Pascal's Pensées
literary artist, his book would have been also his own spiritual
autobiography; his style, free from all diminishing idiosyncrasies, was
yet very personal. Above all, he was a man of strong passions; and his
intellectual passion for truth was reinforced by his passionate
dissatisfaction with human life unless a spiritual explanation could be
found.
We must regard the _Pensées_ as merely the first notes for a work which
he left far from completion; we have, in Sainte-Beuve's words, a tower
of which the stones have been laid on each other, but not cemented, and
the structure unfinished. In early years his memory had been amazingly
retentive of anything that he wished to remember; and had it not been
impaired by increasing illness and pain, he probably would not have been
obliged to set down these notes at all. But taking the book as it is
left to us, we still find that it occupies a unique place in the history
of French literature and in the history of religious meditation.
To understand the method which Pascal employs, the reader must be
prepared to follow the process of the mind of the intelligent believer.
The Christian thinker--and I mean the man who is trying consciously and
conscientiously to explain to himself the sequence which culminated in
faith, rather than the public apologist--proceeds by rejection and
elimination. He finds the world to be so and so; he finds its character
inexplicable by any non-religious theory; among religions he finds
Christianity, and Catholic Christianity, to account most satisfactorily
for the world and especially for the moral world within; and thus, by
what Newman calls "powerful and concurrent" reasons, he finds himself
inexorably committed to the dogma of the Incarnation. To the unbeliever,
this method seems disingenuous and perverse; for the unbeliever is, as a
rule, not so greatly troubled to explain the world to himself, nor so
greatly distressed by its disorder; nor is he generally concerned (in
modern terms) to "preserve values." He does not consider that if certain
emotional states, certain developments of character, and what in the
highest sense can be called "saintliness" are inherently and by
inspection known to be good, then the satisfactory explanation of the
world must be an explanation which will admit the "reality" of these
values. Nor does he consider such reasoning admissible; he would, so to
speak, trim his values according to his cloth, because to him such
values are of no great value. The unbeliever starts from the other end,
and as likely as not with the question: Is a case of human
parthenogenesis credible? and this he would call going straight to the
heart of the matter. Now Pascal's method is, on the whole, the method
natural and right for the Christian; and the opposite method is that
taken by Voltaire. It is worth while to remember that Voltaire, in his
attempt to refute Pascal, has given once and for all the type of such
refutation; and that later opponents of Pascal's Apology for the
Christian Faith have contributed little beyond psychological
irrelevancies. For Voltaire has presented, better than any one since,
what is the unbelieving point of view; and in the end we must all choose
for ourselves between one point of view and another.
I have said above that Pascal's method is "on the whole" that of the
typical Christian apologist; and this reservation was directed at
Pascal's belief in miracles, which plays a larger part in his
construction than it would in that, at least, of the modern liberal
Catholic. It would seem fantastic to accept Christianity because we
first believe the Gospel miracles to be true, and it would seem impious
to accept it primarily because we believe more recent miracles to be
true; we accept the miracles, or some miracles, to be true because we
believe the Gospel of Jesus Christ: we found our belief in the miracles
on the Gospel, not our belief in the Gospel on the miracles. But it must
be remembered that Pascal had been deeply impressed by a contemporary
miracle, known as the miracle of the Holy Thorn: a thorn reputed to have
been preserved from the Crown of Our Lord was pressed upon an ulcer
which quickly healed. Sainte-Beuve, who as a medical man felt himself on
solid ground, discusses fully the possible explanation of this apparent
miracle. It is true that the miracle happened at Port-Royal, and that it
arrived opportunely to revive the depressed spirits of the community in
its political afflictions; and it is likely that Pascal was the more
inclined to believe a miracle which was performed upon his beloved
sister. In any case, it probably led him to assign a place to miracles,
in his study of faith, which is not quite that which we should give to
them ourselves.
Now the great adversary against whom Pascal set himself, from the time
of his first conversations with M. de Saci at Port-Royal, was Montaigne.
One cannot destroy Pascal, certainly; but of all authors Montaigne is
one of the least destructible. You could as well dissipate a fog by
flinging hand-grenades into it. For Montaigne is a fog, a gas, a fluid,
insidious element. He does not reason, he insinuates, charms, and
influences; or if he reasons, you must be prepared for his having some
other design upon you than to convince you by his argument. It is
hardly too much to say that Montaigne is the most essential author to
know, if we would understand the course of French thought during the
last three hundred years. In every way, the influence of Montaigne was
repugnant to the men of Port-Royal. Pascal studied him with the
intention of demolishing him. Yet, in the _Pensées_, at the very end of
his life, we find passage after passage, and the slighter they are the
more significant, almost "lifted" out of Montaigne, down to a figure of
speech or a word. The parallels[A] are most often with the long essay of
Montaigne called _Apologie de Raymond Sébond_--an astonishing piece of
writing upon which Shakespeare also probably drew in _Hamlet_. Indeed,
by the time a man knew Montaigne well enough to attack him, he would
already be thoroughly infected by him.
