Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal

The Church established by Jesus is commissioned by Christ to faithfully pass on the doctrines of the faith. The number of cultures, ethnicities and languages in which this task is accomplished is overwhelming.  Local cultures and varying degrees of orthodoxy ensure that each Catholic is educated in these doctrines in various ways using culturally meaningful metaphors and with varying degrees of thoroughness.

To a large extent my spiritual journey consists of seeking presentations of doctrine that provide me with a unique understanding or strike me as especially meaningful. That was the case when I read an article in the magazine First Things on Blaise Pascal. The article was one in a series highlighting one individual from each century of the last millennium who most significantly defined the last millennium. The following link is to the entire article.

 ( http://www.firstthings.com/article/1999/08/pascal-the-first-modern-christian)

The author of the article, Edward T. Oakes, outlines Pascal's presentation of Christ's incarnation in Pascal's collected musings entiltled Pensees. Pascal's way of explaining the Incarnation and how it can work in our lives refreshed my view of a doctrine that I confess to at least once a week, but one which I fail to reflect upon as deeply as I should.

In the article Oakes uses a term "iodine of  hyperactivity". I don't know if it is his or Pascal's but my next post will expand on that concept. Oakes contrasts Pascal's thought (theological) against Descartes (reason) so you will see him mentioned.

from Oakes' article:

But Pascal is even more noticeably anti-Cartesian in his concern for the Christian religion. Descartes famously loathed theological disputes and avoided their entanglements whenever possible. Pascal, as his acrimonious debates with the Jesuits attest, entered the fray of theological infighting with startling gusto and vehemence. But what most of his contemporaries, both friend and foe, failed during his lifetime to see about his motivation emerged only after his death, when his younger sister gathered together the shards and disjecta membra of his notes for a projected work of apologetics and published them in the form we know today as the Pensées .

  

From this remarkable work [Pensees] we now realize that Pascal saw himself, above all, as Christ’s apologete and defender against Christianity’s rationalist scoffers. … No doubt Pascal always remained heavily indebted to Descartes’ dualism of mind and matter, but in his apologetics for Christianity he transforms Cartesian dualism into merely one aspect of a much deeper and more central dualism: not between spirit and matter but between God’s holiness and human misery, not between soul and body but between God’s infinity and man’s sin. Christ came to heal these more agonizing divisions -- divisions rooted not in incompatible metaphysical essences but in the pathos of the enfleshed soul trapped in sin. The Incarnation thus becomes a balm applied to man’s riven soul, torn not so much between spirit and flesh as between despair and pride.

 [The Christian religion] teaches men both these truths: that there is a God of whom we are capable, and that a corruption in our nature makes us unworthy of Him. It is equally important for us to know both these points; for it is equally dangerous for man to know God without knowing his own wretchedness, and to know his wretchedness without knowing the Redeemer who can cure him of it. Knowledge of only one of these points leads either to the arrogance of the philosophers, who have known God and not their own wretchedness, or to the despair of the atheists, who know their wretchedness without knowing the Redeemer.

We can see from these remarks that for Pascal Descartes’ dualism is missing a crucial element: he has failed to provide an analysis of the moral dangers to which the human spirit is prone precisely because of its capacity for an infinite reach to the very ends of the universe. Pascal openly affirms with Descartes that our capacity to know the universe makes us masters, in some paradoxical sense, of the universe we conceive. But our capacity to “grasp” the universe and transform it into a mental construct of our knowing powers remains both paradox and pathos: we always accomplish these acts of knowing as puny, pathetic, and vulnerable bodies, whose corruption eventually leads to death.

This knowing mind, however, would rather remain enamored of its cognitive powers than acknowledge that this knowing power is an organic function of the brain. … Fearing the inevitable dissolution of its powers, the mind hides from itself the reality of its own insignificance. Second only to cognition itself, the most notable fact of the human mind lies in its tendency to forget the realities of its corruption and death.

 Hence the central temptation of man is always pride. … For Pascal, pride is a deeply functional sin: it works to help us forget. The mind shrinks from recognizing its status as a thinking reed by hiding under a carapace of pride. Characteristically, Descartes failed to notice this pathos; a missing element that, like the non-barking dog that became the decisive clue in the Sherlock Holmes story, tells us why Cartesian philosophy is more culprit than detective, more likely, that is, to lead us astray than to bring us to the truth.

But despite a few stray remarks in the Pensées that attack Descartes, Pascal’s intent there is not, fundamentally, polemical. Throughout this fascinating book of almost random observations the reader soon picks up the author’s driving motivation. Pascal above all wants to explain to his post-Cartesian contemporaries how the pathos of human nature has its own “balm in Gilead,” a healing ointment in Jesus Christ, who is the very divine incarnation of these human oppositions. But of course Jesus Christ can only be accepted as Christ (the “anointed one”) if one first admits that human nature needs His healing balm. Christ’s coming on earth thus has the odd effect of eliciting hate precisely because His presence in history will reopen wounds that our distracted culture thought had been healed not by His balm but by the iodine of hyperactivity.

  

No wonder, then, that modernity since the Enlightenment has taken scandal in Jesus Christ. Even inside our own culture, which is often called “post”“modern because of its self-image of being more accommodating to local traditions and intercultural understanding than was Enlightened modernity, Christianity still is made to feel something like the bastard son who shows up uninvited at the annual family picnic. Inside all the talk about multiculturalism, contemporary culture often balks at including Christianity in its “gorgeous mosaic.” This uneasiness has sometimes been dubbed the “ABC Rule,” meaning “anything but Christianity.” Undoubtedly Pascal would amend that to mean “anyone but Christ,” for at root that is where the scandal lies. Christianity’s scandal is not just itself (though it is that as well, which is no doubt why the Pope wants the Church formally to repent of her institutional sins); its real scandal is Jesus Christ. And He is the stumbling block precisely because to accept Him is first of all to admit one’s hopelessness without Him. Pride and life in Christ are inherently incompatible.