PASCAL, BLAISE. — French scientist and philosopher, b. at Clermont-Ferrand on 19 June 1623, d. in Paris on 15 Aug. 1662. Second son of Stefano P., a magistrate and accomplished student of mathematics. His paternal education, more scientific than humanistic and philosophical, fostered in P. a disposition for observation and reflection. The prodigious young man soon distinguished himself in the so-called circle of Fr. MERSENNE, MARIN (v.), the first nucleus of the Paris Academy of Sciences, attended by the most eminent scientists and mathematicians of the time: this milieu influenced his intellectual formation.
At the age of sixteen P. prepared a Traité des coniques, of which only an Essai sur les coniques remains; he published it in 1640, and it contains P.’s theorem (Oeuvres, ed. cited in the bibliography, I, pp. 252–60). Around 1642 he invented the «machine arithmétique», which he was able to present publicly only in 1645. In the Lettre dédicatoire (Oeuvres, I, pp. 298–404) he calls it «une des choses extraordinaires». Having learned in 1646 of Torricelli’s experiment (v.), he became passionately interested in the question of the void. The experiments conducted together with the scientist P. Petit convinced him that nature’s horror of the void, still maintained by Descartes himself (v.), was a prejudice. In October 1647 P. made the first results of his experiments public, with great prudence and circumspection, in the booklet Expériences nouvelles touchant le vide, in the form of an Abrégé donné par avance d'un plus grand traité sur le même sujet. From that date the prejudice of horror vacui disappeared. Peripatetic physics found its defender in the Jesuit S. Noël, who addressed P. a letter in which, with arguments based solely on the authority of Aristotle, he sought to demonstrate that the void does not exist because its existence entails a contradiction. P. replied to Noël with a letter of great importance (Oeuvres, II, pp. 90–106), already containing implicitly certain fundamental principles of Pascalian philosophy as well. He maintains there, in fact: a) that in the sciences only the senses and reason have validity, and b) not the principle of authority («when we cite authors, we cite their demonstrations, not their names»), which applies to faith, to which must be reserved «that intellectual submission which sustains our belief in the mysteries hidden from the senses and reason». The decisive experiment was conducted on 19 September 1648, and P. could affirm in the Récit de la grande expérience de l'équilibre des liqueurs (October 1648) that «nature feels no repugnance whatever toward the void and makes no effort to avoid it», and that the sole and true cause of all the phenomena attributed by the universal consensus of peoples and by the multitude of philosophers to the horror of the void «is the weight and pressure of the air». Finally, he prepared a Traité sur le vide (Oeuvres, II, pp. 125–45), a significant document for clarifying the aforementioned Pascalian conception of science and its relations with philosophy and religion.
In the two treatises, remarkable for their scientific rigor and clarity, De la pesanteur de la masse de l'air and De l'équilibre des liqueurs, written between 1651 and 1652 and published posthumously in 1663, all the results concerning the statics of liquids, from Archimedes to Galileo and Descartes, are coordinated and harmonized. P.’s writings on physics, besides constituting a great page in modern science, are a model of balance between the boldness of intuition, the rigor of reasoning, and the prudence of secure and meticulous experimentation.
By the age of eighteen his health was already ruined. In 1646 he had his first contacts with Port-Royal and Jansenism (v.) through the writings of Jansenius, Saint-Cyran, and Arnauld. It is entirely impossible to speak of P.’s «conversion» to Jansenism, nor is it correct to say that this first conversion was purely «intellectual» (Bremond, Strowski, Chevalier, etc.): P. began to understand the meaning of «true piety»; that being Christian means loving Christ seriously and completely, just as he seriously and completely loved us; that truly serving Christ means detaching oneself from everything and everyone, realizing the ascetic dépouillement. His sister Jacqueline’s taking of the habit at Port-Royal (26 May 1652) certainly impressed P., but did not win him over to the religious life. Indeed, for approximately two years (the so-called «worldly period»), he gave in to the ambition and vanity of appearing before others; it seems that he came close to deciding to marry. Thus he came into contact with aristocratic society; without this experience, P. would not have penetrated so deeply or read with such clarity into the human heart, nor would he have written the marvelous analyses of the feelings of boredom, sadness, etc.
