Blaise Pascal, (born June 19, 1623, Clermont-Ferrand, France—died August
19, 1662, Paris) French mathematician, physicist, religious philosopher, and
master of prose. He laid the foundation for the modern theory of probabilities,
formulated what came to be known as Pascal’s principle of pressure, and
propagated a religious doctrine that taught the experience of God through the
heart rather than through reason. The establishment of his principle of
intuitionism had an impact on such later philosophers as Jean-Jacques Rousseau
and Henri Bergson and also on the Existentialists.
Pascal’s life to the
Port-Royal years
Pascal’s father, Étienne Pascal, was presiding judge of the tax court at
Clermont-Ferrand. His mother died in 1626, and in 1631 the family moved to
Paris. Étienne, who was respected as a mathematician, devoted himself
henceforth to the education of his children. While his sister Jacqueline (born
in 1625) figured as an infant prodigy in literary circles, Blaise proved
himself no less precocious in mathematics. In 1640 he wrote an essay on conic
sections, Essai pour les coniques, based on his study of the now classical work
of Girard Desargues on synthetic projective geometry. The young man’s work,
which was highly successful in the world of mathematics, aroused the envy of no
less a personage than the great French Rationalist and mathematician René
Descartes. Between 1642 and 1644, Pascal conceived and constructed a
calculating device, the Pascaline, to help his father—who in 1639 had been
appointed intendant (local administrator) at Rouen—in his tax computations. The
machine was regarded by Pascal’s contemporaries as his main claim to fame, and
with reason, for in a sense it was the first digital calculator since it
operated by counting integers. The significance of this contribution explains
the youthful pride that appears in his dedication of the machine to the
chancellor of France, Pierre Seguier, in 1644.
Until 1646 the Pascal family held strictly Roman Catholic principles,
though they often substituted l’honnêteté (“polite respectability”) for inward
religion. An illness of his father, however, brought Blaise into contact with a
more profound expression of religion, for he met two disciples of the abbé de
Saint-Cyran, who, as director of the convent of Port-Royal, had brought the
austere moral and theological conceptions of Jansenism into the life and
thought of the convent. Jansenism was a 17th-century form of Augustinianism in
the Roman Catholic Church. It repudiated free will, accepted predestination,
and taught that divine grace, rather than good works, was the key to salvation.
The convent at Port-Royal had become the centre for the dissemination of the
doctrine. Pascal himself was the first to feel the necessity of entirely turning
away from the world to God, and he won his family over to the spiritual life in
1646. His letters indicate that for several years he was his family’s spiritual
adviser, but the conflict within himself—between the world and ascetic life—was
not yet resolved. Absorbed again in his scientific interests, he tested the
theories of Galileo and Evangelista Torricelli (an Italian physicist who
discovered the principle of the barometer). To do so, he reproduced and
amplified experiments on atmospheric pressure by constructing mercury
barometers and measuring air pressure, both in Paris and on the top of a
mountain overlooking Clermont-Ferrand. These tests paved the way for further
studies in hydrodynamics and hydrostatics. While experimenting, Pascal invented
the syringe and created the hydraulic press, an instrument based upon the
principle that became known as Pascal’s principle: pressure applied to a
confined liquid is transmitted undiminished through the liquid in all
directions regardless of the area to which the pressure is applied. His
publications on the problem of the vacuum (1647–48) added to his reputation.
When he fell ill from overwork, his doctors advised him to seek distractions;
but what has been described as Pascal’s “worldly period” (1651–54) was, in
fact, primarily a period of intense scientific work, during which he composed
treatises on the equilibrium of liquid solutions, on the weight and density of
air, and on the arithmetic triangle: Traité de l’équilibre des liqueurs et de
la pesanteur de la masse de l’air (Eng. trans., The Physical Treatises of
Pascal, 1937) and also his Traité du triangle arithmétique. In the last
treatise, a fragment of the De Alea Geometriae, he laid the foundations for the
calculus of probabilities. By the end of 1653, however, he had begun to feel
religious scruples; and the “night of fire,” an intense, perhaps mystical
“conversion” that he experienced on November 23, 1654, he believed to be the
beginning of a new life. He entered Port-Royal in January 1655, and though he
never became one of the solitaires, he thereafter wrote only at their request
and never again published in his own name. The two works for which he is
chiefly known, Les Provinciales and the Pensées, date from the years of his
life spent at Port-Royal.
