Pascal Part 10

The knowledge of Jesus is the means by which we at once find G.o.d and our misery." "Without Jesus Christ man is sunk in vice and misery. . . . In Him is all our virtue and felicity."

Of the more directly apologetic 'Pensees' of Pascal there are many of great significance and interest, slight as may be the value of his general historical argument, so far as this can be traced. Wherever he trusts to his own clear judgment and profound penetration, he throws out sentences weighty with meaning, and capable of being expanded into trains of argument. Our shortening s.p.a.ce warns us that our quotations must come to an end; but the reader may thank us for drawing his attention to the following:-

"Even when Epictetus had discovered the right way, he could only say to man, 'You follow a wrong one.' He shows that there is another, but he does not lead to it. . . . Jesus Christ alone leads to it-_via_, _veritas_.

"Jesus Christ has spoken great things so simply that they seem to have cost Him little thought-and yet so fitly that we see well what His thought was." [This combination of clearness and _navete_ is admirable.]

"The apostles were either deceived or deceivers; either supposition is full of difficulty.

"What right have they to say, 'It is impossible that we should rise again'? Which is the more difficult to be-to be born, or to be raised from the dead? Is it less difficult to come into being than to return to being? Custom (experience) renders the one easy to us; the want of custom makes the other seem impossible. But _this is a popular way of judging_.

"Who taught the evangelists the qualities of a truly heroic soul, that they should paint it to such perfection in Jesus Christ? Why have they made Him weak in His agony? Did they not know how to describe a death of fort.i.tude? a.s.suredly; for it is the same St Luke paints St Stephen's death as so much braver than that of Jesus Christ. They have made Him capable of fear before the necessity of death had come, then entirely calm and brave. But when they show Him in trouble, the trouble comes from Himself; in the face of men He remains unmoved.

"The highest achievement of reason is to recognise that there is an infinity of things which surpa.s.s its powers.

"If we submit everything to reason, our religion would have nothing mysterious or supernatural. If we violate the principles of reason, our religion will be absurd and ridiculous.

"There are two extremes-to exclude reason, and to admit only reason.

"It is your own consent, and the steady voice of your own reason, and not that of others, which must make you believe.

"If antiquity was the rule of faith, the ancients were without a rule.

"Let them say what they will, it must be confessed that the Christian religion is something astonishing. 'That is because you were born in it,' they say. So far from this, I am on my guard against it on this very account, lest this incline me unduly to it. But though I was born in it, the facts are not the less as I find them."

True to his whole conception of religion as the free choice of the heart and will, Pascal does not find any special difficulty in the fact of so many rejecting Christianity. It is of its very nature that it cannot be forced on any mind. The G.o.d of the Gospel can only be reached by faith.

To all without faith, or the inner eye to see Him, He is a _Deus absconditus_, "a G.o.d who hides himself." In one of his letters to Mademoiselle de Roannez, he dwells upon this idea, which also continually recurs in his Thoughts:-

"If G.o.d continually revealed Himself to man, faith would have no value; we could not help believing. If He did not reveal Himself, there could be no such thing as faith. While hiding Himself, He yet reveals Himself to those who are willing to be His servants. . . .

All things hide a mystery. All are a veil which conceal G.o.d. The Christian must recognise Him in all. . . . There is light enough for those who wish to see, but darkness enough for those who are of an opposite disposition. . . . For G.o.d would rather move the will than the intellect. Perfect clearness would cure the one, but injure the other."

And so this great mind comes round once more to its central thought, that religion is born not of science, but of love and faith. Christianity appeared to Pascal divine-as the only true interpreter of human experience; and where this experience bore no witness to it, and found no blessing in it, the fault and the misery were its own. The divine light was not gone because men did not see it, when they were not willing to see it. This may seem a hard saying,-a paradox of faith rejoicing in its own illumination, rather than an utterance of reason challenging the world. But can a divine appeal ever go further? Christian apology has its own sphere, no less than science; and the evidence which the one desiderates is not the supreme life and power of the other. It may not on this account be the less satisfactory or the less rational when the whole life of humanity is looked at.

If we ask ourselves, in conclusion, what is the chief charm of the 'Pensees,' we feel inclined to answer,-their touching reality. They are the utterances of one who thought not only deeply but pa.s.sionately. A strange thrill of personal emotion runs through them all, animating them with vitality, even when one-sided or extravagant. One of his own countrymen {204} has said of Pascal that it was his mission to do for theology what Socrates did for philosophy-to bring it down from heaven to earth. And certainly there is the breathing movement as of a human heart through his whole writings. More than anything else, it is this vitality combined with his exquisite literary art which sets him above all his friends and contemporaries-Arnauld, De Saci, Le Maitre, Nicole, or Fontaine. Still, when we read the 'Provincial Letters' or the 'Pensees,'

we feel ourselves in communion with a living writer who knew how to light up with an immortal touch both the follies of ecclesiasticism and the struggles of a solitary spirit after truth. The tenderness of a genuine insight mingles with all the sublimity and severe reserve of the thought, and so we get close to a true soul, distant as Pascal himself in some respects remains to us. The play of human feeling which we miss in the man moves in his writings, and touches our hearts with an ineffable sympathy, even when we remain unconvinced or unenlightened.

