Pascal's God and the Fragments of the World 3031556267, 9783031556265

Table of contents :
Acknowledgments
Contents
Abbreviations
Chapter 1: Introduction
References
Chapter 2: God
1 Infini Rien: The God of the First Distinction
2 Difficulties of Divine Disclosure
3 God and Memory
References
Chapter 3: Nature
1 Incarnation and Nature
2 Greatness and Wretchedness
3 The End of Things and their Principle
4 Incarnation and Supernature
References
Chapter 4: Man
1 The Heart
2 Prayer
3 Divertissement
4 The Hateful Self
5 Martyrdom
References
Chapter 5: Afterword—Divine Grace and Human Freedom: Pascal, Jansenism, and Sacred Tradition
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
References
Bibliography
I. Pascal
II. Others
Index

Citation preview

Pascal’s God and the Fragments of the World Martin Nemoianu

Pascal’s God and the Fragments of the World

Martin Nemoianu

Pascal’s God and the Fragments of the World

Martin Nemoianu Loyola Marymount University Los Angeles, CA, USA

ISBN 978-3-031-55625-8    ISBN 978-3-031-55626-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55626-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Credit line: Agence Opale / Alamy Stock Photo This Springer imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Paper in this product is recyclable.

To the memory of my friend, Joseph d’Amécourt.

Acknowledgments

To my colleagues, Scott Roniger, John McCarthy, Dan Speak, Marcela García Romero, Erin Stackle, Andrew Israelsen, Raciel Cuevas, Fr. Alexander Earl, Tianqi  Jing, and Anacan Mangelsdorf, whose influence here is evident at every joint. To my family, Virgil, Anca, Martina, Luca, and Anna, whom I owe what I cannot repay.

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Contents

1 Introduction  1 References 18 2 God 21 1 Infini Rien: The God of the First Distinction 21 2 Difficulties of Divine Disclosure 28 3 God and Memory 35 References 42 3 Nature 45 1 Incarnation and Nature 45 2 Greatness and Wretchedness 51 3 The End of Things and their Principle 54 4 Incarnation and Supernature 58 References 62 4 Man 65 1 The Heart 66 2 Prayer 81 3 Divertissement 88 4 The Hateful Self 94 5 Martyrdom 97 References104 ix

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Contents

5 Afterword—Divine  Grace and Human Freedom: Pascal, Jansenism, and Sacred Tradition107 I109 II112 III115 IV126 V130 VI137 References139 Bibliography143 Index151

Abbreviations

L S OC I and OC II

Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. Louis Lafuma (Paris: Seuil, 1962) Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. Philippe Sellier (Paris: Bordas/ Classiques Garnier, 1991) Blaise Pascal, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Michel Le Guern, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1998-2000)

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction

This is the prose of the world, as it appears to the consciousness both of the individual himself and of others:—a world of finitude and mutability, of entanglement in the relative, of the pressure of necessity from which the individual is in no position to withdraw. For every isolated living thing remains caught in the contradiction of being itself in its own eyes this shut­in unit and yet of being nevertheless dependent on something else, and the struggle to resolve this contradiction does not get beyond an attempt and the continuation of this eternal war.—G.W.F Hegel1 Ultimate experience can only be achieved when ‘Above’ and ‘Below’ have ceased to be irreconcilable opposites.—Wilhelm Furtwängler on Anton Bruckner2

The disordered state of the Pensées at the time of Pascal’s death hangs heavy over the efforts of any interpreter. What is the text about? What does Pascal mean to show? What is his argument? Questions like these are natural and straightforward in the history of philosophy. Asked about Pascal, they become difficult and embarrassing. The problem, however, is not altogether an accident of circumstance. Pascal himself is highly sensitive to the question of the proper order of his text, a question which, he insists, cannot be answered independently of the nature of its object:  Hegel (1975), p. 150.  As quoted in Allen (2018), p. 159.

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© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Nemoianu, Pascal’s God and the Fragments of the World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55626-5_1

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I will write my thoughts here without order, and yet not perhaps in unplanned confusion. This is the true order, and it will always indicate my aim by its very disorder. I would be honoring my subject too much if I treated it with order, since I want to show that it is incapable of it.3

On this point, Pascal is plain: the right form of a text must be drawn not from art but from nature: Eloquence. It requires something of the pleasant and of the real, but the pleasant must itself be derived from the true … We must not judge nature according to ourselves but according to it.4

The natural order of the text, then, must be disorder, where the object of the text is the disorder of nature. As in the world, so in the work: a fragmentary text will be most suitable to the fragmentary state of things.5 3  S457/L532. References to the Pensées are given by two numbers. The first, marked with an S, is taken from the Sellier edition, based on the second copy of Pascal’s manuscript: Pascal (1991). The second number, marked with an L, refers to the Lafuma edition, which follows the first copy: Pascal (1962). Page numbers to the longer fragments refer to Sellier’s French in Pascal (1991). For the English, I have consulted two translations of the Sellier version— that of Roger Ariew in Pascal (2005) and that of Pierre Zoberman et al. in Pascal (2022)— one translation of Lafuma—A. J. Krailsheimer in Pascal (1995)—and one translation of the older Brunschvicg ordering—Trotter in Pascal (1931). Quotations are drawn primarily from Ariew and Zoberman et al., with a preference for the greater philosophical sensitivity of the former, but, in all cases, with frequent modification and retranslation. Translations from other texts by Pascal are my own, made from Michel Le Guern’s two volume edition of the Oeuvres complètes, Pascal (1998–2000), indicated OC I and II. 4  S547/L667–668. 5  This point is well observed by McCarthy (1997), pp. 669–670. Jean Mesnard proposes that the opening of S457/L532 abbreviates “Pyrrhonisme” and that the passage is therefore to be read as a parodic presentation of skepticism. Mesnard (1992), pp. 363–370. Michel Le Guern argues that the abbreviated opening refers rather to Descartes’ Principles. See OC II, p. 1489, n. 4 to p. 748. The debate is treated by Hammond (1994), pp. 63–65. Le Guern’s reading, though less widely accepted, is more plausible in my view. Its implication would be that Pascal’s rejection of Cartesianism is written into the very style of the text. But even taking the initial abbreviation to mean “Skepticism” or “Pyrrhonism”—as Lafuma, Sellier, Trotter, Krailsheimer, Ariew, and Zoberman et al. all do—it does not follow that Pascal is merely parodying skepticism, one legitimate moment of his dialectic, the “Continual reversal of pro and con” (S127/L93). See S164/L131 and the Entretien avec M. de Sacy sur Épictète et Montaigne, in OC II, pp. 95–98. In any case, the fitness between the actual form of the Pensées and its substantive philosophical content is independent of the particular (and unsettled) historical question of whether Pascal harbored designs for a fragmentary presentation of his completed work. Some commentators do suggest that Pascal intended to employ a fragmentary style: see, notably, Goldmann (1959), most directly at pp. 220 and 225–226. For discussion, see Melzer (1986), pp. 132–135 and Hammond (1994), p. 63 n. 43.

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And yet it is not enough to say, simply, that the Pensées is about a fallen and fragmented nature. Pascal cleaves to a still stronger hermeneutical principle, one not satisfied by his “orderless order”6 alone: Every author has a meaning in which all contrary passages are reconciled [s’accordent], or he has no meaning at all … We must, then, seek for a meaning that reconciles all oppositions.7

What is this meaning? The answer is already adverted to in the very disclosure of disorder. What is the condition of the possibility of our recognition of disorder? Against what does fragmentation show itself as such? What then does this craving and powerlessness cry out to us, but that there was once a true happiness in man, of which there now remains only the wholly empty mark and trace?8

Disorder is fragmentation of form. A fragmentary form implies a frustrated teleology, the falling short of a standard. A fragmentary text, by its very character, adverts to a principle of its unification. It is meaningful, as fragmentary, only in terms of this principle, which must be implicit in the text and yet beyond the text. A fragmentary text which is the reflection of fragmentary nature adverts to a principle which is implicit in nature and yet lies beyond nature. Such a principle must be “universal … within us … ourselves and not us.”9 The disorder and fragmentation of the Pensées, therefore, is the reflection of the disorder and fragmentation of nature. Both are haunted by a principle of order adequate to the integration and unification of the whole, “a sole principle of everything … a sole end of everything.”10 Without this sole principle and end, at once immanent and transcendent, nature and text alike are a disordered nothing, a fragmentary heap. It is the contention of this book that the central theme of Pascal’s Pensées is the articulation of this sole principle and end in terms of a distinction between the principle and all else—all nature, all being—which, without the principle, would be nothing at all. This first and most

 This ideal formulation is due to McCarthy (1997), p. 669.  S289/L257. 8  S181/L148. 9  S471/L564. 10  S237/L205. See also S808/L988 and S230/L199, pp. 249 and 255. 6 7

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fundamental distinction Pascal names “Infini rien,” “Infinity nothing.”11 This is the “meaning that reconciles all oppositions,” in text and in nature.12 The whole of the Pensées, and not only the Pensées, is devoted to the question of how this distinction can be made to appear and, in its appearance, what it implies, particularly for human nature and human personhood. With respect to his own approach to the disclosure of this distinction— we cannot call it a method—Pascal has not left us altogether starless. For him, “Man is obviously made to think. That is his whole dignity and his whole merit, and his whole duty is to think properly. Now, the order of thought is to begin with self and with its author and its end,” that is, from the lowest to the highest, or from what appears to the principles of its appearance.13 Put in terms of the Infini rien distinction, Pascal means to begin with the second term, with what is, in itself, nothing, and in disclosing the per se nothingness of things, to direct readers toward the first term, the principle of their being. The pattern of the text in both copies of the Pensées, set out in the table at S1, seems to confirm a “bottom up” approach, even if Pascal may, at times, have had doubts about its propriety.14 This order of thought recommends itself not least because the very disorder and fragmentation of nature tends to obscure its own character, to conceal yet deeper, behind that obscurity, the fact that there is a principle of things, and to encourage, thereby, each thing in nature to regard itself as ordering center.15 Because of this complex of hiddenness, Pascal holds, the proper order is to begin by drawing attention to what is nearest at hand: If there is a sole principle of everything, a sole end of everything … the true religion must teach us to worship only him and to love only him. But as we find ourselves powerless to worship what we do not know or to love any-

11  “Infini rien” occurs as the opening line of S680/L418. Ariew and Zoberman et al. render Pascal’s “rien” as “nothingness.” I have chosen, like Krailsheimer and Trotter, to translate it as “nothing” and to reserve the English “nothingness,” more strictly, for his “néant.” 12  S289/L257. 13  S513/L620. 14  S573/L694. 15  See, among many other places, S680/L421, S494/L597, and the whole series of fragments on divertissement, from S165/L132 to S171/L139.

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thing other than ourselves, the religion instructing us of these duties must instruct us of this powerlessness as well.16

The principle and end of things, that is to say, is to be shown negatively and indirectly, by making readers self-consciously aware of their own metaphysical condition, thus placing them in a position to wonder what makes it possible for them to think beyond it.17 Or, if they will not wonder, that very fact again may be adduced as evidence of their condition.18 Indeed, the heuristic worth of starting with the nothingness of things apart from their principle and end is inscribed even in Pascal’s own act of composition: In writing my thought, it sometimes escapes me, but this prompts me to remember my weakness, which I am constantly forgetting. This is as instructive to me as my forgotten thought, for I care only to know my nothingness.19

Seen in these lights, Pascal’s text cannot be called an apology in the usual sense, if by that we mean the accumulation of mundane evidence which, added together, yields an ultramundane conclusion. Pascal is not concerned to offer mid-level justifications for a religion, for a god, for a life lived according to these that could be reconciled with a hostile or alien philosophical frame. His goal is not to make Christianity plausible and pleasing, by arguing for this or that doctrine or claim, leaving settled the language of a modernity that takes for granted its implausibility and unpleasantness. He means, rather, to open up a horizon around modernity, to cast into relief its smallness, its shallowness, its cowardice, its dishonesty. His is not a defense of Christianity to modernity but from modernity, revealing that the modern turn to the self as the Archimedean point out of which nature may be constructed, according to a plan of the self’s own methodic design,20 is founded on a delusion about what the self is, a delusion that lives parasitically, concealing the ultimate principle of  S237/L205  On this point, see S155/L122, S151/L119, and especially S164/L131. See also the bundle of fragments that runs from S221/L189 to S225/L192, with its emphasis on seeing one’s own misère as a necessary condition of knowing and loving God. 18  S681/L427-S682/L428–429. 19  S540/L656. See also S459/L542. 20  See Meditations II (AT VII, 24), in Descartes (1984–1985) and also Kant (1965), p. 20 (B xiii). 16 17

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things on which the self depends.21 Rather than mount a defense of Christianity from within this modern frame, then, Pascal means to speak always at the level of the first and most fundamental distinction, Infini rien, to lay bare the per se nothingness of the self and of all things in terms of their absolute dependency on the principle of being that transcends them, one and all, radically. By starting with the second term of this distinction, he aims to effect or, rather, to be the occasion of effecting a transformation, volitional as much as intellectual, in his readers.22 Pascal’s transformative aim explains and justifies his starting point at the lower and dependent half of the distinction with which he is ultimately concerned, as well as his embrace of order through disorder, whether this means, finally, the intentional employment of fragmentation or merely the rejection of the geometric method.23 The aim of the present study, however, is not apologetic but philosophical: the consideration of the view Pascal affirms. As our aim does not simply repeat Pascal’s own, neither does our presentation of his themes. Again: Pascal seems to have wanted to provide what we might almost call a phenomenological disclosure of the Infini rien distinction, moving from low to high, drawing his readers into self-conscious awareness of their place in a fallen and fragmentary world and, so, opening for them an awareness of the possibility of reintegration, reunification, wholeness, and health, in terms of the principle of that world’s being, a principle which is at once the condition of the possibility of fallenness and fragmentation and the remedy. Our own pattern moves instead from high to low, from the first term of Infini rien, its distinction from nature and its appearance in the world, and then to the implications of that distinction and appearance for the self specifically. 21  A sketch of the history of philosophy in these terms is developed in Prufer (2018). See, in particular, p. 8. 22  S41/L7. 23  If the reading of S457/L532 proposed by Le Guern is to be believed, and that fragment is a direct reference to Descartes’ Principles, then it is plausible to suppose that Pascal contrasts his own “disorder” as “true order” with the geometric style. See OC II, p. 1489, n. 4 and 5 to p. 748. Pascal’s understanding of that style would be past question, even if he had not articulated “the entire method of geometric proof of the art of persuasion,” in De l’esprit géométrique, OC II, p. 175. The style of the Pensées, of course, is quite different and seems perhaps to aspire to that persuasive approach, of which Pascal says, in the former work, he feels himself incapable: “it is necessary to attend to the person whom we wish to persuade, whose mind and heart we must know, what principles he grants, what things he loves; and then to observe what link the thing in question has with the stated principles or delightful objects.” Ibid., p. 173.

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This is a reversal of Pascal’s order—not, we may hope, as a betrayal of his thought but, rather, in service of articulating its philosophical substance. Following Thomas Prufer, we may call this rearticulation “recapitulation.”24 Recapitulations are “shifts, shifts that show themselves as shifts by preserving what they shift from” or, again, through the image of the palimpsest: “The new is inscribed over the old; the old is legible beneath the new.”25 To recapitulate is, thus, to repeat with a difference. As Robert Sokolowski explains it: To recapitulate is to repeat, but also to select, to summarize, and to put into hierarchic order, with the more important distinguished from the less. We place the old material into new chapters or headings, capitula … When something is said to be recapitulated, it is obvious that it is still there in the recapitulation, but it is also obvious that it has been abridged, rearranged, and inevitably slanted.

Sokolowski’s most illuminating metaphor is linguistic: “[Things that are recapitulated] are re-syntaxed … and to re-syntax something is to rethink it.”26 Recapitulation is not repetition, if this is understood as mechanical recitation of particular formulations. Nor again is it explication, if this means interpretation and analysis from the outside, in disinterested detachment. Recapitulation is retrieval of what is old, of bringing what is old to new light by ordering it anew, under new headings, and thinking it afresh, in a new head.27 Pascal himself seems to endorse a form of recapitulation, characterizing his own relation to the Catholic tradition in similar terms: Let no one claim that I have said nothing new: the arrangement of the material is new. When we play tennis [Quand on joue à la paume], it is the same ball hit back and forth, but one of us places it better. I would as soon be told 24  Prufer (1993), integrating work previously published between 1963 and 1991. And see Sokolowski (2012), pp. 9–10. 25  Prufer (1993), p. xii. 26  Sokolowski (2008), p. 78–79 n10, and Sokolowski (2012), pp. 9–10. 27  Recapitulation, so understood, bears some affinity with Ezra Pound’s modernist slogan “Make It New,” where “It” refers to “Tradition.” The genealogy of Pound’s phrase is traced by North (2013), pp.  162–171. The connection between Prufer’s “recapitulations” and Pound’s “make it new” is perhaps not so far-fetched, since Prufer’s thought and style are marked decisively by the influence of T. S. Eliot’s “Old stone to new building” modernism, with its “easy commerce of the old and the new.” See Prufer (1993), pp. xi-xiii.

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I have used old words. As if the same thoughts did not form another body of discourse when arranged differently, just as the same words form other thoughts by their own different arrangement.28

There is, of course, an ironic distance here, but the deployment of it is not for the sake of mere novelty, and still less for the sake of innovation. Pascal is absolutely unequivocal that the highest truth, the condition of all other truth, is the entry of God into human history—the simultaneous disclosure of both sides of the Infini rien distinction—transmitted in the tradition of the Church, the “higher principle” to which “submission and conformity” are required.29 This is the tradition “Jesus Christ bequeathed to the ancients, to be transmitted to the faithful,” so that “the history of the Church must properly be called the history of truth.”30 Pascal’s distance is in service of drawing near, of throwing new light on old truth, so that it may appear in new circumstances, beneath which it would otherwise be hidden: But when we no longer listen to tradition; when … the true source of truth, which is tradition, has been excluded … the truth is no longer free to manifest itself. Then, as men no longer speak of truth, truth itself must speak to men.31

Pascal’s recapitulation is, finally, for the sake of disclosing a truth which is timeless. Though my approach here inverts Pascal’s own, my ultimate object is to disclose his ultimate object. My aim is to recapitulate his recapitulation and, so, to make manifest, in a new way, what he hoped to make manifest in a new way. In shifting from an order that leads with the second term of Infini rien to one that opens with the first, we move from beginning with 28  S575/L696. See also S645/L784: “Words differently arranged make for different meanings, and meanings differently arranged make for different effects.” The original model of reading Pascal in light of these passages is provided to us as the version of the Penées prepared by Léon Brunschvicg—not, to be sure, as a scholarly edition, where it must be judged inadequate, but as a systematic interpretation and recapitulation of Pascal’s themes, where it stands almost alone in its scope. Like Brunschvicg, my concern is less Pascal’s historical intentions and the details of composition as it is the themes of the text and the picture of things they open up. 29  S317/L285. 30  S634/L769 and S641/L776. 31  S439/L865.

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a question to beginning with an answer, or, again, we move from the order of experience to the order of being. This shift reassigns the emphasis of the Pascalian themes from goodness to truth. Of course, from whatever side one takes it, the two come together ultimately, as Pascal himself does not hesitate to point out.32 Nevertheless, to pose the per se nothingness of nature, and man in nature, as a question is to think of it as a problem in need of a solution, a privation that should be or could be remedied. And, of course, Pascal characterizes his own project in just these terms.33 By contrast, to begin with the first term of Infini rien is to step behind the questions and problems of experience and to open not just with the condition of experience but, indeed, the condition of conditions. The emphasis here is a shift to truth because it is set on what is ultimately and absolutely real. Again, what is ultimately and absolutely real is also the good of each individual, but this is so in a deeper sense than merely the fulfillment of the natural needs of a natural kind (let alone pleasure), reaching to the transcendent ground of each and of all and, so, to the reason why each is “anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever.”34 Interpretively, to step behind the questions and problems of experience is to step behind the many “epistemology of religion” debates in which Pascal is implicated and to enter, rather, into the metaphysical issues before which those debates swirl. Putting it otherwise, we might say that the recapitulated order takes up the Pascalian themes first from the side of theoretical rather than practical reason. But this simple formulation still fails to capture the radicality of Pascal’s essential drive, which does not come to rest with either theoretical or practical reason but pushes always toward the transcendent ground of both. This book does, therefore, concern itself with the metaphysical lineaments, explicit and implicit, of Pascal’s thought, but always and only in light of what goes beyond 32  S471/L564 employs “universal being” and “universal good” interchangeably. S808/ L988 claims that God must be at once the ground of things and their ultimate consummation, and likewise the end of S230/L199. See also the identification of justice and wisdom in the order of charity at S761/L933. 33  S230/L199 most obviously, but see especially S491/L595 and S46/L12, which cast the order of human understanding and of the text in relation to the true good. Hibbs (2017), reads Pascal’s account of human life as having “the structure of a quest” (p. 104). Manent (2022) provides an excellent illustration of reading Pascal from the side of the question and, thus, in terms of the good—here, specifically, the good that will answer to the cultural and spiritual fragmentation of Europe. 34   John Wippel attributes this striking formula to Siger of Brabant. See Wippel (2007), p. 731.

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metaphysics, if by that we understand the study of being in and of the natural whole. The Pascalian metaphysical picture emerges only in light of a concern that is deeper than this: “the end of things and their principle,” so whole and self-sufficient as to be radically transcendent, so radically transcendent as to be able to enter even into immanent nature as a singular particular, so singular and absolute in its fundamentality that, without it, all else is nothing at all.35 My recapitulation begins, accordingly, with the Pascalian God. I return to a familiar text—S680/L418, the fragment containing the wager—to read it in an unfamiliar way, by asking about the God it presupposes. The answer to this question yields three different levels of the text, addressed to three different readers, with a deeper understanding of God at each. On this reading, the third level of the text offers, to those capable of it, the fullest glimpse of God in the Infini rien distinction: between the principle of being and being, between God and the created world which, without God, is nothing. The primacy and fundamentality of this distinction complicates its disclosure. The absolute character of the distinction’s first term precludes any possibility of getting behind or above it to secure demonstrative purchase. The independence of the first term precludes any straightforward inference from the second. Indeed, the radical transcendentality of the first term seems to preclude the possibility of attaining to it from the second in any way at all. The essential and irreducible nature of the difference between God and all else means that there is nothing more fundamental or necessary in terms of which God could be shown, and, in particular, nothing in created being adequate to reach the difference. Natural theology, of itself, is not sufficient, and its deliverances remain ambiguous between first principles in nature and first principles of nature. The only disclosure fully adequate to the depth of the Infini rien distinction must come from the side of the first term: the initiative of the divine in making itself manifest to created being. The primary disclosure of God to man, the disclosure that establishes for man the distinction between God and the world, in its priority and depth, is the incarnation of Christ. In one sense, of course, God must always be present in the created cosmos, from the high level of what is universal and necessary, to the low level of contingent particularity, for, again, these are, strictly and exactly, nothing without God. The  S230/L199, p. 249.

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incarnation goes further. God’s entry into the created cosmos as, at once, wholly God and wholly this particular man, subject to history, to birth, to death, discloses God more fully in the depth of his distinction from the world. Incarnation—and not mere theophany—is possible only if God is radically transcendent in such a way as not to compete for being with created things. Only then could he enter in among them without change or loss.36 The incarnation discloses the Infini rien distinction singularly: in a way that nothing else could and through what is singular and particular. The historical appearance of God as this man, the singular point of contact between divine transcendence and created immanence, becomes the center of a sacred tradition that points backward and forward through history and by which God is disclosed. This disclosure is established not by an argument but by a person, not by inference or abstraction from reality but by a real, existent one.37 That the incarnate Christ is wholly God and wholly man, therefore, discloses a deeper sense of divinity than what is available to natural reason alone. In so doing, the incarnation discloses a deeper sense of nature than what is available to natural reason alone. The incarnate Christ is the unifying center, the mediator of the principle and end of all things in the created whole. Without God, the created whole would be nothing. Without the incarnate Christ, created nature, incoherently struggling to separate itself from God, weakens and yields to fragmentation and disorder. What remains is a nature riven between high and low, the necessary and universal estranged from the contingent and particular. Philosophy, struggling to reconstitute cosmic order out of tragic heterogeneity, either subsumes the low into the high or else reduces the high to the low, when it does not simply counsel resignation. The division of nature appears no less in man, who is both wretched and great, at once finite, contingent, and mortal, and also capable, in his rational dimension, of knowing himself as such and, so, of thinking beyond his wretchedness, in terms of what is general and necessary. These contrarieties form a paradox. Human grandeur emerges from misère and yet is unable to escape from it or remedy it, with the result that all the efforts of philosophy to account for man either exalt him in his rationality by obscuring the lowliness of his condition or turn instead to skeptical denigration of his nature, traducing his rational 36  These latter points—which I owe to Prufer (1993), Sokolowski (1982), and Sokolowski (2006)—are discussed in much greater detail below. 37  Along similar lines, see Spaemann (2017), p. 21.

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capacity and its cosmic ambitions. The “meaning that reconciles all oppositions,” that unifies high and low, universal and particular, without reduction or subsumption, must be both in nature and beyond it, both “ourselves and not us,” able to enter into the world at both its levels, to ground the reality and integrity of each alone and both together.38 This is the mediation of the incarnate Christ. The entry of the transcendent divine into human history as a particular man, of course, carries profound implications for the human being specifically. These implications must not be considered primarily in epistemological, psychological, or moral terms. They are, in the first place, a question of being: Christ’s mediation discloses a deeper sense of man than what is available to natural reason alone. It shows not only that what is ultimately true is higher than the horizon of the natural whole. It shows also that, in uniting himself to man, God opens the possibility of man’s transcendence of the natural whole and points to a human destiny beyond the necessities of nature and, above all, beyond death, the chief consequence of those necessities for each particular. Man is shown to be not merely an instance of a nature but something more: a person who has a nature.39 It is here, above all, that man bears the image of the incarnate Christ, one person with two natures, human and divine. The heart is the name given by Pascal to this human personhood, this dimension of the human being set at once in and beyond nature. On one side, the heart is related to human nature, both rational and corporeal, and is able to see that nature, to know it, and to integrate it. On the other side, it transcends this nature in its receptivity to what lies beyond all nature as the principle of the whole. Taking these two sides together, the heart is the transcendent aspect of the human being capable of grasping the whole as a whole, in terms of its transcendent principle and end. In its transcendence of nature, analogous to the divine transcendence of the created whole, the heart is the location of a deeper and more radical freedom than that found in the ordinary, quotidian actions of the will, which follow the determinations of reason. In having and not simply being his nature, man may be well or badly, rightly or wrongly, properly or improperly related to his nature and to nature as such. Man is rightly related to nature by being rightly related to God, to Christ, to the truth  S289/L257 and S471/L564.  This formulation follows Spaemann (2017), especially at pp. 31–33.

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which is the principle and the end of all created things. The incarnation thus poses for man an ultimate question of being along with the power to answer it. Man is given the freedom to determine his ultimate orientation to the truth: whether he will accept or reject his created nature and his place in the created natural order.40 In slightly different terms, we may say that man is faced, ultimately, with the question of whether he will turn in receptivity to divine truth and be ordered in cooperation with it or, instead, treat the self as center and its preferences as what is ultimately real. Prayer is the characteristic activity of the heart ordered toward God. God creates through speech. His word creates and discloses what is. In prayer, I speak the word that God has spoken to me.41 I am disclosed to myself by participation in God’s disclosure to me; I become myself by participation in God’s creation of me. In prayer, the human heart turns and is turned toward God. It participates in the sustenance and growth of its own being, and the governance of being in nature more generally, through imitation of the divine act, intellectual and volitional, which is generative of all being. Divertissement is the characteristic activity of the heart ordered toward the self as Archimedean point, the self-creating, ordering principle of all things. Incapable, by its nature, of sustaining the pleasing fiction of its own self-sufficiency and overwhelmed by the boredom which is the index of this incapacity, the self tacks this way and that, swinging from one diversionary activity to another. The teleological structure of these activities discloses the partial, perishing, and insufficient nature of the self, reaching always beyond itself, even as the means serve to obscure this disclosure. The self which would make itself center of all things is forced to turn its attention away from itself and toward some something else in order to conceal the per se nothingness of its own nature. This concealment always presupposes the concealment of God, against whom human nature and the human condition stand out in stark relief. God is hidden behind the hiding of the self to itself. Divertissement, thus, stands as the metaphysical inversion of prayer. Where God’s disclosure to man, spoken back to God, is man’s own self-disclosure, ordering quotidian activity in its light, divertissement is, rather, quotidian activity concealing the self to itself and concealing God beneath that self-concealment.

 Cf. Spaemann (2017), pp. 32–33.  Wonderfully articulated by Prufer (1993), p. 29.

40 41

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The self turned from God, mired in boredom, palliated by diversions is, in a word, hateful. The hateful self is in a condition of ontological ingratitude. Chosen gratuitously to be, out of the nothingness which is otherwise its lot, the self obscures or elides this gratuity by means of its very participation in it. In Pascalian terms, this is nothing other than amour-­ propre, in its fullest metaphysical sense: resentful and jealous of its universal human rights. The ingratitude of self-love is hateful because it hates createdness: it hates the truth which makes it, and all things, to be. The hateful self refuses to make the Infini rien distinction or, having made it, has chosen—and, in so choosing, has set itself in tension with—the distinction’s second term. Such a self is to be overcome. Such overcoming is martyrdom. The preservation of the self as center of all things requires the concealment of what is ultimate—death and God—against which the self appears as what it truly is. The overcoming of the hateful self requires a return to what is ultimate: on one side, the turning of the heart in receptivity to the God who is beyond nature, and, on the other, receptivity to nature, and especially one’s own rational and bodily nature, as created, as given by God. Submission to God and submission to the natural order as created are inseparable. Just as the hateful self conceals God beneath concealment of created nature, the turn toward God must also be a turn toward created nature. The overcoming of the hateful self requires the acceptance of nature’s necessities, even as one sees that these necessities are themselves created and contingent, subject to another, deeper necessity which is absolute. For mortal man, the natural necessity that frames all others is death, and the acceptance of death for the sake of God is the highest expression of assent to nature as created and given. This is martyrdom. The culmination of the Pascalian vision of things, then, is not the separation of the self from nature. It is, rather, the full and joyful embrace of created nature, in imitation of the transcendent God who enters unreservedly into nature, even to the point of death. Whereas the hateful self that would make itself the center of all things loses even itself in its own nothingness, the self that accepts its own nothingness for the sake of God receives things—itself and the whole—as they really are, on the basis of union with the transcendent God who makes all things to be. This is the heart of the martyr, who has made the Infini rien distinction fully. My recapitulation, thus, begins and ends with the Infini rien distinction. It orders and interprets Pascal’s text and his themes according to this distinction, which for him discloses what is ultimate and absolute. It takes

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his central concern to be a fundamental question of metaphysics—“What is a god?”42—and his answer to that question to be, “Truth as such.”43 The effect of this reorientation of focus on the metaphysical question of what is ultimate and absolute, of reading Pascal in terms of God as truth rather than in terms of human problems of knowledge or the good, allows us to see more clearly the stakes of Pascal’s project. These stakes, of course, may be found announced in the wager fragment, particularly when that fragment is read more carefully and closely than it usually is. But Pascal’s view is by no means exhausted by S680/L418. The distinction between the divine absolute and the per se nothingness of all else forms the context, implicit and explicit, of all of Pascal’s later thinking, particularly in the Pensées: the fragments on grandeur et misère, on the corruption of nature, on prayer, on boredom and divertissement, on the self. The alternative to the Pascalian vision of the ultimate and absolute is not, as the superficial reading of the wager has it, an ordinary life of ordinary pleasures. The negative counterpart of “that universal being,” before whom only “self-annihilation” in martyrdom suffices,44 may appear in any number of proximate guises, but it does not terminate in a middling life spent watching Notre Dame football on television.45 No: for Pascal, outside of the transcendent and incarnate God of the Infini rien distinction, all options reduce, finally, to the wisdom of Silenus: Wretched, ephemeral race, children of chance and tribulation, why do you force me to tell you the very thing which it would be most profitable for you not to hear? The very best thing is utterly beyond your reach not to have been born, not to be, to be nothing. However, the second best thing for you is: to die soon.46

In Pascalian language, the follower of Silenus, conscious or unconscious, has seen that the self, for all its paradoxical self-awareness, is nothing, belongs properly to nothing, and so ought to be nothing. The upshot of such a view, the triumph of the second term of Pascal’s distinction, is not suicide but a headlong plunge into divertissement. The Silenian, like the 42  Indeed, if Allan Bloom is to be believed, this is “the most difficult and dangerous question of all philosophy.” See Bloom (2001), p. 117. 43  S164/L131, p. 211. 44  S410/L378. 45  As it was suggested to me once by a hostile interlocutor. 46  Nietzsche (1999), p. 23. Nietzsche here glosses Aristotle in Eudemus VI.

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Pascalian, may recognize the triviality of most diversion and the ultimate futility of all.47 But—here again, like Pascal48—he sees that some diversions do afford a certain escape, precarious and temporary, casting up a veil of “resplendent, dream-born figures” before the truth, that is, the nothingness of the self. Lost in the wondrous pattern thus created, the heart’s insistent reminders of human nothingness are, for a time, stilled: Here, in the highest symbolism of art, we see before us that Apolline world of beauty and the ground on which it rests, that terrible wisdom of Silenus, and we grasp, intuitively, the reciprocal necessity of these two things. At the same time, however, we encounter Apollo as the deification of the principium individuationis in which alone the eternally attained goal of the primordial unity, its release and redemption through semblance, comes ­ about; with sublime gestures he shows us that the whole world of agony is needed in order to compel the individual to generate the releasing and redemptive vision and then, lost in contemplation of that vision, to sit calmly in his rocking boat in the midst of the sea.49

For the Silenian, there is no higher horizon than the final nothingness, but, within this horizon, the awful tension of the human admixture of being and nothingness offers up glittering moments in which the primordial truth withdraws before splendid shadows, the nothingness of the self is forgotten, the heart is silenced, and the wheel of Ixion comes to rest.50 The wisdom of Silenus is, therefore, an inversion of Pascalian martyrdom. Both alike seek an overcoming of the self, but each according to its view of ultimacy: infinity or nothingness. For Pascal, the hateful self is overcome by submitting and being submitted to the God who is both within and beyond it. This overcoming passes through death but does not end there. Precisely because the martyr is unified to the principle of his own innermost being, nearer to him than he is to himself, his overcoming is a restoration of the self and a reintegration into the whole of what is. For the Silenian self, there is no stable end and principle, no true transcendent self-overcoming. There is only the quieting of the truth—better not to be, better still never to have been—in passing instances of dreamlike self-forgetfulness.  S165/L132.  S168/L136, S33/L414. 49  Nietzsche (1999), pp. 23 and 26. 50  See Schopenhauer (1969), p. 196. 47 48

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Pascal rules out any third option. The wisdom of Silenus is the destiny of every supposed alternative to the Infini rien distinction. Either one makes the distinction between the principle of being and all else which, without the principle, would be nothing at all, or else one must invert the distinction, affirming the ultimacy of the nothingness which is the distinction’s second term and treating everything, including the first term, as a projection out of it.51 To be sure, only seldom will this second option be taken in full self-consciousness. More often, it will proceed through various projects of diversionary consolation, more or less refined and more or less effective at resisting the pull of the void, at most fleetingly recognized for what they are.52 Thus all half-measures, whether self-satisfied Cartesianism or Stoicism, Humeanism or Epicureanism, or anything else, must finally break themselves on the disorder and fragmentation of nature, struggling to overcome its tragic heterogeneity through soothing tales that subsume or reduce its disparate elements, high and low, universal and particular, in man and in nature writ large. Only the God who transcends the world so entirely that he is able to enter it freely, as a lowly, contingent particular, suffices to integrate the natural whole as a true cosmos, drawing it out of nothingness by reconciling its oppositions, securing its reality at both the level of universality and that of particularity, without the subsumption of the low into the high or the reduction of the high to the low. Once more, save for the God of the first distinction, nature and man, and the text itself, are nothing but an indifferent heap of bad fragments. With the options so stated, Pascal’s argument finally takes on the shape of a reductio: the foot of the cross or the barrel of a gun.53 Pascal himself finds it noteworthy that even those in a position to see this reductio prefer

51  As Pascal would have it, seeking to make the distinction is, in some sense, already to have made it: “You would not be seeking me, if you had not found me” (S751/L919). 52  One might think here of Conrad’s Kurtz, who has looked beyond the divertissements of moral progress and human improvement and is shattered by the vision of metaphysical horror upon which they rest. Conrad’s narrator, Marlow, in recounting Kurtz’s tale to his fiancée, is unable to utter this truth and, instead, offers her a consoling lie about Kurtz’s final devotion. Marlow’s story is itself a diversion for sailors, waiting beneath the “brooding gloom” for the turn of the tide, hemmed in “by a black bank of clouds,” on a waterway that “seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.” He concludes sitting “apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time.” Conrad (1910), pp. 65, 147, and 157–158. 53  See Huysmans, quoting Barbey d’Aurevilly: “il ne reste plus … qu’à choisir entre la bouche d’un pistolet ou les pieds de la croix.” Huysmans (1922), p. xxiv.

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to distract themselves, a fact he adduces as further evidence of the reductio itself, the absurdity of cleaving to one’s own nothingness: For it is indubitable that that the duration of this life is but an instant, that the state of death is eternal, whatever its nature may be, and that thus all our actions and thoughts must take such different paths, according to the state of this eternity, that it is impossible to set out with sense and judgment except by adjusting course in light of that point, which must be our final object … On this, then, let us judge those who live without considering the ultimate end of life, who let themselves be guided by their inclinations and their pleasures, without reflection and without concern, as if they could annihilate eternity by turning their minds away from it, thinking only of how to become happy in the present moment.54 It is not natural that there exist men indifferent to the loss of their very being … They behave quite differently with regard to all else: they fear even the most trivial things, foresee them, feel them. And this same man who spends so many days and nights in rage and despair at the loss of some office, or because of some imaginary insult to his honor, is the very one who knows, without anxiety and without emotion, that he will lose everything upon death. It is monstrous to see in the same heart and at the same time such sensitivity to the slightest things and such strange insensitivity to the greatest.55

This work does not argue for the success of Pascal’s reductio. It seeks only to trace it to its foundations in the distinction between infinity and nothing, to consider the implications of that distinction for the nature of nature and the nature of man, and, perhaps, to express thereby something of Pascal’s own sensitivity to both the slightest things and the greatest.

