PASCAL, BLAISE. - French scientist and philosopher, b. Clermont-Ferrand, 19 June 1623, d. Paris, 15 Aug. 1662. Second son of Étienne P., a magistrate and keen student of mathematics. His father’s education, more scientific than humanistic or philosophical, fostered in Pascal an aptitude for observation and reflection. The young prodigy soon distinguished himself within the circle of the Rev. Mersenne (q.v.), the nucleus of the future Paris Academy of Sciences, frequented by the most eminent scientists and mathematicians of the time; this environment deeply influenced his intellectual formation.
At the age of sixteen, Pascal composed a *Traité des coniques*, of which only an *Essai sur les coniques* survives, published in 1640 and containing Pascal’s theorem (Œuvres, ed. cit. in bibl., 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* (Œuvres, I, pp. 298-404) he describes it as “une des choses extraordinaires.” Upon learning in 1646 of Torricelli’s experiment (q.v.), he became passionately interested in the question of the void. Experiments conducted with the scientist P. Petit convinced him that the supposed “horror of a vacuum” was a prejudice, as Descartes (q.v.) still maintained. In October 1647 Pascal cautiously published the first results of his experiments in the pamphlet *Expériences nouvelles touchant le vide*, presented as an *Abrégé donné par avance d’un plus grand traité sur le même sujet*. From that date onward, the prejudice of *horror vacui* was overturned. Peripatetic physics found its defender in the Jesuit S. Noël, who addressed a letter to Pascal arguing, solely on the authority of Aristotle, that the void cannot exist because its existence implies contradiction. Pascal replied to Noël in an important letter (Œuvres, II, pp. 90-106), already containing some fundamental principles that would later shape his philosophy. There he asserts: a) in the sciences, only the senses and reason have value; 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 mysteries hidden from the senses and reason.” The decisive experiment took place on 19 Sept. 1648, and in *Récit de la grande expérience de l’équilibre des liqueurs* (Oct. 1648) Pascal could affirm that “nature feels no repugnance for a vacuum and makes no effort to avoid it,” and that “the sole and true cause of all the phenomena universally attributed by the consensus of peoples and the multitude of philosophers to the horror of the vacuum is the weight and pressure of the air.” Finally, he prepared a *Traité sur le vide* (Œuvres, 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 lucidity—*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. Pascal’s writings in physics, besides constituting a great page in modern science, are a model of equilibrium between the boldness of intuition, the rigor of reasoning, and the caution of secure, meticulous experimentation.
By the age of eighteen his health was already ruined. In 1646 he first came into contact with Port-Royal and Jansenism (q.v.) through the writings of Jansenius, Saint-Cyran, and Arnauld. One cannot speak of Pascal’s “conversion” to Jansenism, nor is it accurate to say that this first conversion was purely “intellectual” (Bremond, Strowski, Chevalier, etc.): Pascal begins to grasp the meaning of “true piety”—that being a Christian means loving Christ seriously and entirely, as seriously and entirely as He has loved us; that truly serving Christ means detaching oneself from all things and all people, achieving ascetic renunciation. The clothing of his sister Jacqueline at Port-Royal (26 May 1652) certainly made a strong impression on him, but did not win him over to the religious life. Indeed, for about two years (the so-called “worldly period”), he yielded to ambition and the vanity of appearances; it seems he nearly decided to marry. Thus he came into contact with aristocratic society; without this, Pascal would not have penetrated so deeply and read so clearly into the human heart, nor written his remarkable analyses of feelings such as boredom and sadness.
During these years (1653-54) Pascal composed mathematical treatises: *Traité du triangle arithmétique*; *Traité des ordres numériques*; *Traité de la sommation des puissances*; and *Combinaisons*. Notable also is a *Mémorial* written in Latin (1654) and presented to the Paris Academy of Mathematics, in which he outlines a vast research program on divisors of a number, numerical powers, magic squares, spherical contacts, conic sections, the rule for dividing stakes in games, etc. Of the latter, he would later make an application to problems of religious order. Pascal also addressed the foundations of the calculus of probabilities in his important correspondence with Fermat (Œuvres, III, pp. 369-430), who had approached the same subject by the method of combinations, unlike Pascal, who followed the arithmetical method. One cannot draw a sharp line between Pascal the scientist, rationalist, and critic, and Pascal the apologist, “theologian, and dogmatician”: his religious interest is present even in his scientific researches, from which he derived motifs and suggestions that underlie the apologetics of the *Pensées*. For Pascal, if a “fact” is physics, a “fact” is also Revelation, and a “fact” is theology: “facts” ascertainable by different proofs, yet all equally valid and certain. This clarifies his conception of truth (q.v.), the so-called Pascalian “realism” (both gnoseological and metaphysical). It is true that for him science is an open system, developing and progressing, and thus truth is dynamic; yet this does not exclude (indeed, it implies and entails) the eternity, extratemporality, and objectivity of truth itself, which does not begin to be when it is known, but is eternally, prior to being known and independently of its being known. It is not truth that is historical, mutable, and progressive, but the human knowledge of it that is historical, mutable, and progressive. Truth is discovered in time and history, yet it transcends time and history.
