Pensées

Overview

Blaise Pascal died in 1662, at thirty-nine, having spent his last years as an invalid. Among his papers were hundreds of scraps of writing, some copied out neatly, many scribbled, a proportion of them sewn together with thread into bundles with headings. He had told friends he was working on an apology for the Christian religion. What he left was the raw material, sorted only partly by his own hand.

This is the first thing to understand about the book. It is not a book. Its editors have had to decide what order to print the fragments in, and they have decided differently. The Port-Royal editors of 1670 rearranged and softened. Léon Brunschvicg, in the 1890s, grouped them by subject in the arrangement that dominated for a century. Louis Lafuma and later Philippe Sellier went back to the copies of Pascal’s own bundles, which preserve his headings and something of his plan. Modern editions use Lafuma or Sellier numbers, older quotations use Brunschvicg, and most editions print a conversion table. When you cite a fragment, name the numbering.

What you actually read is a mixture of aphorisms, dialogue in an imagined unbeliever’s voice, drafts of arguments, biblical exegesis and single sentences with no context. Some are finished to the point of perfection. Others are notes to himself. Pascal’s admirers have long argued that the fragmentary form suits the subject better than a finished book would have.

The argument

The plan, as far as it can be reconstructed, has two movements: the wretchedness of man without God, and his happiness with God. Pascal intends to bring a worldly, intelligent, uninterested reader to the point of wanting Christianity to be true, and only then to offer historical evidence.

The first movement is anthropology. Pascal takes from Montaigne the catalogue of human inconstancy and turns it into an argument. We cannot hold a single thought for an hour. We would rather hunt than possess the hare. We pursue offices, wars and entertainments not for their own sake but to avoid being left alone with ourselves, because sitting still means noticing that we will die and do not know why we are here. He calls this divertissement, diversion, and his pages on it read like a description of a phone. Custom and imagination govern us more than reason: a judge’s robes persuade us more than his argument, and we call justice whatever our side of the river calls justice.

Yet the same creature is aware of all this. Pascal’s signature move is to hold misery and greatness together without resolving them. We are dethroned kings, ruins that remember being a palace. Any doctrine that explains only our nobility or only our corruption fails to fit the evidence, and he argues that the doctrine of a fall accounts for both, however incomprehensible it is. He is explicit that this is its strength: a religion tailored to reason would explain nothing.

On reason itself he is a sceptic with limits. Sitting between two infinities, the immensity of the cosmos and the endless divisibility of the mite, we can grasp neither the beginning nor the end of anything. First principles are not proved but felt, which is what he means by the heart: an immediate knowing that supplies the premises reason then works with. Descartes gets a few contemptuous lines. Pascal thought the God of the philosophers was useless, and after his own night of religious experience in 1654 he wrote a scrap of paper about fire and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob and carried it sewn into his coat for the rest of his life.

Then the wager, fragment 418 in Lafuma. Note what it is not. It is no argument that God exists; Pascal says reason cannot settle that. It is addressed to a man who thinks the question undecidable and therefore not worth attending to. You are already betting, since you must live one way or the other, and the stakes are a finite life against an infinite gain. The libertine objects that he cannot make himself believe. Pascal agrees, and prescribes practice: go to mass, take holy water, act as if, and the habit may bend the machine of your body until belief follows.

The second movement, much less complete, argues from within the tradition. The hiddenness of God is doctrine, not embarrassment. The Jews preserved a scripture that convicts them, which Pascal takes as evidence of its authenticity. Prophecies, figures and types point forward to Christ. There are three orders, body, mind and charity, each infinitely above the last, so that Archimedes outranks kings and a saint outranks Archimedes. And there are the hard sayings, including the one about there being enough light for those who wish to see and enough darkness for those who do not.

How to read it

Do not start at fragment one and grind forward. Read the long connected sequences first: diversion, the two infinities, the misery and greatness pairings, and the wager. In Krailsheimer’s Penguin, that means the early bundles on vanity, wretchedness and diversion, then 199 to 201 and 418. Then browse. The short fragments repay being read a dozen at a time and put down.

Keep track of voice. Pascal frequently writes as the unbeliever or the objector, and readers who miss this attribute to him positions he is staging. The line about infinite spaces is the clearest case.

Do not treat the wager as Pascal’s proof of God, and do not treat it as a cynical bit of decision theory either. Read the whole fragment, including the part where the gambler says he still cannot believe.

Context helps. Pascal belonged to the Jansenist circle at Port-Royal, which emphasised human corruption and the necessity of grace and was fighting the Jesuits over both. His Provincial Letters is the public half of that fight.

Questions it raises

• Is the wager a real argument, or a description of how someone already half-persuaded talks himself over the line?
• Pascal says our restlessness is evidence of a lost greatness. What else could it be evidence of?
• If first principles are known by the heart rather than proved, how do we tell a true heart from a trained one?
• Does the fragmentary form strengthen his case or protect it from being tested?
• He argues that a religion which explains our contradictions must be true because nothing else fits. Is that a good inference?
• Can you practise your way into belief, and if you can, what is the belief worth?