References Roger Allen, Wilhelm Furtwängler: Art and the Politics of the Unpolitical (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 2018) Allan Bloom, “The Ladder of Love,” in Plato, Plato’s Symposium, trans. Seth Benardete (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001) Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer (New York: Signet, 1910)

 S682/L428.  S681/L427.

54 55

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René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham et al., 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984-1985) Lucien Goldmann, Le Dieu caché: étude sur la vision tragique dans les Pensées de Pascal et dans le théâtre de Racine (Paris: Gallimard, 1959) Nicholas Hammond, Playing with Truth: Language and the Human Condition in Pascal’s Pensées (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994) G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 1, trans. T.M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975) Thomas S.  Hibbs, Wagering on an Ironic God: Pascal on Faith and Philosophy (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2017) Joris-Karl Huysmans, À rebours (Paris: Crès, 1922) Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1965) Pierre Manent, Pascal et la proposition chrétienne (Paris: Grasset, 2022) Jean Mesnard, “Pourquoi les Pensées de Pascal se présentent-elles sous forme de fragments?”, in La culture du XVIIe siècle (Paris: PUF, 1992) John C. McCarthy, Review of God Owes Us Nothing: A Brief Remark on Pascal’s Religion and on the Spirit of Jansenism, by Leszek Kołakowski, The Review of Metaphysics 50 (1997): 669-671 Sara E.  Melzer, Discourses of the Fall: A Study of Pascal’s Pensées (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986) Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings, ed. Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) Michael North, Novelty: A History of the New (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013) Blaise Pascal, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Michel Le Guern, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1998-2000) Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. W. F. Trotter (London: Dent, 1931) Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. Louis Lafuma (Paris: Seuil, 1962) Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. Philippe Sellier (Paris: Bordas/Classiques Garnier, 1991) Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (New York: Penguin, 1995) Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. and trans. Roger Ariew (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005) Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. and trans. Pierre Zoberman et  al. (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2022) Thomas Prufer, Recapitulations: Essays in Philosophy (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1993) Thomas Prufer, “A Protreptic: What is Philosophy?” Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy 2 (2018): 1-19 Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, vol. 1, trans. E. F. J. Payne (Garden City, NY: Dover, 1969) Robert Sokolowski, The God of Faith and Reason: Foundations of Christian Theology (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982)

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Robert Sokolowski, Christian Faith and Human Understanding: Studies on the Eucharist, Trinity, and the Human Person (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006) Robert Sokolowski, Phenomenology of the Human Person (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) Robert Sokolowski, “The Science of Being in Aristotle, Aquinas, and Wippel,” in Gregory T.  Doolan (ed.), The Science of Being as Being: Metaphysical Investigations (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2012) Robert Spaemann, Persons: The Difference between ‘Someone’ and ‘Something’, trans. Oliver O'Donovan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) John F. Wippel, “Thomas Aquinas on the Ultimate Why Question: Why Is There Anything at All Rather than Nothing Whatsoever?” The Review of Metaphysics 60 (2007): 731-753

CHAPTER 2

God

1   Infini Rien: The God of the First Distinction The series of notes collected under the opening “Infinity, nothing” is perhaps the best known and certainly the most discussed fragment in the Pensées.1 Interpretations are typically organized around the pieces of it that have come to be called “Pascal’s Wager.”2 Its philosophical value, however, lies deeper than these interpretations have recognized, in the articulation of Pascal’s understanding of God. Whatever Pascal’s proximate intentions for its position and role in his apology, the ultimate thematic focus of the fragment, on which anything else it may say must depend, is the question “What is a god?”, the answer to which is the latent ordering principle for the Pensées as a whole.3 Attention to this question uncovers three levels of the text, addressed to three different readers, building, at

 S680/L418.  Among the many Anglophone studies focused almost exclusively on the wager argument, see Hacking (1972), Mackie (1982), Flew (1984), Rescher (1985), Oppy (1991), Jordan (1994), and, more recently, Rota (2017) and Bartha and Pasternack (2018), particularly in its latter two thirds. Francophone commentators, starting with Diderot and Voltaire, have tended more frequently to consider the broader context of Pascal’s work (as it was available), while still treating the wager argument as the chief interest of this particular fragment. Among the prominent modern studies, see Gouhier (1984), pp. 245–306, Thirouin (1991), pp. 130–189, and Carraud (1992), pp. 434–50. 3  On the significance of this question, see Bloom (2001), p. 117. 1 2

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Nemoianu, Pascal’s God and the Fragments of the World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55626-5_2

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each level, toward a statement of the Pascalian view of God in terms of the fundamental distinction between God and the created cosmos. The first level of the text appears in the familiar portion of the fragment now known as the wager, beginning roughly a quarter of the way into the customary editorial arrangement of Pascal’s notes and covering the middle half of the fragment, ending a quarter of the way before the fragment’s close.4 It is addressed to a superficial reader, represented by the skeptical or agnostic interlocutor engaged dialogically in this section, and it discloses that reader’s own confused conception of God. The discussion here is presented as a pragmatic argument, made on the basis of a utilitarian cost-benefit analysis. The argument is offered to practical reason, so the story goes, because theoretical arguments—the traditional metaphysical proofs demonstrating the existence of God—have been ruled out. Speaking “by natural lights,” God cannot be demonstrated by argument, theoretically, and so God’s existence is uncertain.5 The decision to believe or not to believe in the existence of God is, therefore, a decision under uncertainty and has the structure of a bet, on which there is a finite stake for the possibility of a specific gain: a wager. At the first level of the text, we find, therefore, a calculative appeal to subjective self-interest: the risk of finite goods, taken to be certain, in the hope of gaining an uncertain but infinite good: Since a choice has to be made, let us see on which side you have less to lose … there is an infinity of infinitely happy life to win, one chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you are staking is finite … what is staked is finite … there is infinity to be won.6

Presupposed at this level is an understanding of God as a very powerful dispenser of value. Questions of God’s nature and of the relation of man and the world to that nature are set aside. God is named here only in terms 4  S680/L418, starting at the second half of p. 468 and running to the first line of p. 471. The internal order of the fragment is itself attended by many difficulties and is no small matter of scholarly dispute. For discussion, see Pascal (2022), p.  345 n. 1 and pp.  346–347, which reproduces the jumble of Pascal’s notes. While I accept the familiar version which is more or less uniform across Sellier, Lafuma, Le Guern, and Brunschvicg, the present treatment seeks to recapitulate an implicit thematic pattern and, as such, does not depend on any particular editorial arrangement. 5  S680/L418, p. 468. 6  Ibid, pp. 469–470.

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of his capacity to provide a good already recognized as desirable from the point of view of a man concerned with comfort and pleasure, but now in superabundance: “an eternity of life and of happiness.”7 God is cast as distinct from the good he provides, and this good is cast as different from and in competition with the quotidian goods normally available in a mundane life. In this way, a choice—a wager—is set up between the finite but supposedly certain goods of an ordinary life devoted to enjoyment and ease and the very different goods, infinite but uncertain, promised to follow from the more rigorous life of religious devotion to a God who is, moreover, distinct himself from both sorts of goods, temporal and eternal. And yet, the dialogue’s interlocutor is reluctant to take this wager: “I confess it, I admit it, but still … my hands are tied and my mouth dumb. I am being forced to wager, and I do not have a free hand; I am being offered no respite. And I am made in such a way that I cannot believe. What, then, would you have me do?”

The Pascalian reply: That is true. But you might at least learn that your inability to believe—since reason prompts you and yet you cannot do so—comes from your passions.8

With this exchange, the attentive reader, still represented by the interlocutor, is signaled to move beyond the first, superficial level of the text and its understanding of God. The focus shifts away from putative losses and gains internal to the bet, and, instead, the very formulation of the wager becomes the occasion for the interlocutor’s insight that his base passions enslave him to the conception of the good latent in the calculus and the confused understanding of God behind it. The turn here is not toward convincing the interlocutor to enter more fully into the track of calculative rationality but, rather, showing that this very way of conceiving of man and God, the way presupposed by the homme moyen sensuel himself, is inadequate. The blandly hedonic life of the ordinary man, glutted on present comfort, boasts to itself of its rationality, but this rationality is enslavement to the appetites, an enslavement so profound that reason itself acquiesces and cooperates by redescribing 7 8

 Ibid., p. 469.  Ibid., p. 471.

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the restless drive of the passions as its own activity. The God emerging from this tangle is an artifact of human desire, projected from a calculation of interest.9 Taken this way, “the wager” serves to open for the thoughtful reader a different understanding of God by making explicit this self-­ enslavement, showing that such a life is not structured by any stable rational principle but by the capricious flux of the appetites, into which calculative reason has interwoven itself. Thus, the interlocutor is enjoined to “Work, therefore, at persuading yourself, not by multiplying proofs of God, but by diminishing your passions.”10 The specific recommendations made here—stop fretting over what you take to be an adequate proof and instead imitate those who have faith by imitating their acts of faith—are not aimed at silencing reason. Such imitation will, indeed, “stupefy you [cela … vous abêtira],”11 but this means to strike dumb the corrupt, self-regarding rationality held in bond by the infected passions, with the object of returning to health. Thus, when the interlocutor expresses fear at the prospect, the response comes: “And why? What do you have to lose? But so as to show you that this is the way: it is because this diminishes the passions, which are your great obstacles.”12 Reason is purged of its emotional subjection and restored to itself through the reorientation of the body.13 The heuristic of the wager thus opens onto a second and deeper level of the text, proper to a second and more thoughtful reader, and a second and more adequate conception of God. Here, we pass beyond pleasure to an ordering of the body’s passions in relation to a higher good, one proper to the nature and needs of the human being. We have moved from the good as mere subjective satisfaction to the good apprehended at the level of the mind, the rational nature of man. What were to have been finite goods at the first level are now shown to be “pestilential pleasures [plaisirs 9  That Pascal does not endorse this understanding of God should go without saying, given the disputes in which he was embroiled during his life, expressed in the arguments of the Provinciales and the Écrits sur la grâce. But the point is obvious from the Pensées also: “They imagine that this conversion consists in worship of God as exchange and conversation, such as they represent to themselves. True conversion consists in self-annihilation before that universal Being” (S410/L378). 10  S680/L418, p. 471. 11  Ibid. 12  Ibid. 13  For a sardonic and critical treatment of Pascal’s move here, which nevertheless registers its efficacy against passional torpor, see Nietzsche (2006), p. 97 (III.17).

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empestés],”14 not true goods proper to man but damaging vices, however they may feel. The “wager” is dissolved and, with it, the conception of God as a dispenser of infinite value distinct from the finite value available in the world. At the second level of the text, God is understood, instead, as the ground of the good objectively proper to human nature, on the basis of which one may turn from poisonous pleasures to real virtues: loyalty, honesty, humility, gratitude, generosity, and, above all, true friendship. The friendship here named by Pascal is the key to the text’s second level. It stands in specific contrast to the ideal of honnêteté promoted by Pascal’s own friends, Méré and Miton. Friendship in this latter sense is shared esteem founded on self-controlled civility and avoidance of offense. It remains, therefore, structured by the desire for pleasure and the fear of pain, covering over amour-propre in order to acquire the self-satisfied reputation for virtue and, so, reinforcing hidden self-regard.15 Friendship which is “sincere [and] true” is made possible not by private vices but by an objective and comprehensive end grounding a stable, common human nature.16 It is expressed not in mannered politesse but in fraternal correction and encouragement, mutual assistance toward the perfection of this common nature and the achievement of this comprehensive end.17 On the second level of the text, then, God is the objective ground of human nature and the virtues which are the natural human good. That good is no longer understood to be distinct from God or in competition with the goods proper to temporal human life. God is the one who sees man more fully than man sees himself, who comprehends human nature in whole, and to whom, therefore, man may entrust himself, for the graces he makes available are the perfection of that nature. And yet there is a still fuller dimension of the text, addressed to a more contemplative reader, disclosing a yet deeper conception of God. At the conclusion of the dialogue, the interlocutor is told that, as he draws nearer to the ground of the good proper to the nature of the human being, such that he “will gain from it in this life,” he will also come to a new recognition of God as “something certain and infinite for which you have given nothing.”18 At the second level, where we find man’s natural good in the  S680/L418, p. 472.  S494/L597 and S541/L657. 16  S680/L418, p. 472. 17  S680/L422: “We are truly obliged to those who point out faults … They prepare us for the exercise of correction and freedom from a fault.” 18  S680/L418, p. 472. 14 15

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rational integration of the body and its appetites, this statement is read metaphorically: we gain without losing anything corresponding, for vice is in fact a privation of the natural good. At the third level, however, the metaphor gives way to a literal statement of the ultimate alternatives: something certain and infinite rather than nothing. Here, we find God not as more pleasure in exchange for less, nor even God as the good proper to our nature, but, most deeply, God as being rather than nothing: quite exactly Infini rien. Once this statement of alternatives is made explicit, the reader, like Pascal’s interlocutor, is in a position to see its presence all along, throughout the dialogue: at the end, where “you will see such certainty of gain and such nothingness [tant de néant] in what you risk,” and earlier, at the middle, where “you win everything [vous gagnez tout] … you lose nothing [vous ne perdez rien] … the loss of nothingness [la perte du néant].”19 More subtle but more illuminating is the formulation embedded at the start of the dialogue, in the announcement of the superficial first level of the fragment: “A game is being played, at the extremity of that infinite distance, which will come down either heads or tails.”20 The English idiom here conceals the French, which is not the more familiar “pile ou face” but the rarer “croix ou pile,” the cross or the heap: the simultaneously transcendent and immanent principle of being or the formless, unintelligible soros. We are returned to “Infinity nothing,”21 the opening of the fragment, but are now in a position to see its meaning, not as a statement of alternative options to be reckoned from the side of the subject but as a distinction on the side of the object, disclosing the relation between the world and God. This is the true and deepest statement of the alternatives and the truest and deepest statement of the understanding of God underlying the text. God is the whole and self-sufficient principle of all things. Apart from God, all things would be, strictly and exactly, nothing.22 There would be no alternative mundane goods. There would be no natural good of the human being. There would be no contingency and particularity and no natural necessity. At the highest level, the choice of the human being is not  Ibid., pp. 472 and 469–470.  Ibid., p. 469. 21  Ibid., p. 467. 22  Discussion of this point, without reference to Pascal, can be found in Sokolowski (2006), pp. 40–43. 19 20

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between types or amounts of goods. It is between the very principle of the true and real, already intimated to the interlocutor at the opening exchange of the dialogue as “a substantial truth [une vérité substantielle],” or the non-being of all else, the “many true things that are not truth itself.”23 The good which is the former includes within itself all good, including both the higher good of the virtues, reflecting the natural necessities of the human being, and the lower goods proper to the quotidian contingency of the human being, the healthy pleasures consistent with human nature. Put in Pascalian language, it includes and transcends both human grandeur and human misère. It is, therefore, at once both immanent, entering into nature at both the high level of natural necessity and the low level of human history and the particular existence of man, and also transcendentally self-sufficient and whole, and for this reason capable of entry into both natural levels without diminution or change.24 It is, then, only a superficial reading of the “wager” that would regard it, finally, as an argument of self-interested calculation when it is, in fact, a reflection on the alternatives of being and nothingness. The ultimate sense of the fragment is not the employment of probability in practical decision-­ making, which, in any case, Pascal does not expect his interlocutor to accept. Nor even is it found in the subsequent observations, however acute, about the role of the body in the formation of belief. Rather, it lies in an articulation of the first distinction: that between God and the world, between the very principle of being and that which, without this principle, is nothing at all. The singular character of this distinction lies in the fact that one side of it is prior not only to the other but to distinction-making as such.25 One side of the distinction, that is, establishes the being of the other and remains altogether unchanged in doing so. The creation of the world neither adds to nor detracts from divine being, which is, whole and self-­ sufficient, with or without creation.26 On the other side, the distinction establishes that the created world is dependent on God entirely; without God, it would be nothing. But this dependency is not in the manner of an efficient causal relation, which entails its effect mechanically. God does not  S680/L418, p. 468.  This point is discussed in more detail below. An exceptional treatment of the issue can be found in Prufer (1993), pp. 35–42. 25  Sokolowski (1982), pp. 31–40 puts the distinction in similar terms, especially at p. 33. 26  Prufer (1993), pp. 28, 32–33, 34 n. 4, and Sokolowski (1982), pp. 9–10. 23 24

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imply creation and depends not at all on the distinction between himself and the cosmos. His relation to being is free rather than necessitated—so deeply free, in fact, that it cannot strictly be called a relation at all.27 The distinction, therefore, names something different, something deeper and more fundamental than what is normally spoken of as being, such that we may meaningfully say “God is all there is,” even if this is contrary to fact.28 God is radically free, radically independent, radically transcendent. This distinction between God and the world, in its absolute character, is the fundamental theme of the Pensées. All of Pascal’s fragments are in service, directly or indirectly, of making it appear.

2  Difficulties of Divine Disclosure How the distinction between God and the world can be made to appear is, of course, a question of no small moment for Pascal. If we accept the standard editorial presentation, the wager dialogue is aimed at dislodging a confused and inadequate conception of God by disclosing the affective disorder upon which it rests. It functions, thus, as a form of indirect argument, taken up precisely because the interlocutor, perhaps like the first reader, is in no fit condition to appreciate a directly discursive presentation. A presentation of that sort is, in fact, provided at the opening of S680/L418, and its rejection by an interlocutor yields the start of the wager dialogue.29 Having moved through the dialogue, to the end of the fragment, are we are able to return to the start and see that presentation in a clearer light. 27  This position, of course, is hardly an innovation by Pascal. As Aquinas points out, quoting Dionysius, while it may be right to say that creatures are in some sense like God, just as a statue is in some sense like the man it represents, it cannot at all be said that God is like a creature. See ST I, q. 4, a. 3, ad. 4 in Thomas (1920/2017). See also Sokolowski (1982), pp. 33–34 and his reference to Thomas at p. 40 n. 1. 28  This formulation is due to Prufer (1993), pp.  28, 34, and 39. See also Sokolowski (2006), p. 42. 29  This is pointed out by Balthasar (1986), pp. 202–205. The general scholarly neglect of this first quarter or so of the fragment, to say nothing of the almost exclusive fixation on the pons asinorum of the fragment’s first level, is testament to Pascal’s insight about the condition of the reader. Matthew Jones points out that “[the wager’s] centrality to the ‘philosophical’ parts of Pensées is easily overstated. Its relationship to Pascal’s other arguments in Pensées is often disregarded.” Jones (2006), p. 298 n. 58. I take Jones’ former point to refer to what I am calling the first level of the Infini rien fragment; the disregard he rightly observes is the consequence of preoccupation with this level.

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Following a simple statement of the first distinction—“Infini rien”30— we are offered a description of the place of man in nature, governed by nature’s necessities. The soul is “thrown [jetée]” into the body: man finds himself in the midst of an order not of his own making.31 The union of soul and body is union with nature; it is because of embodiment that one is subject to the principles of natural necessity that characterize the natural world: “number, time, space [dimensions].”32 The mind reasons from the principles of “nature [and] necessity,”33 but, at a higher level, is able to see these too as contingent principles, proper to embodiment, proper to being set in a world that is given.34 There is an implicit contrast here with Cartesian thought, according to which the soul is substantially distinct from the body and the world of which the body is part. For Descartes, the soul is not thrown into the body; it is not in the body at all. Time, dimension, and number are not, for the Cartesian, disclosed by embodiment. They are not given but made: projected, imposed, mapped onto the undifferentiated extended world by the mind. The fragment’s more significant contrast, however, is between natural necessity and the first distinction—first in the fragment and first before every other distinction. The Infini rien distinction is prior to anything in nature, including the highest principles of natural necessity. While the contrast with Descartes remains implicit, this latter contrast is stated openly in the next passage: “Unity added to infinity does not increase it at all … The finite is annihilated [s’anéantit] in the presence of the infinite

 S680/L418, p. 467.  Ibid. 32  Ibid. 33  Ibid. 34  Pascal use of “soul” here blurs his distinction, about which we will say much more further on, between reason—discursive, geometrical, critical, calculative—which is concerned with arguments from first principles, and the higher order heart, which knows first principles, fundamental distinctions, and definitions themselves by intellectual intuition. See S142/ L110. In the present fragment, “soul” refers primarily to reason, to the mind, but in providing an account of the activity of reason, the passage itself points to the action of the heart in receiving and knowing, immediately and directly, the principles on which reason depends. The distinction between reason and the heart is articulated after the Infini rien fragment, at S680/L423, and this casts light on Pascal’s remarks at S680/L419, about why some stop at the level of natural first principles and others are able to see that even those principles are given by what lies beyond them. Here again, the discussion is framed by the Infini rien distinction. 30 31

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and becomes pure nothingness [un pur néant].”35 Infinity, in the sense articulated by the distinction, is absolute. It is not augmented or diminished or changed in any way at all by anything else at all. Whatever is finite—whatever is not infinity—is annihilated before the infinite; in itself, it is nothing. Seen from the point of view of the Infini rien distinction, then, the ceasing-to-be of any single person should not be found at all shocking or surprising. That is the fate of anything and all things apart from God. What would be shocking or surprising, rather, would be to find, for example, that natural justice and divine justice bear some proportion, that the natural good of man is more than nothing.36 For if there is not an irrevocable discontinuity between God and beings, if nature, and man in it, might share some part in the absolute, then God might be disclosed to beings and united to them. At this point, the fragment turns from articulation of the distinction toward the prospects of its disclosure, first from natural knowledge. We know that there is an infinite in number, even though we do not know what it is or whether it is odd or even. It is, therefore, possible “to know the existence of a thing without knowing its nature,” and, so, to conclude that one “may well know that there is a God without knowing what he is.”37 Having established this principle, Pascal makes a pass at reasoning from the particular things of our acquaintance, which are true and real but which are not true or real per se, to the existence of their ground, “a substantial truth,” that which is true or real as such.38 Here, however, the interlocutor intervenes, making a triple distinction between the finite, the natural infinite, and the absolutely infinite. The metaphysical proof and the demonstration of God by analogy to nature move from what is low in nature, the finite particulars of our acquaintance, to what it high in nature, the general or universal natural principles that are the causes or reasons of the finite particulars. But they do not reach the transcendent infinite, the first term of the Infini rien distinction, which  S680/L418, p. 467.  Ibid. 37  S680/L418, p. 468. Here again, there is an implicit contrast with Descartes, for whom we can form a positive conception of God’s nature, precisely because what Descartes refers to by that term is not the God who transcends the cosmos but infinite substance that is part of the natural whole. See Principles I.14 and 18 (AT VIIIA, 10 and 11–12) in Descartes (1984–1985). 38  S680/L418, pp. 467–468. 35 36

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was to be proved. The traditional proofs are, therefore, ambiguous between showing God, as the absolute, transcendent principle of being, or showing what is naturally “best and most powerful,”39 the greatest or first in nature. The interlocutor insists that we are warranted only in accepting the latter. As Hans Urs von Balthasar notes, with this objection, Pascal seems to have “now abandoned the metaphysical proofs.”40 The directly discursive approach to articulating the distinction between God and the natural whole is set aside in favor of speaking “by natural lights,”41 that is, through the indirect argument which seeks to show the interlocutor the inadequate conception of man and God to which he is in thrall. Ought we to conclude, as von Balthasar does, that Pascal here turns his back decisively on natural theology? Much, indeed, has been made of his supposed “refusal of the metaphysical proofs.”42 Pascal, in fact, endorses such proofs and employs them repeatedly in the Pensées, as arguments from particular contingencies to their ground and once as a variation on the key premise of the Anselmian argument.43 Nevertheless, his attitude toward these proofs and toward classical metaphysics more generally does exhibit a certain diffidence.44 The reason for it lies precisely in his dogged insistence on the fundamental and essential distinction between God and the world. Divine transcendence, the wholeness and self-sufficiency of God, does not entail or even imply the existence of the world. God’s creation of the world is wholly free. Put from the other side of the distinction, the things of the cosmos are entirely dependent—a fact illustrated by their lack of self-­ sufficiency, their wavering between being and nothingness—and, so, do imply some reason of their being, perhaps even a god, but they do not, of any necessity, imply the God named by Infini rien. The adversions of their dependency are ambiguous; they might refer equally to whatever is 39  Sokolowski (2006), p. 33. Sokolowski seems to suggest that Aquinas also takes the metaphysical proofs alone to attain only to the natural understanding of God, the one shared by classical pagans and certain moderns. See Ibid., pp. 33–34 and n. 8. 40  Balthasar (1986), p. 204. 41  S680/L418, p. 468. 42  Among many others: Carraud (1991) and again Carraud (1992), pp. 347–392. On the anglophone side: Fouke (1989). 43  S167/L135, S182/L149, pp.  231–232, S680/L418, p.  467–468. In relation to Anselm’s argument, see S690/L440 and S690/L448. More generally, Pascal takes natural theology to be scripturally mandated: see Letter IV to Mlle de Roannez, OC II, p. 31. Some discussion of these proofs can be found in Nemoianu (2015), pp. 326–329. 44  S644/L781, S702/L463, S38/L4, S222/L190.

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­ ttermost in nature as to the transcendent God who is the free creator of u the cosmos. In fine, the proofs of classical metaphysics are insufficient to their object.45 They are unable to reach the depth required for the distinction between God and the world, and, whether structured by the logic of entailment or probability, they are unable to express the gratuitous freedom of God’s relation to being.46 Thus, at the start of the Infini rien fragment, the argument from contingent truths to truth as such is set aside at the request of the interlocutor not because of its invalidity or unsoundness but because it is not adequate to the distinction between God and things: Is there no substantial truth, seeing that there are so many true things that are not truth itself? We know, therefore, the existence and nature of the finite, because, like it, we are finite and extended. We know the existence of the infinite and do not know its nature, because it has extension like is, but not limits like us. But we know neither the existence nor the nature of God, because he has neither extension nor limits.47

The reply, as we have seen already, is a three-fold distinction between the low, finite level of nature, the high, infinite level of nature, and God who transcends both.48 The argument from contingent truths, beginning at the low level of nature, indeed points beyond itself, but its conclusion may come satisfactorily to rest in the higher level of natural necessity. It does not, of itself, attain to the transcendent principle of nature as such. Likewise, Pascal’s Augustinian argument from the contingency of the human being: I sense that I might never have been, for the self consists in my thought. So I, who think, would never have been if my mother had been killed before I had been given life. So I am not a necessary being. Likewise, I am neither 45  A similar point is perhaps suggested by Jean-Luc Marion: “It is not so much a question of refusing natural theology as it is of disqualifying metaphysical discourse applied to God.” See Marion (1999), p. 293. 46  Here as elsewhere, this is only a manner of speaking: in the strict sense, God is not related to created being. I am grateful to John McCarthy for clarification on this point. 47  S680/L418, p. 468. 48  This triple distinction repeats itself in Pascal’s treatment of the dialectic of grandeur et misère, discussed further on.

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eternal nor infinite. But I see well that in nature there is a necessary, eternal, and infinite being.49

The contingent self appears to thought at the finite level of the natural world. Its finitude and contingency, to be sure, imply a ground which cannot itself be contingent and finite, but that implication leads most readily not to what transcends nature but to the necessities of nature’s highest level. It is perhaps for this reason that Pascal groups the fragment in the bundle headed “Divertissement”: inasmuch as the argument does not attain to the first distinction but treats nature itself as the ultimate horizon, it misleads. Pascal brings the whole matter together in the long S690 fragment: And this is why I will not undertake here to prove from natural reasons … the existence of God … Even if a man were convinced that proportions between numbers were immaterial and eternal truths, dependent on a first truth in which they subsist and which we call God, I would not consider him as having made much progress toward his salvation.50

As before, the point is not that Pascal regards the argument—a variation on the very one presented to the interlocutor in the preamble to the Infini rien fragment51—to have failed, as invalid and unsound. It is, rather, that the conclusion of the argument is ambiguous as between natural necessity and the transcendent God who is the principle of the cosmos, including natural necessity, as its free creator. Pascal again: The God of Christians does not consist in a God who is merely the author of geometrical truths and the order of the elements: that is the part given by the pagans and Epicureans.52

But if God is not simply to be identified with the highest and controlling part of nature, in its laws and its necessities, neither is he to be understood simply as a benevolent and powerful being:

49  S167/L135, emphasis mine. Sellier underscores the Augustinian provenance of the proof in his edition. 50  S690/L449, p. 491. 51  S680/L418, pp. 467–468. 52  S690/L449, p. 491.

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He does not consist merely in a God who exercises his providence over the lives and fortunes of men, bestowing a happy span of years upon those who worship him: that is the portion given by the Jews.53

Both the Jewish and the pagan construals take God to be a thing in the world, either a powerful steward of finite goods or the first and best being in the natural order (not far off from the initial two levels of the Infini rien fragment).54 These construals regard God as a good relative to some part of things, either the upper level of nature and necessity or the lower level of custom and contingency: they “stop in nature.”55 Christianity alone discloses a God who is the comprehensive good of man, the dialectical integration and unification of the world as cosmos (and human nature as part of the cosmos, reflecting its division) by being able to enter into the cosmos (and into man) at both levels, rendering a truly unified whole precisely because he transcends the whole as its principle: But the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God of Christians is a God of love and consolation. He is a God who fills the soul and the heart of those he possesses. He is a God who makes them inwardly aware of their wretchedness and his infinite mercy; who unites himself to the depths of their soul; who fills it with humility, with joy, with trust, with love; who renders them incapable of any other end but himself.56

To say that the God of the Patriarchs is a God of love is to say that his action is not necessitated but free. To say that he is a God of consolation is to say that his action is the unification of the whole of nature, entering  Ibid.  Pascal, of course, does not deny that the God of the Hebrew scriptures is also the God of the New Testament, but he distinguishes between “carnal Jews,” who expect the dispensation of material goods, and “true Jews,” who await Christ and the perfection of the human person in him. See S318–319/L286–287 and S287–288/L255–256. Or again, at S276/ L243: “The Jewish religion must be regarded differently in the tradition of their saints and in the tradition of the people. Its morality and happiness are ridiculous in the tradition of the people, but it is admirable in that of their saints.” Pascal’s distinction may owe something to Thomas in SCG IIIa, 27 (13), just as his treatment of Islam in the same section seems indebted to SCG I, 6 (4). See Thomas (1975a, b). Prior to the Pensées, Pascal had cast the distinction as between the “literal” and “mystical” senses of Hebrew scripture, of which, more below. 55  S690/L449, p. 491. An account quite close to Pascal’s, though without reference to him, may be found in Sokolowski (1982), pp. 12–19. 56  S690/L449, p. 491. 53 54

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into the world even at the lowest level of being, as the good proper to the things of that level, and standing as ultimate end. This is the God who, in the absolute primacy and freedom of his distinction from the world, cannot be adequately expressed by the proofs of classical metaphysics. For Pascal, then, the first distinction appears not through the multiplication of proofs.57 The basic meaning of the Infini rien distinction is that its first term is prior to all else: to all other things, if there are other things, to all other distinctions, if there are other distinctions—indeed, to distinction-­making itself.58 There could be nothing more fundamental in terms of which it could be explained or demonstrated, no argument adequate to deliver the transcendent God as its conclusion. To expect such an argument is to misunderstand the primacy and fundamentality of the distinction, the radical transcendentality of God.59

3   God and Memory If the God of the first distinction is indeed radically transcendent, altogether prior to anything else, if there is anything else, how could a finite being attain to it? How could that distinction be made to appear at all? We are returned to the question of divine disclosure. The model for Pascal’s answer is the Mémorial, the document of the mystical experience he underwent on the night of Monday, Nov. 23, 1654. The source and object of Pascal’s experience is “Fire/God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob/not of philosophers and scholars.”60 The formulation anticipates  S680/L418, p. 471.  See, again, Sokolowski (1982), p. 33. 59  Cf. Nemoianu (2015), p. 326 n. 3: “There is, of course, also a deeper sense of hiddenness … in which the fullness of God’s nature, rather than his existence, remains hidden from the human being.” The theological background of this view is set out by Michon (2007), pp. 315–332. It is possible to express the same point from the side of man, by putting it in terms of the “infinite distance” between the “three different orders of kind” (S339/L308), so that the proofs fall into a sort of “tyranny” (S91–92/L58) by trying to make what is proper to the order of charity belong to the order of the mind. See, e.g., Marion (1999), pp. 302, 305, and, more generally, 306–322. The danger is that this approach recasts a fundamentally metaphysical issue—the difference in being between God and created things—as a merely epistemic one—the human problem of divine hiddenness. To be sure, Pascal claims that “God is a hidden God” (S644/L781), but this hiddenness is made manifest because of an underlying distinction in being to which it points. A consideration of the orders in terms of the more fundamental Infini rien distinction is offered below. 60  S742/L913. 57 58

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the discussion of the Pensées in the name it gives to God and in the distinction it articulates between the Christian understanding of God and all others. The principal theme of the Mémorial, so named by Pascal’s sister, is memory. The text casts this faculty or power as the basis of true theological knowledge.61 The function of the Mémorial as a whole is to record and so recall Pascal’s own experience of the immediate presence of God as absolutely distinct from created being, an experience so powerful as to bring about “Forgetfulness [Oubli] of the world and of all, apart from God.”62 The text is the recollection of this forgetfulness. Pascal holds God in memory by remembering that he forgot the world. But how can one remember that he forgot the world? By what means, save worldly ones, could that recollection be effected? In the series of quotations that forms the body of the Mémorial, Pascal develops his answer. Beginning with divine self-identification as the God of the Patriarchs at the burning bush and proceeding through the resurrected Christ’s echo of that self-identification to Mary Magdalene at the tomb,63 we see that God has made himself known through the mediation of tradition, held in memory. Memory forms the link between finite, fallen man and the infinite, transcendent God: as Ruth is united to the God of Israel through entry into the particulars of Naomi’s tradition, all men are united to the divine through entry into the particulars of Christ’s tradition.64 Pascal’s quotation from Ruth, however, does not describe a simple one-­ way link but a dynamic, dialectical relation. Ruth unites herself to Naomi’s God by the promise to remember her tradition, so that she will not herself be forgotten. In remembering God, she is herself remembered. The point is deepened in the second half of the Mémorial: I have separated myself from him./Derelinquerunt me fontem aquae vivae./ My God, will you forsake me?/May I not be eternally separated from him.65

A mirrored pairing of paired lines: man’s forgetfulness of God, the living water, is also God’s forgetfulness and abandonment of man. To hold  The importance of memory in Pascal is brought out nicely by Hibbs (2017), p. 182.  S742/L913. 63  Exodus 3:6 and John 20:17. 64  Ruth 1:16–17 and John 17, especially 25 and 3. 65  Ibid. 61 62

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God’s word in memory—“I will not forget your words [Non obliviscar semones tuos],” the Psalm with which Pascal closes the text—is to be held by God in memory.66 The memorial link between human and divine is reciprocal. To recall the words spoken by God to man in time is to be remembered by the God who is beyond time, beyond the world and its history, and, so, to be united to him. The God who transcends the world radically, then, has disclosed himself historically. His self-disclosures form a sacred tradition. Man recalls God by holding this tradition in memory.67 In doing so, he is also recalled by and united to God. This is the model of divine disclosure for Pascal, the only one, ultimately, that is fully adequate to the Infini rien distinction. The immanent appearance of God does not obscure or minimize divine transcendence but, in fact, emphasizes it. The God who appears as fire in the burning bush identifies himself, in the Exodus 3:6 passage quoted by Pascal, immanently with the tradition of the Patriarchs. But this immanent self-identification is paired with God’s transcendence in the same scriptural chapter: the whole, self-sufficient, and unchanging “ONE-WHO-IS” of Exodus 3:14. God is at once immanently present in history and altogether transcendent of any particular appearance. The immanence of God discloses the radical character of divine transcendence for only a radically transcendent God—one so whole and sufficient as to be neither augmented nor diminished by the cosmos in any respect and thus one who does not vie for being with the cosmos in part or in whole—could enter into the cosmos while remaining altogether what he is.68 The God of the Mémorial is thus simultaneously immanent and transcendent, one whose immanent self-disclosure is disclosive, more deeply, of a radical transcendentality. It is here that we find the distinction between the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and the god of the philosophers. The latter, whether the god of Plato, the god of the stoics, the unmoved mover, the Plotinian One, the Cartesian infinite substance, or the Spinozist deus-sive-natura, is always the highest, the first, the controlling element of the cosmos. Such a god might be called transcendent inasmuch as it excels everything below it in power and goodness, but it remains a thing in nature, bound  Ibid., with the quotation from Psalms 118:16.  On these latter two points, see also Pascal’s remarks on memory and sacred tradition in the Préface sur le Traité du vide, OC I, pp. 452–454. 68  This point is set out with great force and clarity in Sokolowski (1982), pp. 31–40. 66 67

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essentially to what is below it. As the highest level of nature, the god of the philosophers cannot enter into the particularity and contingency of human history without contradiction. It is in this sense exactly that incarnation is folly to the Greeks.69 The highest part of nature—the controlling and determining part, the necessary and most general part—may speak through the guise of what is low, but it cannot be itself and also be what is low.70 The God of the Patriarchs is not a thing in the cosmos. He transcends the cosmos, both in its higher necessities and in its lower contingencies, as its principle.71 And while he may be found disclosed at the upper level of nature, as the ground of the general laws and principles that form particulars, his transcendence of the cosmos is evinced most fully by his entry into human history, in its immanent particulars, without diminution of his wholeness and self-sufficiency. It is precisely this that the god of philosophers cannot do. And this is why Pascal insists that God is more truly disclosed in memorial attention to sacred tradition than in rational multiplication of the proofs: whereas the latter are ambiguous between God and whatever is highest in nature, the former can refer only to the God who transcends nature. To be sure, the entry of the divine into human history is only intimated in the burning bush and the self-revelation of God to the Patriarchs. Its full achievement, disclosing the radical transcendence of God, occurs in the incarnation. Christ is simultaneously the whole and self-sufficient principle of being and this incarnate man who suffers and dies. The incarnation is not merely a paradox but a contradiction for the god of the philosophers, whether named in ancient or modern terms.72 The Aristotelian unmoved mover is the cause, in multiple senses, of this beautiful and excellent man, but the former is not and cannot be the latter. Likewise, Spinoza’s free and rational man is only ever a finite mode within and

69  1 Corinthians 1:23, referenced by Pascal in S680/L418, p. 468: “They declare, in showing it forth to the world, that it is a folly—stultitiam.” 70  For a discussion along these lines of the distinction between pagan divinity, Heideggerian being, and the Christian God, see Sokolowski (1982), pp. 12–19 and 49–51. A tight summary of the essential difference of the Christian understanding of God and its contrast with pagan divinity may be found in Sokolowski (2006), p. 4. 71  This point is very well brought out as a criticism of Leo Strauss’ misunderstanding of the Christian God in Prufer (1993), pp. 35–42. 72  Cf. Sokolowski (2006), pp. 43–44.

