Archimandrite George Kapsanis: Theosis: The True Purpose of Human Life. Anonymous translation. Mount Athos: Holy Monastery of Saint Gregorius, 2023.

 

The translator defies theosis as “personal communication with God ‘face to face.'” Such communication can only come with godliness, perfection, righteousness, since no merely human being can look upon the Lord and live. A human being can attain such spiritual elevation through membership in the Christian Church, the New Israel, the spiritual Israel, a Church in which “all humanity” can and should find welcome. “The Orthodox Church has retained this original message of Christ unchanged.” Against the sola Scriptura claim of Protestantism, the Orthodox Church maintains that “Christ’s teachings could not be arrived at from the Holy Bible alone; we would simply project our modern concepts onto the early Church” if we struggled to understand Scripture without the interpretive guidance of the early Fathers of the Church as faithfully transmitted from those centuries to our own. “Theosis stems from this tradition in which the early Church, Traditional Christianity, and Orthodoxy are identical.” The early Church Synods, notably “the seven Oecumenical Synods, the Synod of S. Photios of 867 and the Palamite Synods of the fourteenth century,” expressed doctrines already “fully present within the Church from the day of Pentecost” and, crucially, determined which books now recognized by Christians as the New Testament. Thus, “the dual task of Orthodox Theology is to define and also to protect from human distortion the teachings of Jesus Christ,” teaching not merely ‘academic,’ a matter of intellectual apprehension, but of whole-souled “living faith,” a way of life. The translator denies that Western Christianity fully believes and practices original Christianity because “over one thousand years separate it from this tradition”—the centuries since the Great Schism.

Theosis is central to Orthodox Christian doctrine; it is the telos, the purpose, of human life. “Theosis is the Pearl of Great Price alluded to by Christ” and it “can become a present reality for those who are willing to tread the path, and so it is not exclusively an after-death experience.” The Apostle Paul expresses this experience in saying “it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me,” victory over death.

In his book, Theosis, George Kapsanis, Archimandrite of the Holy Monastery of Saint Gregorious at Mount Athos, provides a succinct explanation of this overarching purpose that God has set down for His human creatures. Archon means ruler; mandra means enclosure: an archimandrite rules a large monastery or group of monasteries; the human ruler thus writes of the ruling purpose of human life. Archimandrite George lists seven purposes in writing his book: to identify “the highest and ultimate purpose of our life; that for which we were created”; to uphold is conviction that “the only truly Orthodox form of pastoral guidance is that which is intended to lead to Theosis,” to “quench the depth of the psyche’s thirst for the Absolute, the Triune God” [1]; to prompt readers to “overflow with gratitude toward our Maker and Creator for His great gift to us, Theosis by Grace”; to have us “realize the irreplaceability of our Holy Church as the only community of Theosis on earth”; to reveal “the magnificence and truth of our Orthodox Faith…as the only faith that teaches and provides Theosis to its members”; and finally, to console our psyches, “for regardless of the degree to which they have been poisoned and darkened by sin, they yearn for the light of Christ’s face.”

Theosis is the purpose for which we were “placed on earth.” In the words of St Gregory the Theologian, a human being is an animal “in the process of Theosis.” Man is the “only one which can become a god” because he is the only animal created “in His image.” God’s image means “the gifts which God gave only to man in order to complete him as an icon of God,” namely, nous, conscience, and “individual sovereignty” (“freedom, creativity, eros, and the yearning for the absolute and for God”); self-awareness—in sum “everything that makes man a person.” The Archimandrite defines nous as “man’s highest faculty,” both the “eye” and the “energy” of the psyche, both what enables the psyche to perceive God’s teachings and commands (it is “cognitive, visionary, and intuitive,” capable of “perceiv[ing] God and the spiritual principles that underlie creation”) and to act in obedience to them. Man’s “fall,” resulting from his first sinful act, fragmented his psyche, causing the nous to “identify itself with the mind, the imagination, the senses, or even the body,” preventing man from achieving “a personal union with his Creator.” Philosophies and “psychological systems” thus fail to “correspond to man’s great yearning for something very great and true in his life.” 

What is this psyche, which yearns for God while no longer knowing how to reach him? The Archimandrite calls it “the most important and least understood of all Biblical words.” Orthodox Christians define it as “a pure unalloyed essence which animates the body and gives it life; it is our immaterial nature, created yet eternal, comprising our cognitive, conative, and affective aspects, including both the conscious and the unconscious.” This implies that “psychic health precedes salvation”; theosis requires continual and victorious spiritual warfare, not mere conversion and baptism. Psyche encompasses “the meanings of five English words: ‘soul,’ ‘life,’ ‘breath,’ ‘psyche’ (“as in modern psychology”), and ‘mind.'” In the West, soul, life, and breath have become estranged from psyche and mind, as in such locutions as the ‘mind/body problem’ in philosophy. “This dislocation is indicative of a deep spiritual malady in Western man” or, more precisely, in Western man following Greek antiquity. The Archimandrite asserts, implausibly, that the ancient Greek philosophers were “very pious and god-fearing people,” that the “Tradition of the Greeks” is a tradition “of piety and respect for God.” In making this claim, he refers to the Greek “yearning for the unknown God,” the temple noted by the Apostle Paul; one may rather suspect that Paul has alertly turned a Greek inscription to his evangelical purposes. The Archimandrite concurrently demotes the Old Testament, admitting that one “find[s] many jut and virtuous people” there, but no “full union with God.” This could only become possible and could only be achieved “with the incarnation of the Divine Logos” described in the New Testament in the mediating Person of Jesus. 

