Pascal’s Way Back to God – An Answer To The Errors of Modern Philosophers
By Gary L. Morella
With the rise of Rationalism in the seventeenth century, the central mysteries of the Christian Faith came under attack. Blaise Pascal planned to counter the Rationalist threat with a systematic work of apologetics. However, he died before he could write the book, but the material he had collected for the project, a series of disconnected reflections, was published under the title of Pensees.
Before we get into Pascal’s apologies, we will consider the nature of apologetics as described in G.H. Dugan’s Beyond a Reasonable Doubt in regard to the teaching of the First Vatican Council (1869-1870). What is described in this teaching is practically an emulation of Pascal’s Pensees. Then we will look at the climate of the times that required Pascal’s Pensees.
Faith, as the Council defined it, is "an assent of the intellect to the truth." Faith, it declared, is "the supernatural virtue whereby, inspired and assisted by the grace of God, we believe that the things which God has revealed are true, and this not because the intrinsic truth of the things revealed is plainly perceived by the natural light of reason, but because of the authority of God Himself who reveals them, and who can neither be deceived no deceive." This teaching was repeated and developed by the Second Vatican Council in its dogmatic constitution On Divine Revelation. In this document, faith is taken in the wider sense of "the faith that works through love" (Gal. 5:6), so that it includes not only its essential characteristic of an intellectual assent to truth, but also the commitment of the entire self to God, a "working faith" per the Epistle of James 2:14-26, which is absolutely necessary for salvation as evidenced by the Gospel of Matthew 25:34-46.
There are, the First Vatican Council declared, two God-given means by which men may learn the religious and moral truths necessary for the right ordering of human life: reason and faith. Reason is that which distinguishes man from the lower animals. It is because he has this capacity for abstract thought that he has been able to create science, philosophy, literature, political systems, religion and moral codes – of which there is no sign in the lower animals. The teaching of the Council on the role of reason in the attainment of religious truth is opposed to Fideism on the one hand and Rationalism on the other.
Fideism is the view, espoused by Luther and others, that human reason by its natural powers is incapable of attaining any certain knowledge of religious truth, since our only source of certain knowledge in this field is faith.
Rationalism is the view, held by Spinoza, Kant and others, that human reason is all-sufficient. All that we can know – all that we need to know – about God and the management of human life is to be provided by human reason, rightly used.
Rejecting Fideism, the Council taught that human reason is capable of attaining some genuine knowledge of religious truths such as the existence of a transcendent Creator. But it also taught, contradicting the Rationalists, that divine revelation was necessary, and this on two grounds: first, in order that men might arrive quickly, and with certainty allowing for no error, at the knowledge of truths that were in principle attainable by unaided reason, and second, because man has a supernatural destiny, which he can know about and fulfill only by assenting to divine revelation.
When we assent to some statement, accepting it as true, we do so on the basis of evidence, which may be intrinsic or extrinsic. The former pertains to the witness that the statement bears to its own truth, so that the human mind when it grasps the meaning of the statement sees by its own powers that the statement is true. The latter pertains to the testimony of reliable witnesses testifying to some truth of which they have intrinsic evidence, e.g., the testimony of eye-witnesses in a murder trial.
When we assent to supernatural mysteries, such as the Trinity of Persons in God, of which we have no direct experience, our assent is based on extrinsic evidence. We accept this as the truth, not because we have seen it for ourselves, but because it has been revealed to us by God, who sees the realities of which He speaks: "No one has at any time seen God; the only-begotten Son, who is in the bosom of the Father, he has revealed him" (John 1:18).
The First Vatican Council declared, "The assent of faith is brought about by the grace of God, with which man freely cooperates." This grace certainly was made available to the authors of Sacred Scripture as the "inspired Word of God." And we will see that it was not lacking in the apologetics of Blaise Pascal. The Council further pointed out that the assent of faith, while it is essentially supernatural, is in harmony with the demands of human reason, for there are rational grounds, called the motives of credibility, which justify, though they do not compel, the assent of faith. These motives of credibility, distinct from the revelation itself, bear witness to its divine origin.
