When all else has fallen, Love still stands
“Dull minds are never either intuitive or mathematical.” (Pascal).
I think I must hold the world record for the number of maths exams failed. Numbers are a blur to me. So I go direct to truth. Pascal is remarkable in that he is both a mathematical and emotional genius. I can’t count, so I have to rely on intuition a lot. In the end, it’s all a leap of faith. I call it a heart-leap. I got the idea from Dante. But it’s there in Pascal, too. Of course, the more logic and evidence you have on your side, the less of a leap you will have to make. But leap you must. Because reason has its limitations. Rely on reason alone and you will fall short. G.K. Chesterton was spot on when he wrote that “You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it.” And you can only find truth if you love the truth and are therefore motivated to seek it in the first place. Before truth comes the desire. 'All men desire to know,' Aristotle writes in the opening lines of the Metaphysics. The desire for knowledge is prior to knowledge. And that desire is an attribute of love. As Pascal wrote:
“Truth is so obscure in these times, and falsehood so established, that, unless we love the truth, we cannot know it.”
That’s a notion which goes back to St. Thomas Aquinas, who argued that love takes up where knowledge leaves off. (I am paraphrasing, see my posts 'Love and Knowledge' and Love and the Just Society). By that, Aquinas meant that we can love something that we do not and even cannot have full knowledge of.
We have enough to make the leap:
“There is enough light for those who only desire to see, and enough obscurity for those who have a contrary disposition.” (Pascal)
“Those great spiritual efforts, which the soul sometimes assays, are things on which it does not lay hold. It only leaps to [toward] them, not as upon a throne, for ever, but merely for an instant.” (Pascal)
I’ve been reading Montaigne again. Montaigne is gently subversive, unfreezing fixed standards and morals. He doesn’t so much deny our cherished beliefs as make us think why they may not be the be-all and end-all, that there may be other ways of looking at the world. In that sense, he doesn’t ask us to give up our beliefs but examine them more closely and, as a result, come to know them more consciously and intimately. Rather than some mechanical, unthinking adherence and rigid application, we come to know our beliefs, and ourselves, better. Rather than see Montaigne as a relativist, I see him as undermining false fixities and making continually think with respect to the standards we live by.
A thinker whom I have come to love the more I read him is Blaise Pascal. Pascal was influenced by reading Montaigne. In fact, to say that Montaigne influenced Pascal is a very mild way of putting the impact of the old essayist on the great scientist-cum-theologian. Montaigne shook Pascal profoundly, not so much inspiring him as first unsettling him, and then inciting him. Pascal is a brilliant thinker, a prodigy and a scientist of genius who went on to became one of the greatest of religious thinkers. Will Durrant writes: “Pascal argued so earnestly because he had never really recovered from the doubts suggested to him by Montaigne … and by the merciless neutrality of nature between ‘evil’ and ‘good.’”
Like Montaigne, I can open Pascal at random, any time I am in the mood for dialogue, and immediately get swept away by his emotional and spiritual force. Pascal is more than a philosopher; he knows your hopes and, even more, your fears, and seeks to ground them. It’s where and how he grounds them, though, that is the real exhilarating experience.
Nature? Pascal is unsettling.
I shall focus on Pascal’s confrontation with ‘the merciless neutrality of nature.’ I’ll nail my colours to the mast immediately and confess to a belief in God. I say this rather sardonically. Up to around 2010, my works were implicitly and often quite explicitly atheist. I developed my organizing theme of ‘rational freedom’ quite explicitly in terms of the universality of human rationality and its capacity to ground freedom. Breaking away from that well-developed view in my work still has the feeling of heresy for me. Philosophically, my life would be much easier without God and religion. But, as Pascal knew, philosophical and scientific reason have their limits. I reached those limits. Pascal did too. I found the questions I had been asking to remain.
“There is nothing so comformable to reason as to disavow reason,” he wrote, arguing further that “to make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher.” I have been known to tell people that “philosophy is rubbish.” Pascal didn’t quite go that far. I do understand why Dante put the philosophers in Limbo, though. It’s not quite the punishment of Hell, but it isn’t the joy of Heaven, either. The philosophers would probably enjoy making themselves miserable dialoguing with each other for all eternity on that one. Their endless philosophizing may seem like Hell to us, but it is Heaven to them. “To have no time for philosophy is to be a true philosopher.” (Pascal).
I repudiate neither philosophy nor science. Instead, like Dante, I enfold them within the Greater Love that nourishes and sustains all and enrich them thereby. And Pascal understands precisely why there can be no peace without God. Many people like to cite Einstein’s view of God. When asked if he believed in God, Einstein replied that he believed in the God of Spinoza:
"I believe in Spinoza's God, who reveals himself in the harmony of all that exists, not in a God who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind."
