And so off to prison went the abbé de Saint-Cyran, the newly made martyr of the age. Eventually, Richelieu released the abbot from the dungeon, but only after Saint-Cyran had gone blind, and transferred him to the minimum security prison at Vincennes, where he spent the next few years receiving guests and writing theological treatises. But Richelieu was as concerned about Saint-Cyran’s political impact as he was about his religious influence.
Saint-Cyran had come from a wealthy, deeply religious family of Basques, and at the proper time he was sent off to study with the Jesuits. He learned his lessons well, but after meeting Pierre de Bérulle, he came to see the teachings of his old masters as too easy, too worldly. Along the way, he made friends with a fellow graduate of Louvain, Cornelis Jansen, who had fallen in love with the writings of Augustine and wanted to find the true Augustine, freed from centuries of commentators.
Jansenism was the result—a spiritual movement within the Catholic revival that brought together these two strands. The Jansenists derived their spirituality from that of Bérulle, but did so after a muscular study of the church fathers, most especially Augustine, by using a method of positive theology, which was an intense, even scientific examination of the texts. What they came up with was something similar to the ideas of Luther and Calvin—that is, that without the grace of God human beings were capable only of doing evil, and that the grace of God, given to some but not to others, was irresistible. This kind of grace, which they called “efficient grace,” could not be denied and would always produce the desired result. However, it was not given to all, but only to those whom God had preordained to become members of the elect. In this, they were radical Augustinians, close to the Calvinists in their reading of the writings of Augustine.
The entire Society of Jesus looked askance at this. They taught that human beings have the power to do good as well as evil, and that Christ had come to save all men and women and not just the select few. For the Jesuits, otherwise known as Molinists, the human will had the power to choose good over evil, and divine grace, which was nearly ubiquitous, gave aid and comfort to those striving to achieve God’s will. They recognized the impact of original sin on the lives of ordinary people, but held that Adam’s sin did not utterly bestialize people but wounded them, stacking the deck toward sin.
Because of the Reformers, however, Augustinian philosophy had become chic. It was perfect for times of uncertainty. If you are one of the elect, your future is assured. At that point, the spiritual life becomes less about conversion than about watching for signs of your inclusion. Just what those signs were was up to the spiritual leader, which gave such men and women extraordinary power over their charges. Richelieu had the power of life and death, certainly, but over his followers Saint-Cyran had the power of salvation. Augustinianism was therefore the perfect theology for putting together a holy remnant. Just as Lenin found out that a highly motivated cadre of socialists could change the world without the agreement of the majority, so the Augustinians found that they could create a church full of janissaries utterly devoted to their cause.
In this sense, the seventeenth century was not that different from our own. Softer, more sympathetic Christianity, as represented by the Jesuits and the Molinists, produced an open, forgiving church that seemed to be edging toward a kind of relativism—“laxism,” as Arnauld and Pascal called it. This moral and spiritual relativism produced a backlash, a set of new spiritual movements within Christianity that insisted on dividing the world between the saved and the damned. This was just as true for Luther and Calvin in relation to the Renaissance church as it was for the Jansenists in the seventeenth-century church. An Augustinian backlash reformulated the church along Augustine’s harsher lines, lines that were more in tune with the uncertainties of the entire century. In a sense, these two versions of the faith could be typified today as “liberal” and “conservative.”
[1614–1646]
The void
Nature abhors a vacuum.
—ARISTOTLE, Ethics
If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
“Because,” it is said, “since childhood you have believed that a box was empty because you could not see anything in it, you have believed in the possibility of a vacuum. This is an illusion of your senses, strengthened by habit, that science must correct.” And others say: “Because you have been taught in the schools that there is no such thing as a vacuum, your common sense, which understood the notion of a vacuum perfectly well before receiving this false idea, has been corrupted and must be corrected by a return to your original state.” Which is doing the deceiving: the senses or the education?
—BLAISE PASCAL, Pensées
The story of the vacuum begins with Galileo. One spring day, he was watching the workmen pump water out of one of the cisterns on his property. He noticed that the suction pump that they were using worked well as long as the water was at a certain level, but that as soon as it fell below that level, the pump suddenly stopped working. Galileo called in a plumber to repair the pump, but the man told him that there was nothing wrong with it, for as everyone in the plumbing trade knew, no suction pump could raise water above eighteen braccia, or about ten and a half meters. Intrigued, Galileo studied the question for a time and then wrote about it in his Two New Sciences. He drew a distinction between a force pump and a suction pump, and noted that a force pump, which pushes the water from the bottom, could move the water much higher, depending upon the amount of force used, than a suction pump, and that a suction pump, which works by attraction, was limited in the height to which it could raise the water out of the cistern. He admitted that he was confused by this and was full of wonder, and then it hit him: in a suction pump, a vacuum was created above eighteen braccia.
