Pascal's Wager

by James A. Connor

  Meanwhile, back in Paris, the sisters prayed their own prayers to save their way of life. Staying at Port-Royal de Paris at the time was Gilberte Perier’s ten-year-old daughter, Marguerite, Blaise’s favorite niece and godchild. She was a young student, or pensionnaire, at the school there who had come to Paris from Clermont with her mother on the outside chance of finding a cure for an eye disease that tormented her. Her left eye had become infected, and a fistula, filled with pus and blood, swelled underneath it. Worse yet, the eye stank with infection, and no doctor in Clermont could do anything about it. Gradually, the infection spread throughout her body, and she spiked fevers. Both Blaise and Jacqueline did their best to care for the girl, and sent her to the best physicians they could find, but none of them had an easy cure either. The doctors were certain that the infection would spread to other parts of the little girl’s body, especially her nose, and they suggested ever more radical treatments. Finally, they recommended an operation on the wound, essentially by taking a hot poker and cauterizing the fistula. They could cure the wound by doing this, they said, but it was also possible that they would kill the girl. Blaise sent word to his brother-in-law about what the doctors had said, but the thoughts of hot pokers jabbing the eye of his little girl galled poor Florin, and he wrote back asking that they postpone the operation until he had the chance to come to Paris and make a decision for himself.

  It was March 24, and Mère Angélique was just finishing her vigil before the Blessed Sacrament, praying for a sign of God’s favor for her beleaguered convent. As a pious act, Jacqueline Pascal wrote, the sisters at Port-Royal in Paris had placed on their altar a “very beautiful relic in which was encased in a little sun of silvergilt a splinter of a thorn of the Holy Crown.” According to legend, this sliver of thorn was a tiny piece of the crown of thorns placed upon the head of Jesus by the Roman soldiers. Obviously identifying with the passion of Christ, the sisters of Port-Royal had spent the day venerating the relic. They brought the students along with them to join them in their prayers. As little Marguerite approached the holy relic to kiss it, on an impulse, the sister in charge of the students, Sœur Flavia, took the relic from the altar and touched it to Marguerite’s eye. That evening, Marguerite came to her and showed her that the fistula was gone. “My eye is healed, Sister,” she said. Sœur Flavia ran at once to Mère Agnès, who was acting superior at the convent while her sister Mère Angélique was in the country. Mère Agnès ordered that everyone who knew about the incident keep quiet until it could be properly investigated.

  It wasn’t until March 29, the following Wednesday, that the sisters told Marguerite’s uncle Blaise, and asked him to bring the physician along with him. Both showed up on March 31, and once the physician examined Marguerite’s eye, he announced that the eye was healed and that Marguerite had completely recovered. He had no idea how this had happened but wanted to see Marguerite again soon, after he had given himself a chance to think things over. Meanwhile, Jacqueline summoned Marguerite’s father from Clermont. On April 7, in the presence of the sisters and of little Marguerite’s father and uncle, the surgeon declared that the girl’s eye had been cured by an act of God.

  But the opinion of one physician, though confirming, was not enough. Everyone who knew about the miracle understood that miracles were complicated affairs. On one hand, the healing of Marguerite’s eye may well have been the sign of God’s favor that Mère Angélique was praying for; on the other hand, if Port-Royal proclaimed the miracle too widely, they might be accused of creating a hoax. In seventeenth-century France, miracles were highly political, and everyone involved knew that. For that reason, Florin Perier and Blaise Pascal both decided to keep the event quiet until they could gather more medical support. They invited seven doctors, the ones who had treated Marguerite’s eye during the previous months, to gather at Port-Royal on April 14, which happened to be the Wednesday of Holy Week. Each doctor examined her eye, and after a long discussion among themselves, all seven of them signed a document proclaiming the miracle: “Since this sort of cure of so severe a disease effected in an instant can only be termed extraordinary, to the degree that it can be understood we think that it surpasses the ordinary forces of nature and that it could not have been done without a miracle, which we believe to have been genuine.”71

  As happy as the people at Port-Royal were about the healing throughout the Easter season, the Pascals and the Periers foremost among them, they decided to keep the event quiet until they could figure out whether it would help them or hurt them. However, no one told the doctors, and they spread the word throughout Paris, so that within a very short time the entire city was electric with talk of the Miracle of the Holy Thorn. Even people at court, those who would once have counted themselves enemies of the Jansenists, were fascinated by the stories. Queen Anne sent the king’s doctor to examine Marguerite, and he seemed to concur with his colleagues. Things began to turn around for the sisters at Port-Royal, for even as some of the most radical enemies of the Jansenists—namely, the priests of Saint-Sulpice—complained that the miracle was a hoax, the king’s physician simply told them that it seemed like a miracle to him, that “the little Perier” appeared to have been healed. Soon after, on May 27, a formal inquiry was launched by the archbishop of Paris. The vicar general interviewed Marguerite, Florin, Blaise, the physicians, and a number of the sisters who had witnessed the alleged miracle. On October 22, the committee, composed of five theologians, declared that the healing of Marguerite’s eye was indeed a miracle, an act of God, and a supernatural intervention into the world. At Port-Royal, Père Singlin presided over a solemn Mass of thanksgiving, where both the relic of the holy thorn and little Marguerite Perier were placed on display. What the ten-year-old girl may have thought of her sudden burst of fame is uncertain.

