Pierre Manent: Challenging Modern Atheism and Indifference: Pascal’s Defense of the Christian Proposition. Paul Seaton translation. Introduction by Daniel J. Mahoney. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2025.

Blaise Pascal: Pensées. A. J. Krailsheimer translation. New York: Penguin Books, 1996.

 

“Montaigne’s faults are great,” Pascal writes. “Lewd words” from a man so credulous as to believe the most implausible travelers’ tales yet so skeptical as to inspire “indifference regarding salvation,” with “his completely pagan views on death” whereby he thinks only of dying a death of cowardly ease” (#680). He regards each individual man as possessing a self or “master form” which can never be reformed. The convert to Christianity, the penitent, “claims,” as Manent characterizes the argument, “to be inwardly afflicted and to punish himself for not having attained a perfection he cannot attain,” but “he cannot sincerely desire” to attain it. Better simply to admit we are merely human and leave it at that. Rousseau replies that Montaigne’s candor is false and that he, Rousseau, offers the only sincere confession. Human beings are naturally good, corrupted by society. Pascal regards Montaigne as bound up in self-love; had he lived long enough to read Rousseau, he would have regarded him as equally so bound. “The bias towards self is the beginning of all disorder, in war, politics, economics, in man’s individual body”; and this is a bias, the product of a will that is “depraved” (#421). “While Pascal points everyone, and first of all himself, toward repentance, Rousseau directs his accusation against the gaze of others.” For Montaigne, man is made miserable by religion, particularly the Christian religion; for Rousseau, he is made miserable by his life in civil society under the gaze of other men.

Pascal admits that no one can escape the self. “We want to be loved, we want to be esteemed, we want to be the object of the attention of other human beings, and we cannot not want this.” We put on a show. In saying this, Pascal “does not accuse us.” “He simply wants to help us to become aware of the strangeness of a state that lies beneath all our actions or dispositions, good as well as bad, and that consists in a hatred of the truth about ourselves,” assiduous about exactly how much of this despicable truth we reveal to the world. “What is also strange” is that even “philosophers, historians, rhetoricians, and poets of Greece and Rome,” otherwise so morally perceptive, “did not discern clearly, how to articulate this fundamental characteristic of the human condition.” Pascal emphasizes the condition of human beings more than their nature cause human nature has been corrupted: “Man does not act according to the reason which constitutes his nature” (#491). They understood vice but they did not understand sin. They could describe the ‘parts’ of the soul, the actions of ensouled human bodies; they could not conceive of self-centeredness in contrast with God-centeredness. “No religion except our own has taught that man is born sinful, no philosophical sect has said so, so none has told the truth” (#421). Yet self-love “is absolutely universal”; as a description of human beings, it has what our contemporaries call impressive ‘explanatory power.’ We do not know the origin of original sin; Pascal does not offer an explanation of this master explanation, as Rousseau does. Famously, “the heart has its reason of which reason knows nothing” (#423). “It is the heart which perceives God and not the reason,” and it is God who tells us that we are sinful (#423). Knowing the origin of our sin, the reason Eve was beguiled by the Serpent, the reason Adam consumed her proffered, fatal snack, both disobeying God’s command, would “not help us to escape” its consequences. “All that it is important for us to know is that we are wretched, corrupt, separated from God but redeemed by Christ.” (#431). As an eminent mathematician, Pascal scarcely intends to tell his readers to abandon reason but rather to exercise it within the Christian framework. “Submission and use of reason: that is what makes true Christianity” (#163). And famously, “Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed” (#200). [1]

For Rousseau, by contrast, the folly of self-love “comes from a series of accidents and circumstances, from a history that degraded the love of self, a disposition that in itself has nothing evil, into self-love.” In anticipation, of Rousseau’s stance, Pascal exclaims, “Would to God…that we never needed [reason] and knew everything by instinct and feeling!” (#110). What history has caused, Rousseau imagines, human beings can correct. Self-love “must be seen as a superficial modality of our being, because it is something that has happened to love of self and that therefore does not belong essentially to our being.” Love of self is amoral, in and of itself; “it does not pertain to the will,” to moral choice. It is a mere passion, “a passion that is innocent as long as it does not motivate an unjust action toward other human beings, an unjust action that would call for the intervention of the will.” We don’t hate each other, by nature. We are indifferent to one another, except when the equally innocent passion of sexual desire drives us to mate. But for Pascal, for Christianity, “the human will is flexible between good and evil,” free to choose, but “at the same time” a “slave of a radically unjust disposition from which it cannot be healed or delivered except by grace.” It is the heart, the will, that perceives God. The one who rejects God “can oppose reason to faith at his ease, because it is by the heart, not reason, that God is perceived, but this appeal to reason is hardly relevant or conclusive, because the love of self that he has not rejected does not come from reason” either, “but from the heart,” and therefore cannot be “especially rational.” In Rousseau’s case, “in making the love of self the sole primitive passion of man, indifferent to good and evil, anterior to the will and to reason,” he “postulates a moral or spiritual quantity that is as impossible to measure as to regulate.” The link between natural love of self and political love of country, of one’s civil society, leads to ‘totalizing’ the civil society so constituted, to giving it no limits. While “for Rousseau the center of gravity is found in the individual who identifies himself imaginatively with the whole,” for Pascal “the center of gravity is in the body animated by the spirit of the body, which makes the members live.” That spirit is the breath of God, breathed into clay fashioned in the form of a human body. Far from indifferent, that life-giving spirit was good, until Man and Woman marred it, gulled by God’s Enemy. It now can only be reoriented by the intervention of the Holy Spirit, an intervention only made possible by the intervention of the Son, who took on the sins of Man and Woman—past, present, and future—in the supreme act of graciousness. Pascal aims to “dispel the illusion of which the love of self is the author, but also the result, the illusion of only depending on oneself, when in reality, because of a lack of strength and of justice, one has renounced seeking the body of which one is a member,” the body of Christ. “In order to control the love we owe to ourselves, we must imagine a body full of thinking members (for we are members of the whole) and see how each member ought to love itself” (#368). 

Rousseau “persuaded us that human reality and truth were found elsewhere than in the desires and choices of our will, a conviction that rendered the Christian proposition increasingly inaccessible to us.” Christian dogma, by contrast, “is proposed to the faith of the believer, not as an idea that it would be good to entertain in his mind or cherish in his heart, but as an imperative and urgent proposition”—objective, not subjective—that “the Christian is obliged in conscience to adhere to under penalty of excluding himself from the communion of believers.” The communion of believers has a regime of its own, with its King. “The way in which one defines the person of Jesus Christ is determinative for the meaning and content of the Christian life.” That is, the character of the ruler, rightly understood, the character of his ruling offices, the Church, the purpose of his rule, human salvation from otherwise irresistible sin, all generate a way of life, a set of actions in consonance with faithful thoughts. “Communication with God was broken through our fault and cannot be restored except by God himself.” 

And so, in response to Montaigne and (in advance) to Rousseau, Pascal finds a misery-making contradiction in “the nature of self-love and of this human self.” “It cannot prevent the object of its love from being full of faults and wretchedness: it wants to be great and sees that it is small; it wants to be happy and sees that it is wretched; it wants to be perfect and sees that it is full of imperfections; it wants to be the object of men’s love and esteem and sees that its faults deserve only their dislike and contempt.” To our fullness of faults, we attach the “still greater evil” of unwillingness “to recognize them,” our “deliberate self-delusion.” Indeed, “a prince can be the laughingstock of Europe and the only one to know nothing about it.” Man is “nothing but disguise, falsehood and hypocrisy, both in himself and with regard to others,” unwilling “to be told the truth” about himself or to confess the truth even to one man, the confessor-priest the Church has provided. (#978). The result is indeed a sort of analogue to Hobbes’s war of all against all: “open war between men, in which everyone is obliged to take sides, either with the dogmatists or the skeptics.” Scholars are not exempt; the academic is “the nastiest kind of man I know” (#432). The skeptics are right to say that “truth lies beyond our scope and is an unattainable quarry.” But that is because “it is no earthly denizen, but at home in heaven, lying in the lap of God, to be known only in so far as it pleases him to reveal it.” At the same time, “you cannot be a dogmatist without turning your back on reason. Nature confounds the sceptics and Platonists, and reason confounds the dogmatists.” You are “a paradox to yourself.” Therefore, “Be humble, impotent reason! Be silent, feeble nature!” (#131). Instead, “listen to God,” who tells you that “man in the state of his creation, or in the state of grace, is exalted above the whole of nature, made like unto God and sharing in his divinity,” while “in the state of corruption and sin he has fallen from that first state and has become like the beasts. These two propositions are equally firm and certain.” If you choose to return to God, good, because if you reject God’s grace you deserve to be “treated like the beasts of the field.” (#131). “It is quite certain that there is no good without the knowledge of God; that the closer one comes, the happier one is, and that ultimate happiness is to know him with certainty; that the further away one does, the more unhappy one is.” (#432).

