John Tulloch

“ He is no enemy of philosophy, but he certainly does not believe it capable of explaining the riddle of human nature. He is so far from being a Pyrrhonist in the sense of resting on Pyrrhonism, that he seeks to mount on its shoulders to a higher truth. Nay, he clearly recognises that man has an inborn faculty for truth which not all the contradictions of his experience can belie. We may and must doubt as to many things; but there are principles lying at the root of human life which are invincible to all doubt. ”

“ When we are away from the object of our love we resolve to do and say many things, but when we are present we hesitate. The explanation is, that at a distance the reason is undisturbed, but in presence of the beloved object it is strangely moved. In love we fear to hazard lest we lose all. It is necessary to advance, yet who can tell to what point? We tremble always till we reach this point, and yet prudence does not help us to keep it when we have found it. . . . There is nothing so embarrassing as to be in love, and see something in our favour without daring to believe in it. ”

“ And if I admit it, as you do, so that efficacious grace is still necessary, why I sin against common-sense, I am a blockhead, say the Jesuits. What can I do in this dilemma, of being a blockhead, a heretic, or a Jansenist? To what a strait are we come, if it is only Jansenists, after all, who are at variance with neither faith nor reason, and who preserve themselves both from folly and error?’”
The Dominican, in short, is made to appear very ridiculous in his union with the Jesuits. ”

“ And if any one loves me for my judgment or my memory, does he really love me? No; for I may lose those qualities without ceasing to be. Where, then, is this me, if it is neither in soul nor body?
“How is it that a lame man does not anger us, but a blundering mind does? Is it that the cripple admits that we walk straight, but a crippled mind accuses us of limping? Epictetus asks also, Why are we not annoyed if any one tells us that we are unwell in the head, and yet are angry if they tell us that we reason falsely or choose unwisely? ”

“ With all enthusiasm for its grandeur and unity of purpose, and that moral and intellectual elevation which it everywhere shows, it may be found lacking in breadth and variety, and that familiar interest and charm which strangely often come from the contemplation of human weakness rather than of human strength. There is certainly less to love in him than to admire—less to call forth delight than respect. ”

“ The thought may be shallow and poor in itself, but in such cases it comes not out of the shallows but out of the depths of a mind torn by distracting doubts in the face of the dreadful problems of life.
Out of the same depth of spiritual experience and trenchant moral analysis comes all that is true and valuable in his so-called ‘Apology.’ That the ‘Pensées’ were more or less designed to form such an Apology—to be woven into the plan of a treatise in defence of the Christian religion—seems beyond doubt. ”

“ It is a voice within him, a conflicting cry of weakness and aspiration going up everywhere from humanity, that find their answer in Christ. There is the enigma of man on the one side, to him otherwise hopeless, and Christ on the other, holding the keys of the enigma in His hand. The solution appeared to him perfect, according to his study and analysis of the problem—the twofoldness that he found in man, of divine dignity on the one hand, and frivolous, sensual degradation on the other. ”

“ Constantly searching the foundations of human knowledge,—sifting them as with lighted glance,—they seemed to him at times to crumble away before him. Nothing remained fixed to his piercing look. As few minds have experienced, he felt the awful darkness which encloses all mortal aspiration, and the keenest audacities of human speculation. The incapacities of human reason at such times overwhelmed him, and left him hopeless, or, still worse, in a half-derisive mood. ”

“ The possession of the earth would not add to my greatness. As to space, the universe encloses and absorbs me as a mere point, but by thought I embrace it. . . . Man is but a reed, the feeblest of created things—but one possessing thought (un roseau pensant) . It needs not that the universe should arm itself to crush him. A breath, a drop of water, suffices for his destruction. But were the whole universe to rise against him, man is yet greater than the universe, since man knows that he dies. He knows the universe prevails against him. ”

“ The Christian religion, according to him, alone “understands at once man’s greatness and degradation, and the reason of both the one and the other.” “It is equally important for man to know his capacity of being like God and his unworthiness of Him. To know of God without knowing his misery, or to know his misery without knowing the Redeemer, who alone can deliver him from it, is alike dangerous. The one knowledge constitutes the pride of the philosopher, the other the despair of the atheist. Man must therefore have the double experience, and so it has pleased God to reveal it. ”

“ 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 ‘Pensées,’ we feel inclined to answer,—their touching reality. They are the utterances of one who thought not only deeply but passionately. ”

