PASCAL, BLAISE (1623–1662)

PASCAL, BLAISE (1623–1662), French mathematician, scientist, religious polemicist, and apologist. Pascal was born in Clermont-en-Auvergne, where his mother died when he was three. He was educated with his two sisters by his father, and the family moved to Paris in 1631. Finding that the young Blaise had worked out the principles of geometry up to Euclid's thirty-second proposition, his father took him to the mathematical academy recently founded in Paris by Marin Mersenne. Influenced by the encounters he made there, Pascal published his first mathematical paper, the Essai sur les coniques (Essay on conic sections) in 1640. In this year, Pascal's father was appointed royal tax commissioner for Normandy, and the family established itself in Rouen. Looking to help his father with his accounting, Pascal invented the calculating machine two years later.

Following an accident in Rouen, Pascal's father was treated by two members of the Jansenist religious movement (which followed the theologian Cornelius Jansen in teaching a strict Augustinianism), and the entire family was influenced by Jansenist ideas about grace and piety. Pascal nonetheless turned, following a period of ill health during which he returned to Paris with his sister Jacqueline, to the "worldly" entertainments provided by fashionable Parisian society. His father died in 1651, and when Jacqueline subsequently became a nun at the Jansenist convent Port-Royal, Pascal opposed such commitment vigorously. It was not until the night of 23 November 1654 that he underwent a profound spiritual experience, coming to the absolute conviction that God had been revealed to him.

After this nuit de feu ('night of fire'), Pascal undertook a retreat at Port-Royal-des-Champs, where he met Isaac Le Maistre de Saci (an account of their conversations was published posthumously in 1728 and is important for the insights it gives into Pascal's reading of the secular authors Montaigne and Epictetus). At this time, attacks on Jansenism were becoming increasingly frequent, with rival Jesuit theologians closely allied with the monarchy of Louis XIV. Antoine Arnauld was on the point of being condemned by the Sorbonne for his ongoing defense of Jansen's Augustinus. Certain other Jansenists (among them the philosopher Pierre Nicole) solicited Pascal's help; known only for his mathematical gifts, he was much less likely than they to be identified as the author of an attack on the Jesuits. Between January 1656 and March 1657 Pascal composed eighteen Lettres provinciales (Provincial letters), which launched a vicious offensive against Jesuit morality. The first ten letters constitute a dialogue between a naïve enquirer (presented as the writer of the letters), a friendly Jansenist, and some Jesuit priests. Through Pascal's diffusely ironic manipulation of these different personae, the Jesuits come across as absurd figures clinging to doctrine that is theologically unsound, especially on the subject of grace. In letters eleven through eighteen, all pretense of an exchange is dropped, and Pascal's speaker responds directly to the counterpolemic precipitated by the first ten letters. The last two letters are targeted specifically at Louis XIV's confessor, the Jesuit François Annat. Official reaction to the letters was uncompromising (they were placed on the Catholic Church's Index of Prohibited Books in 1657), but general readers, unused to having complex theological debate laid out with such immediacy, were delighted and admiring.

Pascal reopened the main topic of the letters in four Écrits sur la grâce (Writings on grace) composed around 1658. During the same period, he gave an account to his friends at Port-Royal of a planned apology for the Christian religion. The fragments he jotted down, cut up, and arranged in bundles in preparation for this work, which he did not live to complete, are known as the Pensées (first edited and published in 1670). They are imbued with the Augustinian belief that the only way we can account for the dramatic contradictions found in human beings, who are wretched, yet capable of self-awareness, is through the doctrine of the Fall—once embodiments of divine perfection, humans distanced themselves from God at the moment of original sin. In the famous Fragment 199, "Disproportion of Man," which exploits the new science of the microscope and the telescope, humanity is depicted as lost between the infinitely large and infinitely small. Divertissement ('diversion') is any activity humanity turns to so as not to have to confront this metaphysical plight. The human faculty of reason can be useful (as evinced in the wager argument: we can deduce that we have nothing to lose by betting on the existence of God), but should accompany an awareness of its own limitations. Most important, these limitations can themselves be instructive, pointing to the need for faith. Pascal was fascinated by, rather than condemnatory toward, his fellow human beings and continually projected his own authorial voice into their different positions on the spectrum of belief. Having dedicated himself, from the moment of his conversion, to the advocacy of Christian ideas, he died at the home of his sister Gilberte on 19 August 1662.

See also Jansenism ; Jesuits ; Mathematics ; Mersenne, Marin ; Philosophy .

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Sources

Pascal, Blaise. Pensées. Translated and with an introduction by A. J. Krailsheimer. Rev. ed. Harmondsworth, U.K., 1995.

——. Provincial Letters. Translated by A. J. Krailsheimer. Harmondsworth, U.K., 1967.

Secondary Sources

Hammond, Nicholas. Playing with Truth: Language and the Human Condition in Pascal's Pensées. Oxford, 1994. Account of how the instability of the human condition manifests itself on the level of the language used in the Pensées.

Parish, Richard. Pascal's Lettres provinciales: A Study in Polemic. Oxford, 1989. Best available study of the themes and tactics employed in the Provincial Letters.

Sellier, Philippe. Pascal et saint Augustin. Paris, 1995. Invaluable and comprehensive account of Pascal's reading of St. Augustine.

Emma Gilby