Reason, thought governed by the principle of non-contradiction, “makes distinctions” and “brings together things or ideas that initially seemed quite distant.” “This double capacity feeds tendencies in the mind that can crystallize in doctrinal tendencies”; biologists who seek to classify organisms recognize that some of them are ‘splitters,’ some ‘lumpers.’ Some philosophers incline to analyze, some to synthesize. In egalitarian modernity, we want to ‘celebrate diversity’ while insisting that humankind is one, and not only with itself but with the animals, too, and even the cosmos. Pascal observes that our moralists, including our moral philosophers, encourage “impulses of pure greatness” along with “impulses of pure abasement” (#398). “It is Pascal’s conclusion that philosophy has not succeeded, and cannot succeed, in mastering the polarity characteristic of the human phenomenon,” which is “stronger than the reason of the strongest philosopher, who cannot do otherwise than allow himself to be drawn toward one pole or the other.” For example, while the Stoic Epictetus adjured his disciples to contemplate the memento mori, take on the duties of entertaining no base thoughts and desiring nothing to excess. This is well thought, but he went on to presume that by so doing human beings can perfect themselves. Lax Montaigne, a modern Epicurean, an Epicurean with a Machiavellian streak, denies that reason has the power to perfect human nature, but then falls back to commending complacency, the life of comfortable peace of mind. And there can be no synthesis of the two, as a Hegel might suppose: “each of the two cannot correct the error of the other except by ruining at the same time his part of the truth.” Philosophy “only revolves in a ‘circle.'” “Darting from one pole to the other in search of a median point, the philosopher remains incapable of giving an account of the phenomenon that prompts him to think.” His incapacity derives not from the incapacity of reason to rule the passions (with the assistance of spiritedness, Plato’s Socrates would stipulate) but because reason, as part of human nature, has itself been wounded, mortally wounded, by sin. “There must be impulses of abasement prompted not by nature but by penitence, not as a lasting state but as a stage towards greatness. There must be impulses of greatness, prompted not by merit but by grace, and after the stage of abasement has been passed.” (#398). Only God can reconcile human greatness and human misery, leading men from their misery back to their original greatness, ultimately by transforming them by His power, in accordance with His wisdom, both far beyond theirs. The only real synthesis of human greatness and human misery is “the union of wo natures in Christ” (#733). 

If I remain on the level of philosophy, taking the side of either Epictetus or Montaigne, of “a certain pride or a certain sloth,” I will become an ironist, one who looks down upon the boor benighted souls trapped in their human-all-too-human conventions. [1] And if I attempt to synthesize these opposites, “there comes a moment when, while sloth dissuades [me] from going further, pride persuades [me] that [I] have arrived at the point of repose and perspective where the human problem finds its resolution”—rather in imitation of Hegel. Pascal instead urges me indeed “to think constantly about death and what perhaps follows after it.” To this, there is a philosophic reply that differs from those of Epictetus and Montaigne, the reply of Socrates in the Phaedo. To fear death is to claim to know what one does not know, whereas I can know justice and do it. It would therefore be wrong for Socrates to evade capital punishment by a city whose laws have otherwise nurtured him and indeed allowed him to philosophize for so long. Manent suggests that Pascal would object on the grounds that God’s Bible, His revelation, has given us the way to know the truth about death. “The philosophy of the ancients does not seem to have seriously contemplated the possibility of a personal immortality,” a life after death that could be very good or very bad. “Christianity in an extraordinary way inflamed the concern for what comes after death,” Christ’s resurrection having “banished the Greeks’ Hades as well as the Sheol of the Jews.” Christianity holds out the possibility of “the divinization of the whole person by his participation in the divine life.” For his part, Pascal “wants to awaken a sleeper whom a power greater-than-human keeps asleep.” 

“All our dignity consists in thought. It is on thought that we must depend for our recovery…. Let us then strive to think well; that is the basic principle of morality.” (#200). The heavens and the earth God created “are not conscious of the happiness of their existence”; God “wanted to create beings who would realize it and compose a body of thinking members.” Reasoned recognition of the happiness of existence, its order, requires not only intelligence but “the good will to fall in with that of the universal soul.” As the only creatures into whom God breathed life, animated with some part of his own spirit, human’s “delight” and “their duty consists in consenting to the guidance of the whole soul to which they belong, which loves them better than they love themselves” (#360). After the entry of sin into those souls, Christ’s redeeming mission stipulated that Christianity, “which alone has reason” rightly directed, “does not admit as its true children those who believe without inspiration.” We “must open our mind to the proofs, confirm ourselves in it through habit, while offering ourselves through humiliations to inspiration, which alone produce the real and salutary effect.” (#808). None of these three steps may be omitted. “Proofs only convince the mind; habit provides the strongest proofs and those that are most believed. It inclines the automaton,” the machine of the body, which then “leads the mind unconsciously along with it” (#821). We must resort to habit once the mind has seen where the truth lies, in order to steep and stain ourselves in that belief which constantly eludes us, for it is too much trouble to have the proofs always present before us. By itself, “reason can be bent in any direction” (#820). We must acquire an easier belief, which is that of habit.” This is what “incline[s] my heart.” (#821). Reason, habit, humiliation: these constitute the way of life of the Church. Accordingly, “the history of the Church should properly be called the history of truth” (#776). 

And so, Pascal replies to the philosophers, “Let them at least learn what this religion is which they are attacking it before attacking it.” God “has appointed visible signs in the Church so that he shall be recognized by those who genuinely seek him,” if they do so “with all their heart.” “In order really to attack the truth they would have to protest that they had made every effort to seek it everywhere, even in what the Church offers by way of instruction.” They do not, and “such negligence in intolerable.” It is, after all, “our chief interest and chief duty…to seek enlightenment on this subject, on which all our conduct depends,” moreover “a matter where they themselves their eternity, their all are at stake.” (#427). But of course we prefer to distract ourselves. “I have often said that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room” (#136). We want to take our minds off what we think of when in solitude. “Gaming and feminine society, war and high office are so popular” not because “they really bring happiness” but because “the agitation” they afford us “takes our mind off” ourselves, our wretchedness. And men have “another secret instinct, left over from the greatness of our original nature, telling them that the only true happiness lies in rest and not in excitement” (#136). This is where Jesus comes in. “The truth had to appear so that man should stop living inside himself,” as the Stoics commended (#600). Truth and the happiness that accords with living within the truth, “is neither outside nor inside us; it is in God, both outside and inside us” (#407). If we know our nature in its sinfulness, if we attain natural self-knowledge, we will hate ourselves. But “he that is joined to the Lord is one spirit” and will love himself because he is among the “members of Christ.” “We love Christ because he is the body of which we are members,” just as the members of the physical body love it. In Christianity, “all are one.” “One is in the other like the three persons” of the Trinity. (#372).

But why Christ, not simply God the Father? Because there is “a long way…between loving God and knowing him” (#377). One may witness a miracle, but one cannot know God through the miracle. “True conversion consists in self-annihilation before the universal being whom we have so often vexed and who is perfectly entitled to destroy us at any moment in recognizing that we can do nothing without him and that we have deserved nothing but his disfavor. It consists in knowing that there is an irreconcilable opposition between God and us, and that without a mediator there can be no exchange.” (#378). “God and man have reciprocal duties” (#840). In Aristotelian terms, this means that their relationship is political, a relationship of ruling and being ruled in turn, a covenantal relationship. Among the human duties is loving “him alone and not transitory creatures, since “becom[ing] attached to creatures…prevents us from serving God” (#618). 

Such single-minded and single-hearted attachment is not for everyone. Although “the Christian proposition” is “obviously addressed to every human being,” not all “will have ears to hear.” Christianity not only commands humility: to some extent, it presupposes some degree of it. “Such a person does not know if God exists, but senses that, if he exists, communication with him has been broken” and that he lacks the capacity to reestablish it. “He measures that, from man to God, neither reason nor nature suffices to pave the way.” That is, “the truth about God, or in the relation to God, is inseparable from the truth about self, or in the relation to self.” As Pascal states it, “I condemn equally those who choose to praise man, those who choose to condemn him and those who choose to divert themselves, and I can only approve of those who seek truth with groans” (#405).

The Torah itself teaches this. More than once, God and His prophets describe the Israelites as a stiff-necked people, stubbornly refusing to listen to Word, to obey it. And in the eyes of Jews who accepted the Gospel, to say nothing of the Gentiles who did, the fact that most Jews “did not recognize Jesus as the Messiah for whom they waited,” relations declined, despite the fact that “Jews and Christians have the same God” and it “was in the Jewish people” that “a purely spiritual religion whose content was identical to what Christians proposed” first arose. “For Pascal, Judaism is already Christianity in its entirety”; “it is by regarding itself in the mirror of Judaism that Christianity acquires the most vivid and clearest awareness of what it is.” Christianity “recognizes itself ” in Judaism. “True Jews and true Christians have the same religion,” Pascal insists (#453); they “have always awaited a Messiah who would make them love God and by this love overcome their enemies” (#287). 

