Blaise Pascal

Blaise Pascal (June 19, 1623–August 19,1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, and religious philosopher. Pascal was a child prodigy, who was educated by his father. Pascal's earliest work was in the natural and applied sciences, where he made important contributions to the construction of mechanical calculators and the study of fluids, and clarified the concepts of pressure and vacuum by expanding the work of Evangelista Torricelli. Pascal also wrote powerfully in defence of the scientific method.

Mature life, religion, philosophy, and literature

Religious conversion

Biographically, we can say that two basic influences led him to his conversion: sickness and Jansenism. As early as his eighteenth year he suffered from a nervous ailment that left him hardly a day without pain. In 1647 a paralytic attack so disabled him that he could not move without crutches. His head ached, his bowels burned, his legs and feet were continually cold, and required wearisome aids to circulation of the blood; he wore stockings steeped in brandy to warm his feet. Partly to get better medical treatment, he moved with Jacqueline to Paris. His health improved, but his nervous system had been permanently damaged. Henceforth he was subject to deepening hypochondria, which affected his character and his philosophy. He became irritable, subject to fits of proud and imperious anger, and he seldom smiled. {{ref|sickness}}

Related Topics:
Jansenism - 1647 - Hypochondria

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In 1646, Pascal's father was wounded in the thigh and was consequently looked after by a Jansenist physician. Blaise spoke with the doctor frequently, and upon his successful treatment of Étienne, borrowed works by Jansenist authors through him. In this period, Pascal experienced a sort of "first conversion" and began in the course of the following year to write on theological subjects.

Related Topics:
1646 - Jansenist

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Pascal fell away from this initial religious engagement and experienced a few years of what he called a "worldly period" (1648–54). His father died in 1651, and Pascal gained control over both his inheritance and that of his sister Jacqueline. In the same year Jacqueline moved to become a nun at Port-Royal, despite her brother's opposition. When the time came for her to make her ultimate vows, he refused to return to her enough of her inheritance to pay her dowry as a bride of Christ; without money she would attain a less desirable position in the convent hierarchy. Eventually, however, he relented on this point. {{ref|M93}}

Related Topics:
1651 - Port-Royal

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When this was settled, Blaise found himself both rich and free. He took a sumptuously furnished home, staffed it with many servants, and drove about Paris in a coach behind four or six horses. His leisure was spent in the company of wits, women, and gamblers (as evidenced by his work on probability). For an exciting while he pursued in Auvergne a lady of beauty and learning, whom he referred to as the "Sappho of the countryside." {{ref|Sappho}} About this time he wrote a Discours sur les passions de l'amour, and apparently he contemplated marriage—which he was later to describe as "the lowest of the conditions of life permitted to a Christian." {{ref|marriage}}

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His sister Jacqueline reproached him for his frivolity and prayed for his reform. During visits to his sister at Port-Royal in 1654, he displayed contempt for affairs of the world but was not drawn to God. {{ref|EP52}} Until...

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Upon brink of death

In late 1654 he was involved in an accident at the Neuilly bridge where the horses plunged over the parapet and the carriage nearly followed them. Fortunately, the reins broke and the coach hung half over the edge. Pascal and his friends emerged, but the sensitive philosopher, terrified by the nearness of death, fainted away, and remained unconscious for some time. Upon recovering fifteen days later, on November 23, 1654, between ten thirty and twelve thirty at night, Pascal had an intense religious vision and immediately recorded the experience in a brief note to himself, which began: "Fire. God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of the philosophers and the scholars…" and concluded by quoting Psalms 119:16: "I will not forget thy word. Amen." He seems carefully to have sewn this document into his coat and always transferred it when he changed clothes; a servant discovered it only by chance after his death.{{ref|OC618}} During his lifetime, Pascal was often mistakenly thought to be a libertine, and was later dismissed as an individual who had only a deathbed conversion.

