"... Pascal is one of those writers who will be and who must be studied afresh by men in every generation. It is not he who changes, but we who change...
... born at Clermont, in Auvergne, in 1623...
... So far as is known, the worldly life enjoyed by Pascal during this period can hardly be qualified as 'dissipation,' and certainly not as 'debauchery.' Even gambling may have appealed to him chiefly as affording a study of mathematical probabilities....
... in 1654 occurs what is called his 'second conversion,' but which might be called his conversion simply. He made a note of his mystical experience, which he kept always about him, and which was found, after his death, sewn into the coat which he was wearing. The experience occurred on 23 November, 1654, and there is no reason to doubt its genuineness unless we choose to deny all mystical experience....
... His Letters must not be called theology.... The Letters are the work of one of the finest mathematical minds of any time, and of a man of the world who addressed, not theologians, but the world in general....
... The plan of what we call the Pensées formed itself about 1660. The completed book was to have been a carefully constructed defence of Christianity, a true Apology... As I have indicated before, Pascal was not a theologian, and on dogmatic theology had recourse to his spiritual advisers. Nor was he indeed a systematic philosopher. He was a man with an immense genius for science, and at the same time a natural psychologist and moralist. As he was a great literary artist, his book would have been also his own spiritual autobiography; his style, free from all diminishing idiosyncrasies, was yet very personal. Above all, he was a man of strong passions; and his intellectual passion for truth was reinforced by his passionate dissatisfaction with human life unless a spiritual explanation could be found.
We must regard the Pensées as merely the first notes for a work which he left far from completion... To understand the method which Pascal employs, the reader must be prepared to follow the process of the mind of the intelligent believer. The Christian thinker... He finds the world to be so and so; he finds its character inexplicable by any non-religious theory; among religions he finds Christianity... to account most satisfactorily for the world and especially for the moral world within...
... To the unbeliever, this method seems disingenuous and perverse; for the unbeliever is, as a rule, not so greatly troubled to explain the world to himself, nor so greatly distressed by its disorder; nor is he generally concerned (in modern terms) to 'preserve values.' ...
... Now Pascal's method is, on the whole, the method natural and right for the Christian...
...Pascal is a man of the world among ascetics, and an ascetic among men of the world; he had the knowledge of worldliness and the passion of asceticism, and in him the two are fused into an individual whole. The majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities, and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or much faith; and when the ordinary man calls himself a sceptic or an unbeliever, that is ordinarily a simple pose, cloaking a disinclination to think anything out to a conclusion....
... [Pascal's] despair is in itself more terrible... because our heart tells us that it corresponds exactly to the facts and cannot be dismissed as mental disease; but it was also a despair which was a necessary prelude to, an element in, the joy of faith. [Rm. 5:3-5]...
... How fast a hold he [Pascal] has of humility!...
... And although Pascal brings to his work the same powers which he exerted in science, it is not as a scientist that he presents himself. He does not seem to say to the reader: I am one of the most distinguished scientists of the day; I understand many matters which will always be mysteries to you, and through science I have come to the Faith; you therefore who are not initiated into science ought to have faith if I have it. He is fully aware of the difference of subject-matter...
... He who reads this book will observe at once its fragmentary nature; but only after some study will perceive that the fragmentariness lies in the expression more than in the thought. The 'thoughts' cannot be detached from each other and quoted as if each were complete in itself. le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point: how often one has heard that quoted, and quoted often to the wrong purpose! For this is by no means an exaltation of the 'heart' over the 'head,' a defence of unreason. The heart, in Pascal's terminology, is itself truly rational if it is truly the heart. For him, in theological matters, which seemed to him much larger, more difficult, and more important than scientific matters, the whole personality is involved....
... But I can think of no Christian writer, not Newman even, more to be commended than Pascal to those who doubt, but who have the mind to conceive, and the sensibility to feel, the disorder, the futility, the meaninglessness, the mystery of life and suffering, and who can only find peace through a satisfaction of the whole being.
T. S. Eliot."
<-Retake-The Memorial-"God-Shaped Vacuum"->
I hope to read through Pascal's Pensées in my free time.
Get a copy, so you can follow along too:
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