by Will Durant
For a time they engaged in a dispute over the division of their patrimony. When this was settled Blaise found himself both rich and free—a condition hostile to sanctity. He took a sumptuously furnished home, staffed it with many servants, and drove about Paris in a coach behind four or six horses. 24 His temporary recovery gave him a deceptive euphoria, which turned him from piety to pleasure. We must not grudge him his few years “in the world” (1648–54), when he enjoyed the company of Parisian wits and games and belles, and for an exciting while pursued in Auvergne a lady of beauty and learning, the “Sappho of the countryside.” 25 About this time he wrote a Discours sur les passions de l’amour, and apparently he contemplated marriage—which he was later to describe as “the lowest of the conditions of life permitted to a Christian.” 26 Among his friends were some libertins, who combined free morals with free thought. Perhaps through them Pascal became interested in Montaigne, whose Essais now entered deeply into his life. Their first influence probably inclined him to religious doubt.
Jacqueline, hearing of his new frivolity, reproached him, and prayed for his reform. It was characteristic of his emotional nature that an accident reinforced her prayers. One day, as he was driving over the Pont de Neuilly, the four horses took fright, and plunged over the parapet into the Seine. The carriage almost followed them; fortunately the reins broke, and the coach hung half over the edge. Pascal and his friends emerged, but the sensitive philosopher, terrified by the nearness of death, fainted away, and remained unconscious for some time. On recovering he felt that he had had a vision of God. In an ecstasy of fear, remorse, and gratitude he recorded his vision on a parchment which henceforth he carried sewn in the lining of his coat:
The year of grace 1654.
Monday, Nov. 23rd, . . . from about half past six in the evening to half an hour after midnight.
The late
God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the scholars.
Certainty, certainty, feeling, joy, peace.
God of Jesus Christ . . .
He is not to be found except by ways taught in the Gospel.
Grandeur of the human soul.
Just Father, the world has never known you, but I have known you.
Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy . . .
My God, will you abandon me? . . .
Jesus Christ
Jesus Christ . . .
I was separated from Him, I fled Him, renounced Him, crucified Him.
May I never be separated from Him . . .
Reconciliation sweet and complete. 27
He resumed his visits to Port-Royal and Jacqueline, gladdening her heart with his new mood of humility and penitence. He listened to the sermons of Antoine Singlin. In December, 1654, he became a member of the Port-Royal community. 28 In January he had a long conversation there with Sacy, who undertook to convince him of the superficiality of science and the futility of philosophy. Arnauld and Nicole discovered in the new recruit an ardor of conversion, and a skill in literary expression, that seemed a providential instrument placed in their hands to defend Port-Royal against its enemies. They begged him to devote his pen to answering the Jesuits who were trying to make Jansenism a sin. He responded with such brilliance and force that to this day the Society of Jesus feels his sting.
2. The Provincial Letters
On January 23 and 29, 1656, Pascal published the first and second of what he called Lettres écrites par Louis de Montalte à un provincial de ses amis, et aux RR. PP. Jésuites, sur la morale et la politique de ces Pères—“Letters written by Louis de Montalte” (a fictitious name) “to a provincial friend, and to the reverend Jesuit Fathers, on their ethics and politics.” The framework was clever: it pretended to be the report of a Parisian to a friend in the provinces on the moral and theological issues then exciting the intellectual and religious circles in the capital. Arnauld and Nicole helped Pascal with facts and references; Pascal, combining the fervor of a convert with the wit and polish of a man of the world, provided the style that reached a new level in French prose.
