Pascal's Wager

by James A. Connor

  The Sainctot family is little known, though they had their moments. Originating in the Île-de-France region, they were ennobled in 1583, and then confirmed in 1604, likely for bureaucratic service to the king. Jean-Baptiste de Sainctot, the lord of Veymar, had been an ordinary gentleman who had served several terms working in the justice system and as an adviser to Louis XIII. Jean-Baptiste was the uncle of Nicholas de Sainctot, who was the master of ceremonies for Louis XIV. His sister, Madame Françoise de Dreux, was later denounced and tried as a poisoner, though how justly this was done was controversial even then.

  Étienne’s three children played with Madame Sainctot’s children, and so Blaise and his sisters might often have chased one another through the salon until they were caught, or crept about the corners of the adult gatherings, listening in. This would have been Blaise’s introduction to the libertins érudits, the rising breed of skeptics who would build a new world out of their faith in doubt. Though Blaise was still too young to sense it, the world of adults was changing fast, so fast that a pall of doubt had covered Europe. The old certainties that dominated the Middle Ages had been mortally wounded, but their dying was slow. Blaise himself would become part of the killing. Christendom had been shattered by reform, and throughout most of Blaise’s short life, Christians fought one another with a ferocity that only true believers can muster. The old aristocracy, the noblesse d’épée, the nobility of the sword, was being replaced step-by-step by the bourgeoisie, that class of new men who spent their lives worrying about money. Blaise’s own father, Étienne, was himself one of these new men, as were the Sainctots.

  Change was everywhere. Doubt was everywhere. And in times of such uncertainty, some people fling off their clothes and run around proclaiming wild new beliefs and wild new freedoms, while others wall themselves into the fortresses of their beliefs and hunker down. These were the two types who were gathering their forces all across France, first in the Jansenist debate over free will, and then later in the bourgeois revolution that swept aside all their society.

  The salon was the gathering place where the intellectually inclined chewed on these uncertainties. There, in Madame Sainctot’s salon, Blaise would have heard the wry comments of the satirists and libertins érudits, the literary set who first questioned the very basis of the Christian faith and sought to replace it with Deism, with its god of reason, who created the world but who had little to do with the daily affairs of human beings. After a few years, when Blaise entered the society of Père Mersenne, he would have heard the other side of the story—that is, Mersenne’s ferocious defense of Christianity and his attacks on the pundits and the scoffers.

  Blaise would also have encountered the art of diversion. Within the court, and for those attending it, like Madame Sainctot, one of the most important parts of life was the pursuit of good times. There were, of course, music and the theater, but most of all, there was gambling.

  Gambling was everywhere: the aristocracy gambled ferociously; the poor gambled desperately. There was an itch there, an itch that could not be scratched in any other way, an itch caused by the uncertainty of life and a desire for some great event to make it all better. Gamblers place all they are and own at risk, and that is the fun of it. The player throws the dice. The bets are down, the game is committed, and while the dice are tumbling, there is that thrill of mystery and that fear of the future. No one knows what the dice will show, and yet everything rides on it. Whole family fortunes were lost or regained in the tumbling of the dice. In a world where money unrelentingly nibbled at the power of the aristocracy, like hot groundwater eating at stones, what happened in a dice game or card game could mean life or death.

  There was something military about gambling among the aristocrats in Pascal’s day. Those who were noblesse d’épée, ennobled through the sword, or the descendents of long-dead heroes who had risked their lives fighting beside their king, were given lands and titles just as modern armies give medals, and their children and grandchildren inherited their good fortune. These were the old aristocrats, whose families curled back into the dim memory of the nation. Their descendents enjoyed numerous honors and great wealth by the odd accident of their birth. And they assumed that they were superior because of it. But living in the comfortable court as they did, they had few opportunities for heroism, save for the perennial duels that exploded over trifles, so they spent their evenings attending salons looking for a substitute, throwing dice or turning cards.