Les Provinciales
Written in defense of Antoine Arnauld, an opponent of the Jesuits and a
defender of Jansenism who was on trial before the faculty of theology in Paris
for his controversial religious works, Pascal’s 18 Lettres écrites par Louis de
Montalte à un provincial deal with divine grace and the ethical code of the
Jesuits. They are better known as Les Provinciales (“The Provincial Letters”).
They included a blow against the relaxed morality that the Jesuits were said to
teach and that was the weak point in their controversy with Port-Royal; Pascal
quotes freely Jesuit dialogues and discrediting quotations from their own
works, sometimes in a spirit of derision, sometimes with indignation. In the
two last letters, dealing with the question of grace, Pascal proposed a
conciliatory position that was later to make it possible for Port-Royal to
subscribe to the “Peace of the Church,” a temporary cessation of the conflict
over Jansenism, in 1668.
The Provinciales were an immediate success, and their popularity has
remained undiminished. This they owe primarily to their form, in which for the
first time bombast and tedious rhetoric are replaced by variety, brevity,
tautness, and precision of style; as Nicolas Boileau, the founder of French
literary criticism, recognized, they marked the beginning of modern French
prose. Something of their popularity, moreover, in fashionable, Protestant, or
skeptical circles, must be attributed to the violence of their attack on the
Jesuits. In England they have been most widely read when Roman Catholicism has
seemed a threat to the Church of England. Yet they have also helped Catholicism
to rid itself of laxity; and, in 1678, Pope Innocent XI himself condemned half
of the propositions that Pascal had denounced earlier. Thus, the Provinciales
played a decisive part in promoting a return to inner religion and helped to
secure the eventual triumph of the ideas set forth in Antoine Arnauld’s
treatise De la fréquente communion (1643), in which he protested against the
idea that the profligate could atone for continued sin by frequent communion
without repentance, a thesis that thereafter remained almost unchallengeable
until the French church felt the repercussion of the revocation of the Edict of
Nantes (which had granted religious freedom to French Protestants) in 1685.
Whereas the Jesuits seemed to represent a Counter-Reformation predominantly
concerned with orthodoxy and obedience to ecclesiastical authority, the
Provinciales advocated a more spiritual approach, emphasizing the soul’s union
with the Mystical Body of Christ through charity.
Further, by rejecting any double standard of morality and the
distinction between counsel and precept, Pascal aligned himself with those who
believe the ideal of evangelical perfection to be inseparable from the
Christian life. Although there was nothing original in these opinions, Pascal
nevertheless stamped them with the passionate conviction of a man in love with
the absolute, of a man who saw no salvation apart from a heartfelt desire for
the truth, together with a love of God that works continually toward destroying
all self-love. For Pascal, morality cannot be separated from spirituality.
Moreover, his own spiritual development can be traced in the Provinciales. The
religious sense in them becomes progressively refined after the first letters,
in which the tone of ridicule is smart rather than charitable.
Pensées
Pascal finally decided to write his work of Christian apologetics,
Apologie de la religion chrétienne, as a consequence of his meditations on
miracles and other proofs of Christianity. The work remained unfinished at his
death. Between the summers of 1657 and 1658, he put together most of the notes
and fragments that editors have published under the inappropriate title Pensées
(“Thoughts”). In the Apologie, Pascal shows the man without grace to be an
incomprehensible mixture of greatness and abjectness, incapable of truth or of
reaching the supreme good to which his nature nevertheless aspires. A religion
that accounts for these contradictions, which he believed philosophy and
worldliness fail to do, is for that very reason “to be venerated and loved.”
