Pascal’s thoughts: Beyond the wager
Pascal is probably best known to you for his famous ‘wager’, but his interests were far broader than that. Steve McCarthy examines his influence
Blaise Pascal was a mathematician, scientist and inventor. He also made significant contributions to the philosophy of religion. His observations on religious issues are largely contained in the series of notes that constitute the volume known as Pensées, which translates simply as ‘thoughts’. Today we might characterise these penetrating musings as the fruits of introspective, psychological explorations.
Context
Their significance is best appreciated with a grasp of their context, both temporal and in relation to Pascal’s broader achievements. He was born on 19 June 1623, 10 years before Galileo (1564– 1642) was condemned by the Inquisition for heresy. This verdict signalled a movement of creative, empirical thought northward, away from Italy. Its focus became the already liberal, cosmopolitan, intellectual hotbed that was Paris. Pascal’s father moved his young family to Paris in 1633, the same year as Galileo’s condemnation.
René Descartes (1595–1650) was a prominent scholarly presence in French intellectual circles at the time. He was a rationalist, looked upon by many as the leading exponent of the new mechanistic approach to the universe. Descartes’ formulation of Cartesian methodology was to be hugely influential over succeeding generations of empirical enquirers, and continues to be so.
Galileo’s cosmological assertions and Descartes’ Cartesian methodology are now considered two of the cornerstones in the development and validation of the secular worldview. In the mid seventeenth century the implications of the new science for faith were beginning to be fully appreciated, especially in Paris.
Pascal the prodigy
Blaise Pascal’s father educated his son in a way that encouraged him to exploit his prodigious intellectual gifts. Pascal published a book on the conic sections in algebra when he was 17. Subsequently his reputation grew rapidly, leading him to correspond with prominent people like Christopher Wren and Queen Christina of Sweden. His stock was particularly high in the intellectual saloons of the French capital city, where there was great enthusiasm for the new learning. At one such gathering Pascal encountered Descartes, to whom he subsequently wrote sporadically.
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His precocious early achievements in mathematics were rapidly followed by developments in both the pure and applied usages of empirical methodology. He wrote a spirited defence of scientific methodology and used it to make a series of departures that are still significant. For instance, he made discoveries about the relationship between air pressure and altitude, which are the basis of modern altimeters. Modern computers are also descendants of his calculating machines —a proto-computer that he made in 1652 still works.
As well as being a gifted exponent of pure mathematics and abstract physics, Pascal demonstrated the practical abilities of an inventor. Like the calculators, his inventions in the sphere of public transport have been of lasting importance. A Parisian bus still runs along the route that he demarcated, from the Bastille to the Luxembourg Gardens. This was the first coach route of its type in the world, for the use of the general public.
Religious inf luences
Thus Pascal was no stranger to empirical observation in general and scientific methodology in particular, nor did he fail to appreciate their power and potential. However, he viewed Descartes’ validation of the existence of God solely in terms of natural theology as reductionistic. For him, Descartes was merely depicting a sort of ‘God of the Gaps’, filling in the limited space available before contemporary science could take over and provide answers.
Pascal’s mother had died when he was very young and from 1646 the remaining family all became closely associated with a religious movement based in a convent at Port-Royal. This movement, led by Jean Giullebert, was a splinter group from the Catholic sect known as Jansenism. A form of Augustinism, the movement stressed the corruption inherent in ordinary worldly existence and the need to break with it.
Pascal’s sister Jacqueline seems to have had something akin to a conversion experience. She wished to join the convent. However, Blaise and his father rejected the idea, perhaps influenced by the scale of the dowry. In 1651 his father died and the following year Jacqueline entered the convent. Blaise Pascal is known to have been deeply influenced by the teachings at Port-Royal. He was distressed by this strife within his family and feared abandonment.
Despite his public prominence, Pascal was a tormented character in private, claiming that sickness is a natural state for Christians. He wrote that human existence is plagued by vanity, being actually typified by inconstancy, boredom and anxiety. He felt that participation in contemporary scientific departures helped stave off boredom — but it also eroded a traditional sense of place in the world.
