Pascal

The room will not hold him.

Diversion is the flight.

The ground, if it is one, is fire, not a proof.

Pensées (Blaise Pascal; written c. 1657–1662; published 1670)

Message

Man is a contradiction: wretchedness and greatness in one creature. He is a reed, the weakest thing in nature, and a thinking reed, which is his whole dignity. Without God he cannot sit still in a room. He invents divertissement—hunting, war, office, talk, science even—so that he will not have to face death, boredom, and the self. Reason cannot settle the infinite. The heart has its reasons that reason does not know. The God who matters is not the God of the philosophers but the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. Because one is already embarked, one must wager. The true religion must explain both our grandeur and our fall; only a doctrine of original corruption and a Redeemer does so.

Pascal is the first writer in this whole list for whom the inability of the self to rest in itself is the central fact. Everyone after him is, knowingly or not, rewriting that sentence.

Content

Not a finished book. About eight hundred fragments for an unwritten apology of Christianity, some bundled by Pascal under headings (Vanity, Wretchedness, Greatness, Diversion, The Wager), many loose. The intended movement: from knowledge of man to knowledge of God; from the failure of the philosophers to Christ. Alongside it stand the Memorial of 23 November 1654 and the Provincial Letters (1656–57), which are the public war of the same mind.

Presentation

French prose of extreme clarity and sudden fracture. A fragment may be a theorem, a sermon, an insult, or a cry. The unfinished form is not a defect of transmission only; it is the right shape for a thought that refuses system. Where Descartes builds from the cogito, Pascal scatters from the abyss.

Method

Anthropological apology. Do not begin with proofs of God. Begin with man as he is: inconstant, bored, anxious, unable to ignore death and unable to face it. Show that every pagan and philosophical remedy fails. Then show that Christianity alone accounts for the contradiction. The Wager is not the centre; it is a device against indifference once the anthropological diagnosis has been made. Mathematics (probability, infinity) is used against mathematical pride.

Summary

You cannot stay in your room because the room contains you, and you contain a void. Diversion is the ordinary religion of modernity. Greatness is that you know this. Wretchedness is that knowing it does not save you. Only a God who is not a theorem can.

What shaped Pascal

People: Étienne Pascal (father, mathematician, educator); Jacqueline Pascal (sister, Port-Royal nun, his sharpest spiritual antagonist and aide); the Deschamps brothers who brought Jansenism into the house after the father’s injury; Antoine Singlin; the Arnaulds of Port-Royal; Descartes as the great rival method; Montaigne as the great worldly mirror; Augustine behind all of it; Fermat in the correspondence on chance.

Place: Clermont-Ferrand; Rouen (vacuum experiments, the father’s fall); Paris; Port-Royal des Champs.

Formative experiences: prodigy in geometry; the calculating machine; illness from youth that never lifted; Jacqueline’s vocation against his will; the night of 23 November 1654—Fire. God of Abraham… not of the philosophers and scholars—the Memorial sewn into his coat until death; the Provinciales war with the Jesuits; death at thirty-nine, 1662.

Cultural events: the new mechanical science; the Fronde; Jansenism versus Jesuit casuistry and a church of accommodations; the rise of the honnête homme who would rather be amused than saved.

Quotes

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

“Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed.”

“The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know it is wretched.”

“We are a deposed king.”

“The only thing that consoles us for our miseries is diversion, and yet this is the greatest of our miseries.”

“The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.”

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

“You must wager. You are already committed.”

“If you win, you win everything; if you lose, you lose nothing.”

“It is not only impossible but useless to know God without Jesus Christ.”

“We desire truth and find in ourselves nothing but uncertainty. We seek happiness and find only wretchedness and death.”