Pascal's Wager

by James A. Connor

  “But that’s what I fear.” Why? What do you have to lose?

  How will you be harmed by choosing this path? You will be faithful, honest, humble, and grateful; you will be full of good works, and will become a true, good friend to those who know you. What will you lose? Noxious pleasures, vainglory, and riotous times, but these loses will be easily supplanted by other, greater joys.

  Of course there are holes in what Pascal says, but most of those come from misunderstanding his project. Those who want to argue against it as they would any philosophical idea are playing Descartes’ game and not Pascal’s. They are back to metaphysics, looking for an argument that is so compelling that the bystanders must believe its conclusions or accuse themselves of being irrational. For Pascal, such arguments, though they look nice, lead us into orbit and leave us spinning there, without rooting us to the earth of human life. To understand his argument, you must think not like a philosopher but like a gambler. What Pascal is doing is applying to questions of the existence of God the old rule of expectations that he suggested to Fermat in his letters on the gambler’s ruin. Does he claim any absolute proof for God’s existence? Quite the contrary: he acknowledges that such proofs are illusions. What he tried to do, within the context of seventeenth-century France and the religious climate of that time, was to demonstrate that if you did believe in the Christian God, especially the God of St. Augustine, then you weren’t an idiot, that you were taking a calculated risk that had a good chance of succeeding. This argument can be found in other religious contexts, most notably Hinduism, and can really be judged only within the context of each religious culture.

  In Pascal’s argument, there are four possibilities:

  You believe in God, and God exists. This would mean you could go to heaven, and your winnings would be infinite and everlasting.

  You believe in God, and God doesn’t exist. In this case, you die like everyone else and rot in the grave like everyone else, and what you lose is some wild times on earth, which compared to eternity is nothing, and your loss is negligible.

  You don’t believe in God, and God doesn’t exist, in which case, see possibility 2.

  You don’t believe in God, and God does exist, in which case, you are in a lot of trouble. You go to hell, and your loss is infinite.

  Given the outcomes and the odds, therefore, it would behoove a betting man to bet on God. Pascal here is applying game theory to theology. Certainly unconventional, certainly puckish, but puckish with a dash of genius. Once you accept the rules of the game and the context of the game, you’d be the worst kind of donkey not to believe in God, Pascal’s God. This is because the first possibility, believing in God, dominates the last, not believing in God.

  Now, philosophers, being that sort, have been merrily punching holes in Pascal’s argument for centuries. Almost all of their jabs turn on some act of stepping out of the context of Pascal’s game—that is, the context of a Christian society that was losing its faith—and criticizing the whole thing from that outside position, like the uninitiated kibitzer who comes to a bridge tournament and shouts, “Well, that’s stupid!” every time somebody puts down a card.

  First of all, they argue, what if God isn’t into rewarding or punishing? What if God doesn’t do things like that? Pascal’s argument would then fall apart. After all, they say, doesn’t Pascal assume a Christian God? What if God is a Hindu God, or Muslim, or even maybe Zeus? Couldn’t Pascal’s wager also be used to encourage belief in Chemosh? Or Odin? Or New Age pantheism? All of these criticisms are fine, if you want to play another game, some game other than Pascal’s. It is easy enough to stand outside of his argument and propose other possibilities, but to do so would be to miss the point. Pascal made no claim to metaphysical or even mathematical compulsion. He made the claim only that it was prudent to believe in the Christian God, at least from inside the world that he lived in. His argument was not made to logic-chopping philosophers, but to honnêtes hommes, gentlemen gamblers running the odds at Vegas.

  One thing that Pascal does assume is that there is at least a possibility that God exists. Therefore, his argument would have little effect on strong atheists, because they argue that there is no possibility that God exists. But of course, this is as much a belief statement as is Pascal’s Jansenism, and can be relativized in exactly the same way. People can stand outside of the atheist’s game and shout, “That’s pretty stupid!” just as they can outside the Christian game.