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wholly determined by deus-sive-natura, under this or that attribute.73 For both, man may share in divinity, through the perfection of his rational nature or the acquisition of adequate ideas, but to that extent is more than human or, perhaps, no longer human.74 In no case is it possible to be a particular and also to be God. The two are hierarchized aspects of one and the same economy of being, two things in one whole. God can be man only if God is not part of the cosmos.75 Only then can God be what he is and also this finite particular. To say that Christ is God is to say that God is not a thing in nature but transcends nature radically: this is the God of the first distinction, who stands to the things of the cosmos, both high and low, as being to nothingness, Infini rien. Thus it is that, in the Mémorial, Pascal highlights Christ’s self-­ identification, at John 20:17, with the God of Naomi and Ruth, who is the God of the Patriarchs in the burning bush, and then moves to two passages from John 17 which establish that it is through Christ that God is truly seen. The sacred tradition, which discloses God to memory, points always to the incarnation. Two years after the Mémorial, in an October 1656 letter to Charlotte de Roannez, Pascal develops this very point in a history of divine disclosure. His account begins in the pagan discernment of God beneath the veil of nature, following Paul in Romans 1:19–20, and then moves to the revelation given to the Jews in scripture, in the literal and then, more importantly, in the mystical sense. The latter anticipates the self-disclosure of God as man, the incarnation of Christ, who then deepens his own self-disclosure in the sacrament of the Eucharist.76

73  See Ethics IIp10–11, and likewise, among many other places, IIIpref and IVapp7 and 32 in Spinoza (1994). Descartes, it seems, is left with the same view as Spinoza, for either there is a real distinction between the infinite substance and each particular man, so that there is no interaction between them, or, as seems more likely, finite substances are only substances in a qualified sense and, so, are distinct only modally from the infinite substance. See Principles I.51–52 and 60 (AT VIIIA, 24–25 and 28–29) in Descartes (1984–1985). That the thinking self stands in priority to all things, including God, who is not real until determined to be so by the self, deepens this problem for Descartes. 74  Ethics Vp23 in Spinoza (1994) and Nicomachean Ethics X.7 (1177b25–30) in Aristotle (2011). Sokolowski suggests a partly similar point in relation to Aristotle: Sokolowski (1982), p.  16. See also Sokolowski (2006), p.  52 on the incoherence of praying to the Aristotelian god. 75  See, again, Sokolowski (1982), pp. 36–40. 76  OC II, pp.  30–31. Discussion of this letter may be found in McDade (2004), pp. 122–128 and Nemoianu (2015), pp. 340–343.

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The historical pattern of Pascal’s sketch develops from universal to particular, from general to specific. Pascal notes that, on the one hand, this movement acts as a progressive concealment: God, he says, was seen more easily beneath the general veil of nature, whereas the Eucharist is “the strangest and most obscure secret of all.”77 And yet, the development toward the particular and specific is, for that very reason, a progressively fuller disclosure of God. This is not only because the pattern—from the order of nature, to the tradition of a people, to the culmination of that tradition in a person, to the continual presence of that person in bread and wine—lends itself to greater existential immediacy at each moment but, also and more importantly, because each stage articulates with greater clarity and force the radical transcendence of God. The invisible God found beneath visible nature might be the God named by Infini rien but might be, more simply, the natural necessities that govern the cosmos at its highest level. The God of the Hebrew scriptures might be the one who becomes incarnate in Christ but might be merely a powerful steward of the temporal ambitions of men.78 With the incarnation and the Eucharist, these ambiguities are dissolved: if this man is God, if God is truly present, whole and entire, beneath the species of bread and wine, it can only be because God does not belong to the world as one more of its contents but transcends it so completely that he is able, without loss or change, to enter into its homely particulars. Returning with this point to the treatment of the classical proofs in the Pensées, we can see more completely why those proofs, relying on the operation of nature alone, do not go far enough to disclose the distinction between God and the world: I wonder at the boldness with which these people undertake to speak of God … their first chapter aims at proving divinity through the works of nature. I should not be surprised by this undertaking if they addressed their arguments to the faithful, for it is certain that those who possess living faith in their hearts see immediately that all existence is nothing other than the work of the God they adore. But for those in whom that light is extinguished … to give them as the whole proof of this great and important matter the course of the moon and the planets, and to claim to have

 OC II, p. 30.  This, indeed, is the reason for Pascal’s distinction between the spiritual and carnal senses of the Old Testament See S738/L502, S493/L593. 77 78

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c­ ompleted that proof with such an argument, is to give them grounds for believing that the proofs of our religion are weak indeed.79

Those proofs only take on their proper sense once they are related to the sacred tradition whose center is Christ: And this is why I will not undertake here to prove from natural reasons … the existence of God … not only because I would not feel myself sufficiently capable of finding in nature anything to convince hardened atheists, but also because without Jesus Christ such knowledge is useless and sterile … All who seek God outside Jesus Christ, and who stop in nature, either find no enlightenment to satisfy them or come to fashion for themselves a means of knowing God and serving him without a mediator. In this way, they fall into either atheism or deism[.]80

And still more emphatically: We know God only through Jesus Christ. Without this mediator, all communication with God is cut off; through Jesus Christ, we know God. All those who claimed to know God and to prove him without Jesus Christ had only ineffectual proofs … It is not only impossible but useless to know God without Jesus Christ.81

Pascal’s argument here is not concerned primarily with the epistemological matter of the condition or disposition of the argument’s audience. Those who lack the grace of faith, let alone hardened atheists, may well be incapable of giving the proofs their due, whatever the object to which those proofs point. Regardless, the underlying issue for Pascal is metaphysical. Only proofs that move from the tradition that points, forward or backward, to the incarnation are sufficient to disclose the depth of the distinction between God and the world because only with the incarnation is that distinction available to man. The incarnation establishes a new and different meaning of the name God, one that was intimated, but only intimated, before Christ. In doing so, it also establishes a new and different meaning of nature. What was before taken to be the highest horizon, with God as the outermost limit of that horizon, is now shown to be a  S644/L781.  S690/L449, emphasis mine. 81  S221/L189 and S224/L191. 79 80

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proximate horizon by the God who transcends it.82 The classical proofs from nature, thus, take on their proper sense only in relation to Christ because nature, including the nature of man, becomes what it is only in relation to Christ: Not only do we not know God except through Jesus Christ, but we do not know ourselves except through Jesus Christ. We do not know life and death except through Jesus Christ. Outside Jesus Christ, we do not know what our life is, or our death, or God, or ourselves./Thus without the scriptures, which have only Jesus Christ as object, we know nothing and see only obscurity and confusion in the nature of God and in nature as such.83

Infini rien, the first distinction, the one on which everything else hangs, emerges fully, then, only in the incarnation of Christ. Of course, evidences of the divine may be found everywhere in the world. As Pascal puts it to Mlle de Roannez, “all things are veils that cover God. Christians ought to recognize him in everything … he has disclosed himself in all things and in so many ways for us.”84 And yet the divine entry into the world as a concrete particular, inside the temporal flux of history, available to memory as the focal point of sacred tradition, sets the meaning of all these other disclosures by revealing what they alone cannot: a manner of being so singular and so deep as to render any other nothing beside it, a transcendence of nature so total as to establish the meaning of God and nature in an entirely new way.

References Aristotle, Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Robert C.  Bartlett and Susan D. Collins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011) Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 3, ed. John Riches, trans. Andrew Louth et al. (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986) Paul Bartha and Lawrence Pasternack (eds.), Pascal’s Wager (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) Allan Bloom, “The Ladder of Love,” in Plato, Plato’s Symposium, trans. Seth Benardete (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001)

 See Sokolowski (2006), p. 48.  S36/L417. 84  OC II, p. 31. 82 83

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Vincent Carraud, “Le refus pascalien des preuves métaphysiques de l’existence de Dieu,” Revue des Sciences philosophiques et théologiques 75 (1991): 19-45 Vincent Carraud, Pascal et la philosophie (Paris: PUF, 1992) René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham et al., 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984-1985) Daniel Clifford Fouke, “Argument in Pascal’s Pensées,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 6 (1989): 57-68 Antony Flew, God, Freedom, and Immortality (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1984) Henri Gouhier, Blaise Pascal: commentaires (Paris: Vrin, 1984) Ian Hacking, “The Logic of Pascal’s Wager,” American Philosophical Quarterly 9 (1972): 186-192 Thomas S.  Hibbs, Wagering on an Ironic God: Pascal on Faith and Philosophy (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2017) Matthew L.  Jones, The Good Life in the Scientific Revolution: Descartes, Pascal, Leibniz, and the Cultivation of Virtue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006) Jeff Jordan (ed.), Gambling on God: Essays on Pascal’s Wager (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 1994) J. L. Mackie, The Miracle of Theism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982) Jean-Luc Marion, On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism: The Constitution and the Limits of Onto-theo-logy in Cartesian Thought, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) John McDade, SJ, “Divine Disclosure and Concealment in Bach, Pascal and Levinas,” New Blackfriars 85 (2004): 121-132 Hélène Michon, L’ordre du coeur: philosophie, théologie et mystique dans les Pensées de Pascal (Paris: Honoré Champion, 2007) Martin Nemoianu, “Pascal on Divine Hiddenness,” International Philosophical Quarterly 55 (2015): 325-343 Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, ed. Keith Ansell-Pearson, trans. Carol Diethe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) Graham Oppy, “On Rescher on Pascal’s Wager,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 30 (1991): 159-168 Blaise Pascal, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Michel Le Guern, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1998-2000) Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. W. F. Trotter (London: Dent, 1931) Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. Louis Lafuma (Paris: Seuil, 1962) Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. Philippe Sellier (Paris: Bordas/Classiques Garnier, 1991) Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (New York: Penguin, 1995) Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. and trans. Roger Ariew (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005) Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. and trans. Pierre Zoberman et  al. (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2022) Thomas Prufer, Recapitulations: Essays in Philosophy (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1993)

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Nicholas Rescher, Pascal’s Wager: A Study of Practical Reasoning in Philosophical Theology (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1985) Michael Rota, “Pascal’s Wager,” Philosophy Compass 12 (2017) Robert Sokolowski, The God of Faith and Reason: Foundations of Christian Theology (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982) Robert Sokolowski, Christian Faith and Human Understanding: Studies on the Eucharist, Trinity, and the Human Person (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006) Benedict de Spinoza, A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) Laurent Thirouin, Le hasard et les règles: le modèle du jeu dans la pensée de Pascal (Paris: Vrin, 1991) Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Book One: God, trans. Anton C. Pegis, FRSC (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975a) Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, Book Three: Providence, Part 1, trans. Vernon J. Bourke (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975b) Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 1920/2017, https://www.newadvent. org/summa/

CHAPTER 3

Nature

1   Incarnation and Nature The absolute transcendence of the God of the first distinction, Infini rien, is disclosed by his entry into the world. Only because God entirely transcends creation is he able to enter into the immanent world and be truly present in the things of that world without any contradiction or diffusion.1 Intimacy with creation, not only at the elevated level of natural necessity but even at the low level of immanent particularity, subject to the contingencies of human history, is available because the transcendent God does not vie for being with the world. The fullest disclosure of the absolutely transcendent God is Jesus Christ. Christ is the center of a sacred tradition of divine disclosure that, while including God’s presence in what is most elevated in nature—its necessities, its laws—culminates in God’s entry into nature’s lowest level, as a particular man subject to the contingencies of history and continually thereafter in the species of bread and wine. Christ is not a theophany: not God represented in the appearance of some finite and particular thing, a burning bush or the descent of a dove.2 He is the incarnation of God as a particular man, subject to birth, time, and death. He is the divine as such become, at once, a particular in the cosmos. Christ’s very being, thus, reveals the depth of divine transcendence, of God become this one without loss, an action possible only for a God neither augmented nor diminished by the world as a whole or by anything in it. 1  Once more, a very clear consideration of this point can be found in Sokolowski (1982), pp. 31–40 and Sokolowski (2006), pp. 17, 19, 36, 44. 2  Much less a swan or a bull: see Sokolowski (2006), p. 44 and Spaemann (2017), p. 28.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Nemoianu, Pascal’s God and the Fragments of the World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55626-5_3

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As God and man at once, Christ is not a mere prophet but a “mediator” of the divine.3 His mediation unifies the two sides of the Infini rien distinction. In his very person, he is the crucial point at which the created world, not only in its general laws and natural necessities but also in its immanent particularities, is united to its transcendent origin and end. The person of Christ is the principle according to which whatever is derives its sense: “a sole principle of everything. A sole end of everything. Everything through him, everything for him.”4 In slightly different terms, Christ may be said “to be universal [d’être universel].”5 His action as “mediator” is between “universal being [être universel],” the principle of being as such, and every other thing: that which is in itself nothing and, without mediation, lacks even potentiality.6 Again, Christ’s mediation is not a middle point between two otherwise distinct modes of existence. He is the principle of being as such united to what is, in itself, nothing at all, creating things and sustaining them in a way that is more intimate and essential to them than their own innermost natural essence. For this reason, there is ultimately no coherent choice between “universal being [l’être universel]” and the “self,”7 in the way suggested by common construals of the wager, since the distinction between the two depends on the former, and the former is more fundamental than the distinction between the two.8 The self, as such, is nothing, and “the true and only virtue is to hate oneself.”9 The self is worthy of love only because it is united to “a being who is in us and who is not us … Now, only the universal being [l’être universel] is like that. The kingdom of God is within us. The universal good [Le bien universel] is within us, is ourselves and is not us.”10 And this is nothing other than Christ: Not only do we not know God except through Jesus Christ, but we do not know ourselves except through Jesus Christ. We do not know life and death

 S223/L190.  S237/L205. 5  S254/L221. 6  S410/L378. 7  S680/L423. 8  On this latter point, see, once more, Sokolowski (1982), p. 33. 9  S471/L564. 10  Ibid. See also S26/L407. 3 4

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except through Jesus Christ. Outside Jesus Christ, we do not know what our life is, or our death, or God, or ourselves.11

Not by appearance or by symbol or by teaching, then, but by being, Christ sustains the reality of the various things of the world and effects the integration of the heterogeneous assortment into a true cosmos by elevating nature, linking it from the bottom up to what lies beyond it as its condition, its creating origin, its ground: “Jesus Christ is the object of everything and the center to which everything tends. Whoever knows him knows the reason of all things.”12 Put negatively, the position appears still more starkly: “Without Jesus Christ, the world would not continue to exist. It would either be destroyed or be a kind of hell.”13 Here again, the first distinction, being and nothingness: God is the reason of the world’s being, without which there is only non-being, whether simply or as the formless flux of the infernal plane. Pascal’s discussion of the corruption of nature, of a fallen world that labors, incoherently, to separate itself from the principle of its being, is the development of the theme announced by the distinction in negative terms.14 The immanence of Christ in human history discloses divine transcendence and the distinction between God and the created whole. The condition of a world that has, in spite of itself, tried to obscure this first distinction discloses the ontological place of Christ. What is this condition? “Let man then contemplate the whole of nature in all its exalted majesty.”15 Rational reflection on nature, working outward and upward, locating the parts against the natural horizons in which they are placed, reveals a universe that grows outward and upward, in scale and scope, without any determinate limit: [L]et him behold this dazzling light set like an eternal lamp to illuminate the universe, let the earth appear to him as a point compared to the vast orbit this star describes, and let him wonder at the thought that this vast orbit itself is only a very fine point compared to that comprehended by the stars wheeling in the firmament. But if our gaze stops here, let imagination pass beyond. It will tire sooner of conceiving than nature of supplying. This whole visible  S36/L417.  S690/L449. 13  Ibid. 14  S35/L416, S40/L6, S681/L427 (p. 478), S708/L471. 15  S230/L199, p. 247. 11 12

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world is but an imperceptible trace in the amplitude of nature … It is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere.16

Returning to the parts and working inward and downward, by reduction, dissection, and decomposition, an equal and opposite chasm opens: [L]et him examine the most delicate things he knows. Let a mite show him, in the minuteness of its body, parts incomparably more minute, legs with their joints, veins in the legs, blood in the veins, humors in the blood, drops in the humors, vapors in the drops. Let him divide these last things again until he exhausts his powers of conception … Perhaps he will think that this is nature’s extremity of smallness. I want to make him see a new abyss in there. I want to depict for him not just the visible universe but the immensity of nature we can conceive inside the boundaries of this compact atom. Let him see there an infinity of universes, each with its firmament, its planets, its earth, in the same proportion as in the visible world; and on this earth animals, and finally mites, in which he will rediscover what the first ones disclosed, and find in these others the same again, without end and without rest.17

Nature, thus presenting itself to man, is not unintelligible. We know that things are, and, as Pascal’s own scientific efforts bear out, it is possible to know, at least to some extent, how they are, their behavior and their causal relations, within and without. The invitation to natural philosophy here is framed by a deeper metaphysical question: whether the world is a unified cosmos or a fragmentary heap. Natural philosophy, which must presuppose cosmological unity as the condition of the causal order it proposes to identify, may elide this question by treating proximate degrees of scope as grounding principles: Having failed to contemplate these infinities, men have rashly embarked on the investigation of nature, as though they bore some proportion to it … a presumption as infinite as their object … For who cannot see that those [principles] proposed as ultimate do not sustain themselves but rely on others which, relying on others, never allow for ultimacy? But we treat as ­ultimate what appears so to reason, as we do with material things, where we

 Ibid.  Ibid., p. 248.

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call a point indivisible when our senses no longer perceive anything beyond it, even though by its nature it is infinitely divisible.18

The stipulation of some provisional frame serves only to hide from view the ambiguous openness revealed by rational reflection on nature. Natural philosophy as such does not evince a unified cosmos but, rather, a “double infinity,” of “greatness” and “minuteness.”19 This double infinity appears superficially as a natural analogy of the Infini rien distinction. And yet the analogy is imperfect and even parodic.20 The infinities do not repeat the distinction between the transcendent ground of being and that which, without the former, is nothing. They are, rather, natural superlatives—equal and opposite expressions of what is uttermost in nature—growing in extent, scope, and complexity, upon their respective trajectories. As such, they may be said to gesture toward what is truly ultimate and fundamental, “the end of things and their principle,” but are themselves only a corrupted copy, “two abysses of the infinite and of nothingness,” mirror images of the implacable momentum, ever expanding and dividing, of nature at its furthest, highest, deepest.21 In the unremitting drive of nature toward the outermost and innermost, we find what is general and necessary in nature: its laws and regularities. But from the extremes of the double infinities, the place of the particular and contingent is called into question. This issue appears first as a hermeneutic problem of knowledge: “I hold it impossible to know the parts without knowing the whole, no less than to know the whole without knowing the parts in particular.”22 But underlying the epistemological issue is a problem of being. How do the parts and the whole cohere? How 18  Ibid., pp. 249–250. See also S99/L65: “A man is a supposit, but if he is dissected, will he be the head, the heart, the stomach, the veins, each vein, each portion of vein, the blood, each humor in the blood?” 19  S230/L199, pp. 249–250. 20  Cf. S762/L934: “Nature has perfections, to show that it is the image of God, and faults, to show that it is only his image,” together with S708/L471: “For nature is such that it points everywhere to a lost God, both within and without man./And a corrupted nature.” 21  S230/L199, p. 249. In his careful consideration of “infinite distance” in Pascal’s mathematical works, João Figueiredo Nobre Cortese points out that, in De l’esprit géométrique, Pascal had proposed that the same double infinity obtains in motion, number, space, and time. See OC II, pp. 162–164 and Cortese (2015), p. 2389. These are, of course, the very principles of “nature [and] necessity” identified at the start of the Infini rien fragment (S680/L418, p. 467), discussed in the previous chapter. 22  S230/L199, p. 253. See also S756/L927.

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are the general laws and necessities of nature related to particular individuals? What is the particular between the natural infinities? Nothing can fix the finite between the two infinities that encompass and elude it … From the perspective of these infinities, all finites are equal, and I cannot see why we should set our imagination on one rather than another.23

Natural philosophy may link together a causal chain toward the highest or subdivide its points over and again toward the nethermost, but the what and why of particular things is not thereby better understood but increasingly obscured. Pascal emphasizes the problem as it pertains to the particular man: “Let man, returning to himself, consider what he is, compared to what is. Let him regard himself as lost in this remote outpost of nature … What is a man in the infinite?”24 Suspended between the two infinities, man’s condition is one of “disproportion.”25 Man can know what he is and be what he is only when he is rightly located and properly related to the rest of what is. But setting the right location and proper relation depends upon a stable point of reference.26 This is precisely what the dynamism of nature will not provide: We are drifting in a vast middle, ever uncertain and fluctuating, driven this way and that. Any limit against which we may think to secure and ground ourselves founders and forsakes us … Nothing stands still for us.27 For what, finally, is man in nature? A nothingness compared to the infinite, a whole compared to the nothingness, a middle between nothing and all, infinitely estranged from understanding the extremes, the end of things and their principle insuperably hidden from him in impenetrable secret, equally

 S230/L199, p. 252.  Ibid., p. 248. 25  Ibid., p. 246. “Disproportion of man” is the heading with which Pascal opens the fragment. Consideration of the “proportion” or otherwise between the particular and the natural infinities occurs throughout the fragment: pp. 247, 249, 252. 26  On this point, see also S19/L400, S576/L697, S577/L699, S55/L21, S465/L558, S72/L38. Pascal’s consideration of perspective and its connection to similar questions in Leibniz and Descartes is nicely brought out by Cortese (2015), pp.  2391–2392 and 2391 n. 43. 27  S230/L199, pp. 251–252. 23 24

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incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he is drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed.28

In fine, what appears is a discontinuity or heterogeneity within nature, between the high and the low: “It is infinite in two ways; he is finite and limited. It endures and maintains itself perpetually in its being; he fades and is mortal.”29

2   Greatness and Wretchedness The discontinuity or heterogeneity that appears in nature presents itself even more forcefully in the fallen nature of man himself and is made manifest in the very activity of man’s reflection on his place in fallen nature: Man is only a reed, the weakest thing in nature, but he is a thinking reed. The whole universe does not have to take up arms to crush him; a vapor, a drop of water, is enough to kill him. But even if the universe were to crush him, man would still be nobler than what killed him, for he knows he is dying and the advantage the universe has over him. The universe knows nothing of this.30

 Ibid., p. 249. See also S227/L194 and S102/L68.  S230/L199, p. 255. Cortese details the mathematical background of this heterogeneity. See Cortese (2015), pp. 2386–2388. Philosophically, we might note that this very heterogeneity is identified by Plato (1991) at the dead center of the Republic, in the “third wave,” at 472a and following. There, after a long attempt to establish the oneness of the regime, and the oneness of each in the regime (370b), Socrates finally concedes that the essential requirement of any particular regime is not a oneness but a twoness: the coincidental meeting (473d) of the particular, as political power, and the universal, as philosophy. The accidentality of this meeting is underscored by Socrates’ preface to these remarks, at 472e-473b, that the city “in speech” cannot come into being “in deed,” that is, that there remains a - possibly tragic - gap between the universal and the particular This point is well developed by Bloom in Plato (1991), pp. 460–461 n. 36 and pp. 391–392. The discontinuity between what is ultimate in nature and what is particular is suggested perhaps even more forcefully in the Laws - again at the very heart of the text in Book VII - where the Stranger claims that, for the philosopher, the arrangement of particulars in some regime or another is rightly regarded as nothing more than a self-protective game (803b-c, and also 667e), that is, that the universality of nature grasped by philosophy is never united but always remains in tension with the particular things of history and contingency. See Plato (1988). Pascal seems to refer to this very passage at S457/L533. 30  S231/L200. 28 29

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Man, in one sense, is a lowly particular, vulnerable to other particulars and vulnerable to the universe as a whole. And yet man is capable of knowing himself as a part, a lowly particular, vulnerable within nature’s horizon. He is therefore able to think outside and beyond himself in a manner that attains to the higher level of nature, to what is general and necessary, straining toward the whole itself: “Thinking reed … Through space, the universe encompasses me and engulfs me like a point; through thought I encompass it.”31 Nature becomes self-conscious in man. In slightly different terms, we may say that, on one side, man’s condition is an immanent one, of contingency, finitude, and mortality. On the other, the very capacity of man to achieve conscious purchase on his immanent condition, so as think himself in these terms, as bounded, as coming to be and passing away, shows that there is, in man and proper to man, some standard of necessity and self-sufficiency transcending this condition, against which it can appear as what it is: The greatness [grandeur] of man lies in his knowing himself to be wretched [misérable]. A tree does not know itself to be wretched. So it is to be wretched to know oneself wretched, but it is to be great to know that one is wretched.32

The human being is both great and wretched, participating at once in the lowliness of nature’s contingency, finitude, mortality and the loftiness of its necessity and self-sufficiency. The dialectic of grandeur et misère seems initially to function as a traditional proof from contingency, in something like the Augustinian fourth way of Thomas Aquinas, a proof from the understanding of degrees of perfection in being to the reality of a highest being. And Pascal indeed suggests repeatedly that greatness does advert to another, higher and better, condition that was once our own.33 But the temptation to read grandeur simply as God or as participation in God is to be resisted. Reason discloses being in nature. The human condition is characterized by misère: contingency, finitude, mortality. Indeed, the condition of coming to be and passing away pervades all particular things of our acquaintance. And yet, unlike these other things, man finds himself to be self-consciously  S145/L113.  S146/L114. 33  E.g., S164/L131, S168/L136, S148/L116, S149/L117. 31 32

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aware of his condition. Man understands or can understand himself as wretched. He acts or can act in terms of this understanding. This understanding and action is itself a theme for his own cognition. Rational consciousness of self indicates that the human being is different from other things in nature. Man is not just a thing or another living being, but a distinctive kind of living being, one for whom being itself matters. Ego vir videns: man sees the condition of things, and he is thus set in the world as the prophet is set among the ordinary run of humankind.34 But this rational self-consciousness is every bit as much an aspect of his nature as is his contingency and mortality: Wretchedness [misère] being inferred from greatness [grandeur] and greatness from wretchedness … They come back on one another in a circle without end, since it is certain that, to the extent men possess enlightenment, they discover both greatness and wretchedness in man. In a word, man knows he is wretched. He is therefore wretched because he is so. But he is truly great because he knows it.35

Greatness and wretchedness are both found in man, are both proper to man, are both truly constitutive of man.36 Simply put, “man’s condition is dual.”37 This dual condition itself, however, is anything but simple. Man is a “chimera,” a “monster,” a “chaos,” a “subject of contradiction,” a “prodigy, judge of all things, imbecile earthworm, repository of truth, cesspool of uncertainty and error, glory and garbage of the universe.”38 In his self-­ surpassing, man is a “paradox.”39 The dialectic of grandeur and misère is paradoxical precisely because, although the latter adverts to the former, grandeur is not the solution of misère; misère is not resolved by or subsumed into grandeur. Pascal’s argument is not merely that, because the low appears as low, there is something high adequate to account for it, which something we may call God.40 Indeed, if we do find temporality and contingency and find it as temporal and contingent, it must be because we  S689/L437, quoting Lamentations 3:1.  S155/L122. 36  S248/L215. 37  S164/L131, p. 212. 38  Ibid., p. 211. 39  Ibid., p. 212. 40  Pascal considers an argument of this sort at S167/L135. 34 35

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apprehend something more that throws it into relief, and this serves to answer the sophist who would say that custom and contingency rule over all.41 But it is man’s nature itself that exhibits a dynamic tension between high and low, between reason, necessity, and universality, on one hand, and custom, contingency, and particularity, on the other. What first appears as a traditional proof, therefore, opens onto a deeper and richer question: how can one and the same nature be both contingent, finite, and mortal and also necessary, infinite, and eternal? How can man be one and heterogeneous? This question returns us to the issue of nature’s discontinuity or heterogeneity. Man’s condition reflects the state of nature more generally. The dynamic tension of grandeur et misère in the human being reflects the dynamic tension between what is general and necessary in nature—the two infinities—and what is contingent, historically situated, particular. Here again, the temptation is to assimilate or subordinate the latter to the former, so that particularity is made exhaustively determinate by what is uttermost in nature. Misère is absorbed into grandeur, history is made a function of reason, and contingency is subsumed into necessity. But this is reductive: the cosmos is both nature and necessity and also custom and contingency, both universality and particularity. And while the latter appears as what it is in light of the former, this disclosure distinguishes without eliminating or explaining away. Likewise, it is our reason that discloses our finitude and mortality, and this reveals our reason to be something more than just finite and mortal. And yet, finitude and mortality are not—pace Spinoza42—overcome by our reason. Nature, including the nature of man, is both grandeur and misère. The paradox of man is also the paradox of nature.

3  The End of Things and their Principle This is the condition of a world that has tried to obscure the first distinction and separate itself from the principle of being. It is the incoherent self-assertion of what is, in itself, nothing. The condition is a dual disunity: the dynamic tension of grandeur et misère within man and the heterogeneity of the low and the high without. This dual disunity calls out for an explanation and, so, manifests an absence: “the end of things  See the possibly ironic quotation of Pindar in The History, 3.38. Herodotus (1987).  Ethics Vp23 in Spinoza (1994).

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and their principle insuperably hidden.”43 The end and principle which would secure the unity of all things as a cosmos—the wholeness of man, the wholeness of nature, the wholeness of both together—cannot be sought in nature, since nature is one of the terms of the disunity and, at its uttermost, is itself split and pulled toward the two infinities. The wholeness of the whole requires something that transcends the two infinities and yet is proportionate to the particular individuals between them. The efforts of philosophy alone to find this unity in nature fall chiefly into the reduction and assimilation of the parts into the whole, the low into the high, misère into grandeur. Pascal identifies this position with Descartes and the stoics, though perhaps the most extreme expression is the Cartesian philosophy of Spinoza, itself heavily indebted to stoicism.44 Less frequent, though no less reductive, is the skeptical affirmation of misère over grandeur, which Pascal associates with Montaigne, but which finds a deeper declension in the empirical tradition that culminates in David Hume.45 In either direction and in whatever variant, the whole, within man and without, is not established as a whole at all but a heterogeneous assortment, in which one aspect or another must be subsumed or explained away: The philosophers did not prescribe thoughts proportionate to the two states. They inspired movements of pure greatness, and that is not the state

 S230/L199, p. 249.  See, e.g., Ethics Ip14, Ip14c1, along with Ip25 and Ip25c, and in consequence, the amorphous plasticity of “res singulares” set out at IId7. Spinoza (1994). The general charge may be found in Hegel (1990), p. 163 (111–112). Yitzhak Melamed’s effort to save the reality of finite particulars in Spinoza seems rather to confirm the specific problem identified here, leaving us with “weak” individuals that function only to point back to the one substance of which they are “fuzzy” parts. See Melamed (2010), especially p.  91. The same position is well in view at the very origins of philosophy, in Parmenides, Fragment 8: what is must be, whole and one, or else not at all. See Diels and Kranz (1951–1952). Spinoza’s relation to stoicism is detailed in Miller (2015). 45  See, e.g., Hume (1975), pp. 18–20 and 22 (EHU Sect. II, 13–15 and 17), on the origin of ideas and the method of their correction. Perhaps the most direct (and radical) expression may be found in Berkeley’s claim that “everything which exists, is particular,” so that it is impossible to “frame a distinct idea of entity in general, prescinded from and exclusive of … all particular things whatsoever.” Berkeley (1979), pp. 28 and 57. 43 44

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of man. They inspired movements of pure baseness, and that is not the state of man.46

The true unity of things can be found only in what transcends grandeur and misère, in what is beyond both history and contingency and also nature and necessity, and is able, therefore, to stand as the principle of both, to enter into both at once, and in which, thus, both at once are brought together and elevated. Without this, there is no cosmos; the world, and man in it, is nothing more than a fragmentary heap. The disunity of nature and of man offers an intimation of the claim that “Without Jesus Christ, the world would not continue to exist. It would either be destroyed or be a kind of hell;” it reveals the ontological position of Christ as the “object of everything and the center to which everything tends.”47 The incarnation is the disclosure of God in his absolute transcendentality, but it is also the promise of the reestablishment of the unity of the whole cosmos and of each thing in it in terms of “the end of things and their principle.”48 Here again, the principle that would bring all together— high and low, grandeur et misère—as a true unity, without reduction, can only be a true transcendence and, thus, also truly immanent. Not the subsumption of the particular and contingent into the universal and necessary, not the overcoming or denial of misère, not the skeptical denial of universality and grandeur, but the sanctification, the transfiguration, the participation of both in divinity as nature most fully actualized: “We must,

46  S17/L398. On the oppositions between the stoics and rationalist “dogmatists,” on the one hand, and the skeptics and Epicureans, on the other, see S164/L131, S240/L208, S683/L430, and, on Montaigne especially, the Entretien avec M. de Sacy, OC II, pp. 82–98, a translation of which can be found in Pascal (2022), pp. 497–512. On Descartes, see S118/ L84, S445/L887, S462/L553. The proposal made by Ariew (2007), that Pascal is a Cartesian because of his apparent agreement with Descartes on two points touching on natural philosophy, is historically rich but philosophically thin, suggesting, at most, that Pascal employs Cartesian positions at certain moments in his dialectic. Marion argues that Pascal’s initial appropriation of Descartes is in service of a more comprehensive “overcoming” of Cartesian thought. See Marion (1999), pp.  277–345. In response to Marion, Hélène Bouchilloux argues from S339/L308 to a more essential Pascalian subversion and refutation of Cartesian thought. See Bouchilloux (1997). The relentless criticism of Descartes pervading the Pensées as a whole is set out masterfully by McCarthy (1994–1995). 47  S690/L449. 48  S230/L199, p. 249.

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then, seek for a [meaning] that reconciles all oppositions.”49 Only Christ, “sole end” and “sole principle” of all things, suffices to achieve the unification of man, of nature, and of man in nature.50 Christ is sole end and principle of all things, in whom “all contradictions are reconciled,” because he is “mediator” the of the Infini rien distinction: “in him we find both God and our wretchedness.”51 He is the principle of the unification of all immanent things, in themselves and among themselves, because he is the principle of the unification of the absolutely transcendent God with the world even at its ontologically lowest level, a world created out of nothing and which would be nothing without God. That mediation is achieved in his very person, fully God and fully man, fully transcendent and fully immanent, the latter and former together possible because of the former. Christ’s mediation is not to be understood on the model of efficient causation. It consists, rather, in “naming,” in speaking things into being, making them to be what they are: “the ultimate end is what gives things their names.”52 The essence and end of speech is truth. The coherence of the speech act depends on truth; it arises from truth; it aims at truth; truth is what distinguishes it from senseless noises. The ultimate end that gives names to things is, then, nothing other than truth: “Truth is thus the first rule and ultimate end of things.”53 The person of Christ is, therefore, “uncreated and incarnate truth,” the logos who discloses what things really are and from whom we “learn our true nature.”54 The truth, imparting itself, makes things to be out of nothing and integrates them with each

49  S289/L257. The specific context of these remarks is scriptural interpretation, but the general point plainly extends beyond that context, as the opening of the fragment itself makes plain. Consider also Pascal’s suggestive remarks at S501/L604, in his treatment of the relation between the Pope and the whole Church: “Multiplicity not reducible to unity is confusion. Unity that does not depend on multiplicity is tyranny.” 50  S237/L205. 51  S289/L257, S223/L190, and S225/L192. 52  S738/L502. The sense of the fragment is not that God names each thing (a task left partly to Adam, following Genesis 2:19–20) but that the true names of things are set in relation to their natures and their natures in relation to God, the end which establishes that they are and what they are. Word and being are already one in the act of creation. 53  S771/L974. 54  S164/L131, p. 211. See also Pascal’s gloss on St. Bernard of Clairvaux at S802/L968: “In God, the word does not differ from the intention, because he is true [véritable, that is, actual].”

