Blaise Pascal Part 3

Finally we come to what Pascal meant by the "iodine of hyperactivity". We flit from one diversion to another so as not to be alone in the presence of our thoughts. For our Dante reading group I've included the author's tip of the hat to Dante.

Oakes continues:

... Pascal was an acute student of boredom, and saw in this phenomenon… the clue to the very pathos of the human condition. Generally speaking, says Pascal, “we think either of present woes or of threatened miseries.” But moments occur in almost everyone’s experience when life reaches a temporary pause of homeostasis, when we feel quite safe on every side, when bad health does not threaten, when bill collectors are not baying at the door, when rush “hour traffic is light and the weather pleasant.” But precisely at such moments “boredom on its own account emerges from the depths of our hearts, where it is naturally rooted, and poisons our whole mind.” Not just the king craves diversion. So terrified are we of boredom that the king’s ambition is our own.

I have called Pascal “the first modern Christian” because, among other reasons, our civilization, in contrast to all other past civilizations, gets its very identity from the sheer range of distractions that have now been made available to us, from hundreds of channels on cable TV to over a thousand video cassettes on the shelf of any self-respecting video rental agency to the millions of websites on the Internet, group activities of every sort imaginable, aerobics classes, talk-show radio on the air twenty-four hours a day, and so on....

 Our own age is not likely to be distinguished in history for the large numbers of people who insisted on finding the time to think. Plainly, this is not the Age of Meditative Man . . . . Substitutes for repose are a billion dollar business. Almost daily, new antidotes for contemplation spring into being and leap out from store counters. Silence, already the world’s most critical shortage, is in danger of becoming a nasty word. Modern man may or may not be obsolete, but he is certainly wired for sound and he twitches as naturally as he breathes.

Of course no one denies the legitimate need for entertainment or the role that diversion plays in generating demand for the works of art that have become the glory of our species. Often life achieves its goal of testifying to its own goodness as worth living when a human being is able to enjoy the highest benefits of culture. I personally count myself most glad to be alive when I am enjoying a good meal with a friend, listening to Mozart in the privacy of my room, or reading a good book. Nor, despite his seeming Jansenist severity, would Pascal contemn such pleasures. Even he, the least therapeutic writer imaginable, admits that diversions can help to heal the beset soul ….

  

But our extraordinary obsession with entertainment and distraction constitutes perhaps the hallmark of our civilization in contrast to past cultures. From the time the clock radio goes off in the morning to the late-night talk shows, the average denizen of contemporary culture need never be alone, encounter silence, or have to listen to the voice within. As Pascal says: “We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to keep from seeing the precipice.” ….

Second only to Dante, Pascal is Europe’s most politically incorrect writer. He dares to raise the unmentionable topic of truth in religion, and even called one of the sections of his Pensées “Nature Is Corrupt: On the Falseness of Other Religions.” In contrast to most reflection on the problem of world religions in today’s academy, Pascal sees the “problem” as in fact essential for the truth of the Christian message:

 That God wanted to be hidden . If there were only one religion, God would be clearly manifest. If there were martyrs only in our religion, the same. God being therefore hidden, any religion which does not say that God is hidden is not true. And any religion which does not give us the reason why does not enlighten. Ours does all this . . . . If there were no obscurity man would not feel his corruption: if there were no light man could not hope for a cure. Thus it is not only right but useful that God should be partly concealed and partly revealed, since it is equally dangerous for man to know God without knowing his wretchedness as to know his own wretchedness without knowing God. “Truly God is hidden with you” (Isaiah 45:15).

Blaise Pascal Part 2

I thought I could lay out Pascal's thought in two posts but it is not possible. The following is then the second installment exerpted from the First Things article by Edward T. Oakes. the entire article can be found at http://www.firstthings.com/article/1999/08/pascal-the-first-modern-christian.

