Part 3: Introduction to the Pensées

Introduction

In our first two lectures, we considered Pascal’s early life, his prolific mathematical and scientific accomplishments, and his two-hour encounter with God on November 23, 1654. Within the space of two years of his Night of Fire, he began work on his Apology for the Christian Religion, finally given the name Pensées. It has been called his “imperishable monument” and continues to attract countless readers who are “seeking to escape from a condition of ‘inconstancy, boredom, anxiety’ (24/127) of which they are only too well aware.” The Pensées, as Muggeridge notes, “have enchanted, infuriated, uplifted, depressed, enlightened, mystified, but always enthralled countless readers from generation to generation and are today as sparkling as when they were written and, if anything, more relevant.”

Pensées 165/210

“The last act is bloody, however fine the rest of the play. They throw earth over your head and it is finished for ever.”

Introduction

In the Introduction to the Oxford University Press edition of the Pensées, editor Anthony Levi observes that “Pascal’s analysis of the ecological fragility of the human race is elegantly expounded in prose constructed as if it were music, with ever bigger antitheses sometimes chiasmically encompassing smaller and smaller ones in balanced phrases with cadenced endings….What the Pensées show with overwhelming vigor is the power to penetrate to the realities of human existence, whether humanity is considered as a race, as a series of societies, or as individuals.” Atheist Voltaire hailed Pensées as the greatest masterpiece in French prose.” And philosopher Peter Kreeft suggests that “the only other two Christian writers who may be more powerful ecumenical bridges than Pascal are Augustine and C.S. Lewis.”

What Precipitated the Apology?

• Florin and Gilberte (Pascal) Perier were married on June 15, 1641; Florin was 36 and Gilberte, 21.

• Their five children were given Pascal names: Etienne, Louis, Jacqueline, Marguerite, & Blaise.

• On March 24, 1656 (Pascal’s Night of Fire occurred on November 23, 1654), their daughter, Marguerite, experienced a miracle.

• From 7 years old until she was 10, she suffered from what was then called lacrimal fistula.

Marguerite’s lacrimal fistula

“A swelling the size of a hazel nut had formed at the corner of the left eye; it discharged so foul an odor that the child had to live apart from the others. Probings indicated that part of the bony structure of the nose was affected. She had been treated by five of the best surgeons of Paris. All had concluded that the only hope of cure, and that a slight one, lay in the burning away of the growth with a red-hot iron. Florin Perier, Marguerite’s father, struggled long against the doctor’s decision. But as the child’s state grew worse, he at length surrendered. On the 24th of March…a letter was dispatched to Clermont, summoning him to the operation. It was to take place immediately on his arrival in Paris.”

The Miracle of the Holy Thorn

• A collector of religious relics sent a thorn from the Crown of Thorns to Port-Royal-de Paris. It was set in glass in a silver-gilt monstrance.

• On Friday, March 24th, the relic was displayed. The nuns sang the 86th

Psalm as an introit for the Mass: “Show me a sign of your favor, that those who hate me may see and be put to shame because you, Lord, have helped me and comforted me” (Ps. 86:17).

• After vespers, the nuns passed in procession before the relic, and each kissed it. When little Marguerite Perier approached, the mistress touched the relic to the girl’s diseased eye.

The Miracle of the Holy Thorn

• On the afternoon of March 24, the little girls were sent to their quarters, and “Marguerite said to one of her companions: ‘My eye is cured; it doesn’t hurt me any more.’ The mistress of the boarders heard; she found that the swelling had disappeared. She pressed the spot; no fetid matter emerged. She ran immediately to tell her superior, Mere Agnes. That wise woman advised delay, to make sure that the cure was permanent” (Bishop).

• A week later, the sisters were certain. They sent for the surgeon who examined Marguerite and who, after the examination, exclaimed, “If this isn’t a miracle, there never was one!”