By logos, ancient Greek philosophers meant a variety of things, including order, reason, and knowledge. The Archimandrite transforms these nouns into related verbs: think, reckon, speak, perhaps to make them consonant with a Creator-God, a God of action as well as of words. The Apostle John “completes the philosophical truths of the Ancient Greeks by connecting them to the Hebrew Tradition of his day,” in the striking first sentence of his Gospel, “In the beginning was the Logos, and the Logos was with God, and the Logos was God”—Jesus Christ. “It is in the Logos that creation finds its reason, cause, and purpose.” While “the human race could have been taught to become morally better by the philosophers, by the righteous men and teachers, or by the prophets,” moral virtue does not suffice for salvation. That is especially true since Adam and Eve “desired to become gods not through humility, obedience, or love but through their own power, their own willfulness—egotistically and autonomously.” This led to knowledge of Good and Evil, to the foundation of moral thought, but not to God. On the contrary, the first humans separated themselves from God, suffering not only physical death but “spiritual death.” There was now “a need for a new root for humanity,” for “a new man, who will be healthy and able to redirect the freedom of man towards God.” Jesus met that need as the embodied Logos. “The God-Man Christ, the Son and Logos of God the Father, has two perfect natures: divine and human,” joined, in the words of the Fourth Holy Ecumenical Synod at Chalcedon, “without change, without confusion, without separation, and without division.” “This definition forms the whole theological armory of our Orthodox Church against Christological heresies of all kinds throughout all ages.” With Jesus, “human nature is irrevocably unified with the divine nature because Christ is eternally God-Man”; “human nature is now enthroned in the bosom of the Holy Trinity,” where nothing can “cut human nature off from God.” Individual human beings can “unite again with God” if the repent of the sins that separate them from Him. Sin is “estrangement from Life,” from the Creator-God. Repentance is a “change of nous aiming at “clearing the nous and the heart from sin.” Because sin is so stubborn, now engrained in our nature, repentance and redirection must be continual. The prayer, “Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner” is no one-time-spoken thing. As Lord, as supreme ruler or King of Kings, Jesus can grant mercy not only because He is omnipotent but because He sacrificed Himself for human beings, taking on their sins and dying on their account for us. 

Jesus enables theosis without being the only person enabling it. He could not be fully human without being born of a woman, “the new Eve, the Panagia” or All-Holy One, “who put right the wrong done by the old Eve by becoming the Theotokos or God-birthgiver,” a person “necessary and irreplaceable” to human salvation. Jesus “would not have been able to incarnate if there had not been such a pure, all-holy, immaculate psyche as the Theotokos, who would offer her freedom, her will, all of herself totally to God so as to draw Him towards herself and towards us.” In an Orthodox Christian Church, the picture of the Theotokos is placed in the apse of the altar “to show that God comes to earth and to men through her” as “the bridge by which God descended” and the one “who conducts those of earth to Heaven.” Similarly, although not so exalted, the depictions of Christian saints placed around Jesus the Pantocrator, the All-Ruler, show congregants “the results of God’s incarnation,” namely, “deified men.” The Church is “the place of man’s theosis,” the “body of Christ,” a union not with the divine essence—God’s essence (ousia) is His own, alone, as the one God, “inaccessible and unknowable to us,” an eternal mystery—but “with the deified human nature of Christ.” What we can know, what Christians mean when they say the ‘know God,” are “His energies,” the energies of a Person with whom we can “achieve intimate and personal communion.”