During these years (1653–54) P. composed treatises on mathematics: Traité du triangle arithmétique; Traité des ordres numériques; Traité de la sommation des puissances and the Combinaisons. Also noteworthy is a Mémorial written in Latin (1654) and presented to the Parisian Academy of Mathematics, in which he outlines a vast program of research to be undertaken concerning calculations involving the divisors of a number, numerical powers, the problem of magic squares, contacts between spheres, conic sections, the rule for dividing the stakes in games of chance, etc. He would apply the last of these to problems of a religious nature. P. also addressed the foundations of the calculus of probabilities in the important correspondence he conducted with Fermat (Oeuvres, III, pp. 369–430), who had interested himself in the same subject according to the method of combinations, unlike P., who followed the arithmetical method. No sharp division can be made between P. the scientist, rationalist, and critic, and P. the apologist, «theologian and dogmatist»: P.’s religious interest is present even in his scientific investigations, from which motives and suggestions are drawn that underlie the apologetics of the Pensées; for P., if physics is a «fact», Revelation is also a «fact», and theology a «fact»: «facts» ascertainable by different proofs, but all equally valid and certain. This clarifies his conception of truth (v.), what is called Pascalian epistemological (and also metaphysical) «realism». It is true that, for him, science is an open system that develops and progresses, and that truth is therefore dynamic; but this does not exclude (indeed, it implies and entails) the eternity, extratemporality, and objectivity of truth itself, which does not begin to exist from the moment it is known, but exists eternally, before it is known and independently of the fact of being known. It is not truth that is historical, changeable, and progressive; rather, human knowledge of it is historical, changeable, and progressive. Truth is discovered in time and history, but transcends time and history.
Knowledge of man, viewed at close range, sharpened in P. the problem of man, a mystery to himself. The world distant from God brought P. definitively closer to God: his «disgust» with worldly life and awareness of its vanity directed him toward the world that is fullness, joy, and suffering. His mathematical studies themselves presented man suspended between infinity and nothingness; Epictetus (v.) Montaigne (v.) made the drama of man more vivid for him; Jacqueline’s example admonished and summoned him; P. took the step toward which his entire spiritual life had been preparing. It was a fulfillment more than a true conversion in the strict sense, occurring on the night of 23 March 1654, when he wrote the celebrated Mémorial, which he carried sewn into the lining of his doublet, from where a servant later removed II.
He removed it a few days after his death. From that night P. loved God; previously he had known him only. After 24 November he sought solitude and silence, far from the world. He obtained a cell among the « solitaires » of Port-Royal. Besides prayer and meditation, he read Augustine and took an interest in the pupils of the « small schools » and ARNALDISTI (v.) and the Jesuits, in which he took part, greatly disturbing his spiritual peace. As his physical sufferings increased, P. grew in perfection, renunciation, and works of charity; he subjected himself to an extremely rigorous ascetic discipline, even to certain exaggerations of a Jansenistic character (the Prière pour le bon usage des maladies is a significant document). On 19 August 1662 he passed away, after receiving Viaticum, as a Christian and a Catholic, submissive to the Church and the pope. To this final period (from the « conversion » onward) belong: a) other important mathematical writings; b) the Provinciales; c) the Pensées and other minor writings (among them the celebrated Entretien avec M. de Saci sur Epictète et Montaigne).
a) Besides the writings (1658) on the problem of the area of the roulette, or cycloid, noteworthy is the fragment Esprit géométrique of 1655 (Oeuvres, IX, pp. 229 ff.), closely connected with certain fundamental themes of the Pensées. Indeed, it contains the doctrine of the two infinities to which mathematical magnitudes are suspended. « Those who clearly perceive these truths will be able to admire the greatness and power of nature in its twofold infinity, which surrounds it on every side, and through this marvellous consideration learn to know themselves, between an infinity and a nothingness of motion, between an infinity and a nothingness of time ».