Since God is the Author of both faith and reason, and He cannot contradict Himself, there cannot be any contradiction between the truths that He has revealed and truths established with certainty by human reason. Someone maintaining that such a contradiction exists has either misunderstood some articles of faith or mistaken a matter of opinion for a truth that has been established with certainty by reason.
The world of Pascal was under the influence of the philosophers who developed Descartes’s basic ideas in political and religious directions. It was the modern philosophical world of Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza where the three basic issues were idealism, rationalism, and dualism.
Idealism is the core notion that the mind does not know things that are not oriented to being; ultimate reality lies in a realm transcending phenomena with the essential nature of reality lying in consciousness or reason where only mental states or entities are knowable. It’s opposite is realism, a doctrine that universals exist outside the mind; the conception that objects of sense perception or cognition exist independently of the mind.
Rationalism became mathematicism, the one method for all inquiry, a unitary method for mathematics and physics that must exclude faith and spirituality. It was extended to all realms of thought, in many instances to ridiculous extremes where Spinoza believed that the implied QED after every "proof" sufficed for showing the indisputable efficacy of the geometrical form of his ethics. The great diversity of Aristotle and Aquinas through their approaches to reality via natural philosophy and metaphysics is suppressed, as the rationalists want to fix hypotheses to explain every area of life. Jacques Maritain said that rationalism will go between pantheism, the identification of God with respect to one’s own idea of the universe per Spinoza, and agnosticism, the denial of or simply not caring about any possible knowledge of God, because the knowledge of God is a challenge to the human mind.
Cartesian dualism is the separation of the world into the mechanism of the body and the consciousness of the mind with the constant danger of the reduction of the human being to one or the other pole. For Hobbes, the reduction was to the mechanistic side that left man open to various pressures and manipulations. For Spinoza, the reduction was to the spiritualizing of man, an extreme stoicism where there was no room for effective life or love.
Hobbes was the example of the solitary self in opposition to the world. His was a great material vision when he said, "It seems to me that there exists a single true thing in the entire world, and that truth is matter." He used a mathematical model like Descartes’s as everything in the past was marred by not having a scientific approach to ethics. His Leviathan is the blueprint for an artificial mechanized society. He held that it was wrong for Aristotle, on the fundamentals of politics, to say, "Man is a social and political being." Hobbes says no. By nature we are selfish, isolated, and in fundamental antagonism with others. Aristotle recognized that all men by nature desire to know, and that knowing is great fulfillment for rational life. Hobbes says No. We just seek knowledge for power, sharing that notion with Bacon, or for vanity’s sake. He begins with a notion that human nature is a point of desire or appetite, a lowest common denominator approach whereby mankind is reduced to being animalistic in seeking satisfaction for appetites. He defines good as what is pleasant or satisfying as opposed to Aristotle’s pleasurable, useful and noble good, which commands respect. Noble good for Hobbes is nothing but a sense of honor; there is no highest good, no "summum bonum." Taking his bearings solely by materialistic philosophy, there is no good on earth for Hobbes that will satisfy human beings as we’re in perpetual motion always seeking fulfillment for our desires. Power is the key for understanding human life – the ability to control and insure future access to goods that are satisfying. Religion is nothing more than an invented superstitious fear that humans have about not knowing their future state. The "real fear" for Hobbes is his natural condition for mankind where politics are artificial. We are equal because of the following: we’re equally vulnerable, not equal in dignity under God but how we may hurt others; we all think that we’re equal in terms of our assessment of ourselves leading to a state of war necessary for self preservation. The Ancients knew that there was a competition for scarce resources but they had a more complex human being who had a soul and was capable of seeing the common good. Hobbes complete rejection of the Ancients left him with nothing in common so war was inevitable.
Let’s now summarize Hobbes’s "Pensees."
We need to preserve ourselves. We need glory to be better than others. A state of war means no security. We have a continual fear of violent death. Life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. The state of nature is very sorry as the body is in constant motion and conflict. Nothing can be unjust. There is no justice by nature. I do what I have to do. I have a right to everything for self-preservation. No one can blame me. We build on the fear of violence and the desire for the good life that leads me to become rational, to make social contracts, to agree to lay down my right to all things with respect to your equal rights. I won’t harm you; you won’t harm me. Out of selfishness we will get morality. Liberty is the freedom to move. Those who are powerful do what they want and those who are weak make due with what they have.