[A] Cf. the use of the simile of the _couvreur_. For comparing
parallel passages, the edition of the _Pensées_ by Henri Massis (_A
la cité des livres_) is better than the two-volume edition of
Jacques Chevalier (Gabalda). It seems just possible that in the
latter edition, and also in his biographical study (_Pascal_; by
Jacques Chevalier, English translation, published by Sheed & Ward),
M. Chevalier is a little over-zealous to demonstrate the perfect
orthodoxy of Pascal.
It would, however, be grossly unfair to Pascal, to Montaigne, and indeed
to French literature, to leave the matter at that. It is no diminution
of Pascal, but only an aggrandisement of Montaigne. Had Montaigne been
an ordinary life-sized sceptic, a small man like Anatole France, or even
a greater man like Renan, or even like the greatest sceptic of all,
Voltaire, this "influence" would be to the discredit of Pascal; but if
Montaigne had been no more than Voltaire, he could not have affected
Pascal at all. The picture of Montaigne which offers itself first to our
eyes, that of the original and independent solitary "personality,"
absorbed in amused analysis of himself, is deceptive. Montaigne's is no
_limited_ Pyrrhonism, like that of Voltaire, Renan, or France. He
exists, so to speak, on a plan of numerous concentric circles, the most
apparent of which is the small inmost circle, a personal puckish
scepticism which can be easily aped if not imitated. But what makes
Montaigne a very great figure is that he succeeded, God knows how--for
Montaigne very likely did not know that he had done it--it is not the
sort of thing that men _can_ observe about themselves, for it is
essentially bigger than the individual's consciousness--he succeeded in
giving expression to the scepticism of _every_ human being. For every
man who thinks and lives by thought must have his own scepticism, that
which stops at the question, that which ends in denial, or that which
leads to faith and which is somehow integrated into the faith which
transcends it. And Pascal, as the type of one kind of religious
believer, which is highly passionate and ardent, but passionate only
through a powerful and regulated intellect, is in the first sections of
his unfinished Apology for Christianity facing unflinchingly the demon
of doubt which is inseparable from the spirit of belief.
There is accordingly something quite different from an influence which
would prove Pascal's weakness; there is a real affinity between his
doubt and that of Montaigne; and through the common kinship with
Montaigne Pascal is related to the noble and distinguished line of
French moralists, from La Rochefoucauld down. In the honesty with which
they face the _données_ of the actual world this French tradition has a
unique quality in European literature, and in the seventeenth century
Hobbes is crude and uncivilised in comparison.
Pascal is a man of the world among ascetics, and an ascetic among men of
the world; he had the knowledge of worldliness and the passion of
asceticism, and in him the two are fused into an individual whole. The
majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and
tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or
much faith; and when the ordinary man calls himself a sceptic or an
unbeliever, that is ordinarily a simple pose, cloaking a disinclination
to think anything out to a conclusion. Pascal's disillusioned analysis
of human bondage is sometimes interpreted to mean that Pascal was really
and finally an unbeliever, who, in his despair, was incapable of
enduring reality and enjoying the heroic satisfaction of the free man's
worship of nothing. His despair, his disillusion, are, however, no
illustration of personal weakness; they are perfectly objective, because
they are essential moments in the progress of the intellectual soul; and
for the type of Pascal they are the analogue of the drought, the dark
night, which is an essential stage in the progress of the Christian
mystic. A similar despair, when it is arrived at by a diseased character
or an impure soul, may issue in the most disastrous consequences though
with the most superb manifestations; and thus we get _Gulliver's
Travels_; but in Pascal we find no such distortion; his despair is in
itself more terrible than Swift's, because our heart tells us that it
corresponds exactly to the facts and cannot be dismissed as mental
disease; but it was also a despair which was a necessary prelude to, and
element in, the joy of faith.
I do not wish to enter any further than necessary upon the question of
the heterodoxy of Jansenism; and it is no concern of this essay, whether
the Five Propositions condemned at Rome were really maintained by
Jansenius in his book _Augustinus_; or whether we should deplore or
approve the consequent decay (indeed with some persecution) of
Port-Royal. It is impossible to discuss the matter without becoming
involved as a controversialist either for or against Rome. But in a man
of the type of Pascal--and the type always exists--there is, I think, an
ingredient of what may be called Jansenism of temperament, without
identifying it with the Jansenism of Jansenius and of other devout and
sincere, but not immensely gifted doctors.[B] It is accordingly needful
to state in brief what the dangerous doctrine of Jansenius was, without
advancing too far into theological refinements. It is recognised in
Christian theology--and indeed on a lower plane it is recognised by all
men in affairs of daily life--that freewill or the natural effort and
ability of the individual man, and also supernatural _grace_, a gift