Passport to Pascal's Pensées
“The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.”
Blaise Pascal, Pensées
Born in south-central France in 1623 and raised in Paris by his mathematician father, Blaise Pascal emerged as something of a wunderkind who taught himself geometry at age 12, composed a scientific treatise on conics at 16, and invented the world’s first “computing machine” before he turned twenty. He would go on to become a first-rate scientist and literary genius, earning acclaim for his Provincial Letters, “daring, uproarious satires of the most powerful churchmen in France…and one of the greatest best sellers of the ancien régime.”[^1]
In spite of the success and satisfaction of his brilliant young career, Pascal became increasingly disturbed by the “existential consequences of the modern scientific revolution” and the cultural trends diverting society’s attention away from eternal things and towards the restless pursuit of immanent contentment. Following a mystical experience and religious conversion after a carriage accident in 1654, Pascal increasingly sensed the deficiency of science to speak to the distressing issues of his day. “Physical science will not console me for the ignorance of morality in the time of affliction.”[^2]
Pascal’s Pensées is a posthumous collection of diverse thoughts related to his existential angst as well as his abiding faith in Christ and the Church. Mortimer Adler describes this work as belonging to “that group of writings which describe man’s plight as he seeks God and at the same time doubts God”.[^3] We see this especially when Pascal contemplates man’s finitude in a seemingly infinite universe:
When I see the blindness and the wretchedness of man, when I regard the whole silent universe and man without light, left to himself and, as it were, lost in this corner of the universe, without knowing who has put him there, what he has come to do, what will become of him at death, and incapable of all knowledge, I become terrified, like a man who should be carried in his sleep to a dreadful desert island and should awake without knowing where he is and without means of escape.[^4]
The main religious influence on Pascal was Jansenism, a French Catholic faction sometimes described as “Catholic Calvinism” which emphasized a saving faith as God’s exclusive prerogative (thus negating the role of personal cooperation with grace). Two words that Pascal repeatedly uses to describe man’s existential plight are wretchedness and despair: wretchedness as to man’s corrupted nature, despair as to his lack of hope for redemption outside of God. These conditions create a paradox for him:
It is equally dangerous for man to know God without knowing his own wretchedness, and to know his own wretchedness without knowing the Redeemer who can free him from it. The knowledge of only one of these points gives rise either to the pride of philosophers, who have known God and not their own wretchedness, or to the despair of atheists, who know their own wretchedness, but not the redeemer.[^5]
What completes man’s despair is his inability to understand his own nature, by which Pascal means as having both an immaterial mind and a physical body. “Who would not think, seeing us compose all things of mind and body, but that this mixture would be quite intelligible to us? Yet it is the very thing we least understand.”[^6] Without certain knowledge of “what the body is, still less what the mind is, and least of all how a body should be united to a mind,” man feels himself to be in a state of “eternal despair,” understanding neither his origins nor his final purpose.[^7]
Overshadowed by ignorance, Pascal longs to see his fellow humans acting more responsibly, which is to say, inquiring into the mysteries that might lead them to a greater knowledge of God and their own cosmic predicament. Instead, he finds them mostly engaged in a superficial and unreflective existence. Pascal begins to wonder how a “reasonable man” could think the following to himself:
I know not who put me into the world, nor what the world is, nor what I myself am. I am in terrible ignorance of everything. I know not what my body is, nor my senses, nor my soul, not even that part of me which thinks what I say, which reflects on all and on itself, and knows itself no more than the rest…All I know is that I must soon die, but what I know least is this very death which I cannot escape.[^8]
Sobered by these thoughts, Pascal next imagines the “frightful spaces of the universe” with a kind of cosmic horror intensified at that time by recent advancements in astronomy. With the invention of the telescope and the planetary discoveries of Galileo, the neatly circumscribed model of the medieval cosmos was beginning to fracture, revealing a gaping universe: “I see nothing but infinites on all sides, which surround me as an atom and as a shadow which endures only for an instant and returns no more.”[^9]
Pascal concludes this passage by wondering at the irony that such a man, insensible to the danger of his predicament, could carelessly resolve “to spend all the days of [his] life without caring to inquire what must happen to [him].”[^10] Not only does it reveal his ignorance of the eternal verities, it places his own nature hopelessly outside the boundaries of a saving knowledge.
Pascal was not only disturbed by man’s displacement in a boundless universe. He also lamented the seemingly irreconcilable mind-body duality that divided the human experience: “Man is neither angel nor brute, and the unfortunate thing is that he who would would act the angel, acts the brute.”[^11] Pascal characterized this condition as an “internal war” between our mind and physical appetites.
The internal war of reason against the passions has made a division of those who would have peace into two sects. The first would renounce their passions and become gods; the others would renounce reason and become brute beasts.[^12]
Today, Pascal is probably best remembered for his eponymous wager, an intentional act of the will designed to hedge one’s bets, as it were, in favor of the premise that God exists. “You must wager; it is not optional…Let us weigh the gain and loss that God exists…If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists.”[^13] I think it would be a mistake to assume that Pascal meant for non-believers to embrace faith merely as a form of calculated self-interest, but rather as a sincere and pragmatic starting point.
In the end, Pascal’s greatest testament to faith was the charity he extended towards others, especially those in need. In 1662, he took a poor family into his own and allowed them to stay even after one of the children came down with smallpox. Moving into his sister’s home instead, he shortly took to his bed with illness and died on August 19 of that year, at the age of 39. In his will, he left half his fortune to the poor. His friends collected his unpublished notebooks of writings, and assembled them into the work that is known today as the Pensées.
[^1] Benjamin and Jenna Storey. Why We Are Restless: On the Modern Quest for Contentment. Princeton, 2021.
[^2] Blaise Pascal, “Pensées” in Great Books of the Western World: Vol. 30, Mortimer J. Adler ed. (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, Inc., 1991), 180.
[^3] Mortimer Adler and Seymour Cain. Religion and Theology. Vol. 4. 10 vols. The Great Ideas Program. (Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1961) 173.
[^4] Pascal, Pensées, 301.
[^5] Ibid, 271.
[^6] Ibid, 184.
[^7] Ibid.
[^8] Ibid, 207.
[^9] Ibid.
[^10] Ibid.
[^11] Ibid, 235.
[^12] Ibid, 242.
[^13] Ibid, 215.