How so? “It is a matter of learning to read the Jewish scriptures,” of breaking the “cipher” discernible in them. A cipher is an image or a turn of phrase which “has two meanings.” “When we come upon an important letter whose meaning is clear, but where we are told that the meaning is veiled and obscure, that it is hidden or that seeing we shall not see and hearing we shall not hear, what else are we to think but that this is a cipher with a double meaning?” (#260). “The Jewish religion…was formed on the pattern of the Messianic truth, and the Messianic truth was recognized by the Jewish religion, which prefigured it” (#826). To prove this, “we need only see whether the prophecies of the one are fulfilled in the other” (#274). And so they are. “A good portrait can only be made by reconciling all our contradictory features, and it is not enough to follow through a series of mutually compatible qualities without reconciling their opposites; to understand an author’s meaning all contradictory passages must be reconciled”—a point Pascal intends to apply not only to the Bible but to his Pensées. (#257). A careful examination of the ‘Old’ Testament shows that Israel is a “figure” of the Church—a figure being “a portrait” in which “we see the thing represented” but, unlike ordinary portraits, it “precede[s] the thing painted in time.” In Jewish law, for example, there are two meanings of circumcision: the physical or “carnal” one and the spiritual one, the “circumcision of the heart.” God planned it that way. “To strengthen the hope of his chosen people in every age he showed them an image of all this, never leaving them without assurances of his power and will for their salvation, for in the creation of man Adam was witness to this and received the promise of a savior who should be born of woman” (#392). And “how highly then should we esteem those who break the cipher for us and teach us to understand the hidden meaning, especially when the principles they derive from it are completely natural and clear? That is what Jesus and the apostles did.” (#260). And so, for example, with the Gospels we now understand that Moses was the preeminent Israelite prophet and lawgiver, but he was also a ‘figure,’ a prefiguration, a ‘type’ of Christ.

A carnal reading of the Old Testament may be seen in Machiavelli, for whom Moses was just another great ‘founder’ of a human political order, along with Romulus, “a political leader who had to make himself obeyed and who was the target of the envy of his rivals as well as of the impatience of those he led.” And indeed, Moses was the founder of a regime for a set of human beings, and he did indeed face vexing opposition in doing so. Yet the story of Israel as related in the Bible features “certain episodes [that] seem so savage, so cruel—with a cruelty of which Machiavelli himself would not have been able to find the purpose—that we are, as it were, forced to seek another meaning.” For example, God commands the Israelites to kill or enslave all the other nations living in Canaan, including the women and children. “One is, as it were, dumbfounded to read” that God not only issued such a command but that he “reproached the Hebrews not for their cruelty but, on the contrary, for a propensity to come to terms with these nations that they ought to have completely annihilated,” without even carrying off the spoils of war. “One cannot understand the conduct of the Hebrews” in such instances “by invoking the customs of the period nor by incriminating an ‘intolerance’ or a ‘cruelty’ that would be proper to ‘monotheism.'” Neither historical relativism nor humanitarian shivers will do. Rather, “it is commanded to the Hebrews to keep nothing for themselves, even, or especially, in the circumstances where their cupidity—human cupidity—is incandescent, in the enemy city that the custom of war handed over to murder and pillage.” The Israelites are told to abstain from such material benefits and even from national glory “for the sake of God,” who rightly demands all the glory for Himself, inasmuch as He alone enabled the Israelites’ conquest. “God’s action, by which he forms his people, implies a wrenching separation from the human order.” His “demands…are indeed exorbitant and inadmissible, in truth incomprehensible, if one takes them literally, but their import and their meaning change entirely if one understands that the purely spiritual command they contain, in truth their only command, is to retain nothing for oneself and give all to God”; “the treatment commanded for the accursed cities can be said to be a ‘figure’ of charity,” of the agapic love that is the opposite of erotic, acquisitive love. For agapic love, the real enemy is the passions, not the Canaanites or the Babylonians.

It is in discerning the spiritual truth of the Old Testament “cipher” that human reason and memory come in. But they can only come in if “the inner disposition” of the readers mirrors that of the authors of the Book, the disposition of humility. “When one must establish with exactness the meaning and import of the decisive words of the sacred text—that is, choose between the possible meanings—it is not reason aided by memory, but the will, according to its direction, that alone can disguise.” Notice that Moses does not say that Israelites must circumcise their mind; they must circumcise their hearts—a “test of their way of thinking” (#279). Manent is careful, as indeed he must be, to deny that this means that the directions of the will create “the meaning that it acknowledges as the true sense of the text.” Jacques Derrida’s ‘deconstructionism’ is not what he has in mind. Machiavelli and his followers interpret the Bible according to the object of their love, the mastery of Fortune and of nature. Genuine Jews and Christians interpret the Bible in terms of the object of their decidedly un-erotic love, their love of God. “Each man finds” in God’s promises to His people “what lies in the depths of his own heart, either temporal or spiritual blessings, God or creatures” (#503). Manent remarks that “not so very long ago, we experienced an illustration of this truth, when so many people believed they recognized the object of their hope—the ‘classless society’—in a reality” called ‘real socialism’ “that ought to have repulsed them.” 

And so it was with Jewish people in Jesus’ time. Those who were animated by erotic and “carnal” loves rejected Jesus. How could the Messiah not be a great conqueror? How could His coming be so “poor and ignominious”? Yet “those who rejected and crucified Christ”—in the latter claim, Pascal is inexact—were “the same who hand down the books which bear witness to him and say he will be rejected and a cause of scandal,” giving proof of Jesus’ real stature to those spiritual Jews, those “righteous Jews who accepted him.” (#502). “The Jews reject him, but not all of them: the holy ones accept him and not the carnal ones, and far from telling against his glory this is the crowning touch to it,” as it demonstrates the spiritual character of Christianity as consistent with the spiritual character of Judaism (#593). As with the Jews, so with the rest of us. “The will of man is divided between two principles: cupidity and charity” (#502). “The sole object of Scripture is charity” and “the kingdom of God was not in the flesh but the spirit” (#270). It is up to each one of us to choose. In so choosing, Pascal hastens to add, we are not choosing only “a God who is the author of mathematical truths and the order of the elements,” the god of “the heathen and Epicureans.” Nor are we choosing only “a God who extends his providence over the life and property of men so as to grant a happy span of hears to those who worship him,” as carnal Jews suppose. “The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob, the God of the Christians is a God of love and consolation: he is a God who fills the soul and heart of those who he possesses: he is a God who makes them inwardly aware of their wretchedness and his infinite mercy unites himself with them in the depths of their soul: who fills it with humility, joy, confidence and love: who makes them incapable of having any other end but him” (#449). That God, the God of the Bible from beginning to end, cannot be chosen by human powers alone. Human beings cannot “devise a means of knowing and serving God without a mediator,” as they will either fail to know Him, becoming atheists, or know Him only dimly, becoming deists (#449). “If the world existed in order to teach man about God, his divinity would shine out on every hand in a way that could not be gainsaid: but as it only exists through Christ, for Christ, and to teach men about their corruption and redemption, everything in it blazes with proofs of these two truths” (#449). The capacity to choose is God-given; the right choice is given by God’s grace. Human reason alone “cannot incline [us] towards one [religion] or another,” or indeed toward belief or unbelief in any religion (#454).

Manent observes that for Pascal “the Christian faith necessarily does without proof.” “‘Faith is a gift of God’; it is God himself who puts it in the heart.” “Do not imagine that we describe it as a gift of reason,” Pascal warns: “Other religions” may “offer nothing but reason as a way to faith…yet it does not lead there” (#588). The proofs (he lists twelve of them in fragment #482) come after that, “solely to satisfy reason in the strict sense of the term—that it is to say, to grant it enough, not to prove in a domain where proofs cannot be conclusive, but to show and even to demonstrate that Christians do not say or do anything that is not accompanied by a process of reason.” Since God is superior to His creatures to begin with, and even more superior to His ‘fallen’ or corrupted creatures, Christians’ lack of rational proof of the divinity of Christ actually “show[s] that they are not without sense” (#418). It is rather, Manent writes, “the person of self-love, the person who intends or claims to use reason, simply disdains to examine it, because it is not ‘rational,'” who exhibits an irrational incapacity to understand the limits of human reasoning, the human need not only for logos but also for the Logos. And just as Jews need Christ, so do Christians need Judaism. “As impressive as the actions and words of Christ are in themselves for every attentive reader, these action and words are first aimed at the Jewish people, at the ‘lost sheep of Israel’; they prolong and recapitulate the drama of the chosen people of God, who in its greatness and its misery, ‘acts for’ all of mankind: the Jewish people is separated from the nations only in order to make known to them the common Father.” 

 

Notes

1. This point applies both to the senses, ‘below’ reason, and reason. “Faith certainly tells us what the senses do not, but not the contrary of what they are; it is above, not against them” (#185). For its part, “reason’s last step is the recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it. It is merely feeble if it does not go a far as to realize that.” And “if natural things are beyond it, what are we to say about supernatural things?” (#188).

      2. For Pascal’s discussion of Epictetus and Stoicism, see fragments #11, 12, 13, 147.

 

 

Pierre Manent: Challenging Modern Atheism and Indifference: Pascal’s Defense of the Christian Proposition. Paul Seaton translation. Introduction by Daniel J. Mahoney. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press, 2025.

Blaise Pascal: Pensées. A. J. Krailsheimer translation. New York: Penguin Books, 1995.

 

Pascal’s famous “wager” comes to light because the rational proofs for the existence of God cannot reach very far towards the God of the Bible in answer to “the question contained in what, or whom, we call ‘God,'” a “Name [that] points toward something, or someone.” “Either we refuse it entry into the field of our awareness and attention, saying ‘no’ to the Name, or, more or less seriously, more or less sincerely, we open the door of the mind or the heart.” We cannot not choose. 

In so choosing, our human nature presents us with options. There is what the Bible calls “the flesh”—the world of kings and rich men (“let us today add; the celebrities“), the world of concupiscence (libido sentienti) and of curiosity, this last being the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, the innate and not intellectual knowledge of Good and Evil. There is the option of the life of the mind, the world of scholars. And there is the option of the will, option of those who aim at justice, the choice of ‘men of good will’—very often animated by pride and by libido dominandi. Yet the will might also direct itself to the truth, as the “eyes of the heart” lead to wisdom not of the world but of the Holy Spirit.