As members of Christ’s body, His Church, through baptism, through being ‘born again,’ “we are not followers of Christ in the way that one might perhaps follow of philosopher or teacher.” This is much more than being “followers of a code of morality,” although it is also that. As a Christian, your spiritual condition determines whether you are a living or a dead member of Christ’s body; “even as dead members, we still do not cease to be members of Christ’s body.” To revive, one needs to do what one did in becoming a member: to repent. “We could not be deified if Christ did not make us members of His body; we could not be saved if the Holy Mysteries of the Church did not exist.” And “if man did not have the image of God in himself, he would not be able to seek its prototype.” This makes the Church different from other organizations. True, like them it has a regime, a ruling order—a Ruler, a set of ruling institutions, a way of life, a telos or purpose. But no other order can bring us to theosis. “Only within the Church can man become a god, and nowhere else.” Of course, as a regime consisting of human beings not yet fully cleansed of sin, “it is possible for scandals to happen in the bosom of the Church.” “We are becoming gods, but not yet.” Scandal is evil but does not excuse any Christian from remaining a member of the Church. God being both essence and energy, and the Church being the living, ‘energetic’ Body of Christ, it is there that human beings can partake of eternal life, preliminarily. If, per impossibile, a human being could see God’s essence, he would die, just as he would die if he touched a bare electric wire, “but if we connect a lamp to the same wire, we are illuminated”; “let us say that something similar happens with the uncreated energy of God.” We will never become gods in essence, only through Christ’s energies in His Church. Pantheistic religions claim the opposite, that God pervades the world not as its Creator, essentially separate from the beings created by Him, but as immanent in all things. And complementarily, if God had only essence and not energies, “He would remain a self-sufficient God, closed within himself and unable to communicate with his creatures.” “God comes out of Himself and seeks to unite” with His human creatures via His uncreated energies; his grace is among those uncreated energies. By those energies he has created and preserved the cosmos, illuminates, sanctifies, and finally deifies man in the limited way described. Because God “has the divine energies, and unites with us by these energies, we are able to commune with Him and to unite with His Grace without becoming identical with God, as would happen if we united with His essence.” “This is the mystery of our Orthodox faith and life.” The Archimandrite insists that the “Western heretics” reject the distinction between God’s essence and His energies and thus “cannot speak about man’s Theosis.” That this is not the case may be seen in the writings of (for example) Pascal. But again, a reader might not come to the Archimandrite when seeking understanding of the teachings of the ‘Western’ churches.

And so, “a Christian is not a Christian simply because he is able to talk about God. He is a Christian because he is able to have experience of God.” This requires desire, struggle, preparation, which make us “worthy, capable, and receptive enough to accept and guard this great gift from God, since God does not wish to do anything to us without our freedom.” The Archimandrite lists three qualities that Christians must cooperate with God in order to enhance their spirituality, to bring them farther along the path to theosis. The first is humility. “Without humility, how will you acknowledge that the purpose of your life is outside yourself, that it is in God?” For some reason, he claims that Roman Catholicism and Protestantism are man-centered, not God-centered, a charge that might correctly be leveled at Aristotle, who considers eudaimonia or happiness of a well-ordered psyche in a well-ordered polis as the purpose of human life. For Christians, however, God must be central because only His grace enables us to continue on the right path, the right regime, the way of life of the Kingdom of God.

The second needed quality is asceticism. “You cannot receive the Holy Spirit if you do not give the blood of your heart in the struggle to cleanse yourself from the passions,” to repent fully, “acquir[ing] the virtues” by giving up your passions. What, then, is the “heart”? It is not, or not simply, “an emotional center,” much less a physical organ of the body. It is “a receptacle for all good and evil,” man’s “psychosomatic center, the deepest and most profound part of our being,” our “inner man,” closely related to but distinct from the nous and the psyche. The heart motivates the man, serving as the battleground of the spiritual warfare between God and Satan, angels and demons. The psyche, in closely related contrast, consists of reasoning powers, the passions, and the appetites—rather as in Plato’s logos, thumos, and epithumia. To walk the path towards theosis, we must will to cleanse our reason by watchfulness, “the continuous guarding of the nous from evil thoughts, cleanse our passionate part by love, cleanse the appetitive part by “self-control,” by moderation.

The third and final needed quality is the willingness to partake of Christ’s “Holy Mysteries,” which are “Holy Baptism, Chrismation, Holy Confession, and the Divine Eucharist.” All of these are necessary because “the passions cover Divine Grace as ashes bury a spark,” and the Mysteries brush the ashes away. So does prayer. The Jesus Prayer, for example, “helps us to concentrate our nous more easily,” enabling the Christian to get a taste of “the sweetness of communion with God,” who is “not an idea, something that we think about, that we discuss or read about” only “but a Person with Whom we come into living and personal communion.” In walking along the way of life of the Christian regime, with the Person who is Christ, we “receive experience” from Him, rather than from those we might otherwise walk with—typically, the wrong crowd. The religions of the Far East—Hinduism, Buddhism, and the like, with their practices of meditation and yoga—can undoubtedly lead the nous away from “the various considerations of the material world,” but they do not lead us to “a dialogue with God.” Without that dialogue, the soul remains trapped in its anthropocentrism, even as it imagines itself to be freed from it.

“Experiences of theosis are proportioned to the purity of man.” This can be achieved gradually, by stages. After tears of repentance for sins, the nous is illuminated by God, now “see[ing] things, the world, and man with another grace.” Tears of love for God result in “theoria,” “in the course of which [stage] man, having already been cleansed from the passions, is illumined by the Holy Spirit,” resulting in theosis, “the vision of the uncreated light of God.” “Those who are very advanced in Theosis see this light, very few in each generation”; such persons are depicted iconographically by halos. “The Grace of Theosis preserves the bodies of the Saints incorruptible, and these are the holy relics which exude myrrh and work miracles,” relics and also icons, graves, and the Churches of the Saints which Orthodox Christians venerated (but do not worship) because they “have something of the Grace of God which the Saint had in his psyche because of his union with God.” 