b) On 14 January 1656 the Sorbonne condemned Arnauld. P. threw himself fully into the controversy between the Jansenists and the Jesuits; on 23 January of the same year the first of the Provinciales appeared, under the pseudonym Louis de Montalte, with the aim not of Grace (v.), but of mitigating the effects of Arnauld’s condemnation. Hence the dialectical force and polemical skill of the Lettres: to reduce the theological importance of the controversy to a minimum and make it appear as a dispute over words and a struggle of petty, personal interests. From the fifth letter (20 March) through the sixteenth (4 December), P. attacks, with passionate vehemence, « Jesuit morality », probabilist (v.) and casuistic. In the last two (17th and 18th), while the 19th remained in draft form, dated 23 January and 24 November 1657, he returned to theological problems, but did not accept the Jansenist doctrine of Grace, as is also clear from the important Écrits sur la Grâce; this proves that P.’s so-called Jansenism was not theological, but merely moral. The Parliament of Aix condemned the Provinciales on 9 February 1657, and on 5 September they were placed on the Index. In less than half a century the Lettres had approximately fifty editions in French, Latin, or other translations. Universally, from the literary point of view, they are regarded as the first masterpiece of French prose. There is, however, considerable disagreement concerning their ideal meaning and doctrinal importance. Certainly the Lettres, like all polemical writings, contain something excessive and passionate (even if in good faith), but they are not sufficient to accuse P. of theological Jansenism. Nor did he ever inspire excessive confidence among the Jansenists themselves; and it could not have been otherwise, since his anti-Jansenism was, as Blondel writes, « profound and personal ». Theological distinctions and subtleties did not interest P., even though he was sometimes subtle; his incandescent Augustinianism was far removed from the crystallized and systematized Augustinianism of the theologians of Port-Royal. Arnauld reasons and debates, and does not disdain evasions and expedients; P. « feels » his ideas as living realities; he is whole and direct: for him, it is the man himself who is the highway leading to God, not formulas and quibbles. Jansenism entirely enslaves the will to sin; P. teaches, although only to a certain extent, that man, if he wills it, can cooperate, for his salvation, with the necessary action of Grace. Thus, in his final years, he proposed to devote the remainder of his already ruined life to writing an apologetic work capable of converting atheists, and to acting as a spiritual director, for he felt that he possessed this vocation. This does not prevent one from saying, with Laporte, that « P. ne se laisse pas séparer de Port Royal », as is proved by his sometimes ruthless, subtle, and relentless dialectic (especially in demolishing, almost with satisfaction, the claims of reason), by the excessive and disproportionate place that, within the economy of Christian theology, original sin (v.), and finally by that sense of harshness and gloom encountered in certain episodes of his life and in some of his fragments. But this is the occasional, superficial, and transient P.
c) For P., man discovers himself before the God revealed by Christ. This is the central theme of the grand design of the new « Apology of Christianity », on which he worked during the final years of his life. He left numerous notes for it which, together with others collected after his death, formed the Pensées, one of the masterpieces of philosophical and religious literature. Despite their originality, the Pensées bear evident traces of the works that P. kept before him. First of all, the Bible, which he knew by heart, and the writings of Augustine; then the works known at Port-Royal (by Jansen, Saint-Cyran, and Arnauld, and Bérulle’s Discours des grandeurs de Jésus [v.]); the two writers who, in his view, best presented the essential attitudes of the « libertine »: Epictetus (pride) and Montaigne (indifference); certain apologetic treatises and works from which he could glean material; Raimondo Sabunde’s Theologia naturalis in Montaigne’s translation, Pierre Charron’s Trois Vérités, Jean de Silhon’s Traité de l’immortalité de l’âme, Hugo Grotius’s De veritate religionis christianae, and the Pugio fidei christianorum of Raimondo Martini, a thirteenth-century Spanish Dominican.
