Posts Tagged Blaise Pascal

I grew up at the tail-end of the Evangelical Apologetics Explosion. Somewhat arbitrarily, I’m selecting as the apex of that movement the year 1999. (I use that date because of the publication of Josh McDowell’s New Evidence That Demands a Verdict, but that was also the year of Norman Geisler’s Encyclopedia of Christian Apologetics and the year after Lee Strobel’s The Case for Christ.) I was seventeen in 1999 and was just starting to be disillusioned with the church I grew up in. We weren’t terribly devoted to apologetics at my church–and I don’t mean to suggest that McDowell and Geisler are in any sense responsible for my alienation from the Southern Baptist Convention–but my youth group did attend a summer camp with a Creationist theme and a very obvious apologetics influence.

(A tangent: We sang a song there that suggested that the monster in Job 40:15-24 was in fact proof that human beings and dinosaurs co-existed: “Behemoth is a dinosaur / I know creation’s true!” Subtlety, let us say, is not a hallmark of the apologist’s creed, at least not as it is presented to teenagers. It was also at this camp that I first heard the Standard Evangelical Sermon on Premarital Sex^TM, in which amorous teenagers are instructed for half an hour that OH MY GOSH SEX IS AWESOME before receiving a brief disclaimer that “it’s much better if you wait until you’re married”–as if anyone could possibly experience both waiting and not waiting and thus be in a position to judge.)

I also took a mandatory apologetics course at my Christian college, in which I angered the Bible and theology majors around me by consistently failing to see the big deal–or, indeed, the point. We read Strobel and Geisler and a book by Paul Copan that promised to “deflat[e] the slogans that leave Christians helpless”–and I found them helpful on some level. But when it came to the actual purpose of the class–training us to prove the truth of the Gospel to unbelievers–I was left in the dark. I don’t remember for sure, but I suspect my classmates responded to my disinterest by citing 1 Peter 3:15: “sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense to everyone who asks you to give an account for the hope that is in you” (NAS). For reasons I will go into in a bit, I think it’s entirely possible to obey this verse without subscribing to a Geislerian view of apologetics: that is, that Christianity is imminently reasonable and that unbelievers are faulty in their rational thinking.

We must have discussed Pascal’s Wager in that class; it is, after all, a standard in apologetics and an argument which nearly everyone encounters at some point. Its premises are familiar: Either there is a God, or there isn’t. The consequences for believing in a God that doesn’t exist are not much to speak of–but the consequences for not believing in a God Who exists and Who commands faith are infinite. Therefore, we should believe in God. This argument is full of holes, as any atheist (and not a few believers) can tell you. The biggest problem is that Pascal’s Wager can make no distinction among the hundreds of religious conceptions of God, most of them mutually exclusive. What if I choose to believe in the Christian God, and it’s the Muslim Allah Who is real? Suddenly the consequences of belief are much more serious!

The Wager also results, presumably, in a rather intellectualized and cold-fish faith, a fact that Walker Percy’s character Will Barrett points out in The Second Coming:

To the best of my knowledge, only one man in history ever made a practical proposal, that is, a proposal of which the rare sane unbeliever could at least make a modicum of sense. That was the famous wager of Pascal, who was the last French intellectual who was not insane. . . . But it is after all ludicrous to reduce the question to a crapshoot at Vegas. . . . The trouble with Pascal’s wager is its frivolity.

These very legitimate objections notwithstanding, Pascal’s Wager is important to existential apologetics for at least two reasons: (a) It assumes the mutual absurdity of faith and atheism; and (b) it posits faith as primarily an act of the will, rather than of the intellect or of the emotions.

That first point is, I suspect, forgotten or ignored by apologists of the Geislerian variety. But the Wager, though it’s a logical appeal of sorts, is built on several dozen pages of absurdist theology. Most notably–and this is, in my opinion, the single most profound sentence in the Pensées–he tells us that “It is incomprehensible that God should exist, and it is incomprehensible that He should not exist” (¶230). The effect of this mutual absurdity is not merely to make religious belief into a leap of faith; it makes atheism into the same sort of leap. Agnosticism seems to be left as an option, but on a practical level there is no agnosticism, as you either live as if there is a God or as if there isn’t. Not only is (a)theism a leap of faith; it’s a leap of faith that everyone must take in order to exist.