  Then, there was the liberal Protestant criticism of William James, who didn’t much care for Pascal’s Catholic hocus-pocus.76 Pascal would have you believing in God out of a hope for a reward and fear of punishment, says James, and this, says James, isn’t real faith. A true, pure faith should have none of that, and should be held freely, and without strings attached, out of a desire to do good. Thank you, but Pascal is not talking to strong believers, but to wavering believers, and most especially to cultural Catholics, to those people who had been brought up in the faith but could not get beyond their own immediate desires. Pascal’s wager is therefore a prudential one, aimed at the tepid and the lukewarm, those who would go to church if they could see a percentage in it. The kind of purity that James is demanding is something that Pascal would address somewhere down the line. His wager is not evangelization, but pre-evangelization, and James’s argument smacks of the fellow who went to the Happy Kangaroo Play School and demanded to know why the children weren’t studying ablative absolutes.

  But now comes the real test, the only true criticism of Pascal’s wager. It is a Jansenist criticism that, following Augustine, would question whether people are free to choose the good in any way, without efficacious grace. So why talk to these waverers at all? Why write an apology for Christianity if the elect have already been chosen and will believe out of efficacious grace, whether they choose to or not? Would this apology not be a fool’s errand—to try to convince such lukewarm folks when efficacious grace is so obviously absent? Moreover, wouldn’t there be a possibility that the apologist was going against the will of God in doing so? There is something rather Jesuitical in the entire project, something taken from his great enemies, which had entered and infected his Jansenist worldview. Maybe Mère Angélique and Père Singlin were right after all. Buried in his argument is the notion that people can decide on their own beliefs, that they have the power to choose the good and to change their lives. Perhaps at bottom Pascal was a humanist after all.

  [1660–1662]

  Port-Royal Agonistes

  Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle;

  I am no traitor’s uncle, and that word “grace”

  In an ungracious mouth is but profane.

  —SHAKESPEARE, Richard II

  Grace! ’tis a charming Sound,

  Harmonious to my Ear!

  Heav’n with the Echo shall resound,

  And all the Earth shall hear.

  —PHILIP DODDRIDGE (1702–1751), Hymns Founded on Various Texts in the Holy Scriptures (1755)

  Grace under pressure.

  —ERNEST HEMINGWAY, New Yorker (NOVEMBER 30, 1929)

  Blaise spent the summer of 1660 staying with Gilberte and her family in Clermont. While there, he received a letter from Pierre Fermat inviting him to Toulouse for a visit, but Pascal declined, saying that his health was not strong enough to permit it. Moreover, he said, he no longer considered geometry to be anything more than a craft—a noble craft, to be sure, but a craft nonetheless. His religion had finally trumped his science. Thus he and Fermat, who had been collaborators through so many years, on so many projects, never met in the flesh. In the end, Pascal regretted it, not because Fermat was a man of mathematics, but because he was a man of honor and integrity—a good friend, even from a distance. Though his life as a scientist and mathematician was far from over, the young ambitious careerist who had so ardently defended the existence of the vacuum had become something else entirely. His values had changed, and he was a new man.

  Instead of traveling to Tou
louse, Pascal left for Bourbon to take the curative waters, and from there went on to Poitou to spend Christmas with the duc de Roannez and his family. On December 13, 1660, while Blaise was still in Poitou, the young king called the officers of the Assembly of the Clergy to him at the Louvre and announced to them that he had determined to bring about the end of Jansenism. Cardinal Mazarin stood nearby, but it was obvious to everyone that he was sick unto death, and that this decision was not his doing.