This was quite a leap, because for nearly twenty-two hundred years Western culture had been following Aristotle and quoting his little maxim that “nature abhors a vacuum,” as if that explained it all. Almost everyone in the seventeenth century believed that it was impossible to create a void, a space empty of matter, because nature so radically preferred all space to be filled that it reacted violently to keep a vacuum from occurring. We must remember that Aristotle was an intensely earthbound man and that many of his odder dicta, like this one, came from his observations of nature. Greek philosophers had long held that like things tend to congregate together and that unlike things tend to repel one another. Thus, the idea of a force of gravity never occurred to them because they observed that heavy things tend to fall down and light things tend to go up. They didn’t need to pursue the matter further. The things that go down are mostly made of earth, and so they go to the place where earth is, and the same for water, while air and fire tended to rise to their natural places. There were five elements: the four just mentioned—air, earth, fire, and water—that are natural to the earth; and the quintessence or fifth element, a particularly rarefied and perfect form of matter, which filled the heavens. The quintessence had the unique ability to execute perfect circular motions, like the motions of the heavenly spheres. Thus, there were two sets of laws in Aristotle’s physics, one for earth and one for the heavens, the earthbound laws applying up to the sphere of the moon, and the celestial laws applying beyond it.22
Nevertheless, Galileo’s experiments touched off a flurry of new questions and new experiments. If a vacuum could indeed be created in a glass cylinder, would the glass be completely empty of air or only partially empty? Just how empty was empty? And if it was truly empty, would sound be transmitted through it? Would light? In all of Galileo’s experiments, he didn’t notice that it got any darker in the cylinder with the creation of a vacuum. On the other hand, if sound could not be transmitted through the vacuum and light could be, then sound and light must be very different things indeed, which proved to be true in the end.
But in the seventeenth century, people were still wondering if a vacuum could be formed in truth, and if so, what
kind of force would be needed to produce it. Evangelista Torricelli in Florence decided that the use of water columns was simply too unwieldy and began to use columns of mercury to run his experiments, which brought the whole thing down to scale for once. In 1642, he filled a glass tube with mercury and then stuck his thumb over the bottom of the tube and immersed the bottom end into a bowl of mercury, and then removed his thumb. The mercury fell seventy-six centimeters, rather than the ten and a half meters that a water column fell. From his experiments, he concluded that it was the weight of the atmosphere that caused the pressure to fill the vacuum, that we were all living at the bottom of a sea of air, and that the weight of all that air pressed on us so constantly that we didn’t notice it. Could it not be this weight, pushing on the surrounding surface of the water, that allowed a suction pump to work? Could it not be the weight of this ocean of air that raised the water to eighteen braccia and no more?
Torricelli discussed all this in a series of letters to a skeptical friend in Rome, Michelangelo Ricci, who defended the traditional view with a series of arguments, which Torricelli responded to. And in his responses, he laid out his entire idea. Parts of the contents of these letters eventually came to Père Mersenne by way of François du Verdus, a friend of Roberval’s who was living in Rome, though Verdus left out some of Ricci’s best objections and much about Torricelli’s belief that it was the weight of the sea of air that created the pressure. Mersenne re-created Torricelli’s experiments, and after visiting Torricelli in Florence and watching a demonstration of his experiments before a new cardinal in Rome, Giovanni-Carlo de’ Medici, he returned to Paris in 1645 and once again tried to re-create Torricelli’s experiment but couldn’t find enough high-quality glass tubes. A local engineer named Pierre Petit tried the experiment himself and failed, but then passed word of these experiments on to the Pascals, father and son, on his way through Rouen to Dieppe. And that brought the Pascals into the story.
It was 1646, and nearly everyone accepted Aristotle as the last word in the physical sciences. Étienne Pascal, however, was an exception. He was one of the few who had never accepted the Aristotelian cosmology and always thought that it would be possible to create a space devoid of matter if one followed the proper technique.23 After Petit’s visit, Étienne was excited about the possibility of repeating Torricelli’s experiment, and waited for his friend to return from Dieppe so that they could work on it together. Happily, they both lived in a city where there were plenty of first-class glassmakers, far better than those in Paris, and after Petit’s return they ordered a glass tube four feet long, with one end sealed, and slightly wider than a little finger. They then purchased fifty pounds of mercury, filled a bowl to three fingers, with two fingers of water on top, and then filled the tube with mercury. Petit stuck his finger over the open end and inserted it, finger and all, into the bowl of mercury until it touched the bottom. He checked to see if any air bubbles had slipped past him and settled at the top of the tube. Satisfied for the moment, he removed his finger, and the level of mercury in the tube dropped over eighteen inches. Both men were amazed, and Petit, wondering if they had made a mistake, checked to see if air had gotten in somehow, but found nothing.
At that point, Blaise walked in and joined the conversation. He was skeptical at first and wondered aloud if air could get through the pores of the glass. Petit told him that if that were so, air would continue to penetrate and the level of mercury would go down as they were watching, but it did not. They then slowly raised the tube and were stunned to see that the empty space above the mercury grew larger as they raised it. The height of the mercury level in relation to the mercury in the bowl remained constant, however, until the bottom of the tube hit the level of the water, when all the mercury rushed out and water rushed in, right to the top. This proved that no air had gotten into the tube through the pores, because if it had, there would have been a bubble of air at the top when the water rushed in.