  [1658–1662]

  Pascal’s Wager

  If you ain’t just a little scared when you enter a casino, you are either very rich or you haven’t studied the games enough.

  —VP PAPPY

  Gambling: The sure way of getting nothing from something.

  —WILSON MIZNER

  The subject of gambling is all encompassing. It combines man’s natural play instinct with his desire to know about his fate and his future.

  —FRANZ ROSENTHAL, Gambling in Islam (1975)

  By the spring of 1658, the attacks on Jansenism had quieted for a time, the result of the Miracle of the Thorn. “When there are parties in dispute within the same church,” Pascal wrote, “miracles are decisive.”72 Gilberte later wrote that after her daughter was so mysteriously healed, her brother became fascinated by miracles and visited every church in Paris that sported a relic with some miracle attached. He went to every liturgical festival, every High Mass he could find, and even kept a record of the church celebrations in the city so he could attend as many as possible.

  Though he never quite considered himself a member of Port-Royal, he was still a partisan, was deeply involved with the movement, and was in total agreement with its leaders. Indeed, he even shared some of their danger. Had Cardinal Mazarin’s secret police ferreted out the true identity of the author of the Provincial Letters sooner, Pascal could have found himself wasting away his last days, somewhat shortened by the cuisine, in the Bastille. But because Mère Angélique and Père Singlin still suspected him of worldliness, he was never fully embraced by the movement, and so Pascal began to define his life in terms of his own commitment to the faith, by which he meant the faith as read by Augustine and Cornelis Jansen, regardless of what the purists of Port-Royal thought of him. In the period leading up to April 1658, during his last year of good health, he delivered a series of seminars to the gentlemen at Port-Royal des Champs. Here, he outlined his plan to write a comprehensive apology for the Christian religion and told them that the old proofs for the existence of God were abstractions beyond the ken of the average person. Too many philosophers—and Pascal must have had Descartes in mind—gloried in abstractions, while such abstractions were
of little use for the common man, and would have little impact on their lives. For Pascal, the ontological proofs for God’s existence were so far from human life that they meant little.

  A true apology for the faith, Pascal argued, would have to take full account of the human condition, which is that human beings are both great and wretched at the same time, that we are great because we have reason and thus can see the world for what it is, while we are wretched because we have no real power to change it or ourselves. His apology was, in essence, a theology of moral powerlessness. We are all sinful, base creatures who desire heaven most of all. This is our glory and our most wretched suffering. Such an apology would lead the questing mind from a realization of the truth of the human condition, with a full acknowledgment of all that is dark and ugly about humanity, into a new light based on penance, a penance that could introduce the soul to a cure for this helplessness, and from there onto a path for obtaining that cure. For Pascal, any argument for the faith must appeal to the “three orders” of the human condition—the intellectual order, the moral order, and the physical order. One cannot argue the existence of God without also appealing to the heart. The word heart here means more than just the emotions. It means that deep abiding sense of wonder and fear that constitutes human consciousness as it confronts its own insignificance in the face of God and of the universe.

  “When I think about the shortness of my life,” Pascal said, “melted into the eternity that came before me, and into the eternity that will come after…and the insignificance of the space I fill and even see, I’m lost in the infinite vastness of that space that lies beyond, that space of which I am ignorant and which has no knowledge or care of me. I’m frightened and astonished to awaken in this place rather than that, and I see no reason why I should be here and not there, now and not then. Who put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time come to me?”73

  For Pascal, this was the greatest moment of discovery of all, a far greater moment than the discovery of the vacuum or of the laws of probability. For many contemporary people, this same insight leads to atheism, for how could there be a God who loves us in the face of our insignificance? For Pascal, it led to a deep, abiding faith in a God who had disappeared from the earth and had chosen to remain hidden. But this Deus absconditus, this hidden God, still abides in us as the great desire of our hearts, for, as St. Augustine said, “My heart will not rest until it rests in you.” Outside of that God, for Pascal, there was no meaning in life, no purpose, and no point to any study, or any science.

  It was Pascal’s desire, therefore, to create an apology not of the mind but of a heart. In this, he was the great precursor to existentialism, which tried to gaze at the human condition with an unflinching heart. But in its atheism, or at least the atheism of its most famous practitioners, existentialism merely encouraged people to bravely face the meaninglessness of their lives, the meaninglessness that Pascal abjured, and to courageously attempt to create meaning out of nothing. For Pascal, such atheism was impossible, and worse, it was a fool’s errand. Meaning cannot be created from emptiness, nor can it be found by the moral courage required to face nothingness. To look into the human heart and the human condition for him was to ultimately find God.

