in Blaise a sense of curiosity and adventure in learning. Going against the educational tradition of his day, Étienne began Blaise’s education exclusively with Latin and Greek and postponed his instruction in mathematics.
However, Étienne did speak briefly to the inquisitive Blaise about the basic nature of mathematics. This was enough to shift the youngster’s mind into high gear. Sister Gilberte recounts that her father discovered his untaught twelve-year-old son working out Euclid’s geometry to the thirty-second proposition. Whether strictly factual or a bit exaggerated, the account illustrates Pascal’s prodigious and precocious propensities in mathematics. As Woodgate touchingly put it, young Blaise was “sometimes excited beyond control, since mathematics were to him already what notes are to musicians or paints are to the artist.”1
His father’s method of instruction, coupled with his own genius, fostered in Pascal a great confidence in his abilities, as well as intellectual bravado. He was always the smartest one in the room, even when Descartes was there. This cockiness, while serving him well in in the exciting and competitive world of science, would need to be tamed—even crucified—in his later religious endeavors, which become quite ascetic near the end of his life.
After Blaise’s display of mathematical aptitude, Étienne wisely lifted the ban and formally acquainted his son with Euclid. Not long after, father and son began to attend the prestigious weekly mathematical meetings of Father Marin Mersenne (1588–1648), a friend of Descartes. French high society was quite taken with natural philosophy (which comprised what we now call science and philosophy), and some of its celebrities were superb mathematicians. While contemporary American culture celebrates entrepreneurs and entertainers, the life of the mind was central to Parisians in Pascal’s youth. Young Blaise thrived in this heady and intellectually challenging ambiance and elicited no little praise—and probably some envy—for his advanced and unusual abilities.
THE MATURING SCIENTIST
In 1637, after raising the ire of the powerful Cardinal Richelieu in a governmental dispute, Étienne fled Paris and returned to Auvergne for a time. Shortly thereafter, Blaise’s younger sister Jacqueline, who was talented in poetry and acting, performed before Richelieu in such a winsome manner as to win back some favor for the Pascal family. Étienne was then commissioned to collect taxes at Rouen, a city recently troubled by civil strife over taxation. The recent unrest made being a civil servant a tough assignment. It was there that Pascal, while still a teenager, published in 1640 his first major work, Essay on Conic Sections (Essai pour les coniques), a small treatise on projective geometry. In 1642, Pascal invented and supervised the arduous construction of the first adding machine for the purpose of helping his father with the onerous task of calculating taxes. Upon the Pascal family’s return to Paris in 1648, Pascal again accompanied his father to some of the weekly meetings of noteworthy scientists, which they had previously frequented.
From about 1646 until 1651 Pascal designed groundbreaking experiments related to atmospheric pressures and the existence of vacuums and engaged in other significant scientific pursuits. On September 23 and 24, 1647, Pascal was visited by the illustrious Descartes, who admired Pascal’s adding machine but disputed his claim that nature did not abhor a vacuum. Descartes may also have made medical recommendations to the ailing younger scientist. This was likely their only personal encounter, but Descartes’s reasoning on a variety of subjects could not be ignored by Pascal—or any other thinking European.
SPIRITUAL DISCOVERY: FIRST CONVERSION
An injured leg initiated a spiritual turning point for the Pascal family in 1646. After wounding his thigh from slipping on ice, Étienne was attended for three months by two young brothers who were amateur bonesetters. More important, they were influenced by Jansenism, an Augustinian reform movement within Catholicism, and had been converted from debauched lives of dueling and womanizing. As devout Catholics, the Pascals were impressed by the sincerity, earnestness, and practicality of the young men’s faith. That faith emphasized a deep prayer life, a cognizance of human sinfulness, and the need for God’s grace in salvation. Jansenism also rejected a mechanical reliance on religious ceremony or human merit as a means of salvation. This spirituality particularly influenced Blaise and Jacqueline. She eventually became a Jansenist nun at the abbey of Port-Royal des Champes, a country outpost of the Port-Royal abbey just outside Paris.