That sounds eminently rational and, appropriately, impresses those who see themselves as rationalists. That applies to humanists, but also to people who repudiate anthropocentrism in all forms and argue that all that there is is Nature. But here is where the problems lie. The indifference of Nature seems an inordinately cold not to say callous ethic for human society to mirror, frankly inhuman and impersonal. Nature might well be unconcerned about human concerns, but human beings can never be. Einstein may have considered the belief in and the existence of a personal God naïve, but the 'God' he espouses does not make complete psychological and emotional sense. Nature doesn’t care, but God does. There are two concepts of God in the Hebrew Bible, one relating to the physical Creation, the other to the Creator as the God of love and relationships. Einstein, like Spinoza before him, has the God of the physical universe, the God of the scientists. Both have missed the God of love. Pascal knew this:
“Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the scholars. I will not forget thy word. Amen.”
In true religion, both concepts go together to form the one God. Pascal knew this, too:
“Happiness can be found neither in ourselves nor in external things, but in God and in ourselves as united to him.”
At the time that Spinoza in his Ethics was defining his concept of God/Nature as a single self-subsistent entity, Pascal was wrestling with the emotional implications of God and Nature. Spinoza would no doubt write of ‘inadequate ideas’ and 'imagination' as lying at the source of Pascal’s difficulty. Pascal could respond by suggesting that Spinoza suffered from inadequate emotions. Pascal was a troubled soul, and his troubles were such that could not be resolved by the proofs of reason, no matter how brilliantly defined:
“This is what I see, and what troubles me. I look on all sides and everywhere I see nothing but obscurity. Nature offers me nothing that is not a matter of doubt and disquiet. If I saw no signs of a divinity, I would fix myself in denial. If I saw everywhere the marks of a Creator, I would repose peacefully in faith. But seeing too much to deny [Him], and too little to assure me, I am in a pitiful state, and I would wish a hundred times that if a God sustains nature it would reveal Him without ambiguity."
This is one for those contemporary naturalists who claim that there is no God, only Nature. I see these naturalists dividing into two basic camps. The first camp is constituted by those who affirm a disenchanting science. There is no design, no purpose, and no meaning in Nature. There is no evidence of any extraneous intelligence. There is no God. The second camp, whilst repudiating God, nevertheless refer to Nature as in some way purposeful and animate. ‘There is only Nature, and she needs us,’ is a quote (italics added) from Dr Glenn Barry that many of my naturalist friends shared over social media. That is a clear case of investing Nature with human qualities and existential significance which, in strict naturalist terms, is illegitimate. There is confused thinking here. The disenchanters are the most ruthlessly consistent here, even if their cold, indifferent nature doesn’t satisfy the cosmic longing for meaning that motivates human beings. The latter abolish God in one form, then smuggle divinity back in another. If there is no evidence for the traditional God, as they state, then likewise there is none for this natural intelligence and purpose they allege.
“Nature has made all her truths independent of one another. Our art makes one dependent on the other.”
Pascal
Pascal is much more satisfying than these modern authorities, in that he has the intelligence and, more, the guts to take on the weighty theological issues. The moderns have lost the nerve and the nous. I like to take time out and ponder ultimate reality with Pascal every so often. Not often. He could easily become an unhealthy obsession taking me away from my other work. The emotional charge of his engagement with deep issues incites the theological passions. His spiritual intensity threatens to give me more than a few nights of fire.
I would always urge people to read the ideas and arguments of the philosophers in the raw. Many philosophers, I would admit, are brain-breakingly difficult to understand, others just mind-numbingly boring. The former break into two camps: those who are worth persevering with in order to understand, and those who write plain gibberish. Knowing the difference makes a decent philosopher and saves a lot of time. That said, the latter camp itself is worth investigating in that it, too, divides into two camps: those whose gibberish entertains and even sheds new light on things, however inadvertently, and those whose gibberish should consign them, body and soul, to the lowest pits of Hell. But, read in the raw, it soon becomes apparent why the great philosophers earned the right to be called 'great philosophers,' despite the worst efforts of the epigones to render their work mind-numbingly boring. Aristotle is actually very easy to read. Aquinas too. Rousseau’s writing is so beautiful it practically reads itself. I did initially find Plato’s dialogues hard to follow. I just wanted him to tell me what he thought rather than think for myself! Plato makes you think things through. Then we have Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, whose ideas are presented as aphorisms, often unconnected. Pascal’s Pensées are of this frustratingly intriguing quality, too. He is hard to follow. He is also treacherous in that his quotes can be wrenched out of context very easily, with Pascal taken to be arguing a position that he is in fact arguing against. At the same time, some passages from Pascal are so sublime and transcendent that to comment and interpret would be to detract from their crystalline intellectual power. Pascal has this unique combination of sheer soaring imaginative power and deep moral depth. Little or no comment is required, and so, from now on, I shall just quote with barely a line from me stringing the passages together.