These several “orders” of the human soul “are indifferent and invisible to each other. “As soon as we live or enter into one of these orders, we are subject to its law, to its specific manner of acting on our faculties, of irresistibly gaining the upper hand over them—over our eyes of flesh, our mind, or our heart,” constituting our “form of life,” our soul’s regime. Hence the title of Plato’s dialogue: Politeia, Regime, traditionally translated as Republic. All of these regimes promise “splendor, luster, empire, victory.” “All are dazzled by the palaces or pageants of the ‘great,'”; Archimedes “shines to the minds,” “triumphs convincingly over every human mind with sufficient abilities”; and “the order of Jesus” “transforms in secret those for whom the ‘eyes of the heart’ are open,” open someday win the greatest victory of all, to enter the most splendid Kingdom of all, the City of God.

In one sense, only one of these regimes is universal. “All human beings belong to and participate in the order of the flesh.” We all see; we all want to be seen. And even if we fail in being seen, our contemporaries commend ‘self-esteem’ to one another. Do it yourself! The Christian “order of charity is ordered in an opposite way, being “invisible” and entered not by one’s own powers but by the grace of Jesus Christ, by “going inside oneself, concentrating and collecting oneself in this invisible place of the heart that race alone attains and reveals.” The order of the flesh, with Machiavelli, desires to acquire. It acts, as Machiavelli remarks, according to nature, according to what human nature has become, visibly. “The wellspring of charity is entirely opposite, because charity extirpates the movement-of-taking at its root,” consisting in the heart’s purity and humility, which “leaves all the room for God’s will.” As for the order of the mind, it lives “between these two opposed orders.” “Reserved for a small number,” it rests not on the will, “either one’s own or God’s,” but “on the understanding, in whose exercise it finds its triumphs.” “Such is the Pascalian tripartition of the human world.” It is instructive to compare his tripartition with Plato’s. Plato divides the regimes of the soul and the regimes of the city into logos, the reasoning mind, epithumia, appetites, and thumos, translated “spiritedness.” Thumos is natural, having nothing to do with the Holy Spirit. It is the closest Plato comes to Pascal’s will, but it is not the will but rather a natural desire for victory, rule, glory. If allied with reason, thumos can assist reason in ruling the appetites; if allied with the appetites, it overthrows reason and runs to crime and even madness. Pascal sees in thumos the perpetual ally of the epithumia. For logos to rule, it must enlist the aid of the Logos, God, or more accurately, it must consent to the aid and indeed the rule of the Logos because it is the Logos Who enlists it, by His grace, not the reverse. As Manent puts it, “certain traits of the third Pascalian order are not absent from the Greek city, or, in any case, from Athens,” as seen in Socrates, “he of a nondescript, even repulsive appearance,” “penniless, without splendor, without rule, without triumph and, as such…invisible to the ‘eyes of the flesh,’ but for those who ‘see wisdom,’ or at least love and desire it, would they not say he was invested with a certain ‘magnificence’?” The regime of Socrates’ soul “separated him from the passionate or ‘carnal’ city.” “For the Greeks,” philosophy is “the only thing [that] is really situated outside of the city.”

For his part, however, “Pascal unsparingly dismisses this figure of the philosopher,” whose “splendor is vanity in the two senses of the term, because he wants ‘to win men’s esteem’ and because his secret does not harbor any truth,” his erotic intellectual quest for the ‘ideas’ of justice, truth, and all else undertaken ‘in vain.’ “Political philosophy as it was conceived by the Socratics, that critical dialectics that never tires of scrutinizing the opinions and speeches of the city, is dismissed by Pascal” because “the mind [that] emancipates itself and becomes an entirely separate order” from the city has no “criterion beyond its own clarity and fecundity,” resulting often enough in conceiving of truth as zeteticism about the things of the heavens, let alone the things of the Kingdom of Heaven. “The Pascalian tripartition…breaks with the civic synthesis” of the ancients “by emancipating and separating the mind”—this much, as philosophers do—but then “add[ing] a new order, the order of humility and charity, in such a way that human life can no longer be seen in a synoptic way, brought together in the same view,” within the rubric of nature, of the cosmic order or regime. The Creator-God is a holy, a separate Being, “ontologically and epistemologically separated from the other two lives and orders.” It too is comprehensive, but it is not homogenous, merely a variegated but integral ‘one,’ but radically heterogeneous, consisting of Creator and His Creation. 

Further, the Creator rules His Creation, commands it, makes just demands on it. Accordingly, Pascal “constantly exposes himself and exposes us to the force of the question that is the wellspring common to the three separate orders,” the “question ‘How should I live?'” If I live according to the ‘Flesh,’ I must pay “respect and obedience” to kings and oligarchs, “in short, to ‘force,’ because there is no real human order except by a certain arrange of force.” If I live according to the mind, I must pay respect to “established facts” and to “indemonstrable but evident principles” and to “demonstrated propositions—in short, to ‘geometry’.” If I live according to Christ, I must pay respect to “the order of wisdom or charity [that] provides access to the proposition and its power of illuminating the greatness and misery that define human life.” These separate orders or regimes nonetheless “encounter one another, jostle and mingle, struggle for preeminence, claim victory in the battlefield that is each human life,” not unlike rival countries ruled by regimes whose principles contradict one another do. But in the soul-struggle, “the order that is constantly on the offensive, that never stops or grows tired, is the order of the flesh.” The life of the flesh has received extraordinary enhancement in modernity from the life of the mind, as modern science aims at the conquest of nature for the relief of man’s estate, and beyond relief, ever more extensive and exquisite physical pleasures. What, Manent asks, “should we say about the way in which these two unlimited desires”—the desire to know and the desire to acquire—were “tied together in the West to form a single passion, the vector of a unique project, a bond that should have remained eternally ruled out because, according to Pascal, the mind and the flesh are separated by an ‘infinite distance’?” 

Christianity teaches that “the will is capable of entering into the secret of charity”—of agape not eros—as soon as “it renounces itself.” “God wishes to move the will rather than the mind” (#234). Unfortunately, in Roman Catholic Christendom the alliance of mind and will forged by Aquinas led the Church to deny the further discoveries of the mind achieved by Galileo and others. This led to abuses of Church authority—the Inquisition, Jesuit maneuverings. “Pascal intervenes at this moment of extreme spiritual tension” among “the three orders of human life.” In this “drama,” the Church “pays for the power that it retains over consciences by renouncing proposing the Christian truth in its integrity and by refusing to grant their due to the truths of an unprecedented sort brought by the new physics”; additionally, as “the order of the mind and the order of the flesh encourage and stimulate one another, drawing humanity—in any case, Christendom—into a ‘progress’ that continually incites and disappoints the desire for a collective ‘order’ that satisfies all the needs of the body, or even for an entirely renewed human condition”—the results of the Second Coming without the Second Coming. But, as Pascal puts it with polite irony, “the ungodly who propose to follow reason must be singularly strong in reason.” Having addressed the challenge of Jesuit Machiavellianism in the Provincial Letters, Pascal turns to the challenge of modernity in the Pensées. 

Pascal acknowledges the truths discovered by modern science, with its combination of reasoning and physical experimentation. But those discoveries do not help us to understand how to live. And, being part of nature ourselves and given the vastness of nature as discovered by modern science, we will never really conquer it, although we will better understand our place in it as modern science progresses. Pascal, Manent observes, “is the only one, as it were, to take seriously geometry’s character as an order—that is, as a separate, and even infinitely distant order from the other orders.” The strength of geometry is its clarity; the limit of geometry it is that it does not, cannot, clarify everything.” On the contrary, and thankfully, “geometry causes humanity to encounter its limits, revealing to humans the weakness of their strength,” because geometry runs our minds up against infinity, showing the mind the limits of the mind.” As a result of our scientific inquiries, “we never arrive at the ultimate principles, but only at the ‘last that seems so to our reason.” So, for example, a physicist might postulate a ‘big bang’ as the origin of the cosmos, but if that explosion destroyed evidence of what caused it, we remain in the position of Socrates after he had studied the natural philosophy of his time: we will know that we do not know. “In accepting our ‘being’—that is, our ‘middling’, thus fluctuating condition—we reconcile ourselves to the contingent character of the human establishment and we understand that the communities in which we live cannot be founded on reason.” Pascal throws into question the ‘certainties’ Descartes had supposed himself to have based his geometry upon. “In radically detaching our knowledge from our being, Descartes had ruled out putting any limit to human desire,” Pascal sees that the limits of the human mind must limit the human desires Descartes has allied with the mind. “Whatever the new possibilities opened by the science of ‘figure’ and of ‘motion’…its developments will be without power or effect on the essentials of our condition” because “what we are is stronger than all our knowledge, our concrete and contingent being is stronger than all our abstracts sciences,” a truth we might not otherwise glimpse because “the smallness of our being hides infinity,” the vastness of the cosmos, “from our sight.” The “abstract sciences” “permit us to dispel countless errors about physical nature,” while having “nothing to say about what is proper to us.” If at least one proper study of mankind is man, modern science can explain him analytically, break him down into his elements, describe the relations of those physical elements among themselves; that is much, but it is not all. Modern science “multiplies indefinitely the types of knowledge that separate us from the knowledge of ourselves.” But “one must know oneself. Even if that does not help in finding truth, at least it helps in running one’s life, and nothing is more proper” (#72). [1]

In modernity, “experimental physics and the Christian religion form the two poles of human life insofar as it ‘knows what it is doing.'” The scientific experimenter “knows how to apply reason to experience”; the Christian can know “how to subject reason to faith” in “a domain of experience that has its own criteria.” Manent quotes a letter Pascal wrote to his sister, Gilberte, saying (along with the mystics of the early centuries of the Church, that “attention to ‘the interior movement of God’ cannot be effectively preserved except by ‘the continuation of the infusion of grace,’ so much so that ‘one must continually make new effort to acquire this constant newness of spirit, because one does not preserve the old grace except by the acquisition of a new grace'”—a conviction that Roman Catholic Pascal shares with Orthodox Christians. Admittedly, it is true that neither the regime of geometry nor the regime of Christianity knows (very much in the so-called ‘Biblical sense’) “the irregularities, lacunae, and disorders of the third order, the order of the flesh, the properly ‘human’ order”—the regime of postlapsarian humans, a regime that renders them “equally indifferent to human reason and to the grace of God.” “It is perhaps not superfluous to add that” this third order “is a factor that Europeans today refuse to consider soberly and impartially,” the factor of force. “Concupiscence and force are the source of all our actions. Concupiscence causes voluntary, force involuntary actions.” (#97).

