"If the world existed to instruct man of God, His divinity would shine through every part
in it in an indisputable manner; but as it exists only by Jesus Christ, and for Jesus Christ,
and to teach men both their corruption and their redemption, all displays the proofs of these
two truths. All appearance indicates neither a total exclusion nor a manifest presence of divinity,
but the presence of a God who hides himself. Everything bears this character."
Blaise Pascal was clearly a Roman Catholic with heavy Jansenist leanings, if not a full-blown Jansenist in the image of Port-Royal. And yet unlike so many of his contemporary Catholics, he defies both modernism and reaction. He most clearly reviles the Jesuits, who were the shock-troops for early modern Catholic absolutism, while simultaneously undermining it. Vociferous support can do that unironically: the king is as a god on Earth, and we'll kill all who deny this claim, even the king! Revanchist Catholics, on the heels of the Wars of Religion, were willing to grind any opposition to dust, including royal opposition. The most devout were also the most radical, spawning assassinations and rebellions.
But Pascal also didn't have time for the modernists either. He was no fan of Rene Descartes or his philosophy. He deplored a mechanistic philosophy that turned all of material life into infinitely perfectible machines before man's reason. Rather, man was a creature born in flux and chaos. He was likely to make his strong opinions based on tastes that he had no control over, and yet spout them as if they were divinely revealed fiat. Soldiers and stone-cutters reviled each other as degenerate, even as they received their profession from a surrounding context (even if it was in revolt against that surrounding context). Pascal was even clear that faith was no different, with Catholics and Muslims sneering at each other. The fact that any was Catholic was a sheer act of God's graciousness though, for not all were elect and not all made it to the end. Pascal's internally violent religious conversion, with the cryptic and jerky account of discovering the fire of the God of Abraham sown into his coat, was life changing. Pascal lived through the millennarian fervor of the English republic, concerned that Cromwell would export revolution all across Europe. Pascal was a monarchist, but one who never mistook the institution as a channel for the divine. Instead kings, like all men, were prone to foibles, trapped in sin, and doomed to death.
And that's where Pascal's genius shines. He was both a product of the early blooming of French thought, as well as its cautious critic. Pascal believed man was a monster, a product of both a cursed fall and a promised/sealed redemption. Man was but a beast that rotted and died, but also so glorious that he could contemplate his own death and shake his fist against the heavens in defiance of this unjust sentence. Pascal makes these contradictions clear in the following quotes from Pensees:
Discourses on humility are a source of pride in the vain and of humility in the
humble. So those on scepticism cause believers to affirm. Few men speak humbly of humility,
chastely of chastity, few doubtingly of scepticism. We are only falsehood, duplicity, contradiction;
we both conceal and disguise ourselves from ourselves.
[...]
If he exalt himself, I humble him; if he humble himself, I exalt him; and I always contradict him, till he understands that he is an incomprehensible monster.
And for our contemporary gnu-atheists, Pascal would've found it whimsically absurd that there were books written to convince people they had no free will, that reflective scientists denied consciousness, and hundreds of footnotes were deployed to argue that we can know nothing at all. Pascal's day saw the revival of Pyrrhonian skepticism, breeding both the worst kind of Roman Catholic apologetics and spreading to form atheistic philosophical attitudes among elite Frenchmen. He could only rave and rant like a madman about these lazy psychopaths who were too enamored with their own petty learning that they could not see the horror before their eyes. They were to die, waiting their turn for the execution block: why would they not struggle to make sense of their chains? Why would they not spend their days in a fevered search for an answer while they had time? Pascal only could sympathize with the protest atheist who could not have faith, but desperately grasped the fleeting nature of time. I will quote extensively to show both Pascal's whimsy and anger:
In order to attack [doctrine of God's existence, they should have
protested that they had made every effort to seek Him everywhere, and
even in that which the Church proposes for their instruction, but
without satisfaction. If they talked in this manner, they would in truth be attacking one of
her pretensions. But I hope here to show that no reasonable person can speak thus, and I
venture even to say that no one has ever done so. We know well enough how those who are
of this mind behave. They believe they have made great efforts for their instruction when
they have spent a few hours in reading some book of Scripture and have questioned some
priests on the truths of the faith. After that, they boast of having made vain search in books
and among men. But, verily, I will tell them what I have often said, that this negligence is
insufferable. We are not here concerned with the trifling interests of some stranger, that we
should treat it in this fashion; the matter concerns ourselves and our all.
