Pascal (CTB)

Pascal (1623–1662), for the Christian Theological Branch

On this branch Pascal is the first writer who makes Augustine’s corruption felt as a modern interior, rather than as a doctrine about the race. The self cannot sit in its room. Diversion is the everyday form of the bound will: not Erasmus’s cooperating freedom, but flight from a wretchedness we are too great to ignore. Original sin is the only hypothesis that accounts for the contradiction; grandeur and misery together, a deposed king. The God who answers is not the philosophers’ God. He is the God of the Memorial: fire, certainty, the God of Abraham. The wager is not a proof. It is what a bound will can still do once it has been shown that indifference is already a choice.

He does not advance Luther’s forensic machinery. He advances the phenomenology of the condition Luther accused. Sin here is ennui, self-love, and the inability to rest, before it is a catalogue of vices.

Pascal

Quotes

The lines that carry this station: 

“All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” 

“Man is a reed… but a thinking reed.” 

“The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched.” 

“God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and scholars.” 

“You must wager. You are already committed.”