To find our way back to God, we must come back to Nature. We must come back to that ‘merciless’ indifferent Nature that so impresses modern day Spinozists, but which so troubled Pascal. Pascal’s starting point was the way in which the Copernican-Galilean astronomy was undermining the traditional conceptions of Christianity. It was the same starting point that inspired Descartes. From that same starting point, Pascal and Descartes moved in different directions to draw different conclusions. Many have seen Descartes as an atheist, a man who saw only a mechanical order. I don’t believe that that was Descartes’ purpose at all. I think he sought to take core religious truths and beliefs and see if, in light of the advances of natural science, he could rest them on rational grounds. I think Kant did something similar a century later. For Pascal, this approach was misguided and doomed to failure.
The tremendous blow that natural science had reigned upon traditional religious conceptions could not be overcome by means of the very scientific reason that had delivered that blow. Instead, Pascal hit back with all of the emotional and spiritual, even mystical, power at his command. This, as the quotes below will show, was quite some power. Pascal thus pondered at length the place of man in the cosmos:
“Let man then contemplate the whole of nature in its lofty and full majesty, and let him avert his view from the lowly objects around him. Let him behold that brilliant light set like an eternal lamp to illuminate the universe. Let the earth seem to him like a point in comparison with the vast orbit described by that star.
And let him be amazed that this vast orbit is itself but a very small point in comparison with the one described by that star. And let him be amazed that this vast orbit is itself but a very small point in comparison with the one described by the stars rolling around the firmament.
And if our vision is stopped there, let imagination pass beyond. It will sooner tire of conceiving an imperceptible trace in the amplitude of nature. No idea approaches it. However much we may inflate our conceptions beyond these imaginary spaces, we give birth only to atoms with respect to the reality of things. It is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere.”
Pascal concludes:
“In the end, the greatest perceptible sign of God’s omnipotence is that our imagination loses itself in this thought.”
“Let man, returning to himself, consider what he is with respect to what exists. Let him regard himself as lost in this remote corner of nature, and from the little cell in which he finds himself lodged, I mean the universe, let him learn to estimate the just value of the earth, kingdoms, cities, and himself.
But what is a man in the infinite? But to present him with another equally astonishing prodigy, let him examine the most delicate things he knows. A mite with its minuscule body shows him incomparably more minute parts, legs with joints, veins in its legs, blood in its veins, humors in this blood, drops in the humors, vapors in these drops. Let him divide these last things again until he exhausts his powers of conception, and let the final object to which he can now arrive be the object of our discourse. Perhaps he will think that this is nature’s extremity of smallness.
I want to make him see a new abyss in there. I want to depict for him not just the visible universe, but the immensity of nature we can conceive inside the boundaries of this compact atom. Let him see there an infinity of universes, each with its firmament, its planets, its earth, in the same proportion as in the visible world; and on this earth animals, and finally mites, where he will find again what he saw before and finally still in the others the same thing without end and without cessation.
Let him lose himself in wonders as astonishing in their minuteness as the others are in their extent! For who will not marvel that our body, imperceptible a little while ago in the universe, itself imperceptible inside the totality, should now be a colossus, a world, or rather a whole, with respect to the nothingness beyond our reach?”
But where, in all of this, is God? Pascal adds a passage that defines his religious sensibility:
“When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in an eternity before and after, the little space I fill engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces whereof I know nothing, and which know nothing of me, I am terrified. The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.”
Pascal, Pensées
That troubling line has become rightly famous: “The eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.” There is, however, another infinity, the world of the infinitely small. The infinite divisibility of the “uncuttable” atom implies that no matter how minute the extent to which we reduce anything, it always seems that it can be made even more minute by further reduction. Human reason forever expresses wonderment and fear when vacillating between the two poles of the infinitely vast and the infinitely minute:
“Whoever considers himself in this way will be afraid of himself, and, seeing himself supported by the size nature has given him between these two abysses of the infinite and nothingness, he will tremble at these marvels. I believe that, as his curiosity changes into admiration, he will be more disposed to contemplate them in silence than to examine them with presumption.