The other contribution Pascalian absurdism makes to existential theology is that it makes faith into an act of the will. This, no doubt, displeases those who wish to posit Christianity as wholly reasonable and who see faith in Christ as primarily a matter of intellectual assent. But it’s not; it can’t be, not if the essence of Christian faith is a trust in Jesus Christ. St. James suggests as much when he says that “You believe that God is one. You do well; the demons also believe, and shudder” (2:19, NAS). What makes the difference is an active faith (built, James says to Luther’s chagrin, on works)–an act of the will. Intellectual assent without what William James famously calls “the will to believe”–forcing oneself to behave as though one believes, even if it doesn’t make sense at times–is fairly worthless.

As for the notion that faith is built on “feeling”–that idea stems from a faulty reading of Matthew 22:37: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.” That heart implies emotion to the modern reader, but Christ is quoting Deuteronomy 6:5–and the seat of the emotions in the Hebrew Bible is not the heart but the bowels. If the author of Deuteronomy had wished to suggest that we ought to love God with our emotions, he would have instructed us to “Love the Lord your God with all your bowels”; as written, heart more likely refers to what we’d call the soul, and soul refers to something akin to life-breath.

Faith in Christ, then (and other religious faiths, as well), is an act of the will, that is, something we choose to trust in, even though it doesn’t always feel great or make perfect intellectual sense. For how this works, we must skip ahead several centuries from Pascal to Søren Kierkegaard. The Danish philosopher is famously resistant to attempts to force God into human understanding (which is, after all, the end results of much of modern apologetics). He remarks in his journals–and in the new beverage holder at the Christian Humanist Store, cheap at twice the price!–that “to stand on one leg and prove God’s existence is a very different thing from going on one’s knees and thanking Him.” He takes it even further in the Concluding Unscientific Postscript and suggests that attempts to prove the existence of God end up accomplishing the exact opposite purpose:

To demonstrate the existence of someone who exists is the most shameless assault, since it is an attempt to make him ludicrous, but the trouble is that one does not even suspect this, that in dead seriousness one regards it as a godly undertaking. How could it occur to anyone to demonstrate that he exists unless one has allowed oneself to ignore him; and now one does it in an even more lunatic way by demonstrating his existence right under his nose?

The existence of God, strangely enough, is completely beside the point for Kierkegaard; he takes it as a given and expects from his “knight of faith” not a belief in the existence of God (after all, even the demons have that) but a painful, crushing–some might say “horrible,” and they wouldn’t be misreading Kierkegaard–trust in the invisible, perhaps unknowable, God.

His model for this is Abraham’s intended sacrifice of Isaac, which he discusses in his most famous book, Fear and Trembling. Abraham is a Man of God specifically because, when the Divine approaches him, he asks neither for verification nor for a justification for the horrifying action demanded of him. Indeed, he commits himself wholly to God’s commandment–even though it contradicts both an earlier promise God made to him and every human law, including the law of logic, which is violated by the contradiction. What makes Abraham a knight of faith, in fact, is his ability simultaneously to believe God’s promise about making him into the Father of a Great Nation and to obey God’s later command for human sacrifice without active or passive rebellion of the Camusian variety. This process is the “teleological suspension of the ethical,” a Kierkegaardian phrase from which later scholars derived the concept of the “leap of faith.” The ethical sphere involves not only morality but all universal systems, most notably logic.

This is, obviously, a full-fledged attack on apologetics based on logical argument; God simply cannot be reached in this way. Karl Barth takes this bold assertion and runs with it, remarking in The Word of God and the Word of Man that “There is no way from us to God–not even a via negativa–not even a via dialectica nor paradoxa. The god who stood at the end of some human way–even of this way–would not be God.” (John Updike memorably quotes this passage in Roger’s Version, a novel about the seamy underbelly of fideism.) Hence, the need for revelation–God’s reaching down to man, reliably described, for Barth, in the New Testament. Logic isn’t revelation; it is trumped by it.