Such experiences obviously must never be confused with demonic or merely psychological ones, by which “many people have been deluded.” Orthodox Christians should consult their Spiritual Father, who “will discern whether these experiences are genuine or not, and…give appropriate direction to the psyche who is confessing.” Indeed, “our obedience to the Spiritual Father is one of the most basic points of our spiritual path,” the path along which “we acquire an ecclesiastical spirit of discipleship.” “Within the Church we are not isolated members but a unity, a brotherhood, a fraternal community—not only among ourselves, but also with the Saints of God, those who are living on earth today and those who have passed away.” And of course “the head of this body is Christ Himself.”

“Our holy God molded us for Theosis, so if we are not deified, our whole life is a failure.” Causes of such failure include attachment to “the basic cares of life,” including too much time “learning, studying, reading,” working, and socializing, with no time to “pray, to go to Church, or to confess and take Holy Communion.” Such activities “have real and substantial value when undertaken with the Grace of God,” aiming at His glory. “Only when we continue to desire Theosis as well” do “all these find their real meaning in an eternal perspective” and prove “of benefit to us.” Moralism is another snare. “Guidance that only aims for moral improvement is anthropocentric,” making it seem “as if it is our own morality that saves us, and not the Grace of God.” But even an atheist can be moral. Speaking of which, some are blocked from theosis by adopting false doctrines such as anthropocentric humanism, “a socio-philosophical system which is separated from and made independent of God,” leading “contemporary man to a civilization based on selfishness.” Not egocentricity, not ‘class consciousness’ or ‘race-consciousness’ or ‘gender-consciousness,’ not nationalism or even humanitarianism but only ‘theocentrism’ can bring human persons to theosis. It “brings great joy into our life when we know what a great destiny we have, and what blessedness awaits us.” More, “as long as we are closed within ourselves—within our ego—we are individuals but not persons.” “That is to say that when our ego encounters the Thou of God, and the ‘you’ of our brother, ten we begin to find our lost self.” The Divine Liturgy within the Orthodox Christian Church teaches human beings “to overcome the narrow, atomistic interest in which the devil, our sins, and our passions compel us, and instead learn to open up to a communion of sacrifice and love in Christ.” The Archimandrite deplores “the tolerance of the state,” earthly regimes, wherein demi-citizens “squander the precious time of their lives, as well as the powers which God gave them for the purpose of achieving Theosis, in hunting for pleasure and carnal worship.” Archimandrite George is no enthusiast of Church-State separation, although it must be said that Church Establishment carries its own dangers, as contemporary Russia has so tellingly demonstrated.

 

Note

1. Oddly, the Archimandrite claims that “Western Christianity” in both its Roman Catholic and Protestant forms, “aimed at a moral perfection for man which does not depend on God’s Grace.” He is mistaken, but one does not read his book to gain knowledge of Western Christianity.

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

 

In contemporary life, men have pushed Christianity “to the margins of collective life,” largely “by commanding that we no longer think about it.” Yet we continue to do so, as obedience to such a command “does not suit the thinking animal,” even if he is only a weak, “thinking reed.” Jesus himself was an obscure figure in the eyes of Roman and Jewish historians—or, perhaps more accurately, they deliberately obscured him: since Jesus existed and “his religion made a great stir,” Pascal considers that they must have “concealed it on purpose,” unless their histories were altered (#746). Or perhaps they ignored Him because He was not the militant, political Messiah they would have made more of, as political historians. As Manent writes, “the only thing that was splendid in their eyes is what pertains directly or indirectly to force, because such is the human order, the order of force, the order of the flesh,” while Jesus’ splendor manifested itself, in Pascal’s words, only to the “eyes of the heart” (#308). Jesus avoided ‘carnal’ splendor so as better to concentrate men’s attention on the things of the spirit. Things of the spirit not only subordinate human opinion, they subordinate human nature in the sense that the moral virtues, discernible by human reason (as in Aristotle’s eminently sensible ‘mean between two extremes’) do not “affect what theology calls the ‘theological virtues’—faith, hope, and charity—which can always be greater, or whose measure is to be ‘without measure,'” beyond means and extremes. Nor does reason commend humility, neither a theological nor a natural virtue, but nonetheless stands as “the Christian virtue par excellence, precisely in that it is the specific virtue by which the Christian imitates Christ.” (And not only Christianity; Moses is described as the most anav, the most humble man, of his time—in Christian terms, a ‘type’ or ‘figure,’ a prefiguration, of Christ.) Christ’s glory, after death, “has been of use to us, to enable us to recognize him and he had none of it for himself” (#499).