  Because he based his apology on the complete grand opera of the human condition, he wove into it those very diversions that he had said kept people from examining their lives and therefore kept them from God. The chief of these was gambling, something he knew a great deal about. How many hours did he spend watching the nobility of France gambling away their fortunes, and daintily laughing in the face of their own folly? Certainly, he was an astute enough observer to see the religious power embedded in the act of rolling the dice, as the knights and lords and ladies risked everything they valued in le hasard, tilting with the bitch goddess Fortune. If they could risk their wealth, their honor, and their reputations as part of the game, a mere sport, would they not also be willing to risk the same on the possibility of eternal life? Here then was Pascal’s practical argument for the existence of God. In it, he showed that religious belief was not irrational, as the Pyrrhonists, the skeptics, and the atheists would say. Indeed, to believe in God was rational both in the mind and in the heart. This, then, is the argument of his famous wager.74 The argument is a dialogue addressed to the rational doubter, to the man of the world, a man very much like Pascal’s own father. It begins not with faith or with doubt, but with a simple assertion that God either exists or doesn’t. If God did exist, then this God would be unfathomable, infinitely unknowable, beyond our imagination. And therefore, Christians should not be accused of stupidity if they can’t give a rational account of their faith. Would one expect a God who was so far above us to be accountable to reason?

  Okay, say the nonbelievers, so believers might be excused for their irrationality. But should not an honest, rational doubter be accused of irrationality if he bought into religion?

  Pascal responds that reason is powerless to decide the existence or nonexistence of God. In doing this, he tacitly rejects all the cosmological proofs of Aquinas and the ontological proofs for God’s existence put forth by Anselm and Descartes. The best way to understand the issue is to treat it like a game:

  Let’s examine that point, then: let’s say that God does or does not exist. Which side should we choose? Reason is powerless before such an issue. There is an infinite abyss separating us. At the far end of this infinite universe, a coin is tossed—which will turn up, heads or tails? What will you wager? Relying merely on reason, you can’t decide. You can’t rationally bet either way, for you can’t defend either choice.

  Thus, don’t call people who have made a choice fools, for you know nothing about it.75

  But then the doubter says that people can be blamed for making any choice at all, that it would be best not to choose. Pick either side and you are a fool.

  This is where Pascal steps into a new territory, and sets the stage for existentialism. His argument shifts its focus from the order of the world to the common lot of humanity. He says to the doubter that it’s the human condition to choose, that we can do nothing else:

  But, I say it’s necessary to bet. You cannot avoid it, for you are already launched on the waters. This being the case, which one will you take? How will you decide? Come now, since you must choose, let’s consider which one is of less importance to you. You have two things to lose—the true and the good, and two things to stake—your reason and your will, your knowledge and your bliss, and your nature has two things to shun—error and misery. Since you absolutely must choose [by living, you cannot avoid it], your intelligence will not be offended by one choice any more than by the other. That’s one point settled.

  So we are in the game; so we have to set the outcomes: if you win, you win everything in this game, and if you lose, you lose nothing, so why not play? So how do you set your bet? That depends on what’s at stake. In this game, says Pascal, the prize is eternal life. By belief in God, what we are risking is a lifetime of meaningless pleasures. We are accepting a life of spiritual discipline in the hope of gaining an infinite reward. One would be irrational to refuse such a bet. If God exists, and you believe in God, then throw the dice and you win an eternity of life, love, and joy. If God doesn’t exist, and you believe, and you throw the dice, then all you lose is the pile of meaningless pleasures you were sitting on. If God does exist and you don’t believe, then you give up all hope of eternal life, and worse than that, you will one day find yourself in hell. Therefore, it is a prudent and reasonable thing to believe in God, because you could gain everything and risk very little. There isn’t a casino in Vegas that could give such odds.

  The doubter says that even if he wanted to believe, his own nature wouldn’t allow it. He can’t just force himself to believe if he doesn’t. Pascal responds that action comes first. Act as if you believe, and belief will follow:

  It’s true, but at least wake up to the fact that your inability to believe comes
from your passions, since reason induces you to believe but you still can’t. So, don’t strive to persuade yourself by counting up proofs of God’s existence; strive to diminish your passions. You want to find faith, but you don’t know the way. You want to cure yourself of your unbelief and you’re asking for remedies; learn from those who were once tied up like you and are now throwing the dice. They are people who know the path you’d like to follow; they are people cured of a disease from which you’d like to be cured—follow the way they started on.

  They acted as if they believed—they took holy water, they had Masses said, and the like. That will make you believe quite naturally, and will make you more pliable to the faith.