“ It is never that he may laugh at man, or that he may rest in the mere contemplation of his follies or extravagances, but because he himself profoundly realised the height and the depth of his being—the grandeur to which he could rise, or to which God could raise him, and the baseness and miseries to which he could sink. Doubtless, as with all concentrated and meditative natures, Pascal delights to dwell on the weaker and gloomier side of humanity. This was partly the result of his Jansenist leanings, but mainly it came from his own intense reality of feeling. ”

“ If a man sets himself at a window to see the passers-by, and I happen to pass, can I say that he set himself there to see me? No; for he does not think of me in particular. But if a man loves a woman for her beauty, does he love her? No; for the smallpox, which will destroy her beauty without killing her, will cause him to love her no more. ”

“ From the same point of view he thunders vigorously against the horrible impiety of those who dare to be certain that there is no God! He attacks them especially in the ‘Apology for Raymond de Sebonde.’ Having voluntarily set aside revelation, and abandoned themselves to their natural light—all faith set aside—he asks them on what authority they, who know not the essential reality of anything, dare to judge of that Sovereign Being who is infinite by His very definition. He demands upon what principles they rest, and presses them to point them out. ”

“ Again, reverting to the very same line of thought, as in the conversation with De Saci—
“Philosophers have propounded sentiments not at all adapted to the twofold condition of man. They have sought to inspire emotions of pure greatness; but this is not man’s condition. They have sought on the other hand to inspire sentiments of mere baseness; but neither is this man’s condition. Man needs abasement, not of nature, however, but of penitence; not that he remain degraded, but that he may rise to greatness. He needs to feel within him the emotion of greatness,—not of merit, however, but of grace. ”

“ They brought to play upon it not only a penetrating and rapid intelligence, but a brightness of wit, and a dramatic creativeness, which made the Sorbonne and its parties, the Jansenists and their friends, alive before the reader. Never was the triumph of genius over mere learned labour more complete. Arnauld, as he listened to them, must have felt his own thoughts spring up before him into a living shape, hardly less startling to himself than to his opponents. ”

“ Mere man as he was, after having so well explained human duty, he loses himself in the presumption of human capacity. He avers that God has given to every man the means of acquitting himself of all his obligations; that such means are always within his own power, that happiness is to be sought by things within our reach, since God has given us them for this very end. He points out in what our freedom consists: goods, life, esteem are not in our power, and therefore do not lead to God; but none can force the mind to believe what is false, nor the will to love that which will make it miserable. ”

“ Occupying rooms in the house of his friend, who, we have seen, could not bear him out of his sight, Pascal and Mademoiselle de Roannez were necessarily much in each other’s society. What so natural as that he should fall in love, and overlooking all disparity of rank, cherish the secret hope of a union with one so gifted and beautiful?—or why may not ambition have mingled with his love, as he himself implies, and carried him for a time into a dreamland from which all shadows fell away? ”

“ Pascal certainly speaks at times both of human life and human reason in a contemptuous manner. Even Rochefoucauld could hardly express himself more bitterly than he does now and then when he fixes his clear gaze upon the folly, the vanity, the weaknesses which make up man’s customary life, and the deceits which he practises upon himself and his fellows. All the world seems to him at such times “in a state of delusion.” If there is truth, it “is not where men suppose it to be.” The majority are to be followed, not “because they have more reason, but because they have more force.” ”

“ Man’s fall from a state of divine innocence alone explains them; and the Gospel alone recognises the one side as well as the other of human nature, and provides a Power capable of restoring its true balance and rectifying all its disorder. He felt in himself the might of this power healing all the wounds of his own heart, and binding up the shreds of his Christian efforts “to do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with God.” ”

“ Of all the illustrious names which group themselves around Port Royal, it is Pascal alone, and Racine—who was more its pupil, but less its representative—whose genius can be said to survive, and to invest it with an undying lustre.
Pascal’s early death, the reserve of his friends under the assaults which the ‘Provincial Letters’ provoked, and his very fame, as a writer, have served in some degree to obscure his personality. To many a modern reader he is little else than a great name. The man is hidden away behind the author of the ‘Pensées,’ or the defender of Port Royal. ”

“ Looking at morality entirely from without, as an artificial mode of regulating life and society for the supreme good of the Church, the Jesuit casuists were driven, under the necessities of such a system, from point to point, till all essential moral distinction was lost in the mechanical manipulations of their schools. Whatever happened, no man or woman was to be lost to the Church; the complications of human interest and passion were to be brought within its fold and smoothed into some sort of decent seeming, rather than cast beyond its pale and made the prey of its enemies. ”