Jesus is undoubtedly the most anav man of His time, of any time. Citing Pascal’s fragment, “The Mystery of Jesus,” Manent observes that at Gethsemane, in his “agony,” Jesus complains, for the only time in His life, “his person…turned entirely to the Father.” He wishes He could be exempted not from a physically excruciating death but from the even more crushing weight of taking on all the sins of human beings. “To see in the fear of death the wellspring of Jesus’s distress and torment in the garden of olives is to give a psychological interpretation, a human interpretation, of a trial whose meaning resides entirely in the divine mission of Jesus, in his highest activity, and not in the passivity of his human nature. It is to banalize, it is to humanize, the ‘cup’ and the ‘hour,’ which belong to him exclusively.” “This punishment is inflicted by no human, but an almighty hand, and only he that is almighty can bear it” (#919). “Jesus is in a garden, not of delight, like the first Adam, who there fell and took with him all mankind, but of agony, where he saved himself and all mankind” (#919).

This agony should not be confused with His “passion,” his suffering on the Cross, when, “far from being reduced to the final impotence of a dying person, he is capable of exercising his all-powerful goodness,” promising salvation to the believing thief and commending His spirit into His Father’s hands. Jesus died “not by natural necessity but by his own will,” having suffered the natural pain of crucifixion but “retain[ing] entire mastery over his death itself.” By giving up his human nature to the designs of men inspired by Satan and more, by allowing Satan a victory, however temporarily, and by “verify[ing] with his Father that the design of God for human beings, that the ‘divine philanthropy,’ includes or requires this ‘laissez-faire’ to sinners,” Jesus “pardons sins” by “being ‘made sin’ in order to be delivered into the hands of sinners, and thus to become a ‘ransom for many,'” as the Gospel writers and the Apostle Paul testify. “By delivering himself into the hands of sinners, he gives license to human liberty to oppose itself to redemption.” At the same time, the Ecclesia, the Assembly, the Church Jesus founds receives the ceremony of the eucharistic sacrifice, the picture of His pardoning sacrifice.  “The sacrifice of Christ allows the Christian to do what was impossible for the disciples in the garden,” who fell asleep: “to keep watch and pray with Jesus.” As a result, “the Christian lives neither in time nor in eternity; he lives in this tension and suspense when the infirmity of the human will is constantly overcome by the grace of Christ.”

Would it not take “a very narrow reason, or a quite ungenerous nature, to simply dismiss this personage as a fiction or a myth, or even a mixture of reality and legend—in short as a creation of this god always at hand which is ‘the human mind'”? As Pascal has it, “Jesus said great things so simply that he seems not to have thought about them, and yet so clearly that it is obvious what he thought about them. Such clarity together with such simplicity is wonderful.” (#309). If fear of God is the beginning of wisdom according to the Bible, wonder is the beginning of wisdom according to philosophy. Pascal invites us to wonder at the Son, not only to fear the wrath of the Father. For “all the splendor of greatness lacks luster for those engaged in pursuits of the mind,” whose greatness “is not visible to kings, rich men, captains, who are all great in a carnal sense.” At the same time, wondering at Jesus does not bring true wisdom as “the greatness of wisdom, which is nothing if it does not come from God, is not visible to carnal or intellectual people…. Jesus without wealth or any outward show of knowledge [1] has his own order of holiness. He made no discoveries; he did not reign, but he was humble, patient, thrice holy to God, terrible to devils, and without sin,” great only “in the eyes of the heart, which perceive wisdom!” (#308). The eyes of the rightly-ordered heart are the eyes of agape. “The infinite distance between body and mind symbolizes the infinitely more infinite distance between mind and charity, for charity is supernatural.” Naturally self-centered, we do not love God or neighbor except when granted to power to do so by divine grace. And so, “the style of the Gospels is remarkable in so many ways; among others for never putting in any invective against the executioners and enemies of Christ”—not “against Judas, Pilate or any of the Jews” (#812).

Understand this about Pascal, Manent urges: “He rejected the temptation to install the mind as sovereign spectator of the natural and human world, exposing the passional roots under whose rule” we attempt to investigate, to comprehend, and finally even to rule nature. “Nature is an infinite sphere whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere,” the “greatest perceptible mark of God’s omnipotence that our imagination should lose itself in that thought” (#199). This means that it cannot be fully comprehended. Not only God but even His creation should humble us, since “such being as we have conceals from us the knowledge of first principles, which arise from nothingness, and the smallness of our being hides infinity from our sight”; we are “limited in every respect.” Limitation is “our true state,” the human condition (#199). Pascal exempts geometry from this stricture, while stipulating that while it does clearly define some things it does not define everything. Qua geometry, a geometer cannot know God; he cannot know man, the being who practices geometry; one who wields geometry cannot really conquer nature. For certainty, for go to Euclid. For all the other “conditions of existence,” if we stay on the human plane, go to Montaigne, to skepticism, to Pyrrhonism, or Socratic zeteticism. “The temptation of the ‘proud’ philosopher is to seek a path, a ‘method,’ to apply the geometric order to the comprehension of the human world,” as Descartes and Hobbes essay to do. This and other “abstract sciences are not proper to man,” not a way toward understanding man (#687). “However,” Manent comments, for Pascal “there is indeed a third possibility, a third path, what I have called the Christian proposition.”