Continuing on from the previous post:

Pride tells us we can know God without Jesus Christ, in effect that we can communicate with God without a mediator. But this only means that we are communicating with a God who is the [prideful] result that comes from being known without a mediator. Whereas those who have known God through a mediator know their own wretchedness. Not only is it impossible to know God without Jesus Christ, it is also useless . . . . [For] knowing God without knowing our wretchedness leads to pride. Knowing our wretchedness without knowing God leads to despair. Knowing Jesus Christ is the middle course, because in Him we find both God and our wretchedness.

  

Because he wants the Incarnation to be a cure appropriate to the disease and because the death of Christ on the cross is indeed a most radical cure, implying a serious illness, Pascal is usually categorized as a “pessimistic” thinker” he wants his readers to see how far advanced the disease infecting them really is. And certainly he can be unsparing in his portrayal of the fleshly corruption and frail constitution of that “bruised and crushed reed” that is the human body…. But in depicting human wretchedness Pascal never wallows in scenes of grim despair but simply faces the human condition as it is, universally. In fact … the real issue comes down not to the sheer immensity of human suffering but more crucially to the fact that human suffering only has to occur once for the issue of man’s predicament to be raised.

  

…. What Pascal would say, in other words, is that as long as we take the spectator’s part and view human suffering from the outside, then, no matter how happy our circumstances are at the moment, we must know ourselves fundamentally as wretched beings. “Imagine a number of men in chains, all under sentence of death, …some of whom are each day butchered in the sight of the others; those remaining see their own condition in that of their fellows, and looking at each other with grief and despair await their turn. This is an image of the human condition.”

  

Especially in this era of terrorists parading their hostages in front of the world’s television screens, or hijackers holding a pistol to the head of an airline pilot for all the world to behold, or high school students hiding under cafeteria tables while their friends are being murdered by their own peers, we immediately recognize the truth of what Pascal is saying. But Pascal does not intend to force his readers to wallow in this misery. Rather, his depiction of the human condition is meant only to create the first opening through which we hear God’s response to that misery. … Pascal firmly believed that “God owes us nothing” …. And yet … God’s answer is not nothing. But that answer cannot even be heard if we do not admit the realities of the human condition in all their bleakness. Even as spectators, we suffer what we are forced to see. Television screens force us to become spectators of appalling suffering, but the situation they reveal is rooted in everyone’s nature. There is no escape from its pathos, only balm for our wounds if we are willing to accept the astringency of the ointment.

  

Of course, not many want that kind of painful healing, making it well “nigh inevitable that we will avail ourselves of distractions from our woes". Few words, in fact, are more crucial to Pascal than divertissement , usually translated as “diversion” or “distraction.” One of Pascal’s most famous observations, found in nearly every anthology of quotations, holds that “all the misfortunes of men derive from one single thing, their inability to remain at repose in a room.” …Pascal’s remark actually forms the opening gambit of his Christian apologetics, for he knows that “being unable to cure death, wretchedness, and ignorance,” and being not too fond of the medicine of Christ on offer either, “men have decided, in order to be happy, not to think about such things.” “Pessimist” that he is, however, Pascal refuses to let us evade God’s answer to our plight just because we would rather not advert to our distress in the first place. “That is why men are so fond of hustle and bustle,” he says. “That is why prison is such a fearful punishment; that is why the pleasures of solitude are so incomprehensible.”

  

This craving for distraction is so overriding and exigent that for Pascal it actually constitutes the driving force of ambition…. We crave distractions because we do not want to face the realities of the human condition. And because we are unwilling to admit our despair, we perforce cannot face the thought of applying the appropriate balm to heal these unacknowledged wounds. Consequently we hurl ourselves into an endless round of diversions, jobs, hobbies, etc., all to avoid our nature as thinking reeds:

   "Man is obviously made for thinking. Therein lies all his dignity and his merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought. Now the order of thought is to begin with ourselves, and with our Author and our end. But what does the world think about? Never about that, but about dancing, playing the lute, singing, writing verse, jousting and fighting, becoming a king, without ever thinking what it means to be a king or to be a man."

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.