ADVANCES IN THE DESIGN OF TELESCOPES GREATLY ASSISTED THE ADVANCES IN ASTRONOMY MADE BY GALILEO AND OTHERS.
Creation and human nature
He appreciated that contemporary departures in optics were opening up the sheer scope of creation, both macrocosmically and microcosmically, on a previously unprecedented scale. Advances in the design of telescopes greatly assisted the advances in astronomy made by Galileo and others. Similar strides forward in the design of microscopes were opening up an understanding of the structures of the microscopic. Indeed, Robert Hooke’s Micrographia — published in 1665, 3 years after Pascal’s death — was so popular in London that it was an immediate sell-out.
However, the awesome scale of these realisations about the sheer size and complexity of creation provoked a sense of dread in Pascal. He also began to appreciate how little we actually know and understand about our place in the totality of things, though he valued the human capacity for knowledge and appreciation. He said ‘man is only a reed, but at least he is a thinking reed’.
Seemingly paradoxically, Pascal held that people’s greatness comes from knowing that they are inconsequential and wretched. Indeed, at its heart his analysis emphasised the paradoxical nature of human existence, between:
■ infinity and nothingness
■ faith and reason
■ soul and matter
■ death and life
■ meaning and vanity
In Pascal’s thought, people’s increasing exile from past securities coalesced with his sense of the contradictions of human nature. In turn he coupled this with his religious understanding of the loss of paradise, sin and the need for salvation. He planned a book on these themes, but only the notes for it survive. They constitute Pensées. In it the paradoxes of existence are reconciled by humility, grace and the acknowledgement of ignorance.
Pascal and God
Privately Pascal was not seeking a metaphysical demiurge like Descartes’, that conformed to the dictates of enlightenment, rationalist, materialist philosophy. Nor was he seeking the reasonable deity of medieval natural theology.
DO WE BET ON THE PROPOSITION THAT GOD EXISTS, OR DO WE BET ON THE DIALECTICALLY OPPOSITE PROPOSAL?
He argued that the Christian God is not a deity that simply underpins theories or equations. Rather the divine is some thing that ‘fills the souls and hearts of those that He possesses’; making them conscious of his infinite mercy and their comparative wretchedness. A fully realised person is incapable of pursuing any end other than that of the divine. For Pascal it is not reason, but the heart that craves God. So it is the heart that perceives God, not the reason. He famously asserted that, ‘the heart has its reasons, of which the reason knows nothing’.
Personal epiphany
At the age of 30 Pascal was effectively alone and living in a house in Paris, which is still standing. His personal journey reached its peak late on the night of Monday 23 November 1654, between 10.30 p.m. and 12.30 a.m. He had a sort of personal epiphany of the type that is often described as a religious experience. He recorded what transpired to him in fragmentary, poetic phrases:
■ He begins stridently with the word ‘fire’ and then calls upon the Old Testament Patriarchs.
■ Subsequently he discounts the significance of the thinking of scientists and philosophers.
■ Then came the repetition of ‘certainty’, followed by words such as ‘joy’ and ‘peace’.
■ This is succeeded by exaltations to Christ, the confirmation that Jesus is his God.
■ Next comes the suggestion that the Messiah should be universally embraced as such and recognised throughout creation. Again Pascal confirms that in this experience he has come ‘to know God’.
■ He concludes with ‘joy, joy, tears of joy’.
He inscribed this disjointed account onto a piece of parchment, which was found sewn into his clothing when he died.
The noetic element of experience gave confirmation to the teachings of Port-Royal. He now saw them as a rational extension of his own previous conjectures about faith. In turn this reconciled Pascal to his sister’s commitment to the Order. The experience also confirmed his mature belief that God is hidden from those who are acclaimed for their wisdom. He realised that people’s paradoxical natures (characterised by both intellectual potential and wretchedness), is met by a divine paradox. This entails both the omnipotence of divine glory and the weakness of Christ. Paradoxically Pascal finds God’s hidden glory most profoundly revealed in the wretchedness of Christ’s passion.
Pascal’s wager
In the philosophy of religion, Pascal is best remembered for the proposal known as Pascal’s wager. Put simply, this focuses on the fundamental question of whether God exists, or not. He proposes that neither science nor reason can afford us with an adequate solution to that fundamental quandary. Thus he concludes that we all find ourselves in the position of gamblers. Do we bet on the proposition that God exists, or do we bet on the dialectically opposite proposal?