The first letters sought public support for those Jansenist views on grace and salvation which Arnauld had defended; they were designed to influence the Sorbonne against the motion to expel Arnauld. In this they failed; Arnauld was solemnly degraded and expelled (January 31). The failure stimulated Pascal and Arnauld to attack the Jesuits as undermining morality by the laxity of their confessors and the loopholes of their casuistry. They explored the tomes of Escobar and other Jesuits, and denounced the doctrines of “probabilism,” “direction of intention,” and “mental reservation”; even the Jesuit missionaries’ accommodation of Christian theology to Chinese ancestor worship was condemned 29—though they made no explicit charge that the Jesuits justified means by ends. As the letters proceeded, and Arnauld revealed more and more of Escobar’s casuistry to Pascal, the convert’s passion rose. After the tenth letter he abandoned the fiction of a Parisian writing to a provincial; he spoke now in his own person, and addressed the Jesuits directly with indignant eloquence and sarcastic wit. Sometimes he gave twenty days to composing one letter, then rushed it off to the printer lest the public interest should cool. He gave a unique apology for the length of Letter XVI: “I had no time to make it shorter.” 30 In the eighteenth and final letter (March 24, 1657) he defied the Pope himself. Alexander VII had issued (October 16, 1656) another denunciation of Jansenism; Pascal reminded his readers that the papal judgment might err, as (he felt) it had done in the case of Galileo. 31 The Pope condemned the letters (September 6, 1657), but all educated France read them.
Were they fair to the Jesuits? Were the excerpts from Jesuit writers correctly quoted? “It is quite true,” says a learned rationalist, “that qualifying phrases have at times been improperly omitted, a few phrases have been wrongly translated, and the condensing of long passages into short sentences has in a few instances the effect of an injustice”; but, he adds, “these cases are relatively few and unimportant”; 32 and the essential accuracy of the extracts is now generally acknowledged. 33 It must be admitted, however, that Pascal took out of their context the most alarming and questionable passages of some casuists, and led a part of the public to the exaggerated view that these theological jurists were conspiring to destroy the morality of Christendom. Voltaire praised the excellence of the Letters as literature, but thought that “the whole book rested on a false basis. The author skillfully ascribed to the whole of the Society the extravagant ideas of a few Spanish and Flemish Jesuits,” 34 from whom many other Jesuits had differed. D’Alembert regretted that Pascal had not lampooned the Jansenists too, for “the shocking doctrine of Jansen and Saint-Cyran afforded at least as much room for ridicule as the pliant doctrine of Molina, Tambourin, and Vásquez.” 35
The influence of the Letters was immense. They did not immediately lessen the power of the Jesuits—certainly not with the King—but they so shamed the excesses of the casuists that Alexander VII himself, while continuing his opposition to Jansenism, condemned “laxism,” and ordered a revision of casuistical texts (1665–66). 36 It was the Letters that gave the word “casuistry” its connotation of specious subtleties defending wrong actions or ideas. Meanwhile a masterpiece of style had been added to French literature. It was as if Voltaire had lived a century before Voltaire—for here were the gay wit, the cutting irony, the skeptical humor, the passionate invective of Voltaire, and, in the later letters, that warm resentment of injustice which redeemed Voltaire from being an encyclopedia of persiflage. Voltaire himself called the Letters “the best-written book that has yet appeared in France”; 37 and the most penetrating and discriminating of all critics held that Pascal “invented fine prose in France.” 38 Bossuet, being asked what book he would rather have written had he not written his own, answered, the Provincial Letters of Pascal. 39
3. In Defense of Faith
Pascal returned to Paris in 1656 to superintend the publication of the Letters, and lived there through his six rema