Hobbes is the preeminent philosopher of force. Hobbes took Descartes’ method into the human/political realm, elaborating an anti-Aristotelian, geometric political science, “the first rigorous science of obedience.” We only really know what we make. Let us then set about to making our regimes, founding them on “the most constant and powerful passion,” the “fear of violent death at the hands of others.” For Hobbes the political order can be, should be, “the methodical fabrication of the human world by man himself.” in the form of “the modern state—the great machine of rational obedience.”  But for Pascal, to a substantial extent “the components of human life are given.” Pascal agrees with Hobbes that men naturally hate each other and want to tyrannize one another. The human ‘self’ “has two characteristics. It is unjust in itself for making itself center of everything; it is a nuisance to others in that it tries to subjugate them, for each self is the enemy of all the others and would like to tyrannize them.” Well-designed political institutions may “take away the nuisance, but not the injustice.” (#597). Geometrical abstractions can only take us so far. 

With Hobbes and his more genial predecessor, Montaigne, Pascal fully recognizes the varieties of human life, the rule of custom as our “second nature that destroys the first” (#126). (“I am very much afraid that nature itself is only a first habit, just as habit is a second nature.”) [2] But he interprets that diversity in a way unlike that of modern social sciences and the public opinion it has shaped. “For the moderns, this cultural diversity is the sign and expression of the power of humans over their condition, the sign and expression of the unlimited plasticity of their being—in short, of their freedom.” Not so, Pascal counters. Cultural diversity betrays our “servitude,” for “if people were actually free, they would have access to universal and stable criteria of justice, which would allow them to judge and order human things in full assurance.” Natural and divine laws exist; we violate them because we are ‘fallen.’ As far as “true justice” is concerned, “we no longer have any”—not since Eden (#86). Hobbes believes that human reason, in the form of his new and, he claims, first genuinely scientific political science, can provide access to natural laws while eschewing what he dismisses as mythological divine laws. On the contrary, Pascal rejoins, human reason cannot provide human beings with “adequate support.” Man “does not know” what justice is (#60). “Larceny, incest, infanticide, parricide, everything has at some time been accounted a virtuous action”; “it is by virtue of senatorial decrees and votes of the people that crimes are committed” (#60). And if we did have a sure knowledge of it, it would “be dangerous to tell the people that laws are not just, because they obey them only when they believe them to be just. “That is why they must be told at the same time that laws are to be obeyed because they are laws, just as superiors must be obeyed because they are superior. That is how to forestall any sedition, if people can be made to understand that, and that is the proper definition of justice,” as least on ‘this earth’ (#66). When they wish to “dislodge established customs,” to revolutionize, to change a political regime, men ‘question authority,’ refute the prevailing customs, demand “a return to the basic and primitive laws of the state which unjust custom has abolished. There is no surer way to lose everything.” (#160).  This is why that “the wisest of legislators” commend that “men must be deceived for their own good”—the “noble lie” Socrates finds in the best founding, the others being less than noble (#160). “The truth about the usurpation must not be made apparent; it came about originally without reason and has become reasonable” because at least it makes men less irritating and dangerous to one another; “the greatest of evils is civil war” (#94). Pascal even pays a sort of tribute to the Hobbesian effort: It is “man’s greatness even in his concupiscence” to have “managed to produce such a remarkable system from it and make it the image of true charity” (#118). Because, alas, “the name of right goes to the dictates of might” (#85); “it is necessary to follow the mighty” (#103). For example, “equality of possessions is no doubt right,” and it even finds shaky fulfillment in some monasteries, “but, as men could not make might obey right, they have made right obey might. As they could not fortify justice they have justified force, so that right and might live together and peace reigns, the sovereign good” (#81).   “It is not the same thing with the Church, because there genuine justice exists without any violence,” at least insofar as Jesuitism does not prevail in its precincts (#85). “The way of God, who disposes all things with gentleness, is to instill religion in our minds with reasoned arguments and into our hearts with grace, but attempting to instill it into hearts and minds with force and threat is to instill not religion but terror,” Manent adds. [3] Or, as Pascal has it (prefiguring an argument of the American Founders), “Multiplicity which is not reduced to union is confusion. Unity which does not depend on multiplicity is tyranny” (#604).  

It would be far better to “combine right and might, and to that end make right into might or might into right.” Thus far, however, “unable to make right into might,” we have “made might into right.” (#103). Hobbes’s attempt to found political science on geometric abstraction must fail. “How can people who are morally undetermined by nature receive rules of justice, not to mention produce them?” The “regime of the modern state” that Hobbes propounds, following the Baconian science derived from Machiavellian ambition, “can be called just because in principle it produces a peace advantageous to all, but no one in this regime, governing or governed, can be called just.” Hobbes attempts a geometrical solution to the problem of the flesh, an attempt to conquer human nature. Because “natural hatred among men” is an “interior cause,” its “core” being “an intention of the human being as such,” it cannot truly be remediated by any political science. At best, human cooperation can occur when these other-hating human beings that they need to cooperate with one another in order to satisfy their concupiscent desires more fully—when they consent to rule and to be ruled within a commercial regime. Nonetheless, “Montesquieu himself,” the “most determined and subtle promoter” of that regime, “will not fail to point out that a certain moral degradation accompanies the exclusive reign of the commercial spirit.” But “anyone who does not hate the self-love within him and the instinct which leads him to make himself into a God must be really blind” (#617). 

Catholic tradition adapted Aristotelian political science to the European circumstance, “placing in a law oriented to the common good the principal instrument of the good life,” concurring with Aristotle’s judgment that politics is the architectonic art, that political science is the architectonic discipline, while “formulating the new exigencies that the concern for salvation added to the political and social obligations arising from our nature.” That proved too heavy a burden for political communities to bear, even with the Church as their guide. In the respublica christiana, “the law directly attacked concupiscence and claimed, if not to defeat it, at least to control it,” albeit with “little success.” Pascal eschewed the failed attempt to control concupiscence directly by civil law. There was no sense in “claim[ing] to act ‘as if’ the kingdom of charity had arrived.” “Despite the meritorious virtues of sincere Christians, despite even the heroic virtues of the saints, the kingdoms of the world will remain kingdoms of concupiscence until the day of judgment.” Justice is invisible, force visible. Concupiscent human beings incline to ‘think’ with their eyes, claiming as justice what is really nothing more than some arrangement of their desires. Concupiscence defeats the unworldly commands of the Church, as Machiavelli and Hobbes understand, but it also defeats their own systems. At best, in order “to render their victory sure and, for that purpose, to exit from the state of war,” strong men “must convert their military victory into a peaceful order,” a “new regime” that will be “accepted by all, including the defeated party” by including members of that party in its ‘power structure.’ Now, “the bonds securing men’s mutual respect are generally bonds of necessity, for there must be differences of degree, since all men want to be on top and all cannot be, but some can” (#828). “The masters, who do not want the war to go on, ordain that the power which is in their hands shall pass down by whatever means they like; some entrust it to popular suffrage, others to hereditary succession, etc. And that is where imagination begins to play its part,” the possibly and passably noble lie. “These bonds securing respect for a particular person are bonds of imagination.” (#828). The one, the few, the many: whoever rules must invest itself with imagined majesty and authority, if not mystery. “The imagination, formed by the legislator…fixes the perspective on the human world.”