■ If we bet for the proposition that God exists and this proves correct, then we will gain enormous rewards in heaven. If we opt for this proposition and it proves erroneous, we lose little or nothing as a result.
■ If we opt to believe that God does not exist and this proves correct, there is no long-term benefit, for there is no hereafter. However, if we choose this option and it proves wrong, then we will suffer eternally.
Thus it would make sense for the canny gambler to take the former option, to wager on the existence of God and to adopt the corresponding mode of life.
More than a wager
This is an argument for the rationality of theistic belief, assuming that no satisfactory additional evidence is available. Pascal’s wager forms a neat, self-contained adjunct to the arguments of natural theology. However, the passage called ‘The Wager’ occupies a mere 6 pages of Pensées, from a total of around 350 pages. There is much more to Pascal’s thinking on faith than this worthwhile, but somewhat glib, formulation — a sort of adjunct to the perennial Ontological Argument. It should be emphasised that ‘wagering’ on theistic belief also entails adopting the appropriate mode of life, long-term.
The contents of Pensées, while fragmentary and sometimes aphoristic, are surprisingly wide ranging. In the expanded version there are several passages exploring the Old Testament, the Patriarchs, the nature of Judaism and even whether Christianity and Judaism are, at root, the same faith. Coincidentally, Pascal lived at the same time as another great Enlightenment figure, this time of Jewish extraction, best known as Spinoza (1632–77). Other sections of Pensées focus on introspective psychological enquiry and yet others on ethics.
Morality and personal experience
Elsewhere (in Lettres Provinciales, 1656) Pascal was strident in his criticisms of the absurdities generated by the extremes of casuistry. This is an early critique of this mechanistic application of the Doctrine of Natural Moral Law from within the Roman Catholic tradition. Casuistry was the approach to moral evaluation then favoured by the Jesuits — the adversaries of the Jansenists. Pascal’s attack is also illustrative of the fact that, by this stage in the Counter Reformation, criticism of casuistry did not come solely from the Protestant tradition. Though he was a stickler for mathematical and scientific accuracy, Pascal was not impressed by this sort of ‘nit-picking’ religious scholasticism.
The significance of the pivotal experience on the night of 23 November, coupled with the manner of its description, is reminiscent of the fiery teachings of some of the early church fathers and Christian mystics such as Saint Teresa of Ávila. Indeed, when considering this dimension of Pascal’s life and writings, one is often reminded of eastern, non-Christian religious traditions that stress the significance of the experiential. Similarly, cross-cultural echoes are set up by the manner in which he revels in paradoxical character of existence.
Lines of transmission
Much of what we have explored in this article emphasises the importance of personal experience and the appreciation of paradox to the foundations of faith. There is a strong strain of fideism running through Pascal’s religious thinking, which is highly unusual in the early Enlightenment. It is also reminiscent of the thought of Søren Kierkegaard, 200 years before the great Dane put pen to paper (there is an account of his theology in RELIGIOUS STUDIES REVIEW, Vol. 10, No. 1, pp.26–29). We could also chart a line of transmission from Pensées through this seminal nineteenth-century figure and others like Rudolf Otto, to dialectical theology, situation ethics and The Sea of Faith Network, and an alternative line into secular existentialism and even to Wittgenstein.
However, despite this breadth of intellectual context, Pascal’s thoughts on religious issues have only come down to us in the form of notes and letters, unprepared for publication, although he is known to have planned a comprehensive defence of faith. Its would-be author died at the tender age of 39 in August 1662. He was dogged by ill health throughout his adult life, and the autopsy report on Pascal suggests that he was suffering simultaneously from tuberculosis, stomach cancer and a brain lesion. We can only ruminate on what he might have composed if his life had not been cut short.
His fragmentary and idiosyncratic thoughts on faith continue to have a wide influence outside of academia. This article has been inspired by paintings from the young, British street artist Aboluv. Influenced by Pascal’s thoughts, his work includes a piece entitled Pascal’s Wager.