Thoughts on the Pensees

I am always reticent to engage with those writers often touted for their Christian insight, yet who cannot be praised for their orthodoxy or saintliness, and in fact gain adherents precisely because they are unorthodox and less-than-saintly. In this category fall Simone Weil and Kirkegaard, who have always left me uninterested and cold; and so lay Pascal until recently, when I finally read his Pensees as my first book of the new year.

But this is somewhat inaccurate. The Pensees are not really a book; they are the fragments of a book never completed by Blaise Pascal, dead at 39. This fact can only add to the luster of said thoughts, for if such high reputation can be attached to fragments, surely those fragments are on par with the great spiritual writers of our age of any other?

Yet they are not. The Pensees, if great for anything, are great for their mediocrity in aim and method. This is their appeal. They take as given the errant metaphysics of the age (Cartesianism) and attempt to engage the reader on a personal level. In a sense, the Pensees are the progenitor of Christian self-help books and minor works of apologetics. It is only in this sense that the Pensees can be termed a classic. If the great aphorisms are weighed against the banal and tedious, Pascal comes out the loser.

One of my wife’s dowry books, Peter Kreeft’s Christianity for Modern Pagans, is in fact an encomium of Pascal. In Kreeft’s words, Pascal is the first postmedieval apologist. He has moved beyond the stark rationality of the Scholastics: of the implicit belief that explicating the nature of reality is proof positive of the Christian worldview, and thus sufficient as a means of evangelization. Not so, says Pascal, for you can lead a man to truth, but you cannot make him believe. Christianity must seemingly offer something more than truth to sustain its place in the world.

At the outset, we must recognize this is a strange state of affairs. Veritas ipsa loquitur, one might presume that Truth, once found, is an irresistable beacon. Yet an additional step is added in the Cartesian age: It is no longer presumed that having the Truth and pursuing its dictates will make man happy. The 19th and 20th Century man will add to this: The Truth is often the medium of our misery, and knowledge the means of our downfall. One thinks of Ibsen’s Wild Duck, or revived interest in Oedipus, whose hubris is described not in defying the gods but in unworthily pursuing the truth at all.

The rise of this divide is typically Cartesian. True reality is no longer intrinsically good; true reality is not intrinsically anything. What we beleive we see as unities and forms are really res cogitantes, or mental figments created in the human mind. There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so, says that buffoonish Danish pseud. And this is the premise Pascal assumes. The Truth is not sufficient unto itself, but must also be shown to have the power of making man feel happy. And so Pascal meets man not as homo sapiens, but homo sentiens, a man who is not below the level of ration, yet whose primary blight is not intellectual darkness but rather the misery of pride and pain. It is to the lamentations of Job that the evangelist must direct his attention.

“Men despise religion; they hate it and fear it is true. To remedy this, we must begin by showing that religion is not contrary to reason; that it is venerable, to inspire respect for it; then we must make it lovable, to make good men hope it is true; finally we must prove it is true.” [187]

One is not greatly offended by this track, for our course men are more than dumb reason; they are creatures of heart, head, liver and spleen. The Faith is not an intellectual trick, but Truth that appeals to all men in all their various capacities. Yet from the order Pascal provides above we may now surmise that religion is higher than truth, and man’s feelings towards religion more important than truth itself.

Pascal can only really be great if we take Cartesian premises as truth. We don’t really know the world; we cannot really know the world; so we must appeal to the heart, where a deeper more personal “truth” seems to lie. There is nothing bad with an appeal to the heart, but there certainly is something greatly evil in taking the Cartestian presumption as the basis for our metaphysics.

This is why I cannot take Pascal seriously. He is a good evangelist for those who adhere to bad metaphysics. But the goal should be to uproot the bad metaphysics. While reading the Pensees, I often found myself thinking of Diedrich von Hildrebrand’s Transformation in Christ, a far better work of Christian theology. Hildebrand is called a “personalist” (from what I can tell, a rebuke from those who dislike his departures from strict Thomism, whatever that means). This is true enough: But his premise does not rely on emotion. Rather, our purpose on earth is to engage with the objective logos of all things, to value them accordingly and, by learning the proper hierarchy of values which must place God infinitely on the top, to engage in personal transformation by placing ourselves in relation to those values. We see appeal made to the heart, but by aiming directly at the heart of things: At the forms and quiddities of things which Descartes specifically denounces and Pascal implicitly denies. The heart is content when it is placed in relation to things as they are, those immanent logoi, and only in such relation can men be happy.

Perhaps Kreeft is right, and Pascal is an effective means of reaching out to “modern pagans.” Of course, there are no modern “pagans” in the West. All so-called pagans still position themselves in relation to the One True God; their attempts at reclaiming pre-Christian multiplicity are bogus and all devolve into Satan worship if given enough time. It is God or nothing, as Cardinal Sarah says. “It may be the devil, and it may be the Lord, but you gotta serve somebody,” says the man from Hibbing. And all efforts to depart from the imminant logos of things, and facile attempts at attacking the Logos Himself, are embarrassing attempts to strike at God the Father, like the shameful slut who pairs herself with fifty different men when her soul is still bound in hatred to her dad.

We should not take “modern pagans” seriously, and we should not take Descartes seriously. Pascal is an effective evangelist to the modern mind because the modern mind is poisoned. But remove the poison and Pascal’s appeal is left at almost nil. Remove the poison, and the teachings of the Church Fathers and Doctors not only become explicable, but the source of individual happiness and solace. See the world as it actually is, and you have no need for the therapeutic approach that we see in utero in Pascal.

It is so much richer to engage with the work of men who attacking the errors which Pascal takes as given: Hildebrand of course, but also Wolfgang Smith. Read Chesterton’s biography of Aquinas and understand the real relation of the human heart in the hierarchy of being.

STRAY THOUGHTS (hahaha)

“As custom determines what is agreeable, so also does it determine justice.” [309]

“The most unreasonable things in the world become most reasonable, because of the unruliness of men…This law would be absurd and unjust; but because men are themselves and always will be so, it becomes reasonable and just.” [320]

Pascal verges very closely to denying the Natural Law; he gives lip service to it, then pounces on the absurdity of happenstance. Again, a clear sign of his desire to hold onto orthodoxy, but his instinctive nominalism.

“All men naturally hate one another.” [451]

“The Self has two qualities: it is unject in itself since it makes itself the center of everything; it is inconvenient to others since it would enslave them; for each Self is the enemy, and woudl like to be the tyrant of all others. You take away its inconvenience, but not its injustice, and so you do not render it lovable to those who hate injustice; you render it lovable only to the unjust, who do not any longer find in it an enemy. And thus you remain unjust and can please only the unjust.” [455]

“We cannot know Jesus Christ without knowing at the same time both God and our own wretchedness.” [556]

“There is nothing on earth that does not show either hte wretchedness of man or the mercy of God.” [562]

“Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.” [864]