  It is likely that news of the king’s announcement hit Poitou fairly quickly, putting a chill into Pascal’s already wasted body. By the time he returned to Paris, the city was buzzing with news of the death of the cardinal, and of Louis’s newfound determination. For the Jansenists, this was like the tolling of a bell, not only for the cardinal but for themselves, for he was the one person who had been holding the young king’s opposition in check, and although he was no great friend of Port-Royal, he did not wish to go to war with them, either. But all of that ended as the cardinal lay dying in Vincennes, when Louis affirmed the rumor that he would not replace Mazarin but would take on the duties of first minister himself. In doing so, he was declaring to the nation and to the world that he and only he would be the master of France.

  The partisans of Port-Royal shuddered at the announcement, for the young king was no friend of theirs. Back in 1657, Louis had taken counsel from his pious mother, who was then under the influence of Vincent de Paul, and announced his opposition to Port-Royal and everything it stood for. Now that he had come into his own power, he had declared them to be his enemy. In France, there would be one king, one faith, one law, and that would be Louis XIV on all three counts.

  By that February, the Assembly of the Clergy published their document, including a formulary one that had the legal power of an oath, and required that all priests and religious sign it as a proof of their orthodoxy. This formulary contained nothing less than a complete repudiation of Jansenism, so that when the Port-Royalists signed it, they were signing their lives away. By the king’s command, the peace brought on by the Miracle of the Thorn was over. On April 23, an officer of the court appeared at Port-Royal in Paris, handed Mère Agnès Arnauld an official document, and then announced to her that the monastery could no longer accept postulants until further notice, that they were required to close the convent schools, the one in Paris and the one at Port-Royal des Champs, and that they were to send the nearly seventy students, or pensionnaires, back to their homes. Of course, this included the two Perier girls, Blaise’s nieces, as well. Next, the king sent another court official to the country to close Lemaître’s petites écoles.

  Along with this, the crown removed Père Singlin as the spiritual director for Port-Royal. Mère Angélique, who had often taken to her bed, stricken, when opposed by a stronger personality than her own, was suddenly stricken once again at the prospect of losing all she had created, and this time in earnest. She died in late summer, after calling her sisters to her and consoling them about their dark future. Then, just before she died, she said that she expected it would be a long, terrible eternity.

  As Mère Angélique lay ill, her brother Antoine and the other Jansenist leaders gathered to discuss their strategy. What they wanted was a new document, drafted by their friends and supporters among the diocesan clergy, that they could sign and that would yet maintain the distinction between fact and law. Pascal was involved in this conference because he had written the Provincial Letters, and had therefore had taken several good swipes at the Jesuits and their supporters. In their document, they looked for some kind of accommodation that would allow them to sign the formulary and yet maintain their beliefs. Luckily, the original formulary had gaping holes left in it, so that all of Port-Royal would be able to squirm through.

  The document was ready by the end of May, and it called for a “complete and sincere respect” for the church’s teaching authority, even in its condemnation of the five propositions. It even forbade anyone connected to them from “preaching, writing, or disputing anything in a sense contrary to the assent of faith.” However, Antoine Arnauld, Nicole, and the others made certain that the document did not include an admission that the five propositions were indeed found in the Augustinus, which allowed them to preserve their carefully constructed distinction between fact and law. Satisfied, Arnauld and Nicole then recommended to the sisters at Port-Royal de Paris that they sign the formulary. At first the sisters resisted, but then Père Singlin secretly consulted with them and convinced them. They signed on June 22.

  But this wasn’t enough for Louis, who was determined to bring the Jansenists to heel. He quickly made it clear through his royal council that this new document had too many loopholes, and he commanded the vicars general to go back and draft a new formulary that would keep the Jansenists from squirming out of the cage he had put them in. The king wrote a letter in early July to the Vatican, asking the pope for a new statement, one that would tighten the ambiguities of the first formulary. The pope, Alexander VII, responded quickly for a pope, as quickly as the middle of August. By October 31, 1661, bowing to pressure from the king, the vicars general in Paris issued a new formulary. They were not happy about it, because they believed that the pope had transgressed on their Gallican liberties, but they did it anyway. The rub came about halfway through the formulary:

  …I condemn with my heart and my lips the doctrine of the Five Propositions of Cornelius Jansenius, as found in his book titled Augustinus, condemned by two popes and the gathering of bishops; and whose doctrine is not that of St. Augustine but only of Jansenius, who has badly misunderstood the true sense of this holy doctor.