These men gave Pascal the spiritual works of Cornelius Jansen, the father of Jansenism; Saint-Cyran, the spiritual director of Port-Royal; and Antoine Arnauld, a philosopher and theologian. These writings all affected him deeply. Little did Pascal know that these humble and unassuming servants had introduced him to a movement that eventually would enlist his aid in their bitter and dangerous controversies with the Jesuit establishment and even with the pope himself. This exposure to a more serious faith led to what many call Pascal’s “first conversion,” although he was not irreligious before this time.
THEOLOGICAL CONTROVERSIES AND SICKNESS
By 1647, Pascal’s physical condition deteriorated. Sister Jacqueline writes of his terrible headaches, indigestion, and inability to swallow cool liquids. His medicine had to be taken heated, drop by drop. “All this resulted in a condition painful in the extreme, though my brother never uttered a word of complaint.”2 After a serious illness in the summer 1647, his physicians recommended that he avoid undue stress and cease his concentrated intellectual endeavors. Instead, the driven scientist and inventor should seek some diversion. Reluctantly, he acquiesced, “believing himself to be obliged to do everything possible to restore his health and imagining that upright diversions could not but help promote it. So it was that he turned for solace to the world.”3 For Pascal, this meant tennis, hunting, dancing, theatre, and especially gambling. Some of the most poignant and true-to-life fragments in the Pensées take up the follies and deceptions of diversion. “If our condition were truly happy we should not need to divert ourselves from thinking about it” (70/165).4
These activities did not have the desired long-term physical effects, although Pascal did socialize with some vigor. He began to partake of Paris’s high society with several less-than-pious friends, who enjoyed gambling, socializing, and worldly enterprise. These characters sometimes appear as a focus of concern in the Pensées. One companion, Damien Mitten, is mentioned by name several times. Pascal initially got on quite well in these environs and was the darling of the royal court, given his penchant for enchanting conversation, a prized art in that day. Pascal was hardly dissolute during this time; he engaged in much scientific endeavor (despite the doctor’s warnings against it) and began to attend the abbey of Port-Royal near Paris with Jacqueline to hear Jansenist preaching. Jacqueline had resolved to become a nun, but her father’s opposition prohibited this until his death in 1651.
The elder Pascal’s death was deeply felt by Blaise, as it was by the rest of his close-knit family. It occasioned a long, serious, and theologically rich letter by Pascal in which he sounds some themes that play a major role in his later philosophical and theological writings. “We should seek consolation in our ills, not in ourselves, not in men, not in any thing that is created; but in God.” The senior Pascal’s death, his son counsels, should not be regarded as the result of chance, “but as a result indispensable, inevitable, just, holy, useful to the good of the Church, and to the exaltation of the name and the greatness of God, of a decree of his providence conceived from all eternity.”5
Pascal claims that “it is certain that Socrates and Seneca have nothing consolatory on such an occasion as this,” since they take death to be natural and not due to sin. “There is no consolation, but in truth alone.”6 The crux for Pascal is this: “Without Jesus Christ [death] is horrible, detestable, the horror of nature. In Jesus Christ it is altogether different; it is benignant, holy, the joy of the faithful.”7 Despite the letter’s sobriety, Pascal’s full dedication to Christianity would not come until another sorrow brought his spiritual devotion into question. Echoing Augustine, Pascal wrote: “God has created man with two loves, the one for God, the other for himself; but with this law, that the love for God shall be infinite, that is, without any other limits than God himself; and that the love of self shall be finite and relating to God.”8
Although he had initially agreed with Jacqueline’s decision to become a nun at Port-Royal, Pascal demurred after his father’s death, thus causing a painful rift with his beloved and devout sister. Pascal may have objected because he feared the loss of his sister’s company and the loss of finances that would result from her donating her share of their inheritance to Port-Royal as her dowry.
Nevertheless, Jacqueline was resolute. After a meeting with the formidable head of the abbey, Mère Angélique Arnauld, Pascal relented. He attended the ceremony of his sister’s final vows as a novice in May of 1652, but not with rejoicing.
Despite Pascal’s popularity and growing renown in French high society, the experiment with worldliness as a cure for illness was failing. He was not a healthy man, despite his notoriety. Pascal was restless and lacked the financial security he desired. He then began to visit Jacqueline often, speaking to her through the grill, as was required of sequestered nuns at Port-Royal des Champes. After one of his visits, Jacqueline wrote to her sister that her brother was weary with the world; however, he was not yet ready to turn wholeheartedly to God, which distressed her considerably.