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other, in the measure that they participate in that truth. This is what it is for Christ to be mediator, both means and end: “via, veritas.”55

4   Incarnation and Supernature Christ’s incarnation transforms the usual meaning of nature. In one sense, this is obvious from what has gone before. The condition of fallen nature is one of disunity, heterogeneity, discontinuity. Christ offers its restoration to harmonious unity. In more Pascalian language, nature is corrupt but redeemed and restored by Christ: First part: That nature is corrupt, proved by nature itself. Second part: That there is a Restorer [Réparateur], proved by Scripture. For the Christian faith functions almost exclusively to establish these two things: the corruption of nature and the redemption by Jesus Christ.56

This is the meaning of Christ’s place as mediator of the Infini rien distinction, both God and man, the reconciliation of oppositions in nature. But there is further, deeper sense in which Christ changes how we are to speak of nature. Christ’s disclosure of God’s absolute transcendence is at the same time a disclosure that the uttermost levels of nature are uttermost only in a qualified sense. The natural infinities of greatness and fineness which frame all contingent particulars are infinite only in a qualified sense. They are not ultimate. Such necessity as they have obtains only within the frame of the cosmos.57 They are created and dependent upon a deeper necessity and self-sufficiency which is absolute. This reveals some of what were taken to be ineluctable consequences of these natural necessities to be, in fact, contingencies. Foremost among these is death. Within the frame of the world, the destiny of each contingent particular is death. Death is the subjection to natural necessity that sets the horizon of meaning and action for individual things. Death “threatens us at every moment” and thus “places us infallibly” under a “horrible necessity … There is nothing more real than this.”58 The “fixed and constant  The quotation from John 14:6 is at S172/L140.  S40/L6, together with S681/L427, p. 478. 57  I owe this point to a conversation with Scott Roniger. See also Sokolowski (2006), p. 41. 58  S681/L427, p. 476, repeated in S682/L428 and S684/L432. 55 56

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immobility” of the two infinities of nature is defined by its production of death as “continual change” in particulars, all things succeeding one another, always.59 The “perpetual motion” characteristic of things in nature is a ceaseless and futile effort to overcome death.60 Nature thus adverts to death in its very form. There is no natural escape from this restless striving: “Our nature consists in motion; complete rest is death.”61 For man, the horizon of death is apprehended consciously. Death is the “eternal culmination [comble]” of our experience of life.62 It frames the tragic drama of striving and final acquiescence: “The final act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play. In the end, they throw a bit of soil over your head, and that is all, forever.”63 Indeed, Stoicism, which counsels a life lived according to nature, regards suicide as a fulfillment of just such a life.64 More often, of course, human striving is marked by an assiduous avoidance of the fact of mortality: We seek happiness and find only wretchedness and death.65 Unable to cure death, wretchedness, ignorance, men have decided, in order to make themselves happy, not to think about such things.66

There is scarcely any human activity that cannot become an expression of man’s divertissement from his condition.67 But however deep and unselfconscious these habits of distraction and delusion may become, they only underscore the centrality of death as the subjection to natural necessity that defines human striving: The only thing that consoles us of our miseries [misères] is diversion [divertissement], and yet that is the greatest of our miseries. For it is principally this that prevents us from reflecting on ourselves, leading us imperceptibly to ruin. Without it, we would be bored [dans l’ennui], and this boredom [cet

 S230/L199, p. 253 and S38/L3.  S89/L56. 61  S529(bis)/L641. 62  S181/L148. 63  S197/L165. 64  S180/L147, where Pascal refers to Seneca. 65  S20/L401. 66  S166/L133. 67  See especially S168/L136. 59 60

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ennui] would drive us to seek a more solid way out. But diversion amuses us and bears us imperceptibly to death.68

But even the spur of boredom does not suffice, serving only to drive us back toward the “tumult” of “some violent and impetuous pastime.”69 In this way, human activity under divertissement mirrors the constant change and perpetual succession of nature writ large, aimed at mastering death and yet uncovering, in every moment of achievement and rest, only the recrudescence of our mortal limits and, so, a renewed cycle of diversionary striving.70 With Christ’s disclosure, in his person, of the principle of being that transcends natural necessity and before which even natural necessities are seen to be contingent, the possibility is opened that death may not be the destiny of all things within the ambit of nature. By entering into the lowest level of nature, Christ offers the overcoming of nature’s oppositions and the unification of unified nature with the principle of being: Source of oppositions. A God humiliated, to the point of death on the cross. Two natures in Jesus Christ. Two comings. Two states of man’s nature. A Messiah triumphing over death by his death.71

By entering even into the nothingness of nature, Christ draws it into being. By entering into death and passing through it, Christ overcomes death, which is otherwise nature’s lot. The being of particulars is shown thereby not to be exhausted by natural necessity. Particularity is established as something more than the mere shadow of what is high in nature. A certain reality proper to each individual particular is established by relation to Christ, that is, by the entry of the truth that makes the world real into that world at the very lowest level of contingent, historical particularity. Christ’s entry into the world as this one offers the pattern for man’s own overcoming of his mortal limits. The possibility that subjection to death is not the final necessity comes by way of a space that transcends human  S33/L414.  S168/L136, pp. 217–218. 70  Ibid., at section A., pp. 217–218. 71  S273/L241, partly repeated in the second half of S285/L253. Sellier links these passages to the Paschal liturgy as it was celebrated in Pascal’s day. The final line is retained in the Paschal troparion of the Byzantine Rite. 68 69

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nature, one established or awakened by the incarnation. Some inkling of this transcendence was always evident in the rational self-consciousness of man that affords him an awareness of himself as a being in nature and thereby also a certain dignity, that of a being who can act out of reflection on reasons, for the sake of natural perfection.72 The incarnation, however, discloses a higher, supernatural end of the human being. Following Robert Spaemann, we may say that the union between divine and human establishes that man is, more than an instance of a nature, a person, one who has rather than is his nature.73 This is a deeper transcendence of nature than the measure available in rational self-consciousness alone, a freedom with respect to one’s nature and the ends proper to it.74 The possibility that man, in his personhood, may transcend nature and pass beyond death is opened by Christ’s mediation. If Christ is both the transcendent, infinite, necessary, and self-sufficient principle of being— God—and also this man, then we may say that one and the same person, Christ, has a divine nature and a human nature. Since these natures are distinct from each other and unmixed, the person who has the natures is not identical with them. Personhood, then, emerges with the incarnation of Christ and stands in priority to nature, over which it enjoys a certain transcendence.75 Christ, in his disclosure and mediation of the God of the Infini rien distinction, offers a new model of what it is to be human, not ethical or legal or behavioral but ontological: the establishment or awakening of a personhood through which man would be united to the principle of being: “man, in the state of creation or in that of grace, is raised above the whole of nature, made like God, participating in divinity … through grace, man is made like God and participates in his divinity.”76 To be sure, even those brought “to participation in divinity itself … still carry the source of all corruption, rendering them throughout their lives  See S513/L620, S231–232/L200, S145/L113, and S628/L759.  Spaemann (2017), pp. 31–33, who follows Thomas (1920/2017) at ST I, q. 30, a. 4. 74  Spaemann (2017), p. 32. 75  Here again, see Spaemann (2017), pp. 27–29. The view, however, does not belong to any single thinker. Spaemann attributes it to the Greek Fathers at the Council of Chalcedon. An admirably clear statement of the position, to which Spaemann’s is very close, may be found in Marshner (1972), p. 12. Thomas Prufer makes a closely related argument, drawing from Augustine and thence also from Augustine’s scriptural sources. See Prufer (2018), pp.  5–8. Yet another version is set out by Berdyaev (2009), throughout, but especially pp. 20–59, and, on the origin of the insight, in contrast to ancient thought, pp. 32–33. 76  S164/L131, pp. 213–214. 72 73

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subject to error, wretchedness, death, and sin.”77 Christ’s mediation is not the elimination of misère by grandeur but their integration and elevation. The way he opens is not the avoidance of death but the possibility that, in embracing and suffering death, one may pass through it and beyond it, not only to what is highest but to what is beyond all else. The implications appear at every level for the life of man.

References Roger Ariew, “Descartes and Pascal,” Perspectives on Science 15 (2007): 397-409 Nikolai Berdyaev, Slavery and Freedom, trans. R.  M. French (San Rafael, CA: Semantron, 2009) George Berkeley, Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, ed. Robert Merrihew Adams (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1979) Hélène Bouchilloux, “La portée anti-cartésienne du fragment des trois ordres,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale 1 (1997): 67-83 João Figueiredo Nobre Cortese, “Infinity between Mathematics and Apologetics: Pascal’s Notion of Infinite Distance,” Synthese 192 (2015): 2379–2393 Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz, Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (Berlin: Weidmann, 1951-1952) G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, The Lectures of 1825-1826, vol. 3, ed. and trans. Robert F.  Brown et  al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) Herodotus, The History, trans. David Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987) David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975) Jean-Luc Marion, On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism: The Constitution and the Limits of Onto-theo-logy in Cartesian Thought, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) W. H. Marshner, “Politique d’Abord” Triumph 7 (1972): 11-15 John C.  McCarthy, “Pascal on Certainty and Utility,” Interpretation 22 (1994-1995): 247-269 Yitzhak Y. Melamed, “Acosmism or Weak Individuals?: Hegel, Spinoza, and the Reality of the Finite,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 48 (2010): 77-92 Jon Miller, Spinoza and the Stoics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015) Blaise Pascal, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Michel Le Guern, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1998-2000) Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. W. F. Trotter (London: Dent, 1931)  S240/L208.

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Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. Louis Lafuma (Paris: Seuil, 1962) Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. Philippe Sellier (Paris: Bordas/Classiques Garnier, 1991) Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (New York: Penguin, 1995) Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. and trans. Roger Ariew (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005) Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. and trans. Pierre Zoberman et  al. (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2022) Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1991) Plato, The Laws of Plato, trans. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) Thomas Prufer, “A Protreptic: What is Philosophy?” Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy 2 (2018): 1-19 Robert Sokolowski, The God of Faith and Reason: Foundations of Christian Theology (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982) Robert Sokolowski, Christian Faith and Human Understanding: Studies on the Eucharist, Trinity, and the Human Person (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006) Robert Spaemann, Persons: The Difference between ‘Someone’ and ‘Something’, trans. Oliver O'Donovan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) Benedict de Spinoza, A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 1920/2017, https://www.newadvent. org/summa/

CHAPTER 4

Man

The incarnation of Christ discloses the first and most fundamental distinction—Infini rien—between God and all else. The disclosure of the radical transcendence of the principle of the whole changes the meaning of the world by showing that the cosmos is not the highest horizon. The world, thought to be ultimate and necessary, is revealed to be contingent and dependent. It is revealed not merely to be but to have been given being. That the principle of its being is radically transcendent—not augmented, not diminished, not changed in any way at all by the being or non-being of anything else—shows that the world is chosen gratuitously, a creation which might not have been and need not be.1 What is highest is no longer to be thought of as within the cosmos but beyond it—or rather both in it and yet not it, for the incarnation at once discloses an abyss in being and overcomes that abyss. In mediating the Infini rien distinction, Christ impresses the image of the radically transcendent onto the particulars of the whole, unifying them in themselves and in relation to each other by unifying them with God. The incarnation of the divine as a man suggests profound implications for the human being. Chief among these is nothing less than the establishment of the human person as that which moves higher than the merely

1  For discussion of the shift from the sense of the world as necessary to the sense of the world as created, see Prufer (1993), pp. 32–33.

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Nemoianu, Pascal’s God and the Fragments of the World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55626-5_4

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natural.2 Disclosed as the image of God in a new and fuller way, man stands at once in nature and also beyond and above nature: “homo abyssus.”3 While man’s nature is, indeed, determined by its place in the cosmos, the being of man is not exhausted by this placement. In his personhood, “man infinitely transcends man.”4 The point is already partly intimated in the mystery of self-consciousness, the awareness of myself as a being, my own being given as an object to myself.5 The incarnation opens this intimation: that God enters the world as man discloses the radical character of divine transcendence and the possibility of man’s participation in it.6 Said simply, “God made himself man in order to unite himself with us.”7 The destiny of man is accorded a supernatural dimension. Man is magnified by the incarnation. The meaning of life is no longer merely happiness in conformity with natural necessity but something higher: the integration and elevation of man’s whole being in union with God.

1   The Heart For Pascal, the heart is the product of the incarnation, new or newly awakened. It is the innermost personhood of man, that aspect of man that is highest, capable of attaining to the principle of being that transcends nature. In it are established the deeper faculties of the human person, ones that transcend, comprehend, and form the mind, just as the mind transcends, comprehends, and forms the body, with its sensible appetites, its passions and its imaginations. In the heart we find faculties suitable to the supernatural end of man, mediating between immanent, created being and the divine, transcendent and uncreated. In order to explain the heart more fully, we must consider Pascal’s philosophical anthropology. The whole human being, in three dimensions, is body, mind, and heart. Pascal speaks of these as three “orders”: the order of the body, the order

 This point is well set out by Spaemann (2017), pp. 27–29.  Prufer (2018), pp. 6–8, and also Prufer (1993), p. 29. In both, Prufer brings out the Augustinian provenance of this conception of man. On the affinity between Pascal and Augustine on this point, see Balthasar (1986), p. 187. 4  S164/L131, p. 212. 5  S145/L113 and S231/L200 6  S240/L208 and S164/L131, pp. 213–214. 7  S413/L381. 2 3

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of the mind, and the order of charity or of the heart.8 For Pascal, an order is an object of human experience and domain of human activity and also a dimension of the human being, a faculty or complex of faculties proper to that object and domain. The order of the body refers to temporal pursuits and the everyday goods of the human being, all subject to custom, habit, and force. At the same time, it refers to man’s physical being and the complex of the sensitive appetites, the imagination, and the passions. The order of the mind covers natural science and mathematics, philosophy, and natural theology, the higher, rational good of man, all related to the faculty of discursive rationality. Finally, the order of charity names religion, the divine good, and the heart—on Pascal’s view, the highest faculty of the human being. Commentators are fond of emphasizing that, for Pascal, the three orders are distinct and discontinuous.9 More important, however, is that they are arranged in a hierarchy, with the order of charity standing above mind, and mind above body. It is this hierarchical ranking that makes sense of the “infinite distance” between the orders.10 Body does not give rise to mind, and reason, likewise, does not cause or yield or add up to charity. Rather, it is the supernatural order of charity which is the condition and the cause of the natural order of the mind, and it is the immaterial mind which stands as form to the material order of the body.11 The mind stands to the body in the same way that the heart stands to both mind and

8  S339/L308, S329/L298, S761/L933. The third fragment here seems to follow De civ. Dei, XIV.15 in Augustine (1998). Pascal’s view of “orders” is also suggested in S480/L577, S544/L661, S91–92/L58, S201/L170, the Trois discours sur la condition des Grands, OC II, pp. 196–199, and the June 1652 letter to Queen Kristina. OC I, pp. 349–352. See also De l’esprit géométrique in OC II, pp. 171–172, which touches on the distinction between reason and the heart. The orders play a central role in the interpretations of Chevalier (1933), Balthasar (1986), and Marion (1999). An influential interpretation may be found in Mesnard (1976), pp.  324–326 and Mesnard (1988), pp.  29–55. For an overview in English, see Armour (1993), especially pp. 7–9 and 27–44 and Robbins (2015), pp. 145–151. 9  The most extreme expression of this tendency is the contention that the orders have “no intrinsic connection” made by Walzer (1983), pp. 17–20. The view can be found in subtler and more plausible formulations in, e.g., Baird (1975), p. 8; Robbins, (2015), p. 145; Hibbs (2017), pp. 32–33, 108, 172 n. 61, 181. 10  S339/L308. 11  See, in particular, the last three paragraphs of S339/L308. This point is suggested elegantly by Marion (1999), p.  314. It is discussed at some length in Nemoianu (2013), pp. 46–52.

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body: as squares to roots and cubes to squares.12 Each higher order grasps the truth more comprehensively, in a way that the orders below it cannot. A higher order, therefore, is not a greater faculty of the same kind. A lower order does not and cannot give rise to a higher order; it does not add up to a higher order; indeed, it cannot even disclose the reality of a higher order except indirectly, through the evidences of its own limitation. A higher order, however, enfolds what is below it, allowing it to appear as what it is. And yet, at the same time, the higher order is not an elimination or overcoming of the reality of the lower. Lines do not add up to squares or squares to cubes. But squares are comprehended by cubes and lines by squares, and, in each case, the latter opens a new meaning for the former by putting it into a new context, a new setting that it does not present on its own. The knowledge of the mind, discursive rationality, arises from reflection on embodiment.13 United to the body, the mind thinks in terms of the body and the body’s placement in nature, but the mind also transcends the body, inasmuch as it can see the body as an object for itself. The mind thus holds the position of being present in and yet more than the world of bodily things, encompassing that world.14 The pattern repeats itself at the yet higher level of the heart, which comprehends without displacing both of the orders below it. In one sense, then, we may say that the whole human being is body, mind, and heart, and, in another, we may say that the heart is the whole human being. The heart is what is highest in man. It is the truly transcendent aspect of the human being, in which may be found the intellectual vision capable of grasping the whole as a whole, in terms of its principle. Because it transcends both the bodily level of chance and contingency and the rational level of nature and necessity, the heart is also volitional, the place of ultimate choice, the turning of the whole human being toward or away from truth, the principle of the whole, which is its object. And in its transcendent capacity to reflect on time and the mind’s relation to it, the heart is memorial. In uniting the body and mind intellectually, volitionally, and memorially, the heart is rightly identified with the person, who has rather 12  S339/L308. It is frequently pointed out that Pascal’s formulation of the orders may have originated in his Potestatum numericarum summa, OC I, 265–266. See, for example, Lazzeri (1993), pp. 263–265 and McCarthy (1994–1995), p. 261. 13  S680/L418, p. 467. 14  S145/L113.

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than simply is his rational and bodily nature. The heart stands to the mind and body of a man as the person of Christ stands to his divine and human natures and to both the higher and lower levels of the cosmos, both nature and necessity and also particularity and contingency.15 Pascal’s readers have sometimes observed that the heart is intellectual as well as volitional, but none of whom I am aware have recognized that the Pascalian heart is, in fact, triple.16 The heart is intellectual: it knows and has reasons. It is volitional and affective: it chooses and loves. It is memorial: it recalls. We consider each aspect in turn. As intellectual, the heart is sapiential and integrating. The heart knows: “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. We know this in a thousand things.”17 It has reasons, and we know that it does. What does it know? To begin with, it grasps first principles, including space, time, and number, in receptivity to being.18 Recall that these are the necessary principles of nature at its most fundamental, apprehended by or disclosed to the soul which is thrown into the body.19 The heart knows these as immediate intellectual intuitions, and not as the deliverances of arguments. The “intuition of the heart [sentiment du coeur]” is the “heart’s knowledge [connaissances du coeur].”20 This “intuition [sentiment]” is “immediate [immédiat]”21 and “acts instantaneously [le sentiment … agit en un instant],” in contrast both to reason, which is slow, systematic, and dependent on the principles grasped by the heart, and also to the body, 15  Here again, I follow the discussion of personhood found in Spaemann (2017), especially at pp. 19–33. 16  John McCarthy describes the Pascalian heart as a “hendiadys,” combining what an older moment in the tradition would have called intellectus and voluntas, the former of these distinct from the lower order ratio, equivalent to Pascalian “reason.” See McCarthy (1994–1995), p. 262. A longer analysis of Pascal’s “coeur,” showing both its volitional and intellectual character, is offered in Norman (1988), pp. 38–60. Bernard Wills’ sophisticated consideration of Pascal’s relation to Augustine and the multiple traditions of Platonism is almost alone in emphasizing the importance of memory for Pascal. His interpretation, however, minimizes, not always consistently, the intellectual dimension of the heart and takes the upward discontinuity between body, mind, and heart to obtain in their downward relation also—which could be true only on pain of rendering incoherent their hierarchical ordering. See Wills (2006) and also the development of some of its themes in Wills (2012). 17  S680/L423. 18  S142/L110. 19  S680/L418, p. 467. 20  S142/L110. 21  S360/L328.

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which forms habits gradually over time.22 The heart intuits the disclosures of nature, the basic distinctions among things, that are grasped directly and known more surely than whatever can be demonstrated: “speaking in good faith and sincerely, we cannot doubt natural principles.”23 It is this sure knowledge of the heart upon which demonstrative, discursive rationality must depend.24 Pascal’s well-known formulation, “Submission and use of reason, in which true Christianity consists,”25 does not set out opposed alternatives and certainly does not propose anything like an immolation of the intellect.26 As Rémi Brague observes, the proper construal of Pascal’s formulation depends on the order of its elements: submission and therefore the use of reason, the former making possible and, indeed, enjoining the use of the latter toward “the knowledge of things and the choice of proper action.”27 The heart’s receptivity to being, its submission to an order not of its own making, is the condition of discursive, critical rationality. Without being anchored in this order, reason is simply turned this way and that.28 The intellectual dimension of the heart, however, is found not only in its receptivity the first principles of natural necessity. The heart also knows ultimate ends: The heart has its order … This order consists principally in digression on each point in relation to the end, so as to disclose it always.29

22  S661/L821. That the sentiments of the heart are not to be confused with the emotions—the fantasies and imaginations of the body—is set out in S455/L530 and S739/ L975. For discussion of this latter distinction, see Wood (2013), pp. 140–143 and 184–185. 23  S164/L131, p. 210. 24  Again, S142/L110 and the second passage in S661/L821, as well as the first line of S455/L530. The rational reflection upon nature and the discovery of what is general and necessary in it, as described in the previous chapter, proceeds from these immediate intellectual intuitions of the heart, without which it could not begin. 25  This is the title of bundle XIV in Sellier’s edition, L167  in Lafuma, covering S199/ L168-S220/L188, but developing themes that start at S182/L149 and extend until at least S225/L192. 26  Nietzsche (2002), p. 44 (III.46). 27  Brague (2018), p. 120. 28  S455/L530. Again, Pascal’s “sentiment,” which both Ariew and Zoberman et al. translate here as “feeling,” are the intellectual intuitions of the heart. See the same term, and both translators’ rendering of it as “intuition,” in S142/L110. 29  S329/L298.

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This is to say that it knows truth, which is “the first rule and ultimate end of things.”30 And this is to say that it knows God: “It is the heart that perceives God, and not reason.”31 Indeed, God, the first term of the first distinction, is both ultimate end and first principle, both telos and arche: “But it is impossible that God should ever be the end [fin], if he is not the beginning [principe].”32 In its knowledge of the ultimate end, the heart knows itself and its place in what is. The problem of cosmological order is overcome by the ordering principle that transcends the cosmos and establishes the whole and man’s place in it. Here again, this knowledge of the heart is not deductive or discursive or demonstrative or critical. It is intellectual intuition, that is, receptivity to disclosure.33 Just as the model of divine causation is speech, the model of this knowledge is hearing, the hearing of the word by which God creates, or else vision “with the eyes of the heart, which see wisdom.”34 The metaphors of speech and sight do much to illuminate the intellectual intuitions of the heart. Think here of how one understands speech: not the meaning of this or that word, in this or that language, but that a given utterance is speech, that it conveys meaning, that it has a sense which is there to be understood. Such an understanding is not and cannot be given in argument. It is, rather, apprehended in a more immediate way that is presupposed fundamentally in argument. Think likewise of how one understands sight: not the question of whether this or that sensation is accurate or misleading, but that there is an intelligible reality given to sight about which it might be possible to be mistaken. Such an understanding is not and cannot be given in argument. It is, rather, apprehended in a more immediate way that is presupposed fundamentally in argument. On this point, Pascal is very clear and direct:

 S771/L974.  S680/L424. See, likewise, S41/L7, S142/L110, and S646/L793. 32  S808/L988. As Sellier points out, the fragment is a reference to Rev. 1:8, 21:6, and 22:13. 33  As Anacan Mangelsdorf put it to me once, the relevant distinction is between “discursive rationality” and “disclosive rationality.” 34  S339/L308, p. 298. On the relation between sight and truth, see also S708/L471. On divine speech: S738/L502, S802/L968, S794/L957. S41/L7 emphasizes hearing by quoting Romans 10:17—fides ex auditu—which relates it to the knowledge of the heart at 10:10: Corde enim creditur. 30 31

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We know the truth not only through reason but also through the heart. It is through this latter that we know first principles, and vainly does reasoning, which is uninvolved, strive to challenge them. The skeptics, who have no other object than this, labor uselessly here. We know that we are not dreaming, however powerless we may be to prove it through reason. This powerlessness proves nothing more than the weakness of our reason, and not the uncertainty of all our knowledge, as they claim. For knowledge of first principles, like space, time, motion, number, is as firm as any given to us by our reasoning. And it is on this knowledge of the heart and instinct that reason must rely and ground all its arguments … Principles are perceived, propositions proved, and all with certainty, although in different ways.35

The intellectual intuitions of the heart are not discursive, geometric, critical, though they provide the foundation for discursive, geometric, critical reason. They are, rather, sapiential and integrative: orienting all other knowledge, seeing all things as they are, in their places. Balthasar draws attention to the triple distinction made by Pascal between the body as sense and appetite, reason as the mind that sees effects, and the heart as the mind that sees causes.36 Where reason describes how things are and what they do, the heart goes further, grasping why they are, according to their origin and end. In Balthasar’s memorable formulation, the heart is “sensorium for the whole.”37 The heart knows first principles in the disclosures of natural being and the ultimate ends which are highest supernatural fulfillments of being, the end and the beginning of what is. To say that the heart is sensorium for the whole is thus to say that it is what puts man into contact with reality, both natural and supernatural.38 The same point may be made yet another way, by speaking of the volitional dimension of the heart, of the heart as that aspect of man that establishes his fundamental orientation to the truth.39

 S142/L110.  S480/L577. See Balthasar (1986), pp. 179–180. 37  Ibid., p. 184. 38  Cf. Carlyle (1877), pp. 12–13: “The healthy understanding, we should say, is not the logical, argumentative, but the intuitive; for the end of understanding is not to prove and find reasons, but to know and believe.” Cf., likewise, Wordsworth’s The Tables Turned, in its final two stanzas. Wordsworth (1849), p. 181. 39  This comes out especially in S761/L933, where Pascal calls the order of charity and the heart the order of the will. Even here, however, this order is connected not only to “justice” but to “wisdom.” 35 36

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As volitional, the heart chooses and directs itself, but its manner of choice and direction is distinguished from the ordinary choices that follow, directly or indirectly, from rational deliberation and apprehension. The choices of the heart are certainly distinguished from banal, quotidian decisions, but even heavy choices of great moral or existential moment recede before the more fundamental, more basic, more grounding turn toward or against the truth. All lower order choices, whatever their weight, are responses to reasons.40 These reasons may or may not be articulated as arguments. They may be appeals to considerations that do not involve words or discourse, but they proceed from the ratio, from discursive rationality, whether explicitly and directly or implicitly and indirectly. Turning toward the truth is not a choice made on the basis of one more reason. Indeed, it cannot be: deliberation about reasons presupposes commitment to truth, on which its structural coherence as an activity depends. It is the heart that carries this more fundamental choice of the person toward truth, toward receptivity to the disclosures of things as true and real. In slightly different terms, we may say that the volitional dimension of the heart has as object the question of whether one loves the truth: Truth is so obscured in these times and falsehood so entrenched, that unless one loved the truth, one could not know it.41

And so, “the greatest of Christian virtues … is love of truth.”42 Put simply, truth and charity cannot be separated.43 The will in question, which loves or does not love the truth, is entirely bound up with intellect and the intellectual apprehension of truth, but in the most fundamental sense, from which, again, reason takes its bearings. The capacity to make distinctions well from what is given depends upon the higher volitional dispositions of the heart. If one is not volitionally disposed toward the truth, one does not attend to what is real but, instead, rejects what is real and true and, so, diverts himself, attending to what is merely comfortable or pleasant instead.44  See the discussion in Spaemann (2017), pp. 20–21.  S617/L739. Sellier notes that the final phrase is drawn from Augustine’s Contra Faustum, XXXII, 18: “Non intratur in veritatem nisi per caritatem.” 42  S747/L979. 43  S755/L926, and also S182/L149, p. 228, which identifies human happiness with the trio of knowing, loving, and “being in” God. 44  S458/L539, p. 367. 40 41

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The heart, therefore, carries a sense of freedom that is essential to the human person. Because it is the transcendent aspect of man, higher than his rational and bodily nature and in contact with his supernatural end, the heart enjoys a freedom from natural necessity that is different in kind from the voluntary action found in the usual volitional activity of man that always depends upon knowledge. This is freedom in a more fundamental sense: the choice to assent to truth, to what is given as real, or else to reject this in favor of something else. The freedom of the heart, therefore, is the freedom to direct oneself toward what is ultimate. Nevertheless, the function of the heart as formally oriented toward what is ultimate is ineradicable, so that even a heart that has chosen against the truth will be oriented toward some false substitute and will treat that substitute as ultimate.45 It is easy to see how a choice against the truth might feel like “liberation.” Receptivity to what is real is a sort of submission and limits significantly what one can take oneself to do. But this very submission and limitation is, in fact, the fulfillment of human freedom because it is the condition of meaningful action, that is, action in accord with what is. There are intimations of this position among the ancients, particularly in the Platonic view of the essential relation between eros and truth. But whereas the Platonic attunement to the truth is movement toward what is abstract and ever more away from concrete particulars—Diotima’s ladder—the Pascalian choice of the heart is the fundamental response for or against a person who discloses the truth in himself, as himself.46 It is at once universal and particular. The memorial or recollective aspect of the heart is easiest to overlook, but a close reading reveals it to be embedded together with the heart’s intellectual and volitional character, in the general dependency of the ordinary human faculties on memory. Memory is named by Pascal a “sentiment,” the term reserved for the heart’s knowledge.47 It is, indeed, the one necessary for all the operations of the ratio: deduction, inference, calculation.48 Only in my being able to hold what is absent—what is past—together with what is present can I engage in complex acts of deduction, inference, and calculation. To bring the objects of these acts together, to perceive and relive the premises as I  S544/L661.  Symposium 210a-212a in Plato (2001). On the latter point, see Spaemann (2017), p. 21. 47  S531/L646. 48  S536/L651. 45 46

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presently attend to the conclusion, to move from premise to premise to conclusion, requires that I attend to all, both present and absent, to see that what is absent leads to what is present. This is the work of memory. In an analogous way, memory is the condition of consciousness of space and, even more obviously, time, so that any rational reflection following from the first principles known by the heart—space, time, and number— will also depend on memory. Here, the memorial aspect of the heart shows itself to be tightly bound to the intellectual—and with discursive, critical rationality dependent on both.49 The memorial dimension of the heart is also implicated in man’s turning toward the truth, specifically in the continuity of receptivity to God, in faith.50 It is not random coincidence that Pascal’s record of his religious experience came to be called Le Mémorial.51 Its memorial focus is twofold. First, it appears as Pascal’s recalling and retaining his own mystical experience, on continuing to see the experience, to relive it, even in its absence, as volitionally and intellectually grounding and orienting, in distinction from other sorts of experience. Second, it shows that the God who transcends the world radically—“forgetfulness of the world and of all, apart from God”—is present in the particulars of history, available to memory as sacred tradition: “I will not forget your words [non obliviscar sermones tuos].”52 The deeper sense of memory proper to the heart is disclosed and awakened in the incarnation, which opens the cyclical and repetitive necessities of nature so than now there may also be linear history, awaiting the overcoming of the age. This signals the distinctiveness of the heart, its difference from anything found in the ancient world.53 If one takes history to be cyclical, then memory plays comparatively little role. It may be of practical 49  It is worth noting here that the epistemic problems of circularity faced by Descartes arise precisely because of his attempt to validate memory rationally. See especially the Second and Fourth Replies (AT VII, 140–141 and 246) in Descartes (1984–1985). 50  Pascal is explicit that faith itself is proper to the heart: S680/L424, S41/L7. This point and the one in the previous paragraph are drawn together by Pascal’s remarks in the Préface sur le Traité du vide, where the principles of sacred tradition, which are “higher than nature and reason,” are said to be known by memory. OC I, p. 453. 51  S742/L913. 52  Ibid. This quotation from Psalms 118:16 (in the Vulgate), with which Pascal concludes the Mémorial, is directly linked to the heart: “in toto corde meo exquisivi te” (Psalms 118:10). The importance of tradition for Pascal and its intimate connection with truth is explored by Hartle (2017), pp. 21–23. 53  This point is well developed by Spaemann (2017), pp. 19–21.

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value, but it is without philosophical significance. It is reason, rather than memory, which grasps the general forms that repeat over and again. The specifics formed by those forms are details, and tradition is simply failure to see the universal.54 If history, however, becomes linear and teleological, the particulars are no longer trivial instances. Tradition takes on a new role, pointing beyond the whole, to the condition of the whole, and memory then becomes central as the bearer of the tradition that points beyond reason and nature to their ground. Thus, in the memorial aspect of the heart, we find, once again, Pascal’s emphasis on the ontological significance of the incarnation: the entry of the divine into nature at the lowest levels of particularity and, though that entry, the reunification of nature with itself and to its source. Even if the specific references to memory are few, then, the place of memory in the heart is secured by the role that perpetuity plays in the Pensées.55 The history of the Jews is revealed by the incarnation to be not just one more cyclical, pagan repetition but, rather, a line pointing to Christ and, through him, to the end of the age. Articulated as a general principle, “The eternal being exists always, if he exists once.”56 The appearance of God in human history implies his presence at all points in history. It remains for us to recall this appearance, to recall it together with what is past and what is present, in order to look toward what is yet to come. Theology is overseen by memory.57 And memory, along with the higher intellect and will, are the threefold Pascalian heart. In sum, then, the heart is that aspect of man that is innermost. It is the way Pascal speaks of the person, of the human being as the particular reality which has a nature rather than just being a particular instance of a nature.58 In having rather than being a nature, the heart is in a position of semi-transcendence: both in nature, and receptive to the disclosures of 54  Thus, for Aristotle, poetry is more philosophical than history: the former is able to express what is universal, the latter mere particularity. See Poetics IX (1451b1–10) in Aristotle (2006). 55  Perpétuité is the heading of bundle XXII in Sellier’s edition. See S311/L279-S321/L289. 56  S690/L440. 57  See Hibbs (2017), p. 182. The point, of course, owes more than a little to Confessions X in Augustine (1960). For an extraordinary reading of this text, see Prufer (1993), pp. 27–31. As McCarthy points out, the literary style of the Pensées is confessio. See McCarthy (1994–1995), p. 248. And, we may add, confessio is a recollection and recounting of what is past. 58  This formulation, again, follows Spaemann (2017), pp. 31–33.

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nature, but also beyond nature, and receptive to divine disclosure. In this receptivity, the heart, itself a three-in-one, integrates the tripartite human being: body, mind, and heart. The heart transcends and comprehends both of these, holding them together dynamic tension. This transcendence of the heart is evident in its intellectual apprehension of nature’s most fundamental necessities. Even more deeply, it is evident in the heart’s apprehension of human nature as an object for itself. The heart is not one more aspect of the nature of man. It is the innermost personhood that transcends nature and thus is able to see human nature not merely as subject but as object: nature is what the person has, not what the person is. Pascal treats this point in his discussion of the self: What is the self [le moi]? A man who goes to the window to see the passersby: if I pass by, can I say that he went there to see me? No, for he is not thinking of me in particular. But he who loves someone because of her beauty: does he love her? No, for smallpox, which will kill beauty without killing the person, will make him love her no more. And if someone loves me for my judgment, for my memory, does he love me, myself? No, for I can lose those qualities without losing myself.59 Where, then, is this self, if it is neither in the body nor in the soul? And how to love the body or the soul if not for its qualities, which do not constitute the self, since they are perishable? For would we love the substance of a person’s soul in the abstract, whatever qualities were there? That cannot be and would be unjust. Therefore, we never love a person, but only some qualities.60

The self, the heart, the personhood of the human being, is something more than what can be seen in nature. It is the hidden center around which the elements of that nature are ordered and held together, itself made manifest only indirectly, through the mediation of particular, contingent qualities of rational and bodily nature. The analogy to the hidden

59  Pascal’s mention of memory here is either a moment of inconsistency with what I have shown before, or else, as I think more likely, he refers here to specific memories, which may be lost. In any case, the rest of the fragment works to the broader point, which is that the self—the person—is a particular reality deeper than the body and the rational soul. 60  S567/L688.

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God, made manifest through the contingent particulars of the created whole, is, of course, unmistakable. The heart is established or awakened by the incarnation and the disclosure that the cosmos is not the highest or final horizon. The opening of nature that occurs when a higher horizon than the cosmos is disclosed has, as its effect and implication in man, the corresponding opening of a distance between himself and his nature, between that part of himself—the innermost part—which transcends nature by its receptivity to what is beyond nature. This very space is the freedom of the human person who no longer merely is his nature but has his nature—and therefore can choose to be in harmony or in conflict with nature, including his own.61 The question of whether the heart is in harmony or conflict with nature is the question of whether the heart takes the ground of nature also as its own ground, that is, whether it assents to the truth of itself as created or, rather, refuses this truth—a refusal that may, proximately, appear any number of ways, but, finally, means the affirmation of the self as the center of all things, answerable to nothing beyond itself.62 The question, therefore, is answered, in one sense, by what the heart takes as its object. The proper object of the heart is truth, the first principles and the ultimate end of what is, the ground of being: God. Because of its transcendent freedom, the heart is able to turn itself either toward God or toward the self as ultimate.63 On the basis of one or the other of these ends, the heart attunes us to things, it frames our seeing them and grasping them and living with them. All human action will depart from and tend toward one or the other of these as end. To be oriented toward God, in and through Christ, “the uncreated and incarnate truth,”64 is to be established as a self, as a person.65 The three-­ fold heart is enlivened in receptivity to God, ordering thereby reason and the lower, rational will toward ordering and moderating the body and its passions. Mind and body are thus integrated under the oversight of the 61  Again, Spaemann (2017), pp. 31–33. This, of course, is one philosophical sense of the theological doctrine that man bears the image of Christ, the second person of the Trinity who has two natures. 62  S181/L148, S111/L76, S680/L421. 63  S680/L423. 64  S164/L131, p. 211. 65  In a similar way, Sokolowski, commenting on Spaemann, makes the interesting suggestion that the heart’s receptivity to God is what “establishes us as agents of truth.” See Sokolowski (2006), p. 21.