  An ethical stoicism hid behind this martial understanding of gambling. In classical culture, the soldier, and therefore the noble, encountered a choice when confronted by chance events. If a battle turned against you, you were expected to stand up to your fate and take it without flinching. If a battle went for you, you were expected to do the same. When Fortune turned against you, you could either buckle before fate and cry to heaven over your bad luck, or you could stand tall and accept whatever came, the good and the bad, with equal aplomb. This was areté for the Greeks and virtus for the Romans, an ethical quality of soul that raised the aristocrat above the common herd.10

  Dicing in one form or another is the oldest of all gambling games. Card games became popular only after the invention of printing, but throwing the astragali is as old as civilization. Egyptian inscriptions have depicted dicing games from 2000 B.C.; the Chinese have references dating back to 400 B.C. The word dice is the plural of die, which comes from street Latin data, which comes from dare, “to give.” To throw the dice is to face that which is given by the gods, by powers higher than human. It is to face reality at its most mysterious, like standing unflinching before the thunderstorm.11 The tradition, coming down to us from the Romans, was that there was a goddess, Fortuna—or, in Greek, Tyche—who ruled each turn of the card, each toss of the dice:

  O Fortune

  like the moon

  changeable in state

  always waxing

  and waning;

  detestable life

  first oppresses

  then assuages

  as its whim takes it,

  poverty

  and power

  it melts them like ice.12

  This was the dominant belief, the common sense throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. The tavern was the goddess’s place, the place where the courageous wrestled with her nightly. It was a place apart from the rest of the world, where the ordinary rules of society did not apply. Those who forgot the slipperiness of Fortune were doomed to suffer under her wheel, for such fools were guilty of hubris, vaunting pride, the source of all sin. Thus, in its earliest incarnation, gambling was a warriors’ game, a sparring match between the knight and the goddess. Like jousting, it was both a sport and a reenactment of the truth of life. The first Christian dice game, le hasard, was brought back to France by crusaders, and it offered the knights a chance of doing battle in the drawing room, a way of civilizing war itself or of bringing war home with them. William of Tyre tells the story, in his Historia rerum in partibus transmarinis gestarum, about a crusader army forced to stay in a Syrian castle named Hasart. Far from battle, the men were so bored that they invented a dice game, hasart, and enjoyed it so much that when they returned to Christian lands, they brought the game with them, and that game gradually mutated into the modern game of craps. The goddess, meanwhile, the personification of surprise and of caprice, handed out good and evil as she desired.

  Young Blaise likely attended one of Madame Sainctot’s soirees and peeked into the room where the adults were playing adult games. As a child, he would not have understood the subtleties. Gambling was a demonstration of the aristocrats’ superiority over the bourgeoisie, who spent their lives intertwined in the affairs of money. It was therefore winked at, though it was illegal. The fact that the aristocracy could practice it with impunity was another sign of their inherent superiority. Meanwhile, the bourgeoisie looked at gambling as a moral evil, as a languid vice of the nobility, whom they saw as living misspent lives. Not that they didn’t
yearn for the aristocratic pleasures themselves. After the French Revolution, the bourgeoisie happily picked up all the vices that the aristocracy had dropped on the way to the guillotine. Before the Revolution, however, their condemnation of gambling was largely a product of their own fear of falling. Because their social standing depended so thoroughly on money—to accumulate it, to use it, and to disperse it—any cavalier use of money, especially in the manner practiced by the aristocracy, was treated almost as a personal affront. Nevertheless, as a courtesan, Madame Sainctot would have practiced those very vices, and allowed them to be practiced. How else could she have looked like an aristocrat herself?

  Oddly enough, the bourgeoisie were caught between the martial games of the upper classes, partly expressed through high-stakes gambling, and the endemic gambling practiced by the poor. Whereas the aristocracy could disdain money because their social position did not depend upon it, the poor had no money, or too little of it, and so did not fear falling from their social position, because they had already fallen. It was the unique and exquisite plight of the middle classes, especially those who had been recently ennobled or were on their way to becoming noble, that no matter how high they climbed, their lives were still dependent upon money, and they still suffered the lightly veiled contempt of the aristocracy, whose social position was so much more stable than their own. When they gambled, which they did regularly in order to fit in with the court, they did so with fear and trembling—which, of course, they could not let show without also displaying their middle-class origins.