Despite all this, Pascal is no ‘perspectivist’ or ‘relativist.’ “He intends to preserve the universal validity of the moral code.” The pagans of antiquity built “disagreement over justice” into their regimes—Aristotle’s ‘mixed regime’ in which neither the few who are rich nor the many who are poor can get anything done without the others’ consent being an excellent example. This “struggle of the parties does not know any truce” because the imagination of the partisans focuses not on the known, the self-interest of all the parties, but on “the city itself, which is the object of the citizens’ eros. In Pascal’s France, however, where the monarchic-aristocratic regime “has been established for a very long time,” it is “a question of preventing, rather than explicating, the dialectical debate, the conflict of opinions concerning justice.” Imagination and force combine to prevent faction: “The chancellor is a grave man, dressed in fine robes because his position is false; not so the king. He enjoys power, and has no use for imagination. Judges, doctors, etc., enjoy nothing but imagination.” (#87). “Thinking too little about things or thinking too much both make us obstinate and fanatical,” the first out of piety, the second out of ideology (#21). But in this world, it is imagination “that decides everything: it creates beauty, justice and happiness, which is the world’s supreme good” (#44). In Pascal’s more measured view, “the world is a good judge of things, because it is in the state of natural ignorance where man really belongs. Knowledge has two extremes which meet; one is the pure natural ignorance of every man at birth, the other is the extreme reached by great minds who run through the whole range of human knowledge, only to find that they know nothing and come lack the same ignorance from which they set out, but it is a wise ignorance which knows itself. Those who stand half-way have put their natural ignorance behind them without yet attaining the other; they have some smattering of adequate knowledge and pretend to understand everything. They upset the world and get everything wrong.” Crucially, the imagination is “quite visible,” thus obeyable by worldlings. “Ordinary people honor those who are highly born, the half-clever ones despise them, saying that birth is a matter of chance, not personal merit. Really clever men honor them, not for the same reason as ordinary people, but for deeper motives. Pious folk with more zeal than knowledge despise them regardless of the reason which makes clever men honor them, because they judge men in the new light of piety, but perfect Christians honor them because they are guided by a still higher light,” the light that brings the Apostle Paul to adjure Christians to respect the one who does not bear the sword in vain, the light of Christ who tells Christians to pay their taxes in the coin that has the stamp of Caesar on it. 

Manent asks, “Does not modern democracy rest on the close alliance of the people and the half-clever?” It has not been a fatal alliance, in the long run, but it remains fragile, as one set of men can turn on the other. “Pascal perhaps invites us to put the half-clever back in their place.” It might be far more strenuous and bloodier to attempt to put the people in their place. And as for “the devout” and “the perfect Christian,” the devout has more zeal than knowledge, attempting to make the Christian light prevail in politics. The perfect Christian has the “knowledge” the devout lacks, or perhaps even more the prudence of the serpent that Jesus commends to His disciples. “One must obey in conscience—in conscience—the established order, while keeping in mind that this order—force and justice mixed together—is contingent and that, if it is not simply ‘just,’ it is not simply ‘unjust’ either.” That is, “there is a just way of comporting oneself in a world without justice, and of relating to it.” 

This makes the Christian proposition, as understood by Pascal, “incomparably more concrete and determinate than any human proposition, whose binding element, as we have emphasized, resides in the imagination.” The Christian proposition demands a choice: my self against all the other human ‘selves’ or the Person who is God, who is ‘for’ all human selves? Egocentricity or theocentricity? “As the clever knows that it is not possible to separate human justice from the force without which it is only an insubstantial ‘quality,’ the ‘perfect Christian’ knows that the good wheat and the chaff grow together and that it is at the very least imprudent, and probably impious, to give to social man the mandate to perform this discrimination reserved to divine justice.” As Pascal has it, “justice and truth are two points so fine that our instruments are too blunt to touch them exactly.” (#45). 

 

Notes

1. “Unless we know ourselves to be full of pride, ambition, concupiscence, weakness, wretchedness, and unrighteousness, we are truly blind” (#595). It is also true than man is “made for thinking,” which means that our “whole duty is to think as [we] ought,” beginning with what we ought to think of ourselves” (#620). There being a “civil war in man between reason and passions” (#621), we find, upon self-examination, that “man is neither angel nor beast” and, moreover, “anyone trying to act the angel acts the beast” (#678). To win the civil war, to do that as a self-knowing man, “we must treat [the passions] like slaves, and give them food but prevent the soul feeding on it” (#603). Since this is humanly impossible, we need, first, to learn to “hate ourselves” and to love God, who is the only Person who can effectively strengthen our reason, our distinctively human nature, against the bestial passions (#220). “The true and only virtue is…to hate ourselves, for our concupiscence makes us hateful” (#564). However, “we cannot love what is outside us,” given our self-love, so “we must love a being who is within us but is not our own self” (#564).  That being is the God of the Bible. “Not only do we only know God through Jesus Christ, but we only know ourselves through Jesus Christ; we only know life and death through Jesus Christ. Apart from Jesus Christ we cannot know the meaning of our life or our death, of God or of ourselves.” (#417). It is “the sign of the true religion…that it obliges men to love God,” a love expressed through prayer; “no other religion has asked God to make us love and follow him” (#214). “How then can we have anything but respect for a religion which knows man’s faults so well? What desire but that a religion which promises such desirable remedies should be true?” (#595). Thus, “I marvel at an original and august religion, wholly divine in its authority, its longevity, its perpetuity, its morality, its conduct, its doctrine, its effects. Thus I stretch out my arms to my Savior, who, after being foretold for four thousand years, came on earth to die and suffer for me at the time and in the circumstances foretold. By his grace I peaceably await death, in the hope of being eternally united to him, and meanwhile I live joyfully, whether in the blessings which he is pleased to bestow on me or in the afflictions he sends me for my own good and taught me how to endure by his example.” (#792).
2. “Montaigne is wrong. The only reason for following custom is that it is custom, not that it is reasonable or just, but the people follow it because they think it just. Otherwise they would not follow it any more….” (#525).
3. “It is false piety to preserve peace at the expense of truth,” just as “it is also false zeal to preserve truth at the expense of charity” (#949). Pride and sloth are “the twin causes of all vice”; “the Christian religion alone has been able to cure these twin vices, not by using one to expel the other according to worldly wisdom, but by expelling both through the simplicity of the Gospel” (#208). “States would perish if their laws were not stretched to meet necessity, but religion has never tolerated or practiced such a thing. So either compromises or miracles are needed.” (#280). “Two laws are enough to rule the whole Christian republic better than all political laws”: love God, love your neighbor (#376). For states, more laws are necessary, and Christians should obey them.

 

Pierre Manent: Challenging Modern Atheism and Indifference: Pascal’s Defense of the Christian Proposition. Author’s Preface, chapters 1-3. Paul Seaton translation. Introduction by Daniel Mahoney. South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press, 2025.

Blaise Pascal: Pensées. A.J. Krailsheimer translation. London: Penguin Books, 1995.

 

Why Pascal?

If you want to be challenged by a writer, put your money on Blaise Pascal. Pierre Manent has, and the payout is substantial.

He writes primarily to his fellow Europeans, whom he describes as perplexed and doubtful: “Who are we?” Once understanding themselves as Christians, yet also pulled toward “the attraction of strength, the desire for glory, and the affirmation of human will and freedom,” Europeans now “do not know what to think or do with Christianity” and, perhaps, do not know what to do with power freedom, now a bit embarrassed by glory. When Europe was Christendom, “nowhere else but in Europe was human liberty exposed to such a breadth of possibilities, the human will to an alternative of such profundity.” But now? A choice between two mighty alternatives, both gone lukewarm? A condition of hesitation worthy only of the Last Man?

“Europe is not Christian, it does not want to be Christian.” It re-baptized itself in “a baptism of erasure” that rendered it “impermeable to its historical religion, and consequently incapable of conducting itself judiciously vis-à-vis the other religions that it agrees to receive, most often favorably, because they at least are not Christian”—in the dubious hope that it can somehow neutralize them, too, in its “condition of untroubled incomprehension of the religious question.” The problem is not only that it thereby leaves itself vulnerable to religious militants who refuse to tolerate toleration, but that Christianity (rather like the Holy Spirit) doesn’t go away. It is “the only religious that is entirely independent of every existing human association—people, city, empire.” It leaves itself room for adaptation to circumstances in a way that old and new civil religions do not. In this way, it resembles Aristotle’s prudential man while following Jesus’ command to be prudent as serpents while remaining (or, in light of stubborn old sin, aspiring to be) innocent as doves.

Christianity declared its independence with “a radically new word,” the Word of God, Logos, with “a radically new action,” the work of the Cross, and with “a radically new bond between word and action,” the Ecclesia, the Assembly of Christians; “there is no ‘Christianity’ without the Christian church,” “an unprecedented human association.” This radically new regime, this Kingdom of God, in but not of the many cities of Man, posited a new purpose for human beings as such: “to arrive at God.” To put it Greekly, theosis is not eudaimonia, although it encompasses and elevates eudaimonia.  It is not human or, like the incarnate God, not exclusively or even primarily human. This regime requires, as all regimes do, a purpose (salvation of the souls of individual persons), a Ruler and a set of vicegerents, a set of ruling offices, institutions, and a way of life (“My way” and no one else’s, as God told, first, the Israelites and then the nations). Such authority could not but inflect the thoughts and actions of “princes and peoples” in an extraordinary manner, making itself “an axial question of the political, moral, and spiritual history of Europe.” 

Christianity troubled Europe, as it had troubled Rome before. The European princes attempted to use it for their own purposes, as Machiavelli recommended, or to make a truce with it by separating their states from the Church. But “today, we no longer have separation, properly speaking, because the state has drawn to itself all authority,” since “the state cannot simultaneously be superior and really separate.” The modern state has elevated itself above all religions and, its partisans suppose, above “human passions and opinions,” being ‘impersonal’ in a way that no previous ruling body had been. At the same time, it makes itself into a sort of church, not only “the guardian of external order” but “the guardian of ‘values.'” Values are a matter of mere opinion, ‘relative’ to one another, but in practice they must ultimately be relative to the purposes of the state. “The neutral state went in search of each member of society in the intimacy of his will, in order that he agree to obey it before giving his faith and eventually his obedience to the church; in this way the first act of the human will was for the state and not for God.” Such a priority, consent to the sovereign state, cannot but conflict with the authority of God and cannot consistently uphold any purpose, even a ‘secular’ purpose, inasmuch as a “church of separated wills,” consenting to nothing more than hanging out together, finally can neither govern itself nor sustain itself against those whose purposes are firmer.