“ The play of natural individuality is hidden behind lines of lofty distance, and latterly of Jansenist severity. A proud, ascetic, and worn figure seems to rise before us; but strangely Pascal’s portrait, as known to us, conveys no idea of asceticism. The face is full-fleshed and expressive, like the face of a child, with large ripe lips and open eyes of wonder,—a portrait which suggests the companion of the Duc de Roannez in his years of pleasure, rather than the weary and pain-worn penitent of Port Royal. ”

“ But the life of thought which survived in him no sooner touched the outer world of intellectual ambition, than it flamed forth into something of the passion of controversy which his pen had already kindled in another direction. Religion is best vindicated, not in the strifes of science, but by the beauty of its own activities. ”

“ His moral analysis, at once keen and veracious, enabled him not only to lay bare all the “disproportions” of humanity, but, moreover, to unfold the adaptation of Christianity as a spiritual system to meet and remedy these disproportions. This is the real “apologetic” work of the ‘Pensées,’ and the only one for which Pascal’s mind pre-eminently fitted him. He sees in the Gospel a Divine Power which is capable of ministering to man’s higher wants—a power of infinite compassion towards human weakness and misery, of infinite help for the one and remedy for the other. ”

“ On the side of sense, all things seem to fluctuate and waver in uncertainty; on the side of mere intellect we soon cross the limit of our powers. But Humanity is more than either sense or intellect. There is, as he believes, a primitive endowment of spiritual instinct in man, which looks forth upon p. 188a higher world of reality. Repeatedly, and in various applications, he recurs to these three radical sides or elements of Humanity; “the sensible—the intellectual, or the exercise of reason left to itself—and the spiritual or divine.” ”

“ The power of kings is founded on the reason and on the folly of the people, but chiefly on their folly. The greatest and most important thing in the world has weakness for its basis, and the basis is wonderfully secure, for there is nothing more certain than that people will be weak. ”

“ In love we forget fortune, parents, friends, and the reason of this is that we imagine we need nothing else than the object of our love. The heart is full; there is no room for care nor disquietude. Passion is then necessarily in excess; there is a plenitude in it which resists the commencement of reflection. Yet love and reason are not to be opposed, and love has always reason with it, although it implies a precipitation of thought which carries us away without due examination. Otherwise we should be very disagreeable machines. Do not exclude reason from love, therefore ”

“ The licence which your teachers have assumed of tampering with the most holy rules of Christian conduct amounts to a total subversion of the Divine law. They violate the great commandment which embraces the law and the prophets; they strike at the very heart of piety; they take away the spirit which giveth life. They say that the love of God is not necessary to salvation; they even go the length of professing that this dispensation from loving God is the special privilege which Jesus Christ has brought into the world. ”

“ Man finds no full scope for love in himself, yet he loves. It is necessary, therefore, for him to seek an object of love elsewhere. This he can only find in beauty. But as he himself is the most beautiful creature that God has made, he must find in himself the type of that beauty which he seeks elsewhere. This defines and embodies itself in the difference of sex. A woman is the highest form of beauty. Endowed with mind, she is its living and marvellous personation. If a beautiful woman wishes to please, she will always succeed. ”

“ It is a tyrant which suffers no rival; it must reign alone. Every other emotion must subserve and obey its dictates. A high attachment fills the heart more completely than a common and equal one. Small things are carried away in the great capacity of love.”
“The pleasure of loving, without daring to say anything of one’s love, has its pains, but also its sweetnesses. With what transport do we regulate all our actions with the view of pleasing one whom we infinitely value! . . . The fulness of love sometimes languishes, receiving no succour from the beloved object. Then we fall into misery ”

“ Pascal, of all men, is not to be measured by his strong expressions. His intellectual nature, while profound, was narrow and intense. He put his whole soul into what moved him for the time; and a certain excess of passionate intellectual emotion evidently speaks in some of the most striking of the ‘Pensées.’ We may imagine how in some—perhaps in many—cases they would have been toned down had he lived to revise and refashion them into a harmonious whole. ”

