On Pascal’s Revealed Word (and What it Says about Being Human)

Le cœur a ses raisons …

Perhaps we should begin, in naïve earnestness, by consulting the heart. Perhaps, before erecting our scholarly apparatus, advancing our arguments and adducing the evidence we have compiled, we should attend, not to the “text itself” (whatever that means), but to the feelings that the text provokes. And perhaps, in so doing, we will be led to a question of overwhelming simplicity: what is it with Pascal anyway?

The question can be understood in various ways. It can, for instance, express a particular sort of admiration—that of the dour co-religionist, who weighs the rhetorical efficacy not of Les Pensées so much as of L’Apologie that they came to supplant, and deems it a fit enough tool to bludgeon the backslider.¹ Or, three parts outburst and one part frenzy, it can ride the crest of a mounting indignation, or trace the threshold of an intolerable disgust—past which Valéry noses out and decries, “dans cette attitude parfaitement triste,” a dogged and systematic will to abase;² and Saint-Beuve reproaches him his tin ear;³ and Charles Peguy intuits that no mind so extremist in bent can fully embrace, much less exemplify, the spirit of Christian caritas—and so fruitlessly Les Pensées reason, and toothlessly their reasons bite: “Il faut produire. Il ne faut ni démontrer ni expliquer. Pascal raisonne trop, alors les incroyants lui poussent des colles et se foutent de lui” (ctd. in Douglas 828)^. Finally, it can incorporate bits of both and all of neither, threading the vanishingly small passage between Jansenist propaganda and humanist blowback: an uncomfortable space to occupy, for around it the factions of the soul war ceaselessly, and in it contraries meet. Here we will disagree with Pascal and yet find ourselves moved by him; will (per Péguy’s prediction) fail utterly to convert, but will not (despite his grim imaginings) mock or shrug indifferently, because while we reject the content of Pascal’s “coquilles,”⁴ we do not (cannot) deny their pertinence … though as to what and to whom we remain in the dark. We will feel, in short, both that none of this at all concerns us—not our habits, not our values, not our world, bedeviled by its own intractable crises—and that something deep within ourselves—our humanness, our pith—has been profoundly implicated: staked on a wager between parties that we cannot as yet identify, the import of which we only dimly perceive.

To the latter group belong, each in his own way, Stendhal, Baudelaire and Nietzsche; for each felt within himself a sympathetic vibration not to any particular argument, but rather to the soulfulness, the profundity, and the tremendous disquiet that Pascal’s arguments give voice to and conceal. When Harold Bloom observes, “Montaigne remains in our mind, Pascal in our heart” (5) I take him to ratify their experience. Theirs and ours too, or at least a majority of us, as how could it be otherwise? In a world where religiosity has waned in inverse proportion to Pascal’s fan-base, piety alone cannot account for our sustained interest, nor can all that Barcosian misanthropy have done much to suppress it. “Si le cuivre s’éveille clarion,” writes Rimbaud, “il n’y a rien de sa faute”; similarly, something there is in Pascal that does not love self-loathing—that despite (indeed because of) his best efforts to kill it dead, whelms glorious and annealed up from every putdown. This, it seems to me, is what “we” react to; and to that reaction the present article will attempt to do justice. But first, an example.

Fragment 758 deals, ostensibly, with “l’amour propre,” with friendship, and with the grammar of social relations.⁵ Vertiginous leaps abound, as do stark generalizations; still, it proves easy enough to reconstitute the stages of the argument. (1) Touching the self, our aspirations and perceptions drastically misalign. (Whence that cascade of antitheses, which in its searing simplicity and accumulated power attains to a Biblical eloquence: “[le...