The indifference of the skeptic, Pascal wrote, is to be overcome by means of
the “wager”: if God does not exist, the skeptic loses nothing by believing in
him; but if he does exist, the skeptic gains eternal life by believing in him.
Pascal insists that men must be brought to God through Jesus Christ alone,
because a creature could never know the infinite if Jesus had not descended to
assume the proportions of man’s fallen state.
The second part of the work applies the Augustinian theory of
allegorical interpretation to the biblical types (figuratifs); reviews the
rabbinical texts, the persistence of true religion, the work of Moses, and the
proofs concerning Jesus Christ’s God-like role; and, finally, gives a picture
of the primitive church and the fulfillment of the prophecies. The Apologie
(Pensées) is a treatise on spirituality. Pascal was not interested in making
converts if they were not going to be saints.
Pascal’s apologetics, though it has stood the test of time, is primarily
addressed to individuals of his own acquaintance. To convert his libertine
friends, he looked for arguments in their favourite authors: in Michel de Montaigne,
in the Skeptic Pierre Charron, in the Epicurean Pierre Gassendi, and in Thomas
Hobbes, an English political philosopher. For Pascal, Skepticism was but a
stage. Modernist theologians in particular have tried to make use of his main
contention, that “man is infinitely more than man,” in isolation from his other
contention, that man’s wretchedness is explicable only as the effect of a Fall,
about which a man can learn what he needs to know from history. In so doing,
they sacrifice the second part of the Apologie to the first, keeping the
philosophy while losing the exegesis. For Pascal as for St. Paul, Jesus Christ
is the second Adam, inconceivable without the first.
Finally, too, Pascal expressly admitted that his psychological analyses
were not by themselves sufficient to exclude a “philosophy of the absurd”; to
do so, it is necessary to have recourse to the convergence of these analyses
with the “lines of fact” concerning revelation, this convergence being too
extraordinary not to appear as the work of providence to an anguished seeker
after truth (qui cherche en gémissant).
He was next again involved in scientific work. First, the “Messieurs de
Port-Royal” themselves asked for his help in composing the Élements de
géométrie; and second, it was suggested that he should publish what he had
discovered about cycloid curves, a subject on which the greatest mathematicians
of the time had been working. Once more fame aroused in him feelings of
self-esteem; but from February 1659, illness brought him back to his former
frame of mind, and he composed the “prayer for conversion” that the English
clergymen Charles and John Wesley, who founded the Methodist Church, were later
to regard so highly. Scarcely capable of regular work, he henceforth gave
himself over to helping the poor and to the ascetic and devotional life. He
took part intermittently, however, in the disputes to which the “Formulary”—a
document condemning five propositions of Jansenism that, at the demand of the
church authorities, had to be signed before a person could receive the
sacraments—gave rise. Finally a difference of opinion with the theologians of
Port-Royal led him to withdraw from controversy, though he did not sever his
relations with them.
Pascal died in 1662 after suffering terrible pain, probably from
carcinomatous meningitis following a malignant ulcer of the stomach. He was
assisted by a non-Jansenist parish priest.
Assessment
At once a physicist, a mathematician, an eloquent publicist in the
Provinciales, and an inspired artist in the Apologie and in his private notes,
Pascal was embarrassed by the very abundance of his talents. It has been
suggested that it was his too concrete turn of mind that prevented his
discovering the infinitesimal calculus; and in some of the Provinciales the
mysterious relations of human beings with God are treated as if they were a
geometrical problem. But these considerations are far outweighed by the profit
that he drew from the multiplicity of his gifts; his religious writings are
rigorous because of his scientific training; and his love of the concrete
emerges no less from the stream of quotations in the Provinciales than from his
determination to reject the vigorous method of attack that he had used so effectively
in his Apologie.
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