A Thinking Reed: Pascal’s Voice, Yesterday and Today

By Stephen N. Williams

Blaise Pascal (1623-62) was a provocative and important thinker. Both the range and the influence of his work is immense. His Pensees ("Thoughts"), unfinished and composed of fragments, is widely regarded as a classic of Christian apologetics. In this volume, the reader is introduced to this work, with a view to both describing what Pascal says and assessing its present value. After introducing the man and his life, Pascal's views on reason and the heart, and on human wretchedness and greatness, are discussed before asking in a final chapter, "Would you bet on God?" An appendix treats Pascal and modernity. Four hundred years on, Pascal's voice can still be heard. Four hundred years on, we still need to heed it. Pascal does not simply speak from the mind to the mind. He speaks as a person to persons.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Release date: Apr 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666751512

Stephen N. Williams

Stephen N. Williams is honorary professor of theology at Queen’s University, Belfast.

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Preface

Blaise Pascal would have been four hundred years old this year. As it is, he did not make one tenth of that life journey. In a world where anything or anyone good is described as amazing, one hesitates to use that word to describe him, so let us stick to genius. ‘The restlessness of his genius’: two bold words too many, Pascal says in one of his gnomic utterances.¹ Applied to Pascal himself, they are two fitting words, all too apt. Mathematician, physicist, stylist, apologist, the evidence of his extant works and trajectory of his thinking suggests that he could well have turned out to be a theologian of distinction. Theology is a science, but at the same time how many sciences?² By this, we shall see that Pascal certainly did not mean that theology should be conformed to the hard sciences; science is a much looser business here. We can but imagine his potential theological explorations. Rather less speculatively, there is also a case to be made for his distinction as a philosopher too.³

To come down to earth with a bump, and mix metaphors in a way which would have scandalized and soured Pascal, I shall barely be exploring in this book the tip of the iceberg that is the Pascalian corpus, or even giving an indication of its depth and dimensions. My objective is to take a look at his best-known work, the Pensées, try to hear and heed something of his voice there, and muse a little on its contemporary resonances. There is a further restriction: this volume is not a proper study of the Pensées. A proper study would be impossible without reading it in the context of his scientific writings and reflections on intellectual method and the human mind, his ruminations on language, writing and persuasion, and the substance of his religious thought as it unfolds in writings other than the Pensées. Except for occasional allusion to these writings, and saying a little about his Provincial Letters in the first chapter, I do not deal with anything outside the Pensées.

Although I have sought to be attentive to the scholarship, I am not attempting to make a fresh contribution to academic scholarship on Pascal. Evidence of this is that my volume is very footnote-light in that respect. It would have defeated Pascal’s objective in writing the Pensées if books engaging with it could be written only by those who made a lifetime study of it or its author, and this author has not. My modest wish is to communicate something of what Pascal wanted to communicate in the Pensées in the conviction that we rather badly need to hear it. I do not agree with everything that he says, but I believe that neglect of what he had to say in his day, and what he has to say in ours, will greatly impoverish us in both mind and spirit. My volume is designed as a somewhat selective look at a work that has made an enduring contribution to religious thought in the Christian tradition, though the selection is certainly not arbitrary. I hope to capture and comment on what Pascal was about. I assume in the reader no prior knowledge of Pascal.

In preparing this book, a fear that became twin to my original fear of getting Pascal wrong, was the fear of unpardonably domesticating him. I have worried about making him shallow when he is deep, humdrum when he is original. However, in the spirit of Pascal, who liked to muse on contraries, I have also feared the opposite, that of implying that he was original when he was just conventional. I make no apology for quoting him so much. It is sometimes bad form to sprinkle a volume as heavily as I do with quotations from its primary source, but, in this case, I believe it would be worse form to do anything very different. No one would write about Pascal if he were not so quotable, certainly where the Pensées are concerned, and the style he adopts to make his points are essential to their force. And I am afraid that the casualty of this policy is that I have no option but to retain Pascal’s references to man. Still, my objective is to expound and not to parrot. I have also very, very occasionally repeated one of his statements. Their significance often apply in different ways and contexts, and a heady resolution never to quote more than once anything that he said would have meant forfeiting some insight in the cause of some obscure and futile authorial ideology.