The immortality of the soul is a matter which is of so great consequence to us and which
touches us so profoundly that we must have lost all feeling to be indifferent as to knowing
what it is. All our actions and thoughts must take such different courses, according as there
are or are not eternal joys to hope for, that it is impossible to take one step with sense and
judgment unless we regulate our course by our view of this point which ought to be our ultimate
end. Thus our first interest and our first duty is to enlighten ourselves on this subject,
whereon depends all our conduct. Therefore among those who do not believe, I make a vast
difference between those who strive with all their power to inform themselves and those
who live without troubling or thinking about it.
I can have only compassion for those who sincerely bewail their doubt, who regard it
as the greatest of misfortunes, and who, sparing no effort to escape it, make of this inquiry
their principal and most serious occupation.
But as for those who pass their life without thinking of this ultimate end of life, and
who, for this sole reason that they do not find within themselves the lights which convince
them of it, neglect to seek them elsewhere, and to examine thoroughly whether this opinion
is one of those which people receive with credulous simplicity, or one of those which, although
obscure in themselves, have nevertheless a solid and immovable foundation, I look
upon them in a manner quite different.
This carelessness in a matter which concerns themselves, their eternity, their all, moves
me more to anger than pity; it astonishes and shocks me; it is to me monstrous. I do not say
this out of the pious zeal of a spiritual devotion. I expect, on the contrary, that we ought to
have this feeling from principles of human interest and self-love; for this we need only see
what the least enlightened persons see.
We do not require great education of the mind to understand that here is no real and
lasting satisfaction; that our pleasures are only vanity; that our evils are infinite; and, lastly,
that death, which threatens us every moment, must infallibly place us within a few years
under the dreadful necessity of being for ever either annihilated or unhappy.
There is nothing more real than this, nothing more terrible. Be we as heroic as we like,
that is the end which awaits the world. Let us reflect on this and then say whether it is not
beyond doubt that there is no good in this life but in the hope of another; that we are happy
only in proportion as we draw near it; and that, as there are no more woes for those who
have complete assurance of eternity, so there is no more happiness for those who have no
insight into it.
Surely then it is a great evil thus to be in doubt, but it is at least an indispensable duty
to seek when we are in such doubt; and thus the doubter who does not seek is altogether
completely unhappy and completely wrong. And if besides this he is easy and content,
professes to be so, and indeed boasts of it; if it is this state itself which is the subject of his
joy and vanity, I have no words to describe so silly a creature.
How can people hold these opinions? What joy can we find in the expectation of nothing
but hopeless misery? What reason for boasting that we are in impenetrable darkness?
[...]
Nothing reveals more an extreme weakness of mind than not to know the misery of a godless man. Nothing is more indicative of a bad disposition of heart than not to desire the truth of eternal promises. Nothing is more dastardly than to act with bravado before God. Let them then leave these impieties to those who are sufficiently ill-bred to be really capable of them. Let them at least
be honest men, if they cannot be Christians. Finally, let them recognise that there are two
kinds of people one can call reasonable; those who serve God with all their heart because
they know Him, and those who seek Him with all their heart because they do not know Him.
What makes Pascal especially interesting is that he grasps the paradox of man's reason amid irrationality. Man was both desperately wicked or incorrigibly corrupt, as well as an angel in flesh who straddled the world with his powers of intellect and will. Condemned to die, but with the faculties to quest for a cure, man was the strangest beast. The village atheist or the fasionable sceptic was someone immune from the anxiety of this crossroads. Pascal grasped the strange theological symbol of the cross: a promise of a radical new within the very old.
Why is this so? Pascal mainly framed these questions in terms of ontology, but his fellow Jansenists had richly symbolic view of history. They viewed things in terms of the Bible's symbolic categories, types, and figures as the providential map to understand the times. The world's corruption was given in scripture, as well as its redemption.The world is corrupted, corrupting and corruptible for a particular reason, not simply as an accident of time or a precondition of matter. But this corruption is only dealt with the paradoxical sign of the cross: redemption through death and blessing through curse.
It is because of both corruption and redemption that God acts in strange ways, and yet these strange ways reveal more about ourselves than not. An example of this problem is divine violence. I used to believe, along with neo-Anabaptists like Greg Boyd, that the violence of the Old Testament was a problem to overcome. It was perhaps a paedogogical tool based in Israel's primitive tribalism, or perhaps it was a corrupted communication. However, the violence of the OT can only be understood in terms of divine redemption. It's because we're so sick that the cure appears so drastic, the same way violence is applied to prevent something truly evil. Pascal makes this point here:
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," He says, "and to teach them of this war. I came to bring fire and the sword." Before
Him the world lived in this false peace.