END OF PASCAL.

NOTES.

{3} Lettres, Opuscules, et Memoires de Madame Perier et de Jacqueline, Surs de Pascal, et de Marguerite Perier, sa niece; publies sur les Ma.n.u.scrits originaux, par M. P. Faugere. Paris, 1845.

{4a} Jacqueline Pascal, par M. Victor Cousin. Troisieme ed. 1856.

Lelut, L'Amulette de Pascal. Paris, 1846.

{4b} Sainte-Beuve. Port Royal. Tom. ii. iii. Mr Beard, in his two volumes on Port Royal, gives an excellent sketch of Blaise and Jacqueline Pascal, in which he has made a diligent use of all the recent French authorities on the subject.

{4c} British Quarterly Review, August 1850.

{5} The Provincial Parliaments in France before the Revolution discharged within a definite area the same judicial and administrative functions as the Parliament of Paris; but they were always regarded as offshoots of the latter, and subordinate to its supreme direction. They possessed no lawful political powers. Lalanne, Dictionnaire Historique, Art. "Parl.," p. 1421. The "Court of Aides," according to the same authority, p. 32, decided in the last resort civil and criminal processes relating to subsidies, a.s.sessments, and taxes in general, and superintended the collection of the royal revenues.

{6a} Gilberte Pascal-Madame Perier-says, in her life of her brother, 1626. Marguerite Perier, her daughter, Pascal's niece, says 1628.

Cousin (B. Pascal), App. I. 315. Faugere, Lettres, Opuscules, etc., p.

419.

{6b} Cousin, Jacqueline Pascal, p. 23.

{7} Memoir by Marguerite Perier, her daughter, quoted by Cousin, ibid., p. 24. "Do not think," adds Cousin, "that this portrait is embellished: the austere Marguerite flatters no one; and if she, a Jansenist, says that her mother was beautiful, we may be sure that she was very much so."

{10} "The exterior angle of a triangle is equal to the two interior and opposite angles; and the three interior angles are together equal to two right angles."

{11} Baillet, Vie de Descartes, liv. V. c. v. p. 39.

{12}

"Ne vous etonnez pas, incomparable Armand, Si j'ai mal contente vos yeux et vos oreilles; Mon esprit agite de frayeurs sans pareilles Interdit a mon corps et voix et mouvement.

Mais pour me rendre ici capable de vous plaire, Rappelez de l'exil mon miserable pere."

{13} Cousin, Jacqueline Pascal, pp. 7275.

{15} The Intendant was a special Royal Commissioner, sent into the provinces to watch over the administration of justice and the finances.

{16} See Cousin, Jacqueline Pascal, pp. 7880.

{17} M. Lelut's volume (already referred to) deserves special attention in its bearing on Pascal's health, and the character of his sufferings.

He lays great stress on Pascal's highly-strung nervous const.i.tution, in connection both with the precocity of his genius, his physical sufferings, his religious susceptibility, and the profound melancholy which affected his later years. The study is very interesting in some respects, but is overstrained in its physiological details and imaginary a.n.a.lysis.

{18} Madame Perier, Vie de Pascal.

{20} A disciple and friend of Francois de Sales, who had been bishop of Bellay or Belley, but had at this time demitted his bishopric for the Abbey of Aulney-Havet.

{21} The doc.u.ments containing these details are found among the Pascal MSS. in the National Library at Paris, having been given by Marguerite Perier to one of the Guerrier family, by whose care so many interesting memorials of Pascal have been preserved. See Faugere, Int. to Ed. of Pensees, xlvi.-ix.

{23a} Cousin, app. 392.

{23b} Faugere, Lettres, Opuscules, etc., p. 452. It is difficult to make out the exact chronological sequence of some of the facts mentioned by Pascal's sister and niece. But a special accession of ill-health, according to both, seems to have followed his conversion at Rouen, and to have been amongst the causes of his removal to Paris in 1647.

{23c} Pp. 134137.

{26a} Jacqueline Pascal, p. 73.

{26b} uvres de Blaise Pascal, t. 4. Paris, 1819.

{28a} North British Review, August 1844, p. 296.