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heart, on the basis of the generating ground of all three. This is an orientation to the truth not only because it establishes and integrates man as he truly is but also because it allows the natures of things to appear as they truly are, in relation to the ultimate reason they are and the ultimate end for which they are. Once the principle of being as such is disclosed, the order of being is able to appear, each thing in relation to its end and in relation to every other. The ultimate orientation of the heart toward God, thus, orders the human being in whole. And once man is made to be what he truly is, he is able to come into contact with things as they truly are. Such an orientation depends on the gratuity of divine disclosure but requires also an active human response. This very response, however, is opened by the disclosure and through it. It is only within the disclosure and as part of it that a response which would attain to a supernatural end can become the action of a natural and created being.66 So, while indeed we may say that the answer to the question of whether the heart is in harmony or conflict with nature is given by what the heart takes as its object, we must also say that to take truth as object is, at the same moment and in a more fundamental way, to be taken as object by the truth.67 But the transcendent freedom of the heart also makes possible man’s refusal to be so taken, his rejection of receptivity to the truth. This refusal and rejection is not simple lying, the utterance of this or that falsehood, which harms the mind. It is, rather, the equivalent of perjury, action contrary to willful avowal of the truth, which harms the heart in its fundamental orientation to truth as principle.68 The heart is closed off from God and turned instead toward something else as ultimate, which finally will mean the self.69 The self takes its semi-transcendence to separate itself from 66  A much more detailed treatment of Pascal on grace and freedom (and the vexed question of “Jansenism”) can be found in the Afterword. 67  The point is already embedded in Pascal’s fragment on self, which turns the well-known Cartesian example on its head. For Pascal, the answer to the question “But what then am I?” is not given by my own looking, seeing, and then judging that the “hats and coats which could conceal automatons … are men.” See Meditations II (AT VII, 32) in Descartes (1984–1985). Rather, it is disclosed by being seen: not, to be sure, by the “man [who] goes to the window to see the passersby” (S567/L688)—the self remains obscure and indeterminate to rational judgment—but by the truth that makes things to be. A similar interpretation is offered by Marion (1999), pp. 322–326. See also Hibbs (2017), pp. 188–189. 68  The distinction is suggested in S813 (not included by Lafuma). 69  The point is made directly at S680/L423 and S680/L421, along with S544/L661. It is suggested with varying degrees of indirectness at, e.g., S496–497/L599–600, S547/ L667–668, S617/L740, S743/L978, and S769/L948.

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nature, seeing nature not as a gift but as plastic to be stamped out in the pattern of the self’s desires. Reason and the body are likewise no longer taken to have a given, determinate form but are, rather, a flux that may be molded in whatever ways might bring satisfaction from moment to moment. The body becomes the blank grid onto which the games of identity and desire are played, and reason is left scurrying to calculate the most probable means. With nothing beyond the self to establish its relation to the world, the intelligible givenness of things becomes irresolvably mysterious. Experience becomes a representation internal to the mind and projected back onto the world. Though cast in the language of heroism, as “mastery” or “fortitude,”70 life is, more deeply, alienation, starting and ending in the narrow circuit of self-preoccupation, a restless grasping for comfort. The choice of the heart, at its most fundamental, is for or against truth. The self that would make itself the center of all things has chosen against the truth: the self is not the center and cannot be.71 The self may feel itself to be the center, the point and place of judgment, the epistemic window on the world, without which the world cannot be thought, and the thought of whose non-being seems a contradiction. And yet there is no contradiction. The self is finite, in its being and in its knowledge. It is subject to contingency and, finally, to death. Its own being is not through and by itself but depends on the order of things to be. Though ordered toward knowledge and aimed at truth, able to know truth and to express it, man is not the author of truth. The choice of oneself as the center of all requires, therefore, self-deception. It requires that man hide his mortality, his finitude, his contingency from himself. And it requires that he hide God from himself, as the true center and, as such, the standard against which any false self-conception is seen and dissolved.72 In fine, the choice of self as center is a refusal to be seen. A paradox presents itself: that the choice for the self, out of love of the self, in fact distorts the self, defaces it, loses it in disorder. The imperious heart that would be master and possessor of all nature, including its own, in fact is rendered defenseless before the unchecked passions and 70  See, e.g., Discourse 6 (AT VI, 62) in Descartes (1984–1985); Ethics IIIp59s and IVp73s in Spinoza (1994); Prince XXV in Machiavelli (1998). 71  S494/L597, S404/L372, S680/L421. 72  See S182/L149, p. 229: “He wanted to fashion himself center, unto himself, independent of my aid.”

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imagination, which harm the body and enslave the mind. The autonomous self is indeed subjected to its own law. The self that would be independent of all things is in fact most subject to them in the disordered condition it makes for itself. In the ambition to be much more than what it is, it loses even that. Only by being ordered toward the transcendent principle of being, the center and end of all, does it find its place in the order of things and, so, the freedom and flourishing proper to it. Conformity with nature, the end of the ancients, is not lost in this higher end but retained with a difference, as man’s free response to the gratuitous initiative of divine creative action. It is submission to nature, including one’s own nature, as created and given, a response which unifies the whole human being. The difference from ancient conformity with nature is threefold: God’s radical transcendence of the natural whole, the gratuitous givenness of nature as that which need not have been, and the freedom of man in his self-transcending personhood. This personhood is the crux of man’s being, at once within and beyond nature, adverted to by the natural order and implied by reflection on that order but not itself given by that order. Rather, personhood, this third difference, emerges from the first two. Its ground is being “gratuitously chosen by and exhaustively manifest to God.”73 Personhood is established in sight of God. I am because I am seen and spoken and known.74 My personhood is given by my perfect manifestness to God, a manifestness disclosed to me by the incarnation and located in the heart. Conformity with nature, therefore, depends on the heart’s orientation toward God, and the inclination of the heart away from God will also be alienation from nature. The heart may choose for or against God and, in so choosing, it also chooses for or against nature. But how does it choose? What is the natural form of the choice for or against the truth? It is these opposed options that we take up next.

2   Prayer The Pascalian teaching about the heart implies a view of philosophy which rejects the modern turn and makes new a position shared by both the Ancients and the Medievals. Put simply: philosophy is not truth; it is  Prufer (1993), p. 34.  Ibid., p. 30: “man as abyss, who is as being known by God, man who is whatever God knows him to be.” 73 74

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consecration to the truth that lies beyond it. Part of the defining character of modern philosophy is to obscure this point, to cast its own rational activity as productive of the truth. By Pascal’s lights, this is nothing more than another version of the rejection of God—the truth that lies beyond philosophy, beyond all of nature and natural activity—in favor of the self. This is the starting point of modern philosophy, as identified by no lesser figure than Hegel: man is the generative source of truth.75 Even if, as in Descartes, the guarantor of the reliability of human ideas lies beyond man, the truth of God’s existence itself depends on human reason—a circle which, if unbreakable, illustrates the incoherence of the rationalist ambition or, if broken in favor of the primacy of the cogito, simply advances the view that philosophy itself is truth and man the center.76 The empiricist critique of rationalism, as one finds it in Hume paradigmatically, still accedes to the essential rationalist view—that man creates the truth and projects it onto the mind-independent world (if there is a mind-independent world)—but with a much reduced confidence in the range of the truth philosophy is able to generate and sustain.77 Nietzsche’s suggestion that Pascal represents the “protracted suicide of reason” presupposes a rationalist understanding of philosophy as generating or embodying truth in itself.78 What Nietzsche thinks of as Pascal’s attack on reason is, however, an effort to show that philosophy is not itself the truth, that the truth is not made by reason but received by it. It is man’s self-love that takes the truth to be the product of his own activity rather than the cause of his activity. Pascal’s move here is precisely parallel to his effort to understand what is in terms of the centrality of the transcendent God rather than man. God is the truth toward which the human activity of contemplation is to be oriented. Pascal’s hostility is directed toward the project of making man the ordering center of all things, man’s activity its own source of what is true, real, good, and beautiful. Pascal’s “renunciation of reason” is in fact a refusal to accept the modern conception of philosophy as generative of truth, a conception Nietzsche does not reject but radicalizes.  Hegel (1990), pp. 131–133 (88–89).  Principles I.14–21, with I.2 (AT VIIIA, 10–13 and 5), in Descartes (1984–1985). 77  See, e.g., Hume’s discussion of the reduction and restriction of philosophy to “common life,” in Hume (1975), p. 103 (EHU Sect. VII, Part II, 81), pp. 158–159 (EHU Sect. XII, Part II, 126), and p. 162 (EHU Sect. XII, Part III, 130). 78  Nietzsche (2002), p. 44 (III.46). For an excellent account of Nietzsche’s critical admiration of Pascal, whom he groups with Schopenhauer, see Buben (2018), pp. 95–100. 75 76

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The core of Pascal’s rejection of the modern turn in philosophy is his view that truth is the cause of man and man’s activity, and therefore the cause of philosophy, rather than the effect. This view is enshrined in the doctrine of the heart. In this sense, the Pascalian heart recapitulates a key theme of classical metaphysics, as that theme was received and developed in the middle ages: truth is one of the names of God; Christ is the truth.79 Here is an understanding of life entirely opposed to the spirit of modern philosophy, which would transform nature into human convention. No: life is for the sake of being worthy of truth’s disclosure in the world. Prayer is the act of the heart turned toward God, in receptivity to divine disclosure. It is in prayer that the human being participates most fully in God and in the divine action of creation. Prayer is speech. Speech is the act common to God and to man.80 The model of speech for man is speech about God: “We must keep to silence as much as we can and speak with ourselves only of God, whom we know to be the truth.”81 This speech is the characteristic activity of the human person, the primary activity that unifies man in whole, turning the heart in receptivity toward God and so also orienting man toward creation, ordering reason (and the rational will) and directing the appetites and the body. The whole human being is involved in prayer: the inclination of the heart, speech and rational attention, the motion and rest of the body. Man is unified in whole by speaking to God the words God first speaks to him.82 Man’s very being is constituted by participation in the divine that occurs in and through speech. For all of Pascal’s supposed denigration of reason, the highest activity of man on his view, the one that links him most directly to his end and good, lies in speech, speech patterned on Christ, understood as the incarnate Logos.83 Such denigration as there may be is not of reason but of the conceit that man is the source of his own rational activity, generating rather than participating in reason. Here, once more, we find Pascal’s fundamental break with the essence of the modern turn in philosophy: truth is not the effect of reason but the cause. As the heading of bundle XIV has 79  On the former: S771/L974, S680/L418, p.  468, S738/L502, S802/L968, S230/ L199 p. 249. On the latter: S164/L131, p. 211, S172/L140. 80  Cf. Prufer (1993), p. 29: “God is spoken to with words first spoken by God to us (prayer as quotation and appropriation of scripture) and in the Word spoken in common with us (Christ, human and divine, Mediator).” 81  S132/L99. 82  Again, Prufer (1993), p. 29. 83  Or, perhaps, the second highest: see below, on martyrdom.

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it, “Submission and use of reason, in which true Christianity consists.”84 This submission of the heart which makes the use of reason possible is prayer. Prayer is, thus, rational obedience, receptivity to what is higher: “It is therefore just that it [reason] submits when it judges that it ought to submit.”85 Far from any compromise, this is the fulfillment of reason’s nature, linking it to its source, making possible its proper activity: “There is nothing so consistent with reason as this disavowal of reason.”86 The turning of the heart toward God in prayer, a turning which is a once intellectual, volitional, and memorial, is more fundamental than reason. As Sokolowski puts it, following John Paul II, “reason stands in need of the revelation that took place in the Death and Resurrection of Christ.”87 Faith—the turning of the heart toward God—opens reason by offering access to its ground, a ground which cannot be just one more object of reason. The heart and reason, so understood, are in harmony because faith is aimed precisely at the divine understood as truth itself. They are not competing rivals for this truth. The heart attains to an apprehension of what reason most essentially aims at and is. When it does so attain, the range of reason is extended. Its activity becomes most fully real. It becomes most truly what it is.88 Returning to Pascal’s formulation, we must not, therefore, understand the two halves of “submission and use of reason” as uncoupled, and still less as opposed, but, rather, as linked in hierarchical relation: “submission and thus use of reason.”89  Starting at S199/L168, p. 237.  S205/L174. 86  S213/L182. 87  Sokolowski (2006), p. 16. 88  Ibid., pp. 18–19. 89  Again, I follow Brague (2018), p. 120. Any similarity to Descartes here is purely superficial. In Descartes, god—the infinite substance—underwrites the reliability of reason in terms of his power as the uttermost thing in the cosmos. God is not truth itself but the immanent power that secures the right of reason to determine the truth: truth is not disclosed to reason by God and through nature but determined by mental projection according to method. Most fundamentally, the reliability of reason itself is not, on Descartes’ account, disclosed by God. God as guarantor of the mind’s ideas is itself guaranteed by the mind’s own presentation of its own ideas to itself, out of its own resources, in isolation. On this point, see Prufer (2018), especially p. 12. Mind arrogates to itself both God and the world: “Mind offers itself the possibility of making itself in the world with others out of the solitude of its worldless freedom.” Prufer (1993), pp. 30–31. Put otherwise, the Cartesian self is the ground of the system in which it subsequently appears as a subordinate element, a metaphysical circularity much deeper than the epistemological problem of the “Cartesian circle.” 84 85

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Prayer, understood as “submission and [thus] use of reason” captures at once the human condition of greatness and wretchedness.90 As to wretchedness, the very act of prayer acknowledges in itself divine glory and human insufficiency and dependence on God. As to greatness, it offers the highest expression of human dignity through participation, as rational and free, in divine activity: Why has God established prayer?

1. To impart [communiquer] to his creatures the dignity of causality.91 But to preserve his preeminence, he bestows prayer upon whom he pleases. 2. To teach us from whom we derive virtue.92 3. To render us meritorious, by our efforts, of other virtues.93 The receptivity of the heart to God illuminates the whole of man and makes possible man’s activity, as a free cause, in nature. Man turns and is turned94 toward the principle of being, attains to an understanding of himself in terms of his own proper perfection in relation to that principle, and is able to act freely, though his nature, toward that perfection. Man’s receptivity to God’s disclosure thus becomes man’s self-disclosure: in being manifest to God, he becomes manifest to himself and properly oriented to nature more generally, able to act freely within the whole of  The point is suggested by Pascal at S247/L214, linking it specifically to prayer.  This phrase occurs at least twice in Thomas (1920/2017): ST I, q. 22, a. 3 and I, q. 23, a. 8, ad. 2. The first of these concerns Thomas’ affirmative response to the question “Whether God has immediate providence over everything?”: “there are certain intermediaries of God’s providence; for He governs things inferior by superior, not on account of any defect in His power, but by reason of the abundance of His goodness; so that the dignity of causality is imparted even to creatures.” The second instance of the phrase concerns the question of the sense in which prayer furthers divine action: “Nor is this on account of any defect in the power of God, but because He employs intermediary causes, in order that the beauty of order may be preserved in the universe; and also that He may communicate to creatures the dignity of causality.” 92  This too has an antecedent in Thomas (1920/2017), ST II-II, q. 83, a. 2, ad. 3, on whether it is fitting to pray: “but that He wishes to bestow certain things on us at our asking is for the sake of our good, namely, that we may acquire confidence in having recourse to God, and that we may recognize in Him the Author of our goods.” 93  S757/L930. This third reason seems also to have a Thomistic pedigree: see throughout ST II-II, q. 83 in Thomas (1920/2017). 94  The concurrence of these in grace is treated in the Afterword. 90 91

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which God is the principle. Man is revealed to himself by participation in God’s revelation of himself to man.95 We may deepen this account through consideration of the Écrit sur la conversion du pécheur, a work completed five years before the inception of the Pensées and one year before the Mémorial, in which Pascal outlines a phenomenology of conversion, culminating in an account of prayer set in relation to the Infini rien distinction.96 The conversion of man toward God centers on knowledge [connaissance], not knowledge of this or that fact, but an apprehension [une vue] of the whole “under a new light.”97 This new light, entering the heart, is accompanied initially by a fear and a disquiet as the rational soul, taking its bearings from the heart, sees that the things most evident to it and to which it was most attached are, in fact, partial and perishing, subject to strife and finally to death. The soul is torn between these things and what it begins to see: a true and self-subsistent good [un bien véritable et subsistant par lui-même].98 Part of this vision is to see all things as being in themselves nothingness [néant] and returning to nothingness: the world (“sky … earth”), one’s own nature (“mind … body”), political life (“parents … friends … enemies … honor … esteem … authority”), material things of all sorts, and even being itself.99 The distinctions here are repeated slightly further on as “gold … knowledge … reputation,” the classical division of goods into material, honors, and understanding.100 These are all seen to be contingent, qualified, and so not ultimately adequate—and, in that distinction, it is disclosed that there is some proportion between a true good and the soul itself. On the basis of this distinction, a definition of the true good [le véritable bien] presents itself: that it last as long as the soul, that it can be lost only by consent of the soul, and that there may be nothing more worthy of love.101

95  The pattern of manifestness to God-manifestness to self (and others) is set out deftly by Prufer (1993), pp. 29 and 33, whom I (try to) follow here. 96  OC II, pp. 99–102. An English version of this text is available in Pascal (1989), but it contains a number of mistranslations at key points. 97  OC II, p. 99. 98  Ibid., p. 100. 99  Ibid. 100  Ibid. 101  Ibid., p. 101. Pascal says that the definition is made of two parts, and he treats the first two elements as one, but it seems more conceptually appropriate to treat these as three criteria.

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The soul sees that this good is not within or without or in front—not present inwardly, outwardly, or in temporal progress—but beyond: eminently and transcendently.102 At this moment, the soul has made what Pascal will later name the Infini rien distinction. It has seen God as the transcendent principle of being and beings as created out of nothing. And it can now grasp that no created being is adequate to the good, but only God, that indeed it is a contradiction to suppose created beings superior to the principle of their creation—that, indeed, to love a created being is to affirm a fortiori the absolute value of the principle of its being created.103 The fundamental activity of the soul thus converted is meditation upon the Infini rien distinction: profound adorations of God in which the soul annihilates itself [s’anéantit en sa présence], takes itself to be incapable of forming a sufficiently sublime conception of the sovereign good, and makes new efforts to abase itself unto the ultimate abysses of nothingness [jusqu’aux derniers abîmes du néant].104 This activity, the adoration of God and the annihilation of the self, is the aspiration to God as such—not for the sake of the self or even for the sake of God and the self: For since it is to God that it [the soul] aspires, it aspires all the more to attain to him only by means that proceed from God himself, for it wishes that he alone be the way, the object, and the ultimate end.105

In an echo of John 14:6, then, God is end and consummation, intentional object, and means to both. The culmination of meditation on the Infini rien distinction, therefore, is prayer. The means to God himself are means provided by God himself. God constitutes us by speech, and we know ourselves by returning that speech to him. Thus, we know ourselves by knowing him.106 We speak ourselves by speaking to him and of him, as he speaks us.107 This knowledge and speech is expressed in a four-fold division of prayer: adoration (“to adore God as one created”), thanksgiving (“to give him thanks as one beholden”), penance (“to make recompense to him as one guilty”), and petition (“to entreat him as one destitute”).108 In prayer, man learns and recalls that he is created, that the right attitude for one  Ibid.  Ibid. 104  Ibid. 105  Ibid., p. 102. 106  S36/L417. 107  S132/L99. 108  OC II, p. 102. Cf. Aquinas: ST II-II, q. 83, a. 17 in Thomas (1920/2017). 102 103

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given the gift of being is gratitude, that he is guilty of neglecting or abandoning this right attitude, and that he depends ultimately on God for whatever goods, proximate or otherwise, he might receive. Returning, then, to the three reasons of prayer’s divine institution,109 we may say, with greater specificity: 1. By participation in divine action through petition, creatures are imparted the dignity of causality. 2. Through adoration and thanksgiving, creatures acquire and express knowledge of the principle of being and goodness. 3. Through contrition and lamentation, creatures become worthy of further goodness. Taking these together, we may say that prayer is the choice of man for his own source and is, thus, the activity fully proper to his being. In prayer, man is united, in the personhood of the heart, to God, the transcendent principle of being. This unity orders man’s nature, mind and body, and orders man in nature, orienting his own created nature to the rest of the created cosmos properly. In prayer, therefore, the human person is fully being, without any remainder struggling to conceal itself. Every other activity, even consistent with its nature, may be an expression of concealment and distortion of being, of turning away from God—in Pascalian terms: divertissement.

3   Divertissement The French word divertissement, used frequently by Pascal, is generally rendered in English as “diversion” and names a kind of self-deceptive behavior, one which “turns away.” Almost any quotidian pursuit can function as divertissement: career, sport, conversation, games, war, politics, and, indeed, even philosophical inquiry.110 As with all activities, every instance of divertissement exhibits a teleological structure which is ­essential to the coherence of the act. Diversionary behaviors, however, are not undertaken for the sake of the ends that form them and render them intelligible. Were the end of the act available without the means to it, the agent  S757/L930.  See, for example, S168/L136-S171/L139 (esp. pp. 218–222), along with S27/L408 and S176/L143 on philosophy. 109 110

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would refuse; the fulfillment of the act alone would be unacceptable to him.111 But even having passed through the means, the end of the diversionary act remains hollow, issuing not in the natural satisfaction of stable completion but, almost at once, in a restless discontent that drives the agent either toward repetition of the same act or rotation toward some other act in which the pattern of striving and disappointment is repeated. The pattern of divertissement reveals that man is, in all his actions, teleologically oriented toward what is truly good, that is, the fulfillment of his being. At the same time, it shows that these actions and their ends are insufficient to that final orientation and that man himself senses this insufficiency and, thereby, his own incapacity to secure his end, an insight he then seeks to conceal by losing himself in preoccupation with means.112 Put otherwise, the subjective purpose of the agent in taking up the diversionary behavior is not the objective end of the act but the distraction offered by the means. In the first place, then, diversion is a reaction to the unsatisfying character of the proximate goods found in the ends of ordinary human actions. More deeply, however, it is a concealment of the insufficiency of the self, which is the reason for the dissatisfaction: Nothing is so intolerable to man as to be at complete rest, without passions, without concerns, without diversion, without effort. He then feels his nothingness, isolation, insufficiency, dependence, powerlessness, emptiness.113

And: Unable to cure death, wretchedness, ignorance, men have decided, in order to make themselves happy, not to think about such things.114

The function of diversion, thus, is to conceal precisely what reflection on the activity reveals: the finitude, partiality, contingency, and mortality of the self. So: The only thing that consoles us of our miseries [misères] is diversion [divertissement], and yet that is the greatest of our miseries. For it is principally this that prevents us from reflecting on ourselves, leading us imperceptibly to  S168/L136, p. 219.  S16/L397, S19/L400, S20/L401. 113  S515/L622. 114  S166/L133. 111 112

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ruin. Without it, we would be bored [dans l’ennui], and this boredom [cet ennui] would drive us to seek a more solid way out. But diversion amuses us and bears us imperceptibly to death.115

The boredom that arises in the space between diversionary activities is precisely the symptom of man’s insufficiency and allows us to see that the movement of divertissement is not one of knowledge only—and still less of psychology—but of being. Boredom (ennui) presents itself as a feeling of dissatisfaction, at once anxious and enervated, with oneself and the succession of things in one’s ambit. The feeling underlies the activities of diversion: boredom drives to diversion, diversion is diversion from boredom. As an affect, however, it points to a more fundamental condition of being: man’s own insufficiency and of the insufficiency of all natural things in answering to his condition. Boredom arises because we are capable of self-reflective thought. Deprived of the opportunity for diversion, we are forced to introspection, where we encounter our own “nothingness [néant]” and the “vanity of the world.”116 Rationally self-conscious self-reflection, undertaken in “boredom [and] anxiety,” discloses our “condition” of “inconstancy.”117 This drives us outward to seek a remedy in diversion, but we find that no other created thing suffices either. Rather than accept the point, we begin to rotate through the outward options, from finite to finite.118 This pattern of behavior, ­written even into the temporal structure of our thought, discloses, at once, our placement in and estrangement from nature.119 Our inability to  S33/L414.  S33/L414, S515/S622, and S70/L36. Orwell observes that boredom is much more difficult to bear if one lacks the interior storehouse of diversions provided by learning: “I have come to think that boredom is the worst of all a tramp’s evils, worse than hunger and discomfort, worse even than the constant feeling of being socially disgraced. It is a silly piece of cruelty to confine an ignorant man all day with nothing to do; it is like chaining a dog in a barrel. Only an educated man, who has consolations within himself, can endure confinement. Tramps, unlettered types as nearly all of them are, face their poverty with blank, resourceless minds. Fixed for ten hours on a comfortless bench, they know no way of occupying themselves, and if they think at all it is to whimper about hard luck and pine for work. They have not the stuff in them to endure the horrors of idleness. And so, since so much of their lives is spent in doing nothing, they suffer agonies from boredom.” Orwell (1984), p. 11. Pascal makes the same point in connection to prison specifically at S168/L136, p. 217. 117  S58/L24. 118  S114/L79. 119  S80/L47. 115 116

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“remain at rest in a room” is the index of “the natural unhappiness of our weak and mortal condition,” a condition that comes into view when “we think about it more closely,” ultimately in relation to the “sight of death,” which “turns [us] from thinking” about ourselves.120 Boredom thus reveals an awareness of one’s own being, but also that one’s own being does not suffice, since one is driven outward, and also that no other created thing suffices, since these are captivating when novel but wear thin with familiarity and are passed over for a new novelty. In moments of optimism or pride, man may construe the movement away from boredom as a progressive project, the overcoming of mortal limits, the perfection of a nature, the constitution of a person. The pretention is undercut by the movement’s pattern of repetitive instability. Dissatisfied with himself, unable “to remain at rest in a room,” man is driven outward toward actions and objects, one and then another, each promising some respite from the languid restlessness of being “left to consider and reflect upon what he is.”121 However captivating these new pursuits may be, their novelty wanes, man is thrown back upon himself in boredom, and the movement begins once more.122 Boredom thus discloses grandeur et misère, both the greatness of human reason and the wretchedness of human finitude and mortality, in all their dialectical tension. It is not merely a psychological state but an index of being, the symptom of a condition. To be bored is to be aware of oneself, aware of the actions and objects in one’s ambit, and aware of the insufficiency of these in relation to each other. While it appears most obviously around finite particulars, it arises quite readily with objects that are general or universal, including even natural excellences like honor and beauty.123 The affects of boredom, the feelings of languor and listlessness, are the symptoms of the ontological condition of the insufficiency of man and of things, both high and low. This insufficiency is not due to some specific defect, such as might be remedied through technological improvement. Indeed, it appears all the more powerfully when there are no practical difficulties that can serve as a preoccupation, diverting the self from  S168/L136, pp. 215–217.  S168/L136, with the quotations from pp. 215–216. Pascal’s well known observations here are nicely illustrated by the empirical findings in Wilson et al. (2014). 122  On novelty, see S114/L79. On the movement to and from the self brought about by boredom, see S168/L136, especially p. 218. 123  S636/L771 and S168/L136, at p.  216. Pascal’s observation about the boredom brought about by continual aesthetic excellence is echoed by Scruton (2011), p. 11. 120 121

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thought and distracting it from itself.124 The inadequacy disclosed by boredom is, rather, in man and man’s relation to nature. The outward affects of boredom are symptoms of the same underlying condition of being disclosed by death: the per se nothingness of man and of all created things. Divertissement is the concealment of boredom and so must be understood in terms of this condition, as man turning away from seeing himself as he is, in light of his underlying nothingness: Strip off their diversion, and you will see them wither of boredom. They then sense their nothingness without understanding it, for it is indeed miserable to be sunk into insufferable sadness as soon as you are reduced to self-­ reflection without any means of diversion.125

The per se nothingness of the self is, of course, the second term of the Infini rien distinction, the one made and made evident by the first. Its concealment, therefore, will require, a fortiori, an effort to conceal God, the first term of the distinction which discloses the second. On one side, then, God is hidden to man in proportion to the degree that man hides himself to himself.126 On the other, man’s self-concealment in diversion serves to make the self the central principle around which all else is organized and in relation to which the things of the world are admitted to or excluded from reality.127 Boredom shows that the self points beyond itself; the concealment of boredom in divertissement points back to the self. Allowing the self to be disclosed as what it is points beyond the self, to what is higher and better, to what lies beyond it, to what makes it to be. Divertissement conceals what the self truly is by making the self the center and organizing principle of what is: everything from the self, everything for the self. It is nothing other than the effort of man to situate the self as ground, to nurse the narrow, consoling fiction of the self as the ultimate end in reference to which actions and objects derive their meaning and worth.  See, e.g., S171/L139, S168/L136, p. 218.  S70/L36. 126  This point is discussed in some detail by Nemoianu (2015), esp. p. 343. 127  The Cartesian resonances are, once more, unmistakable: “the mind uses its own freedom and supposes the non-existence of all the things about whose existence it can have even the slightest doubt.” Meditations Synopsis (AT VII, 12) in Descartes (1984–1985). In effect, Pascal charges Descartes’ method with being the philosophical distillation of divertissement. 124 125

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Diversion stands, therefore, as prayer’s inversion. Prayer is the turning of the heart to God, for the sake of God, with personhood in full and free assent to its total disclosure to God, and, so, fully and freely receptive to created nature, including and especially its own. Divertissement is the turning of the heart away from God, for the sake of the self, with personhood, inflated and elevated, as the ordering principle of all things, from which things it presumes to transcend, in essential distinction. And yet the two are not equal and opposite ultimate alternatives. Both prayer and diversion exhibit the freedom of man with respect to his ultimate orientation, diversion in the very misuse of that freedom, the substitution of purposes for ends.128 But precisely because of the dependency of man’s freedom on God, the self and God are not and cannot be equal competing options, and the choice against God and for the self must be undertaken obliquely, through self-deceptive concealment of man’s insufficiency, revealed by boredom.129 Thus, in the diversionary act, the function of the end’s subordination to preoccupation with the means is hiding man’s condition. By obscuring from himself, however briefly and imperfectly, his insufficiency, at once wretched and great, and the nothingness to which this insufficiency points, he keeps alive the vain hope that he may be the center of things, the ground of what is real and good. As prayer’s negative counterpart, therefore, divertissement is not a direct rejection of God, a refusal of God as God. It proceeds, rather, indirectly, as a choice for the ultimacy of the self: I say that the heart loves the universal being naturally and itself naturally, in accord with its devotion. And it hardens itself against the one or the other, by choice. You have rejected the one and preserved the other. Is it though reason that you love yourself?130

The self that loves itself above all things hides itself. It hides its boredom and the implications of its boredom. And it conceals God beneath its own self-concealment. Such a self, Pascal tells us, is hateful.  For a short, sharp critique of this substitution, see Slade (1997).  Wood (2013) offers a detailed discussion of how divertissement operates and responds well to various contemporary objections to the possibility of self-deception. My own concern here is not with the mechanisms by which self-deception proceeds but with what the phenomenon, the reality of which I take to be obvious, discloses about the metaphysical condition of man. 130  S680/L423. 128 129

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4   The Hateful Self That which, in itself, is nothing and is for nothing is not, in itself, worthy of love. On the contrary, from the side of man’s immanence alone, “the self is hateful,” and “the true and only virtue is to hate oneself.”131 To say that the self is hateful is less a moral judgment than a statement about the intrinsic condition of the self taken in itself, by itself, for itself, and from which such judgments may follow: In a word, the self has two qualities: it is unjust in itself, in that it makes itself the center of all things; it is bothersome to others, in that it would subjugate them, for each self is the enemy and would like to be the tyrant of all the others. You remove the bother but not the injustice. And thus you do not make it loveable to those who hate the injustice. You make it lovable only to the unjust, who no longer find it their enemy. And thus you remain unjust and can please only the unjust.132

The hatefulness of the self is not a function of a belief self-consciously held or a choice self-consciously made. It may or may not be the explicit intention of the self to make itself the center of all things. Few selves, perhaps, harbor any ambition so grand, and, as we have seen, the choice against God and for the self is typically effected indirectly, through the self-­ concealment of diversion. Neither does the self’s hatefulness depend on the consequences arising from amour propre. Such consequences, indeed, may be significant and pervasive. In our desire “to be the object of men’s love and esteem,” we avoid telling unpleasant truths, and we desire not to hear them ourselves.133 As this is generally so for all men, the very fabric of public life comes to be woven out of mutual deception.134 Poisonous though this tendency may be, it will obtain sometimes more and sometimes less, and it may even be managed and turned toward a kind of ­political utility, a public image of virtue—“a tableau of charity”—derived from hidden vice.135 Whatever the explicit intentions of men or the

 S494/L597 and S471/L564.  S494/L597. Pascal addresses himself to his friend Damien Miton, defender of the putative virtue of honnêteté, which Pascal here attacks as mere civility. 133  S743/L978. 134  Wood (2013) emphasizes the pervasive social consequences of self-deceptive self-love. 135  S150/L118, with S243–244/L210–211. Pascal points out that this political prudence reveals the teleological orientation of the human being, despite himself, toward the good, an orientation built into the very structure of human action. See S138/L106, under the heading “Grandeur.” 131 132

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collective results of their behavior, the hatefulness of the self remains, intrinsic to the condition of the self apart from God. The proper posture of a being brought gratuitously out of nothingness is gratitude, to see all things from or through the first distinction, attuned at once to God as the transcendent principle of being and to one’s own essential nothingness apart from God.136 Absent this, man is, always and necessarily, in a condition of ontological ingratitude, one that obscures the gratuitous choosing that makes him to be, out of the nothingness to which he otherwise belongs, while simultaneously retaining and exploiting participation in that gratuity.137 This ingratitude is nothing else than self-love [amour propre]: The nature of self-love and of this human self is to love only self and to consider only self. But what will it do? It cannot prevent this object it loves from being full of faults and wretchedness [misère]. It wants to be great, and it sees itself small; it wants to be happy, and it sees itself wretched; it wants to be perfect, and it sees itself full of imperfections; it wants to be the object of men’s love and esteem, and it sees that its faults merit only their aversion and their scorn. This embarrassment in which it finds itself produces in it the most unjust and criminal passion imaginable: for it conceives a mortal hatred against the very truth which reproves it and convicts it of its faults. It would like to annihilate the truth, but unable to destroy it in its essence, it destroys it as far as possible in its own knowledge and in that of others.138

And again: Whoever does not hate in himself his self-love [amour propre] and this instinct that leads him to make himself God is indeed blinded. Who does not see that there is nothing so contrary to justice and truth?139

The character of man’s being, as gratuitously chosen out of nothingness, renders ludicrous any pretentions to a life ordered by self-love. That which, in itself, is nothing and for nothing is not, in itself, worthy of love, whether the expression of that love is understood hedonistically or  Among very many places, see S383/L351-S386/L354, S223/L190-S225/L192, S153–154/L121, S690/L449. On gratitude for creation, see Sokolowski (1982), p. 19 and Sokolowski (2006), pp. 42–43. 137  Prufer locates this dialectic at the heart of the modern turn in philosophy. See Prufer (2018), especially pp. 5–12. On the gratuitous chosenness that defines the being of creatures, see Prufer (1993), pp. 32–34. 138  S743/L978. 139  S510/L617. 136

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eudaimonistically, let alone in the terms of projects of self-creative liberation. The hateful self is hateful because, in wishing to make itself the center of all things, it is contrary to the truth. Since Christ is the truth, the hateful self is in the condition of being contrary to Christ. Since Christ is indeed the center of all things and the ground of personhood, the hateful self is in opposition to itself, fragmented, separated from its principle and its end, tending only back toward its own nothingness. It conceals this from itself, burying its own nothingness, its own fragmentation, beneath the restless motion of divertissement, a motion that always betrays its true character. The ontological ingratitude of self-love, therefore, is hatred of created being. The self that loves itself in such a way as to treat itself as the center of all things ranges itself in opposition to being and is thrown back on the nothingness from which it is derived. It is in this sense that the self is hateful, filled with hatred—“mortal hatred against the truth” which it “would like to annihilate.”140—and, so, deserving of hate. The hateful self refuses to look from the point of view of the Infini rien distinction. It is the self that chooses, instead, to turn the heart from God and to love itself as what is ultimately real. Such a project fails and fails necessarily. Only the gratitude that follows from grasping the Infini rien distinction can serve as the foundation of the proper estimation of the self and of the love that is due to it in imitation of the divine love which brought it to be and sustains it out of pure gratuity. Any other basis for valuation will necessarily require diversion from its true state. The ultimate alternatives are only God or nothingness. The distinction in which God is disclosed to the heart is also the statement of options for the whole of man. These options return us to prayer, the choice of the heart for God, but with a difference. Prayer now appears not only as the gratitude of the creature in returning to God the word God provides to him: as adoration, as thanksgiving, as contrition, as petition. It is also gratitude expressed as the overcoming of the hateful self: True conversion consists in self-annihilation [s’anéantir] before that universal being whom we have angered so many times and who may legitimately abandon us [reading nous for vous] at any moment, in recognizing that we can do nothing without him and have merited nothing from him but his disfavor. It consists in understanding that there is an invincible opposition 140

 S743/L978.

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between God and ourselves and that, without a mediator, there can be no communication with him.141

Communion with God as “self-annihilation,” already broached by Pascal in Sur la conversion du pécheur, is the assent of man to natural death, in imitation of Christ, the mediator,142 for the sake of God: [The soul] comes in sight of the greatness of its Creator … It annihilates itself in his presence [Elle s’anéantit en sa présence] … it makes new efforts to abase itself unto the ultimate abysses of nothingness [jusqu’aux derniers abîmes du néant] … it adores him in silence.143

The trajectory of prayer bends toward martyrdom.