“For in fact what is man in nature? A nothing in respect to the infinite, everything in respect to the nothing, a meeting between nothing and everything. Since he is infinitely removed from comprehending the extremes, both the end and the beginning or principle of things are invincibly hidden in an impenetrable secret; he is equally incapable of seeing the nothing whence he has been drawn, and the infinite in which he is engulfed.”
Pascal, Pensées
Science and philosophy, therefore, rest on a limited premise which, if ignored, can render them facile and fallacious. Science and philosophy have their grounds in a reason which, in turn, derives from a sense experience which may deceive us in myriad ways. Reason is limited by the narrow bounds within which the senses operate. The senses deceive, the flesh corrupts. Reason in itself is incapable of understanding, let alone providing a solid base to – social bonds and community, human interaction, family and other social groups, morality and moral commitment, the state and politics. Still less can Reason comprehend the real nature and true order of the world, not to mention undertaking the difficulties of understanding God. There is more wisdom in custom and myth, Pascal contends, than in reason. Pascal gives us virtues as qualities for living in community with others: “The strength of a man's virtue must not be measured by his efforts, but by his ordinary life.”
And imagination has much greater power than reason:
“If the greatest philosopher in the world find himself upon a plank wider than actually necessary, but hanging over a precipice, his imagination will prevail, though his reason convince him of his safety. Many cannot bear the thought without a cold sweat. I will not state all its effects.
Every one knows that the sight of cats or rats, the crushing of a coal, etc. may unhinge the reason. The tone of voice affects the wisest, and changes the force of a discourse or a poem.
Love or hate alters the aspect of justice. How much greater confidence has an advocate, retained with a large fee, in the justice of his cause! How much better does his bold manner make his case appear to the judges, deceived as they are by appearances! How ludicrous is reason, blown with a breath in every direction!
I should have to enumerate almost every action of men who scarce waver save under her assaults. For reason has been obliged to yield, and the wisest reason takes as her own principles those which the imagination of man has everywhere rashly introduced. [He who would follow reason only would be deemed foolish by the generality of men. We must judge by the opinion of the majority of mankind. Because it has pleased them, we must work all day for pleasures seen to be imaginary; and after sleep has refreshed our tired reason, we must forthwith start up and rush after phantoms, and suffer the impressions of this mistress of the world. This is one of the sources of error, but it is not the only one.]
Our magistrates have known well this mystery. Their red robes, the ermine in which they wrap themselves like furry cats, the courts in which they administer justice, the fleurs-de-lis, and all such august apparel were necessary; if the physicians had not their cassocks and their mules, if the doctors had not their square caps and their robes four times too wide, they would never have duped the world, which cannot resist so original an appearance. If magistrates had true justice, and if physicians had the true art of healing, they would have no occasion for square caps; the majesty of these sciences would of itself be venerable enough. But having only imaginary knowledge, they must employ those silly tools that strike the imagination with which they have to deal; and thereby in fact they inspire respect.”
Pascal, Pensées, SECTION II: The Misery of Man Without God, Imagination
Pascal presents us with a choice to be made:
“In reading this author [ Montaigne ] and comparing him with Epictetus, I have found that they are assuredly the two greatest defenders of the two most celebrated sects of the world, and the only ones conformable to reason, since we can only follow one of these two roads, namely: either that there is a God, and then we place in him the sovereign good; or that he is uncertain, and that then the true good is also uncertain, since he is incapable of it.”
It follows that if we reject God, sooner or later we lose the summum bonum. Kant made the highest good the end that human beings ought to pursue. He rested his ethics on a universal reason. If anyone could make this work, then Kant, the greatest of the modern philosophers, could. No one else. He couldn’t. Kant’s intersubjectivism dissolved subjectivism under the weight placed on a groundless reason. Kant himself discovered ‘the scandal of reason,’ the idea that the mind raises questions which reason cannot answer. Logical positivists seek the easy way out and declare such questions to be non-questions, non-sense. But if we remain within the realm of the senses, we are deceived, for all the reasons Pascal gave.
Pascal makes a distinction between two kinds of wisdom. In the first place there is the wisdom of the simple and “ignorant” multitude, who live by the wisdom of tradition and imagination (ritual and myth). Then there is the wisdom of the sage who, in reaching the limits of science and philosophy, has come to understand his ignorance. Therefore, “there is nothing so comformable to reason as to disavow reason,” and “to make light of philosophy is to be a true philosopher.”
Pascal therefore considered the attempts to base religion on reason not merely unwise but foolish. It cannot be done and, to the extent that it is attempted, opens the door wide open and invites atheism in. Reason can prove neither God nor immortality; the evidence for either is not merely insufficient but contradictory. Likewise the Bible cannot serve as the ultimate source of faith, since it is full of passages that are either ambiguous or obscure.