ining years. He had not abandoned the world; in the very year of his death he shared in organizing a regular coach service in the capital—the germ of the present omnibus network. But two events occurred which renewed his piety, and led to his culminating contribution to literature and religion. On March 15, 1657, the Jesuits secured from the Queen Mother an order closing the schools of the Solitaries and forbidding the admission of new members to Port-Royal. The order was peacefully obeyed; the children, now including Racine, were sent to the houses of friends, and the teachers sadly dispersed. Nine days later (the date of the last of the Provincial Letters) an apparent miracle occurred in the chapel of the troubled nunnery. Pascal’s ten-year-old niece, Marguerite Périer, suffered from a painful lachrymal fistula that exuded noisome pus through eyes and nose. A relative of Mère Angélique had presented to Port-Royal what he and others claimed to be a thorn from the crown that had tortured Christ. On March 24 the nuns, in solemn ceremony and singing psalms, placed the thorn on their altar. Each in turn kissed the relic, and one of them, seeing Marguerite among the worshipers, took the thorn and with it touched the girl’s sore. That evening, we are told, Marguerite expressed surprise that her eye no longer pained her; her mother was astonished to find no sign of the fistula; a physician, summoned, reported that the discharge and the swelling had disappeared. He, not the nuns, spread word of what he termed a miraculous cure. Seven other physicians who had had previous knowledge of Marguerite’s fistula subscribed a statement that in their judgment a miracle had taken place. The diocesan officials investigated, came to the same conclusion, and authorized a Te Deum Mass in Port-Royal. Crowds of believers came to see and kiss the thorn; all Catholic Paris acclaimed a miracle; the Queen Mother ordered all persecution of the nuns to stop; the Solitaries returned to Les Granges. (In 1728 Pope Benedict XIII referred to the case as proving that the age of miracles had not passed.) Pascal made himself an armorial emblem of an eye surrounded by a crown of thorns, with the inscription Scio cui credidi—“I know whom I have believed.” 40
He now set himself to write, as his last testament, an elaborate defense of religious belief. All that he found strength to do was to jot down isolated thoughts and group them into a tentative but telling order. Then (1658) his old ailments returned, and with such crippling severity that he was never able to give these notes coherent sequence or structural form. After his death his devoted friend the Duc de Roannez and the scholars of Port-Royal edited and published the material as Pensées de M. Pascal sur la réligion, et sur quelques autres sujets (1670). They feared that as Pascal had left these fragmentary “thoughts” they might lead to skepticism rather than to piety; they concealed the skeptical pieces, and modified some of the rest lest King or Church should take offense; 41 for at that time the persecution of Port-Royal had ceased, and the editors deprecated a renewal of controversy. Not till the nineteenth century were the Pensées of Pascal published in their full and authentic text.
If we may venture to impose an order upon them, we may place their starting point in the Copernican astronomy. We feel again, as we listen to Pascal, the tremendous blow that the Copernican-Galilean astronomy was dealing to the traditional form of Christianity.
Let man contemplate Nature entire in her full and lofty majesty; let him put far from his sight the lowly objects that surround him; let him regard that blazing light, placed like an eternal lamp to illuminate the world; let the earth appear to him but a point within the vast circuit which that star describes; and let him marvel that this immense circumference is itself but a speck from the viewpoint of the stars that move in the firmament. And if our vision is stopped there, let imagination pass beyond. . . . All this visible world is but an imperceptible element in the great bosom of nature. No thought can go so far. . . . It is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere. 42 This is the most perceivable feature of the almightiness of God, so that our imagination loses itself in this thought.
And Pascal adds, in a famous line characteristic of his philosophical sensitivity, “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.” 43
But there is another infinity—the infinitely small, the endless theoretical divisibility of the “uncuttable” atom: no matter how tiny the minim to which we reduce anything, we cannot but believe that it too has parts smaller than itself. Our reason wavers perplexed and appalled between the infinitely vast and the infinitely minute.