If there is one point at which there is no difference between Pascal’s time and ours, it is revealed in his statement: The last thing one discovers in composing a work is what to put first.⁴ I must plead an exception in this instance, if first may generously be extended to include this whole preface. Yet again, my wife, Susan, has lived with another presence in the house—this time, Pascal. Not only am I grateful for her constant and faithful support, I have been increasingly influenced by her thinking over the forty-plus years of our marriage, and a hint of this is dropped in chapter 5. I also want to thank warmly Bishop Graham Tomlin, author of a forthcoming biography on Pascal, who made valuable comments on a first draft of this volume. Over the years, I have grown tired of acknowledgments that such and such a benefactor is not responsible for the faults of a work, which are the author’s own. Well, it is a truth that applies very evidently here, and Pascal would probe the psychology of the matter rather penetratingly if I were to conceal it.

The day on which this manuscript was submitted to the publisher was the day on which one of the finest scholars of his generation, and a fine human being, to boot, retired from his post at Queen’s University, Belfast, after an unusually distinguished career, and clad in an outstanding international reputation. In honor of the occasion and the man, I gladly dedicate this work to him.

1

. Pensées,

637

. See chapter

1

, fn.

1

, for comment on publication and referencing details.

2

. Pensées,

65

. Pascal proceeds: A man is a substance, but if you dissect him, what is he? Head, heart, stomach, veins, each vein, each bit of vein, blood, each humour of blood? Just so, landscape comprehends such things as houses, grass, and ants’ legs, a diverse crowd of things, requiring diverse methods of study.

3

. See Hunter, Pascal the Philosopher, who supports Pascal as a philosopher, but does not rate his theological potential very high.

4

. Pensées,

976

.

1

Something about Pascal

The Road to Controversy

However familiar we are with the fact that some people have more than their fair share of mental gifts, it is hard not to be a tad overawed by the range that Blaise Pascal possessed. My prefatory remarks signaled this. Even if there are others who have shared his mathematical genius and aptitude for physics, how many of them have simultaneously equaled his literary capacity to write scintillating French prose, and intellectual capacity to strike out on lines of apologetic thought original in their time and permanent in their influence on religious thought? We are also familiar with the fact that many people have to cope with more than what is widely judged to be their fair share of suffering, though judgment about what counts as a fair share depends on where and when we live, what we have experienced, and what our expectations are. At all events, whether the problem was with digestion, headaches, nausea, blurred vision, raging toothache, or imbibing selected fluids to combat partial and temporary paralysis, and whatever the underlying clinical pathology, Pascal put up with one or some combination of these from childhood, without much in the way of intermission. He apparently said that he had experienced no pain-free days after the age of eighteen.

He put up with all this, but there is something with which he would not have put up: a commentator who, whether then or now, began an account of him that highlighted intellectual attainment and physical suffering. Only one thing is needed (Luke 10:42), he would have reminded us, with a touch of holy asperity towards those who should have known better. Between the hours of 10:30 p.m. and 12:30 p.m. on the night of 23–24 November 1654, he obtained that one thing:

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.¹

Years after his death, a paper contained in a parchment recording this experience was found stitched into the lining of Pascal’s coat, with just a little variation between the contents of paper and parchment, the latter version apparently being a later and reflective rendering of the hastily scrawled account on paper. What was quoted above is just an excerpt. Pascal would not have insisted that we should all experience what he experienced in the way he experienced it. But he not only would have said, he did say, that what matters in life is coming to know this God and, when we do, achievements of the mind and ailments of the body fade into comparative insignificance. You cannot be over six feet tall and not know it, Wittgenstein is supposed to have said. It is hard to say definitively to what extent Pascal’s religious experience rooted out pride in the achievements of mind, and pride is, in any case, a multicolored thing, but the fragment of paper lying close to Pascal’s heart certainly reflected what was in that heart.

Who was the man who, aged thirty-one, had this experience? It is hard to know what Pascal inherited from his mother, who died three years after his birth in 1623, but his father was no slouch, either as a thinker or as a public servant. Tax assessor and then financial magistrate, he had moved his family of three children from Clermont, capital of the Auvergne, to the grand city of Paris itself before they settled in Rouen. He himself undertook the education of all three of his children, thus including Pascal’s two sisters, and his views on the philosophical tradition and literature of his day played a role in Pascal’s intellectual formation. Pascal never attended either school or university, but in demonstrating extraordinary aptitude for mathematics at an early age, he showed himself to be the inheritor of his father’s gifts, though he surpassed his father in them. Whether or not his sister exaggerated with her claim that her brother had demonstrated the thirty-second proposition of Euclid’s geometry off his own bat when he was around twelve, he was clearly something of a mathematical prodigy. At that stage of his life, he did not restrict his interest to number and angle, he also wrote about sound and experimented with sonic vibration.