  Thus, in one stroke the papacy condemned Augustine’s teaching on original sin, correctly interpreted by Jansenius, while praising this “holy doctor” and claiming that he was badly misunderstood. This new formulary was published on November 20, and read out in all the churches in Paris. At the end, there was a little postscript saying that priests and religious had fifteen days to sign it. The “or else” was understood.

  Pascal was furious, not because his Jansenist friends had instructed their followers to sign the formulary, which was bad enough, but because of the effect this would have upon the sisters, most notably his own, residing at Port-Royal. This was an injustice, he believed, a persecution, for by demanding that they sign the formulary repudiating the theology of Jansen, and therefore of the abbé de Saint-Cyran, the king, the pope, and everyone else concerned was asking them to give up their faith. These were pious women, not theologians, and they were new to subtle argumentation and dissertations that went nowhere. They had settled down in their convents to live lives of penance and holy piety and were no threat to anyone. They were more than ordinary women; they were holy women. And to force them to repudiate the theology of Cornelis Jansen under the threat of closing their convents, confiscating their dowries, and sending them home to families where they no longer belonged was a crime; more than a crime, it was a sin.

  But there was more to Pascal’s reaction than this. His concern for the sisters was real, but moreover, by asking the priests and the nuns of Port-Royal to repudiate their faith in Jansen’s theology, the church was also asking Blaise Pascal to repudiate the night of fire, for it was from that experience that he had learned that the true God was not a God of the philosophers and theologians but of the prophets. The God he had encountered was the God of Scripture, of Jesus Christ. In this encounter, he had learned about the wretchedness and the nobility of the human race. Everything that he had come to believe, everything he had written about in his Pensées, preparing for his great argument against the atheists, was being attacked by the Jesuits and their surrogates. And then, disaster—the greatest disaster he had yet faced.

  On October 4, 1661, Jacqueline Pascal, Sœur Jacqueline de Sainte-Euphémie, died; her brother believed that she had died of a broken heart. Though he too would be dead within a few months, his anger with his old friends at Port-Royal for their theological maneuvering, and for their slipper
y recommendation to the sisters that they should sign the document, had become white-hot. In 1660, when the first stage of the persecution had begun, Jacqueline had been sent to Port-Royal des Champs, to get her out of the line of fire, and to have her act as subprioress and novice mistress. When the second wave of persecution hit in June 1661, Jacqueline was one of the few who resisted signing the formulary. She believed it to be an injustice to ask the sisters to sign even the first of the formularies, the one that gave the Jansenist party so much wiggle room.

  In her anger, she sent a letter to Antoine Arnauld protesting his decision. Little Jacqueline Pascal, Blaise Pascal’s baby sister, was apparently ready to start the revolution. “I am prepared, with the help of God, to die confessing my faith during these present sufferings. What are we afraid of?” The closing of the convents, the loss of their dowries, the loss of Port-Royal itself—these were not important. What was important was that they remain faithful to the teachings they were given. “But we can rest secure within the simple boundaries of our sorrow and of the meekness with which we shall accept our persecution. The love with which we shall embrace our enemies will tie us unseen to the church.”77

  Eventually, Jacqueline signed the first formulary, but she never quite reconciled herself with it. Like her brother, she suffered from fragile health, and the stress of watching everything that she had loved collapse around her finally broke her spirit, and she took sick. Within a few months, she lay on her deathbed. After she died, Blaise railed against his old acquaintances at Port-Royal for their dithering. Would Jacqueline still be alive if they had been willing to fight on? Luckily, she had died before the second formulary could be presented to her, and so she was spared that torment.