He who sees himself thus will be frightened by himself, and, perceiving himself sustained . . . between these two abysses of infinity and nothing, will tremble . . . and will be more disposed to contemplate these marvels in silence than to explore them with presumption. For in the end, what is man in nature? A nothing in respect to the infinite, everything in respect to the nothing, a halfway between nothing and all. Infinitely far from comprehending the extremes, both the end and the beginning or principle of things are invincibly hidden in an impenetrable secret; he is equally incapable of seeing the nothing whence he has been drawn, and the infinite in which he is engulfed. 44*
Science, therefore, is a silly presumption. It is based on reason, which is based on the senses, which deceive us in a hundred ways. It is limited by the narrow bounds within which our senses operate, and by the corruptible brevity of the flesh. Left to itself, reason cannot understand—or offer a solid base to—morality, the family, or the state, much less perceive the real nature and order of the world, not to speak of comprehending God. There is more wisdom in custom, even in imagination and myth, than in reason, and “the wisest reason takes as her own principles those which the imagination of man has everywhere rashly introduced.” 46 There are two kinds of wisdom: that of the simple and “ignorant” multitude, who live by the wisdom of tradition and imagination (ritual and myth); and that of the sage who has pierced through science and philosophy to realize his ignorance. 47 Therefore “there is nothing so conformable to reason as to disavow reason,” and “to make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher.” 48
So Pascal thought it unwise to rest religion on reason, as even some Jansenists tried to do. Reason cannot prove God, nor immortality; in either case the evidence is too contradictory. Nor can the Bible serve as the final basis of faith, for it is full of passages ambiguous or obscure, and the prophecies which piety interprets as pointing to Christ may have had quite other significance. 49 Moreover, God in the Bible speaks through figures, whose literal sense is misleading, and whose real meaning is perceived only by those blessed with divine grace. “We understand nothing of the works of God unless we take it as a principle that He wishes to blind some and to enlighten others.” 50 (Here Pascal seems to take literally the story of Yahveh hardening Pharaoh’s heart.)
Everywhere, if we rely on reason, we find the unintelligible. Who can understand, in man, the union and interaction of an obviously material body and an obviously immaterial mind? “There is nothing so inconceivable as that matter should be conscious of itself.” 51 Philosophers who have mastered their passions—“what matter could do that?” 52 And the nature of man, so mingled of angel and brute, 53 repeats the contradiction of mind and body, and reminds us of the Chimera, which, in Greek mythology, was a she-goat with a lion’s head and a serpent’s tail.
What a Chimera is man! What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy! Judge of all things, and imbecile norm of the earth; depository of truth, and sewer of error and doubt; the glory and refuse of the universe. Who shall unravel this confusion? 54
Morally man is a mystery. All kinds of wickedness appear or lie hidden in him. “Man is only a disguise, a liar, and a hypocrite, both to himself and to others.” 55 “All men naturally hate one another; there could not be four friends in the world.” 56 “How hollow is the heart of man, and how full of excrement!” 57 And what bottomless, insatiable vanity! “We would never travel on the sea if we had no hope of telling about it later. . . . We lose our lives with joy provided people talk about it. . . . Even philosophers wish for a
dmirers.” 58 Yet it is part of man’s greatness that out of his wickedness, his hatred, and his vanity he evolved a code of law and morals to control his wickedness, and drew out of his lust an ideal of love. 59
The misery of man is another mystery. Why should the universe have labored so long to produce a species so fragile in its happiness, so subject to pain in every nerve, to grief in every love, to death in every life? And yet “the grandeur of man is great in that he knows himself to be miserable.” 60
Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed.* The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him; a vapor, a drop of water, suffice to kill him. But when the universe has crushed him man will still be nobler than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and of its victory the universe knows nothing. 61
None of these mysteries finds an answer in reason. If we trust to reason alone we shall condemn ourselves to a Pyrrhonism that will doubt everything except pain and death, and philosophy could be at best a rationalization of defeat. But we cannot believe that man’s fate is as reason sees it—to struggle, to suffer, and to die, having begotten others to struggle, to suffer, and to die, generation after generation, aimlessly, stupidly, in a ridiculous and superabundant insignificance. In our hearts we feel that this cannot be true, that it would be the greatest of all blasphemies to think that life and the universe have no meaning. God and the meaning of life must be felt by the heart, rather than by reason. “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know,” 62 and we do right to listen to our hearts, to “place our faith in feeling.” 63 For all belief, even in practical matters, is a form of will, a direction of attention and desire.” (The “will to believe.”) The mystical experience is profounder than the evidence of the senses or the arguments of reason.