Passing over Pascal’s track record in science in the way I am about to do borders on the criminal. To switch from austerely legal to broadly moral categories, it seems despicably brutal not to tell the unfolding story of a scientific life, and merely to record woodenly what Pascal did: published on conic sections, reaching out towards a projective geometry; studied the equilibrium of liquids and zealously experimented with mercury in the course of investigating atmospheric pressure and confirming the possibility of a vacuum; laid foundations for the integral calculus and probability theory; tackled to great effect challenges in thinking about cycloids. In mathematics, you come across Pascal’s Theorem or Pascal’s Arithmetical Triangle; in computing, the programming language PASCAL; in hydrostatics, the SI unit of pressure, Pascal. Much of Pascal’s mathematical, scientific, even engineering work was not only done with distinction, it also had an enduring impact on the history of science. By way of a footnote, we might add that he invented a calculating machine, which aided his father’s tax administrations, and, extending his domain a little, devised a transport system in Paris towards the end of his days. These facts should not just be interwoven into a biography of Pascal, they are largely constitutive of it, including their financial, commercial, and social vagaries. Only severe constraints on authorial ambition in this volume, constraints that receive a smidgeon of sanction from Pascal’s concentration on the one thing needful, prevents their exploration, though if the author possessed a little Pascalian honesty, he might also admit the constraining effect of his own mathematical and scientific ignorance.

Pascal’s religious formation is more to the point. To risk putting it in a rather lazy way, we could say that he was raised conventionally Catholic, or at least in one of the conventionally Catholic modes—as an adherent of the Church, doubtless sincere, but not bubbling over with religious enthusiasm. Étienne, Pascal’s father, well connected in Parisian intellectual circles, had apparently assumed the garb of the honnête homme, the man of all-round excellence, one of that cultivated, urbane number from the upper echelons of society which prided itself on exemplary open intellectual endeavor and social and moral propriety in early seventeenth-century France.² Pascal was to find the ideal religiously deficient and a target for displacement or reformation, although he did not abandon the civic virtue that it exemplified. France was racked by the experience of war, past and present. The vicious French Wars of Religion between Catholics and Protestants, which had occupied the greater part of the second half of the sixteenth century, formally ended when a measure of toleration was granted to the Huguenots by the Treaty of Nantes. However, within twenty years, in 1618, what came to be known as the Thirty Years’ War broke out, bloody outcome of the religious and political disturbance unleashed by the Protestant Reformation. France was involved in it, specifically in war with Spain, which started halfway through the Thirty Years’ War, and dragged on for over a decade after the Peace of Westphalia formally concluded the war in 1648. In the middle of this, the king of France got involved in an internal political power struggle, known as the Fronde. Pascal did not live and think against the backdrop of a tranquil scene, and it has been aptly suggested that we might usefully think of his intellectual work as an exercise in seeking to bring order to intellectual disorder parallel to the political attempt to bring order to social disorder.

Intellectual order was a quarry well worth pursuing, because intellectual change, along with political change, was dramatically afoot in Pascal’s time. Philosophical skepticism and the scientific revolution were obviously part of the French scene—these are the days of Descartes (1596–1650), although Descartes himself spent much of his time outside France. He was intellectually well-known in the Pascal household, and Pascal himself was acquainted with him. To political and intellectual, we must add religious change, so culture generally is on the move. In the first half of the seventeenth century, France was feeling the impact of religious awakening, different forms of which were powdering the European scene. One of these forms plays a central role in the life of Pascal, featuring importantly both before and after the night of fire. It goes under the name of Jansenism.