The first edition of the Pensées, in a small number of copies, dates from 1669; it was reprinted the following year for the public under the title Pensées de M. Pascal sur la religion et sur quelques autres sujets. It had been prepared by a « committee » that included Arnauld, Nicole, Jean Filleau de la Chaise, and other friends of P. Faced with the question whether to publish the fragments as the author had left them, or to group, select, and supplement them, the « committee » thought it appropriate to choose the « clearest and most complete » fragments, arrange them systematically, group them according to subject, and introduce corrections and cuts. The 1669 edition served as the basis for subsequent editions, until V. one. In 1844 the first complete edition of the Pensées was published, edited by P. Faugère; others followed, up to the edition by Brunschvicg (1897), and the later, likewise important, editions by Strowski (1930) and Tourneur (1938).
To «persuade» the atheist, P. chooses the psychological path, whose method is not the esprit de géométrie but the esprit de finesse, which must take the individual into account and adapt itself to him; hence, it must know man in the most secret movements of his heart, in the contradictions of his nature, and place him before the enigma (the «incomprehensible monster») that he is to himself. It is not that P. rejects traditional apologetics, nor that his is purely subjectivist and fideistic. On the contrary: 1) it is always a rational act by which reason recognizes its limits and recognizes that there is an order of truths surpassing it—unless one wishes to call the pride of reason rationality. P. is ready to say: if it rises, I lower it; if it lowers itself, I raise it, against the two opposing skepticism (v.). What is above reason is by no means against reason. Pascal’s critique of the «pleasant reason that the wind moves in every direction» is intended to have this liberating and purifying function; indeed, it is directed against the «raison superbe que la malignité étale en tout son lustre». There are three ways of believing: per raison, per coutume, per inspiration. P. gives primacy to the last of these, but does not exclude reason: a pure and simple religion du coeur is insufficient, just as a pure and simple religion de la raison is the negation of the Christian religion. Thus: coeur and raison: the so-called «fideism» of P. is an exaggeration on the part of some of his interpreters. The celebrated wager argument (Pensées, ed. cit. in the bibliography, 233) too is rational and not pragmatist. The whole of man leads to religion.
Hence the limitations and the merit of Pascalian apologetics: its merit lies in being intrinsic as a method (provided that the two orders, the natural and the supernatural, are clearly distinguished), and its limitation in being psychological, even if Pascalian psychology succeeds in attaining metaphysical depths. No less immense is the historical importance of this apologetics: at a decisive moment in the history of human thought, when faith and reason, Christianity and science, no longer formed the unity that characterized the finest Middle Ages and were at times in open conflict, P., the contemporary of Descartes, was the first to see the problem and confront it, bringing to it the most vital demands of modern thought and demonstrating how these could be satisfied by that tradition and that religion against which reason was rebelling. This incomplete and fragmentary apology remains the first and grand protest of a modern man whom the new science had advanced by great strides, against that modernity which, after severing man from God and then setting him against God, ended by placing man in God’s stead. P. sets man before the Cross of Christ. The God made man, the Mediator, is the whole of his Christianity: without Christ nothing can be explained—not science or geometry, not nature or man. And P.’s is the Christ persecuted, mocked, condemned, scourged, and crucified, who inspired the immortal pages of the Mystery of Jesus.
Here lie the whole distinctiveness of Pascalian Christianity and its limitations: Adam and Christ; Adam who offends God and falls, and with him man falls; Christ who takes upon himself sin and dies for the redemption of man. P. cannot see Christ risen and triumphant, Christ in Glory. His God is Christ crucified; his man is fallen man. God the Father, who creates out of love and is providence, is obscured (almost forgotten) by God the Son, who suffers and is crucified by men. Nevertheless, the Pensées, an incomplete and fragmentary apology, are perhaps, owing to their incisive eloquence, the profound pathos that animates them, and the truths they contain, one of the most effective apologies for Christianity since the seventeenth century.