  Thus the Pascals, who lived on a fixed income, settled into a life at court, where people nightly put their children’s future at risk, and pretended to be amused. Blaise, ever observant, watched the great show, and learned more than anyone expected.

  [THE 1640s]

  Le Libertin Érudit

  The sworn enemy of impiety,

  The Deist lives in peace with all people,

  The only true observer of religion

  He worships the Author of the earth and sea.

  —QUATRAINS DU DÉISTE

  Pascal was fourteen years old when he entered Père Mersenne’s seminar, and sixteen years old when he presented his first paper, his one-page essay on conic sections. He was no doubt the enfant terrible, the prodigy, the boy from whom everyone expected great things. At this point in his life, young Blaise was little more than an extension of his father, Étienne. Always under his father’s thumb, he showed little evidence of adolescent rebellion, for nearly everything he did was to gain his father’s approval. For some in the group, especially Descartes, he may have seemed too proud, too confident for a boy his age, but then again, how would any sixteen-year-old react to praise lathered on not only by his father but by his father’s friends?

  One can only imagine the conversations held in that room: the reports from Père Mersenne about the latest scientific discoveries; the terrifying news of Galileo’s trial, which everyone in the group—Catholics all—deplored; Étienne’s discussions about the longitude question; Père Mersenne’s latest attempts to predict prime numbers; and the most recent controversy of several on Descartes’ algebraic geometry and on his philosophy. In the back of everyone’s mind, however—troubling them all, including Descartes—was the secretive group of doubters and freethinkers who had burrowed their way into the intellectual life of Paris. These were the libertins érudits, that collection of atheists and materialists, like Cyrano de Bergerac, whose ideas were being quietly discussed in the salons and universities around the city. Père Mersenne wanted to refute them. Descartes wanted to employ their very doubt against them, to make it impossible to doubt by finding one undoubtable truth.

  The roots of unbelief go deep in Western culture, predating Christianity, back to Rome, back to Greece, perhaps as far back as religion itself. Atheism and materialism form a tradition of their own, a belief system of their own, a vision of life with its own body of arguments, a tradition that is forever the negative of religion, its dialogic partner in the great conversation. Who knows why some people are religious and others are not?

  For Pascal, in his later work, those without faith were predestined by God to be faithless. He believed that God chose to be revealed to some people and to be hidden from others. This was his theory of the Deus absconditus, the hiding God. The issue is still alive. For contemporary biochemists, there is talk of a God gene—a gene that, expressed in one way, leads to spirituality and an abiding sense of the presence of God and that, expressed in another way, leads to materialism and the sense that human beings are but bags of chemicals. Perhaps these two points of view are not that different, in that they both assume a manner of fate. However, some hear the music of the angels, and some do not. The Gospels often point to the same experience: “Those who have ears to hear, let them hear!”13 Why this is so is the strangest of things, for luck and grace seem like the twin sides of the god Janus.

  Everyone believes, for there is no other way to live. There is no way out of this. Pascal saw this in his famous passage on the wager. Even those who say they know, that they have no need of belief, are throwing the dice. They are just throwing them harder than most.

  The doubters in Pascal’s time were largely Deists, those who rejected the idea of Providence, the belief that God is directly involved in the lives of people. This new religion was a rejection of the heart of Christianity and not a mere tinkering with the theological details, as had occurred in the rift between Protestants and Catholics. Moreover, it was a perfect religion for the growing scientific mentality of middle-class capitalism, with its God who, once having created, stood back and observed the working of the world without getting his fingers dirty, without trying to alleviate pain, or save souls, or punish the wicked. That left room enough for human enterprise to do the rest.