Jansenism was so named after Cornelius Jansen, or Jansenius, bishop of Ypres, whose massive Augustinus was published posthumously in 1640.³ Jansen’s intellectual contribution was contextualized by a stream of piety and concomitant theology into which it fed. Personal commitment to God, an ideal of detachment from the world, and a reforming drive religiously surrounded the Augustinian theology that he propounded in the circles that welcomed it. Back in 1536, the Society of Jesus had been formed, its adherents known as the Jesuits. It was given papal approval in 1540, and it quickly and impressively developed and spread, not only numerically and geographically, but also in power and influence. Jansen and his colleagues believed that, both in teaching and in practice, it embraced serious error. The theological story is (inevitably?) complicated, and the ecclesiastical politics accompanying theological disagreement, and undergirding its course, made the Jansenist controversy a major public and a social matter, intelligible only against the background of French national and political life, and not just of European Catholicism more broadly. The magisterial Protestant Reformers had insisted that their views on grace and predestination, human capacity and human freedom, were fundamentally Augustinian, even if they felt at liberty to dissent from Augustine at points. Of course, the Catholic Church would have none of that, so battle over Augustine was part of the battle over the Reformation. The Catholic Church had its own reformation, sometimes controversially labelled the Counter-Reformation, but Jansen and his colleagues maintained that, on themes of grace and predestination, human capacity and human freedom, the Church was corrupting the teaching of Augustine. Jansenist interpretation of Augustine emphasized those aspects of Augustine’s teaching that the Reformers had reclaimed, including the strengthened view of predestination informing the theology of grace in his later writings. Jansen and his fellow travelers strenuously denied the allegation of Protestantism. They insisted that they materially differed from Protestants on the question of grace when you scrutinized properly their interpretation of predestination and liberty, which rejected the cruel injustice of Calvin’s God in decreeing the fall and punishing Adam on that account. Further, their interpretation of grace was embedded within an ecclesiology and eucharistic piety that was at the polar, that is, Catholic, end from Protestantism.

Nonetheless, four propositions from Augustinus, all dealing with human capacity in relation to works and grace, were eventually judged officially to be heretical. A fifth was declared false, formulated by his critics on behalf of Jansen as follows: It is a semi-Pelagian sentiment to say that Jesus Christ died or that he shed his blood for all men without exception. Semi-Pelagianism named a doctrinal position in the early Christian centuries (though the label was given later) that was judged by its opponents to attribute to the human will an active religious capacity that detracted from divine grace, and so to sail too close to the heresy of Pelagianism. Sustained battle was joined in the seventeenth century, compelling Jansenists to distance themselves from the tenets Augustinus allegedly contained. Allegedly is a key word, and it gives us a peek into a world of dispute that generally lies beyond our purview. The dispute between Jansenism and its ecclesiastical foes was not only materially about the theology of grace and the theologically correct interpretation of Augustine, but also formally about what propositions Augustinus actually, as opposed to allegedly, contained, and about the scope of the papal right to declare impeccably on matters of fact (for example, whether or not a proposition is contained in a book) as well as on matters of doctrine (for example, whether or not a proposition is heretical). Jansenists did not question papal authority in the latter case. However, it was different in the former case; matters of fact were to be settled not by authoritative fiat but by the ordinary uses of the senses and of reason.

This distinction was of interest to Pascal more widely as a matter of intellectual principle in epistemology. Meanwhile, he got embroiled in the Jansenist affair, which was anything but a merry knockabout, being potentially a matter of life and death, whether of body or of soul. Prior to his night of fire, the Pascal family had experienced the influence of Jansenist piety, for Jansenism was not involved simply in a theologically or ecclesiastically intra-mural dispute but constituted at its very heart a religious movement set against religious and moral laxity, bent on promoting disciplined purity in the life of faith, and on restoring standards set by the early Church. The physical site at the center of it all was Port-Royal. Originally a Cistercian convent a little distance out of Paris, it became a center for retreat, spiritual direction, preaching, and eucharistic celebration. In fact, a sister house emerged, and the detailed story has to take account of sites in the plural, distinguishing between Port-Royal des Champs and Port-Royal de Paris. It was not only nuns or members of religious orders who were in attendance; provision for male laypersons like Pascal were made on the des Champs site, so that they could pursue spiritual growth without taking up permanent residence. We forget the nuns at the peril of succumbing to male bias principally interested in the leading male actors in the Jansenist drama. The conflict over Jansenism involved them in many ways, and they suffered greatly.⁴ Pascal did not forget them.⁵