A problem arises. What if one "can get away with it?" Hobbes has no answer. Upon closer inspection, however, he most certainly does. Push laws to the maximum in the name of self-interest where minimal morality becomes the defining nature for all morality. Welcome to the administration of William Jefferson Clinton whose name could be aptly changed to William Hobbes Clinton.
Leo Strauss said that the world of Hobbes will be a "joyless quest for joy" where everything gets reduced to self-preservation. What is it that makes life worth living? Surely it has to be more than staying alive in the Hobbesian world.
Leviathan is an artificial society, created by human beings to have the order of the state that has near divine qualities for Hobbes in that it becomes a "mortal god." The irony is that in the name of liberty, Leviathan demands the surrender of complete authority to the state watching out for our interest always in terms of self-preservation. This sovereign will have the following qualities: 1) it will have knowledge of good and evil, 2) it will decree what is right or wrong, 3) it will insure majority rule, and 4) it can not be accused as it is the ultimate arbiter holding the keys to war and peace. It is no accident that the first quality bears a striking resemblance to the Fall in Genesis as a result of believing the lies of the devil.
Onto the scene comes Baruch Spinoza whose significance is the working out of the mechanism of modern philosophy, especially monism, one reality understood by the human mind.
Why do we need the religious view Spinoza develops? There was something unsatisfying by Hobbes’s sovereign state, the brutality of it. The human mind and heart seeks a higher vision of the modern project. Spinoza writes The Ethics using the Euclidean method of axioms, theorems, and demonstration of proofs. Everything is identified with God; God is nature – pantheism with the notion of eternity radically transformed due to a stoic like acquiescence into the fatalism of the mechanical model with consciousness serving as the parallel universe where one’s vector within the whole is made, at least for Spinoza, crystal clear. Spinoza inverts Aquinas by beginning with God, and substance, laying out definitions like Euclid leading to the geometry of pantheism. Aquinas started with reason to argue the existence and nature of God. Spinoza sounds good at first but problems quickly develop. He claims one substance, God, with everything else absorbed into God. God as cause is indwelling and not the transcendent cause of all things. God is not separate from the universe but is within the universe. In short, God is immanent and not the transcendent cause of the universe. Teleology is not acceptable in a mechanistic universe since telos (final cause) is due to our ignorance. There is no contingency; everything happens by necessity. Thought is reduced to seeing your ideas parallel the mechanism of the universe that defines a world that includes just forces and appetites. As we become more understanding of scientific explanations of causes, we’re more ready to accept the way things are in accord with the development of a full world view of science. Through the stoic notion of acquisition, one sees that he has his own share in the power and mechanism of the universe. Freedom is the knowledge of necessity giving a higher understanding of the universe. A wise man will not be disturbed in spirit but be conscious of God Himself and things due to a certain eternal necessity that never ceases to be, i.e., always possessing the true acquiescence of his spirit.
The end result is that unity becomes an obsession. It is looked for everywhere. The significance of the human spirit dwindles as it is only seen as part of the whole. In the name of liberty, the view of the pantheist baptizes and sanctifies anything that happens due to raw power. The dignity required of human beings is lost when the modern notion of rights is required.
Stanley L. Jaki in Miracles and Physics gets to the crux of the problem when he observes that it was Galileo who could exalt the human mind and debase the divine mind in the same breath. When he stated that the human mind was the greatest marvel of creation, Galileo also equated man’s knowledge of geometry with the Creator’s knowledge of it. From there it was a small step to deriving nature’s geometrical structure from the mind. Such a nature soon was seen to be in no need either of mind or of God. The perception was achieved just a decade or so before science came of age through Newton’s Principia. In that perception as offered by Spinoza, nature and God were made identical which simply excluded the possibility of miracles. Much less noted was the most devastating consequence of the Spinozian position. It consisted in Spinoza’s thorough perplexity about the existence of concrete, specific, limited things making up nature and providing science with its subject matter. As Jaki notes, "Spinoza’s attention to this problem arising from his philosophy was called by E.W. von Tschirnhausen, a gentleman-philosopher from Heidelberg, in 1676. All that Spinoza offered in reply was that he hoped to put the matter ‘in due order,’ an impossible project insofar as it was to reduce the order embodied in the specific varieties of things to an order conceived a priori." Of course, the genesis of Spinoza’s difficulties, as pointed out by Jaki, was Cartesian rationalism that aimed at complete certainty (equating it with mathematics which is a series of tautologies). A common sense approach admitting to the unconditional acknowledgment of external reality was never considered by these modern philosophies. Thus, insanity prevailed.