Official Inquiry and Confirmation

• An official inquiry was made by a commission of four physicians and four surgeons. They reported that “the cure surpasses the ordinary forces of nature, and that it did not take place without a miracle, which we assure to be veritable.”

• “Few miracles are better attested. We have two letters from Jacqueline Pascal to Gilberte, written five days and seven days after the event, and a number of contemporary attestations…”

• “I should not be a Christian but for the miracles, says St. Augustine” (169/812).

• “It is not possible to have reasonable grounds for not believing in miracles” (568/815).

Miracles…Pause For A Moment

“If you have hitherto disbelieved in miracles, it is worth pausing a moment to consider whether this is not chiefly because you thought you had discovered what the story was really about? – that atoms, and time and space and economics and politics were the main plot? And is it certain you were right? It is easy to make mistakes in such matters.”

C.S. Lewis1898-1963

The Beginning of the Pensées

• Pascal’s sister, Gilberte, informs us that the idea for his Apology for the Christian Religion (i.e., Pensées) was conceived at the time of the miracle.

• “The joy that he found [in the miracle] was so great that he was completely possessed by it, and as his mind was never occupied with anything without making many reflections, there came to him on the occasion of this miracle several very important thoughts on miracles in general….The reflections that my brother made on miracles gave him many new perceptions about religion. It was on this occasion that he felt himself so animated against the atheists that, seeing in the perceptions God had given him the means of convincing and confounding them without resource (assistance), he applied himself to this task.”

Pascal’s Reading Preparation

• From March, 1657, until the spring of 1658, Pascal took time to read and think about his new enterprise.

• The following are some of the books he read during this time: • Bible• Thomas à Kempis’ The Imitation of Christ• Teresa of Avila (Interior Castle, etc.)• Francis de Sales (Introduction to the Devout Life, etc.)• Bernard of Clairvaux• Augustine• Three from Port Royal: Cornelius Jansen, Saint-Cyran, Antoine Arnauld

Pascal’s Reading Preparation

• He read at least seven previous apologists:1. Raymond Sabunde (1385-1436)2. Pierre Charron (1541-1603)3. Hugo Grotius (1583-1645)4. Marin Mersenne (1588-1648)5. Ramon Marti (born early part of 13th century; died after 1284)6. Jean de Silhon (1596-1667)7. Jean Boucher (1548-1646)

Pascal’s Reading Preparation

• Pascal re-read the moralists:1. Epictetus (55-135 AD)2. Seneca (4 BC-65 AD)3. Guillaume du Vair (1556-1621)4. Stoics5. Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592)

• It seems Pascal knew the sceptics:1. Giordano Bruno (1548-1600)2. Jerome Cardan (1501-1576)3. Lucilio Vanini (1585-1619)4. Francois de La Mothe Le Vayer (1588-1672) – Tudor of Louis XIV

Pascal’s Reading Preparation

• He learned a little Hebrew and brushed up on his Greek• He translated passages from the Vulgate into French• He compiled a “Life of Christ” from the four Gospels• “As he read, he meditated. He made the design of his work, and drew

up long developments in his mind. For the moment, he set nothing down; there was no need, says his nephew, for everything was safe in his prodigious memory; he had never forgotten anything he wished to remember” (Bishop).

Early Progress and Lecture

By 1658, Pascal had “composed the greater part of what we now know as the Pensées....His work on the Apology was far enough advanced for him to give his friends at Port Royal an address (or perhaps more than one) on his proposed method and main arguments.”

- A.J. Krailsheimer

Pascal’s Health and the Pensées

• In 1659, just three years before Pascal died, “his chronic ill-health, perhaps of tubercular or cancerous origin, had finally reached a state which made it virtually impossible for him to concentrate for long on any serious work.”

• When he felt strong enough, he would either write or dictate what he could. He worked on large sheets of paper or jotted notes on used scraps of paper.

