PASCAL, BLAISE. - French scientist and philosopher, b. at Clermont-Ferrand on 19 June 1623, d. at Paris on 15 Aug. 1662. Second son of Étienne P., magistrate and a good student of mathematics. His father's education, more scientific than humanistic and philosophical, fostered in P. a bent for observation and reflection. The precocious boy soon distinguished himself in the so-called circle of Fr. Mersenne (v.), the first nucleus of the Academy of Sciences of Paris, frequented by the most eminent scientists and mathematicians of the time: this environment influenced his mental formation.
At the age of sixteen P. prepared a Traité des coniques, of which only an Essai sur les coniques survives, which he published in 1640 and in which Pascal's theorem is found (Oeuvres, ed. cited in bibl., I, pp. 252-60). Around 1642 he invented the "machine arithmétique," which he was able to present in public only in 1645. In the Lettre dédicatoire (Oeuvres, I, pp. 298-404) he considers 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, carried out together with the scientist P. Petit, convinced him that nature's horror of the void, as Descartes (v.) himself still maintained, was a prejudice. In Oct. 1647 P. made public the first results of his experiments, with great prudence and circumspection, in the pamphlet 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 the horror vacui declined. Peripatetic physics found its defender in the Jesuit S. Noël, who addressed to P. a letter in which, with arguments founded only on the authority of Aristotle, he seeks to demonstrate that the void does not exist because its existence implies contradiction. P. replied to Noël with a most important letter (Oeuvres, II, pp. 90-106), already containing implicitly certain fundamental principles also for Pascalian philosophy. Indeed, in it he maintains: a) that 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 holds for faith, to which must be reserved "that intellectual submission which sustains our belief in the mysteries hidden from the senses and from reason." The decisive experiment was performed on 19 Sept. 1648, and P. could affirm in the Récit de la grande expérience de l'équilibre des liqueurs (Oct. 1648) that "nature feels no repugnance for the void and makes no effort to avoid it" and that the sole and true cause of all the phenomena attributed by the universal consent of peoples and by the crowd 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 defining the aforementioned Pascalian conception of science and of its relations with philosophy and religion.
In the two treatises, admirable for scientific rigor and lucidity, De la pesanteur de la masse de l'air and De l'équilibre des liqueurs, drafted 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 being a great page of modern science, are a model of equilibrium between the boldness of intuition, the rigor of reasoning and the prudence of sure and meticulous experiment.
By the age of 18 his health was already ruined. In 1646 he had his first contacts with Port-Royal and Jansenism (v.) through writings of Jansenius, of Saint-Cyran and of Arnauld. One cannot speak at all of a "conversion" of P. to Jansenism, nor is it exact to say that this first conversion was purely "intellectual" (Bremond, Strowski, Chevalier, etc.): P. begins to understand the meaning of "true piety"; that to be Christians means to love Christ seriously, entirely, as he has seriously and entirely loved us; that to serve Christ truly means to detach oneself from everything and everyone, to realize the ascetic dépouillement. The clothing of his sister Jacqueline at Port-Royal (26 May 1652) certainly impressed P., but did not win him over to the religious life. Indeed, for about two years (the so-called "worldly period"), he yielded to the ambition and vanity of appearances; it seems that he came close to deciding to marry. Thus he came into contact with aristocratic society; without this, P. would not have penetrated so deeply and read with such clarity into the human heart, nor written the admirable analyses of the feelings of boredom, sadness, etc.
In these years (1653-54) P. drafted mathematical treatises: Traité du triangle arithmétique; Traité des ordres numériques; Traité de la sommation des puissances and the Combinaisons. Also noteworthy is a Mémorial drafted in Latin (1654) and presented to the Parisian academy of mathematics, in which he outlines a vast program of research to be undertaken concerning the calculation of the divisors of a number, numerical powers, the problem of magic squares, the contacts of spheres, conic sections, the rule for dividing the stakes in a game, etc. Of the latter, he will make an application to problems of a religious order. P. also deals with the foundation of the calculus of probabilities in the important correspondence he kept 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. One cannot make a clean cut between P. the scientist, rationalist and critic, and P. the apologist, "theologian and dogmatist": P.'s religious interest is present also in his scientific research, from which are drawn motives and suggestions that underlie the apology 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 sure. This clarifies his conception of truth (v.), what is called the Pascalian gnoseological (and also metaphysical) "realism." It is true that, for him, science is an open system, which develops and progresses and that therefore truth is dynamic, but this does not exclude (indeed implies and entails) the eternity, the extra-temporality and the objectivity of truth itself, which does not begin to be from the moment it is known, but is, eternally, before it is known and independently of the fact of being so. It is not truth that is historical, mutable and progressive, but it is man's knowledge of it that is historical, mutable and progressive. Truth is discovered in time and in history, but transcends time and history.
