A View on Blaise Pascal

I had my first formal talk on Blaise Pascal on Sunday afternoon but I first heard of his name years ago, when I was following a European literature course on the French-Swiss philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau's Confessions, the first romantic writer in the genre of autobiography. At that time, I was so surprised and delighted with a beautiful sentence written by him: "The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of."  That elegant sentence was written by Blaise Pascal  (1623-1662), a mathematician writing on projective geometry at age 16, a physicist on fluid dynamics, inventor of the first mechanical calculator at age 20 and a philosopher, a home educated child prodigy of his father (a local judge and member of the noblesse de robe), his mother having died when he was aged 3. He is an ascetic and was heavily involved in a Catholic movement called by its detractors Jansenism. He had a mystical experience in 1654 following which he abandoned all scientific and mathematical studies and devoted himself to meditation, philosophy and theology. He is the author of Pensées and Lettres provinciales. He died at age 39. He was in close touch with the priests of the Catholic monasteries but is not one of them. He invented the Pascal calculator to help his father as a tax collector of Rouen to simplify the calculations and together with Fermat laid the foundation for a theory of probabilities to help his gambling friends and was also the inventor of the famous Pascal's wager to justify belief in God viz. if God did not exist, the believer would lose nothing because there would be no hell, but if he did, then he would have the chance to win heaven for all eternity.

Portrait of Pascal

 

Pascal is a religious man who had reflected most deeply on the condition of man. He says: "For after all what is man in nature? A nothing in relation to infinity, all in relation to nothing, a central point between nothing and all and infinitely far from understanding either. The ends of things and their beginnings are impregnably concealed from him in an impenetrable secret. He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness out of which he was drawn and the infinite in which he is engulfed." Pensées No. 72

 

Pascal studying the cycloid, by Augustin Pajou, 1785, Louvre

 

According to the Wikipedia: In October 1654, Pascal had an accident on a bridge during which the horses plunged over the parapet, closely followed by the coach hung half-way over the edge. Pascal and his friends emerged unscathed but the sensitive and hypochrodraic philosopher, suffering from a young age from a nervous conditions which often inflicted upon him great pains, terrified by the nearness of death, fainted and remained unconscious for some time. On 23 November 1654, between 10:30 and 12:30 at night, Pascal had an intense religious vision which he immediately recorded in a brief note to himself which began: "Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the scholars..." and concluded by quoting Psalm 119:16: "I will not forget thy word. Amen." He is said to have carefully sewn this document into his coat and always transferred it when he changed clothes. It was only discovered by a servant by chance after his death. This piece is now known as the Memorial. The story of the carriage accident as having led to the experience described in the Memorial is however disputed by some scholars. His belief and religious commitment revitalized, Pascal visited the older of two convents at Port-Royal for a two-week retreat in January 1655. For the next four years, he regularly travelled between Port-Royal and Paris. It was at this point immediately after his conversion when he began writing his first major literary work on religion, the 18 Provincial Letters, arguing with the Jesuits on their casuistric methods of justifying moral laxity, writing with great humor and satire and greatly influencing the literary style of such later writers as Voltaire and Rousseau. Voltaire called them "the best-written book that has yet appeared in France" and when Bossuet was asked what book he would rather have written had he not written his own, his answer was Pascal's Provincial Letters.

Pascal's most influential theological work, the Pensées ("Thoughts"), was yet to be completed when he died. It is a sustained and coherent examination and defense of Chrstianity. Its original title was Apologie de la religion Chrétienne ("Defense of the Christian Religion"). Originally, they were isolated scaps of paper on which he wrote his reflections. They were thus not a systematic treatise but isolated though related thoughts on various topics. The first version of the detached notes appeared in print as a book in 1670 titled Pensées de M. Pascal sur la religion, et sur quelques autres sujets ("Thoughts of M. Pascal on religion, and on some other subjects") and soon thereafter became a classic. One of the Apologie's main strategies was to use the contradictory philosophies of sketicism and stoicism epitomized by Montaigne and Epictetus in order to bring the unbeliever to such despair and confusion that he would embrace God. Not until the nineteenth century were the Pensées published in their full and authentic text for fear of persecution. Pascal's Pensées is widely considered to be a masterpiece, and a landmark in French prose. The book deals with such topics as infinity and nothing, faith and reason, soul and matter, death and life, meaning and vanity—seemingly arriving at no definitive conclusions besides humility, ignorance, and grace. He is certainly one of most quotable French authors. His works are full of pithy epigrams which go right to the heart of any topic he chooses to write about.

Pascal's epitaph in Saint-Étienne-du-Mont, where he was buried

 

(to be cont'd)