5  Martyrdom Prayer is the turning of the heart toward God in gratitude for the gift of being, and it is the start of union with God, constituting man’s personhood, ordering his nature, and integrating him into the created whole. Diversion inverts prayer, turning the heart away from God and toward the self as center and ground of what is. Whereas prayer opens the heart in receptivity to the transcendent principle of being, diversion closes the heart, concealing from itself its own boredom, the symptom of its insufficiency, its per se nothingness. The condition of man turned from God and toward the self has at its center the fear of mortality and the desire to avoid or overcome death. Since the finitude of one’s nature cannot be solved, it is hidden, technologically or psychologically, and everything is ordered toward maintaining its absence. This is the posture of the hateful self: a self-deceiving refusal to say what and how one is, functioning to preserve the grotesque conceit that man may make of himself his own ground and organizing center. The lie of divertissement is essentially linked to rejection of God, since to think of God is also, always, to think of one’s own finitude, contingency, and mortality. The hateful self is thus imperiled from two sides: death, which threatens it from the side of being, and God, who threatens it as the horizon beyond the self that grounds its  S410/L378.  Pascal is absolutely emphatic that prayer is imitation of Christ, the Word who is God. See the Mystère de Jésus at S749/L919, p. 558 and continued at S751/L919. 143  OC II, pp. 101–102. 141 142

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being. Both show the self’s pretentions to be a lie. The preservation of the self as “center of all things” requires the concealment of what is ultimate: death and God.144 The overcoming of the hateful self is the reopening of man to what is ultimate: on one side, the turning of the heart in receptivity to the God who is beyond nature, and, on the other, receptivity to nature, and especially one’s own rational and bodily nature, as created, as given by God. The space between these two human ends, supernatural and natural, is at once opened and overcome by the incarnation. Christ discloses, in his person, the principle of being that transcends natural necessity and before which even natural necessities are seen to be contingent and created. At the same time, by entering into the lowest level of nature, Christ offers the overcoming of nature’s oppositions and the reunification of nature, itself internally reunified, with the principle of being. Christ’s human life shows that the space opened in man by the incarnation, the infinite abyss between nature and the supernatural end which is the destiny of the human person, is not a rejection of nature. Indeed, precisely because the abyss between being and its principle is infinite, man’s orientation toward God, fundamentally in the heart, still requires the mediation of nature, a point very obviously underscored by the uniting of divine and human natures in the incarnation. Pascal’s “Submission and use of reason, in which true Christianity consists” means submission to God and nature.145 Submission to the natural order is acceptance of its necessities, even as one sees that these too are created and contingent, subject to a higher and deeper necessity which is absolute. For mortal man, the natural necessity that frames all others is death, and the acceptance of death for the sake of God is the highest expression of assent to nature as created and given. This is martyrdom.146

 S494/L597.  The heading immediately before S199/L168, L167 in Lafuma. 146  Buben (2011) presents a rare consideration of Pascal on death, setting him in fruitful comparison with Kierkegaard. The concluding suggestion, however, that Pascal is unwilling to face up to “bloody martyrdom” and is, rather, holding back from the full implications of Christian sacrifice (p. 76) is wide of the mark. By my lights, the real disagreement between Pascal and Kierkegaard, to which their dispute about the role of reason can be traced, is over the relation of martyrdom to nature. For Pascal, martyrdom is not rejection but affirmation of nature, in imitation of Christ. This point is also germane to Nietzsche’s charge, that Pascal, like Schopenhauer, is life-denying. See Buben (2018), pp. 96–98. 144 145

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Christ’s mediation, in his person, of the divine and the natural indeed opens, as consequence, the possibility of theosis: that the turning of the heart toward God might allow passage through death and beyond it, into eternal participation in divinity.147 But this possibility presupposes the acceptance of death as a created natural necessity. Like Christ, man must pass through death: Jesus Christ did nothing other than to teach men that they loved themselves, that they were slaves, blind, sick, unhappy, and sinners, that he had to deliver, enlighten, beatify, and heal them, and that this would be done through their hatred of themselves and by following him though misery and death on the cross.148

And again: The true religion teaches our duties, our weaknesses, pride and concupiscence, and the remedies, humility [and] mortification.149

The transcendent personhood of man does not seek to separate itself from the nature it has but to accept that nature and be unified with it fully, on the basis of union with the transcendent divinity who does not separate himself from the created world but enters into it, even at its very lowest levels. The turning of the heart toward God in prayer is imitation of the incarnation’s entry into nature, in speech and in deed. It inclines also, therefore, toward the joyful embrace of created nature and its necessities, even unto death.150 Dozens of passages in the Pensées concern the horror of man’s mortality,151 but we must not mistake anything here as counseling fear of death.152 On the contrary, precisely because Pascal is a Christian, death has a meaning; it may be approached in joy and even, in a qualified sense, be called good:

 S164/L131, pp. 213–214 and S240/L208.  S302/L271. See also S347/L316. 149  S249/L216. 150  S390–391/L358–359. 151  See, among many others, S681/L427 pp. 477–478, S682/L428 p. 482, S684/L432, S686/L434, S197/L165. 152  See, e.g., Buben (2018), pp. 98–99. 147 148

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I await death in peace, in the hope of being eternally united to him, and yet I live with joy, whether in the blessings it pleases him to bestow upon me or in the afflictions he sends me for my good and has taught me by his example to endure.153

The textual emphasis on death’s horror is intended to force the reader to confront his own propensity toward diversion in the face of death, a propensity enshrined in modern philosophy as a chief consequence of the establishing the self as first principle: Montaigne’s faults are considerable … we cannot excuse his wholly pagan view of death. Because all piety must be foresworn if one does not, at minimum, want a Christian death. But throughout his book he envisions only a death of craven ease.154

As so often, Montaigne is the specific target, but the criticism could as readily be deployed against the Hobbesian foundation of politics in fear of violent death or the Cartesian sanctification of medicine.155 Pascal’s own position runs in quite the opposite direction, maintaining that even the instinctive impulse away from danger is finally to be resisted.156 His view has the appearance of paradox: the joyful embrace of nature finds its highest expression in the acceptance of death and, so, the loss of nature. Indeed, Pascal pushes this disdain for fear of death so far that he seems sometimes to deny the value of the created world: If God exists, we must love only him and not transitory creatures … And it is the conclusion of the wise that “God exists, let us therefore not delight in creatures.” Thus everything that spurs us to become attached to creatures is bad, since it prevents us from serving God, if we know him, or from seeking him, if we do not … therefore, we should hate ourselves and everything that excites us to any attachment other than to God alone.157

 S646/L793, p. 441.  S559/L680. 155  See Leviathan XIII in Hobbes (1996), esp. pp. 89–90 and Discourse 6 (AT VI, 62) in Descartes (1984–1985), as well as both the opening and closing of that text (AT VI, 1 and 78). 156  S594/L716. 157  S511/L618. 153 154

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And the value of the self specifically: “We must love only God and hate only ourselves.”158 Here too, however, we must take care not to be misled. Because Pascal speaks always of God at the most fundamental level, at the level of the distinction between being and nothingness, the distinction prior to all other distinctions, his emphasis is on disclosing the nothingness of things without God, on bringing to the fore the non-being which is the destiny of all things outside of God, or, put from the other side, the absolute, qualitative priority of God to all else. Again and always, this distinction is the whole aim of the Pensées, and its disclosure is the sense in which the text is an apology. The theme is inscribed into his very act of writing: In writing my thought, it sometimes escapes me, but this prompts me to remember my weakness, which I am constantly forgetting. This is as instructive to me as my forgotten thought, for I care only to know my nothingness.159

To see in this a paradoxical loss of nature is to suppose that nature has some being or worth opposite to or independent of God.160 But Pascal’s point is not that “half a loaf is no better than no bread.”161 Seen from the first distinction, there is no contest between loaves and demi-loaves, because there is no being or worth independent of the absolute ground of being and worth. It is incoherent to speak as though there is. Valuation, proximate or otherwise, waits upon what is absolute. The divine is prior to high and low, whole and part, all and some. It is distinct from these; it transcends these; it is more fundamental than these. God is, whole and self-sufficient, whether or not any of these are.162 For them, to be is to be chosen and chosen gratuitously, out of nothingness. The choice is gratuitous because transcendent wholeness and self-sufficiency is neither augmented nor diminished in any way by the being or non-being of the world or anything in it.163 We are indeed in the vicinity of a paradox, but it is only the paradox of self-love identified in the discussion of the heart: that the choice for the  S405/L373  S540/L656. 160  Such a supposition is at the center of Lucien Goldmann’s interpretation of the Pascalian “tragic vision.” See Goldmann (1959), pp. 306–307. 161  Goldmann (2013), p. 275, in Philip Thody’s somewhat free translation. 162  “‘God is all there is’, although false, is meaningful.” Prufer (1993), p. 28. 163  Ibid., and also pp. 32–33. 158 159

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self, out of love of the self, is in fact the distortion and loss of the self. That paradox is now reversed: the willingness to lose the self, and all its worldly attachments, in death, for the sake of God is to gain not only God but also the self and the created whole in which the self is set. The will to martyrdom, to offer all for the sake of God, is the highest expression of the acceptance of nature as it truly is, created out of nothing. The turn toward this resolution is indeed experienced initially as a loss of nature, the soul’s “fear” and “disquiet” at “the certainty of the annihilation [l’anéantissement] of all that it loves,” described in Sur la conversion du pécheur.164 But this is “a holy confusion and … a healthy trouble”:165 It is true that there is pain upon entering into piety. But this pain does not arise from the piety that begins to exist within us but from the impiety that remains … We suffer only in proportion to the degree that vice, which is natural to us, resists supernatural grace: our heart feels torn between these contrary efforts … It is like a child whose mother snatches it from the arms of robbers: it must love, in the pain it suffers, the loving and legitimate violence of the one who gives it its freedom and hate only the imperious and tyrannical violence of those who detain it unjustly. The cruelest war God can wage against men in this life is to spare them that war he came to bring. I am come to bring war, he says, and to teach them of this war: I am come to bring sword and fire.166

The freedom gained in spiritual war is the vision of the Infini rien distinction.167 Once this distinction is made, once the heart recollects from whence it comes, the apparent denial of the reality and worth of created things is replaced with their affirmation on the basis of the ground that makes them real: I love all men as my brothers because they are all redeemed. I love poverty because he loved it. I love riches because they afford the means of helping the destitute. I keep faith with everyone. I do not render evil to those who wrong me, but I wish them a condition like my own, in which one receives neither evil nor good on the part of men. I try to be just, true, sincere, and faithful to all men. And I have a tender heart for those to

 OC II, p. 99.  Ibid., p. 100. 166  S753/L924. 167  See, again, OC II, p. 101. 164 165

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whom God has more closely united me. And whether I am alone or in the sight of men, all my actions are done in the sight of God, who must judge them and to whom I have consecrated them all. These are my feelings. And every day of my life I bless my Redeemer, who implanted them in me and who, out of a man full of weakness, wretchedness, concupiscence, pride, and ambition, has made a man free from all these evils, by the power of his grace, to which all glory for this is due, since I derive from myself only wretchedness and error.168

To see the Infini rien distinction is to see, at once, the absolute, transcendent being of God the creator and the per se nothingness of creation. But it is also to receive the whole of creation, in all its reality and goodness, on the basis of the divine vision which makes all things to be. The position of the living martyr, therefore, is not merely the refusal of divertissement and the overcoming of the hatful self. It is the realization of the dynamic unity of grandeur et misère, in which the heart sees and accepts both man’s contingency and mortality and also his rational apprehension of the whole and its natural necessities, the two at once on the basis of the transcendent God who created all, freely, out of nothing. In taking it up, man imitates Christ, at once God and man, and, though him, is united to the divine: The Christian religion alone … teaches the righteous, whom it exalts even to participation in divinity itself, that in this sublime state they still carry the source of all corruption, rendering them throughout their lives subject to error, wretchedness, death, and sin.169

The willingness to sacrifice one’s own nature for the sake of what is higher than nature as such is not to reject but to accept the world precisely as created. It is “the loss of nothingness [la perte du néant]” and a gain “for which you have given nothing [pour laquelle vous n’avez rien donné],” in which, quite literally, “you win everything [vous gagnez tout] … [and] you

 S759/L931.  S240/L208.

168 169

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lose nothing [vous ne perdez rien].”170 The heart of the martyr knows, wills, and recalls the insight of the Mémorial—“Forgetfulness of the world and of all, apart from God.”171—which yields the Infini rien distinction. And so, in the end, we find the beginning.

References Aristotle, Poetics, ed. and trans. Joe Sachs (Indianapolis: Focus, 2006) Leslie Armour, “Infini Rien”: Pascal’s Wager and the Human Paradox (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993) Augustine, The Confessions of St. Augustine, trans. John K.  Ryan (New York: Image, 1960) Augustine, The City of God against the Pagans, ed. and trans. R.  W. Dyson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) A. W. S. Baird, Studies in Pascal’s Ethics (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1975) Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 3, ed. John Riches, trans. Andrew Louth et al. (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986) Rémi Brague, Sur la religion (Paris: Flammarion, 2018) Adam Buben, “Christian Hate: Death, Dying, and Reason in Pascal and Kierkegaard,” in Patrick Stokes and Adam Buben (eds.), Kierkegaard and Death (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011) Adam Buben, “Pascal and His Wager in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries,” in Paul Bartha and Lawrence Pasternack (eds.), Pascal’s Wager (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018) Thomas Carlyle, Characteristics (Boston: Osgood and Co., 1877) Jacques Chevalier, Pascal, trans. Lilian A. Clare (London: Sheed and Ward, 1933) René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham et al., 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984-1985) Lucien Goldmann, Le Dieu caché: étude sur la vision tragique dans les Pensées de Pascal et dans le théâtre de Racine (Paris: Gallimard, 1959) Lucien Goldmann, The Hidden God: A Study of Tragic Vision in the Pensées of Pascal and the Tragedies of Racine, trans. Philip Thody (London: Routledge, 2013) Ann Hartle, “Pascal in the Post-Christian World,” Modern Age Winter (2017): 19-29 G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, The Lectures of 1825-1826, vol. 3, ed. and trans. Robert F.  Brown et  al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) 170 171

 S680/L418, pp. 469–470 and 472.  S742/L913.

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Thomas S.  Hibbs, Wagering on an Ironic God: Pascal on Faith and Philosophy (Waco: Baylor University Press, 2017) Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A Selby-Bigge and P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975) Christian Lazzeri, Force et justice dans la politique de Pascal (Paris: PUF, 1993) Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, trans. Harvey C. Mansfield (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998) Jean-Luc Marion, On Descartes’ Metaphysical Prism: The Constitution and the Limits of Onto-theo-logy in Cartesian Thought, trans. Jeffrey L. Kosky (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999) John C.  McCarthy, “Pascal on Certainty and Utility,” Interpretation 22 (1994-1995): 247-269 Jean Mesnard, Les Pensées de Pascal (Paris: SEDES, 1976) Jean Mesnard, “Le thème des trois ordres dans l’organisation des Pensées,” in Pascal, thématique des Pensées, ed. Lane M. Heller and Ian M. Richmond (Paris: Vrin, 1988) Martin Nemoianu, “The Order of Pascal’s Politics,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 21 (2013): 34-56 Martin Nemoianu, “Pascal on Divine Hiddenness,” International Philosophical Quarterly 55 (2015): 325-343 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future, ed. Rolf-Peter Horstmann and Judith Norman (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002) Buford Norman, Portraits of Thought: Knowledge, Methods, and Styles in Pascal (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1988) George Orwell, Essays (London: Penguin, 1984) Blaise Pascal, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Michel Le Guern, 2 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1998-2000) Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. W. F. Trotter (London: Dent, 1931) Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. Louis Lafuma (Paris: Seuil, 1962) Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. Philippe Sellier (Paris: Bordas/Classiques Garnier, 1991) Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (New York: Penguin, 1995) Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. and trans. Roger Ariew (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2005) Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. and trans. Pierre Zoberman et  al. (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2022) Blaise Pascal, Selections, ed. Richard H. Popkin (New York: Macmillan, 1989) Plato, Plato's Symposium, trans. Seth Benardete (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001) Thomas Prufer, Recapitulations: Essays in Philosophy (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1993)

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Thomas Prufer, “A Protreptic: What is Philosophy?” Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy 2 (2018): 1-19 Christopher William Robbins, “Pascal and the Therapy of Faith” PhD diss., University of York, 2015 Roger Scruton, Beauty: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011) Francis Slade, “Ends and Purposes,” in Final Causality and Nature in Human Affairs, ed. Richard F.  Hassing (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1997) Robert Sokolowski, Christian Faith and Human Understanding: Studies on the Eucharist, Trinity, and the Human Person (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2006) Robert Spaemann, Persons: The Difference between ‘Someone’ and ‘Something’, trans. Oliver O'Donovan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017) Thomas Aquinas, The Summa Theologiae of St. Thomas Aquinas, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province, 1920/2017, https://www.newadvent. org/summa/ Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1983) Bernard Wills, “Reason, Intuition, and Choice: Pascal’s Augustinian Voluntarism,” International Philosophical Quarterly 46 (2006): 43-58 Bernard Wills, “Pascal and the Persistence of Platonism in Early Modern Thought,” The International Journal of the Platonic Tradition 6 (2012): 186-200 Timothy D. Wilson et al., “Just Think: The Challenges of the Disengaged Mind,” Science 345 (2014): 75–77 William Wood, Blaise Pascal on Duplicity, Sin, and the Fall: The Secret Instinct (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) William Wordsworth, The Poetical Works, vol. 4 (London: Edward Moxon, 1849) Robert Sokolowski, The God of Faith and Reason: Foundations of Christian Theology (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982) Benedict de Spinoza, A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994)

CHAPTER 5

Afterword—Divine Grace and Human Freedom: Pascal, Jansenism, and Sacred Tradition

Is Pascal a Jansenist?1 To answer, we must distinguish the philosophical-­ theological sense of the question from the historical-biographical. Pascal’s personal devotion and loyalty to the convent of Port-Royal and to his friends and family, religious and lay, celebrated and anonymous, who formed the community around it, is beyond doubt. But this historical fact does not bear on the theoretical charge, which, if it means anything, must mean that Pascal endorsed, explicitly or tacitly, some or all of the five propositions attributed to Cornelius Jansen and condemned by Innocent X in Cum occasione:

1  Among the more well-known Anglophone commentators who respond in the affirmative: Kołakowski (1995), whose whole book is devoted to the claim, and also Hunter (2013), pp. 6–8, 152–153, and 172–174, who insists on the point, though without much argument or textual support. Wood (2018) does engage with some of the relevant passages in the Provinciales and the Écrits sur la grâce, but he likewise assumes rather than demonstrates Pascal’s acceptance of Jansenism. The charge also figures prominently in Clarke (2015), as well as in the scholarly apparatus attached to Pascal (1999). One recent treatment of Pascal’s putative Jansenism turns out, in a highly instructive way, to be a stalking horse for the critic’s rejection of Christianity in favor of Semipelagianism, as he effectively admits himself: Moser (2018). A similar dynamic seems to be at work in Kołakowski’s criticism of Pascal, as brought out by McCarthy (1997).

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2024 M. Nemoianu, Pascal’s God and the Fragments of the World, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55626-5_5

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1. Some of God’s precepts are impossible to the just, who wish and strive to keep them, according to the present powers which they have; the grace, by which they are made possible, is also wanting. 2. In the state of fallen nature one never resists interior grace. 3. In order to merit or demerit in the state of fallen nature, freedom from necessity is not required in man, but freedom from external compulsion is sufficient. 4. The Semipelagians admitted the necessity of a prevenient interior grace for each act, even for the beginning of faith; and in this they were heretics, because they wished this grace to be such that the human will could either resist or obey. 5. It is Semipelagian to say that Christ died or shed His blood for all men without exception.2 These propositions form the essence of Jansenism. Does Pascal endorse them? The pattern of his work on philosophical-theological questions, begun after the intense religious experience he underwent on the night of November 23, 1654, unfolds away from Jansenism.3 Pascal moves from a chiefly satirical and theoretically unsophisticated stance early in the Provinciales to an explicit and unequivocal rejection of the Jansenist propositions at the end of that work, a rejection he then begins to elaborate theoretically in Écrits sur la grâce, before abandoning that work as he finally matures into views altogether independent of the five propositions in the Pensées.4 Examination of this trajectory serves, at once, to establish 2  Denz. nos. 1092–1096  in Denzinger (2002). Denzinger notes at 1096 that the fifth proposition was declared heretical when intended in the sense “that Christ died [only] for the salvation of the predestined[.]” 3  Jacques Chevalier’s meticulous examination of the biographical record demonstrates that the arc of Pascal’s life likewise exhibits a growing distance from, and final break with, Jansenism. See Chevalier (1933), pp. 120–123 and, especially, pp. 318–330. 4  The dating of the Écrits sur la grâce has been attended by some scholarly dispute. According to Jean Mesnard, Pascal abandoned his text unfinished in early 1656, turning his energies instead to the composition of the Provinciales. More recently, Michel Le Guern has proposed that Pascal began the Écrits around the same time as the final few Provinciales, in late 1656 or early 1657, breaking off his work at an unspecified moment thereafter in order to take up the Pensées in 1658. See OC II, pp. 1214–1215. Le Guern’s chief argument on behalf of this dating is persuasive: the early Provinciales reflect a somewhat simplistic approach to the issues under consideration, far from the careful and thoughtful treatment evinced in the Écrits and, by my lights, the latter Provinciales also. The historical question is ultimately, however, of little moment for the present argument, which would stand even if Mesnard were vindicated: whether the Écrits precede or, as seems more likely, issue from the late Provinciales, Pascal’s theoretical development away from the Jansenist propositions, culminating in the Pensées, remains equally in evidence.

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Pascal’s distance from Jansenism, his view of human freedom and divine grace, and the contours of his relation to the tradition of Catholic philosophy.5

   I No careful reader of the Provinciales can fail to observe that Pascal’s epistolary defense of the Port-Royal community changes after its tenth installment. It has been remarked more than once that the early letters sacrifice conceptual rigor for an engaging satirical swiftness, often failing to do justice to the complexity of the theoretical issues they treat.6 By the eleventh letter, however, we find Pascal exhibiting an increasing seriousness of tone and focus. One mark of this seriousness is a redirection of interest, away from the writings of Jesuit contemporaries and toward engagement with the fathers and doctors of the church.7 Pascal’s turn toward sacred tradition is a defensive response to the speculative criticisms directed at the Provinciales and their unknown author. More importantly for our purposes, it serves as the occasion for Pascal to begin specifying more precisely the Catholicity of his views. This becomes most evident with the seventeenth Provinciale, where Pascal takes up the charge that he is a heretic, an apostate, or a schismatic by reason of his defense of Port-Royal. From at least the twelfth Provinciale onward, Pascal had offered occasional remarks that he is “alone,” that he is not a 5  The theoretical question under consideration here—whether Pascal’s thought includes endorsement of the heresy condemned by the church as Jansenism in five propositions—is also distinct from the concrete historical question of Pascal’s reception. This distinction is suggested by Flannery O’Connor’s remark to Dr. T.  R. Spivey, “I like Pascal but I don’t think the Jansenist influence is healthy in the Church.” O’Connor (1988), p. 304. There is another, more popular sense in which “Jansenism” is taken to mean a tendency toward moral and theological rigor or doctrinal traditionalism. For treatments of “Jansenism” so understood, see Cutter (2014), Winters (2016), and Read, (2016). The present argument aims to establish that Pascal transcends the material conditions of his historical situation and cannot be called a Jansenist in the first, more technical sense. It may be that this very argument reveals him to be something like a “Jansenist” in the second, looser sense—a result which would cast doubt on the coherence of this second sense of the term. 6  This point is made by Moriarty (2003), p. 146, who takes his bearings from Duchêne (1985). For a specific version of the charge, see, for example, Petitot (1910), who employs the second Provinciale to argue that Pascal’s understanding of the Thomist doctrine of sufficient grace is superficial, inexact, and erroneous. For a partial rejoinder to Petitot, see Plainemaison (1981). 7  Prov. XI, in OC I, pp. 699–704, alone discusses John Chrysostom, Hugh of St. Victor, Augustine, Cyril, Jerome, Tertullian, Irenaeus, Bernard, Gregory of Nazianzus, and Hilary of Poitiers.

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“paid agent of Port-Royal,” that he is not “of Port-Royal,” and that his opponents are “not dealing with a man of Port-Royal.”8 In the seventeenth Provinciale, however, he reframes the debate, noting that whole matter hangs properly not on biography but on whether he has endorsed the five propositions condemned in Cum occasione.9 To this question, Pascal’s response is direct and unequivocal: explicit repudiation of each of the five propositions and an unqualified statement of obedience to the doctrine of the church: I have never said anything to support these impious propositions which I detest with all my heart. And even if Port-Royal were to hold them, I declare to you that you cannot conclude anything about that against me, for, thank God, I have no attachment on Earth but to the one Catholic, apostolic, Roman Church, in which I want to live and die, in communion with the Pope, its sovereign head, [and] outside of which, I am most convinced, there is no salvation.10

As concerns the issue of principle, there is no ambiguity for Pascal: “either Jansenius merely taught efficacious grace, in which case he is without error, or he taught something else, in which case he is without supporters.”11 The implication is obvious: if indeed the Port-Royalists or anyone else were to hold any of the five propositions, they would be heretics and rightly opposed. Pascal’s total accession to the Magisterium—including support for the censure of the “heretical and Lutheran” propositions by the doctors of the

8  See Prov. XII, OC I p. 710; Prov. XV, OC I p. 760; and Prov. XVI, OC I, p. 763, along with Prov. XVII, OC I, pp. 781–782. An edition of the Provinciales in English can be found in Pascal (1967), which I have consulted in making my own translations. 9  Prov. XVII, OC I, p. 781. 10  Ibid. Likewise, Prov. XVIII, OC I, pp. 807–808 and Prov. XIX, OC I, p. 816. Jacques Chevalier places considerable stress on this passage at the start of his own argument that Pascal rejected Jansenism. Chevalier (1933), p. 99. He also draws attention to the sixth letter to Mlle de Roannez (from late 1656, just before the seventeenth Provinciale), where Pascal argues that “We know that all the virtues, martyrdom, mortifications, and all good works are useless outside of the Church and communion with the head of the Church, who is the Pope. I will never separate myself from this communion, at least I beseech God to give me the grace for it, without which I would be lost forever” in OC II, p.  34. See Chevalier (1933), p. 291. 11  Prov. XVII, OC I, p. 788. Also pp. 786–787, along with Prov. XVIII, OC I, pp. 799–800 and 814.

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Sorbonne12—is no perfunctory Mottramism.13 Pascal understands the teaching to which he assents as the one “so powerfully maintained by St. Augustine, by St. Thomas and his entire school, by so many Popes and councils, and by the whole Tradition,” and again, in the following letter, as “the consistent doctrine of St. Augustine, of St. Prosper, of the Fathers who followed them, of the councils, of St. Thomas, of all the Thomists in general.”14 Indeed, for all that has been written of Pascal’s Augustinianism,15 it is Aquinas who figures most centrally, at the end of the Provinciales and in the Écrits, as the standard of orthodoxy and of philosophical and theological truth. In the eighteenth letter, Pascal defers to Thomas in this way repeatedly and extensively, including substantial quotations both directly from Aquinas and indirectly from the neo-Thomist Diego Álvarez.16 So stamped is the culmination of the Provinciales with the presence of St. Thomas that Jacques Chevalier concludes: “what he is actually justifying is not Jansenism but Thomism.”17 Anyone inclined to doubt the sincerity of Pascal’s statements of fidelity to the church and sacred tradition and his rejections of the heretical propositions of Jansenism must address the frequency and vehemence with which these are made in the final letters. Indeed, Pascal himself anticipates a skeptical reaction from the Jesuits and quotes Pope St. Gregory the Great on this very point: “If one refuses to believe the confession of faith of those who offer it in conformity with the views of the Church, one casts into doubt the faith of all Catholics.”18 For those still moved to verify, however, we may turn to the specifics of Pascal’s account of divine grace and human freedom in the Écrits sur la grâce, where the position at which he finally arrives in the Provinciales is confirmed and elaborated.  Prov. XVII, OC I, p. 784.  “So Rex [Mottram] was sent to Farm Street to Father Mowbray, a priest renowned for his triumphs with obdurate catechumens…“I asked him what he meant by prayer. He said: ‘I don’t mean anything. You tell me.’ I tried to, in a few words, and he said: ‘Right. So much for prayer. What’s the next thing?’ … Yesterday I asked him whether Our Lord had more than one nature. He said: ‘Just as many as you say, Father.’”” Waugh (1999), p. 192. 14  Prov. XVII, OC I, p. 788 and Prov. XVIII, OC I, p. 802. 15  The classic studies are Sellier (1995) and, in English, Miel (1969). There has been some resistance to this construal, e.g., Carraud (2007) and Wills (2006). 16  Prov. XVIII, OC I, pp. 798, 799, 802, 803, 804–805, 810–812. 17  Chevalier (1933), p. 120 n6. Assessments of Pascal’s relation to Thomas are rarer and less extensive than those treating Pascal and Augustine, but one should note the detailed work done by Gérard Ferreyrolles and Sylvio Hermann De Franceschi. See, e.g., Ferreyrolles (2006), pp.  143–159 and De Franceschi (2009). More generally, see the sensitive and insightful reading of Pasqua (2000). 18  Prov. XVII, OC I, p. 785. 12 13

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   II Pascal’s aim in the Écrits is to set out Port-Royal’s doctrine of grace, characterized as that of the “disciples of Saint Augustine,” to identify it with the view of the church as found in the fathers and doctors and defended at the Council of Trent, and to situate it as a mean relative to the errors propounded by the Calvinists and the Molinists.19 Though the work has sometimes been treated as the definitively Jansenist Pascalian text, indications of Jansenism in it are, at most, mixed. Pascal does not endorse, explicitly or otherwise, the five propositions and, in fact, takes up views very close to those of Thomas and Augustine on the questions with which they deal. His account, therefore, supports and develops the position of fidelity to orthodox Catholicism he claims for himself at the close of the Provinciales. The Écrits open with explicit rejection of the first proposition condemned in Cum occasione and direct endorsement of the teaching of Trent, “That the commandments are not impossible to the just.”20 Pascal interprets the pronouncement as an effort to avoid both a Lutheran error—that the actions of those extended grace are nevertheless, always and necessarily, sinful, so that sinless adherence to the divine precepts is impossible—and a Pelagian one—that justification in grace always implies an ongoing power to persevere in that justice.21 By Pascal’s lights, the Council holds that a justified person is able to fulfill God’s precepts sinlessly, provided he is presently acting in a state of grace, but that perseverance in this condition requires the infusion of further graces, not guaranteed by one’s own power.22 In this way, he describes three stages of grace in man’s fulfillment of the commandments: first, justification, which 19  Écrit I, OC II, pp. 211–213 and Écrit VII, OC II, pp. 257–259. A partial English version of the Écrits can be found in Pascal (1999), but it must be approached cautiously, containing as it does many omissions and truncations. 20  Écrit I, OC II, pp.  211–212. Pascal had already maintained that, “one is obliged to believe that the commandments of God are not impossible” at Prov. XVII, OC I, p. 789. 21  Écrit I, OC II, pp. 211–212. 22  Ibid., pp. 212–214. It is worth keeping in mind throughout the discussion of grace that, for Pascal, “the continuation of the justification of the faithful is nothing other than the continuation of the infusion of grace and not one single grace that subsists always,” an operation analogous to the way in which “the Father begets the Son continually and maintains the eternity of his essence by an effusion of his substance that is without interruption as well as without end,” from the letter to Gilberte Périer of November 5, 1648, OC II, pp. 11–12. The implication, of course, is that, through grace, man begins to participate in the pure and perpetual activity of the Holy Trinity. This point is brought out nicely by Balthasar (1986), pp. 174–175, who quotes at length from the letter.

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heals man’s nature and makes possible good acts done from charity, second, the infusion of further, specific graces that move the free will of man to particular good actions, and third, the ongoing infusion of further graces that allow man to persevere in his justification and continue to perform his freely chosen good actions.23 Pascal defends his reading in the first place by analysis of the Council’s canons. The twenty fifth anathematizes the Lutheran view that even the justified sin, venially or mortally, in all good works.24 The eighteenth and twenty second, together, exclude the Pelagian reading of the twenty fifth. The twenty second anathematizes those who say that perseverance in justice is possible without further divine assistance, while the eighteenth specifies that actual observance of the divine precepts requires that one be both “justified” and also “constituted in grace,” which Pascal takes to mean presently infused with the graces that move one to act through charity.25 This last point is reinforced by a second line of argument, in which Pascal links the position of the Council to Augustine, in De natura et gratia and De perfectione iustitiae hominis, whom he glosses: “that the commandments are not impossible to charity and that they are impossible without charity; and that the sole reason for which they are given is to make known the need we have to receive this charity from God.”26

23  The first stage is presupposed throughout Écrit I. The second is identified at Écrit I, OC II, pp. 212–213, in the phrase “…the just man acting by the love of God can perform works exempt from sin…he can observe the commandments if he acts through charity,” again at p.  214, in the phrase “…the just man does not sin when he performs good actions and through the movement of grace,” and in Pascal’s gloss on Augustine, discussed below. The distinction between the second and third stages is suggested on p. 213, “not that he always has the proximate power to conserve that charity which makes them [acts from charity fulfilling the commandments] possible,” as well as in Pascal’s distinction between “actual perseverance” and “the power of perseverance” at Écrit I, OC II, p. 213 and in his discussion of the canons of Trent, outlined below. Michael Moriarty’s admirably clear overview of Pascal on grace seems to affirm a similar tripartite division. See Moriarty (2003), pp. 150–153. In a somewhat different way, Jan Miel identifies “stages” of grace, close to the first two of those set out above. He also rightly observes, though without specifics, that these are “reminiscent of the Schoolmen,” especially St. Thomas, even if Pascal does not himself employ Scholastic terminology. Miel (1969), p. 91. 24  Écrit I, OC II, p. 214. 25  Ibid., pp. 213–216, with the quotation taken from p. 214. 26  Ibid., p. 215. Pascal’s reference is to Augustine, De natura et gratia 69, along with a short supporting quote from De perfectione iustitiae hominis 10. See also Écrit X, OC II, pp.  283–285, where he offers further, extended references on this point to Augustine, Fulgentius, and Prosper. Pascal provides the Latin originals of these passages in Écrit XIV, OC II, pp. 303–308.

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Michael Moriarty suggests that Pascal, in his insistence that one justified may yet be deprived of the graces that would allow him to realize his potential for some particular charitable act or to persevere in that realization, sails perilously close to the view censured by the Sorbonne and finally condemned as the first Jansenist proposition in Cum occasione.27 And yet Pascal here seems consistent with both the canons of Trent he discusses and the passages from Augustine he cites and glosses. His position is also very near to the one defended by Aquinas in the Treatise on Grace. According to St. Thomas, whereas, before the fall, man could act at will in ways consistent with justice, fortitude, prudence, and temperance, afterward, he requires grace even to do this. Thomas hastens to add, however, that fulfillment of the commandments from charity—Pascal’s concern in Écrit I—is impossible, both before and after the fall, without grace.28 And beyond this, he notes, the further help of divine grace is needed, in both states, to move the free will of man in his particular good acts.29 This afterthought is given fuller treatment further on, when Thomas takes up the question of whether “one who has already obtained grace can, of himself, and without further help of grace, do good and avoid sin.” His answer is negative: even after the sanctifying gift of habitual grace, man requires further graces to perform particular good acts—and this is so not merely because divine motion is required for all creaturely acts. Thomas argues that these further graces are needed also to overcome the darkness of the intellect and the fleshly inclination toward sin, that is, the corruptions of human nature that remain even after justification by habitual grace.30 As Garrigou-Lagrange puts it in his study of St. Thomas on grace, “He who is not perfectly cured requires external assistance in order to act properly. But, allowing that the just man is cured by sanctifying grace, he is still subject to inordinate concupiscence and the obscurity of ignorance. Therefore, for this special reason, the just man requires the

 Moriarty (2003), pp. 150 and 160 n16.  ST I-II, q. 109, a. 4 in Thomas (1920/2017). In Écrit XI, Pascal proposes, in almost identical terms, that God created man “just, healthy, and strong [fort]. Without any concupiscence,” and so able to act in ways consistent with justice, fortitude, and the other virtues. At the same time, the full observance of the commandments—from charity, as Thomas puts it here and Pascal puts it in Écrit I—requires grace, even in the state of perfect nature. See Écrit XI, OC II, pp. 287–288. 29  ST I-II, q. 109, a. 4 in Thomas (1920/2017). 30  ST I-II, q. 109, a. 9 in Thomas (1920/2017). 27 28

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help of God to direct and protect him.”31 And even beyond this help, Thomas holds that one who has received grace nevertheless requires yet further graces to persevere in that state, a result not guaranteed by the earlier infusions of grace: “For to many grace is given to whom perseverance in grace is not given.”32 In Thomas’ treatment, therefore, we find the same three stages identified by Pascal: (1) justification by what Thomas calls sanctifying and habitual grace, (2) further, actual graces that move the free will of the justified man to particular good acts done from charity, overcoming the impediments of his nature, and (3) yet further graces of perseverance, over and above the first two, securing, in temporal continuity, the activity toward the good chosen by man through (1) and (2). The close similarities between Pascal and Thomas here should not be found at all surprising. We have already seen that Pascal was reading Aquinas on these issues and took himself to be in accord with the Angelic Doctor. Moreover, the two philosophers employ a common source: Augustine, specifically in De natura et gratia, which Thomas cites in defense of points 2 and 3, just as Pascal does. On the question of fulfilling the divine precepts, the Pascal of the Écrits seems no more Jansenist than Augustine and Thomas are.

   III The second, third, and fourth propositions of Cum occasione are appropriately considered together, dealing as they do with the nature of human freedom and its role in cooperating with or rejecting divine grace. At the start of Écrit VII, Pascal presents the outline of his view, a synergistic account of divine and human activity: It is settled [constant] that there are many men damned and many saved. It is again settled that those who are saved willed to be and that God also willed it; for if God had not willed it, they would not have been, and if they had not also willed it themselves, they would not have been. The One who made us without ourselves cannot save us without ourselves. It is also true that those who are damned very much willed to commit the sins that merited their damnation, and that God also very much willed to condemn them.

 Garrigou-Lagrange (1952), p. 98.  ST I-II, q. 109, a. 10 in Thomas (1920/2017).

