THE NEW LIFETIME READING PLAN
1997, pp. 111-113
From THE NEW LIFETIME READING PLAN, Fourth Edition, by Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major. Copyright © 1997 by Clifton Fadiman and John S. Major. All Rights Reserved. Included in this research database by arrangement with HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.
47. Blaise Pascal (1623-1662): Thoughts (Pensees)
Pascal is a seeming oddity, for he possessed in the highest degree a number of traits not usually combined in a single personality. First and foremost, he is a scientific and mathematical genius. Second, he is a master of prose style; indeed he is often thought of as the norm of classic French prose. Third, he is an acute though unsystematic psychologist. Fourth, he is a God-thirsty, tormented soul, a kind of failed saint. To a freethinker such as Eric T. Bell, author of the fascinating Men of Mathematics, Pascal ruined his life by his preoccupation with religious controversy: "On the mathematical side Pascal is the greatest might-have-been in history." It is hard to make a sensible judgment. Pascal was Pascal. The man who in love and terror cried out for God, and the man who thought of the omnibus and invented the syringe are somehow indivisible.
At twelve, before he had been taught any mathematics, Pascal was proving Euclid for himself. At sixteen he had written a trail-blazing work on conic sections, of which we possess only fragmentary indications. At eighteen, he had invented the first calculating machine and so became one of the fathers of our Computer Age. At twenty-four he had demonstrated the barometer. He did classic work in hydrostatics, and most of us rememberPascal's Law from high school, provided we were lucky enough to attend a high school that offered physics. In mathematics he is famous, among other matters, for having discovered and shown the properties of a notable curve called the cycloid. For its beauty and also for its power to excite controversy, this has been termed the Helen of geometry.
His major contribution, not merely to science but to thought in general, is perhaps his work in the theory of probability, the glory of which he shares with another mathematician, Fermat. It is interesting to recall that the ascetic Pascal was stimulated to his great mathematical discoveries by a gamblers' dispute involving the throw of dice. The ramifications of probability theory, writes Bell, "are everywhere, from the quantum theory to epistemology."
As mathematician and physicist, Pascal will rank higher than he will as moralist and religious controversialist. Yet in these latter fields his influence has been considerable. Just as Montaigne [37], who both fascinated and repelled Pascal, stands for one mood of mankind, so Pascalstands for another. Montaigne lived at ease with skepticism; Pascal's heart and mind cried out for certainties. Montaigne contemplated the sad condition of man with interest, humor, and tolerance. Pascal, who had brilliant wit but no humor, regarded it with terror and despair, from which he was saved only by throwing himself on the breast of revealed religion.
His finest, but to us not most interesting prose, is contained in his Provincial Letters, which you will find in most editions that print the Pensees. These letters are masterpieces of polemic, directed against certain tendencies of the Jesuit order of Pascal's day, tendencies he and his associates of the Jansenist movement considered too tolerant of man's moral frailties. (Jansenism was a kind of puritanical sect within Catholicism, stressing predestination and asceticism, but also inspiring new and brilliant techniques in the education of children.) This controversy, which made Pascal a bestseller, is today of interest mainly to theologians and historians of religion.
The Thoughts, or Pensees, are in a somewhat different category. They consist of a series of scrappy, often unfinished notes, originally intended to serve as parts of a grand design, a reasoned defense of the Christian religion against the assaults or the lethargy of freethinkers. Into themPascal put his painful sense of the inadequacy, even the absurdity of man, as measured against the immensity of the universe, the endless flow of eternity, and the omniscience and omnipotence of God. A great deal of modern antihumanist pessimism flows from Pascal. Those who reject man as the center of the universe, whether they are religionists or nihilists, find the Pensees to their taste. He represents one profound mood of mankind, that which finds man glorious in his powers yet in the end pitiful and incomprehensible to himself.
The nonscientific Pascal is preserved by his style and by his emotional intensity. As a psychologist of the soul his genius is measured by the fact that he can still move many who are quite unable to sympathize with his sometimes noble, sometimes merely frantic devotionalism. Two Pascalian sentences, or cries from the heart, are frequently quoted. The first is "The eternal silence of these infinite spaces terrifies me." The second is "Man is but a reed, the weakest thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed." Between them these two statements suggest moods common to all men and women, whether they be Christian, agnostic, atheist, or of some other creed.--C.F.
Fadiman, Clifton, and John S. Major. "47. Blaise Pascal: Thoughts (Pensees)." The New Lifetime Reading Plan. 1997: 111-113. SIRS Renaissance. Web. 15 Jan 2011.