“The last function of reason is to recognize that there are an infinity of things which surpass it.” (Pascal).
That’s an idea that is developed at length by St Thomas Aquinas.
On soul and body
Whenever and wherever we come to depend on reason we run into the unintelligible. Our reason is incapable of comprehending the union and interaction of an obviously material body and an obviously immaterial mind: “There is nothing so inconceivable as that matter should be conscious of itself.” To quote in full (alternative translation):
"It is impossible that our rational part should be other than spiritual; and if any one maintain that we are simply corporeal, this would far more exclude us from the knowledge of things, there being nothing so inconceivable as to say that matter knows itself. It is impossible to imagine how it should know itself."
With respect to those philosophers who have mastered their passions, Pascal asks: “what matter could do that?” The nature of human beings, in being mix of angel and brute, reproduces the contradiction of mind and body to remind us of the Chimera, which, in Greek mythology, was a she-goat with a lion’s head and a serpent’s tail:
“What a Chimera is man! What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy! Judge of all things, and imbecile norm of the earth; depository of truth, and sewer of error and doubt; the glory and refuse of the universe. Who shall unravel this confusion?”
On Man's fallen nature
We come to the fallen nature of human beings. Morally, Pascal argues, man is a mystery. All kinds of wickedness appear or lie hidden in him:
"Man is only a disguise, a liar, a hypocrite, both to himself and to others."
“All man naturally hate one another; there could not be four friends in the world.”
And what bottomless, insatiable vanity!
On vanity
"We would never travel on the sea if we had no hope of telling about it later... We lose our lives with joy provided people talk about it... Even philosophers wish for admirers."
And yet an integral part of the greatness of human beings lies in the fact that out of the wickedness, hatred, and vanity which characterizes the species, man has developed a code of law and morals to keep his fallen nature under control, drawing an ideal of love out of his lust. The misery of man is another mystery. Pascal asks why the universe should have laboured at such length so as to produce a species that is so weak and feeble, so prone to misery, ‘so subject to pain in every nerve, to grief in every love, to death in every life?’ (Will Durrant And yet … despite all of this pain, misery, and suffering.
Yet there is nobility in humanity
"The grandeur of man is great in that he knows himself to be miserable."
"Man is but a reed, the most feeble (thing) in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself in order to crush him; a vapor, a drop of water, suffices to kill him. But when (even if) the universe would (were to) crush him, man would (still) yet be more noble than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying (that he dies) and the advantage (which) the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of it (of this)."
“L'homme n'est qu'un roseau, le plus faible de la nature, mais c'est un roseau pensant. Il ne faut pas que l'univers entier s'arme pour l'écraser; une vapeur, une goutte d'eau suffit pour le tuer. Mais quand l'univers l'écraserait, l'homme serait encore plus noble que ce qui le tue, parce qu'il sait qu'il meurt et l'avantage que l'univers a sur lui; l'univers n'en sait rien."
“Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him; a vapor, a drop of water, suffice to kill him. But when the universe has crushed him man will still be nobler than that which kills him, because he knows that he is dying, and of its victory the universe knows nothing.”
Let me quote from Durant:
“None of these mysteries finds an answer in reason. If we trust to reason alone we shall condemn ourselves to a Pyrrhonism that will doubt everything except pain and death, and philosophy could be at best a rationalization of defeat. But we cannot believe that man’s fate is as reason sees it — to struggle, to suffer, and to die, having begotten others to struggle, to suffer, and to die, generation after generation, aimlessly, stupidly, in a ridiculous and superabundant insignificance. In our hearts we feel that this cannot be true, that it would be the greatest of all blasphemies to think that life and the universe have no meaning. God and the meaning of life must be felt by the heart, rather than by reason. “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know ,” and we do right to listen to our hearts, to “place our faith in feeling .” For all belief, even in practical matters, is a form of will, a direction of attention and desire.” (The “will to believe.”) The mystical experience is profounder than the evidence of the senses or the arguments of reason.
What answer, then, does feeling give to the mysteries of life and thought?
The answer is religion. Only religion can restore meaning to life, and nobility to man; without it we flounder ever more deeply into mental frustration and mortal futility. Religion gives us a Bible; the Bible tells us of man’s fall from grace; only that original sin can explain the strange union, in human nature, of hate and love, of bestial wickedness and our longing for redemption and God. If we let ourselves believe (however absurd it may seem to the philosophers) that man began with divine grace, that he forfeited this by sin, and that he can be redeemed only by divine grace through the crucified Christ, then we shall find a peace of mind never granted to philosophers. He who cannot believe is cursed, for he reveals by his unbelief that God has not chosen to give him grace.