• He could no longer trust his clouding memory. “Thoughts come at random, and go at random. No device for holding on to them or for having them. A thought has escaped: I was trying to write it down: instead I write that it has escaped me” (542/370).

The Structure of Pensées

• Section One: Papers classified by Pascal (Fragments 1-382 categorized under 28 headings; one remained unused)

• Section Two: Papers not classified by Pascal (Fragments 383-829 in 31 series)

• Section Three: Miracles (Fragments 830-912 in 3 series)• Section Four: Fragments not found in the Copy. “There are in addition

fifty-six original papers omitted from both copies (913-969), for the most part notes of a private nature or drafts for the Provincial Lettersor other polemical works, and a still growing number of fragments of certain authenticity but preserved neither in the Copy nor in the Recueil Original” (Krailsheimer).

Four Basic Sections of the Pensées

Dr. Douglas Groothuis categorizes Pascal’s Apology as follows:• Section 1: Pascal argues that human reason left to itself cannot

understand the greatness and misery of the human condition.• Section 2: The philosophers have not been able to deliver sustained

happiness to the bemused human race.• Section 3: Only Christianity accounts for the human condition as both

great and miserable.• Section 4: Pascal addresses the historical arguments for the divine

authority of the Bible.

Peter Kreeft on Pascal’s Style

“How to describe Pascal’s style? I began by listing twenty or thirty adjectives, then tried to outline them and found that they fit naturally into three categories corresponding to the three great ideals of style and of life itself: the true, the good and the beautiful. Take the beautiful first. Pascal is eloquent, lyrical, delicate, yet potent, witty, gemlike, incisive, stunning, biting, provocative, arresting, sharp haunting, even terrifying. He is also precise, rigorous, accurate, objective, concrete, empirical, enlightening, scientific, brilliant, wise, intelligent – that is, true. Yet he is also warm, personal, passionate, loving, tender, heartening, curative, disarming, intimate, earnest, loving – that is, good. His prose is like the prose of Jesus, his master. I think the burning bush must have sounded like that.”

Recueil Original (Original Collection)

• When Pascal died in 1662, he left behind a mass of mostly autograph papers, which his literary executors decided to preserve.

• Two copies were made by the same person.• Once these copies were completed, the original papers were kept.• In 1711, the original papers were pasted into an album and bound

with little regard for order. This volume is known as the Recueil Original.

• The Second Copy was copied continuously, one unit following the next, and retained by the Perier family in exactly the order in which it was first copied.

Chronological Review

1656 Marguerite Perier, Pascal’s niece, was miraculously healed of a lacrimal fistula

1656 Pascal begins to collect material for a work on miracles; he is 33 years old

1656 Pascal begins to work on the problem of the cycloid

1657-8 Pascal takes time to read extensively and think about his new work on apologetics

1658 Pascal gives a lecture(s) on his proposed Apology for the Christian Religion (he did not give his work this name, nor did he title his “thoughts” Pensées)

1659 Pascal’s health begins to deteriorate; perhaps a quarter of the Pensées belong to this period

1661 Jacqueline dies in October

1662 Pascal moves in with Gilberte in a state of extreme physical and mental weakness

1662 Blaise Pascal dies on August 19, and is buried at St. Etienne du Mont in Paris

The Purpose of Pensées

“Pascal's general intention was to confound skepticism about metaphysical questions. Some of the Pensées are fully developed literary reflections on the human condition, some contradict others, and some remain jottings whose meaning will never be clear. The most important are among the most powerful aphorisms about human experience and behavior ever written in any language.”

The “Uncanny Power” of the Pensées

“When we read Pascal, we find that not only are his own ideas profound and fresh, they have an uncanny power to provoke within us further ideas and yet more connections. The effect is to destroy old ruts and dismantle dusty patterns until our minds capture something of the fertile intensity of his own.”

- Os Guinness

Pensées 230/430b

“Everything that is incomprehensible does not cease to exist.”