Nevertheless, while Étienne was nearly convinced, Petit remained cautious. Couldn’t air have gotten in somehow? Because Torricelli’s complete letters had not been transmitted to Mersenne, they did not know that the Florentine had already speculated that the vacuum was caused by the weight of the ocean of air, a notion that Blaise would discover later on his own. Even with his doubts in place, however, Petit set about demonstrating the experiment among his friends and acquaintances in Paris.
At this point, Blaise was twenty-three, a young man full of the energy of youth, an energy that all too often drained away in the middle of his work and left him sickly. His life alternated between rounds of intense scientific investigation and months of languishing in his bed from one of his many illnesses. By this point in his life, he was a slight fellow, with a biting humor and a rude manner, as if this spoiled son of a controlling father had never quite grown up. He could be tender; he could be kind; he could also be quite funny. But when he was on the trail of an idea, he was often unfair and pigheaded. What he lacked in size he made up for with a loud voice and an imperious manner. He was stubborn, hyperintelligent, with a terrible drive for perfection, a man who desperately wanted to wear the humility of Christ but could never quite pull it off. He spent most of his adult life in controversy, both scientific and religious—a fact that surprised no one. Perhaps much of his personality can be explained by his health. He suffered from migraines nearly every day, and numerous other pains debilitated him. Nevertheless, he would make no excuses for himself and would fight on in spite of his illness. And no one could deny his cleverness. But he would need both his cleverness and his arrogance to defend himself during the coming great debate over the existence of the vacuum.
[1646]
Étienne Breaks His Hip
Whose game was empires, and whose stakes were thrones,
Whose table earth—whose dice were human bones.
—GEORGE NOEL GORDON, LORD BYRON
Brooding on God, I may become a man.
Pain wanders through my bones like a lost fire;
What burns me now? Desire, desire, desire.
—THEODORE ROETHKE
In the winter of 1646, Étienne Pascal slipped on an icy street in Rouen and fell, breaking his hip. According to Gilberte’s daughter Marguerite, he had been on his way to perform some charitable duty. At fifty-eight, he was no longer a young man, and given the state of seventeenth-century medicine, a broken hip could be very serious indeed. An injury like that required a specialist. But, luckily for Étienne, there were two professional bonesetters living in Rouen at the time: Monsieur Deslandes and Monsieur de La Bouteillerie. Étienne would not let anyone other than these men attend him, for he was convinced of their competence. It was a good choice, for the old man survived and was able to walk, though even he acknowledged later that he had come close to death.
The bonesetters were also pious gentlemen who between them had set up thirty beds for the care of the poor and indigent in their hospital. They treated the poor without charge and took on the job of teaching others their medical specialty without pay. But as guests of the Pascal household for over three months, they came not just to set bones, but to make converts. Needless to say, their influence over the Pascal family changed everything.
Until that time, the Pascals were pious but not fervent. As an honnête homme, a cultured gentleman of scientific and philosophical interests, Étienne lived his life by a code of rationality and honor, and suspected extremism in any form, especially the kind of antirational piety that he saw brewing in the Catholic revival, preferring to live his life as much by Michel de Montaigne as by Jesus Christ. Attending to his religious obligations as a matter of duty, he was more interested in intellectual discussions than he was in prayer. In a later century, he might well have been an agnostic.
Nevertheless, the Catholic revival was everywhere, like Christian Huygens’s “lumeniferous aether,” and in such an environment the most extreme forms of Catholic piety would often seem like heroism. One day, the pastor of their local ch
urch, once a member of Bérulle’s Oratory, in a fit of pious poverty renounced his benefice, his rights over the income of the parish, and put on the rough homespun of a hermit. Soon afterward, one of Étienne’s friends and colleagues, a fellow bureaucrat working for the king, told the Pascals quietly about his own conversion to reform Catholicism, and how it had changed his life. Everywhere Étienne turned, someone was getting religion.
The idea that his colleague had been converted from one kind of Catholicism to another, as if changing religions, was puzzling. It was a fairly new phenomenon, for the Catholic Church had always prided itself on its unity: didn’t the Apostles’ Creed call it “one, holy, catholic, and apostolic”? Catholicism had an immense capacity to contain within itself a wide variety of spiritual flavors, because in the past, whenever there was tension in the Body of Christ, the Catholic Church had spawned a new religious order. Protestants had changed that by their tendency to split into ever-smaller denominations. In the seventeenth century, however, this Protestant tendency had leaked into Catholicism, so that movement from one group of the faithful to another, from a more secular variety of Catholicism to a more monastic one, became a secondary conversion, a translation from a debased Catholicism to the true faith—Augustinianism at its best. The Pascals found themselves surrounded by fervent Catholics, and by this new enthusiasm that boiled off the streets of Rouen like summer heat. As part of the unconverted, they were nearly heathen.
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