But there’s more to the story. Some people could do what God commanded of Abraham, Kierkegaard says, but they couldn’t do it in the spirit of faith:

If–in the guise of tragic hero, for higher than that I cannot come–I were summoned to such an extraordinary royal progress as that to the mountain in Moriah I know very well what I would have done. . . . I am fairly certain I would have been there on the dot, with everything arranged–I might even have come too early instead, so as to have it done quickly. But I also know what else I would have done. The moment I mounted the horse I would have said to myself: “Now everything is lost, God demands Isaac, I sacrifice him, and with him all my joy–yet God is love and continues to be so.” . . . And yet this is the greatest falsehood, for my immense resignation would be a substitute for faith.

The distinction Kierkegaard draws here between faith and resignation is helpful in uncovering the role of reason in the religious life. It’s important that he does not recommend a “teleological negation of the ethical,” but rather a suspension.

It may be helpful to go back to another familiar image here. Dante has Virgil, a virtuous pagan, lead him through Hell and Purgatory, but they must part ways. In like fashion, Dante seems to suggest (and Kierkegaard would surely agree), the believer must leave her reason behind the instant she believes. But there’s a third act: in Heaven, in the realm of belief, Dante receives a new and more perfect guide, Beatrice. In like manner, Abraham begins to sacrifice Isaac but “believe[s] that God would not demand Isaac of him”–and receives Isaac back. The believer suspends the ethical and the logical in order to receive a higher ethic, a higher reason, on the other side of faith. One believes in order to understand, in other words, and despite the apologists of the ’80s and ’90s, one does not understand in order to believe.

That’s not to say there’s no place for Strobel and Geisler and other apologists. Their arguments and books can help to bolster faith once a person has already made the leap–but they can’t lead people to God, at least not to any God worth believing in (that is, a God far beyond the limits of the human mind and its commitment to the Kierkegaardian ethical). Strobel’s book The Case for Faith thus has a nonsensical title: no case can be made for faith except the case made in and to faith.

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.

As I mentioned last week, the academic dean of the secondary literature on existentialism, Walter Kaufmann, points to the Christian theologians St. Augustine and Blaise Pascal as early examples of existentialist thought. He does so in a rather unhelpful and patronizing way:

If we look for anything remotely similar [to Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground] in the long past of European literature, we do not find it in philosophy but, most nearly, in such Christian writers as Augustine and Pascal. Surely, the differences are far more striking even here than any similarity; but it is in Christianity, against the background of belief in original sin, that we first find this wallowing in man’s depravity and this uncompromising concentration on the dark side of man’s inner life.

Kaufmann thus manages not only to slight Augustine and Pascal as thinkers—in what sense are their writings not philosophy?—but gives only the vaguest reasons for their influence on Notes from Underground. My task in this post is to expand on Kaufmann’s assertion, to demonstrate exactly why Augustine belongs in the canon of proto-existentialist writers. I will make the case for Pascal next week, when I discuss existentialist apologetics.

St. Augustine is (quite rightly) claimed as a forebear of such disparate traditions as Thomism and Calvinism, so there shouldn’t be too much harm in adding existentialism to this list, so long as we acknowledge that he, like all great thinkers, contains multitudes, and that Charles Taylor and John Piper have as much of a claim on him as Karl Barth and Paul Tillich do. (I’ve even heard him called the father of postmodern semiotics, so maybe Roland Barthes also gets a slice of the pie.)

Augustine’s most important book for existentialist thinkers is indisputably his Confessions, often called the world’s first autobiography and certainly an innovation in theological technique. The book is a work of serious philosophy—no doubt many readers decline to finish the book once they reach the abstract speculation on memory in Book X—but it is also intensely personal. The saint decides here that he cannot tell the story of God without simultaneously telling his own story. He treats theology, in other words, as something other than an academic discipline—he treats it as something that is inextricably bound to his own day-to-day life.

St. Paul did this, too, of course—his letters collected in the New Testament depend on the story of his life and his conversion in order to make their theological point—and yet there is no doubt that for Paul, his story was to come second to the story of Christ. The difference for St. Augustine is that to tell the one story, he has to tell the other—there can be no abstraction, no depersonalization. Frederick Buechner says that “All good theology is autobiography”—this assertion is never more true than it is in Augustine.

