Pascal, Blaise (1623–1672)

Pascal was a polymath who became a major figure in religious thought and polemics, mathematics, theoretical physics, philosophy, and French literature, along with the design of public transport. There are surprising connections between different parts of his thought. For example, his mathematical ideas on probability are used in a famous “proof' of the existence of God. The status of this proof, known as Pascal's wager, should not be exaggerated. It was probably intended [Page 1830]as a way of grounding, or reinforcing faith rather than as the equivalent of a metaphysical-logical deduction of God's existence. In Pascal's wager we should believe in God because it brings us happiness to hope for an eternity of bliss after this life. If the belief is false, we will not lose anything, and if it is correct we make it less likely that we will be punished with an eternity of torment likely to result from failing to accept God.

Source: Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

The argument for God from a form of probability may have survived Enlightenment skepticism better than the intended certainty of metaphysical proofs. What may be more important about the wager is that it expresses the collapse of a metaphysical-theological structure of thought in which God's existence seems tied up with the existence of nature. In this worldview, humanity itself has clearly defined natural and divine purposes.

Pascal is among the key figures in establishing another view of humanity, which underlies the emergence of modern social science. Pascal's questioning of the old commonsense anthropology partly came from the Copernican Revolution in Science, and partly from an insistence on a very austere form of Catholic Christianity known as Jansenism. Jansenism was rooted in commentaries on St. Augustine by the Belgian Bishop Cornelius Jansenius, which came to be regarded as heretical by the Vatican. Jansenius, and his followers, emphasized the elements of pre-destination, the fallen nature of humanity and absolutist moral rigor in Augustine. It seems close to Calvinistic Protestantism, but the Jansenists were keen to deny this (as Pascal does in “Writings on Grace”). The convent and school of Port-Royal, in Paris, became a center of Jansenist religious thought, as well as a great center of education (Jean Racine was a student there) and philosophy (Pierre Nicole and others). Pascal had family connections with Port-Royal and became a Jansenist himself. He joined in a battle against the Jesuits, whom the Jansenists considered lax in application of principles, in the polemical-literary work, Letters Written to a Provincial.

The Jansenists were operating in a political environment where at first the French monarchy found them useful in combating the influence of the Jesuits and the Papacy in France, but they were later repressed when the conflict with Rome started to threaten the monarchy.

The currents of Pascal's life and work come together in his central achievement Pensées (“Thoughts,” but translations always leave the French title). Pascal's Wager appears there in a series of fragments that mix biblical interpretation with compressed meditations on philosophy and the condition of humanity. Pascal's Wager itself rests on Pascal's view of humanity as lost without God, and as marked by the loss of God, since God is absent from nature and the universe. After Copernicus, the universe lacks a center. It has become an eternal sphere without a center. In comparison to the infinite spaces of the universe of modern science, humans can be no more than thinking reeds. Humans have grandeur, but it is lost grandeur because of their fallen nature. We belong with God, but original sin separates us from the happiness of union. Not only are we weak in relation to physical nature, our lives lack substance. Someone who spends half his life dreaming that he is a king is as happy as that king, who might be dreaming that he is one of his lowly subjects.

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