The French philosopher Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) enjoys pride of place in the history of early-modern thought. Renowned for his Pensées and his famous wager on belief in God, praised as a father of modern science, his name memorialized in a unit of pressure (the pascal), he is largely remembered for his intellectual triumphs.
A new biography by Graham Tomlin, a British writer and theologian, describes Pascal as a maker of the modern world, even while emphasizing that the Frenchman’s great scientific accomplishments cannot be understood apart from his profound stake in religion. That difference distinguished him from such contemporaries as Descartes, who tried to make Christianity compatible with Enlightenment rationalism. Tomlin argues that Pascal’s “sense of the deep ambiguity of our knowledge of the world,” grounded in his Christianity, charted a different path from those of his peers who attempted to ground faith in rational certainties. If the increasingly disenchanting pressures of reason and science would define secular modernity, Pascal’s appreciation of the unique truth claims of religion in some ways anticipated the postmodern turn of our own more recent times.
For all Pascal’s accomplishments, however, the cause he came to be most identified with in his own time was a failure. From the year 1640 onward, beginning with the posthumous publication of Cornelius Otto Jansen’s treatise Augustinus, conflict grew between a school of religious interpreters of Saint Augustine—who became known, pejoratively at times, as the “Jansenists,” and with whom Pascal was allied—and the Jesuits, a new religious order against whose modernizing spirit Pascal directed his scathing Provincial Letters (1657).
What began as a debate on the nature of grace soon developed into a theological scandal of such proportion that only papal intervention could quell it. While the Jansenists, with their reputation as moral rigorists, reaffirmed the utter dependence of the soul on the grace of God, the Jesuits sought to soften the Augustinian position on grace, salvation, and repentance so as to keep Christians securely within the care of the institutional Church.
A new translation of his Écrits sur la grâce, by Paul J. Griffiths, shows that Pascal was intensely absorbed by the task of elucidating the nature of God’s will and our own—by answering the questions, as Griffiths puts it, of “what grace is and what it does, and about who gets grace and who does not, and why.” Partially incomplete, these fifteen interconnected essays on grace pulse with Pascal’s brilliant philosophical and poetic talent. While they “show a habitable landscape,” with respect to the tangled intra-Catholic theological disputes that preoccupied the Jansenist moment, Griffiths, a Catholic theologian, takes issue with some of Pascal’s positions. While Pascal’s emphasis on grâce efficace is an enduring reminder of the nature of grace as a divine gift to fallen humanity, Griffiths considers Pascal to be “fundamentally wrong in his view that the graces required for good action are not offered to all, and in the conclusions that flow from such a view.” Subtracting from Pascal’s “Pascalianism” its claim to double predestination, the idea that God withdraws efficacious grace to ensure the damnation of all the non-elect, Griffiths instead proposes that “[a]ll grace is effective, finally, and is never withdrawn.”
As Griffiths’s effort to “reconfigure” Pascalianism more than three centuries after the “querelle de la grâce” illustrates, the debate between the Jansenists and Jesuits touched directly on one of the most “neuralgic points of tension within Christianity.” That conflict saw the triumph of the side Pascal opposed—and the physical annihilation of the spiritual base of the Jansenist world in the closure and eventual destruction of the abbey at Port-Royal-des-Champs, on the orders of King Louis XIV, in 1709, almost fifty years after Pascal’s death. With its center destroyed and its luminaries apart from Pascal—such as Antoine Arnauld, Jean Duvergier de Hauranne (also known as Saint Cyran), and Mère Angélique—gradually fading into relative obscurity, the Jansenists were the losers of this story, in some ways forgotten to time.
Or so it might seem. But in another major recent examination of Pascal, Pierre Manent’s Challenging Modern Atheism and Indifference: Pascal’s Defense of the Christian Proposition, the French political philosopher focuses on the so-called “theological-political problem,” where religion, politics, and philosophy meet. Manent argues that his forebear’s Jansenism is a form of Christianity that serves as a better match for the challenges the Church has faced in the centuries after the Pascalian moment, precisely because it staked out a position that greatly complicates the standard account of the early-modern Church’s response to science.
By restaging the terms of this seemingly obscure debate, Manent seeks to show just how much was at stake at this particular turning point in history—in which, he believes, the wrong side triumphed. The Jesuits sought to “maintain power over souls, even if the price to pay is a weakening, or even a denaturing, of the Christian claim.” The tragedy of their final victory was that the Church itself contributed to “the encouragement and acceleration of a transfer of moral and spiritual allegiance from the church to the state, a transference of which in the following century they will be the intended victims.”
