Blaise Pascal initially seems a rather odd figure to label as a Christian existentialist–or even as a forerunner to the movement. Other than his famous “wager” (about which I will say quite a bit more later), he is perhaps best known for a major contribution to mathematics: Pascal’s Triangle. (It’s apparently quite significant, but don’t ask me to explain it to you.) He was the sort of polymath the Enlightenment excelled at producing, and, like the other renaissance men of the era–Franklin, Jefferson, Priestley, Bacon, Diderot, et al–he can be quite committed both to strictly logical thought and to the scientific method, neither of which mesh terribly well with the thought of what William Barrett calls “irrational man.” But the surface facts of his life mask an important truth about Blaise Pascal: Created though he was by the Enlightenment, any time he thought seriously about subjects outside of mathematics, he was forced to betray the Enlightenment–a betrayal that seems to have been quite difficult, perhaps even painful, for him. This is clear in his most famous work, the so-called Pensées, a book that strives for Enlightenment-style scientific certainty but ends up in the unexplainable darkness of Job or Ecclesiastes.
Pensées is not, properly speaking, a book–or at least it’s not the sort of cohesive work people often mean when they use that word. The academic term text is far more applicable in this case; Pensées is in fact a loose collection of notes, a stabbing toward a major work of apologetics. Some of Pascal’s “thoughts” are more or less fully formed, going on for ten or fifteen pages and making what amounts to a complete argument. Others are so brief and removed from context that they work as Modernist poetry. (The most famous of this category is number 507–“The motions of grace; the hardness of heart. External circumstances”–which John Updike used as the epigraph to Rabbit, Run.) Some are in Latin, making them inaccessible to the illiterate among us. The important thing, though, is that these are mere fragments of a never-completed book that would have presented a cohesive apologetic argument. It is in the nature of fragments, however, to lack cohesion, and the reader will likely be driven mad if she attempts to construct from these tessons de pensée the book that never was to be.
The real irony, of course, is that it is its fragmentary nature, its frustrating failure of coherence that constitutes a large part of the text’s appeal to the post-Waste Land reader. (One imagines Pascal’s Jansenist God, only a step below Calvin’s, planning it this way, killing our author off at the tender age of 39, merely to ensure that readers would continue to find God’s hand in the forever-unwritten book three and a half centuries later.) The modern mind–especially the modern mind of a literary rather than a scientific bent–is far less receptive to “metanarratives,” to use Jean-Francois Lyotard’s term, and far more open to the “stab in the dark” approach that fragments suggest.
The Pensées breaks down, essentially, into two sections. In the first (and more interesting, in my opinion), Pascal attempts to demonstrate that man’s life apart from God is a wretched thing that is not worth living. In the second, he posits that Christ, as Redeemer, is the solution to that alienation. This organization was, of course, neither new nor unique; St. Paul uses it in his epistle to the Romans (and many a teenage Christian in the 1980s and ’90s learned it as the so-called “Romans Road” of evangelism). Nor is it particularly existentialist as a bare organizational schematic–except that it begins not with revelation but with the conditions in which man finds himself. Existence precedes essence. It’s worth noting, however, that Pascal belongs to a line of scientists (stretching at least back to Aristotle) who also move from bottom to top, and so beginning with the human condition rather than with the eternal verities is not enough reason for us to class Pascal with the existentialists; it is more likely to be evidence of his commitment to the scientific.
And indeed, Pascal often seems to want to proceed scientifically, as when he talks about how to correct those who are in error:
When we wish to correct with advantage, and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is usually true, and admit that truth to him, but reveal to him the side on which it is false. . . . [N]aturally he cannot err in the side he looks at, since the perceptions of our senses are always true. (¶9)
Pascal here betrays a profound faith in empiricism, the foundation of the scientific method. Elsewhere, though he takes shots at Descartes throughout the text, he seems to buy into the Cartesian split–between the mind and the world–wholesale, and promotes the man-as-disembodied-head anthropology that existentialists would so vociferously criticize about the Cartesian Enlightenment. “Man is obviously made to think,” he says. “It is his whole dignity and his whole merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought” (¶146). While later existentialist theologians, particularly those of a Neo-Orthodox bent–and I’m thinking especially of late-period Karl Barth here–would deny that the natural world (and with it, human reason) provides a route to real knowledge of God, Pascal is initially rather blithe about Calvin’s general revelation: “Those honour Nature well, who teach that she can speak on everything, even on theology” (¶29).