FIRE: THE SECOND CONVERSION
The next pivotal event in Pascal’s life was only unveiled after his death in 1662. To our knowledge, he did not mention it to a soul. Among Pascal’s personal effects was found a jacket that contained a piece of paper and a parchment sown into the inner lining. Apparently, Pascal had transferred these materials to every new jacket he acquired until his death. He may have carried it with him constantly next to his heart. Inscribed on the paper was a terse and poetic account of an experience dated November 23, 1654. The paper seems to be the original record of the event. The manner of writing suggests it was written quickly to record accurately the significance of what is described. The parchment appears to be a copy of the original account, with some additions and variations. I will quote from the parchment. This account, referred to as “the Memorial,” is often described as “the night of fire.” After introducing the religious significance of the day, Pascal writes,
From about half past ten in the evening until half past mid-night.
Fire
“God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob,” not of
philosophers and scholars.
Certainty, certainty, heartfelt joy, peace
God of Jesus Christ
God of Jesus Christ
My God and your God.
“Thy God shall be my God.”
The world forgotten, and everything except God
He can only be found by the ways taught in the Gospels
Greatness of the human soul.
“Oh righteous Father, the world had not known thee, but I
have known thee”
Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.
I have cut myself off from him
They have forsaken me, the foundation of living waters.
“My God wilt thou forsake me?”
Let me not be cut off from him for ever!
“And this is life eternal, that they might know thee, the only
true God, and Jesus Christ whom thou has sent”
Jesus Christ.
Jesus Christ.
I have cut myself off from him, shunned him, denied him,
crucified him.
Let me never be cut off from him!
He can only be kept by the ways taught in the Gospel.
Sweet and total renunciation.
Total submission to Jesus Christ and my director
Everlasting joy in return for one day’s effort on earth.
I will not forget thy word. Amen.9
Pascal employs staccato statements, several of which are repeated, interspersed with biblical quotations or allusions. The now famous Memorial was not meant for publication. It bears testimony to a transformational event in which Pascal apprehends the holy and joyous fire of the living God, not the cold abstractions of mere philosophy or scholarship. The revelation also discloses both Pascal’s sense of estrangement and his reconciliation to God—as well as his passion to “never be cut off from him.” A new consecration emerges, a “total submission to Jesus Christ” and a pledge to honor Scripture (“I will not forget thy word,” taken from Ps 119:16).
This transcript confesses that (1) God is the living God, not a dead abstraction; (2) God is revealed for salvation only through Jesus Christ; (3) Pascal is totally absorbed in God’s reality and the world is temporally forgotten; and (4) Pascal responds with tearful joy and a resolution to remain true to the God he encountered.
The statement concerning “submission to . . . my director” is not included in the paper statement, and was probably added to the parchment version. Its significance should not be missed. Pascal had been a proud, ambitious, and celebrated man as well as an acclaimed prodigy and genius. He had initially opposed Jacqueline’s admission to Port-Royal des Champes. Now he himself would go on retreats and submit to a spiritual director at Port-Royal, although he would not become a full-fledged solitary there. Pascal’s “fire” experience may have been behind his pithy exclamation, “What a long way it is between knowing God and loving him” (377/280).10
Pascal’s “second conversion” would not spell the end of his scientific endeavors. However, scientific discovery would no longer be his ruling passion. He resolved to champion the cause of the Jansenists against their Jesuit antagonists in a series of letters written under a pseudonym. The Provincial Letters became a classic of polemical literature and helped turn public acceptance toward the reform movement, although it was a short-lived victory.
More importantly, the religiously renewed Pascal began to compose a defense of the Christian religion, aimed at the kind of freethinkers and other unbelievers with whom he had associated during the worldly period. But he either gave up on the project or, more probably, died before it could be completed. Only in the last five years of his life did he begin to write down his thoughts on the subject, lest he forget them due to his declining health. What remains of these notes to himself, the Pensées, has been eminently influential since its first posthumous publication in 1669.
