‘The Pensées of Pascal’
‘The Pensées of Pascal’
Excerpts from ‘The Pensées of Pascal’
T. S. Eliot, Selected Essays (3rd edn., London, 1951)
The period of fashionable society in Pascal’s life is, however, of great importance in his development. It enlarged his knowledge of men and refined his tastes; he became a man of the world and never lost what he had learnt; and when he turned his thoughts wholly towards religion, his worldly knowledge was a part of his composition which is essential to the value of his work.
(p. 404)
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.
(p. 407)
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 – and I mean the man who is trying consciously and conscientiously to explain to himself the sequence which culminates in faith, rather than the public apologist – proceeds by rejection and elimination. … 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’. He does not consider that if certain emotional states, certain developments of character, and what in the highest sense can be called ‘saintliness’ are inherently and by inspection known to be good, then the satisfactory explanation of the world must be an explanation which will admit the ‘reality’ of these values. Nor does he consider such reasoning admissible; he would, so to speak, trim his values according to his cloth, because to him such values are of no great value. The unbeliever starts from the other end, and as likely as not with the question: Is a case of human parthenogenesis credible? and this he would call going straight to the heart of the matter.
(p. 408)
I have said above that Pascal’s method is ‘on the whole’ that of the typical Christian apologist; and this reservation was directed at Pascal’s belief in miracles, which plays a larger part in his construction than it would in that, at least, of the modern Catholic. It would seem fantastic to accept Christianity because we first believe the Gospel miracles to be true, and it would seem impious to accept it primarily because we believe more recent miracles to be true; we accept the miracles, or some miracles, to be true because we believe the Gospel of Jesus Christ: we found our belief in miracles on the Gospel, not our belief in the Gospel on the miracles.
(p. 409)
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.
(pp. 411–412)
Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît 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.
(p. 416)
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.
(p. 416)
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