The knowledge of man seen close at hand sharpened in P. the problem of man, a mystery to himself. The world far from God brought P. definitively closer to God: the "disgust" for worldly life and the awareness of its vanity direct him toward the world that is fullness, joy and suffering. The very studies of mathematics present to him man suspended between the infinite and nothingness; the reading of Epictetus (v.) and of Montaigne (v.) makes the drama of man more vivid to him; the example of Jacqueline admonishes and invites him; P. takes the step that his entire spiritual life had prepared. A fulfillment rather than a true and proper conversion, it occurred on the night of 23 March 1654, on which he drafted the celebrated Mémorial, which he carried sewn into the lining of his doublet, from where a servant took it away a few days after his death. From that night P. loved God; before, he had only known Him. After Nov. 24 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 "little schools" and in the theological controversies between Arnauld (v.) and the Jesuits, in which he took part with great disturbance of his spiritual peace. As his physical sufferings increased, P. grew in perfection, in self-renunciation and in works of charity; he subjected himself to a most rigorous ascetic discipline, to the point of certain exaggerations of a Jansenist flavor (the Prière pour le bon usage des maladies is a significant document). On Aug. 19, 1662 he passed away, after receiving Viaticum, as a Christian and a Catholic, submissive to the Church and to the pope. To this last period (from the "conversion" onward) belong: a) other important writings on mathematics; 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, the fragment Esprit géométrique of 1655 (Oeuvres, IX, pp. 229 ff.) is noteworthy, closely linked to certain fundamental themes of the Pensées. In fact, the doctrine of the two infinities, on which mathematical magnitudes depend, is present there. "Those who will clearly see these truths will be able to admire the greatness and the power of nature in its twofold infinity that surrounds it on every side, and to learn by this wonderful consideration to know themselves, between an infinity and a nothing of movement, between an infinity and a nothing of time."
b) On Jan. 14, 1656 the Sorbonne condemned Arnauld. P. engaged himself deeply in the polemic between Jansenists and Jesuits; on Jan. 23 of the same year the first of the Provinciales appeared, under the pseudonym of Louis de Montalte, with the aim not of defending the Jansenist doctrine of Grace (v.), but of attenuating the effects of Arnauld's condemnation. Hence the dialectical force and the polemical skill of the Lettres: to reduce to a minimum the theological importance of the controversy and to make it appear as a dispute over words and a struggle of petty and personal interests. From the fifth letter (March 20) to the sixteenth (Dec. 4) P. attacks, with passionate vehemence, "Jesuit morality," probabilism (v.) and casuistry. In the last two (17th and 18th) — the 19th remained in the state of a draft — of Jan. 23 and Nov. 24, 1657 he returns to theological problems, but does not accept the Jansenist doctrine of Grace, as also emerges from the important Écrits sur la Grâce, and this proves how P.'s so-called Jansenism is not theological, but only moral. The Parliament of Aix on Feb. 9, 1657 condemned the Provinciales, which on Sept. 5 were placed on the Index. In less than half a century the Lettres had about fifty editions in French, in Latin or in other translations. They are universally considered, from the literary standpoint, the first masterpiece of French prose. There is, on the other hand, a disparity of judgments concerning their ideal meaning and their doctrinal importance. Certainly the Lettres, like all polemical writings, have something excessive and passionate (even if in good faith), but they are not enough to accuse P. of theological Jansenism. Nor did he ever inspire excessive confidence in the Jansenists themselves, and it could not have been otherwise, his anti-Jansenism being, as Blondel writes, "profound and personal." Theological distinctions and subtleties did not interest P., even if he is sometimes subtle; his white-hot Augustinianism was far from the solidified and schematized Augustinianism of the theologians of Port-Royal; Arnauld reasons, discusses, does not disdain shifts and expedients; P. "feels" his ideas alive, he is whole, upright: for him it is man, the main road, that leads to God, not the winding paths and quibbles; Jansenism totally enslaves the will to sin, whereas P. teaches, even if only up to a certain point, that man, if he wills it, can cooperate, for his salvation, in the necessary action of Grace, so much so that, in his last years, he proposed to dedicate all the rest of his life, by then ruined, to writing an apology valid for converting atheists, to acting as a spiritual director, for which he felt he had the vocation. This does not prevent one from being able to say with Laporte that "P. ne se laisse pas séparer de Port Royal," as is proved by his dialectic at times pitiless, subtle, relentless (especially in demolishing almost with satisfaction the claims of reason), the excessive and disproportionate place that he, in the economy of Christian theology, assigns to original sin (v.), and, lastly, that sense of gloom and bleakness that is encountered in certain episodes of his life and in some of his fragments. But this is the occasional, superficial and fleeting P.