Close acquaintance with man brought Pascal face to face with the problem of man, a mystery to himself. A world estranged from God drove Pascal definitively to God: his “disgust” for worldly life and the consciousness of its vanity directed him toward the world that is fullness, joy, and suffering. Even his mathematical studies presented man suspended between the infinite and nothingness; the reading of Epictetus (v.) and Montaigne (v.) made the drama of man more vivid to him; the example of Jacqueline admonished and invited him. Pascal took the step that his entire spiritual life had prepared. More a consummation than a true conversion, it occurred on the night of 23 March 1654, when he wrote the famous Mémorial, which he kept sewn into the lining of his doublet, from which a servant removed it a few days after his death. From that night Pascal loved God; before, he had known Him only. After 24 November he sought solitude and silence, far from the world. He obtained a cell among the “solitaries” of Port-Royal. Besides prayer and meditation, he read Augustine and took an interest in the pupils of the “petites écoles” and ARNALDISTI (v.) and the Jesuits, in which he took part with great disturbance to his spiritual peace. As his physical sufferings increased, he grew in perfection, renunciation, and works of charity; he subjected himself to a most rigorous ascetic discipline, even to certain exaggerations of Jansenist flavor (the Prière pour le bon usage des maladies is a significant document). On 19 August 1662 he died, after receiving Viaticum, as a Christian and a Catholic, subject to the Church and the pope. To this last period of his “conversion” belong: a) other important mathematical writings; b) the Provincial Letters; c) the Pensées and other minor writings (including the famous 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 L’Esprit géométrique of 1655 (Oeuvres, IX, pp. 229 ff.), closely linked to some fundamental themes of the Pensées. Here is present the doctrine of the two infinites between which mathematical magnitudes are suspended. “Those who will see these truths clearly will be able to admire the greatness and power of nature in its double infinity surrounding it on every side, and learn through this wonderful consideration 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. Pascal threw himself wholeheartedly into the controversy between the Jansenists and the Jesuits; on 23 January of the same year there appeared the first of the Provincial Letters, under the pseudonym Louis de Montalte, not with the aim of defending the Jansenist doctrine of Grace (v.), but to mitigate the effects of Arnauld’s condemnation. Hence the dialectical force and polemical skill of the Letters: to minimize the theological importance of the controversy and make it appear a dispute of words and a struggle of petty and personal interests. From the fifth letter (20 March) to the sixteenth (4 December) Pascal attacks, with passionate vehemence, “Jesuit morality,” probabilism (v.), and casuistry. In the last two (17th and 18th; the 10th remains in draft form) of 23 January and 24 November 1657 he returns to theological problems, but does not accept the Jansenist doctrine of Grace, as is also evident from the important Écrits sur la Grâce, and this proves that Pascal’s so-called Jansenism was not theological but only moral. On 9 February 1657 the Parliament of Aix condemned the Provincial Letters, which on 5 September were placed on the Index. In less than half a century the Letters had about fifty editions in French, Latin, or other translations. Universally they are considered, from the literary standpoint, the first masterpiece of French prose. There is, however, a diversity of judgments regarding their ideal significance and doctrinal importance. Certainly the Letters, like all polemical writings, contain excesses and passions (even if in good faith), but they are not sufficient to accuse Pascal of theological Jansenism. Nor did he ever inspire excessive confidence in the Jansenists themselves, nor could he have done otherwise, since his anti-Jansenism, as Blondel writes, was “profound and personal.” Theological distinctions and subtleties did not interest Pascal, even if he was sometimes subtle; his incandescent Augustinianism was far removed from the solidified and schematic Augustinianism of the theologians of Port-Royal. Arnauld reasoned, discussed, did not disdain evasions and subterfuges; Pascal “felt” his ideas, was whole, upright: for him man was the main road that led to God, not formulas and quibbles. Jansenism enslaves the will entirely to sin; Pascal taught, even if only up to a point, that man, if he wills it, can collaborate in his salvation with the necessary action of Grace, so much so that in his last years he proposed to devote the rest of his ruined life to writing a valid apology to convert atheists and to act as a spiritual director, of which he felt he had the vocation. This does not prevent one from being able to say with Laporte that “Pascal cannot be separated from Port-Royal,” as is proved by his sometimes merciless, subtle, and relentless dialectic (especially in demolishing almost with satisfaction the pretensions of reason), the excessive and disproportionate place he assigns, in the economy of Christian theology, to original sin (v.), and, finally, that sense of gloom and darkness encountered in some episodes of his life and in some of his fragments. But this is the occasional, superficial, and fleeting Pascal.
c) For Pascal, man discovers himself before God and reveals his charity. This is the central theme of the great design of the new “Apology of Christianity,” on which he worked in the last years of his life. Of it he left numerous notes which, together with others collected after his death, formed the Pensées, one of the masterpieces of philosophical-religious literature. Despite their originality, the Pensées bear evident traces of the works Pascal had before him. First of all the Bible, which he knew by heart, and the writings of Augustine; then the works known at Port-Royal (those of Jansenius, of Saint-Cyran, of Arnauld, and the Discours des grandeurs de Jésus of Bérulle [v.]); the two writers who, in his view, best presented the essential attitudes of the “libertine”: Epictetus (pride) and Montaigne (indifference); some apologetic treatises and works from which he could draw: the Theologia naturalis of Raymond Sebond in Montaigne’s translation, the Trois Vérités of Pierre Charron, the Traité de l’immortalité de l’âme of Jean de Silhon, the De veritate religionis christianae of Hugo Grotius, and the Pugio fidei christianorum of Raymond Martini, a Spanish Dominican of the 13th century.
