Mathematics was not demanding enough by itself. Pascal’s restless mind sought other challenges, notably in physics, especially in the study of that illusive entity, vacuum. He invented the syringe, improved Torricelli’s barometer, and published important papers on the weight and density of air.
But when he turned twenty-three, in 1646, his father being ill, Pascal underwent a kind of conversion from the easy-going, latitudinarian Catholicism practiced by his family to the much stricter Catholicism of the Jansenists, a sect whose leadership was centered in the convent of Port Royale, in Paris. In 1652, when he was not yet thirty and after a mystical “night of fire” that seared his soul, Pascal entered Port Royale and thenceforth wrote and worked according to the dictates of the fathers of the convent.
He was almost at once swept into controversy, writing a series of “Provincial Letters” in defense of the Jansenists against the more lax (as he viewed them) Jesuits. During the course of two years spent writing the eighteen “Provincial Letters,” Pascal not only developed his mature thinking on religion but also created modern French prose. Before those interesting and readable letters, French prose had often been heavy, bombastic, and tedious. Pascal’s prose, especially as he neared the end of the series of letters, attained those qualities of lightness, variety, and flexibility—souplesse, as the French say—that are so much admired today.
Having completed the “Provincial Letters,” Pascal decided to write an important work on religion, an Apology for Christianity that would emphasize the importance for salvation of God’s grace rather than good works, and would compare in the most graphic terms the abject condition of man without grace to the bliss of those possessing it. This book was never finished, but what he wrote of it—some notes, some longer paragraphs, a few “chapters” of several pages in length—was collected by Pascal before his final illness and published soon after his death at thirty-nine under the title of Pensées (Thoughts). By this title it has been known, and published and republished, ever since.
The surviving fragments of Pascal’s original concept are more eloquent about the abjectness of a life without grace than about the bliss of a life with it. If, indeed, “eloquent” is a strong enough term to describe the potent language of these scattered thoughts, which are certainly the greatest collection of apercus ever composed. Man unredeemed, without the grace of God, is like a caged animal, constantly seeking a freedom that he does not know how to use, requiring “diversions” of all kinds but unable to face himself.
All the unhappiness of men arises from one single fact, that they cannot stay quietly in their own chamber … Nothing is so insufferable to a man as to be completely at rest, without passions, without business, without diversion, without study. He then feels his nothingness, his forlornness, his insufficiency, his dependence, his weakness, his emptiness … As men are not able to fight against death, misery, ignorance, they have taken it into their heads, in order to be happy, not to think of them at all.
What is to be done? In response to the challenge of skeptics, Pascal proposes a wager, which his study of probabilities has made it easier to explicate. Believe in God, he says; why not? If God does not exist what have you lost? It is not so great a burden to fall upon your knees. But if God does exist, think what you have gained! And if God does exist and you do not believe, think of what you will lose—an eternity of bliss exchanged for an eternity of pain. No gambler would refuse these odds, says Pascal; why should you?
There are two kinds of intellects, Pascal tells us: the geometrical and the intuitive (l’esprit de géometrie and l’esprit de finesse). The one thinks with the mind; the other, as it were, with the heart. In a famous apothegm he describes the difference between them: “The heart has its reasons,” he writes, “which reason will never know.” (Le coeur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connait pas.) The most important insights, the most valuable knowledge, come to us through intuition; we apprehend directly, by a power essentially mysterious, as opposed to thinking things through. “I can never forgive Descartes,” Pascal writes, and although the reason given is a metaphysical one, it is clear that Pascal’s philosophy is fundamentally opposed to Cartesianism. Descartes’s Discourse on Method had advocated just the sort of geometrical thinking that Pascal is here declaring to be of secondary importance. Pascal’s distinction between two kinds of thinking remains influential to this day. Probably no one can read the Pensées without asking himself which kind of mind he has, and on which kind of thinking he is accustomed to depend.
The invention by Pascal of a digital calculator—the first “real” computer—seems relevant here. One of the great controversies of our time swirls around the question of whether a computer will ever be able to “think like a man.” A test often proposed is whether a computer can “jump to a conclusion.” (This phrase may beg the question: is “jumping to a conclusion” intuition, or is it just reasoning with suppressed, unconscious steps?) There is no doubt that computers can reason, after a fashion, but will they ever be able to do what a person does when he “has an idea” or “has a flash of inspiration”? Whatever is really meant by the two phrases it seems to be closer to the intuitive than to the geometrical mind.
Even if the subject matter of Pascal’s Pensées were not so interesting, you might still want to read them because of their beauty and pellucid clarity. These qualities come through in most English translations, which has helped to make this collection of scattered observations one of the all-time bestselling books. Read a little or a lot at a time; Pascal will not only delight, but also improve your mind and help you to contemplate reality.
“The last act is tragic,” he concludes, “however happy all the rest of the play; at the last a little earth is thrown upon our head, and that is the end forever.”
JOHN DONNE
1572–1631
Poems
It is widely believed (by persons who are neither) that it is impossible to be both intellectually brilliant and deeply emotional—passionate, as it was called. John Donne is the proof that this belief is not correct.
Donne was one of the most brilliant men of his time, and it was a time of brilliant minds: Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, Newton, to say nothing of Shakespeare and Cervantes. Donne possessed a powerful, cool wit that helped him, in his later years, to attract huge throngs (including King James I) to his sermons in St. Paul’s Cathedral, the premier pulpit of England in his day. His sermons are among the finest in English and his last sermon, preached when he knew he was dying and entitled “Death’s Duel,” is, I believe, unequaled.
Brilliant as he was, he was even more a man of passion, of feelings, of emotion. Sometimes the depth and power of his feelings overcame his intellect, or wit, and then he was wild, like a powerful spring popping out of a watch. When this happened his sermons became bizarre, almost unintelligible, and his poems became almost unintelligible, too. They seem to burst the bonds of their form, their rhythm and meter; they are trying to say more than a person can say, in poetry or otherwise.