c) For P. man discovers himself before God revealed by Christ. This is the central theme of the great design of the new "Apology for 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 that P. kept in mind. 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 to him the essential attitudes of the "libertine": Epictetus (pride) and Montaigne (indifference); certain apologetic treatises and works from which he could glean; the Theologia naturalis of Raymond of Sabunde 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, is from 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 P. Faced with the problem whether to publish the fragments as the author had left them, and to group, select and integrate them, the "committee" thought it appropriate to choose the "clearest and most complete" fragments, to give them a systematic order, to group them according to subject and to make corrections and cuts in them. The edition of 1669 served as the basis for the subsequent ones, until V. Cousin pointed out the need to prepare a less defective one. In 1844 the first complete edition of the Pensées was published, edited by P. Faugère, followed by others down to that of Brunschvicg (1897), and to the subsequent, also important, ones of Strowski (1930) and Tourneur (1938).
To "persuade" the atheist, P. chooses the psychological path, whose method is not the esprit de géometrie but the esprit de finesse, which must take account of the individual and adapt itself to him; hence to know man in the most secret movements of his heart, in the contrarieties of his nature, and to 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 subjectivistic and fideistic. Quite the contrary: 1) it is always a rational act by which reason recognizes its limits and that there is an order of truth that surpasses it, unless one wishes to call the pride of reason rationality. P. is ready to say: if it exalts itself I abase it; if it abases itself I exalt it, against the two opposing abstractions of rational dogmatism and of skepticism (v.). What is above reason is not at all against reason. Pascal's critique of the "amiable reason that the wind moves and in all directions" is meant 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: by raison, by coutume, by inspiration. P. gives the primacy to the latter, 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. Therefore: coeur and raison: the so-called "fideism" of P. is an exaggeration of some of his interpreters. Even the famous wager (Pensées, ed. cited in bibl., 233) is rational and not pragmatistic. The whole man leads to religion.
Hence the limits and the merit of Pascal's apologetics: the merit of being intrinsic as a method (provided the two orders of the natural and the supernatural are kept clearly distinct) and the limits of being psychological, even if Pascal's psychology succeeds in attaining metaphysical depths. The historical importance of this apologetics is also immense: at a decisive moment in the history of human thought, when faith and reason, Christianity and science no longer formed that unity which characterizes the best of the Middle Ages and were at times in open conflict, P., the contemporary of Descartes, was the first to see the problem and to confront it, bringing into it the most vital demands of modern thought and demonstrating how they can be satisfied by that tradition and that religion against which reason was rebelling. The incomplete and fragmentary apology remains the first and grandiose protest of a modern man whom the new science has made advance with great strides, against that modernity which, after having separated man from God and then set him against Him, ended by putting man in the place of God. P. places man before the Cross of Christ. The God made man, the Mediator, is his whole Christianity: without Christ nothing is explained, neither science nor geometry, neither nature nor man. And P.'s is the Christ persecuted, mocked, condemned, scourged and crucified, who inspired in him the immortal pages of the Mistero di Gesù.
Here lies all the peculiarity of Pascal's Christianity and here its limits: Adam and Christ; Adam who offends God and falls and with him man falls; Christ who takes upon himself sin and dies for man's redemption. 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 who is providence, is overshadowed (almost forgotten) by God the Son, who suffers and is crucified by men. Nevertheless the Pensées, an incomplete and fragmentary apology, for their incisive eloquence, for the profound pathos that animates them, for the truths they contain, are perhaps, from the 17th century onward, one of the most effective apologies of Christianity.