Machiavellianism didn’t take hold politically until the middle of the seventeenth century. That, Manent remarks, is when Pascal thought and wrote, rethinking the Christian regime or, as Manent more politely puts it, the Christian proposition, “the connected series of Christian doctrines or mysteries” offered to human beings for their consent and accompanied by a “specific form of life.” “I sought the aid and assurance of Pascal to rediscover the exact terms, and to grasp the gravity and urgency, of the Christian question—that of the Christian faith, of the possibility of the Christian faith.” The middle of the seventeenth century saw horrendous civil wars fought over the Christian faith, along with the sovereign state’s answer to those wars. Pascal thus confronted challenges to Christianity from within and from without. Now that the modern state is so sure of itself, while the demi-citizens of modern European states are so perplexed, Manent poses Christianity as a question, a question that it may also provide an answer to perplexity. Are you sure that all values are relative?

Modern Atheism

In a way, Christianity lends itself to atheism. Human beings tend to believe what they want to believe. God tells them things they don’t want to believe: love your enemies, don’t fornicate. His religion “find[s] support in none of the wellsprings of human nature.” As a result, in Pascal’s words, “men despise religion”; “they hate it and are afraid it may be true” (#12). Why, Manent asks, did the Roman Empire, so intent on ruling the world, “associat[e] itself with the religious proposition the least suited to the motives of the commanding and conquering animal”? It may have needed to. Christians had grown to numerous either to persecute or to ignore; they had to be ‘let in.’ As Pascal writes “What is wonderful, incomparable and wholly divine is that this religion which has always survived has always been under attack,” continuing “without bending and bowing to the will of tyrants ” (#281). And again: “The only religion which is against nature, against common sense, and against our pleasures is the only one that has always existed” since the Garden of Eden and before (#284). Such a phenomenon had to be accommodated, somehow, and it was.

True, both sides saw “the distinction between God and Caesar,” but the Church was itself “a great legal or juridical fact, an immense teaching and commanding association, which cannot convey the gospel message if it does not have the strength to make its absolute independence respected.” Manent locates the crucial break in that association not so much in the Great Schism but in the Reformation, the schism within the Western Church. It was the Reformation that “open[ed] an unprecedented career to the state” by “giving rise to separate churches,” each seeking state protection. With this, “the state became the principle of order par excellence, not only of external order but also of a certain internal order,” its “peace and justice” acquiring “a spiritual quality that until then had eluded the profane powers” of Christendom.” This “spiritual quality…was different from the civic sacredness of paganism” because it “brought the members of society together in an unprecedented sentiment of unity and strength,” consent to state sovereignty often confirmed by what would come to be called nationalism, the valorization of the new cult of national culture. At the heart of those exercising the sovereignty of the state was the decidedly anti-Christian, Machiavellian passion, libido dominandi —the sort of thing that got Satan in trouble with God, much to Adam’s eventual disadvantage. Pascal’s critique of the Jesuits in the Provincial Letters centers on the Jesuits’ fall into Machiavellianism, their surreptitious departure from the principles of their founder, Ignatius of Loyola. The Jesuits have become far too eager “to keep on good terms with all the world,” as Pascal puts it. They would rule souls at the cost of departing from Christianity. But under modern conditions of Machiavellian statism, coming as it does after a way of life governed by doctrines, does not bring back paganism but the manipulation of rival doctrines, eventually called ‘ideologies,’ convenient deceptions, not-so-noble lies, at the service of libido dominandi. [1] 

Against this, Pascal sought to reestablish Christian doctrine, and especially the doctrine of grace “in its clarity and authority and to bring to light the way in which the Christian religion presents itself to the acting person and the way the acting human being relates to the Christian religion.” The way to grace is repentance, animated by humility—the opposite of the natural human propensity to make ruling an ‘end in itself,’ really a means to satisfying human pride in opposition to God. Once human pride establishes itself as the purpose of human life, human life imagines itself to progress by successive conquests—conquests of other men, of fortune, of nature. “We therefore run endlessly toward a horizon that constantly recedes,” a supposed ‘progress’ that actually goes in circles because it has no limit. The Jesuits “contribute to the encouragement and acceleration of a transfer of moral and spiritual allegiance from the church to the state.” 

Manent raises a doubt about Pascal’s preferred Christian sect, the Jansenists. The Jansenists wanted “a sort of ‘direct government’ by God over his church.” God demurred, preferring to allow human beings to choose Him or not. It is to the question of that choice that Pascal addresses himself in the fragments of a book that have come down to us as the Pensées. There is an “atheist in every human being,” including Pascal; in the Pensées, he addresses him. With serpentine prudence, as the editor of Pascal’s Oeuvres Complète observes, “he never began with a dispute, or by establishing the principles that he wished to articulate, but he wanted to know beforehand if they sought the truth with their whole hear; and he acted accordingly with them.” Manent takes up that challenge, engages in that dialogue.

The ‘Wager’

In pagan antiquity, there were three kinds of gods: those of the poets, conjured in imagination; those of the philosophers, who reasoned their way into several theologies; and those of the rulers, the civil religions of Rome and Israel. It is the latter civil religion that Pascal takes seriously. The “Holy One of Israel educate[s] his people by teaching to understand, by tirelessly attempting to make it understand, that he alone is the source of the salvation of the children of Israel.” He commands war against the Amalekites; victory only comes so long as Moses holds the rod of God aloft. “Politics and religion, which we love to separate, are here inseparably mixed,” Manent remarks; “in truth, they are indistinguishable,” and the Israelites’ many attempts to weaken or sever their Covenant with God only led to their punishment by God. God does so because he intends to use Israel to destroy His enemies. “In order to make himself known to the political animal, what is more appropriate than this direct government of Yahweh, with all the consequences for the soul and body of the children of Israel?” Yet the Israelites, like all humans, grew restive under the unnatural (because divine, holy, separate from Creation) divine yoke, demanding a king in order to be “like all the nations.” My way is not your way, My thoughts are not your thoughts. So much the worse for you, unless you align yourself with Me, with My regime, My “way.” 

If you do, you will accept the only really convincing proofs of the God of the Bible, particularly as He manifests Himself in the New Testament. Pascal tells us that “We know God only through Jesus Christ. Without this mediator all communication with God is broken off. Through Jesus we know God.” But how do we know Jesus is the Christ? “To prove Christ we have the prophecies” of the Old Testament” which are solid and palpable truths,” prophecies “fulfilled and proved by the event.” “Without Scripture, without original sin without the necessary mediator who was promised and came it is impossible to prove absolutely that God exists, or to teach sound doctrine and sound morality. But through and in Christ we can prove God’s existence, and teach both doctrine and morality. Therefore Jesus is the true God of men.” (#189). Yes, but to prove God’s existence this way, one must first open our souls to the revelations of Scripture. Proofs of the sort Thomas Aquinas and others offer, amalgamations of Scripture and reasoning, won’t do if Scripture is no authority. “Pascal seeks to free us from the hold of the ‘metaphysical proofs of God’ that presuppose that the same procedure of reason can simultaneously validate the ‘ascending ‘ movement of Greek philosophy and the ‘descending’ movement of Jewish and Christian revelation, in such a way that the God of philosophers can also be the God of Jews and Christians.” As Pascal writes, “the metaphysical proofs for the existence of God are so remote from human reasoning and so involved that they make little impact, and, even if they did help some people, it would only be for the moment during which they watched the demonstration, because an hour later they would be afraid they had made a mistake,” losing “through pride” what they “gained by curiosity” (#190). Given his corrupt nature, “man does no act according to the reason which constitutes his nature” (#491). To proceed more effectively, Pascal intends to induce his readers, in Manent’s words, to “step outside their condition of atheism,” their “practical indifference to the possibility of God,” by “engaging the active faculties of our being, and first of all the one that is the principle of every movement of the soul, the will.” Reasoning, whether that of the classical or of the modern philosophers, has “captured the mind” for atheism, very much in accordance with (sinful) human nature. To recapture the mind for God, the will needs to be redirected, not (initially) the mind itself because the mind by itself does not aim in God’s direction but in the direction of human things or, at most, of the nature that encompasses human things. “The cure for this is first to show that religion is not contrary to reason, but worthy of reverence and respect,” Pascal contends. “Next, make it attractive, make good men wish it were true, and then,” and only then, “show that it is.” Show that it is “worthy of reverence because it really understands human nature,” better than reasoning can. Show that it is “attractive because it promises true good,” not the false or at best partial goods we perceive by reasoning (#12). [2]

Here the wager comes in. Pascal elaborates it in his fragment #418. “We do not know the existence or the nature of God, because he has neither extension nor limits.” Or, as Orthodox Christians say, we cannot know God’s “essence”; to see it would overwhelm our finite capacities and indeed kill us. “We are therefore incapable of knowing either what he is or whether he is” according to the usual proofs. However, “it is quite possible to know that something exists without knowing its nature.” Reason, which requires the finitude of nature seen in its animating principle, the principle of non-contradiction first enunciated by Socrates in Plato’s Republic, “cannot decide this question.” In acknowledging that they have no real rational, demonstrative proof of God’s existence, by admitting the “folly” of their faith, Christians “show that they are not without sense.” “Either God is or he is not”; “reason cannot make you choose either, reason cannot prove either wrong.” Very well then, if not atheism, then reason brings us to agnosticism, advising us that “the right thing is not to wager at all.” As Manent puts it, while the agnostic does not deny God’s existence, he “he does not will to go toward God.” 

