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47
BLAISE PASCAL
1623-1662 Thoughts (Pensйes)
Pascal is a seeming oddity, for he possessed in the highest degree a number of traits not usually combined in a single per- sonality. 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 sen- sible 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 writ- ten 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 remember PascaPs 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 con- troversy, 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 proba- bility, the glory of which he shares with another mathemati- cian, Fermat. It is interesting to recall that the ascetic Pascal was stimulated to his great mathematical discoveries by a gam- blers' 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 Pascal stands 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 Pensйes. These letters are masterpieces of
polemic, directed against certain tendencies of the Jesuit order of PascaTs day, tendencies he and his associates of the Jansenist movement considered too tolerant of man^ 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 chil- dren.) This controversy, which made Pascal a bestseller, is today of interest mainly to theologians and historians of reli- gion.
The Thoughts, or Pensйes, are in a somewhat different cate- gory. 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 them Pascal put his painful sense of the inadequacy, even the absurdity of man, as mea- sured 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 Pensйes 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 ali men and women, whether they be Christian, agnostic, atheist, or of some other creed.
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JOHN BUNYAN
1628-1688 Pilgrim9s Progress
A hundred years ago anyone who spoke of a muckraker or a worldly-wise man or Vanity Fair or the slough of despond or the valley of humiliation would have known he or she was quoting from Pilgrim's Progress. For over two centuries, start- ing with the publication of the first part in 1678, this book was probably more widely read among English-speaking people than any other except the Bible. It cannot, of course, speak to us as powerfully today as it did to the plain, nonconformist folk of Bunyan's time, wrestling with their conviction of sin, fearful of HelFs flames, hoping devoutly for salvation. And yet, for ali its revivalist theology and its faded Dissenters devotionalism, it is still worth reading, not alone for its historical importance, but as a work of almost unconscious art.
We marvel that Christianity could have been founded by so few men, most of them obscure and unlettered. The miracle seems a little less baffling if we consider that these men may have been like John Bunyan. Recall his life: a poor tinker and ex- soldier, almost completely unschooled—indeed he tells us that at one point he had forgotten how to read and write; converted to the Puritan creed; arrested in 1660 as "a common upholder of several unlawful meetings and conventicles>>; spending, except for a few weeks, the next twelve years in Bedford jail; refusing the conditions of release: "if you let me out today, I will preach again tomorrow!"; leaving behind him a wife and four children, one of them blind; spending his imprisonment in writing as well as in memorizing the Bible and John Foxe's Book of Martyrs; jailed again for six months in 1675, during which time he wrote the first part of Pilgrim's Progress; released once more, only to become one of the most popular preachers of his time.
Written in what is now quaint English, Pilgrim's Progress is a
simple allegory for simple people, offering terribly simple answers to the dread question, What shall I do to be saved? It is whole cul- tures remote from Augustine [22] and Dante [30], whose books it in certain respects resembles. Its faith recognizes only a black-and- white ethic. It appeals to a ferocious piety (though Bunyan himself was kind and tolerant) discoverable today only in our intellectual backwoods. And its author, with his dreams and voices and visions and his skinless conscience, was, no doubt of it, a fanatic who would offer Freud [98] a perfect field day.
But it is a remarkable book ali the same. It has swayed not only millions of God-fearing plain folk, but sophisticated intel- lects like Shaw [99]. Its prose is that of a born, surely not made, artist—muscular, hard as nails, powerful, even witty. Has a certain kind of business morality ever been more neatly described than by the comfortable Mr. By-ends? "Yet my great-grandfa- ther was but a water-man, looking one way and rowing another; and I got most of my estate by the same occupation." And, if we cannot respond to the theology, it is hard not to respond to the strong rhythm and naked sincerity of that triumphant climax: "When the day that he must go hence was come, many accom- panied him to the river side, into which as he went, he said, 'Death, where is thy sting?' and as he went down deeper he said, 'Grave, where is thy victory?' So he passed over, and ali the trumpets sounded for him on the other side."