Pensées by Blaise Pascal

First published: 1670 (English translation, 1688)

Type of work: Philosophy

The Work

Blaise Pascal, scientist and mathematician, became a member of the society of Port Royal after his conversion following a mystical experience in 1654. He was actively involved in the bitter debate between the Jansenists, with whom he allied himself, and the Jesuits; the series of polemical letters titled Lettres provinciales (1656–57; The Provincial Letters, 1657) is the result of that great quarrel. Wanting to write a defense of Roman Catholic Christianity that would appeal to people of reason and sensibility, Pascal, in about 1660, began to prepare his defense of the Catholic faith.

Like many other great thinkers whose concern was more with the subject of their compositions than with the external order and completeness of the presentation, he failed to complete a continuous and unified apology. When he died at the age of thirty-nine he left little more than his notes for the projected work, a series of philosophical fragments reflecting his religious meditations. These fragments form the Pensées. Despite its fragmentary character, the book is a classic of French literature, charming and effective in its style and powerful and sincere in its philosophic and religious protestations.

Philosophers distinguish themselves either by the insight of their claims or by the power of their justification. Paradoxically, Pascal distinguishes himself in his defense by the power of his claims. This quality is partly a matter of style and partly a matter of conviction. Pascal writes, “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know,” by which he means not that emotion is superior to reason but that in being compelled by a moving experience, one submits to a superior kind of reason. Pascal also writes that “all our reasoning reduces itself to yielding to feeling,” but he admits that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish between feeling and fancy. Pascal believed that the way to truth is through the heart and feeling and that intuitive knowledge is the most important, not only because feeling or intuition is what leads the mind but also because it is essential to all reasoning, providing the first principles of thought. Much of the value of the Pensées results from the clarity with which Pascal presents his intuitive thoughts.

A considerable portion of the Pensées is taken up with a discussion of philosophical method, particularly in relation to religious reflection. The book begins with an analysis of the difference between mathematical and intuitive thinking and continues the discussion, in later sections, by considering the value of skepticism, contradictions, feeling, memory, and imagination. A number of passages remind the reader that a proposition that seems true from one perspective may seem false from another, but Pascal insists that “essential” truth is “altogether pure and altogether true.” The power of skepticism and the use of contradictions in reasoning depend upon a conception of human thinking that ignores the importance of perspective in determining one’s belief. Thus, from the skeptic’s point of view nothing is known because people can be sure of nothing. The skeptic forgets, however, that “it is good to be tired and wearied by the vain search after the true good, that we may stretch out our arms to the Redeemer.” Contradiction, according to Pascal, “is a bad sign of truth,” since there are some certainties that have been contradicted and some false ideas that have not. Contradiction nevertheless has its use: “All these contradictions, which seem most to keep me from the knowledge of religion, have led me most quickly to the true one.”

Pascal had the gift of responding critically in a way that added value to both his own discourse and that of his opponent. Criticizing writer Michel Eyquem de Montaigne’s skepticism, he comes to recognize the truth—a partial truth, to be sure—of much that Montaigne wrote. His acknowledgment of this is grudging: “It is not in Montaigne, but in myself, that I find all that I see in him. . . . What good there is in Montaigne can only have been acquired with difficulty.” As twentieth-century poet and critic T. S. Eliot points out in an introduction to the Pensées, however, Pascal uses many of Montaigne’s ideas, phrases, and terms.

Perhaps the most controversial part of the Pensées is Pascal’s section on miracles. He quotes Saint Augustine as saying that he would not have been a Christian but for the miracles, and he argues that there are three marks of religion: perpetuity, a good life, and miracles. He writes, “If the cooling of love leaves the Church almost without believers, miracles will rouse them. . . . Miracles are more important than you think. They have served for the foundation, and will serve for the continuation of the Church till Anti-christ, till the end.” Although there are other passages that assert the importance of faith and that are in no way dependent upon miracles for their assertions (for example, “That we must love one God only is a thing so evident, that it does not require miracles to prove it”), Pascal seems unambiguously to assert that miracles are a way to faith. This idea is opposed by those who insist that belief in miracles presupposes a belief in God and the Gospel. Pascal had been profoundly affected by a miracle at Port Royal, but his defense of the importance of miracles goes beyond that immediate reference, using appeals to reason and authority as well as to feeling.

Pascal’s “Proofs of Jesus Christ” is interesting not only because it pretends to offer demonstrations to appeal to unbelievers but also because it uses persuasive references that throw light on the question of Jesus’s historical status. He argues that it is because of the actions of unbelievers at the time of Christ that the faithful have witnesses to him. If Jesus had made his nature so evident that none could mistake it, the proof of his nature and existence would not have been as convincing as it is when reported by unbelievers.

Pascal’s famous wager is presented in the Pensées. He makes an appeal to “natural lights”—ordinary human intelligence and good sense. God either exists or does not. How shall one decide? This is a game with infinitely serious consequences. One must wager, but how shall one wager? Reason is of no use here. Suppose one decides to wager that God exists. Pascal writes, “If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.” Pascal concludes that there is everything to be said in favor of committing oneself to a belief in God and strong reasons against denying God. To the objection that one cannot come to believe simply by recognizing that one will be extremely fortunate if one is right and no worse off if one is wrong, Pascal replies by saying that if an unbeliever will act as if he (or she) believes, and if he wants to believe, belief will come to him.

This wager later inspired William James’s The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1897), in which the American pragmatist argues that Pascal’s method is essentially pragmatic. James’s objection to Pascal’s wager is that the wager alone presents no momentous issue; unless one can relate the particular issue being considered to a person’s great concerns, the appeal of the wager is empty. If such proof would work for Pascal’s God, it would work for any god whatsoever. James’s use of the wager to justify passional decisions, however, is much like that of Pascal.

In a section titled “The Fundamentals of the Christian Religion,” Pascal writes that the Christian religion teaches two truths: that there is a God whom people can know and that because of their corruption, people are unworthy of him. Pascal rejected cold conceptions of God that reduce him to the author of mathematical truths or of the order of the elements. For Pascal, the God of salvation has to be conceived as he is known through Jesus Christ. The Christian God can be known, according to Pascal, but since people are corrupt they do not always know God. Nature assists God to hide himself from corrupt people, although it also contains perfections to show that nature is the image of God.

In “The Philosophers,” Pascal emphasizes thought as distinguishing people from brutes and making the greatness of humanity possible. “Man is neither angel nor brute,” he writes, “and the unfortunate thing is that he who would act the angel acts the brute.”

Pascal is on the one hand eager to defend the Christian faith and on the other hand determined to indicate the shortcomings of humanity. He is remorselessly critical in his attacks on skeptics, atheists, and other critics of the Church, not simply because they err but because they do so without respect for the possibilities of human understanding or the values of religion. In regard to skepticism, he writes that his thoughts were intentionally without order to be true to the disorderly character of his subject.

It is not Pascal the bitter critic who prevails in the Pensées; it is, rather, the impassioned and inspired defender of the faith. Even those who do not share his convictions admire his style and the ingenuity of his thought, and much that is true of all humanity has never been better said than in the Pensées.

Bibliography

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