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
- Not quite so. As a child, He displayed his comprehensive knowledge of Scripture in the synagogue, to the astonishment of the learned rabbis.
- “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.”
- 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).
- 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.”
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