Belief is a wise wager. Granted that faith cannot be proved, what harm will come to you if you gamble on its truth and it proves false? “You must wager; it is not optional . . . Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God exists ... If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.
Wager, then, without hesitation, that He exists .” If at first you find it difficult to believe, follow the customs and rituals of the Church as if you did believe. “Bless yourself with holy water, have Masses said, and so on; by a simple and natural process this will make you believe, and will dull you” ( cela vous fera croire, et vous abetira ) — will quiet your proudly critical intellect . Go to confession and communion; you will find it a relief and a strengthening.
We do injustice to this historic apologia by letting it end on so unheroic a note. We may be sure that Pascal, when he believed, did so not as a gambler but as a soul baffled and buffeted by life, humbly recognizing that his intellect, whose brilliance had astonished friends and foes, was no match for the universe, and finding in faith the only way to give meaning and pardon to his pain. “Pascal is sick,” said Sainte-Beuve; “we must always remember this in reading him .” But Pascal would have replied: Are we not all sick? Let him who is perfectly happy reject faith. Let him reject it who is content with no more meaning in life than a helpless trajectory from a filthy birth to an agonizing death.
On heart and head
“The heart has its reasons, of which reason knows nothing ... We know the truth not only by the reason, but by the heart."
- Blaise Pascal
Le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point.
I shall end with some quotes from Pascal which develop this theme. I am greatly interested in the ‘motivational economy’ of human beings. The hidebound prejudice of the modern world is to think knowledge and know-how, science and technology, sufficient to ‘change the world.’ The problem is that such things lack the qualities of virtue in the true sense. Whilst they give human beings the ability to act, they do not make human beings want to act. The Enlightenment model sees action coming as a result of informing empty and passive heads with knowledge and equipping human beings with technical skills. That model fails to see that the formation of character to cultivate responsiveness and will is at least as important and, I would argue, much more important. The failure to grasp that truth ensures that our modern technics keeps misfiring. Things that ought to be done, fail to be done, for want of or deficiency in agency. The solution is to ensure right relations between knowledge and know-how on the one hand and will, appetite, and agency on the other.
“Clarity of mind means clarity of passion, too; this is why a great and clear mind loves ardently and sees distinctly what it loves.” (Pascal).
The problem is one of discerning the truth and translating it into practice. There is no uni-linear progression from one to the other, as though truth is merely delivered by its holders to its receivers. Truth cannot simply be given, but must be actively willed, absorbed, internalized, practised, and lived as a way of life. The mistake that many make is to work to a dualistic model between active elite dissemination and passive mass reception. It doesn’t work. The passive masses tend to be unreceptive or even downright resistant. The qualities of reception have to be cultivated. Truth has to be set in proper relation to all the human faculties. Truth does not trump all things. Those who think it does succeed not in disseminating truth, as intended, but breeding a reaction against it. Pascal understood well the deficiencies of a position in which some human beings act as though they alone have grasped the truth:
“It is man's natural sickness to believe that he possesses the truth.”
There may well be such a thing as truth. There is a reality, there is an ultimate reality. We can only apprehend it with our limited cognitive resources. We may be as certain that we have the truth on the basis of those cognitive capacities. But to act over against others on account of the belief that we possess the truth is the surest way to tyranny and repression, reaction and resistance. Human beings lose not only the truth as a result, they lose their humanity:
“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”
(Pascal).
That inhuman religious conviction is exhibited by all those who make an idol of truth and employ it zealously against others. I am, therefore, highly critical of the extent to which science is being employed as an authority in politics. When key issues for dialogue and dispute, which is the very stuff of politics, are declared incontrovertible and non-negotiable, then we have a politics of truth that easily becomes totalitarian and inquisitional. Instead of respecting the citizen voice, the thoughts and actions of individuals comes to be policed and judged in order to be conformed to ‘the truth.’
“We make an idol of truth itself, for truth apart from charity is not God, but his image and an idol that we must not love or worship.” (Pascal).
The lesson is clear: do not make an idol of truth. It is important to affirm that truth exists, and important to seek truth.
“We have an incapacity of proof, insurmountable by all dogmatism. We have an idea of truth, invincible to all skepticism.”
The problems come when, having sought and found truth, we come to act in relation to others and to the world as if we alone are possessors of truth and, in being in possession, have a right to override resistance. Tolkien’s lesson in Lord of the Rings is not the obvious one that the Ring would become destructive in the hands of the evil Lord Sauron, but that the destructiveness would be at least as bad should the Ring be in the hands of good folk like Gandalf, for the reason that the good folk would act self-righteously and brook no opposition. That power would consume the goodness of the heart. You do not possess power, power possesses you. It is very easy to make a fetish of truth and sacrifice the health and well-being of individuals in its worship.