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It is thus evident that the will of God and that of man concur [concourent] in the salvation and in the damnation of those who are saved or damned. And there is no question about all these things. If then we ask why men are saved or damned, we may in one sense say that it is because God wills it, and in one sense say that it is because men will it.33

From the outset, then, any suggestion that Pascal regards the human will as the impotent effect of divine action must be ruled out.34 The work of salvation and damnation must be referred both to the will of God and to the will of man. At the same time, of course, Pascal does not hold that God and man are equal. The work of salvation and damnation must indeed be referred to both but, necessarily, according to the nature of each. The divine will is primary [première], and the human will is secondary [suivante].35 The primacy of the divine will, far from vitiating or even opposing the causal power of the human will, is rather “the source, the principle, and the cause of the other.”36 It is the very ground that makes human freedom possible and the causal efficacy of human free choice actual: it ordains secondary causes. The activity of the secondary will indeed proceeds from itself [provient d’elle] and is properly referred to [rapportée à] itself, but that activity must also be referred, in the order of causes and of being, to the primary will as to its principle [comme à son principe].37 Pascal offers both a philosophical and a scriptural justification for this account. On the philosophical side, he distinguishes the senses in which activity may be predicated of God and of man. Of God’s primal will [volonté primitive], “we can indeed say that activity proceeds from it, but we cannot in any manner say that activity does not proceed from it.” By

 Écrit VII, OC II, p. 257.  For an interpretation along these lines, which asserts that, for Pascal, “no human effort could contribute to salvation, even as a partial cause,” see Clarke (2015). Similarly, Moser (2018) supposes that since, on Pascal’s view, God is the source, principle, and first cause of grace, human beings are excluded from any causal contribution (pp. 68, 68–69, and 76–77), so that “Pascal dismisses quickly a role for human volitional cooperation in salvation” (p. 81). As we shall see below, Pascal does no such thing—and not at all quickly—but the general point is already established at Prov. XVIII, OC I, p. 801, where he explicitly affirms, against “the impiety of Luther,” that we do cooperate [“nous coopérons”] with grace in our salvation. 35  Écrit VII, OC II, p. 257. See also, among other places, Écrit XII, OC II, pp. 294–295, where Pascal refers to the human will using the term “cause seconde.” 36  Écrit VII, OC II, p. 257. 37  Ibid. 33 34

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contrast, the secondary will of man is “such that we can say in one sense that activity proceeds from it, because it concurs in it [elle y concourt]; and in one sense that it [activity] does not proceed from it, because it [the secondary will] is not its origin.”38 As the wholly unified, radically transcendent source and principle of what is, God is that of which it cannot be said, “activity does not proceed from it.” In fine, God is pure act, with no admixture of potency. The finite and contingent human person, by contrast, is indeed active but must be brought to be so. Man is not, therefore, the autonomous and independent source of his proper activity but a mixture of potency and act, linked in a relation of dependency to God, whose activity, in the gratuitous infusions of grace, realizes, perfects, completes his created nature. The activity of the human person is thus included or enfolded in the activity of God who is source and principle. In Pascal’s terms, the divine will “comprehends the concurrence of the secondary will [enferme le concours de la volonté suivante],” not swamping but actualizing man’s will thereby.39 Scripturally, Pascal takes his bearings from six verses. The first two, Galatians 2:20 and Ephesians 2:5, emphasize the life of God as the source of human life, through which it becomes its own: “And these two truths subsist together, because his [St Paul’s] life, though proper to himself, does not come originally from him. He is not alive except through Jesus Christ. The life of Jesus Christ is the source of his life.”40 The following four—John 14:10 and 14:12, Isaiah 26:12, and I Corinthians 15:10—disclose the same point, but now with respect to divine and human action.41 Across all six, Pascal stresses the conformity between scripture and his foregoing philosophical principle, four times repeating that God, as origin  Ibid.  Ibid. Miel (1969) recognizes the importance of primary and secondary causes in Pascal’s account, the latter of which “concurs or cooperates with” the former, and notes that, “In this he is still following St. Thomas” (p. 92). He also sees that the secondary cause “is really a part or effect of” the primary and, so, “is itself a cause only by participation in the primary cause” (p. 94). As the “only” suggests, however, he does not quite reach Pascal’s point: rather than a limitation, the participatory dependency of the secondary cause on the primary is in fact the reason of its activity, of its freedom, of its reality and “ownness” as a cause. Finite, created beings are just not the kinds of things that act of themselves, and to look to them for that sort of autonomy is to misunderstand them from the outset. This, of course, is just the point made at a more fundamental level by the Infini rien distinction: finite, created beings are just not the kinds of things that are of themselves. 40  Écrit VII, OC II, p. 258. 41  Ibid., and also Prov. XVIII, OC I, p. 801, where Pascal makes the argument once more by quoting Hebrews 13:21 and linking it to the position taken by Trent, that our merits are themselves gifts of God. 38 39

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and source, is that of which, uniquely, activity can never be denied and on which all other activity must depend.42 As regards Pascal’s putative Jansenism, the question here is whether the dependency of man’s will on divine actualization in any sense compromises human freedom and renders human resistance impossible. We have already seen that Pascal construes divine and human activity as cooperative and synergistic, rather than oppositional, and, moreover, that the ontological relation between man and God entails that this cooperation actualizes rather than limits human freedom. In Écrit XI, Pascal specifies the point further. The “medicinal grace” won by Christ brings those who receive it “of themselves by their free will [d’eux-mêmes par leur libre arbitre]” to love of God, that is, to charity and the sinless acts done from it.43 Pascal is very plain that there is no difference between saying that the free will achieves this end by means of grace or that grace moves the free will to this end.44 Once again, given the nested ontological relationship between the secondary will of man and primary will of God, these converge in the act. It might be thought that, in the pattern of Cum occasione’s third proposition, Pascal means only to rule out external compulsion in this convergence, while still defending a more fundamental internal necessity in the action of divine grace. And one might suppose this thought fortified by Pascal’s repeated claims that grace operates infallibly on the free will of man.45 Against this objection, we should note, first, that Pascal is careful to specify that those who persevere in grace merit glory, and this precisely because their free will, infused with grace, chooses the good both “voluntarily and freely.”46 Pascal’s formulation here renders the Jansenist reading untenable. If he meant only to exclude external compulsion, it would suffice to say that our meritorious choices are voluntary. To distinguish voluntary from free and to insist on both in the meritorious act indicates that the freedom he has in mind is opposed not just to extrinsic coercion but

 Êcrit VII, OC II, pp. 258–259.  Écrit XI, OC II, pp. 289–290. 44  Ibid., p. 290. 45  See, again, Clarke (2015), particularly in the third section. 46  Écrit XI, OC II, p. 290: “[I]ls méritent la gloire et par le secours de cette grâce qui a surmonté leur concupiscence, et par leur propre choix et le mouvement de leur libre arbitre qui s’y est porté de soi-même volontairement et librement.” 42 43

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also to necessity.47 Indeed, the eighteenth Provinciale had already established this very point, arguing, in almost identical terms, that divine grace inclines man toward his supernatural end “of himself [de lui-même], by a movement wholly free, wholly voluntary, wholly loving … It is thus that God disposes the free will of man without imposing any necessity on him[.]”48 The activity of grace in man is clear of necessity in all senses of the word. Second, Pascal does hold that divine grace operates infallibly, since God, who is the principle of things, cannot fail in knowledge or will; this is just what it is be that of which it cannot be said, “activity does not proceed from it.” But this cannot be taken to mean that, for Pascal, the operation of grace is contrary to human freedom. In the final full Provinciale, he writes that the “infallibility of God’s operation in no way spoils the natural liberty of man” and repeats this six times across three pages, including in quotations from St. Thomas, the Dominican Fr. Álvarez, and the Jesuit Fr. Petau.49 Likewise, in the relevant section of Écrit XI, he uses the term infailliblement four times to describe the operation of grace in man, each of those four times pairing it with libre arbitre.50 And, as we have just seen, the free choice of the will in grace is fully free, neither externally constrained nor internally necessitated.51 For Pascal, then, it is true both that grace operates infallibly and that this infallible operation is, at the same time, the cooperative activity of the human will, as secondary cause, choosing the good proper to it, in a manner not just voluntary but free. There is an air of paradox here only if one affirms exactly what Pascal denies: that grace and human freedom are two altogether distinct and 47  Miel (1969) departs here from his usual sensitivity, asserting that, for Pascal, “‘free’ is taken as equivalent to ‘voluntary’” (p. 102). To accept this, we would have to allow that Pascal, who, in the Écrits and the Provinciales, repeatedly employs the terms paired in distinction to describe human action without necessitation, was, philosophically, entirely insensitive to any difference in meaning between them and, stylistically, eager to insist on the most awkward sort of pleonasm. Miel’s confusion here emerges partly from a failure to see that the Pascalian heart is not merely the seat of the will (ibid.) but also the sapiential, integrating intellect and the memory. 48  Prov. XVIII, OC I, p. 801. 49  Ibid., 800–802. 50  Once at Écrit XI, OC II, pp. 289–290 and thrice at p. 290. 51  Indeed, the fourth pairing of infailliblement and libre arbitre in Écrit XI occurs precisely in the context of Pascal’s claim that the free will chooses both voluntarily and freely. See ibid., p. 290. See also ibid., p. 293, where the free will’s “capacity to move with grace” is identified with the power to “cooperate” and, so, with meritorious action.

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opposed forces. For Pascal, grace no more opposes or undercuts human freedom than does intellectual understanding. On the contrary, like intellectual understanding, it restores and perfects human freedom from within, so as to overcome what limits man from choosing his proper end and good.52 Indeed, this parallel with intellectual understanding is less an analogy than a manner of description, since the internal restoration and perfection wrought by grace is as much intellectual as volitional and affective. To be sure, Pascal takes the action of the Holy Spirit to inspire “sweetness and pleasures,” but also an apprehension that God’s law is the “beatitude and happiness” proper to man.53 Putting the whole picture together: God changes the heart of man by a celestial sweetness which he infuses there. Overcoming the delectation of the flesh, this makes man – aware, on the one hand, of his mortality and nothingness [néant] and discovering, on the other, the greatness and eternity of God  – conceive a disgust for the transports of sin that separate him from the incorruptible good. And finding his greatest joy in the God who charms him, he inclines toward him infallibly and of himself [il s’y porte infailliblement de lui-même], by a movement wholly free [tout libre], wholly voluntary [tout volontaire], wholly loving … It is thus that God disposes the free will of man without imposing any necessity on him[.]54 52  Michael Moriarty notes that Pascal, in Écrit VIII, explicitly rejects as misleading any picture of the will as pushed and pulled from the outside by grace or sin: “such models…distort since they always imply that the attraction is somehow external to the will, whereas it actually transforms the will.” See Moriatry (2003), p. 151. 53  Écrit XI, OC II, p. 290. This is brought out beautifully by Moriarty (2003), pp. 148–149 and also 151. 54  Prov. XVIII, OC I, pp. 800–801. Also Moriarty (2003), p. 149. The misunderstanding of Pascal on grace and freedom by Clarke (2015) is traceable precisely to these points: the assumption that divine and human activity are distinct and opposed forces, the former moving the latter by means of extrinsic incentives that compel the passions. The same confusions are on display in Moser (2018), p. 78. Despite an excessive emphasis on the affective dimension of grace, Miel (1969) correctly rules out the interpretation that we are “determined… ‘from behind’ by a God who pushes us against our will.” Nevertheless, his alternative, that we are drawn “in a sense from in front,” by our object, also misses the mark (p. 98). Grace changes man from within by actualizing his natural powers, as Miel’s own discussion of Pascal on primary and secondary causation begins to suggest (pp.  92–94). Wood (2018) draws close to Pascal’s position in his discussion of the dependency of all things, including man’s will, on God as creator and primary cause of all things (p. 56), but he fails to pursue the implications of this observation and slips back into claiming that human “choices about whether to accept or reject God…are ultimately outside their own control” (p. 58). It may be that neo-Humean “compatibilism,” presupposing as it does the reconciliation of opposed elements, is not adequate to the issues at stake.

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God, who is the purely active source, principle, and cause of things, diffuses grace into man, actualizing the natural powers of the human being, so that in cooperation with grace, the whole human person turns toward his supernatural end without either external constraint or internal necessity. To say that grace moves the free will infallibly, then, cannot mean that man is no longer capable of choice and, so, of resistance. Pascal is adamant that there can be only “imaginary contradictions … between the sovereign power of grace over the free will and the potency the free will has to resist grace” and that he knows “only too well that man, by his proper nature, always has the power to sin and to resist grace, and that, since his corruption, he bears an unhappy depth of concupiscence which augments this power in him infinitely[.]”55 Pascal’s “always” is not a hand-waving modifier. Man’s power to resist grace applies not only to initial graces but even “against Calvin … efficacious grace.”56 Man, infused with grace, “would be able always to pull away from it and … would indeed pull away if he willed it,”57 but why would he, when such a choice would undo the very natural powers by which any choice is made? The more grace actualizes the human will, the more capacity man has to choose but, at the same time, the less inclined he is ever to make any choice that would vitiate that capacity. Man in such a condition has begun, however incompletely, to participate in the good which is both the end of grace and his own end—indeed, the end of ends, the summum bonum: “this unique good, which comprehends in itself all other goods.”58 Among these goods are a restored and elevated intellect and will, and included within them is the understanding that these are goods and that they are to be preserved by avoiding the grievous wounds caused by the rejection of grace in the choice to sin. Garrigou-Lagrange, describing Thomas on efficacious divine grace and human freedom, captures the Pascalian view precisely: Divine motion is not a mechanical action, like the action of a man rowing a boat; it is of a higher order, to be compared rather to the influx of life-giving sap by which a plant nourishes and renders itself fruitful. In fact, this infusion is proper to the eternal cause, existing beyond time, which is much closer to our will than our will is to itself; and the divine cause, moving our  Prov. XVIII, OC I, p. 800.  Ibid. 57  Ibid., p. 801. 58  Ibid. Cf. ST II-II, q. 24, a. 3, ad. 2: “gratia nihil est aliud quam quaedam inchoatio gloriae in nobis.” Thomas (1920/2017). 55 56

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will from within, inclines it to self-determination through deliberation toward this particular salutary, meritorious act rather than to its contrary. Thus God actualizes our liberty, causing together with us the free mode of our choice.59

The agreement of Pascal and Thomas is in fact still closer than this, for the Angelic Doctor maintains doggedly both that the free will must be moved by God for man to act meritoriously60 and that this movement operates “infallibly”: “God’s intention cannot fail … Hence, if God intends, while moving, that the one whose heart he moves should attain to grace, he will infallibly attain to it.”61 And, once again, we see Thomas defending his argument by appeal to Augustine, for whom, “By God’s good gifts whoever is liberated is most certainly liberated.”62 There remains a question about the freedom of those who are damned. If the foregoing account is correct, if, that is, God’s primary will is the principle of the secondary will, actualizing human freedom by means of grace, what should we conclude about those from whom grace is withdrawn? Can it still be said that they have rejected it freely, lacking as they do relation to the very ground that ordains their will in its fullness as a secondary cause? In his treatment of this issue, Pascal is clear that, while

59  Garrigou-Lagrange (1952), p. 258, and see also p. 42 n2. Garrigou-Lagrange’s metaphor is particularly apt, reversing as it does the image employed by Pascal to represent the transmission of original sin, “passed from Adam to all his posterity, who were corrupted in him like fruit springing from a bad seed[.]” Écrit XI, OC II, pp. 288–289, perhaps tracking Matthew 7:16–20. Miel links the image to Pascal’s broader “organicist” view, as against “the inherent mechanism of both Molinists and Calvinists[.]” See Miel (1969), pp. 73–74. For Pascal, grace “operates in and through nature and the will, much as the principle of life itself.” Nevertheless, reflecting on the difficulty of articulating his own account, Pascal cautions that, “it is impossible to find in nature any example or any comparison that would comport perfectly with the actions of the will.” See Écrit VIII, OC II, p. 274. 60  See, for example, ST I-II, q. 109, a. 2, ad. 1; a. 6, ad. 1 and ad. 4; a. 7, ad. 1. Thomas (1920/2017). 61  ST I-II, q. 112, a. 3 in ibid., which Pascal quotes at Prov. XVIII, OC I, p. 802. Thomas here is initially concerned with preparation for grace (having already established that this itself requires grace—ST I-II, q. 109, a. 6) but moves to the broader point as the article develops. See also ST I, q. 23, a. 6, where Aquinas argues that God’s “Predestination most certainly and infallibly takes effect; yet it does not impose any necessity …[T]he order of predestination is certain; yet free-will is not destroyed.” 62  ST I-II, q. 112, a. 3 in Thomas (1920/2017). The reference is to Augustine’s De dono perseverantiae XIV, which Pascal does not include in his quotation of the Summa.

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God and man concur in both damnation and salvation,63 the fate of the damned rests decisively with their own choices. On the side of salvation, as we have just established, Pascal holds that the divine will is primary in the order of causes and of being, in a manner that does not exclude but rather enfolds and supports the contribution of the human will as a meritorious secondary cause. On the side of damnation, God’s will remains primary, through the denial of graces, but permissive, allowing the obdurately sinful to languish in the condition they have willed for themselves: And all those to whom this grace is not given, or is not given until the end, remain so titillated and charmed by their concupiscence that they prefer infallibly to sin rather than not to sin, for the reason that they find more satisfaction in it. And thereby dying in their sins, [they] merit eternal death, since they have chosen evil through their own free will [leur propre et libre volonté].64

To be sure, without the help of grace to actualize the will, no one in the state of fallen nature can choose the good from meritorious motives of charity. Indeed, as the habits of sin grow thick, they spread through the whole human person, eroding and deforming the natural powers, not least the will itself.65 At the same time, Pascal insists that the point of entry into sin is the free choice of man to refuse divine grace. This is, of course, spectacularly evident in the initiation of original sin.66 But it is no less true after the fall, with each person who repeats the sin of Adam. Thus, Pascal writes that postlapsarian man “chooses it [evil] voluntarily [volontairement], very freely [très librement], and with joy as the object in which he senses his beatitude.”67 The specification here that the choice to sin is both voluntary and free mirrors the use of these terms in the context of divine grace: for Pascal, the choice to refuse grace is no more subject to necessity than the choice to cooperate with it. The distinction between being mired in the unfree condition of sin, on the one hand, and, on the other, entering that condition voluntarily and freely is clear enough. Still, there may appear to be a tension, inasmuch as  See again Écrit VII, OC II, p. 257.  Écrit XI, OC II, p. 290. 65  Ibid., pp. 288–289. 66  Ibid., pp. 287–288. 67  Ibid., p. 289. 63 64

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man, after the fall, is already in the condition of sin, even if the particular habits have not yet set in as deeply as they might. Pascal does suggest that some may be denied grace owing to original sin, though of course this is itself the product of human free choice: “only Christ and his mother can be said to be truly innocent.”68 But the emphasis in Pascal’s account rests chiefly on divine prevision of individual demerits: Leaving the other part [of mankind] in the damnation where it was [after Adam’s freely chosen sin] and where he could in justice have left the whole mass, he foresaw [il a prévu] either the particular sins that each would commit, or at least the original sin of which they are all guilty, and that following on this foresight [cette prévision], he willed to condemn them.69

This emphasis is underscored in the general summary he gives of his position, that of the “disciples of St. Augustine … according to which, one sees that God has an absolute will to save those who are saved and a conditional will, through foresight [par prévision], to damn the damned, so that salvation proceeds from the will of God and damnation from the will of men.”70 God, thus, withdraws grace as punishment for the sins of the individual, sins God knows by prevision, but this divine volition to withhold graces and so permit damnation preserves human freedom by following from God’s timeless knowledge of the individual person’s free choice to sin.71 God remains, therefore, first in the order of being and causes, knowing and acting timelessly, according to his mode, while human beings choose and act in time, according to their mode. Three groups distinguish themselves: “those who never come to faith, others who come to it and do 68  I owe the formulation of this basic but much neglected piece of Catholic theology to d’Amécourt, (1995), p. 164. See Écrit VII, OC II, p. 261 and Écrit XI, OC II, pp. 287–288 and 290. 69  Écrit VII, OC II, p. 261. 70  Ibid., p. 262. 71  The critical handwringing in Moser (2018) over the “exclusive” (pp.  70, 71, 80–82) character of the divine gift of grace derives whatever force it has from its failure to register— indeed, its contradiction of (p. 70)—this element of Pascal’s thought. Once it is recalled, one can no longer maintain that, “God could have chosen to inspire and to save all people, with no loss of goodness for God or others” (p. 70). The loss in this lax, arbitrarily universal salvific scheme is divine justice. The otherwise rich and sophisticated reading of the Écrits in Miel (1969) also neglects to consider Pascal on divine prevision of demerits, an omission that leads to confusion about supposed tensions between the Écrits, on one hand, and the Conversion du pécheur and the Mystère de Jésus, on the other (pp. 121–122).

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not persevere, dying in mortal sin, and the last who come to faith and persevere there in charity until death.”72 Set against the three stages of grace identified above, we see that the first group, which would include those damned through original sin, fall at the initial stage of justification, while the second group never reaches the actual graces or the graces of perseverance opened through justification. Only the third group, consenting to, cooperating with, and acting from the graces made available through the mediation of created things, grows in full: from justification, to particular charitable actions, and then to perseverance in charity, until earthly death and life eternal. In response to an objection much like the one above—that “it seems unjust that to some merely sufficient grace alone is given and to others efficacious grace besides, without which in fact the commandments are not observed”—Garrigou-Lagrange quotes St. Thomas, who defers, as so often, to Augustine: “Man is held to many things which he cannot do without grace … That help is in fact given to some from on high is an effect of mercy, but that it is not in fact given to others in an effect of justice, as a punishment of preceding sins or at least of original sin, as Augustine says in his book De correptione et gratia.”73 Pascal’s own distinction between damnation owing to original sin and damnation following as a consequence of the particular sins of the individual person is strikingly similar, even in verbal formulation, to that of Aquinas.74 Pascal does not explicitly use this distinction to develop an account of negative and positive reprobation, as in the older Thomistic tradition.75 Nevertheless, he remains close to Thomism in his argument that the damnation of sinners follows from God’s prevision of demerits, demerits God permits rather than effects, and is therefore to be explained by reference to God’s

 Écrit VII, OC II, p. 262.  Garrigou-Lagrange (1952), p. 222. The quotation from Thomas can be found in ST II-II, q. 2, a. 5, ad. 1 in Thomas (1920/2017). Thomas’ reference to Augustine is De correptione et gratia V-VI, which also explicitly links loss of grace to divine prevision of sins, at, e.g., VII, IX, and XII. 74  Compare Pascal’s “les péchés particuliers que chacun commettrait, ou au moins le péché originel” (Écrits VII, OC II, p. 261) and Aquinas’ “in poenam praecedentis peccati, saltem originalis peccati” (ST II-II, q. 2, a. 5, ad. 1). 75  Garrigou-Lagrange (1943), pp. 684–685. A useful discussion of this “older Thomistic tradition” may be found in Most (1997), pp. 8–14 and 426–431. 72 73

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justice, as a punishment due to sin freely chosen.76It seems fair to conclude that, as regards human freedom and its capacity to cooperate with and to reject divine grace, Pascal does not endorse the second, third, or fourth of the Jansenist propositions condemned in Cum occasione. He holds that the human person can and does resist grace in the state of fallen nature, and he affirms that both in the choice to sin and in cooperation with divine grace, man acts freely, clear of both external constraint and internal compulsion. And, as in his treatment of the first proposition, the view at which he arrives is quite closely aligned with the one discovered by Thomas, following Augustine; he is, in the substance of his position, no more or less Jansenist than they.

   IV Pascal’s distance from the final condemned Jansenist proposition—that Christ did not die for all—is well established in the Provinciales. In the seventeenth, as we saw some pages ago, Pascal answers the charge of heresy by repudiating the five propositions and offering an unqualified statement of obedience to the doctrine of the church.77 Lest this reply be thought ad hoc, he points back to his fourteenth letter, written three months earlier, which had already registered his disavowal of the fifth condemned proposition. There, he argues that the unjust killing of a human being is not only homicide but sacrilege. The church regards men as “images of God whom she adores,” and murder is, therefore, the

76  On the reprobation of the sinful as a function of divine justice see, among other places, Écrit VII, OC II, pp. 261–262 and Écrit XI, OC II, pp. 289–290. The distinction between divine “doing and permitting,” as well as the centrality of divine prevision, is nicely articulated at Écrit VII, OC II, pp.  259–260, in the context of Pascal’s unyielding criticism of Calvinism for replacing these doctrines with an unjust divine voluntarism. See also Écrit XI, OC II, pp. 292–293. On the Thomist view of divine permission and prevision of sin in reprobation and its relation to divine justice, see Garrigou-Lagrange (1943), pp. 684–688 and 698–712, as discussed in Most (1997), pp. 8–9. Pascal’s claim that divine foresight always precedes reprobation places him nearer the interpretation of Aquinas taught by the church than the one advanced by Bañez. See Most (1997), pp.  5–6, as well as Hardon (2002), pp. 251–279, esp. 261–268. See also Torre (2009), p. 414. Torre attributes a similar view to Francisco Marín-Sola, OP, against Garrigou-Lagrange and Bañez. 77  Prov. XVII, OC I, p. 781.

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desecration of the imago Dei present in created nature.78 More: the human person acquires a further dignity, “a holy respect,” which makes “all venerable” by virtue of having been “redeemed at an infinite price.” Human beings obtain thereby a supernatural destiny, “to be made temples of the living God.”79 Since this redemption and deification is effected through the church and its sacraments, and murder “deprives her of one of her members, for, whether he is faithful or whether he isn’t, she considers him always either as one of her children or as capable of so being,” the murderer very possibly “damns one for whom Jesus Christ died.”80 As Pascal points out in the seventeenth letter, this whole argument, and especially its conclusion, could not have been set out by a Jansenist: “have I not obviously acknowledged that Jesus Christ died for these damned men and that it is thus false that he died only for the predestined, which was condemned in the fifth proposition?”81 In the Écrits, this position receives a more technical elaboration. Recall that, immediately after his introduction of the doctrine of divine foresight in Écrit VII, Pascal distinguishes three groups: those who never attain to the infused virtue of faith, those who do but fail to act from charity and to

78  Prov. XIV, OC I, p. 742 and also p. 736. As he points out in reference to Genesis 9:5–6, the creation of man in God’s image is the reason, at once, for the absolute prohibition of murder and for the permission and even requirement of capital punishment, together with special care for the eternal disposition of the souls of those so condemned (p. 745). As Pascal notes, this was already largely grasped by pagan natural law. See p. 737. 79  Prov. XIV, OC I, p. 742. 80  Ibid., pp.  742–743 and 745. These passages throw into relief the clumsiness of the observation made by Moser (2018), p. 68, that “In Pascal’s Jansenist story, only God can inspire humans in this way; the Church cannot.” Moser’s reference is to S440/L874. Pascal argues there by distinction that God is the principle, source, and cause of the graces for which we are prepared through the mediation of the church’s teaching, which is infallible just as the operation of grace is. For Pascal, “Jesus Christ is inseparable from the Church,” whose earthly head is the Pope (OC II, p. 34). Divine graces are made available through the church, above all through the sacraments, in which God is literally present (e.g., OC II, pp. 30–31, S751/L919, S794/L957). These are the instruments, of which God is the principle. The very same point is made by Thomas (1920/2017), ST I-II, q. 112, a. 1, especially ad. 2. Once again, we find that there is nothing especially Jansenist about the “story” attacked by Moser. 81  Prov. XVII, OC I, p. 781. See also pp. 786–787, where Pascal maintains the dispute is not over “‘whether Jesus Christ died only for the predestined’,” since that proposition is condemned equally by Port-Royal and the Jesuits.

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persevere, and those who grow from grace to grace, persevering until the end.82 Pascal claims that Christ wills the salvation of the last absolutely. He likewise proposes that Christ wills to redeem the second, imparting to them graces which would lead to that end, but that they make ill use of these and are, for this reason, denied further graces of perseverance.83 All of this is straightforward and directly consistent with what we have set out above. However, Pascal adds that “Jesus Christ did not at have an absolute will that the first should receive any grace by his death, for they have not indeed received any.”84 This statement follows upon another claim, slightly earlier on, that “God sent Jesus Christ to save, absolutely and by wholly efficacious means, those whom he chose and predestined from this mass … it is only these whom he willed absolutely to merit salvation by his death, and … he did not have this same will for the salvation of others who have not been delivered from this universal and just perdition.”85 There is some appearance of conformity with the fifth proposition here: if there are some have not received any graces, we might conclude that Christ did not die for them. This conclusion, however, is quick and superficial. The more charitable way to read these remarks, and also the most natural, taken in the context of Pascal’s view as a whole, is as an explanation of God’s absolute will, in contrast to the conditional will he has for the salvation of others, suspended by his prevision of their free choice to sin and so to refuse grace. This interpretation is supported directly by the summary he gives of this very section: “Here is their view [that of “the disciples of Saint Augustine”], according to which, one sees that God has an absolute will to save those who are saved and a conditional will, through foresight, to damn the damned, so that salvation proceeds from the will of God and damnation from the will of men.”86 It is also supported indirectly by his discussion of the opposed errors of the Calvinists and the Molinists. For Pascal, “the horrifying opinion [l’opinion épouvantable]” of the Calvinists is that God has “an absolute will, without any foresight of merit or of sin, to damn or to save his creatures.”87 The Molinists, for their part,  Écrit VII, OC II, p. 262.  Ibid. 84  Ibid. 85  Ibid., pp. 261–262. 86  Ibid., p. 262. Pascal identifies this position not only with Augustine, but also with “that of the Fathers and of the whole Tradition and, by consequence, of the Church.” See ibid., pp. 262–263. 87  Ibid., p. 260. See also Écrit XI, OC II, pp. 292–293. 82 83

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take up the opinion that “God has a conditional will to save all men generally,” so that “it depends on their will and not that of God to use them [divine graces] well or badly.” In this way, the Molinist view “excludes from God all absolute will and makes salvation and damnation proceed from the human will[.]”88 More briefly, the Calvinist error consists in the rejection of any conditional volition in God, whereas the Molinist one is to suppose that God has no absolute but only a conditional will.89 The opposition here opens the space for the account we have seen: that salvation follows from God’s absolute will and damnation from his conditional will, based on prevision of obdurate sinfulness and refusal of grace, voluntarily and freely chosen. The man murdered in mortal sin might have gone to confession, repented, and amended his life, but he did not. And this was a real possibility for him, or else Pascal could not say that the sin of the murderer lies partly in depriving his victim of the sacraments, removing him from the life of the church, and so bringing on his damnation. God willed the salvation of this man too, but conditionally and not absolutely.90 Christ’s blood, therefore, is not shed only for those who are ultimately saved. Is it shed for all? Pascal does not say so here, but he implies it, and he certainly says enough to defend himself from the heresy of the fifth proposition, just as he has from the previous four. By the summer of 1658 and the start of the text we now call the Pensées, however, Pascal moves

 Êcrit VII, OC II, p. 260. See also Écrit XI, OC II, pp. 291–292.  Miel refers to this as “a kind of dialectic of contrary heresies.” See Miel (1969), p. 76 Pascal’s approach anticipates a characteristic pattern of argument he employs in the Pensées and elsewhere: pitting two opposed and seemingly exclusive positions against one another in order to integrate them into a deeper view that maintains a dynamic tension. See ibid., pp. 122–123 and also Nemoianu (2010), and, more broadly, Chevalier (1933), p. 122. This point needs qualification, however: for all his acerbic criticism of the Jesuits in the Provinciales, Pascal, in the Écrits, is keen to clarify that he regards the dispute with his Molinist opponents—“for whom the Tradition of the Church is held in veneration” and who endeavor to follow the interpretation of scripture established by “her holy doctors and by her Popes and by her councils”—as a family quarrel. This is a concession he nowhere extends to the “error of the Calvinists” which, “joined to their rebellion…cries out to God,” an expression that implies the Calvinists are engaged in a form of parricide. See Écrit VII, OC II, p. 263. 90  The example, again, comes from Prov. XIV, OC I, pp. 742–743 and 745, along with Prov. XVII, OC I, p. 781. It may have its origin in ST I, q. 23, a. 6, ad. 2, where St. Thomas replies to an objection concerning a man murdered in mortal sin by arguing that while it is in principle possible for any man, considered as such, to die in mortal sin, this will not happen to one for whom God infallibly wills graces of perseverance and, so, salvation. Thomas (1920/2017). Pascal refers to this question in Écrit I, OC II, p. 219. 88 89

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beyond mere defensiveness and affirms openly what he uttered cautiously before.

   V Jacques Chevalier concludes his study of the Provinciales maintaining that Pascal “freed himself from the Jansenist idea” and moved toward Thomism, from which he adopted “a twofold principle of supreme importance:” 1. The existence of a sufficient grace which God refuses to none, and the power of human liberty to cooperate with, or resist, this grace; 2. The nature of the Divine action, which sets the human will to work freely, by a causality, not constraining but liberating, which transfers the “dignity of causality” to the secondary cause, and acts in us “without the infallibility of God’s operation in any way impairing man’s natural liberty.”91 Étienne Gilson, whose own thinking is marked by a profound and lifelong sympathy for Pascal, agrees.92 Assembling a substantial collection of passages from the Pensées and setting them beside Jansenius’ own texts, Gilson shows that, by the time of his apology, Pascal has not only freed himself from Jansenism but has come flatly to contradict it. Whatever obscurities there may be in the Pensées, Pascal’s “opposition to Jansenius here is powerfully clear.”93 By Gilson’s lights, the question of whether one accepts Jansenism hangs on the fifth proposition, whether Christ died for all or only for the elect: 91  Chevalier (1933), pp. 120–121. Chevalier’s latter quotation is from Prov. XVIII, OC I, p.  800. Pascal’s phrase “the dignity of causality [la dignité de la causalité]” appears at S757/L930. 92  Gilson’s deep connection to Pascal is brought out in wonderfully comprehensive detail by Fafara (2014). 93  Gilson (1924), p. 310. Gilson outlines a three-step method for assessing Pascal’s relation to Jansenism: 1. distinguishing Jansenius’ position from that of Port-Royal, 2. defining Jansenism by reference to Jansenius’ own doctrine in the Augustinus, and 3. opposing the text of the Pensées to that of the Augustinus. Our own approach is less concerned with Pascal’s distance from Jansenius—though it should be said that Gilson does establish that decisively—and more with his rejection of Jansenism, defined by reference to the particular propositions condemned by the church. Nevertheless, the passages analyzed by Gilson do correspond to the condemned propositions, so the practical difference is ultimately only slight.

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“Here is the very heart of the Jansenism of Jansenius: Jesus Christ died for all the elect, not for all men.”94 Pascal stands far from Jansenius: “Jesus Christ Redeemer of all. Yes, for he has offered, as a man who has ransomed all those who were willing to come to him. Those who died on the way – it is their misfortune. But as for him, he offered them redemption.”95 Christ did shed his blood for all and offers salvation to all who come to him willingly, though some resist and, dying in mortal sin, are not in fact redeemed.96 Moreover, to deny that Christ died for all is to stifle virtue and foster vice: “When you say that Jesus Christ did not die for all, you exploit a vice in men, who at once [incontinent] apply this exception to themselves, which favors despair rather than turning them from it to favor hope.”97 The conclusion, Gilson argues, follows straightforwardly: For Jansenius, “Jesus Christ died for all the elect, not for all men; Pascal teaches that Jesus Christ died for all men, even for those who are not the elect; Pascal is therefore not a disciple of Jansenius.” On the contrary, “he opens well wide the narrow arms of the Augustinus’ crucifix.”98 Wide indeed: as Chevalier in points out, it is simply impossible that a Jansenist could have written, “I love all men as my brothers, because they are all redeemed.”99 According to Gilson, Pascal’s upending of Jansenius on the nature of the sacrifice made on the cross and, indeed, on Christ himself reveals the “depth of the abyss that separates the two doctrines,” with respect to “ethics no less than metaphysics.”100 94  Ibid., p. 310. Gilson supports this claim with a quotation from Jansen’s Augustinus, “De gratia Christi salvatoris,” III. 21. 95  S451/L911. The Christmas hymn quoted by Pascal here—Jesu Redemptor omnium— also refers to Christ as “Tu spes perennis omnium” and as “Mundi salus.” See Britt (1922), pp. 100–102. 96  This echoes the earlier example of the man murdered in mortal sin: Prov. XVII, OC I, p. 781 and XIV, OC I, pp. 742–743 and 745. 97  S451/L912. Chevalier cites both of these passages and provides a detailed explanation of their conformity with the account of divine operation and human cooperation in the Écrits sur la grâce. Chevalier (1933), pp. 264–265 and 265–266 n1. Also Gilson (1924), p. 310. 98  Ibid. 99  S759/L931. Chevalier (1933), pp. 265–266 n1 and Gilson (1924), p. 310. Chevalier notes that, in the manuscript, this line is lightly crossed by a vertical stroke, though whether made by Pascal or a later editor is unclear. Whatever the origin or meaning of this stroke, the sentence is Pascal’s, and the untouched remainder of the fragment develops it. See also McCarthy (1997), p. 670, who adduces the line as further support for Kołakowski’s grudging admission, against the thesis of his own book, that there is little evidence of Jansenism in the Pensées. 100  Gilson (1924), p. 311.