“ The one, observing only the traces of his primitive grandeur, and ignoring his corruption, has treated human nature as if it were whole, without any need of a Redeemer—this leads to the height of pride; the other, sensible of man’s present misery, and ignorant of his original dignity, treats human nature as necessarily weak and irreparable, and thus, in despair of attaining any true good, plunges it into a depth of baseness.” [185]
These two states, Pascal goes on to argue, must be taken together before the truth can be reached. ”

“ 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. ”

“ All things hide a mystery. All are a veil which conceal God. 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 God 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 ”

“ But it secured the credence of Pascal, and became a great fact in the history of Port Royal, staying for a time the hand of persecution, and pointing, as its friends believed, to the visible interposition of heaven. How could the accusations against Port Royal be true, seeing what God Himself had done on its behalf? “This place, which men say is the devil’s temple, God makes His house. Men declare that its children must be taken out of it, and God heals them there. They are threatened with all the furies; God loads them with His favours.” ”

“ That interior elaboration,—“a kind of second creation of genius,” as M. Faugère says—which no one else may venture upon,—would undoubtedly have come from his own masterly hand, if it had been given him to bring fragment to fragment, and to fit them together into a complete fabric. It would be a hard thing to judge any student, and especially a student like Pascal, by the scattered notes of his library table; and precious as these fragments are, we must remember that this is their character, and nothing else. ”

“ Pascal despairs of a philosophy which is either a mere generalisation of sensible experience, or which aims at demonstrating everything from a purely rational point of view; but he is so far from resting in mere intellectual doubt, that he tries to find a ground for human certitude in a deeper stratum of Humanity than either sense or what he calls “reason.” Neander and others have vindicated for him a supreme position as a philosopher on this very account. ”

“ Again: “To set light by philosophy is the true philosophy.” When we look at such expressions, and many others, it is not to be wondered at that Pascal has been accused of scepticism. As he could not forgive Descartes, so Cousin cannot forgive him for his depreciation of Descartes. One who saw nothing in Cartesianism or philosophy in general beyond what these rash sentences, freshly restored in all their audacity, declare, could be nothing but an “enemy of all philosophy.” ”

“ Strangely, it was in this very year, during a fit of severe toothache, apparently connected with his general illness, that Pascal began his wonderful series of problems on the cycloid, showing how fresh and unimpaired his scientific genius remained under all the changes of his health and of his main intellectual interests.
The last years of Pascal’s life, in their deep suffering, and in their many traits of pious resignation and self-denial, have been fully sketched by Madame Périer. We do not think it necessary to repeat the sketch here, touching and beautiful as in some respects it is. ”

“ The play was hardly worthy of Pascal, and the ‘mystery of the game’ could certainly never be unravelled in any such way. But not a few minds like Pascal’s—with deep spiritual intuitions and yet a craving for scientific certainty constantly mocking these intuitions—have felt in a similar manner the hazard of the great question, and may have said to themselves, “We must take our stand, and this is the side which weighs in the balance. We can lose nothing; we may gain everything.” The mood is not a lofty one, and it is no higher in Pascal than in any one else ”

“ It is quite impossible to vindicate his consistency, and it is not in the least necessary to do this, as already explained; while we feel bound to maintain that his higher mood is his true mood, and that the Pascal of the ‘Pensées’—the veritable Pascal—is to be judged, not by his weakness but by his strength; by his moments of clear mental sanity and insight, and not by his moments of despair or of derisive mockery of all human philosophy. ”

“ All was designed to lead the thoughts from all human things up to God. With Pascal, therefore, it was philosophy upon which his conversation fell, to try the depths of his mind, and see what special direction he needed. “Pascal told him that the two books most familiar to him were Epictetus and Montaigne, and he lavished great praise on both. M. de Saci had always wished to read these two authors, and asked M. Pascal to explain them fully.”
“Epictetus,” said Pascal, “is one of the philosophers of the world who have best known the duties of man. ”

“ And it is as absurd for the ‘reason’ to demand of the ‘heart’ proofs of its first principles before asserting them, as it would be for the ‘heart’ to demand of the ‘reason’ a feeling of all propositions that she demonstrates before accepting them. This weakness, therefore, should only serve to humble reason in its desire to make itself judge of everything, but by no means to moderate the certitude of our conviction, as if reason were alone capable of instructing us.” [189]
There may be something to object to in Pascal’s mode of expression in the above passage. ”

“ Still, when we read the ‘Provincial Letters’ or the ‘Pensées,’ 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 p. 205and severe reserve of the thought, and so we get close to a true soul, distant as Pascal himself in some respects remains to us. ”