FINAL SUFFERING, EXTREMITY, AND SERVICE
Eventually, Pascal withdrew from the controversy over Port-Royal and Jansenism, but not without a fight. The tide had turned against them, and there was little left to do. The movement was crushed by the church. Henceforth, Pascal pursued a life of voluntary poverty, prayer, and service to the poor. He refused to use servants or eat seasoned foods, gave away most of his possessions, including all of his books except the Bible, Saint Augustine’s Confessions, and a few others. His asceticism could be extreme. He would secretly push a spiked iron belt into his flesh when he found himself enjoying conversations. He scolded his sister Gilberte for caressing her small children and denounced the idea that her fifteen-year-old daughter should be married to a wealthy suitor, since marriage was entirely unworthy of a spiritual person. Pascal prevailed; she never married. He wrote that no one should love him or be attached to him (396/471).11 Despite this religious zeal, Pascal would be hard-pressed to find biblical support for his extreme asceticism (see Col 2:16-23; 1 Tim 4:1-5).
But Pascal did not renounce helping others. He took the poor into his home. In the last year of his life, he designed the first omnibus, or public transport, to serve the poor of Paris, and established a company to oversee its execution. This was the same man who a few years earlier dashed about Paris in his fine carriage. He prepared his will with ample provision for the poor. He wrote, “I love poverty because he [Jesus Christ] loved it. I love wealth because it affords me the means of helping the needy. I keep faith with everyone” (931/550).12
Despite his controversies with the Catholic authorities, Pascal left this world with the blessings of the church. He died shortly after receiving extreme unction and taking the Eucharist with tears. His last words on August 19, 1662, were, “May God never forsake me.” He was thirty-nine years and two months old. An autopsy revealed a profoundly diseased body. According to his niece, who gave a surprisingly detailed report, his stomach had withered away, and his intestines were gangrenous. There were several abnormalities of the brain as well.
“Man,” Pascal wrote, is “only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed” (200/347).13 Pascal himself was a striking example of this paradoxical identity: weak body, strong mind, and—especially toward the end—a large heart for the poor of Paris.
Pascal’s funeral was attended by a throng of people of all stripes—family members, friends, scientific colleagues, worldly companions, writers, converts, and, hiding in the back, several members of Port-Royal, who risked arrest by attending. Most of the rear of the church was packed with the sort of poor folks for whom Pascal had offered service in his final years of suffering. But, of course, Pascal’s influence would not end at his funeral. We hear his voice ringing out today.14
Scientist and Philosopher of Science
BLAISE PASCAL’S RENOWN IN HIS DAY came chiefly through his achievements in science and mathematics. He is now better known for his comment popularly referred to as “the God-shaped vacuum” in each of us than he is recognized as the defender of the existence of the vacuum in nature. He is known more for his “wager” argument than for his formal theorizing about probabilities. Nevertheless, a survey of Pascal’s scientific endeavors and his reflections on science sheds light on the relationship of science and religion and illuminates other aspects of his thought. Although Pascal became increasingly devoted to religion in later life, he did not disparage scientific pursuits if they were practiced in the proper spirit—some critics to the contrary.
Pascal’s instruction by his father cultivated independent investigation and discovery. In 1640, Pascal got his first taste of notoriety when his Essay on Conic Sections (Essai pour les coniques) was published. This was an illustrated treatise that treated conics as plane sections through a circular cone and expanded the innovative projective geometry of Gérard Desargues (1593–1662). By this time, Pascal had also proposed a theory that came to be called Pascal’s Theorem of the Mystic Hexagon.1 Despite the appreciation he received from many scientists at the time, Pascal was snubbed by Descartes, who became something of an intellectual rival, as we will see.2
THE CALCULATOR AND PROBABILITY THEORY
To help his overburdened father assess taxes, Pascal designed and built the first functional calculator.3 He and Étienne had slaved over work that the young Pascal thought could be automated. Today when digital devices are everywhere, we should try to escape our historical myopia and ponder the impact of a calculating machine on Pascal’s contemporaries. Pascal designed a machine to perform functions previously calculated only by the mind. Others had tried to engineer such a category-bending device, but Pascal succeeded as no one previously.
