Will Morrisey Reviews

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.

 

 

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.