Etienne Gilson in The Unity of Philosophical Experience sums up Spinoza’s philosophy as "metaphysical parallelism." Spinoza decided that thought and extension were two attributes of one and the same infinite substance, flowing from that substance with the same necessity, and according to the same law, so that every mode of extension had to find its equivalent in a corresponding mode of thought. God, being the only true substance, was therefore the common source of those parallel attributes. Malabranche rejected the system of Spinoza because to conceive mind and body as two finite modes of two attributes of the divine substance was to identify them with God, which was pantheism. Bodies, therefore do not act, they merely exhibit particular modes of God’s action.
In a society where the freedom of individuals is reduced to their coincidence with the state, intellectual freedom has to reduce itself to the coincidence of each particular intellect with that of the state in the same manner that the aforementioned bodies reflect particular modes of God’s actions. So much for free will. Per Gilson, "It is Averroism or Spinozism gone mad."
Maritain in The Degrees of Knowledge gives us a warning that we would do well to heed. "May it never be forgotten what an error it would be to try to build a Philosophy of Nature, and a fortiori a metaphysics, on the theoretical conclusions of modern physics and its explanations of the world, taken as ontological foundations, as if those conclusions and explanations could be utilized as such by the philosopher and without a previous rigid critique. That was the error committed by Spinoza with the physics of his day." Translation: The Cartesians got just what they deserved – Spinoza!
Gilson makes come cogent observations re. Descartes’s God. "How thoughtful and accommodating a God indeed was Descartes’s God! All-powerful, He had created just the kind of world which Cartesian philosophy could explain; immutable, He was preserving things with so conscientious a regularity that Descartes could unfold the whole explanation of his world without bothering any more about Him. Pascal had clearly perceived that deep intention, when he wrote that in all his philosophy, Descartes ‘would have been quite willing to dispense with God. But he had to make Him give a fillip to set the world in motion; beyond this, he has no further need of God.’" Prophetic words for the "Lone Ranger" of the 17th century, and the only philosopher until the 19th century, per Peter Kreeft in Christianity for Modern Pagans – Pascal’s Pensees, who did not climb onto Descartes’s new methodological bandwagon, which the 18th century misnamed "the Enlightenment" – namely, trying to do philosophy and even life by the scientific method.
Pascal rose up to give a reality check by blowing the whistle on the extremes and madness of the modern philosophers. He exposed the "methodical doubt" of Descartes for what it was, a false presupposition. Pascal saw perfectly well that Descartes never really doubted whether he was awake or asleep, of sound mind or insane. The point that Pascal wants to make is not simply that the doubt of Descartes was feigned, but rather that, even though he seriously tried, Descartes could not have doubted such truths. They come to us from nature; it is not in our power not to assent to them, which is precisely what is meant by their being evident. The mind does not see why they are true, but it sees that they are true. How does the mind see it? In trying to refuse them assent, since however hard one tries to do so, he fails.
Descartes is useless per Pascal since he goes to the trouble of demonstrating propositions whose truth is evident. He is uncertain, because his way of demonstrating them is so complicated that the mind feels rather shaken in its certitude after following them to the end. According to Descartes, I cannot be quite sure I am awake, or that there are other beings besides myself, until I have established my own existence in the Second Meditation, the existence of God in the Third and Fifth Meditations, His veracity if the Fourth Meditation, and the existence of the world of bodies (including my own) in the Sixth Meditation. Now I may not understand that long chain of reasons. That doesn’t matter because I haven’t ceased one moment knowing that I am awake and not insane; in short, I have not doubted one moment the truth of what nature teaches me in a most convincing way. Principles are not lacking demonstrations; their certitude is above demonstration.