The Jansenists’ position stands in stark contrast to an idea of religion as antithetical to reason and science. Pascal here enters into the equation as a philosopher whose scientific and mathematical accomplishments did not keep him from circumscribing the role of reason. As Manent puts it, “Reason must be reasonable enough to recognize that it does not make the great decision of life.” Looking to Pascal’s famous wager to make his point, Manent explains why, far from a cold calculation designed to justify the choice of the infinite, Pascal’s analogy is intended to show that the heart, not reason, ultimately decides. The heart’s supremacy over reason is a familiar theme throughout the Pensées: “The heart has its reasons, which reason doesn’t know,” Pascal writes. “We feel it in a thousand things.” Yet lest we misunderstand him to be abandoning reason for something as soft as the heart, Pascal the scientist reminds us: “There is nothing so conformable to reason as this disavowal of reason.”
As an eminent figure in the rediscovery of the French liberal tradition, Manent has primarily been concerned with classical liberalism and questions of civic life and democracy. Here, however, Manent turns his gaze to the tension-ridden intersection of Christianity and politics, finding in Pascal a source of sober and humane political judgment—and a Christian apologetics highly relevant to contemporary Europe. “Europeans do not know what to think or do with Christianity,” Manent bluntly avers. Having foreclosed for itself what he calls the “Christian proposition,” Europe has pursued a new baptism in its stead: one of “erasure,” of militant secularity, which prizes a series of goods, such as “[t]he movement of ideas and sentiments, the progress of human consciousness, the evidence of the values of equality and liberty,” all of which have crystallized in the state.
Yet this new baptism has come at a cost: Europe’s inability to understand its past and to conduct itself judiciously in the present with regard to the religious question, whether with respect to Christianity or other religions. As Manent writes, “Europe does not consider the question of God, except to hold it at a distance. It only touches upon it in order not to be affected by it.” But there is no way to be unaffected by that question. The decision to not reckon with it proves to be a false choice, a way of kicking the stone farther down the path. Manent holds that we are still living out “the consequences of a political and spiritual decision taken when [Christianity] was still in its strength,” namely the turn toward secularity, in which the Church itself was partially implicated.
For Manent, the moral consequences of the contemporary political and spiritual state of affairs go beyond the merely religious concern of the salvation of the soul. The moral void at the center of the modern secular state undercuts its ability to think of problems in terms other than rights. Having lost touch with a reference point that would allow it to articulate positions with regard to the human being and the dignity and obligations it is owed, the state is ultimately unable to face the most pressing ethical issues of its time.
Pascal, too, faced the Christian question in an age that was in the process of making a losing wager with a new science and a new vision for the temporal order. Writing when the political gears were shifting decisively toward the form of the sovereign state, “Pascal had the strong sentiment and conviction of living in a society that was in the process of losing the knowledge of its religion, a society that in the depths of its soul was atheist.” As a result, Pascal’s concerns read as refreshingly current, perennially relevant to contemporary concerns.
For Manent, the limits Pascal places on reason testify not to a precocious postmodernism but to a mature conception of the human. His brilliance and facility for the geometric order notwithstanding, Pascal saw in scientific inquiry “a principle of limitation and not of unlimitedness.” Whereas the great inventors and theoreticians of his generation and beyond have seen (and continue to see) in the new science and physics the promise of the mastery of the world and the natural order, Pascal interpreted them instead as putting humanity in its place, poised between wretchedness and grandeur.
Echoing Pascal centuries later, the French philosopher Simone Weil (1909–1943) would write in her notebooks, “The intelligence has nothing to discover, it has only to clear the ground.” Weil exemplifies the persistence of a Pascalian or Jansenist spirit that is not quite as lost to history as Manent may fear.
As for Manent’s polemical proposition, whether it succeeds for those not primed to receive it remains to be seen. (Isn’t this the very quandary of efficacious grace?) Pascal is good at reminding his readers of the existential elements of the Christian life. Yet the picture that he and Manent paint is one of a life that often seems impossible to live, one forever threatened by eddies of despair. As Griffiths shows, Pascal’s own corrective to a culture that avoids the biggest questions may itself need correction from time to time.