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It remains to be added that, as in the Provinciales and the Écrits, the Pascal of the Pensées regards the doctors of the church as the surest guide to the resolution of questions like those over the reach of the cross. Reflecting on the interpretive difficulties posed by “omnes” in Scripture, he remarks, “There is heresy in always interpreting omnes as ‘all’ and heresy in not interpreting it sometimes as ‘all’ … We must, then, follow the Fathers and the Tradition in order to know when [to do which], since there is heresy to be feared on both sides.”101 Pascal’s immediate attention in this fragment is on the word’s implications for who is affected by Adam’s sin—“In quo omnes peccaverunt”—and who may licitly receive the Eucharist—“Bibite ex hoc omnes”102—but it could not be far from his mind that the same hermeneutic must apply to the wider use and meaning of the term. And, indeed, we find the fragment that begins Sellier’s eighteenth bundle employing the very same consideration about the Eucharist in its development of a rich dialectic of particularity and universality, moving from the Jews, to Christ’s sacrifice on the cross, to the transmission of that sacrifice in the sacramental reality of the church. For the Jews, “Moses [is] for one people” alone, and the Law of David is not made for all nations.103 And yet, the good that the Jews would reserve for themselves points beyond them in its nature as the universal good, the ultimate end of man as such. Thus, “The Jews [are] blessed in Abraham” first, but in time “all nations [are] blessed in his seed,” by the “lumen ad revelationem gentium,” so that, in contrast to Moses, “Jesus Christ [is] for all,” and, in contrast to David’s Law, “in speaking of Jesus Christ, we must say Fecit taliter omni nationi … Thus it is for Jesus Christ to be universal.”104 And yet, the universality of Christ affirmed by Pascal is not arbitrary and ­indiscriminate. We must affirm at one and the same time that “The Church herself offers the sacrifice [of the Eucharist] only for the faithful,” and that “Jesus Christ offered that of the cross for all.”105 Christ certainly shed his blood for all men, and yet to receive this sacrifice requires active participation in its sacramental incarnation, free cooperation with the graces it makes available, faithful assent to the  S474/L571.  Ibid. The scriptural references are to Romans 5:12 and Matthew 26:27. 103  S254/L221 and Psalms 147:20. 104  S254/L221, with references to Genesis 12:3 and 22:18, Luke 2:32 (and Isaiah 49:6), and a modification of Psalms 147:20. 105  S254/L221. 101 102

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authority of his church, and dutiful adherence to its laws: and these not all choose to do. The fifth Jansenist proposition is, therefore, the one on which all the rest hang. If the blood of Christ is shed for all but not all are saved, then the fate of the damned must proceed from their own free resistance to the graces made available to them, graces that would otherwise have led them to the Beatific Vision. Pascal affirms that the sacrifice of the cross was for all. In so doing, he rejects the fifth Jansenist proposition. He therefore rejects the first four propositions also. The text of the Pensées provides ample confirmation of this conclusion, affirming the twin Thomist principle identified by Chevalier as the upshot of the Provinciales and the Écrits sur la grâce: the divine initiative of grace and the actualization of the whole human person as secondary cause through free cooperation with it. God, who is the principle and the end of things, creates man with natural powers and ordains activities proper to those powers, in order “to impart to his creatures the dignity of causality.”106 Like St. Thomas, then, from whose Latin he translates this striking phrase, Pascal understands the human person as a secondary cause, a “co-­adjutor,” preserving through his proper activity “the beauty of order in things.”107 For both Pascal and Thomas in these passages, prayer is the highest expression of the dignity of causality in man. The one who prays advances God’s providential rule over the world, above all with respect to the supernatural destiny of the human person, by cooperating with grace and attaining further graces thereby. Thus, Pascal maintains, again following Thomas, that, in general and at the highest level [in communi], God is the principle and cause of salvation, but in a way that is not merely consistent with but, indeed, makes possible free human activity, at the particular level [in particulari].108

106  S757/L930. On God as principle and end, see S808/L988. On Christ specifically as principle and end, see S237/L205. 107  ST I, q. 23, a. 8, ad. 2, in which Thomas cites 1 Corinthians 3:9. Thomas (1920/2017). Compare Pascal’s “Pour communiquer à ses créatures la dignité de la causalité” and Aquinas’ “ut etiam creaturis dignitatem causalitatis communicet.” 108  S645/L791. Following the pattern of the Écrits, Pascal argues that the semi-Pelagians err by making the particular truth—human freedom—the general principle, and the Calvinists by taking the general truth of divine sovereignty to swamp human freedom. As Sellier and Ariew point out, Pascal derives the in communi—in particulari distinction from Aquinas, at ST I, q. 23, a. 5 in Thomas (1920/2017).

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This picture of the human person, freely cooperating with or refusing divine grace on the basis of the natural powers awakened by those very graces, is set against a background of divine initiative, of God’s operation continually inviting human cooperation, a theme that pervades the whole of the Pensées. The theme is already present in Pascal’s view of the universality of Christ’s sacrifice, from which it may be readily inferred, but he does not hesitate to announce it explicitly elsewhere. In the Mystère de Jésus, an extended meditation on Christ’s sacrifice, specifically at the Agony in the Garden, Pascal builds to the conclusion that, whenever and wherever we begin to turn toward God, it is because of graces that have already been made available to us through Christ: “Console yourself: you would not seek me if you had not found me. I thought of you in my agony; I shed such drops of blood for you.”109 The initiative of divine grace, so understood, is operative as the framework of every act of faith, hope, or charity, and it is likewise presupposed in the rejection of such acts and their corresponding virtues. All of these acts, for or against grace, are situated as free responses set within the ontologically and causally primary activity of God, responses this activity evokes and makes possible. The world exists for the exercise of mercy and judgment, not as if the men in it issued from the hands of God but as if they were the enemies of God, to whom he grants by grace enough light to return, if they will to seek and follow him, but also to punish them, if they refuse to seek and follow him.110 God’s operation is first in ontological and causal order, but its character is dual, expressing divine mercy and divine justice simultaneously, and reflecting, thereby, the derived freedom of the human being to assent to or reject the divine overtures. The very same created things that exist to mediate grace to the cooperative are the objects through which grace is withdrawn from the contumacious. To take a single example, the homely bread and wine that become in essence the body and blood of Christ in the Liturgy of the Eucharist are, for the first group, the most direct means of the graces opened by Christ’s sacrifice, all the more plentiful in proportion to the depth of cooperation on the part of the communicant. For the second group, however, reception of the very same transubstantiated 109  S751/L919. Sellier points out that the injunction to console oneself is a reference to the De diligendo Deo of St. Bernard of Clairvaux. 110  S700/L461.

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species occasions the withdrawal of grace.111 In both cases, God’s activity is primary and continual, but the character of its effect on the human person depends upon the nature of the human response to it, a response it demands and, in demanding, makes possible. Thus, when Pascal argues that God enjoins us to “Let yourself be guided by my rules. See how well I have led the Virgin and the saints, who have let me act in them,” we see at once the primacy of divine operation and the nature of human response to it, free cooperation that includes the power to resist.112 The Virgin is called, and she chooses to assent, uniting her activity to God’s: fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum.113 Likewise, the reader is called in a way proper to his station; he may or may not assent. The choice to assent is not a mere affective change, a passive acquiescence to feeling. Following, again, Pascal’s example of the Virgin, who sought to understand—Quomodo fiet istud, quoniam virum non cognosco?114—it requires the activity of all the natural human powers, not least the intellect: “Without a doubt, after considering what life is and what this religion is, we must not reject the inclination to follow the latter, if it comes into our heart.”115 For Pascal, these powers are engaged by grace as the condition of our choice: we could neither attain to nor turn away from our supernatural end without divine initiative; that transcendent end would simply not appear for us at all. Any objection to Pascal on the grounds of some supposed “harshness” or “selective mercy” in his account of grace is, therefore, spectacularly wide of the mark.116 God, indeed, denies grace to some, but precisely as a just punishment for refusing the graces offered to all, through Christ’s cross, as a matter of mercy. Put in simplest terms, sufficient grace is available to all who would but take it up. For this reason, to an interlocutor who complains, “I would soon have renounced pleasures … if I had faith,” 111  The example here is suggested by 1 Corinthians 11:27–29. Pascal offers a rich discussion of God’s hiddenness and disclosure through the particulars of human history, the Eucharist above all, in a letter to Charlotte de Roannez of October 1656 (OC II, pp. 30–31). This letter receives detailed treatment in McDade (2004) and Nemoianu (2015). 112  Again from the Mystère de Jésus, S751/L919. 113  Luke 1:38. 114  Luke 1:34. 115  S717/L482. This remark follows Pascal’s table of twelve categories of proofs of the Catholic faith. 116   The usual suspects: Moser (2018), p.  70, along with Clarke (2015) and Kołakowski (1995).

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Pascal replies, “And I tell you: you would soon have faith, if you renounced pleasures. Now, it is for you to begin.”117 Once again, it is divine mercy that renders intelligible human activity for the sake of a supernatural end. Because of God’s mercy, we can and should strive to be worthy of what we are offered: As the two sources of our sins are pride and sloth, God has revealed to us two of his attributes, to cure them: his mercy and his justice. Proper to justice is felling pride … and proper to mercy is combating sloth by inviting good works … And thus mercy, far from authorizing slackness, is, on the contrary, the quality formally attacking it. So, instead of saying: If there were no mercy in God, we should have to make every effort toward virtue, we must say, on the contrary, that it is because there is mercy in God that we must make every effort.118

The same point is repeated in the Mystère de Jésus, in the very voice of Christ: “Do you want it always to cost me the blood of my humanity, without your shedding tears? Your conversion is my affair. Do not fear, and pray with confidence, as though for me.”119 Christ’s blood, therefore, invites our cooperation, and Christ’s life establishes the means: “I am ­present with you through my word in Scripture, through my spirit in the Church and through inspirations, by my power in priests, by my prayer in the faithful … among my chosen and in the Holy Sacrament.” It also establishes the end: “Physicians will not heal you, for you will die in the end; but it is I who heal you and make the body immortal.” And all this is achieved through the concurrence and unification of human secondary causation with God’s omnipotent primary causation: “Do small things as 117  S659/L816. Pascal makes the same argument, for the same reason, at the end of the Infini rien fragment: “You would like to arrive at faith but do not know the way? You would like to be cured of unfaithfulness, and you ask for the remedies? Learn from those who were bound like you…Follow the behavior by which they began: doing all things as if they believed, taking holy water, having Masses said” (S680/L418, p. 471). For Pascal, this is not because of a psychologistic view that “belief is catching” (Hacking (1975), p. 66, and also Mackie (1982), p. 202 and Flew (1984), p. 63, among a legion of others) but because these are among the ordinary means of our cooperation with grace, ordained by God through his church, and so are the normal place for someone who has made, by grace, the first act of faith and now seeks to confirm and repeat it. More simply: that’s what one does with the infused virtue of faith. 118  S638/L774. The heading of this fragment reads, “Against those who, trusting in the mercy of God, remain indifferent, without performing good works.” 119  S751/L919.

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though they were great, because of the majesty of Jesus Christ, who does them in us and lives our life, and great things as though they were small and easy, because of his omnipotence.”120 Securing the twin Thomist principle identified by Chevalier—the initiative of divine grace and the actualization of the whole human person as secondary cause through free cooperation with it—the Pensées establishes not merely Pascal’s rejection of Jansenism but, in fact, his transcendence of it. The horizon of Jansenism is not the horizon of Pascal; its concerns are not his concerns; its conclusions are not his conclusions.

   VI As Hans Urs von Balthasar puts it in his remarkable overview: “Pascal comes to Port Royal from something of his own that is greater, and he finally passes beyond Port Royal to something of his own that is greater yet.”121 That Pascal’s work is carried on within the Catholic intellectual tradition and is self-consciously subordinated to the authority of the church does not qualify or limit von Balthasar’s claim. On the contrary, this very embeddedness is the source of Pascal’s originality and vitality as a thinker. It is the basis from which he is able to rise above the material and historical conditions that might otherwise have determined his thought, as those were set both by Port-Royal and by the Society of Jesus.122 It is, likewise, what enables him to step over the cultural and intellectual secularity represented by the names of Montaigne and Descartes.123 Indeed, Pascal’s curious position in the history of philosophy, marked at once by esteem and discontinuity from his contemporaries, arises precisely from his deep fidelity to the sacred tradition of the church, which he refers to as “the true source of truth” and “the higher principle,” to which “submission and conformity” are required.124 Set against the background of a  All from S751/L919.  Balthasar (1986), p. 174. 122  Well observed by (the Jesuit) von Balthasar, ibid. 123  This secularity and Pascal’s difference from it is fruitfully explored by Hibbs (2017). 124  S439/L865 and S317/L285. Pascal’s view of the close relation between sacred tradition and truth is brought out by Hartle (2017), pp. 21–23. Christ, of course, is the radically transcendent ground of this tradition, as S634/L769 makes clear. On Pascal’s place in the history of philosophy, we might consider Hume’s simultaneously hostile and fawning assessment of him as an “artificial” man, choosing, despite his “genius” and “virtue,” to live willfully “in a different element from the rest of mankind.” Hume (1975), pp. 342–343. 120 121

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modernity founded on a pervasive rejection of tradition in favor of an iconoclastic conception of originality, Pascal’s difference appears not only novel but even stark.125 Pascal’s simultaneous traditionalism and originality is perhaps nowhere more in evidence than in his choice of allies. Unlike his engagements with Montaigne and Epictetus, which are always carried on in terms that are, at best, mixed,126 and farther still from his profound and even angry rejection of Descartes,127 Pascal’s thought is woven through with positive appropriations from the intellectual tradition of the church. Here we find not only Thomas and Augustine, along with the other Fathers and Doctors referenced in the Provinciales and the Écrits, but also, in the Pensées alone, a profusion of thinkers: Dionysius the Areopagite,128 Irenaeus,129 Tertullian,130 Eusebius,131 Athanasius,132 Hilary of Poitiers,133 John Chrysostom,134 Bernard of Clairvaux,135 Ramon Martí,136 and Teresa of Ávila,137 among others.138 Pascal’s use of these figures is at once old and

125  As Stanley Rosen has it: “Modern thought characteristically begins with a self-confident assertion of its novelty, precision, and power.” Rosen connects to the point to passages in Machiavelli, Galileo, Hobbes, Spinoza, and, especially, Descartes. Rosen (1989), p. 22, who quotes, at n. 1, from Descartes’ 1643 letter to Voet, “Sed circa Philosophiam … nihil laudabilis est, quam esse Novatorem.” 126  In the Entretien avec M. de Sacy sur Épictète et Montaigne, the two are characterized as “the greatest poisons,” from which a skillful doctor may nevertheless concoct a remedy. OC II, p. 97. On Montaigne, see also S534/L649 and S644/L780. On Stoicism, see S26/L407 and, more strongly, S177/L144 and S180/L147. 127  S462/L553, S118/L84, and, famously, S445/L887. The decisive treatment of Pascal’s clash with Descartes is McCarthy (1994–1995). 128  S629/L762. 129  S418/L970. 130  Ibid. and S440/L868. 131  S418/L970. 132  S449/L902, S495/L598, S798/L962. 133  S418/L970, S441/L877. 134  S798/L962. 135  S224/L191, S246/L213, S802/L968. 136  S308/L277 and following, S369/L337, S718/L483. 137  S495/L598, S598/L721, S750/L920, S756/L928. 138  Many of these are discussed in interesting and suggestive ways by Michon (2007). Augustine and Aquinas, of course, both figure regularly in the Pensées, and, as in Pascal’s earlier works, the latter emerges as model more often than one might suppose. See, for example, point #3 in S419/L830, where Thomas’ view of miracles is treated as the standard of orthodoxy.

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new. It is a recovery of the ancient traditions of the church and a reconfiguration or re-presentation of them. It is, in a word, recapitulation.139 As von Balthasar rightly suggests in relation to Pascal on Augustine, the complaint that Pascal’s familiarity with the figures he employs is partial, often taken at second hand and in snippets from other sources or pulled from conversation with friends, is irrelevant.140 The question here is not whether Pascal has met the fussy norms of contemporary scholarship but to what extent his recapitulations are animated by entry into and assumption of sacred tradition, in service of “let[ting] things truly appear.”141 The answer to this question can only be that Pascal’s thought is animated in this way at every joint: “The history of the Church must properly be called the history of truth.”142 To suppose that pursuit of the truth through sacred tradition depends on pedantic repetition of Augustine or Thomas or anyone else is to miss the deeper point—that there is a metaphysics implicit in the structure of Catholicism that cannot be separated from it. Theoretical seriousness about Catholic philosophical theology will always bend toward and draw on this metaphysics. It is there in the very bones of the Catholic understanding of God, the world, and man, and it is, consciously or not, presupposed by any who engage contemplatively with these.

References Hans Urs von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord: A Theological Aesthetics, vol. 3, ed. John Riches, trans. Andrew Louth et al. (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1986) Matthew Britt, OSB (ed.), The Hymns of the Breviary and Missal (London: Burns, Oates, and Washbourne, 1922) Vincent Carraud, “Pascal’s Anti-Augustinianism,” Perspectives on Science 15 (2007): 450-492 Jacques Chevalier, Pascal, trans. Lilian A. Clare (London: Sheed and Ward, 1933) Desmond Clarke, “Blaise Pascal” in Edward N.  Zalta (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2015 Edition), plato.stanford.edu/archives/ fall2015/entries/pascal/

 See, once more, Prufer (1993).  Balthasar (1986), pp. 183–184 and n37. A representative version of the complaint can be found in Carraud (2007). 141  Sokolowski (2012), p. 10 n. 5. 142  S641/L776. 139 140

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5  AFTERWORD—DIVINE GRACE AND HUMAN FREEDOM: PASCAL… 

141

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Index1

A Abyss, 48, 49, 65, 81n74, 87, 97, 98, 131 Álvarez, Diego, 111 Aquinas, Thomas, 28n27, 31n39, 52, 111, 114, 115, 122n61, 125, 125n74, 126n76, 133n107, 133n108, 138n138 Ariew, Roger, 2n3, 2n5, 4n11, 56n46, 70n28, 133n108 Aristotle, 15n46, 39n74, 76n54 Armour, Leslie, 67n8 Athanasius, 138 Augustine, 61n75, 66n3, 69n16, 73n41, 76n57, 109n7, 111–115, 111n17, 113n23, 113n26, 122, 122n62, 124–126, 125n73, 128, 128n86, 138, 138n138, 139

B Baird, A. W. S., 67n9 Balthasar, Hans Urs von, 31, 67n8, 72, 112n22, 137, 139 Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules, 17n53 Being, 1, 3, 4, 6, 9, 10, 12, 13, 16–18, 26–33, 32n46, 35, 36, 38, 38n70, 39, 42, 45–47, 49, 51, 52, 54, 57n52, 60, 61, 65–70, 76, 79–81, 83, 85, 87–92, 95–98, 101, 116, 123, 124 Berdyaev, Nikolai, 61n75 Berkeley, George, 55n45 Bernard of Clairvaux, 138 Bloom, Allan, 15n42, 51n29 Body, 8, 24, 26, 27, 29, 36, 48, 66–69, 69n16, 70n22, 72, 77, 77n59, 78, 80, 81, 83, 86, 88, 134, 136 Boredom, 13–15, 59, 60, 90–93, 90n116, 91n122, 91n123, 97

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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INDEX

Bouchilloux, Hélène, 56n46 Brague, Rémi, 70 Bruckner, Anton, 1 Brunschvicg, Léon, 2n3, 8n28, 22n4 Buben, Adam, 99n146

90–93, 96–100, 102, 103, 114n28, 117, 117n39, 125, 127, 127n78, 134 Cum occasione, 107, 110, 112, 114, 115, 118, 126

C Calvinists, 112, 122n59, 128, 129, 129n89, 133n108 Carlyle, Thomas, 72n38 Carraud, Vincent, 139n140 Catholic, Catholicism, 7, 109–112, 124n68, 135n115, 137, 139 Charity, 35n59, 67, 72n39, 73, 94, 113–115, 113n23, 114n28, 118, 123, 125, 127, 134 See also Love Chevalier, Jacques, 67n8, 108n3, 110n10, 111, 130, 131, 131n99, 133, 137 Chrysostom, John, 109n7, 138 Clarke, Desmond, 107n1, 120n54 Commandments, 112–114, 112n20, 113n23, 114n28, 125 Conrad, Joseph, 17n52 Contingency, contingent, 10, 11, 14, 17, 26, 27, 29, 31–34, 38, 45, 49, 51n29, 52–54, 56, 58, 60, 65, 68, 69, 77, 78, 80, 86, 89, 97, 98, 103, 117 Cortese, João Figueiredo Nobre, 49n21, 50n26, 51n29 Cosmos, 10, 11, 17, 22, 28, 30n37, 31–34, 37–40, 45, 47–49, 54–56, 58, 65, 66, 69, 71, 78, 84n89, 88 See also Whole; World Council of Trent, 112 Creation, created, 10–14, 16, 22, 27, 28, 31, 32n46, 35n59, 36, 45–47, 57, 57n52, 58, 61, 65, 65n1, 66, 78, 79, 81, 83, 87, 88,

D d’Amécourt, Joseph, 124n68 Damnation, 115, 116, 123–125, 128, 129 See also Salvation De Franceschi, Sylvio Hermann, 111n17 Death, 1, 11, 12, 14, 16, 18, 42, 45–47, 58–62, 80, 84, 86, 89–92, 97–100, 99n146, 102, 103, 123, 125, 128 See also Martyrdom Descartes, René, 2n5, 6n23, 29, 30n37, 39n73, 50n26, 55, 56n46, 75n49, 82, 84n89, 92n127, 100n155, 137, 138, 138n125, 138n127 Dionysius the Areopagite, 28n27, 138 Disclosure, 3, 4, 6, 8, 10, 11, 13, 28–35, 37, 39, 40, 42, 45, 54, 56, 58, 60, 61, 70–73, 76–79, 83, 85, 93, 101, 135n111 Distinction, 3, 4, 6, 8, 10, 11, 14, 15, 17, 17n51, 18, 21–33, 29n34, 32n48, 34n54, 35–37, 35n59, 38n70, 39–42, 39n73, 40n78, 45–47, 49, 54, 57, 58, 61, 65, 67n8, 70–73, 71n33, 75, 79n68, 86, 87, 92, 93, 95, 96, 101–104, 109n5, 113n23, 117n39, 119n47, 123, 125, 126n76, 127n80, 133n108 Diversion (divertissement), 13–16, 17n52, 33, 59, 60, 88–94, 90n116, 93n129, 96, 97, 100, 103

 INDEX 

E Eliot, Thomas Stearns, 7n27 Ends, 3–5, 9n32, 10–14, 16, 18, 25, 26, 28, 34, 35, 46, 48–50, 53, 54, 57n52, 59, 61, 66, 70–72, 72n38, 74, 76, 78, 79, 81, 83, 87–89, 92, 93, 96, 98, 104, 108, 111, 112n22, 118–121, 123, 128, 132, 133, 135, 136, 136n117 Epicureanism, 17 Eusebius, 138

153

Goldmann, Lucien, 101n160 Gouhier, Henri, 21n2 Grace, 25, 41, 61, 79n66, 85n94, 102, 103, 107–139 Greatness (grandeur), 11, 27, 49, 51–56, 58, 62, 85, 91, 97, 120 See also Wretchedness (misère)

F Fafara, Richard, 130n92 Faith, 24, 40, 41, 58, 70, 75, 75n50, 84, 102, 108, 111, 124, 125, 127, 134–136, 135n115, 136n117 Ferreyrolles, Gérard, 111n17 Flew, Antony, 21n2, 136n117 Fouke, Daniel Clifford, 31n42 Fragments, fragmentation, 2n3, 3, 4, 6, 6n23, 9n33, 10, 11, 15, 17, 21, 21n2, 22, 22n4, 26–30, 28n29, 29n34, 32–34, 49n21, 50n25, 57n49, 57n52, 77n59, 79n67, 96, 131n99, 132, 136n117, 136n118 See also Order Freedom, 12, 13, 25n17, 32, 35, 61, 74, 78, 79, 79n66, 81, 84n89, 92n127, 93, 102, 107–139 Fulgentius, 113n26 Furtwängler, Wilhelm, 1

H Hacking, Ian, 136n117 Hammond, Nicholas, 2n5 Hardon, John, 126n76 Hartle, Ann, 75n52, 137n124 Heart, 6n23, 12–14, 16, 17n52, 18, 29n34, 34, 40, 49n18, 51n29, 66–81, 83–86, 88, 93, 95n137, 96–99, 101–104, 110, 119n47, 120, 122, 130, 135 See also Intellect; Memory; Will Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1, 55n44, 82 Herodotus, 54n41 Hibbs, Thomas, 9n33, 137n123 Hiddenness, hiding, 4, 13, 35n59, 93, 135n111 Hilary of Poitiers, 138 Hobbes, Thomas, 100n155, 138n125 Hume, David, 55, 82, 82n77, 137n124 Hunter, Graeme, 107n1 Huysmans, Joris-Karl, 17n53

G Garrigou-Lagrange, Réginald, 114, 121, 122n59, 125, 126n76 Gilson, Étienne, 130, 130n92, 130n93, 131, 131n94 God nature of, 32, 42 proofs of, 24, 30

I Immanence, immanent, 3, 10, 11, 26, 27, 37, 38, 45–47, 52, 56, 57, 66, 84n89, 94 Incarnation, 10, 11, 13, 38–42, 45–51, 56, 58–62, 65, 66, 75, 76, 78, 81, 98, 99, 132 See also Jesus Christ

154 

INDEX

Infinite, infinity, 16, 18, 22, 23, 25, 26, 29, 30, 30n37, 32–34, 35n59, 36, 37, 39n73, 48–51, 49n21, 50n25, 54, 55, 58, 59, 61, 67, 84n89, 98, 127 Infinity nothing (Infini rien), 4, 4n11, 6, 8–11, 14, 15, 17, 21–35, 29n34, 35n59, 37, 39, 40, 42, 45, 46, 49, 49n21, 57, 58, 61, 65, 86, 87, 92, 96, 102–104, 117n39, 136n117 Ingratitude, 14, 95, 96 Intellect, 70, 73, 76, 114, 119n47, 121, 135 See also Heart; Reason Intuition, 29n34, 69, 70n24, 70n28, 71, 72 See also Heart Irenaeus, 109n7, 138 J Jansen, Cornelius, 107 Jansenism, Jansenist, 79n66, 107–139, 108n4, 109n5, 127n80 Jesuits, 109, 111, 127n81, 129n89 Jesus Christ, 8, 41, 42, 45–47, 56, 58, 60, 99, 117, 127, 127n81, 128, 130–132, 137 See also Incarnation Jews, 34, 34n54, 39, 76, 132 Jones, Matthew L., 28n29 Jordan, Jeff, 21n2 K Kant, Immanuel, 5n20 Kierkegaard, Søren, 99n146 Kołakowski, Leszek, 107n1, 131n99 L Lafuma, Louis, 2n3, 2n5, 22n4 Lazzeri, Christian, 68n12

Le Guern, Michel, 2n3, 2n5, 6n23, 22n4, 108n4 Love, 4, 6n23, 34, 46, 69, 73, 77, 80, 86, 87, 93–96, 100–102, 113n23, 118, 131 See also Charity Lutherans, 110, 112, 113 M Machiavelli, Niccolò, 80n70, 138n125 Mackie, J. L., 136n117 Manent, Pierre, 9n33 Mangelsdorf, Anacan, 71n33 Marion, Jean-Luc, 32n45, 56n46, 67n11, 79n67 Marshner, W. H., 61n75 Martyrdom, 14–16, 97–104, 110n10 See also Death McCarthy, John C., 2n5, 32n46, 56n46, 69n16, 76n57, 107n1, 138n127 McDade, John, 39n76, 135n111 Mediation, mediator, 11, 12, 36, 41, 46, 57, 58, 61, 62, 77, 83n80, 97–99, 125, 127n80 See also Incarnation; Jesus Christ Melamed, Yitzhak, 55n44 Melzer, Sara E., 2n5 Memory, 35–42, 69n16, 74–77, 75n49, 75n50, 77n59, 119n47 See also Heart Mesnard, Jean, 2n5, 67n8, 108n4 Michon, Hélène, 35n59, 138n138 Miel, Jan, 113n23, 117n39, 119n47, 120n54, 122n59, 124n71, 129n89 Miller, Jon, 55n44 Miton, Damien, 25, 94n132 Molinists, 112, 122n59, 128, 129, 129n89 Montaigne, Michel de, 55, 56n46, 100, 137, 138

 INDEX 

Moriarty, Michael, 109n6, 113n23, 114, 120n52, 120n53 Mortality, 52–54, 59, 80, 89, 91, 97, 99, 103, 120 See also Death Moser, Paul, 107n1, 116n34, 120n54, 124n71, 127n80, 135n116 Most, William G., 125n75, 126n76 Mottram, Rex, 111n13 N Nature, 1–6, 9–15, 17, 18, 22, 24–27, 29–34, 30n37, 35n59, 37–42, 45–62, 66, 68–70, 70n24, 74–86, 75n50, 78n61, 84n89, 88, 90–93, 95, 97–103, 99n146, 108, 111n13, 113–117, 114n28, 121, 122n59, 123, 126, 127, 130–132, 135 Necessity, necessary, 1, 6n23, 10–12, 14, 16, 26, 27, 29, 31–34, 38, 40, 45, 46, 49, 49n21, 50, 52, 54, 56, 58–61, 65, 65n1, 66, 68–70, 70n24, 74, 75, 77, 98, 99, 103, 108, 118–121, 122n61, 123 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 82, 82n78, 99n146 Norman, Buford, 69n16 North, Michael, 7n27 Nothing, nothingness, 3–7, 4n11, 9–11, 13–18, 25–27, 28n29, 30, 31, 35, 39, 40, 42, 46, 47, 49–51, 51n29, 54, 56–58, 60, 65, 72, 78, 80, 82, 84, 86, 87, 89, 90, 90n116, 92–97, 99, 101–104, 112n22, 120, 127n80 O O’Connor, Flannery, 109n5 Oppositions, 3, 4, 12, 17, 56n46, 57, 58, 60, 96, 98, 129, 130 Oppy, Graham, 21n2

155

Order, 2–4, 6–9, 9n33, 11, 13, 14, 16, 22n4, 25, 29, 29n34, 33, 34, 35n59, 40, 48, 59, 66–68, 67n8, 67n9, 68n12, 69n16, 70, 71, 72n39, 73, 76, 79–81, 85n91, 88, 89, 98, 108, 108n4, 114, 116, 121, 122n61, 123, 124, 129n89, 132–134 See also Fragments, fragmentation Orwell, George, 90n116 P Pagans, 31n39, 33, 34, 38n70, 39, 76, 100, 127n78 Parmenides, 55n44 Particular, particularity, 2n5, 7, 10–12, 17, 21n2, 22n4, 26, 27, 30, 31, 36–40, 39n73, 42, 45, 46, 49, 50, 50n25, 51n29, 52, 54–56, 55n44, 55n45, 58–60, 65, 69, 74–78, 76n54, 77n59, 91, 113–115, 122, 124, 125, 130n93, 132, 133, 133n108, 135n111 Pascal, Blaise, 1–9, 2n3, 2n5, 4n11, 6n23, 8n28, 9n33, 12, 14–18, 17n51, 21, 21n2, 22, 22n4, 24n9, 24n13, 25–28, 26n22, 28n27, 28n29, 29n34, 30–33, 31n43, 32n48, 34n54, 34n55, 35–42, 35n59, 36n61, 37n67, 40n78, 47, 48, 49n21, 50, 50n25, 50n26, 51n29, 52, 53, 53n40, 55, 56n46, 57n49, 60n71, 66, 66n3, 67, 67n8, 68n12, 69–72, 69n16, 70n28, 72n39, 74–77, 75n50, 75n52, 77n59, 79n66, 79n67, 82–84, 82n78, 85n90, 86–88, 86n96, 86n101, 90n116, 91n123, 92n127, 93, 94n132, 95n135, 97–101, 97n142, 99n146, 107–139 De l’esprit géométrique, 6n23, 49n21 Écrit sur la conversion du pécheur, 86

156 

INDEX

Pascal, Blaise  (cont.) Écrits sur la grâce, 24n9, 107n1, 108, 108n4, 111, 131n97, 133 Entretien avec M. de Sacy sur Épictète et Montaigne, 2n5, 56n46, 138n126 Mémorial, 35–37, 39, 75n52, 86, 104 Potestatum Numericarum Summa, 68n12 Provinciales, 24n9, 107n1, 108–112, 108n4, 109n6, 110n8, 110n10, 119, 119n47, 126, 129n89, 130, 132, 133, 138 Wager, 21 Pasqua, Hervé, 111n17 Périer, Gilberte, 112n22 Person, personhood, 4, 6n23, 11, 12, 30, 34n54, 40, 46, 57, 60, 61, 65, 66, 68, 69, 69n15, 73, 74, 76–78, 77n59, 78n61, 81, 83, 88, 91, 93, 96–99, 112, 117, 121, 123–127, 133–135, 137 Petitot, Hyacinthe, 109n6 Philosophy, 1, 6n21, 11, 15n42, 48–50, 51n29, 55, 55n44, 56n46, 67, 81–83, 82n77, 95n137, 100, 109, 137, 137n124 Pindar, 54n41 Plainemaison, Jacques, 109n6 Plato, 37, 51n29 Pope, 57n49, 110, 110n10, 111, 127n80, 129n89 Port-Royal, 107, 109, 110, 112, 127n81, 130n93, 137 Pound, Ezra, 7n27 Prayer, 13, 15, 81–88, 93, 96, 97, 97n142, 99, 111n13, 133, 136 Prosper, 111, 113n26 Prufer, Thomas, 6n21, 7, 7n24, 7n27, 11n36, 27n24, 38n71, 61n75, 66n3, 76n57, 84n89, 86n95, 95n137

R Ramon Martí, 138 Reason, 9, 11, 12, 22–24, 27, 29–31, 29n34, 33, 40, 40n78, 41, 46–48, 52, 54, 61, 67, 67n8, 69–73, 69n16, 72n38, 75n50, 76, 78–80, 82–85, 84n89, 85n91, 85n93, 88, 89, 91, 93, 98, 99n146, 109, 113, 114, 117n39, 123, 127n78, 128, 135, 136n117 See also Intellect Recapitulation, 7, 7n27, 8, 8n28, 10, 14, 139 See also Prufer, Thomas Rescher, Nicholas, 21n2 Roannez, Charlotte de, 39, 135n111 Robbins, Christopher William, 67n8, 67n9 Roniger, Scott, 58n57 Rosen, Stanley, 138n125 S Salvation, 108n2, 110, 116, 116n34, 123, 124, 128, 129, 129n90, 131, 133 See also Damnation Schopenhauer, Arthur, 82n78, 99n146 Scruton, Roger, 91n123 Seeing, sight, 32, 51, 71, 71n34, 72, 78, 79n67, 80, 81, 92, 97, 103 See also Vision Self, 4–6, 13–16, 32, 33, 39n73, 46, 53, 77–82, 77n59, 79n67, 84n89, 86n95, 87, 89, 91–93, 91n122, 97, 98, 100–103 as hateful, 14, 16, 93–98 Self-love, 14, 82, 94n134, 95, 96, 101

 INDEX 

Sellier, Philippe, 2n3, 2n5, 22n4, 33n49, 60n71, 71n32, 73n41, 111n15, 132, 133n108, 134n109 Seneca, 59n64 Silenus, 15–17 Sin, 62, 103, 113, 113n23, 114, 120, 120n52, 121, 122n59, 123–126, 126n76, 128, 129, 129n90, 131, 131n96, 132 Slade, Francis, 93n128 Sokolowski, Robert, 7, 26n22, 31n39, 34n55, 37n68, 38n70, 39n74, 45n1, 78n65, 84 Spaemann, Robert, 61, 61n75, 69n15, 75n53, 76n58, 78n61, 78n65 Speaking, speech, 13, 22, 31, 32n46, 51n29, 57, 70–72, 83, 87, 99, 132 Spinoza, Benedict de, 38, 39n73, 39n74, 54, 55, 55n44, 138n125 Stoicism, stoics, 17, 37, 55, 55n44, 56n46, 59 T Teresa of Ávila, 138 Tertullian, 109n7, 138 Theology, 10, 31, 31n43, 32n45, 67, 76, 124n68, 139 Theosis, divinization, 99 Thirouin, Laurent, 21n2 Torre, Michael D., 126n76 Tradition, 7, 7n27, 8, 11, 34n54, 36–42, 45, 55, 69n16, 75, 75n50, 75n52, 76, 107–139 Transcendence/transcendent, 3, 9–12, 14–16, 26, 28, 30–33, 35–38, 40, 42, 45–47, 49, 56–58, 61, 65, 66, 68, 74, 77–79, 81, 82, 87, 88, 95, 97, 99, 101, 103, 117, 135, 137, 137n124

157

Truth, 8, 9, 12–16, 17n52, 27, 32, 33, 53, 57, 58, 60, 68, 71–75, 75n52, 78–84, 78n65, 79n67, 84n89, 94–96, 111, 117, 133n108, 137, 137n124, 139 U Universal, 3, 10–12, 14, 17, 24n9, 30, 40, 46, 51n29, 56, 74, 76, 76n54, 91, 93, 96, 124n71, 128, 132 V Vision, 14–16, 17n52, 68, 71, 86, 102, 103 See also Seeing, sight W Walzer, Michael, 67n9 Waugh, Evelyn, 111n13 Whole, 3, 4, 10–12, 14, 16, 17, 21, 25–27, 30n37, 31, 33, 34, 36–40, 45, 47, 49–52, 55, 55n44, 56, 56n46, 57n49, 61, 65, 66, 68, 71, 72, 76, 78, 79, 81, 83, 85, 86, 96, 97, 101–103, 107n1, 110, 111, 120, 121, 123, 124, 127, 128, 128n86, 133, 134, 137 See also Cosmos; World Will, 12, 24, 72n39, 73, 76, 78, 83, 102, 108, 113–124, 119n47, 119n51, 120n52, 120n54, 122n59, 128–130, 134 See also Heart Wills, Bernard, 69n16 Wippel, John F., 9n34 Wood, William, 93n129, 94n134, 107n1, 120n54

158 

INDEX

Wordsworth, William, 72n38 World, 1, 2, 6, 10–12, 16, 17, 22, 25–29, 31–37, 38n69, 40–42, 45–48, 53, 54, 56–58, 60, 65, 65n1, 66, 68, 75, 80, 82, 83, 84n89, 86, 90, 92, 99–101, 103, 104, 133, 134, 139 See also Cosmos; Whole

Wretchedness (misère), 11, 27, 34, 51–57, 59, 62, 85, 89, 91, 95, 103 See also Greatness (grandeur) Z Zoberman, Pierre, 2n3, 2n5, 4n11, 70n28