And yet, and yet. Throughout the text, Pascal seems to want to break out of the narrow strictures of Enlightenment empiricism, even as he occasionally bows to its philosophical language and assumptions. We see this as early as the first section, where he makes the distinction “between the mathematical and the intuitive mind” (¶1): namely, that the former uses logical but highly specialized principles, to the extent that the mathematician and the scientist are likely to miss out on obvious common-sense truths:
But the reason that mathematicians are not intuitive is that they do not see what is before them, and that, accustomed to the exact and plain principles of mathematics, and not reasoning till they have well inspected and arranged their principles, they are lost in matters of intuition where the principles do not allow of such arrangement. (¶1)
That Pascal not only posits the existence of a sphere of “intuitive truth” inaccessible to the “mathematical” mind but also suggests that it may be a higher form of truth indicates a major break with his Enlightenment peers–and an even larger one with the scientific-materialist philosophers who followed in their wake. And as the book continues, Pascal drills more and more holes in the predominant ideology of his day–until, by the end, he sounds far less like Kant than like Kierkegaard. Midway through, in fact, he’s ready to jettison the whole project:
The metaphysical proofs of God are so remote from the reasoning of men, and so complicated, that they make little impression; and if they should be of service to some, it would be only during the moment that they see such demonstration; but an hour afterwards they fear they have been mistaken. (¶542)
Eventually, he even comes around to what we can recognize as a Barthian position on natural theology. “Those in whom this light [of faith] is extinguished,” he says, “find only obscurity and darkness” in God’s work in the world (¶242). Presumably this includes the empiricists who examine the world so closely.
My explanation for the tectonic shift in the Pensées is that the project he had undertaken–to present a clear and coherent description and defense of Christianity–convinced Pascal of the existential truth that Christianity must be lived before it can truly make sense. Thus, he came up with his Wager–which I will deal with in detail next week in a post on existential apologetics.
In the first semester of 12th grade at my Episcopal high school I came upon the concept of humanism (first through a cursory examination in a world history class and then through my own investigation via Wikipedia) and I fell in love with the concept. Unfortunately I was faced with a problem: according to the “experts” (American Humanist Associate, et al). Humanism=non-theism.
I was ecstatic to find a short Wiki article on “Christian Humanism” – some sign that my beliefs in God and the dignity of man were shared under some impressive sounding philosophical label – and at the bottom of the page were a list of “Christian humanists.” Who’s name was included? Blaise Pascal.
I don’t know why he stuck out to me more so than the other names on the list – it would see to me that anyone interested in the concept should flock to the work of Kierkegaard as they go about formalizing a belief system – but the Frenchman who’s triangle we learned about in Algebra II stayed in my head.
I spent the course of the next several months trying to figure out why exactly Pascal was included on that list. Any Google searches for “Pascal Humanism” or “Pascal Humanist” resulted in atheists bashing the poor Frenchman for his wager. Yet by the end of my freshman year at Swarthmore College in PA I had discovered why Blaise deserved to be on that list: Pascal was not working to compose an apology that would attack disbelievers for having turned their backs to God; Blaise believed that suffering defined the human condition (his term for this was “wretchedness”) and wished to explain what he believed was the only cure – man’s belief in the Christian God.
Rather than write an entire essay on the Pensées (the one above is perhaps one of the best I’ve read on the web) I’ll leae any readers with some of the text’s greatest fragments – esp. those which support my interpretation of his would be apology (I’ve given the numeration from the Penguin edition):
“First Part: Wretchedness of man without God. Second part: Happiness of man with God.” (6)
“Man infinitely surpasses man” (131)
“The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing” (423)
Pascal is probally the best philosopher to discuss philosophical matters. I have looked at some of the other Christian philosophers,and they seem to fail to address certain issues, or get their ideas wrong. I came to the conclusion a while ago when reading all of their ideas that Kierkegaard seemed the most right, but then I discovered Pascal, and the philosophy seemed more complete. I have a little bit of confusion with Kierkegaard and some of his ideas, but I still like him, and still think some of his ideas are interesting. Kierkegaard is probally the second most correct, but Pascal is probally the first most correct. I don’t like any of the other Christian philosophers much. A few ideas of theirs I like,some I don’t, but they get too rational, and it gets confusing, and raises more questions than answers, and philosophy gets put too much in a box as just one answer and way when opposing opposites are sometimes true, but not always, and a lot of it fails to address that when the philosophers see just one point only.