Related Topics:
Neuilly - November 23 - 1654 - Psalms - Libertine

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His belief and religious commitment revitalized, Pascal visited the older of two convents at Port-Royal for a two-week retreat in January 1655. For the next four years, he regularly traveled between Port-Royal and Paris. It was at this point immediately after his conversion when he began writing his first major literary work on religion, the Provincial Letters.

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The Provincial Letters

Beginning in 1656, Pascal published his memorable attack on casuistry, a popular ethical method used by Catholic thinkers in the early modern period (especially the Jesuits). Pascal denounced casuistry as the mere use of complex reasoning to justify moral laxity. His method of framing his arguments was clever: the Provincial Letters pretended to be the report of a Parisian to a friend in the provinces on the moral and theological issues then exciting the intellectual and religious circles in the capital. Pascal, combining the fervor of a convert with the wit and polish of a man of the world, reached a new level of style in French prose. The 18-letter series was published between 1656 and 1657 under the pseudonym Louis de Montalte and incensed Louis XIV, who ordered in 1660 that the book be shredded and burnt. In 1661, the Jansenist school at Port-Royal was condemned and closed down; those involved in it had to sign a 1656 papal bull condemning the teachings of Jansen as heretical. The final letter defied the Pope himself, provoking Alexander VII to condemn the letters (September 6, 1657). But that didn't stop all of educated France from reading them. Even Pope Alexander, while publicly opposing them, nonetheless was persuaded by Pascal's arguments. He condemned "laxism" in the church and ordered a revision of casuistical texts just a few years later (1665–66).

Related Topics:
Casuistry - Ethical - Catholic - Jesuits - Louis XIV - 1660 - 1661 - Papal bull - Alexander VII

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Aside from their religious influence, the Lettres provinciales were popular as a literary work. Pascal's use of humor, mockery, and vicious satire in his arguments made the letters ripe for public consumption, and influenced the prose of later French writers like Voltaire and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The first few letters promote major principles of Jansenist teaching, for instance the dogmas of "proximate power" (Letter I) and "sufficient grace" (Letter II), and explain why they are not heretical. The later letters find Pascal more on the defensive—pressure on the Port Royal Jansenists to renounce their teachings was constantly growing through this time—and contain the assault on casuistry. Letter XIV contains the unique apology, "I would have written a shorter letter, but I did not have the time."

Related Topics:
Satire - Voltaire - Jean-Jacques Rousseau - Jansenist

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Wide praise has been given to the Provincial Letters. Voltaire called the Letters "the best-written book that has yet appeared in France."{{ref|VoltaireLetters}} And when Bossuet was asked what book he would rather have written had he not written his own, he answered, the Provincial Letters of Pascal.{{ref|BossuetLetters}}

Related Topics:
Voltaire - Bossuet

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Miracle

When Pascal was back in Paris just after overseeing the publication of the last Letter, his religion was reinforced by the close association to an apparent miracle in the chapel of the Port-Royal nunnery. His 10-year-old niece, Marguerite Périer, was suffering from a painful fistula lacrymalis that exuded noisome pus through her eyes and nose—an affliction the doctors pronounced hopeless. Then on March 24, 1657, a believer had presented to Port-Royal what he and others claimed to be a thorn from the crown that had tortured Christ. The nuns, in solemn ceremony and singing psalms, placed the thorn on their altar. Each in turn kissed the relic, and one of them, seeing Marguerite among the worshipers, took the thorn and with it touched the girl's sore. That evening, we are told, Marguerite expressed surprise that her eye no longer pained her; her mother was astonished to find no sign of the fistula; a physician, summoned, reported that the discharge and swelling had disappeared. He, not the nuns, spread word of what he termed a miraculous cure. Seven other physicians who had had previous knowledge of Marguerite's fistula subscribed a statement that in their judgment a miracle had taken place. The diocesan officials investigated, came to the same conclusion, and authorized a Te Deum Mass in Port-Royal. Crowds of believers came to see and kiss the thorn; all Catholic Paris acclaimed a miracle. Later both Jansenists and Catholics used this well-documented miracle to their defense. In 1728, Pope Benedict XIII referred to the case as proving that the age of miracles had not passed.