“Yes, but you must wager,” Pascal rejoins. And here reason enters back in, not ‘pure’ or ‘metaphysical’ reason but ‘practical’ reason. “You have two things to lose: the true and the good; and two things to stake: your reason and your will, your knowledge and your happiness; and your nature has two things to avoid: error and wretchedness.” Your reason “cannot be affronted” by either choice, “since you must necessarily choose,” exercise your will. Your happiness is another matter. If you wager that God exists and you are right, “you win everything.” If you wager that God exists and you are wrong, “you lose nothing,” shuffling off this mortal coil to an unavoidable oblivion. What is more (very much more!), you are not betting, say, your one life in the hope of getting two lives, or three. You are betting on “an eternity of life and happiness.” And so, “wherever there is infinity, and where there are not infinite chances of losing against that of winning, there is no room for hesitation, you must give everything”; “you must be renouncing reason if you hoard your life rather than risk it for an infinite gain, just as likely to occur as a loss amounting to nothing.”

And if you reply, “I am so made that I cannot believe,” then blame “your passions,” not reason. “Concentrate then not on convincing yourself by multiplying proofs of God’s existence but by diminishing your passions”—what the Bible calls spiritual warfare. “What harm will come to you from choosing this course? You will be faithful, honest, humble, grateful, full of good works, a sincere, true friend, “eschewing enjoyment of “noxious pleasures, glory and good living”—good according to your passions—but “will you not have others?” Thus, “you will gain even in this life,” although the greatest potential gain is in the ‘next’ life.

Manent writes, “One sees that Pascal takes into account the whole of the human soul with its two great faculties of reason and will and their two great objects, the true and the good.” Our reason alone can bring us to know God, but it “does retain the role of indicating to the will the terms of the choice, without being in the least able to determine the choice.” That choice is a “blind choice.” Once we fully see our blindness, “the more it becomes irresistibly evident that there is only one possible choice,” not on the basis of rational calculation, not on probabilities, for the infinite is by definition incalculable. Rather, “our capacity for choice, activated by our will for happiness…is irresistibly carried away by the disproportion between the terms of the alternative,” all or nothing. Manent does not “justify the wager for God” but responds “to the objections of calculating reason” by the very means of an analogy to wagering, which exercises calculating reasoning. “Because the interlocutor allowed himself to be troubled by the questions of calculating reason, Pascal,” one of the great mathematicians, “is going to teach him how to calculate.” By then introducing the incalulable, the infinite, making the equation radically un-‘equal,’ he “does not want to prove anything” but rather intends to “set us in motion,” to teach us not to confuse the probable with the possible. Winning the infinite reward may not be probable, but so long as it is possible it is the best bet. He does not attempt to prove anything “to calculating reason, but to make practical reason feel that the choice of the Infinite is a very natural way of proceeding.” He wants his readers “to remain open, or to open themselves, to the possibility of infinite life.” What is our finite, natural life, lived within the limits of “self-love,” in contrast with “a good that is infinite”? “Only the ‘heart,'” not reason, “has the breadth and flexibility to make the same being capable of making two absolutely opposed choices”: that “the choice of the Infinite imposes itself on us in a way that overturns the ordinary conditions of human choices” while at the same time “the choice of the Infinite ought to be as easy and natural as our most ordinary choices.” Limited reason needs to recognize its limitations, exercise itself within them; it “must be reasonable enough to recognize that it does not make the great decision of life.” [3] The heart “either gives, or hardens, itself as it chooses.” “By understanding that ‘our life’ is not that solid and sure thing on the basis of which we can decide the just and the reasonable, but rather the deceptive fruit of a choice of the heart, our heart, which is indeed great and capable of infinity, but which our vicious will attaches to this finite life, a movement of the will that immediately shuts us off from the possible Infinite.” Such an attachment is unreasonable, yet it can only be seen as unreasonable once the “heart” opens itself to Logos, to reason. [4]

Pascal’s Wager, Anselm’s Proof

Manent has observed that Pascal’s departs from the proofs confirming the validity of Christian revelation advanced by Aquinas, who “proceed[s] from ‘effects’ that the senses observe in nature, the ‘argument from design,’ or by Descartes, who proceeds “from ‘ideas.'” These proofs “leave us cold because they are too ‘remote from the reasonings of human beings,'” that is, “from the way human beings reason in the ordinary circumstances of life.” And they don’t prove the existence of what so many want to know: the existence of the God of the Bible. Wagering is closer to home. Yet he “seems to ignore a particularly famous argument in the history of philosophical and theological reflection, which is quite different from proofs by ideas or effects” and at the same bases itself on ground shared by everyone. Anselm takes up the condition “where we already find ourselves.” We all say ‘God,’ but we seldom reflect upon the implications of saying ‘God.’ In his Proslogicon, Anselm does so reflect. In saying ‘God,’ both believers and unbelievers think of “that than which no greater can be conceived”; a being that exists in reality is greater than one that exists only in the mind; if God exists as an idea (and He does) but does not exist in reality, then we can imagine something greater than God; that being impossible (by the definition of ‘God’), if God exists in the mind as an idea, then God exists in reality. He does, so he does.

Manent proposes a new understanding of Anselm’s argument, which is usually understood as a logical proof based upon the idea of ‘God.’ Manent proposes that Anselm does not start with an idea, “a thing that is thought, a cogitatum, but a cogitans, a person who thinks,” a person who seeks, who “strain[s] toward something of which one is ignorant and that one desires to know.” In this, he is much closer to Pascal than to Descartes. In “open[ing] up the immensity of what is to be thought, the one who thinks becomes aware of his inability to think it, experiencing simultaneously the greatness of the object of his desire”—the ‘essence’ of God, in Orthodox Christian terms—and “his own littleness.” If, as the Bible says, the fool has said in his heart that there is no God, “when he hears what Anselm says, when he hears the formula, grasps what he hears”; he then cannot “say that he does not grasp what he himself says when he pronounces his denial.” In “comprehending the definition of what he denies, [he] is obliged to understand that in reality he affirms it.” Put another way, “what he thinks in order to deny it is necessarily stronger than his denial.” Any fool might be right to deny an alleged ‘fact.’ But ‘God’ isn’t a fact, is not reducible “to the ordinary condition of things that [the human mind] understands.” A human being can understand Aristotle’s god, the ‘First Mover.’ But Aristotle simply never heard of the God of the Bible, and so did not have to confront the assertion of the Bible, to affirm or to question it. The fool who denies the existence of the Biblical God “considers himself greater than the greatest being and quite competent to decide that about God there is nothing to think and that one can think man without thinking God.” Caught you, you nihilist: you have already thought ‘God.’ But you have not understood the implication of so thinking. 

Pascal demurs. For him, “it is not a question of inciting the unbeliever to better understand, to really understand what the believer intends when he says ‘God,’ but of persuading him to change radically—to invert as it were—the direction of his being.” That is what the wager does; it “engages the unbeliever in a radical change of life,” a change in direction of the will necessary to any genuine change of mind—what Christians call a conversion. Whereas both Anselm and Pascal “endeavor by their argument to provoke in us an active and continuous relation to him who is designated by the word ‘God,'” Anselm addresses how we think whereas Pascal addresses how we choose. “God is not properly an object of the science or art of proving. If he exists, he is without any proportion to the machinery of any proof there might be.” It is God who proposes, reveals Himself, to man. Man’s rational eros, his desire to know, won’t get him to God, no matter how intelligent his efforts may be. For man, “it is a matter of responding to a proposition.” Pace Machiavelli, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, but “whoever desires to enter into the understanding of the Christian proposition,” which is the proposition of a God Who proposes, “must begin by accepting the condition in which it places human beings when it addresses them—the condition of one who listens.” Pascal elaborates, “those to whom God has given religious faith by moving their hearts are very fortunate, and feel quite legitimately convinced, but to those who do not have it we can only give such faith through reasoning, until God gives it by moving their heart, without which faith is only human and useless for salvation” (#110).

 

Note

1. For a fuller discussion of the Provincial Letters and of Manent’s commentary on them, see “Pascal Against the Jesuits,” on this website under the category, “Bible Notes.”
2. “The mind naturally believes and the will naturally loves, so that when there are no true objects for them, they necessarily become attached to false ones” (#661). “The will is one of the chief organs of belief, not because it creates belief, but because things are true or false according to the aspect by which we judge them. When the will likes one aspect more than another, it deflects the mind from considering the qualities of the one it does not care to see,” leading the mind in the direction it “likes” (#539). That is, “all our reasoning comes down to surrendering to feeling” (#530). Indeed, “How absurd is reason, the sport of every wind!” (#44). Therefore, “God wishes to move the will rather than the mind” (#234).
3. See Richard Hooker: The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, discussed on this website in a review titled, “Reason Within the Limits of Religion Alone,” under the category, “Bible Notes.”
4. “Faith is different from proof,” Pascal observes. “One is human and the other a gift from God…. This is the faith that God himself puts in our hearts.” (#7).