Pascals Pensees | Page 5

demonstrate the perfect orthodoxy of Pascal.
It would, however, be grossly unfair to Pascal, to Montaigne, and
indeed to French literature, to leave the matter at that. It is no
diminution of Pascal, but only an aggrandisement of Montaigne. Had
Montaigne been an ordinary life-sized sceptic, a small man like Anatole
France, or even a greater man like Renan, or even like the greatest
sceptic of all, Voltaire, this "influence" would be to the discredit of

Pascal; but if Montaigne had been no more than Voltaire, he could not
have affected Pascal at all. The picture of Montaigne which offers itself
first to our eyes, that of the original and independent solitary
"personality," absorbed in amused analysis of himself, is deceptive.
Montaigne's is no limited Pyrrhonism, like that of Voltaire, Renan, or
France. He exists, so to speak, on a plan of numerous concentric circles,
the most apparent of which is the small inmost circle, a personal
puckish scepticism which can be easily aped if not imitated. But what
makes Montaigne a very great figure is that he succeeded, God knows
how--for Montaigne very likely did not know that he had done it--it is
not the sort of thing that men can observe about themselves, for it is
essentially bigger than the individual's consciousness--he succeeded in
giving expression to the scepticism of every human being. For every
man who thinks and lives by thought must have his own scepticism,
that which stops at the question, that which ends in denial, or that
which leads to faith and which is somehow integrated into the faith
which transcends it. And Pascal, as the type of one kind of religious
believer, which is highly passionate and ardent, but passionate only
through a powerful and regulated intellect, is in the first sections of his
unfinished Apology for Christianity facing unflinchingly the demon of
doubt which is inseparable from the spirit of belief.
There is accordingly something quite different from an influence which
would prove Pascal's weakness; there is a real affinity between his
doubt and that of Montaigne; and through the common kinship with
Montaigne Pascal is related to the noble and distinguished line of
French moralists, from La Rochefoucauld down. In the honesty with
which they face the données of the actual world this French tradition
has a unique quality in European literature, and in the seventeenth
century Hobbes is crude and uncivilised in comparison.
Pascal is a man of the world among ascetics, and an ascetic among men
of the world; he had the knowledge of worldliness and the passion of
asceticism, and in him the two are fused into an individual whole. The
majority of mankind is lazy-minded, incurious, absorbed in vanities,
and tepid in emotion, and is therefore incapable of either much doubt or
much faith; and when the ordinary man calls himself a sceptic or an

unbeliever, that is ordinarily a simple pose, cloaking a disinclination to
think anything out to a conclusion. Pascal's disillusioned analysis of
human bondage is sometimes interpreted to mean that Pascal was really
and finally an unbeliever, who, in his despair, was incapable of
enduring reality and enjoying the heroic satisfaction of the free man's
worship of nothing. His despair, his disillusion, are, however, no
illustration of personal weakness; they are perfectly objective, because
they are essential moments in the progress of the intellectual soul; and
for the type of Pascal they are the analogue of the drought, the dark
night, which is an essential stage in the progress of the Christian mystic.
A similar despair, when it is arrived at by a diseased character or an
impure soul, may issue in the most disastrous consequences though
with the most superb manifestations; and thus we get Gulliver's Travels;
but in Pascal we find no such distortion; his despair is in itself more
terrible than Swift's, because our heart tells us that it corresponds
exactly to the facts and cannot be dismissed as mental disease; but it
was also a despair which was a necessary prelude to, and element in,
the joy of faith.
I do not wish to enter any further than necessary upon the question of
the heterodoxy of Jansenism; and it is no concern of this essay, whether
the Five Propositions condemned at Rome were really maintained by
Jansenius in his book Augustinus; or whether we should deplore or
approve the consequent decay (indeed with some persecution) of
Port-Royal. It is impossible to discuss the matter without becoming
involved as a controversialist either for or against Rome. But in a man
of the type of Pascal--and the type always exists--there is, I think, an
ingredient of what may be called Jansenism of temperament, without
identifying it with the Jansenism of Jansenius and of other devout and
sincere, but not immensely gifted doctors.[B] It is