“Christianity is not a chapter in a dictionary of religions, one religion among the religions of the world; it places itself directly on the plane of universality that is that of the philosophers as well as the geometers,” while “bring[ing] entirely new elements of orientation concerning our ‘true good’ as well as our ‘true state.'” “Modern reason—philosophy or science—as it took form and force in the seventeenth century, proposes to advance methodically from certainty to certainty, from evidence to evidence, unfolding or deploying before us a fabric of continuous and homogeneous knowledge,” whereas Pascal “invites to negotiate a journey in a broken world whose heterogeneity cannot be overcome by our natural capacity for knowledge.” No ‘leap of faith,’ for him; “he proposes to us a journey of reason that leads us before a choice of the heart, of the knowing heart.” The knowledge Pascal has in mind isn’t so much knowledge of the Bible or of Church doctrine. In this sense, he is neither Protestant nor (typically) Catholic. Nor is this a knowledge of nature, an ‘argument from design,’ or an argument from human nature. He does not propose a civil religion, like the Romans, like Mohammad. [2] He argues instead from the human condition, which is “divided between greatness and misery.” Perhaps most troubling to us, especially to ‘us democrats,’ the human condition encompasses persons that God Himself has blinded to His works, deafened to His Word. 

That is because, since Eden, human beings are no longer good. They are in a condition of misery, on account of that. “The experience by which one enters into Christianity is that of an impotence of the will to make effective the capacity for good that is in it.” Nothing human beings can do eradicates our self-centeredness. [3] Self-centered but not self-knowing. “Among the most difficult questions to answer is first this one: What does he, what does she, truly will? And also, What do I truly will?” To know ourselves, we need to admit into our precious ‘selves’ the only Being who is all-knowing, yet unknown to ourselves. Divine grace does not force our will to do its bidding; we can reject it, even if it gets our attention forcefully, as it did when God knocked the future apostle, Paul, off his horse. “Grace and liberty can have no meaning unless liberty can refuse grace, or refuse itself to grace.” Desiring God, wishing for God—neither of those suffice. One must will to discover God, will to ally oneself to Him. (Did Nietzsche understand this? Is that why he rejects God by exercising a will not to God but to power?) Those who do not seek Him receive no signs of Him. The Christian’s will “is too weak, or too fragile, not to ask for aid and confirmation by the divine will. To intimately link his own will with the will of God and to pray for that is not to renounce his own will by passively delivering it to a foreign and infinitely superior will; it is to confirm and strengthen his own will at the same time that one rectifies it.” Only then will it know “truly and completely…the good it wants.”

The matter of salvation implies an answer to the question of ‘Salvation from what?’ Christians are saved from damnation, a teaching that proves a stumbling block for many: Why should the failure to ‘believe in God’ warrant an eternity in Hell? Pascal does not reject such questions out of hand. “One must know when it is right to doubt, to affirm, to submit. Anyone who does otherwise does not understand the force of reason” (#170). Manent suggests that for the Christian soul as understood by Pascal, Hell is not “a scandal or even, properly speaking, an obstacle, but rather…an element of orientation,” “the counterpart logically and spiritually necessary to complete the practical framework in which human choice is inscribed.” God “did not want to damn any human being in particular,” but neither did He want “to save absolutely all human beings.” In His Son, the Father offered salvation to mankind. That means there is “a predestination to salvation, but not to damnation.” This offer was not tendered to each human being separately. “One cannot enter into the understanding of the history of salvation except by seeing that its subject is mankind taken as a whole and in the succession of its states.” The first “state” or condition of mankind was Eden, and there the offer of salvation, the warning against damnation, was indeed necessarily tendered to individuals, for the simple reason that there, mankind consisted of only two persons. After Adam and Eve made the wrong choice, mankind has “live[d] under the regime of concupiscence,” and God deals with us on those terms, unreturned as we are to the condition of free will. “God no longer wants to entrust perseverance in justice to the free will of human beings.” What He does do is to choose us, taking human form and thereby “rejoin[ing] us in our slavery” and offering us “a sort of servitude” or slavery in His justice. Pascal explains, “God’s will has been to redeem men and open the way of salvation to those who seek it, but men have shown themselves so unworthy that it is right for God to refuse to some, for their hardness of heart, what he grants to others by a mercy they have not earned.” In this adventure, “there is enough light for those who desire only to see and enough darkness for those of a contrary disposition.” #149).