Related Topics:
Fistula - March 24 - 1657 - 1728 - Pope Benedict XIII

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Pascal made himself an armorial emblem of an eye surrounded by a crown of thorns, with the inscription Scio cui credidi—"I know whom I have believed." {{ref|ThornMiracle}} His beliefs renewed, he set his mind to write his final, and alas, unfinished testament, the Pensées.

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The Pensées

Unfortunately, Pascal couldn't finish his most influential theological work, the Pensées, before his death. It was to have been a sustained and coherent examination of and defense of the Christian faith, with the original title Apologie de la religion Chrétienne ("Apology of the Christian Religion"). What was found upon sifting through his personal items after his death were numerous scraps of paper with isolated thoughts, grouped in a tentative, but telling, order. The first version of the detached notes appeared in print as a book in 1670 titled Pensées de M. Pascal sur la réligion, et sur quelques autres sujets ("Thoughts of M. Pascal on religion, and on other subjects") and soon thereafter became a classic. Because his friends and the scholars at Port-Royal were concerned that these fragmentary "thoughts" might lead to skepticism rather than to piety, they concealed the skeptical pieces and modified some of the rest, lest King or Church should take offense{{ref|peity}} for at that time the persecution of Port-Royal had ceased, and the editors were not interested in a renewal of controversy. Not until the nineteenth century were the Pensées published in their full and authentic text.

Related Topics:
Christian faith - 1670

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Pascal's Pensées sits among the most profound and beautifully written masterpieces in the history of the world. When commenting on one particular section, Sainte-Beuve praised it as the finest pages in the French language.{{ref|finest}} Will Durant, in his 11-volume, comprehensive The Story of Civilization series, hailed it as "the most eloquent book in French prose."{{ref|eloquent}} In Pensées, Pascal surveys several philosophical paradoxes: infinity and nothing, faith and reason, soul and matter, death and life, meaning and vanity—seemingly arriving at no definitive conclusions besides humility, ignorance, and grace. Rolling these into one he develops Pascal's Wager.

Related Topics:
Sainte-Beuve - Will Durant - The Story of Civilization - Pascal's Wager

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Last works and death

T.S. Eliot described him during this phase of his life as "a man of the world among ascetics, and an ascetic among men of the world." Pascal's ascetic lifestyle derived from a belief that it was natural and necessary for man to suffer. In his last years of bad health, he frequently tried to reject the ministrations of his doctors, saying, "Sickness is the natural state of Christians." {{ref|M104-}}

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In 1659 Pascal, whose health had never been good, fell seriously ill. An autopsy performed after his death revealed grave problems with his stomach and other organs of his abdomen, along with damage to his brain. Despite the autopsy, the cause of his continual poor health was never precisely determined, though speculation focuses on tuberculosis, stomach cancer, or a combination of the two.{{ref|M103}} The headaches which afflicted Pascal are generally attributed to his brain lesion.

Related Topics:
1659 - Autopsy - Brain - Tuberculosis - Cancer

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Louis XIV suppressed the Jansenist movement at Port-Royal in 1661. In response, Pascal wrote one of his final works, Écrit sur la signature du formulaire, exhorting the Jansenists not to give in. Later that year, his sister Jacqueline died, which convinced Pascal to cease his polemics on Jansenism. Pascal's last major achievement, returning to his mechanical genius, was inaugurating perhaps the first bus line, moving passengers within Paris in a carriage with many seats.

Related Topics:
1661 - Bus

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In 1662, Pascal's illness became more violent. Aware that he had little chance to survive, he sought a move to the hospital for incurable diseases, but his doctors declared that he was too unstable to be carried. In Paris on August 18, 1662, Pascal went into convulsions and received extreme unction. He died the next morning, his last words being "May God never abandon me," and was buried in the cemetery of Saint-Étienne-du-Mont.{{ref|M104}}

Related Topics:
1662 - Paris - August 18 - Extreme unction

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