L’Esprit du corps: la doctrine pascalienne de l’amour by Alberto Frigo, and: Blaise Pascal: Miracles and Reason by Mary Ann Caws (review)

It would be difficult to think of two more different books on Pascal. Alberto Frigo undertakes a detailed and searching analysis of a group of previously neglected fragments situated in the liasse titled ‘Morale chrétienne’ of the Pensées (Sellier 351–76), and focuses his enquiry on the concept of ‘un corps plein de membres pensants’ (Sellier 368) who in turn incarnate the ‘ordre de la charité’. This narrowly circumscribed sequence is situated by Frigo in an extended contextual survey (in his words ‘un long travail de mise en perspective’, p. 205), allowing him to conclude with full conviction that ‘les fragments de la liasse “Morale chrétienne” exhibent la véritable économie de la charité et l’unité qui la caractérise’ (p. 258). His study is punctuated by arguments drawn first of all from Scripture, notably from a range of Pauline references to the mystical body of Christ (described by Frigo as a theologoumenon, in other words as a personal belief, rather than as a dogmatic formulation) and from John’s Gospel, above all in the Christic injunction in John 17.21–23 that the unity of believers should be like the unity of the Father and the Son (although the exact meaning of that ‘like’ [sicut] is itself the object of close scrutiny). His second point of reference is patristic, with Augustine figuring in predictably high relief, as Frigo shows how the concept of the mystical body allows for a reconciliation between the two loves (amor Dei and amor sui) as thrown into opposition by the Bishop of Hippo, so that the Christian is enabled to ‘s’aimer soi-même en Dieu’ (p. 241; original emphasis). The final set of parallels is with the spiritual writers of Pascal’s age, above all with Pierre de Bérulle and the abbé de Saint-Cyran but also, and perhaps more unexpectedly, with Descartes’s Les Passions de l’âme, in which Frigo finds scholastically based definitions of love which allow for the kind of unitive ecclesiology implied in Pascal, and also accord to it a striking modernity, pointing forwards in turn to Rousseau. On the other hand, Frigo is eager to stress that approximations made between Christian harmony (‘unanimité’) and secular models of unity (‘uniformité’) are misleading, lacking as they do the spiritual dimension afforded by the equation with the doctrine of the Holy Trinity. The erudition is formidable, and the writing clear throughout (despite some repetitions). Sometimes Pascal disappears for tens of pages, but invariably re-emerges enriched by his reflection in the whole spectrum of Western theology and philosophy.

If Frigo’s work is on the cusp of philosophy and theology, Mary Ann Caws’s study lies somewhere between biography and autobiography. It is prefaced by an essay by Tom Conley, who situates the enquiry within the writer’s own intellectual development, and plays in so doing on three phonetic approximations: on the homophony between ‘croix’ (a symbol that figures in the manuscript of several fragments, including the ‘Mémorial’) and ‘crois’; on the similarity between ‘roseau pensant’ and ‘roseau penchant’; and on the possibility that ‘Dieu est’ can be heard as ‘tu es’ (which might be true in Canada), so that the speaker ‘conjugates and in conjugating is conjugated with God’ (p. 13). The guiding structure of what follows is biographical, and the broad outline of the life-story conforms to what we already know of Pascal, although the principal inspiration — the biography by Jacques Attali, Blaise Pascal, ou le génie français (Paris: Fayard, 2000), described as ‘the most dramatic of Pascal’s biographers’ (p. 38) and ‘a truly colourful reading’ (p. 167) — leads Caws to an overuse of ‘perhaps’, ‘maybe’, and ‘some have suggested’. Where Caws’s narrative...