Putting this in ‘American’ terms, the terms of the Declaration of Independence of human equality in the possession of unalienable natural rights, there is a difference in emphasis. “In the Christian perspective”—a perspective shared by many but not all of the Founders—the unity of the human race “does not rest solely on sharing the same nature, but even more on participating in the same adventure, that of the covenant with God, Creator, and Redeemer.” In Pascal’s view as expressed by Manent, “this humano-divine adventure presupposes and produces a human unity that is much closer than that caused by the social and political nature of man, a solidarity between human creatures that is incomprehensible to natural reason because rooted in their eventful relations with the Most High.” In this way, “the most profound determinants of the human condition escape individual choices: involuntary heirs of sin, human beings receive the promise of a filial adoption that they can neither conceive nor will by their own powers.” We are very much inclined to object that we did not, as individuals, eat the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, that we, as individuals, deserve no divine condemnation, or at least no eternal punishment. But “our sentiment of injustice comes from a valid, but narrow, idea of justice that would reside entirely in the individual responsibility of the agent,” ignoring “the closeness of the bond that attaches each of us to all other human beings,” our condition of “being the object of the same divine purpose in which each is destined to inscribe himself consciously and willingly.” The “true human history” is “the history of salvation,” the “ever-closer covenant between God and human beings,” God’s ongoing effort” to “overcome the human reluctance to accept his benevolent purpose,” which Manent considers to be His offer of adoption into His family as “Sons of God.” Yes, God is omnipotent, “but it is his all-goodness, not his omnipotence, that is the raison d’être of his design and action.” In the sinner, “bad will does not escape from the power of God, but it flees from his goodness.” In Pascal’s words, “the man who knows what his master wants will be more heavily beaten because of what his knowledge enables him to do” (#538). Christ “made his offer as a man redeeming all those wishing to come to him. If some die on the way, that is their misfortune; for his part, he offered them redemption.” (#911).

The philosophers have mismeasured the human condition by “inspir[ing] impulses of pure greatness” and “impulses of pure abasement”; neither of these is “the state of man” Rather, “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 state of abasement has been passed” (#398). [4] “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). Among the religions, only Christianity “teach[es] how to cure pride and concupiscence,” teaches us “our true good, our duties, the weaknesses which lead us astray, the cause of these weaknesses, the treatment that can cure them, and the means of obtaining such treatment.” Only the God of the Bible teaches that “it is I who have made you and I alone can teach you what you are.” (#149). While “philosophers and all the religions and sects in the world have taken natural reason for their guide, Christians alone have been obliged to take their rules from outside themselves and to acquaint themselves with those which Christ left for us with those of old, to be handed down again to the faithful” #769).Your faith in Me is the opposite of blindness.

Manent concludes with a set of reflections on the Pensées as a whole. He begins with the Christian regime, the Christian way of life: “For Pascal, the Christian life is a life—a distinctive life, with its own and exclusive principles.” A democratic way of life inclines us to toward “an affective disposition quick to recognize and assert human similarity.” Christianity recognizes our shared humanity while insisting that our shared nature does not yield shared ways of life led by similar human types. “In the case of the Christian life—it is particularly important to emphasize this today—the end at which it aims, the criteria that guide it, the motives and sentiment that move it, are absolutely distinct and even exclusive to it.” The Christian regime thus differs from all the other regimes, challenging them without intending violently to change them. “The Christian actively participates in the society of which he is a member and respects its rules, but he draws from elsewhere than this society the deepest motives of his conduct.”

Christianity does not discover God by means of reason but of revelation. This doesn’t make Christians irrational, persons who engage in a sacrifizio d’intellectio; rather, it means they understand “the limits of reason as an instrument of knowledge.” “There is nothing so consistent with reason as this denial of reason” (#182), the denial of its capacity fully to understand God or even to provide irrefutable proof of His existence. Nor do Christians rightly “interfere in the physical science based on reason and sense experience,” any more than scientists have reason to interfere with Christianity. Pascal identifies “two excesses: to exclude reason, to admit nothing but reason” (183). That both Christians and scientists do get in the others’ way is a fact, but not a necessary fact. It is, however, a danger. Since “reason is the instrument par excellence of man, therefore also the instrument of his self-love,” “reason does not stop trying to gain the upper hand by reducing the highest, most decisive, contents of religion to its measure.” Manent adds, astringently, that “theologians are particularly prone to this temptation.” “Our reason and our will are thick as thieves in us: as soon as one lets them take the initiative, everything is lost! Self-love the ‘I’ that prefers itself to everything gains the upper hand and will stop at nothing to keep it. One must therefore begin with God; one must really attach oneself to God.”

