THE HEART OF PASCAL

Pascal’s most enduring work, Pensées, is a collection of posthumously published fragments that Pascal had intended to become part of a book defending the Christian religion. It was proposed to be a thorough apologetic. These fragments have been assembled in several arrangements, none of which provides a clearly linear or systematic development of his viewpoints. Therefore, some approach Pascal with a smorgasbord sensibility. Various memorable and arresting aphorisms and epigrams are snatched up, pondered, and even savored, but often at the expense of knowing what they mean or how they fit into the larger puzzle of Pascal’s philosophy. Consider this curiously luminous sentence: “The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing: we know this in countless ways” (423/277).3 Scores have been entranced by the poetic and paradoxical ring of this sentence. But what did Pascal mean by it?

Some have taken “reasons of the heart” to refer to an irrational, emotional, or otherwise arbitrary preference or orientation. If so, so much the worse for Pascal. If “reasons of the heart” are bereft of rational justification, then they cannot be subject to logical evaluation. They would be either nonrational (such as a sneeze or wheeze) or irrational (such as believing in unicorns or centaurs). This is no position for a philosopher to take. Or did Pascal have something very different in mind—something more subtle, profound, and complex? Could the same man who amazed all of Europe with his mathematical and scientific abilities disengage the head entirely for “reasons of the heart”? We will explore this later in the book.

Many think that Pascal was a fideist: one who divorces faith and reason and finds no rational support for religious belief. One might claim that in matters of mathematical calculation and scientific experimentation Pascal employed reason and observation, but in the realm of religion, he took another course. Some of his statements—taken by themselves and out of context—can indeed be read in this way. “It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason. That is what faith is: God perceived by the heart, not by reason” (424/278).4

For Pascal, belief in God, the church, and the Christian Scriptures meant far more than assenting to the conclusion of a complex argument; faith involved submitting the core of one’s being to a supernatural being who calls one into a transformational encounter and an ongoing engagement. On the other hand, Pascal, in the last few years of his life, proposed to write a reasoned defense of the Christian religion (Apology for the Christian Religion), which would win over the skeptics and unbelievers of his day to Christian commitment. One of the fragments from that intended work was so bold as to claim, “One of the ways in which the damned will be confounded is that they will see themselves condemned by their own reason, by which they claimed to condemn the Christian religion” (175/563).5

When Pascal laid out the strategy for this defense of Christianity, he did not dispense with reason as a tool for commending faith; he did not lay aside his prodigious intellectual skills by abandoning rational argumentation. Consider his program for his proposed apology.

Some of Pascal’s most memorable and oft-repeated sayings concern the strangeness and wonder of the human condition. But these were never offered as snippets of wisdom without purpose. They fit integrally into Pascal’s claim that Christianity is “worthy of reverence because it really understands human nature.” Pascal applied his considerable philosophical and rhetorical skills to that end, relying on the biblical account of human nature as his guide.

WAS PASCAL A PHILOSOPHER?

Pascal’s essentially religious or theological outlook has led some commentators to exclude his work from that of philosophy proper or to judge his work as poor philosophy. Some have argued that the title “philosopher” should be used to designate only those who speculate widely and systematically, and who appeal only to human reason apart from any consideration of divine revelation or awareness of a religious mission. But this prejudices the case against the entire stream of influential religious thinkers who have pondered reality deeply and logically in light of their spiritual convictions. It also prejudges the case against less systematic and nonreligious thinkers such as Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900). Any definition of philosophy that excludes in principle Augustine, Anselm, Kierkegaard, or Martin Buber—passionate religious believers as well as earnest, vigilant thinkers—is surely defective and should be discarded.

Nevertheless, Pascal did not approach philosophy as a vocation. His renown in his day came from his genius as mathematician, physicist, and inventor. His religious writings concerned theological disputes (with the Jesuits over morality) and apologetics (the defense of the Christian faith as objectively true and rationally credible). Nevertheless, there was no little philosophizing in Pascal’s writings, especially throughout Pensées. Although he did not develop a systematic philosophy (as did Descartes, for example), it is unfair to rank him as merely a minor philosopher. In Pascal, one finds a developed philosophy of religion and philosophy of science. His thoughts are too large and penetrating for dismissing him as a non-philosopher or as a minor one.7

Since Pascal did not leave us with a final systematic statement of his philosophy, we must reconstruct his views from a set of published polemical letters on theology (The Provincial Letters), personal correspondence, several works on science, some scattered essays, and Pensées. Although many have wondered what sort of finished work of philosophy Pascal would have left us, the lack of a well-organized, detailed philosophy affords the earnest reader some advantages.

As they stand, the many absorbing and arresting fragments of the Pensées furnish us with raw materials for an intellectual adventure concerning our uneasy place in an often-perplexing cosmos, self, and culture. Unlike the more methodical philosophers, such as Descartes, Pascal in many cases does not finish a line of thought for us. Instead, he initiates an intellectual pursuit that we are left to follow up on—or ignore. Some of the fragments of Pensées are not arguments at all but evocative parables meant to trigger a new kind of awareness.