  Deist manifestos, often written as poems and often anonymously, circulated around Paris. The most famous of these was the Quatrains du déiste, which rejected all anthropomorphic images of God as superstition. How can the Eternal God be like mere human animals? To be Eternal, God must be something else, something Other, something abstract, like Plato’s Ideas:

  Since the Eternal Being eternally

  Knows only great beatitude, perfect and all sufficient,…

  Is not the one sunk in superstition insane

  To imagine Him both unchanging and changeable

  Inflamed with vengeance and offended by a thing of little consequence

  An enemy of tyrants, yet more redoubtable than they?

  And is [“le superstitieux”] not yet again insane to imagine [God],

  The Sovereign guide of the whole universe

  And at the same time believe that He lets himself be swayed

  According to the passions and human nature?14

  For the Deists, God was beyond humanity, and that meant that such human notions as God’s wrath, God’s love, and God’s law were all foolish superstition. Père Mersenne was furious with this last part. In his Impiety of the Deists, he attacked the Quatrains as the summation of every doubting impiety since the beginning of Western culture: “I think that your poet has assembled all the impieties of Lucian, of Machiavelli and of all the libertines and atheists who ever existed…to argue that Divine Law is but an imposture.”15 Mersenne took the whole business to be a plot to ensnare the foolish and naive in this world, to draw them away from the faith. Later Pascal, in one of his most Jansenist moments, took up Mersenne’s banner and carried it further, claiming that the Deists were little more than atheists.

  But what Mersenne and Pascal did not realize was that Deism had been given room to grow in Europe because of their own work. A few years after his sojourn with Mersenne’s seminar, Pascal proved the existence of the vacuum—that there could be empty space in the world, space not filled with anything. And behind this concept was the new Copernican universe that took humanity out of the center of things and sent the Earth spinning around a mediocre star in a nondescript corner of a medium-sized gala
xy. How could the creator of all that be born to a single species of animal living on a lukewarm nothing planet like Earth?

  This was the new universe that they were living in, the universe that was only beginning to reveal itself, the universe that gave Pascal such terrors in his last days. And the Deists had a better grip on it than the Christians. It was not until the twentieth century, when this universe proved even stranger than the Deists could imagine, that the increasingly strange vision of a God who becomes human could make sense once again, and even then only through the back door. With a universe as odd as this, anything can happen.

  [1638]

  Charming the Cardinal

  Grown-ups never understand anything for themselves, and it is tiresome for children to be always and forever explaining things to them.

  —ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPÉRY, The Little Prince

  Disaster! In March 1638, Étienne Pascal fled Paris, running for his life. Two of his friends had been put into the Bastille, while those who had evaded the cardinal’s agents were looking for some hole to crawl into. Étienne ended up back in Clermont, in his hometown, where the network of aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews could hide him better than he could hide himself in Paris.

  As with most things, this drama began with the cardinal. When Étienne had brought his children to Paris, he had several financial assets: his house in Clermont, on the rue des Gras, and his office in the Cour des Aides—an office, like many others in France at the time, that could be bought and sold. When Étienne sold his office, he took most of his money and invested it in French government bonds, or rentes. These paid the interest of 1 livre per year for every 18 livres invested at the time of his investment. This made Étienne’s investment worth 65,665 livres. However, within a few short years Cardinal Richelieu brought France into the Thirty Years’ War on the side of the Protestants because he feared the spread of Hapsburg power. We must remember that the Hapsburg family ruled Austria, parts of Germany, what is now the Czech Republic, a good chunk of Italy, and the entire Spanish empire. The Hapsburgs were also ultra-Catholic and were using their power to fight the increasing influence of Protestantism. Richelieu, a cardinal of the Roman Catholic Church, worried more about infringements on French sovereignty than about the life and health of his church, and so he declared war on the Holy Roman Emperor. The problem with war, however, is that it costs a lot of money, and the cardinal had to get that money from somewhere. The cost of the war had nearly bankrupted the nation, and so Richelieu, to solve his financial problems, decided to default on his government bonds. The value of Étienne’s investment dropped from 65,665 livres to less than 7,296.