Pascal, per Gilson in A History of Philosophy, stands "betwixt and between, a skeptic to the dogmatists and a dogmatists to the skeptics. But who knows but what this is not a faithful picture of the human condition? Neither skepticism nor dogmatism is the truth. It is not true that all is uncertain and that nothing is known, since, in all domains, the principles are certain to the sight of those that have eyes to see them. But it is not correct, either, that every true proposition is rationally demonstrable, for the principles are not subject to demonstration and yet they are true."
Jaki, in Pierre Duhem, Scientist and Catholic, shows the effects of Cartesianism in the modern world with this observations. "We live in a secularist age which is not willing to learn from the colossal debacle of institutionalized Marxist slogans about religion as a mere opiate of the people. By and large, scientists in the western world fail to protest about those colleagues of theirs who, blessed with literary and performing talents, keep preaching a now two-hundred-year-old message of secularist Western culture. The message, first formulated by the gurus of the Enlightenment, consists in the claim that science is the only reliable savior of mankind and that for science to be born, Christianity, or the religion most explicitly steeped in belief in a most extraordinary Savior, first must be discredited."
Continuing, Jaki says "That religion, including Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular, can only be tolerated as a subjective option, is the implicit message of pontificating scientists, all to ready to perform before the batteries of television cameras. The option they allow to that religion is a lame license to operate as an opiate which, so they hope, proper exposure to science will sufficiently prevent from doing too much harm."
Catholics are mistaken if they expect Catholic facts to prevail in secularist consciousness. The academics to say nothing of the media will continue in their misguided belief that science had forever disposed of the possibility and fact of Revelation, especially as given in Jesus Christ, the only Lord. It is on that belief that rests the basic dogma of secularism, namely, that man is his own master, accountable to no one on this earth, let alone above it.
Blaise Pascal was 300 years ahead of his time. His words in his Pensees ring out with the same clarity today as they did when he put them to print. Peter Kreeft says, "Pascal is the first postmedieval apologist. He is ‘for today’ because he speaks to modern pagans, not to medieval Christians. Most Christian apologetics today is still written from a medieval mind-set in one sense; as if we still lived in a Christian culture, a Christian civilization, and a society that reinforced the Gospel. No, the honeymoon is over. The Middle Ages are over. The news has not yet sunk in fully in many quarters."
Pensees 6 addresses two great primal truths – that "man is happy with God and wretched without God." In the words of Augustine, "Thou has made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless until they rest in Thee" [Confessions I, 1,2]. All the different forms of Modernist, revisionist Christianity have in common the rejection of the first of these two points, sin. Instances include radical feminism and homosexuality, pop psychology masking as religion, "creation spirituality", wicca, the New Age Movement, and classical theological "demythologizing" ala the Jesus Seminar, which rears its ugly head publicly only twice a year, Christmas and Easter.
Pensees 678 "Man is neither angel nor beast, and it is unfortunately the case that anyone trying to act the angel acts the beast." The two most life-changing revolutions in modern times were the scientific-industrial revolution, which taught man to live and think abstractly, like an angel; and the sexual revolution, which taught man to live and think like an animal. The first knows only the head, the second knows only the hormones. Neither knows the heart. [See Kreeft, Christianity for Modern Pagans, Pascal’s Pensees.]
In Pensees 131 Pascal formerly addresses the questions of Descartes’s dream doubt. How do we know with certainty that we are not dreaming now? Pascal implies that Descartes did not answer the question with the inference that universal doubt is psychologically impossible.
Pensees 84 "Descartes. In general terms one must say: … Pointless, uncertain, and arduous. Even if it were true we do not think that the whole of philosophy would be worth an hour’s effort." Descartes wanted certainty, utility, and ease above all in his philosophy. The Ancients lacked certainty, he said, which was the means to the end of utility, or efficiency, or "the conquest of nature." This conquest led to the easy life. Did his philosophy realize these goals? No, not by a long shot. Life has never been so full of confusion and uncertainty as a result of civilization being seduced by Descartes. All the statistics of societal aberrations are up proving that Pascal is a prophet and Descartes is a false prophet.