For example, the mystery of original sin will remain humanly unsolved, “the mystery furthest from our knowledge,” since “nothing is more shocking to our reason than to say that the sin of the first man has made guilty those who, being so far removed from this source, seem incapable of participating in it” (#131). We are “slaves or prisoners of a fault that we did not commit.” How can “a child incapable of will” be eternally damned “for a sin in which he seems to have so little part that it was committed six thousand years before he existed?” (#131). “We cannot conceive Adam’s state of glory, or the nature of his sin, or the way it has been transmitted to us. These are things which took place in a state of nature quite different from our own and which pass our present understanding.” (#431). What Pascal says we can take from this teaching is not an understanding of how it could possibly be just but of how much it explains about us. “All that is important for us to know” in this life “is that we are wretched, corrupt, separated from God but redeemed by Christ” (#560). “The Christians’ God is a God who makes the soul aware that he is its sole good: that in him alone can it find peace; that only in loving him can it find joy: and who at the same time fills it with loathing for the obstacles which hold it back and prevent it from loving God with all its might” (#460). As Manent observes, the depth of our sickness, our sin—which we cannot understand, only experience—finds its remedy only in the height of God’s healing grace. “God heals an injustice in me of which I am ignorant, or of whose depth I am unaware, by a remedy that is beyond all justice or goodness that I can conceive.” Sin can only be cured by God by “rectif[ying] the very direction of the sinner’s being,” by “caus[ing] it to participate in the divine goodness itself.” Both our sin and our salvation stand beyond “the rules of human justice.” “Reason is entirely incapable of understanding what ‘Adam’ mean, just as it is entirely incapable of understanding what ‘Jesus Christ’ means.” As Pascal has it, “the whole of faith consists in Jesus Christ and Adam and the whole of morality is concupiscence and grace” (#226). Faith, not reason. That is, one can only begin to understand our “human condition”—as Pascal calls it, borrowing from Montaigne, who sees it without understanding it—if we first accept the noetic premises of Christianity. If we only accept the noetic premises of sense perception or of some other ‘self-evident’ natural truth, we will remain perplexed without a reliable guide.

Christianity always goes against the human grain. From age to age, it goes against some new dimension of that grain. The modern dimension of the human grain consists of, among several streaks, egalitarianism—Tocqueville’s ‘democracy.’ Neither Manent nor Pascal identifies Christianity’s origin in Christianity, as Tocqueville does. “Contrary to a widespread opinion, the lane of equality that we presuppose does not result from the ‘influence’ of Christianity, or from its ‘secularization,’ but from the work of the modern state and of modern democracy, which presuppose the prior rejection of the principes of Christianity, or in any case refuse it any role in the formation of the ‘common.’ It is to the work of the modern state and modern democracy that we owe this new being, the human being who is compassionate toward his fellow human being, the kind of human being that all of us have, more or less, become.” Compassion is indeed a passion, a sentiment, but for Christians “the love of neighbor is not a sentiment but a virtue, this virtue is the object of a command, and it is a command because the neighbor is not naturally lovable” and neither am I. Nor is either of us naturally loving in the Christian, agapic rather than erotic, way. “Pity for the unfortunate does not run counter to concupiscence,” Pascal acutely notices; “on the contrary, we are very glad to show such evidence of friendship and thus win a reputation for sympathy without giving anything in return.” And how can a human being possibly love not only his neighbor but his enemy, “someone who is hateful”? Only by “the double mediation of Adam and of Christ,” the recognition of our common sickness, sin, and of the only cure for that sickness. Contra Machiavelli and his epigoni, “this does not prevent the Christian from vigorously fighting this enemy when the common good demands…but it rues out excluding him from the possibility of salvation, excluding him from mankind as it is defined and understood by Christianity.”

Pascal shares with Orthodox Christianity the conviction that “the religious life of the soul is an activity that obeys rigorous rules and demands constant vigilance, because this activity must imperatively be continuous.” To be sure, grace comes from God, but “its reception demands the action—the cooperation—of the human will.” Manent quotes a letter from Pascal to Gilberte, Pascal’s sister: “One must continually make new efforts to acquire this continual newness of spirit, because one cannot preserve the former grace except by the acquisition of a new grace,” primarily through prayer, whose purpose is “the condition of a constant charity,” a constant agape. That condition, as it were the divine condition correcting the human condition, brings joy to Christians here and now, a prelude to the music to be heard in the coming extension of the Kingdom of God. “We must work ceaselessly to preserve this joy that tempers our fear,” he wrote to a friend, “and to preserve this fear that preserves our joy.” 

 

Notes

1. Not quite so. As a child, He displayed his comprehensive knowledge of Scripture in the synagogue, to the astonishment of the learned rabbis.
2. “While the religion of Muhammad conquered its empire by gratifying some of the most powerful passions of human nature, especially virile nature, the Christian religion acquired its authority by declaring itself the irreconcilable enemy of these same passions”; “the word of Christ does not allow itself to be known, like the sword of Muhammad.”
3. For example: “It is untrue that we are worthy to be loved by others. It is unfair that we should want such a thing. If we were born reasonable and impartial, with a knowledge of ourselves, and others, we should not give our wills this bias However, we are born with it and so we are born unfair.” (#421).
4. See also fragment #149: “Man’s greatness and wretchedness are so evident that the true religion that the true religion must necessarily teach us that there is in man some great principle of greatness and some great principle of wretchedness. It must also account for such amazing contradictions.”

 

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.