I frequently praise Rousseau for the way he integrates the two great wings of western philosophy, objective reality and the knowledge we have of it on the one hand and subjective will and appetite on the other hand. Rousseau’s concept of the General Will holds that the truth cannot just be given but must be actively willed on the part of those who receive it. Truth thus ceases to be passive and inert and comes alive in the minds and bodies of thinking, feeling, acting individuals. I’m going from memory and need to check this, but I believe Rousseau took the idea from Jansenist writings on God. The concept has theological origins. Pascal says similar things, only placing more emphasis on the activity of disclosure on the part of human beings apprehending the truth themselves:
“We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others.”
There is a need to communicate truth to others, not dictate it to them:
“One must have deeper motives and judge everything accordingly, but go on talking like an ordinary person.” (Pensées 336).
“In difficult times carry something beautiful in your heart.”
“We know truth, not only by the reason, but also by the heart, and it is in this last way that we know first principles; and reason, which has no part in it, tries in vain to impugn them. The sceptics, who have only this for their object, labour to no purpose. We know that we do not dream, and however impossible it is for us to prove it by reason, this inability demonstrates only the weakness of our reason, but not, as they affirm, the uncertainty of all our knowledge. For the knowledge of first principles, as space, time, motion, number, is as sure as any of those which we get from reasoning. And reason must trust these intuitions of the heart, and must base them on every argument. (We have intuitive knowledge of the tri-dimensional nature of space, and of the infinity of number, and reason then shows that there are no two square numbers one of which is double of the other. Principles are intuited, propositions are inferred, all with certainty, though in different ways.) And it is as useless and absurd for reason to demand from the heart proofs of her first principles, before admitting them, as it would be for the heart to demand from reason an intuition of all demonstrated propositions before accepting them.
This inability ought, then, to serve only to humble reason, which would judge all, but not to impugn our certainty, as if only reason were capable of instructing us. Would to God, on the contrary, that we had never need of it, and that we knew everything by instinct and intuition! But nature has refused us this boon. On the contrary, she has given us but very little knowledge of this kind; and all the rest can be acquired only by reasoning.
Therefore, those to whom God has imparted religion by intuition are very fortunate, and justly convinced. But to those who do not have it, we can give it only by reasoning, waiting for God to give them spiritual insight, without which faith is only human, and useless for salvation.”
Knowledge is affective as well as cognitive, something which entails the unity of the head and the heart. Truth requires a unity of reason and passion:
“There is internal war in man between reason and the passions. If he had only reason without passions. If he had only passions without reason. But having both, he cannot be without strife, being unable to be at peace with the one without being at war with the other. Thus he is always divided against, and opposed to himself.”
“This internal war of reason against the passions has made a division of those who would have peace into two sects. The first would renounce their passions, and become gods; the others would renounce reason, and become brute beasts. But neither can do so, and reason still remains, to condemn the vileness and injustice of the passions, and to trouble the repose of those who abandon themselves to them; and the passions keep always alive in those who would renounce them.”
I like Montaigne’s view here. Montaigne bounds truth within “good faith.” What we know of the world, ourselves, and others and how we act on that knowledge is constituted by the meeting of Honour, Truth, and True Love. Good faith encompasses this triangle:
“Kind words do not cost much. They never blister the tongue or lips. They make other people good-natured. They also produce their own image on men's souls, and a beautiful image it is.”
Pascal comes close to the wisdom of the words with which Dante closes The Comedy:
“Happiness can be found neither in ourselves nor in external things, but in God and in ourselves as united to him.”
“In His will is our peace,” Dante writes (echoing St Augustine). At the close of The Comedy, Dante describes how his will was turned by the Love that moves the sun and the other stars:
“God wishes to move the will rather than the mind. Perfect clarity would help the mind and harm the will.”
That’s not quite Dante’s view. Dante had a much more exalted conception of reason and the intellect. For Dante, love follows the intellect, love being properly ordered to its true object His view is Aristotelian and Thomist. Pascal finds such noble claims for reason unpersuasive. The old edifice had been shattered by the rise of the new science and reason was insufficient to put it back together. Instead of Descartes’ citadel of reason, Pascal offers a more humble God-centred conception:
“Jesus is a God whom we can approach without pride and before whom we can humble ourselves without despair.”
This is the Greater Love that enfolds, nourishes, sustains, and moves all. That's the Love that Pascal understands, the Love that endures:
“Love knows no limit to its endurance, no end to its trust, no fading of its hope; it can outlast anything. Love still stands when all else has fallen.”