The sign of this violent end to violence, the radical surgery to cut out our corruption, comes in the symbol of the cross. And the vision of Christ crucified produces in us either joyful hope or revulsion. But the cross is the universal symbol, under which we all stand. If you don't die now, you will later. Mortification, a being put to death, is a process intrinsic to salvation. The curse either becomes the very means of blessing or deepening into sheer cursedness. The plight of mankind is crucifixion: one either sides with the Son of God and asks to be received into paradise, or he continues to mock the Savior.
Again, the problem is not simply things as they are but, unlike the body/matter-loving Christians of the 20th/21st century, things are bad. For God had created this age to be an imperfect one of growth and transfiguration. There's a typological parallel between Eve birthed from sleeping Adam's side and the dead Christ's pierced side pouring out blood and water, the elements of His bride, the Church. The difference in types truly shows how horrifying sin truly is, and what the curse had contained through a brutal regime of hard-work, suffering in life-giving, and mortality cut off from immortality. But more importantly, God had chosen to hide Himself in a peculiar form. Why not simply make things perfect? And once fallen, why not just fix it? Christ created rational creatures that He draws into the most peculiar relationship. All of heaven and earth sing of their Creator, but the Creator shrouds Himself in darkness. He speaks, but in riddles. The creation bears this mark, the sign of wisdom, but wisdom now crucified. There is a difference between programming and self-discovery. The latter does not mean, or require, a human autonomy in contrast or in differentiation from divine providence. Man plans in his heart, but God directs his footsteps. Advocates of free-will like to contrast God's creation of humans, as rational and willful creatures, not robots. So far, that's basically true, but that is totally irrelevant if God is accountable for the salvation of these creatures. Those who use these arguments to argue for a powerless God who can't stop or intervene in affairs know nothing of the Bible. In Scripture, humans are simultaneously open and free, while never outside God's will. Luther's deterministic pessimism, bordering on the manichean, is as equally delusional as the Jesuit's Molinistic optimism in Human rationality and the integrity of creation.
It's for this reason that the body-positive approach in Christianity is both technically correct but, at a fundamental level, stupid. As this post rightly points out, a lot of the modern love of the body is due to air-conditioning and indoor plumbing. Sneering at the history of Christianity is ridiculous when you realize the conditions of life they lived in. But unlike the above author, who veers towards a neo-Platonic/Vedantic bifurcation between the world of flux and the eternal, I think Pascal deftly addresses this problem without submission. The fact is that the Bible is very earthy, and does not shy away from either the brutality or materiality of life (a feature of a not-yet perfected world God made which was made a struggle from God's curse on Adam's sin). Yet, at the same time, the spirituality of the NT points beyond the earthly coil. The chaos of contingency was not simply a thing to be ignored, but revealed God's work, will, and plan. Why so much sweat, blood, urine, and various other bodily fluids? So we might know our time is short, that we might know that things are not simply as they are. And yet the age of man, the anthropocene, reminds us of God's bounty. 70 years are allotted to man, even 80. But like fools, we can easily confuse a temporary blessing for eternal glory; the sign is collapsed into the thing signified.
Providence doesn't give a more flat or transparent meaning, but its opacity is understood. God's shroud of cloud and darkness is luminous. The cross illumines the inner meaning of the world, even as the rationality involves paradox. History turns on Golgotha, not an airy or superficial progressivism that does not perceive the deep irrationality, darkness, and sinfulness in mankind. And thus the sign of the cross is precisely the narrow path, the small gate, through which paradise comes again to us in the form of the Heavenly Jerusalem. Cain is the first city-builder, and yet Human creativity (as depraved as it may be) participates in the divine plan. The energies of cosmic order come to fruition in the Kingdom of the Slain-yet-Risen Lamb. The curse canceled through the Judge judged ushers in blessedness. The sacrifice of the righteous and holy high-priest ends sacrifice and begins an endless age of feasting. Creation is brought about, through valleys of shadow and thorns, to the hills of perfection and purity. History finds its end in the cross.
Pascal's work goes a long way to appreciating the symbolic weight of the cross. Christ crucified is not simply a ticket to punch, whether for a subjective experience of salvation or the engine of a sacramental-industrial complex that expands the temporal fortunes of an ecclesial organization. Rather, the cross is the hermeneutic key to understand the meaning of the times. May all Christians, like Pascal, bear witness to "the Lamb slain before the foundation of the world" (Rev. 13:8)
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