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SEQ CHAPTER \h \r 1Thoughts on Pascal

Notes on the Pensées (Kraisheimer, 1995)

Citations by paragraph number

unless otherwise indicated

Men are so inevitably mad that not to be mad would be to give a mad twist to madness. (411)

Pascal’s Problem

1. The aim of the Pensées is an edifying “proof” of Christianity, edifying because it leads to faith—yet the problem of the Pensées is whether this is even possible, or if so, how. The very terms of Pascal’s fideistic concept of faith—not just that religion rests on faith and revelation alone, but that even reason rests on faith or revelation—seem to call this possibility into question. There is no convergence of reason and faith as in the classical Thomistic model.

2. The basic impotence of reason is reflected in the seemingly irresolvable quarrel between the skeptics (or Pyrrhonists) and the dogmatists—those for whom reason destroys every certainty and those who reason from supposedly self-evident first principles. Man cannot live without first principles yet reason deprives him of any certainty about them. It is as if man’s reason functioned to humiliate him by constant demonstrations of its own powerlessness. Yet reason is at the same time his dignity and self-esteem.

3. Pascal tries to absorb the truth of each without succumbing to either. So, too, did Descartes, but Pascal rejects any rational or (philosophically) dogmatic solution to this problem.

4. The “philosophical” argument that might lead to faith is not the rational proofs of the existence of God (as in Aquinas or Descartes) but an analysis of the human condition–not theology (or cosmology) but anthropology. Christianity is “worthy of reverence because it really understands human nature.” (12; cf. 215, 687) The rationality of Christianity is that it knows man, from inside out, so to say. And that means in part that it knows the irrational. There is reason in Christianity, but it is reason of the heart.

General Thesis

5. The thesis of the book, in a nutshell, is man’s misery without God, man’s happiness with God. (6)

6. Its aim is to lead man to faith, or at least help make him susceptible of it, partly by showing the human condition for what it is, and partly by showing the aptness of Scripture–how it all fits (prophecy, miracles, the Hebrews, the Pagans, etc.). Thus he seeks to bring the two sides closer together, the human and the revealed truth of God, without actually closing the gap completely.

7. There are two lines of argument in the Pensées, both rational, but differently based: one is the argument from reason proper, one might say—an analysis of the human condition and nature independent of Scripture, showing man’s misery without a redeemer; the other is an argument from Scripture, a demonstration from Scriptural proofs and evidences that that redeemer is Christ. This argument is rational, too, though its basis is Scripture; it aims to show that Scripture “makes sense” as the answer to the human condition; that it “fits.” Christ the Redeemer is the logical solution to the anthropological impasse of man’s fallen nature. The outline of the image of the Redeemer is inversely perceptible, so to say, in the fallenness of man. “Thus without Scripture, whose sole object is Christ, we can know nothing, and can see nothing but obscurity and confusion in the nature of God, and in nature itself.” (417)

8. The first argument has an apodictic or a priori feel to it, as if it were a necessary and inevitable conclusion from the human condition. The second argument from Scripture is probabilistic, a likely story, a good bet. (Hence the famous Wager.) It is impossible to close the gap between these two lines, though they approach each other asymptotically. Pascal wants to bring them close enough to spark, so to say.

Man’s Wretchedness

9. Man’s basic condition is fallenness, the corruption of his original nature.

10. Hence the characterizations of man as a “dethroned king,” an “absurd god,” or a “ridiculous hero” (48): his condition is that of having once occupied a position of greatness but of having also lost it, with enough of a recollection of his original condition to be made miserable by it (430, 477).

11. Man’s misery is thus proof of his greatness, and his greatness is his misery. Man’s sense of greatness is inextricably entangled with his humiliation, and vice versa. Each aspect, his misery or his greatness, leads to the other.

12. He remembers his greatness through his misery, and his greatness only intensifies his misery.

13. This dialectical quality, this “dual nature” pervades human existence and can be discerned in every human phenomenon, an inner tension and paradox. (131) “Man’s dualism is so obvious that some people have thought we had two souls: Because a simple being seemed to them incapable of such great and sudden variations, from boundless presumption to appalling dejection.” (629)

14. It is as if man were once whole and integral, but lost his original unity and disintegrated into elements and drives that henceforth conflict with each other (thus, for example, the war of reason and the senses, reason and the passions, etc. 410). Elements that ought to be ordered and integrated instead find themselves at odds. “Man’s nature must have undergone a strange reversal.” (427, p. 131)

15. Thus in every particular phenomenon of human existence, Pascal uses this original paradox to discern a dialectical tension: in knowledge and science, ethics and politics, human psychology, and so forth. “There are certain mechanisms in our head so arranged that we cannot touch one [side of the scales] without touching its opposite.” (519)

16. Man is a reed in nature, at the mercy of incomprehensible forces, but a thinking reed (200)–that is, his being (as with Descartes) is his self-awareness, his consciousness of himself. “Man is obviously made for thinking; therein lies all his dignity and merit.” (620) He is wretched because he knows he is wretched, but his knowledge of his wretchedness is also his greatness.

