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Volume 48:

Thoughts (full text), Letters (full text), & Minor Works (full text) by Blaise Pascal

Pascal's Thoughts is one of the strangest works in the Classics. To begin with, there is its form -- the Thoughts are really a set of notes, published posthumously, for Pascal's planned but never written Apology for the Christian Religion -- which gives the whole thing a fractured, almost Modernist feel:

60: First part: Misery of man without God.
Second part: Happiness of man with God.
Or, First part: That nature is corrupt. Proved by nature itself.
Second part: That there is a Redeemer. Proved by Scripture.

61: Order. -- I might well have taken this discourse in an order like this; to show the vanity of all conditions of men, to show the vanity of ordinary lives, and then the vanity of philosophic lives, sceptics, stoics; but the order would not have been kept. I know a little what it is, and how few people understand it. No human science can keep it. Saint Thomas did not keep it. Mathematics keep it, but they are useless on account of their depth.

62: Preface to the first part. -- To speak of those who have treated of the knowledge of self; of the divisions of Charron, which sadden and weary us; of the confusion of Montaigne; that he was quite aware of his want of method, and shunned it by jumping from subject to subject; that he sought to be fashionable.
His foolish project of describing himself! And this not casually and against his maxims, since every one makes mistakes, but by his maxims themselves, and by first and chief design. For to say silly things by chance and weakness is a common misfortune; but to say them intentionally is intolerable, and to say such as that…

63: Montaigne. -- Montaigne's faults are great. Lewd words; this is bad, notwithstanding Mademoiselle de Gournay. Credulous; people without eyes. Ignorant; squaring the circle, a greater world. His opinions on suicide, on death. He suggests an indifference about salvation, without fear and without repentance. As his book was not written with a religious purpose, he was not bound to mention religion; but it is always our duty not to turn men from it. One can excuse his rather free and licentious opinions on some relations of life (730, 231); but one cannot excuse his thoroughly pagan views on death, for a man must renounce piety altogether, if he does not at least wish to die like a Christian. Now, through the whole of his book his only conception of death is a cowardly and effeminate one.

64: It is not in Montaigne, but in myself, that I find all that I see in him.

Often such discontinuity (which, of course, wasn't ultimately intended here) can mask surprisingly banal material. But in this case, the strangeness in form is matched by a strangeness of content. Pascal is a highly unusual thinker, an odd mix of modern and ancient. He's rational and systematic like the mathematician he was, but the aim of his system is to push beyond reason. His famous wager argues logically the need to abandon logic:

If there is a God, He is infinitely incomprehensible, since, having neither parts nor limits, He has no affinity to us. We are then incapable of knowing either what He is or if He is. This being so, who will dare to undertake the decision of the question? Not we, who have no affinity to Him...
Reason can decide nothing here. There is an infinite chaos which separates us. A game is being played at the extremity of this infinite distance where heads or tails will turn up. What will you wager? According to reason, you can do neither the one thing nor the other; according to reason, you can defend neither of the propositions...
--Yes; but you must wager. It is not optional. You are embarked. Which will you choose then? Let us see. Since you must choose, let us see which interests you least. 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 happiness; and your nature has two things to shun, error and misery. Your reason is no more shocked in choosing one rather than the other, since you must of necessity choose. This is one point settled. But your happiness? Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager then without hesitation that He is.

Pascal's Wager has become a common enough idea that we can forget what a strange thing it is, a kind of proof from belief in God that begins with the admission that there's insufficient evidence for belief. Pascal believed that reason had a place in these matters, but he believed that place was limited:

There are three sources of belief: reason, custom, inspiration. The Christian religion, which alone has reason, does not acknowledge as her true children those who believe without inspiration. It is not that she excludes reason and custom. On the contrary, the mind must be opened to proofs, must be confirmed by custom, and offer itself in humbleness to inspirations.

Pascal's belief is ultimately psychological. He believes because, he says, The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me. He was one of the first modern writers to identify that silence. But in the face of such a thing, the smart bet on a coin flip can only be so much comfort. Sometimes it seems that the very fragility of Pascal's belief combines with his terror of the alternative to cause his great fervency, not to mention his religious chauvinism. The brief aside above -- which alone has reason -- only hints at Pascal's attitudes towards Jews (the enemy), Muslims and atheists. Finding these attitudes side-by-side with such an inspired sensibility makes reading Pascal's Thoughts a troubling experience.

But he is one of those thinkers who is more interesting, more valuable, for his faults. He writes sometimes as if from a defensive crouch, and this pose has something to teach us about the psychology of belief. (I know that William James was among the editors of the Classics, and one suspects he played a part in the choice to give Pascal a volume to himself.) It seems proper that his great work should come down to us unfinished, for the excitement of reading Pascal is in watching the process of a mind at work. He doesn't tell us truths, he embodies them.


--CRB, December 22, 2007

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