If this were a balanced biographical chapter rather than a quick sortie into selected areas of Pascal’s life, airbrushing his sisters out of the account would be unforgivable, irresponsible, and impossible, even for a modestly self-respecting biographer. As it is, I am compounding the patriarchal and historiographical heresy portended by neglect of the Port-Royal nuns and Pascal sisters by reducing Pascal himself to the bare essentials in recording simply that he was spiritually restless and downcast in his late twenties. Even if he did not require of every true believer a replicated night of fire, experience of God was important, and his work On the Conversion of the Sinner indicates that he thought that his preparatory experience was normative: God works on the soul by creating anxiety about matters that formerly gave pleasure.⁶ Although his father’s financial position had not always been stable, it was such that Pascal could comfortably survive his death without regular income, free to pursue both his scientific interests and a social life with congenial companions. But what was life really about? Unwilling to make the kind of religious commitment with his life that Jansenist theology and piety required, but theologically influenced by it and unable to deny its religious truth and power, Pascal was burdened with a tension. He never joined in either the wild life of some libertines or their free-thinking challenge to Catholicism. However, he hung out with a crowd that was, in practice, if not in theory, religiously pretty indifferent or nominal, and he took the kind of pride in his scientific prowess and reputation that he came to judge spiritually unhealthy. Glossing over the different stages of his personal intellectual, emotional, and psychological preparation for the event, this all changed for Pascal on the night of fire.

In Exodus 3:2, Moses beholds a burning bush. The Lord addresses him out of it: I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. This is the passage to which Pascal refers in his Mémorial of the night of fire. He offers a contrast that has become famous, a contrast between this God and the God of philosophers and scholars.⁷ On paper and intellectually, philosophers and scholars could then, as now, agree with Pascal on a descriptive account of God—on God’s perfections or attributes, such as unchangingness, omnipotence, and love. But the God of philosophers and scholars is the God grasped by thought, even if those who so grasp him believe that thought is undergirded by divine revelation. The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not grasped by thought, even if those who grasp him are constrained to reflect thoughtfully on divine revelation. This God is known in his reality by faith and experience. Certainty, joy, and peace are heartfelt and are gifts of grace, not the product of human endeavor, accomplishment, or striving, even if the gifts are for those who seek. Knowledge of this God is centered on Jesus Christ, whose name Pascal invokes more than once in the Mémorial, including when he quotes the words of Jesus’ prayer to the Father, recorded in John 17:3, And this is life eternal, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.

Pascal had previously been ambitious, something that would not be too difficult to understand in someone who possessed a tenth of his abilities. It is hard to say definitively to what extent mathematical and scientific ambition was rooted out in the night of fire, and if we presume to make a judgment on the matter, it doubtless involves judgment on the moral or religious place of ambition itself. Whatever we conclude, there is no mistaking two things: firstly, Pascal did not abandon his scientific interest and activity; secondly, there was a radical new center to his life, formed deeply and firmly in the heart. Although he did not become an official member of the Port-Royal community, he was an adherent. In that capacity, he produced a literature that has earned him accolades from his time to ours for the quality of its French prose, evoking the admiration of the religiously uninterested and religiously committed alike. They are part of the history, and conscience, of France.⁸ It goes by the name of the Provincial Letters.

The Provincial Letters

In January 1656, a letter Written to a Provincial Gentleman by One of His Friends on the Subject of the Present Debates in The Sorbonne appeared anonymously. The said friend well appreciated that the said gentleman could do with a little explanatory help to understand what was going on when a cohort of ecclesiastical protagonists were stirring the religious pot with ardent solemnity. The Sorbonne was the preeminent faculty of theology in France. What was bothering the godly fraternity there was this Jansenist business. It had to do, explained the helpful friend, with such delicate and pellucid matters as the concept of proximate power. Well, perhaps not so pellucid. Indeed, ignorance of what was invested in and meant by that word proximate might not ruin your life, our friendly correspondent suggests.⁹ A man who became the intellectual leader of Jansenism, Antoine Arnauld, had apparently made the apparently heretical claim that the righteous do not have the power to fulfil God’s commandments. Specifying the sense of power allegedly denied in this connection was a little problematic, our corresponding friend told his provincial friend. Anyway, a second letter followed, and concepts of sufficient grace and of