Pascals Pensees | Page 3

and conflict; the best account, from the point of view
of a critic of genius who took no side, who was neither Jansenist nor
Jesuit, Christian nor infidel, is that in the great book of Sainte-Beuve,
Port-Royal. And in this book the parts devoted to Pascal himself are
among the most brilliant pages of criticism that Sainte-Beuve ever

wrote. It is sufficient to notice that the next occupation of Pascal, after
his conversion, was to write these eighteen "Letters," which as prose
are of capital importance in the foundation of French classical style,
and which as polemic are surpassed by none, not by Demosthenes, or
Cicero, or Swift. They have the limitation of all polemic and forensic:
they persuade, they seduce, they are unfair. But it is also unfair to assert
that, in these Letters to a Provincial, Pascal was attacking the Society
of Jesus in itself. He was attacking rather a particular school of
casuistry which relaxed the requirements of the Confessional; a school
which certainly flourished amongst the Society of Jesus at that time,
and of which the Spaniards Escobar and Molina are the most eminent
authorities. He undoubtedly abused the art of quotation, as a polemical
writer can hardly help but do; but there were abuses for him to abuse;
and he did the job thoroughly. His Letters must not be called theology.
Academic theology was not a department in which Pascal was versed;
when necessary, the fathers of Port-Royal came to his aid. The Letters
are the work of one of the finest mathematical minds of any time, and
of a man of the world who addressed, not theologians, but the world in
general--all of the cultivated and many of the less cultivated of the
French laity; and with this public they made an astonishing success.
During this time Pascal never wholly abandoned his scientific interests.
Though in his religious writings he composed slowly and painfully, and
revised often, in matters of mathematics his mind seemed to move with
consummate natural ease and grace. Discoveries and inventions sprang
from his brain without effort; among the minor devices of this later
period, the first omnibus service in Paris is said to owe its origin to his
inventiveness. But rapidly failing health, and absorption in the great
work he had in mind, left him little time and energy during the last two
years of his life.
The plan of what we call the Pensées formed itself about 1660. The
completed book was to have been a carefully constructed defence of
Christianity, a true Apology and a kind of Grammar of Assent, setting
forth the reasons which will convince the intellect. As I have indicated
before, Pascal was not a theologian, and on dogmatic theology had
recourse to his spiritual advisers. Nor was he indeed a systematic

philosopher. He was a man with an immense genius for science, and at
the same time a natural psychologist and moralist. As he was a great
literary artist, his book would have been also his own spiritual
autobiography; his style, free from all diminishing idiosyncrasies, was
yet very personal. 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.
We must regard the Pensées as merely the first notes for a work which
he left far from completion; we have, in Sainte-Beuve's words, a tower
of which the stones have been laid on each other, but not cemented, and
the structure unfinished. In early years his memory had been amazingly
retentive of anything that he wished to remember; and had it not been
impaired by increasing illness and pain, he probably would not have
been obliged to set down these notes at all. But taking the book as it is
left to us, we still find that it occupies a unique place in the history of
French literature and in the history of religious meditation.
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
culminated in faith, rather than the public apologist--proceeds by
rejection and elimination. He finds the world to be so and so; he finds
its character inexplicable by any non-religious theory; among religions
he finds Christianity, and Catholic Christianity, to account most
satisfactorily for the world and especially for the moral world within;
and thus, by what Newman calls "powerful and concurrent" reasons, he
finds himself inexorably committed to the dogma of the Incarnation. To
the unbeliever, this method seems disingenuous and perverse; for the
unbeliever is, as a rule, not so greatly troubled to explain