Portals to the interior

“I can think of no Christian writer . . . more to be commended than Pascal to those who doubt, but who have the mind to conceive,” wrote the poet T.S. Eliot nearly a century ago. Blaise Pascal (1623–1662), the French mathematician, scientific speculator, and Christian apologist was a celebrated and provocative figure in life whose posthumous reputation grew beyond all measure on the strength of a single work that he would never have dreamed of publishing.

After Pascal’s early death, his nephew, Étienne Périer, gathered together a series of notes, scraps, and fragments of his ancestor’s writings and published them, with evident embarrassment, in 1670 as the Pensées (thoughts). The nephew found them utterly disorganized, “badly written,” and “badly thought out.” But, only five years earlier, François de La Rochefoucauld had published his Maxims, a collection of witty and disillusioned aphorisms, and they along with the Pensées have become classics of French letters—long books of tiny sentences and paragraphs suggestive of two very different sorts of wisdom. La Rochefoucauld simply describes the passions of human beings in a courtly society of elegant appearances and moral snakes. His observations are sociological. Pascal’s world was similarly full of pretensions and appearances, but Pascal’s eyes seek out the hidden needs of human nature, and his wisdom is quintessentially “existential” and religious.

Pascal’s reputation in France is in some ways different from his reputation in the world as a whole, and that difference is likely to determine how much one will appreciate Antoine Compagnon’s charming, eccentric, and fragmentary study of the writer. It’s composed of 41 short chapters, no one of which takes more than five minutes to read.

For the world at large, Pascal’s Pensées constitutes the first great work of Christian existentialism. If one encounters the work in most of its editions, one will have trouble discerning this, but if one goes to the 1931 W.F. Trotter translation, the form of argument toward which Pascal was working becomes clear enough. Pascal examined human nature and found it a mess: Some people understand math, others the heart, but almost nobody understands reality whole. They spend their hours in the pursuit of vanities, whether of money or scientific knowledge, in hopes that such things will make them happy. And yet, we all know that these things will not fulfill us; we pursue them merely as a diversion, to spare ourselves the “misery” of being left alone to think of our actual state and our true need.

What was that condition, according to Pascal? We are thinking things adrift in a mathematical abyss. We can comprehend neither the infinity of space beyond us nor the mathematically infinite divisions of the ground (literal and mental) on which we claim to stand. We are surrounded by infinities, and yet we want to cross those infinities to arrive at certainty. “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me,” Pascal writes, speaking not in his own voice but that of every person first awakening to his natural condition.

If we look inside ourselves, we will be even more shaken. For here Pascal shows us a third infinite abyss. We are empty, and, in our desire for happiness, our desire to be fulfilled, we spend our time in pursuit of any number of vain diversions. They are all vain. Only one object can fill the infinite hole in our souls, and yet we run from it in fear: That object is the true God. But we cannot stuff God into ourselves by reason, will, or imagination—we can only receive Him through the supernatural gift of grace, of charity.

Pascal’s Pensées, we can be nearly certain, was his collection of notes for an apology for the Christian religion that he never actually began to write. The depiction of man’s wretched natural condition, his vanity, fear, and self-deception, as well as man’s sole prospect for happiness in the reception of a divine gift, the interior presence of God Himself, has inspired centuries of Christian apologists, writers, and artists. From Dostoyevsky to Eliot, from Flannery O’Connor to the rock band U2, the modern Christian imagination has in fact been very much Pascal’s imagination: We are wretched, we are empty, but we may wait in the darkness of hope for the sudden fullness of God.

To experience this Pascal, one must return to those fortuitous scraps. But, as I say, there is another Pascal, the Pascal of the French tradition. Along with Michel de Montaigne and René Descartes, Pascal stands as one of the fathers of French national culture, which is the outcome of a paradox for which all three are responsible. The French tradition emphasizes a logical exactitude that prizes careful method and a mathematical precision as the criteria for knowledge. All of these seek to escape the uncertainties of actual human experience. And yet, that same tradition recognizes in various ways that all the methodical thinking in the world cannot account for the fullness of the interior experience of the self. As Pascal himself put it, “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.” The result of these two incompatible principles—rigorous logic and the insufficiency of logic, objective but impoverished method and rich but incommunicable subjectivity—gave form to modern French culture.

French culture recognizes Montaigne, Descartes, and Pascal as having something else in common. Despite the reservations of Pascal’s nephew, all three were master stylists. The influence of their thought has depended as much on how they speak as on what they argue. They are the classics of French philosophical prose: essayistic, perceptive, witty, and elegant.

Compagnon writes of Pascal in just these terms. The little book takes for granted that Pascal will be familiar from one’s school days. It tries to reintroduce the canonized thinker from one angle, then another, never attempting to comprehend the whole. Compagnon rather reflects on the many small ways Pascal spoke wisdom and shaped the life of modern France, in both its religious and secular characteristics. An American audience may find Compagnon’s points of emphasis misplaced, his engagement with Pascal’s ideas insufficiently earnest, his attentions curiously French rather than chillingly “existential.”

For all that, every reader should at some point encounter the bracing, disenchanting gauntlet Pascal throws down at our feet in hopes that, in the absolute solitude of our own interior lives, we may “know God.” Compagnon has not necessarily provided a comprehensive introduction, but he has certainly provided us several portals to the interior.