17. Wretchedness appears in his alienation from nature, his lostness, terror, disproportion, and disorientation in the face of the incomprehensible, vertiginous infinites of space and time. He no longer knows his place, where he belongs. “Man does not know the place he should occupy.” (400) “Man between the infinites.” “The disproportionality of man.” (199)

18. Likewise, he has nearly lost his original nature, so that only a vestige remains. He no longer knows himself or his true good—self-alienation. He know longer knows what he is because he has ceased to be what he was. “Custom is our nature.” (419) He no longer knows his true good, and anything may become his true good. “Since [man’s] true nature has been lost, anything can become his nature; similarly, true good being lost, anything can become his true good.” (397) Desire has lost its attachment to its true objects and now simply settles on whatever objects its imagination can invest with value. His nature is now the lack of a nature, or the relativity of his nature, its reduction to custom or habit. “Nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.” (126) “How many natures lie in human nature!” (129)

19. And he is alienated from God, unable any longer to believe. He has a natural aversion to religion, especially to Christianity. “Men despise religion. They hate it and are afraid it might be true.” (12) Fallen man is allergic to the truth. “Too much truth bewilders us.” (199, p. 63)

Arguments from Man’s Relation to Nature

20. Pascal uses the “de-divinization” of nature by modern science (compare with the pagan divinization of nature as a well-ordered whole exhibiting divine purpose or reason) to lend rational support–albeit of a negative sort–for faith. Nature exhibits divine power but it does so by concealing divine purpose; it affords us no sense of measure or order in terms of which we can orient ourselves.

21. The modern doctrine of nature supplies a rationale for faith because it presents a God made utterly remote by his absence in nature and thus underscores the wretchedness of man. That is, modern science (mathematical physics, mechanics, “the machine”) with its conceptions of infinity (the infinitely large and the infinitely small, etc.) evinces the Deus absconditus, the hidden God, by presenting a universe devoid of divinity. God is intimated by his absence, by the need for God. “Nature points everywhere to a God who has been lost, both within man and without, and to a corrupt nature.” (471) “Nature has nothing to offer me that does not give rise to doubt and anxiety.” (429) God is present in nature, but He is present (paradoxically) as the absent (or hidden) God. We find in nature not so much evidences as haunting intimations.

22. Man’s relation to nature is one of disproportion, incommensurability, disorientation. “The disproportion of man.” (199, pp. 59-65) He has no way of finding his place by reference to nature (unlike the classical cosmos), which however is the only thing he naturally seems to know. “What is a man in the infinite?” (p. 60) “Equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he emerges and the infinity in which he is engulfed.” (61) Compared with the vastness of nature, he is nothing; compared with the infinitesimal of nature, he seems infinite. He is in the middle between extremes, which, however, he cannot grasp. “Two infinites.” (41, 723) He cannot find any proper mean between extremes, any stability between beast and god, angel and animal.

23. The Cartesian plan of establishing a firm foundation on which to build a science that can comprehend nature and encompass it in the mind is groundless and deluded. What science teaches rather is that nature eludes our grasp. Modern science is a Tower of Babel. “We burn with desire to find a firm footing, an ultimate, lasting base on which to build a tower rising up to infinity, but our whole foundation cracks and the earth opens up into the depths of the abyss.” (199, p. 63)

24. Cartesian philosophy attempts to rise from the singular “I” to the universal “I,” a pure self-consciousness which would give us direct access to universal and necessary truths. To the contrary, our experience of “self-consciousness” reveals to us the utter contingency and groundlessness of our being. “When I consider the brief span of my life absorbed in the eternity which comes before and after . . . the small space I occupy and which I see swallowed up in the immensity of spaces of which I know nothing and which know nothing of me, I take fright and am amazed to see myself here rather than there; there is no reason for me to be here rather than there, now rather than then. Who put me here? By whose command and act were this time and place allotted to me?” (68) “Why have limits been set on my knowledge, my height, my life, making it a hundred rather than a thousand years? For what reason did nature make it so, and choose this rather than that mean from the whole of infinity, when there is no more reason to choose one rather than another, as none is more attractive than another?” (194)

25. Descartes and Pascal both start from the thinking self, the reflective ego, in its felt sense of alienation from nature (the nature of modern science). But they proceed in opposite directions—Descartes, towards a universally valid and unshakable foundation disclosed in and to reason, Pascal towards the singular self (cf. Augustine) in its groundlessness, its inconceivability to itself.

