Pascal's Pensées
if, having received intelligence, they employed it to retain nourishment
for themselves without allowing it to pass to the other members, they
would hate rather than love themselves; their blessedness, as well as
their duty, consisting in their consent to the guidance of the whole
soul to which they belong, which loves them better than they love
themselves.
483
To be a member is to have neither life, being, nor movement, except
through the spirit of the body, and for the body.
The separate member, seeing no longer the body to which it belongs, has
only a perishing and dying existence. Yet it believes it is a whole, and
seeing not the body on which it depends, it believes it depends only on
self, and desires to make itself both centre and body. But not having in
itself a principle of life, it only goes astray, and is astonished in
the uncertainty of its being; perceiving in fact that it is not a body,
and still not seeing that it is a member of a body. In short, when it
comes to know itself, it has returned as it were to its own home, and
loves itself only for the body. It deplores its past wanderings.
It cannot by its nature love any other thing, except for itself and to
subject it to self, because each thing loves itself more than all. But
in loving the body, it loves itself, because it only exists in it, by
it, and for it. _Qui adhæret Deo unus spiritus est._[180]
The body loves the hand; and the hand, if it had a will, should love
itself in the same way as it is loved by the soul. All love which goes
beyond this is unfair.
_Adhærens Deo unus spiritus est._ We love ourselves, because we are
members of Jesus Christ. We love Jesus Christ, because He is the body of
which we are members. All is one, one is in the other, like the Three
Persons.
484
Two laws[181] suffice to rule the whole Christian Republic better than
all the laws of statecraft.
485
The true and only virtue, then, is to hate self (for we are hateful on
account of lust), and to seek a truly lovable being to love. But as we
cannot love what is outside ourselves, we must love a being who is in
us, and is not ourselves; and that is true of each and all men. Now,
only the Universal Being is such. The kingdom of God is within us;[182]
the universal good is within us, is ourselves--and not ourselves.
486
The dignity of man in his innocence consisted in using and having
dominion over the creatures, but now in separating himself from them,
and subjecting himself to them.
487
Every religion is false, which as to its faith does not worship one God
as the origin of everything, and which as to its morality does not love
one only God as the object of everything.
488
... But it is impossible that God should ever be the end, if He is not
the beginning. We lift our eyes on high, but lean upon the sand; and the
earth will dissolve, and we shall fall whilst looking at the heavens.
489
If there is one sole source of everything, there is one sole end of
everything; everything through Him, everything for Him. The true
religion, then, must teach us to worship Him only, and to love Him only.
But as we find ourselves unable to worship what we know not, and to love
any other object but ourselves, the religion which instructs us in these
duties must instruct us also of this inability, and teach us also the
remedies for it. It teaches us that by one man all was lost, and the
bond broken between God and us, and that by one man the bond is renewed.
We are born so averse to this love of God, and it is so necessary that
we must be born guilty, or God would be unjust.
490
Men, not being accustomed to form merit, but only to recompense it where
they find it formed, judge of God by themselves.
491
The true religion must have as a characteristic the obligation to love
God. This is very just, and yet no other religion has commanded this;
ours has done so. It must also be aware of human lust and weakness; ours
is so. It must have adduced remedies for this; one is prayer. No other
religion has asked of God to love and follow Him.
492
He who hates not in himself his self-love, and that instinct which leads
him to make himself God, is indeed blinded. Who does not see that there
is nothing so opposed to justice and truth? For it is false that we
deserve this, and it is unfair and impossible to attain it, since all
demand the same thing. It is, then, a manifest injustice which is innate
in us, of which we cannot get rid, and of which we must get rid.
Yet no religion has indicated that this was a sin; or that we were born
in it; or that we were obliged to resist it; or has thought of giving us
remedies for it.
493
The true religion teaches our duties; our weaknesses, pride, and lust;
and the remedies, humility and mortification.
494
The true religion must teach greatness and misery; must lead to the
esteem and contempt of self, to love and to hate.
495
If it is an extraordinary blindness to live without investigating what
we are, it is a terrible one to live an evil life, while believing in
God.
496
Experience makes us see an enormous difference between piety and
goodness.
497
_Against those who, trusting to the mercy of God, live heedlessly,
without doing good works._--As the two sources of our sins are pride and
sloth, God has revealed to us two of His attributes to cure them, mercy
and justice. The property of justice is to humble pride, however holy
may be our works, _et non intres in judicium_,[183] etc.; and the
property of mercy is to combat sloth by exhorting to good works,
according to that passage: "The goodness of God leadeth to
repentance,"[184] and that other of the Ninevites: "Let us do penance to
see if peradventure He will pity us."[185] And thus mercy is so far from
authorising slackness, that it is on the contrary the quality which
formally attacks it; so that instead of saying, "If there were no mercy
in God we should have to make every kind of effort after virtue," we
must say, on the contrary, that it is because there is mercy in God,
that we must make every kind of effort.