My dear friend Hélène Domon has been reading the new novel Serotonin (2018) by Michel Houellebecq.
"Michel Houellebecq's Serotonin is a scathing, frightening, hilarious, raunchy, offensive, politically incorrect novel about the current state of Europe, Western civilization, and mankind in general.
Deeply depressed by his romantic and professional failures, the aging hedonist and agricultural engineer Florent-Claude Labrouste feels he is "dying of sadness." His young girlfriend hates him, his career is pretty much over, and he has to keep himself highly medicated to cope with day-to-day city life.
Struggling with "sex, male angst, solitude, consumerism, globalisation, urban planning, and more sex" (The Economist), Labrouste decides to head for the hills, returning to Normandy, where he once worked promoting regional cheeses, and where, too, he had once been in love, and even—it now seems—happy. There he finds a countryside devastated by globalization and European agricultural policies, and local farmers longing, like Labrouste himself, for an impossible return to what they remember as a golden age: the smaller world of the premodern era.
As the farmers prepare for what might be an armed insurrection, it becomes clear that the health of one miserable body and a suffering body politic are not so different, in the end, and that all concerned may be rushing toward a catastrophe a whole drugstore's worth of antidepressants won't be enough to make bearable."
Houellebecq is onto something. No wonder he disturbs and discomforts so many. So much that is presented as radical and emancipatory in contemporary society is merely dull and conformist. Not Houellebecq. He ends with Christ thinking "Do I really have to sacrifice myself on a cross for those lopettes?” (somebody with no backbone) . He concludes, "Yes." It was ever thus and ever will be. The situation is never hopeless. As Chesterton wrote in The Everlasting Man: ‘Christianity has died many times and risen again; for it had a god who knew the way out of the grave.’
“A God humiliated, even to the death on the cross; a Messiah triumphing over death by his own death. Two natures in Jesus Christ, two advents, two states of man's nature.”
Pascal
There is a quote that is often attributed to Pascal but for which I can find no source. It is well known and is lodged in my own memory bank. But I don’t believe that Pascal wrote this at all. It’s an old Christian idea, though, and worth presenting:
“There is a God shaped vacuum in the heart of every man which cannot be filled by any created thing, but only by God, the Creator, made known through Jesus.”
Pascal presented a similar idea, only more eloquently:
“What else does this craving, and this helplessness, proclaim but that there was once in man a true happiness, of which all that now remains is the empty print and trace? This he tries in vain to fill with everything around him, seeking in things that are not there the help he cannot find in those that are, though none can help, since this infinite abyss can be filled only with an infinite and immutable object; in other words by God himself” (Pascal, Pensées).
Pascal said that most of the troubles in the world are caused by the inability of people to sit quietly in a room.
“All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” (fragment 136 in the Lafuma numbering, 168 in Sellier’s).
This quote is repeated a lot by people who recommend quiet contemplation or meditation. Those things may be admirable, but this is not what Pascal is driving at. You really need to read the statement in context. Pascal makes this statement when considering how much difficulty and turmoil people go through in the pursuit of favour at court or military glory. He says he has often thought that such people would be so much happier if they could just learn to sit quietly in a room alone. But as he thinks further, he comes to the realization that this is not true at all, and that left alone to contemplate quietly human beings would sooner or later descend into a deep dark melancholy, as a result of having to contemplate the human condition and its many sources of unhappiness, particularly mortality. Human beings cannot find happiness in themselves (hence one reason why Pascal rejects Stoicism) but must instead look outside. The problem, Pascal continues, is that the ways in in which human beings seek happiness, are not true satisfactions but merely distractions which save us from having to think about ourselves and the human condition or serve to boost our vanity (through power or glory). Pascal nevertheless argues that it is right for human beings to look for happiness outside of themselves, arguing that we look beyond diversions since happiness can be found only in God.
This final quote from Pascal allows me to give my text on Bruce Springsteen a little plug:
“No religion except ours has taught that man is born in sin; none of the philosophical sects has admitted it; none therefore has spoken the truth.”
That’s one of those exclusive claims to truth I normally stay clear of. They are divisive and betray an imperious attitude that is deeply upsetting to people of other faiths and none. I like the Jewish notion of atonement. But I also see the argument for naming the ills and errors of human affairs for what they are, as a condition of mercy, forgiveness, and redemption. That theme is all over the work of Bruce Springsteen, to an extent that may come as a surprise to even his diehard fans.
Bruce Springsteen and Blaise Pascal. You don't get that combination anywhere else.