Arguments from Human Nature and Society

26. The human condition is not a natural unity of contrasting elements or a true whole (the natural unity has been lost) but an oscillation between them, a dialectical instability. The human condition is thus manic-depressive or bipolar, so to say: alternating between self-exaltation and self-abasement, pride and despair, without any ability to find a natural mean between the extremes, or a proper integration of dignity and humility.

27. Philosophical schools generally base themselves on one side of this oscillation or another: for example, man as a kind of god, or man as an animal.

28. The human condition is one of relativity and fluctuation; there is no stabilizing natural order; its real “foundation” is custom and tradition, in which arbitrariness and violence have been sanctified and rendered lawful by time immemorial. “Custom is our nature.” (419)

29. The same lack of rational or natural foundation is evinced with respect to society. Pascal shows that justice and order rest upon weakness, concupiscence, and vanity, not on reason or nature in the classical teleological sense. Or better, he shows in society too the irrational foundations of reason, the chaotic origins of order, the unjust origins of justice. “Three degrees of latitude upset the whole of jurisprudence and one meridian determines what is true.” (60, p. 16) “The truth about usurpation must not be made apparent; it came about originally without reason and has become reasonable. We must see that it is regarded as authentic and eternal, and its origins must be hidden if we do not want it soon to end. ” (p. 17) “As men could not make might obey right, they have made right obey might. As they could not fortify justify they have justified force, so that might and right live together and peace reigns, the sovereign good.” (81)

30. Thus, for example, human concupiscence gives rise to the most remarkable systems of justice and charity. (118, 210-211) Might gives rise to right. (51, 60)

31. Human power is in fact powerlessness, yet man’s very powerlessness gives rise to a powerful order, made all the more so for being based on human weakness. “The greatest and most important thing in the world is founded on weakness.” (26)

32. Man’s greatness and humiliation are constantly mingled in every dimension of his being. This combination of opposites is the key to decipher every manifestation of human nature.

Arguments from Revelation

33. On the other hand, human self-knowledge is paralyzed without the aid of revelation. Specifically, the “dogma” or revealed truth of original sin is required for man to make sense of his condition. “What could be more contrary to the rules of our miserable justice than the eternal damnation of a child, incapable of will, for an act of which he seems to have so little part that it was actually committed 6000 years before he existed? Certainly nothing jolts us more rudely than this doctrine [of original sin], and yet but for this mystery, the most incomprehensible of all, we should remain incomprehensible to ourselves.” (131, p. 36) And then of course also the revelation of Christ. “Not only do we know God through Jesus Christ, but we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ.” (417)

34. The two key elements of Christianity are the depravity of man (or the corruption of nature) and the possibility of redemption in Jesus Christ.

35. Christ is above all the mediator, who bridges the gap between the hidden God and man. The only hope for man lies in God’s becoming man so as to lead man to God.

36. There has only been one real religion since the beginning of the world acknowledged by all man, according to Pascal. Thus Christ makes sense of history. A rational argument for Christianity is that is provides a framework to make sense of all other religions, schools (e.g., skeptics and dogmatists), and doctrines. “All contradictions are reconciled in Christ.”

37. Borrowing a Kierkegaardian distinction, one might say that Pascal’s Christianity is reflective, not immediate: he shows that Christianity both explains and resolves the contradictions in the human condition philosophically. He shows that Christianity is anthropologically true, that Christianity knows the human heart.

38. By the same token, one might say that Pascal’s defense of Christianity is “literary”: Scripture presents a mythical narrative, a story which can make sense of our condition if we place ourselves in it—if we accept the place allotted to us in the story—if, that is, we take the story for real (though sacred) history.

39. Pascal’s defense of Christianity is generally regarded as perhaps the most powerful of a non-theologian of all times, to be placed alongside Augustine's Confessions, for example, or anything Kierkegaard wrote. What gives it its power is precisely its non-theological, but rather anthropological, approach, as an analysis of the human condition.  He tries to show that without Christ the mediator human existence is hopelessly contradictory and miserable, with Christ, though, it is made whole.  Of course, this argument cannot actually produce conviction, but only incline and dispose. And it achieves its effect by making us more miserable, at least in the short term; he gives new meaning to the proposition of the Greek tragedians, to know is to suffer. In his case, this has a Socratic dimension to it: self-knowledge is suffering.