And yet it’s not just a method that Augustine offers to later existentialist thinkers. There are two main ideas that existentialists take more or less directly from Augustine: (a) the so-called “God-shaped hole,” utilized mostly by Christian existentialists; and (b) the nothingness of evil, utilized by nearly everyone, but Sartre in particular. (These are not Augustine’s only contributions to existentialist thought—Heidegger takes his notion of “curiosity” directly from the Confessions, for example—but they are the two most notable.)

Christian existentialism begins, for all intents and purposes, with the first paragraph of the Confessions:

“You are great, Lord, and highly to be praised” (Ps. 47:2): “great is your power and your wisdom is immeasurable” (Ps. 146:5). Man, a little piece of your creation, desires to praise you, a human being “bearing his mortality with him” (2 Cor. 4:10), carrying with him the witness of his sin and the witness that you “resist the proud” (1 Pet. 5:5). Nevertheless, to praise you is the desire of man, a little piece of your own creation. You stir man to take pleasure in praising you, because you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.

Augustine sees in human beings an innate religious longing, an undeniable pull toward the source of their being, that is, the God of the Bible. As I will demonstrate in my post on apologetics, this puts the arguments for God’s existence on entirely existential grounds. Christian theologians of all traditions will latch onto the last sentence of this paragraph, but existentialists in particular love it. Pascal does so most famously—“there was once in man a true happiness of which there now remain to him only the mark and empty trace, which he in vain tries to fill from all his surroundings, seeking from things absent the help he does not obtain in things present” (Pensée 425)—but nearly every existentialist theologian describes this longing, even if, like Karl Barth, they say the religious impulse is equally matched by a complete inability to find God on one’s own.

The result of this religious instinct is clear, in that Augustine’s philosophical methodology follows directly from it. Philosophy becomes a chance to encounter the God for whom his heart longs, and early on in the book Augustine asks a series of philosophical questions with serious relational ramifications:

Tell me, God, tell your suppliant, in mercy to your poor wretch, tell me whether there was some period of my life, now dead and gone, which preceded my infancy? Or is this period that which I spent in my mother’s womb? On that matter also I have learnt something, and I myself have seen pregnant women. What was going on before that, my sweetness, my God? Was I anywhere, or any sort of person? I have no one able to tell me that—neither my father nor my mother nor the experience of others nor my own memory. But you may smile at me for putting these questions. Your command that I praise you and confess you may be limited to that which I know.

Philosophy thus becomes a special sort of prayer, a desperate attempt to contact the God behind all things. We see the same attitude even in non-Christian theologians, such as Martin Buber, whose I and Thou operates on much the same principle. It’s also related to Augustine’s use of Scripture, which is intensely personal and which begins what Robert McQuilken derisively calls the “existential hermeneutic”: “the existential approach claims that the life-situation of the interpreter plays a formative role in the meaning of any communication.” This hermeneutic very clearly begins with the Confessions, though McQuilken does not acknowledge it.

Augustine’s other contribution to existentialism is a bit more abstract, though he still builds it out of the autobiographical materials of his own life. While talking about the sins of his youth, he marvels, nearly offhand, that “evil has no existence except as a privation of good, down to that level which is altogether without being.” This is a heavy statement, one that Sartre will expand on sixteen centuries later in Being and Nothingness. If evil is nothing but a privation of the good, it is roughly congruent to what Sartre calls “nothingness,” the non-Being that infuses all being on this earth. If evil has no substance of its own, then it must exist at the heart of every substance other than God.

Sartre, obviously, does not agree with most of Augustine’s assumptions—including, of course, the existence of God and probably “good” and “evil” as categories—but it’s hard to argue that his discussion of nothingness does not proceed more-or-less directly from Augustine’s discussion of the same topic. The difference between the two thinkers is ultimately the difference between religious existentialism and atheistic existentialism, which is to say that the former believes in a Being wholly without nothingness that will, presumably, one day banish nothingness from our universe and make us all what we are rather than what we are not.