He formulated the notion of the calculating machine in 1642. Two years later a craftsman produced the first working model under Pascal’s direction. Despite its cumbersome nature, this prototype of the computer added, subtracted, multiplied, and divided numbers with as many as eight digits. Pascal worked ardently for approximately a decade on perfecting the machine, after which he devised an advertising strategy to market the labor-saving device. Although fifty such proto-computers were built, Pascal was not destined to be a seventeenth-century Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. Expenses and difficulties in production limited its popularity, much to Pascal’s distress. Nevertheless, in 1645, Pascal sent Queen Christina of Sweden (1626–1689), no mean thinker herself,4 a Pascaline with an accompanying letter, which was not lacking in philosophical commentary. In fact, it speaks of the order of the body and the order of the mind—two of Pascal’s famous three orders. The other is love.
In his letter to Queen Christina, Pascal complained: “I encountered difficulties as great as those that I wished to avoid and to which I was seeking a remedy. I could hand pen and compass but not hammer and nails, and although the workmen knew how to use their skill, that had little idea of the science on which it rests.”5
Nevertheless, they prevailed, and the machine was built. Eight specimens of Pascal’s machine remain today, one owned by IBM, appropriately enough.6 In honor of his achievement, one of the earliest computer languages was named “Pascal” in 1971. In a particularly curmudgeonly remark, Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–1990), who loved Pascal, said that we should forgive him for inventing the first computer.7
Pascal’s work on probability theory began when a friend who gambled challenged Pascal to calculate the equitable portion of stakes to be rewarded to players in a game of chance that was interrupted before its completion. Pascal then corresponded on the matter with Pierre de Fermat, the well-known mathematician, in 1654. The resulting Treatise on the Arithmetical Triangle (Traité du Triangle arithmétique) contained important work in combinatorial analysis. Although we take probability reasoning for granted, during Pascal’s day, it was largely unknown, except in the crudest terms. As mathematician Keith Devlin writes, Pascal’s letter to Fermat “would change human life forever. It set out, for the first time, a method whereby human can predict the future.”8 Before this discovery, “many learned people (including some leading mathematicians) believed that predicting the likelihood of future events was not possible.”9 Today, business, politics, defense, science, engineering, medicine, and dozens of other areas require probability calculations that stem from Pascal’s discoveries.10 The question of probable outcomes with respect to high stakes would also factor into Pascal’s famous wager argument from the Pensées (418/233; see also 577/234).11
THE EXISTENCE OF THE VACUUM
Pascal’s greatest scientific accomplishment was his work on the vacuum. These reflections were also pivotal in the development of an empirically based scientific method. Although it is assumed today that scientific procedures should be grounded in repeatable empirical observation as much as possible, this was not the received view in Pascal’s day. Cosmology was dominated by two very different and antithetical views, both of which, nevertheless, were united in their denial of the existence of a vacuum in nature. The Aristotelian and later medieval notion claimed that nature was a hierarchical plenum or continuum devoid of any gaps. This was sometimes called “the great chain of being.”12 In this qualitatively oriented cosmology, substances were thought to possess esoteric qualities or forms: heaviness makes lead fall faster than a feather, whose defining quality is lightness. Wood burns because it has the form of being combustible, and so on.
A second reason invoked in favor of the maxim that “nature abhors a vacuum” was the newer and revolutionary theory of Descartes. Instead of a qualitative concept of nature, Descartes attempted to explain matter (which he defined as extension) in strictly quantitative terms. Mathematics and mechanics could explain physical phenomena in all its forms without appeal to qualitative terms. This view would simplify and unify the sciences according to physical laws deductively derived according to a priori principles apart from experimentation. Matter was interchangeable with the geometrical points, or space, in which it is located. Matter, understood as extension, is identical with physical space. Therefore, the idea of empty space (or a vacuum) is a contradiction in terms within the Cartesian system. It seemed rational, but did it fit the facts?
Experimentation, for Descartes, might serve to illustrate a rational truth or theory, but it did not have the vital role of producing newly discovered truth about nature. Further, Descartes’s view deemed a vacuum impossible, not just unlikely. If there is nothing between two bodies, they must in fact be in contact; there can be no gap between instances of extension. If a tube contained a vacuum, Descartes postulated, its sides would collapse on each other. Since experiments concerning the vacuum did not yield this result, there is no vacuum. In this sense, Descartes did appeal to empirical factors, but only in a negative way.