Pascalian Elaborations

Reason and the Heart

40. Pascal uses a reasoned analysis of the human condition to demonstrate the irrationality of (fallen) human nature, the unnerving relativity and contingency of human existence, including the irreducible arbitrariness of human life (35, e.g., the choice of a vocation), of human customs, and of human justice and order.

41. Pascal uses reason to demonstrate the limits of reason; uses reason to demonstrate the necessity of reason’s going beyond reason. “There is nothing so consistent with reason as this denial of reason.” (182)

42. He uses reason to humble if not humiliate reason–to show its radical powerlessness in terms of ultimates. The most radical limit of reason is that it rests on that which is beyond its ken. It cannot demonstrate its basic principles, like the axioms that Descartes sought to prove through clarity and distinctness. The very truths that make reason itself possible (those of logic and mathematics, for example) must be known non-rationally, by the heart or by instinct. It cannot know or establish its own foundations. “Instinct, Reason. We have an incapability for proving anything which no amount of dogmatism can overcome. We have an idea of truth which no amount of skepticism can overcome.” (406)

43. “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.” (423)

44. The heart is not something other than knowledge compared with reason, but (in part) another kind of knowledge which disputes the sovereignty of reason in its own domain (which is that of knowledge).

45. More precisely, the heart is partly a matter of knowledge and partly a matter of belief; both are evidently rooted in instinct. That is, I know certain things are true instinctively, such as that I am awake or that “either A or not-A, there is no third.” If I believe in the true and living God, it is because He inclines my heart thus with His grace. But I also have a capacity to believe things that may be imaginary–thus by instinct I can believe what is false too. Self-deception is also an “instinct.”

46. Certain things are known by the heart but the heart is not infallibly true. Thus the heart, too, evinces the fallenness of man, nor can it do without reason.

47. Faith is a matter of the heart (inclined by grace to believe) not reason, but reason can still dispose the heart towards the possibility of or desire for faith. “It is the heart that perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by the reason.” (424)

Death, Desire, and Self-Deception

48. The ultimate, fundamental stumbling-block in human existence is mortality, the certainty of death and the uncertainty of what it means (eternal nothingness? eternal wretchedness?). (133, 434)

49. The question of death is thus the central problem of existence, whether it is denied and evaded (itself a kind of proof) or confronted in the search for God and faith.

50. According to Pascal, man has a limited capacity for truth, especially for self-knowledge. He cannot bear the truth for very long, for example the misery of human mortality, and must hide it from himself. Man is by nature a self-deceiving animal. Self-deception is the natural condition of fallen man.

51. Hence the need for diversion, the seductions of vanity, the allure of games, of gambling, romance, the hunt, etc.

52. Man is essentially a creature of the imagination, in the thrall of desire or concupiscence (“Cleopatra’s nose”). Much of his world is essentially a phantasm. Most of his existence is expended in inventing ways to evade the reality of existence.

53. We are diverted only to the degree we desire, and we desire only so long as we can. Desire is the capacity to be absorbed in objects of the imagination, like Cleopatra’s nose. Desire is thus essentially a game, just as games satisfy desire, because the point of desire is not to satisfy itself definitively but to prolong itself, that is, to delay and postpone the termination of desire. The problem of desire is to keep on desiring. “We prefer the hunt to the capture.” (136, p. 38)

54. Man desires in order to avoid the truth of existence—which is the vanity of desire. Desire is a strategy by which human beings postpone or delay any encounter with their mortality.

55. Desire thus aims at its own temporization. It is in love with the image, the imagination, as such. The real object of desire is not the object of desire as such, but desire itself; desire seeks to possess not so much its stipulated object as the desire for it. The object of desire is like the goal post in a game; it serves as a pretext or condition for game, but in itself is insignificant. What is important in a game is not the moment the ball goes through the hoop but everything leading up to that point. But without that point being set up, there would be no game. “Only the contest appeals to us, not the victory.” (773)

56. But since termination is inevitable nonetheless, it must be constantly on the lookout for new objects, new games.

57. The mortal threat that hangs over all desire is the failure of belief, the loss of the capacity, the confidence for desire–boredom. Boredom is most terrifying when it threatens to reveal the absurdity of desire and thus to make it impossible to desire, impossible to lose oneself in the imagination. Boredom is the despair of desire, its paralysis. Desire is always engaged in a running battle against its own mortality.

58. Desire is thus above all a desire for desire; its greatest fear is not being able to desire. The inability to desire—as opposed to the emancipation from concupiscence by Christ—would be a mortal depression.