498
It is true there is difficulty in entering into godliness. But this
difficulty does not arise from the religion which begins in us, but from
the irreligion which is still there. If our senses were not opposed to
penitence, and if our corruption were not opposed to the purity of God,
there would be nothing in this painful to us. We suffer only in
proportion as the vice which is natural to us resists supernatural
grace. Our heart feels torn asunder between these opposed efforts. But
it would be very unfair to impute this violence to God, who is drawing
us on, instead of to the world, which is holding us back. It is as a
child, which a mother tears from the arms of robbers, in the pain it
suffers, should love the loving and legitimate violence of her who
procures its liberty, and detest only the impetuous and tyrannical
violence of those who detain it unjustly. The most cruel war which God
can make with men in this life is to leave them without that war which
He came to bring. "I came to send war,"[186] He says, "and to teach them
of this war. I came to bring fire and the sword."[187] Before Him the
world lived in this false peace.
499
_External works._--There is nothing so perilous as what pleases God and
man. For those states, which please God and man, have one property which
pleases God, and another which pleases men; as the greatness of Saint
Teresa. What pleased God was her deep humility in the midst of her
revelations; what pleased men was her light. And so we torment ourselves
to imitate her discourses, thinking to imitate her conditions, and not
so much to love what God loves, and to put ourselves in the state which
God loves.
It is better not to fast, and thereby humbled, than to fast and be
self-satisfied therewith. The Pharisee and the Publican.[188]
What use will memory be to me, if it can alike hurt and help me, and all
depends upon the blessing of God, who gives only to things done for Him,
according to His rules and in His ways, the manner being as important as
the thing, and perhaps more; since God can bring forth good out of evil,
and without God we bring forth evil out of good?
500
The meaning of the words, good and evil.
501
First step: to be blamed for doing evil, and praised for doing good.
Second step: to be neither praised, nor blamed.
502
Abraham[189] took nothing for himself, but only for his servants. So the
righteous man takes for himself nothing of the world, nor the applause
of the world, but only for his passions, which he uses as their master,
saying to the one, "Go," and to another, "Come." _Sub te erit appetitus
tuus._[190] The passions thus subdued are virtues. Even God attributes
to Himself avarice, jealousy, anger; and these are virtues as well as
kindness, pity, constancy, which are also passions. We must employ them
as slaves, and, leaving to them their food, prevent the soul from taking
any of it. For, when the passions become masters, they are vices; and
they give their nutriment to the soul, and the soul nourishes itself
upon it, and is poisoned.
503
Philosophers have consecrated the vices by placing them in God Himself.
Christians have consecrated the virtues.
504
The just man acts by faith in the least things; when he reproves his
servants, he desires their conversion by the Spirit of God, and prays
God to correct them; and he expects as much from God as from his own
reproofs, and prays God to bless his corrections. And so in all his
other actions he proceeds with the Spirit of God; and his actions
deceive us by reason of the ... or suspension of the Spirit of God in
him; and he repents in his affliction.
505
All things can be deadly to us, even the things made to serve us; as in
nature walls can kill us, and stairs can kill us, if we do not walk
circumspectly.
The least movement affects all nature; the entire sea changes because of
a rock. Thus in grace, the least action affects everything by its
consequences; therefore everything is important.
In each action we must look beyond the action at our past, present, and
future state, and at others whom it affects, and see the relations of
all those things. And then we shall be very cautious.
506
Let God not impute to us our sins, that is to say, all the consequences
and results of our sins, which are dreadful, even those of the smallest
faults, if we wish to follow them out mercilessly!
507
The spirit of grace; the hardness of the heart; external circumstances.
508
Grace is indeed needed to turn a man into a saint; and he who doubts it
does not know what a saint or a man is.
509
_Philosophers._--A fine thing to cry to a man who does not know himself,
that he should come of himself to God! And a fine thing to say so to a
man who does know himself!
510
Man is not worthy of God, but he is not incapable of being made worthy.
It is unworthy of God to unite Himself to wretched man; but it is not
unworthy of God to pull him out of his misery.
511
If we would say that man is too insignificant to deserve communion with
God, we must indeed be very great to judge of it.
512
It is, in peculiar phraseology, wholly the body of Jesus Christ, but it
cannot be said to be the whole body of Jesus Christ.[191] The union of
two things without change does not enable us to say that one becomes the
other; the soul thus being united to the body, the fire to the timber,
without change. But change is necessary to make the form of the one
become the form of the other; thus the union of the Word to man. Because
my body without my soul would not make the body of a man; therefore my