The first edition of the Pensées, in a few copies, was published in 1669, 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 Pascal. Faced with the problem of whether to publish the fragments as the author had left them or to group, select, and supplement them, the “committee” believed it opportune to choose the fragments “clearest and most complete,” to give them systematic order, to group them by subject, and to make corrections and cuts. The 1669 edition served as the basis for subsequent ones until V. Cousin pointed out the need for a less defective edition. In 1844 the first complete edition of the Pensées was published by P. Faugère, followed by others up to that of Brunschvicg (1897) and the later important ones of Strowski (1930) and Tourneur (1938).
BIBL.:
Blondel, M., La Pensée de Pascal, Paris 1945.
Brunschvicg, L., Pascal, Paris 1909.
Faugère, P., Pascal, Paris 1844.
Laporte, J., Le Coeur et la raison selon Pascal, Paris 1950.
Strowski, F., Pascal et son temps, Paris 1930.
Tourneur, L., Pascal, Paris 1938.
To persuade the atheist, Pascal chooses the psychological path, whose method is not the *esprit de géométrie* but the *esprit de finesse*, which must take account of the individual and adapt to him; thus, it must know man in the most secret movements of his heart, in the contradictions of his nature, and confront him with the enigma (the “incomprehensible monster”) that he is to himself. It is not that Pascal rejects traditional apologetics, nor is his approach purely subjectivistic and fideistic. Far from it: 1) the act by which reason recognizes its own limits and acknowledges that there is a sphere of truth beyond it is always a rational act, unless one wishes to call rationality the pride of reason. Pascal is ready to say: if reason exalts itself, I will humble it; if it humbles itself, I will exalt it, against the two opposing abstractions of rationalist dogmatism and skepticism (v.). What is above reason is not at all contrary to reason. Pascal’s critique of “that frivolous reason which the wind moves this way and that” aims at this liberating and purifying function; indeed, it is directed against the “proud reason” that the malignity of error adorns with its glitter. There are three ways of believing: by reason, by custom, and by inspiration. Pascal gives primacy to the last, but does not exclude reason: a purely and simply *religion du cœur* is insufficient, just as a purely and simply *religion de la raison* is the negation of Christian religion. Thus: heart and reason. The so-called “fideism” of Pascal is an exaggeration of some of his interpreters. Even the celebrated proof of the wager (Pensées, ed. cit. in bibl., 233) is rational and not pragmatistic. The whole man is brought to religion.
Hence the limits and the value of Pascalian apologetics: its value lies in being intrinsic as a method (provided that the two orders of the natural and the supernatural are kept strictly distinct), and its limits lie in being psychological, even if Pascalian psychology attains metaphysical depths. Also 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 that unity characteristic of the best medieval period and were sometimes in open conflict. Pascal, at the same time as the Cartesian, was the first to see the problem and to confront it, bringing within it the most vital exigencies of modern thought and demonstrating how these could be satisfied by that tradition and that religion against which reason was rebelling. The incomplete and fragmentary apology remains the first and grand protest of a modern man, advanced by the new science, against that modernity which, after having separated man from God and then posited itself against Him, ended by putting man in the place of God. Pascal confronts man with the Cross of Christ. The God-made-man, the Mediator, is the sum of his Christianity: without Christ nothing is explained, neither science nor geometry, neither nature nor man. And Pascal’s Christ is the persecuted, mocked, condemned, scourged, and crucified Christ, who inspired the immortal pages of the *Mystery of Jesus*.
Here lies the entire peculiarity of Pascalian Christianity and here also its limits: Adam and Christ; Adam who offends God and falls, and with him falls man; Christ who takes upon Himself sin and dies for the redemption of man. Pascal cannot see the risen and triumphant Christ, Christ in glory. His God is the crucified Christ; his man is fallen man. The God-the-Father, who creates out of love and is providence, is overshadowed (almost forgotten) by the God-the-Son, who suffers and is crucified by men. Yet the *Pensées*, an incomplete and fragmentary apology, by their incisive eloquence, their profound pathos, and the truths they contain, are perhaps, from the 17th century onward, one of the most effective apologies of Christianity.
PASCAL, JACQUELINE
Third and last daughter of Étienne Pascal and Antoinette Bégon, after Gilberte and Blaise, born in Clermont on 5 Oct. 1625, died in Paris on 4 Oct. 1661.