Pensees 140 "Even if Epictetus did see the way quite clearly, he only told men: ‘Your are on the wrong track.’ He shows that there is another, but he does not lead us there. The right way is to want what God wants. Christ alone leads to it." This is the beginning of a series of Pensees that Kreeft discussed in his book, which makes me, stand in awe of Pascal. Here, we see that Pascal had the courage to tell the uncompromising truth of his faith that we’re lost without Christ. As Kreeft observes, "Many philosophers can do the first thing: tell us we are on the wrong track. Even Marx can do that. Some can go farther and tell us what the right track is: for example, moralists like Plato, Epictetus and the Stoics. But only Christ can get us there, a fact Pascal unashamedly proclaimed.
Pascal in Pensees 199 scolds the theoretical rashness of Descartes, who thought that he could deduce all the truths of nature from the principles of his philosophy, and the practical rashness of technologists like Bacon, who thought that his "knowledge for power" and "man’s conquest of nature" by the "new organon" of inductive logic and scientific method would create a Utopia of wisdom, goodness, happiness, prosperity and peace.
One of the most powerful of all the Pensees is 136 on Diversion. Pascal asks "What else does it mean to be Superintendent, Chancellor, Chief Justice, but to enjoy a position in which a great number of people come every morning from all parts and do not leave them a single hour of the day to think about themselves? When they are in disgrace and sent off to their country houses, where they lack neither wealth nor servants to meet their needs, they infallibly become miserable and dejected because no one stops them thinking about themselves?"
We need constant diversions to keep ourselves from introspective thought on what our priorities in life should really be in the light of the supernatural end for which we were created, not the natural end of the modernist philosophers.
In Pensees 427 Pascal commits the unforgivable secularist sin of talking about the final things, in particular, Hell. "One needs no great sublimity of soul to realize that in this life there is no true and solid satisfaction, that all our pleasures are mere vanity, that our afflictions are infinite, and finally that death which threatens us at every moment must in a few years infallibly face us with the inescapable and appalling alternative of being annihilated or wretched throughout eternity."
How much of Christianity’s power to win the world has been crippled by the modern fashion of denying or ignoring the reality of Hell. It is an option for some "C"atholic theologians like Richard McBrien of Notre Dame who cleverly gives himself deniability that he’s not a heretic by saying that he presents the teachings of the Church in his publications while not telling the other side of the story, that he gives equal time to the dissidents who tell us that there is no need for Hell since without sin, all are saved. McBrien lets you make the decision on what to believe, not the Teaching Magisterium of Holy Mother Church, which speaks infallibly on Faith and morals. Both reason and Faith inform us of Hell: reason, because it is irrational to think that souls created free to refuse God can be compelled to accept him; Faith, because if no one goes to Hell, then Jesus is a liar or a fool, for he more than anyone warned against it.
Some brief examples have been presented of the thought of Blaise Pascal, Catholic Philosopher, Catholic Apologist, in short, Catholic to the core. His famous wager was his attempt not to be overly clever, but rather to present an undeniable truth to anyone capable of rational, objective thought. Kreefts’s description of the wager will be given here. "We can be wrong in two ways: by
‘wagering’ on God when there is no God or by ‘wagering’ on there being no God when there is a God. The second mistake loses everything, in particular, eternity; the first loses nothing. The second is therefore the stupidest wager in the world. And the first is the wisest." It is well to note that the wager is not just about there being some sort of God, but the God of Christianity, the God who promises salvation and threatens damnation. In other words, the wager is not just about God but about Christ, the man who was God and said that if and only if we believe in Him will we be saved. The humility of Pascal led him to the wager for the love of converting souls to Christ recognizing that, from an apologist’s standpoint, you have to walk before you can run.
After considering the pensees of Hobbes and Pascal respectively, which is more preferable, the misery of Leviathan, or the Way, the Truth, and the Life?