Pascal's Wager Read online

  Blaise was furious. There was no doubt about the identity of the “certain persons.” After all, the anonymous Jesuit had specified experiments in the very places where Blaise had so famously triumphed over the plenists. Moreover, because he remained anonymous, his attack was particularly cowardly. If you are going to attack someone’s character, you should at least do so to his face. Blaise wrote a public response, protesting the attack on his character and on the character of his brother-in-law, Florin Perier. He then outlined the history of these experiments, how he was in a tradition of researchers who doubted the Aristotelian physics, from Galileo to numerous others, and how each one had made his contribution, himself included. The experiments he had performed were his own, and their honesty could be attested to by both his brother-in-law and his father, Étienne—good men of high position.

  What was at stake was an entire theory of knowledge. The scientific method was just then being formulated, and Pascal was a part of this. Theological and philosophical knowledge existed as part of a tradition, and so the opinions of great authorities in the past meant something. This was not true of science, for science was a new thing in the seventeenth century, and was still in its infancy. Pascal and others sought to distinguish scientific knowledge from both theological and philosophical knowledge. Cultural questions—who was the first king of France, where the geometers drew the first meridian—are questions of authority and can be solved by reference to books. This is a matter of scholarship. Questions that can be solved only by experiment and by reason—questions in mathematics and physics—cannot be solved by references to authority, and can be solved only by rigorous thought and observation. Père Noël and the other Aristotelians wanted to solve questions of physics as if they were questions of theology. This was not the method taught to Pascal in Mersenne’s seminar; it was not the method taught to him by his father.

  In the midst of this controversy, Étienne died. His health had been declining for some time, perhaps even as far back as Rouen and his fall on the ice. His long hours of tedious calculation couldn’t have helped matters, for he was frequently exhausted in Normandy, and the time he spent there aged him beyond his years. Still, at sixty-four he was an old man by seventeenth-century standards, and his death was not unexpected. He died on September 24, 1651, just as Gilberte was going into labor in Clermont. She gave birth three days later, to a healthy son, and then received a letter from Jacqueline informing her and Florin of her father’s death. A month later, she received a letter from Blaise completing Jacqueline’s letter. The letter he wrote was quite Catholic. He mentioned his own grief in passing, but the rest of the letter reads like “My Sunday Sermon.” For a Christian, all of life should be a dying, an act of sacrifice: “Let us not be afflicted like the heathen who have no hope. We did not lose my father at the moment of his death. We had lost him, so to speak, as soon as he entered the Church through baptism.”38

  At this point, Pascal sets out his idea of the “Two Loves,” an idea that would resurface later, in the Pensées. God has created humanity with two loves—the love of God and the love of self. The love of God is infinite and all-consuming, while the love of self is finite and has the purpose of leading us back to God. But when sin entered the world through Adam, humanity lost the love of God. Only the instrumental love of the self remained, and “this self-love has spread and overflowed into the vacuum which the love of God has left.” In order to recover the love of God, each human soul must die to itself. It must give up the love of self in order to make room for the love of God. And so, dying should hold no fear for the Christian, who has already died in the soul; once that is accomplished, the death of the body is a dawdle.39

  But in spite of all these brave Augustinian words, for Blaise this was a terrible time, perhaps the worst in his life. Underneath his theology he was in deep emotional pain, and the mention he makes of his grief reveals just the tip of his sadness. His father had been the gravitational center of his life from the day his mother died. He had no wife, no children, few friends; his life had turned around his father’s plans for him, and he had become a great man, greater even than his father. But in all that time, partly because of Étienne’s domination and partly because of his persistent illness, he had never created a life for himself. He was a great mind in search of a heart, and now, what was there to love? He knew in his faith that God was the ultimate object of love, but just how does one attain that goal? The only way to do this, as the Jansenist spiritual directors at Port-Royale insisted, was to rid himself of all distraction, of every other love, so that, like the poor of the earth, his soul would have no other place to go but to God.

  But his attachments, it seemed, had their own way of disappearing. His intellectual achievements had produced nothing but controversy—bile from the Jesuits, bile from Descartes, bile from the intellectual gatekeepers of the university. He had followed his father’s path, but now his father was dead, and both of his sisters were setting out to find their own lives, leaving him alone. What had started in Rouen with Gilberte’s departure for Clermont to marry Florin Perier continued on in the death of his father and his sister Jacqueline’s insistence on entering Port-Royal. One by one, the members of the family he depended on were leaving him. He was alone in the world.

  As soon as Étienne had been laid to rest and an appropriate mourning time had passed, Jacqueline announced her intention to enter Port-Royal. After all, she had stayed home out of duty, because her father had asked her to, because he could not bear to part with her, and because to disobey him would have been an act of impiety. But now he was dead and her duty fulfilled. Blaise needed her, too, but he was not her father and did not have the same authority over her, even if he was the only male left in the family. Jacqueline was convinced that gender alone should not give one person authority over another, and that she should follow the calling of her heart over the needs of her brother. He had servants to help him, and money enough to live comfortably. Did he need his sister any longer? Suddenly, there was war in the Pascal household.

  Blaise pleaded with Jacqueline not to leave, but she was adamant. He commanded her to stay, but that didn’t work, either. At the heart of this growing difference, beside Blaise’s fear of abandonment, was a disagreement over Port-Royal itself. Like Francis de Sales and Vincent de Paul, Blaise was shocked by the severity of some of Mère Angélique’s directions. While in Paris, Jacqueline had taken an Oratorian priest as her confessor. Since this was the order founded by Pierre de Bérulle, a longtime mentor for the abbé de Saint-Cyran, he was a good choice. The priest had a noteworthy reputation, and no one said anything bad about his advice. He praised Jacqueline’s poetic ability, especially after she translated a Latin hymn from the breviary, Jesu, nostra redemptio, into French. He told her that her translation was beautiful and that she should seek to incorporate her gifts into her spiritual life. Jacqueline was happy at first, but then suffered a bout of scruples. She fired off a letter to Mère Angélique, who wrote back: “This talent for poetry is not something for which God will ask you for an accounting. You must bury it.”40

  Blaise was aghast at this. The demands of Port-Royal were stricter than even the advice of an Oratorian, one of the strictest orders in the French church. Mère Angélique’s advice sounded too much like what Jansen had said about the study of science—that it was another form of lust. Once you begin with the assumption, as Augustine did, that humanity is a bit of “spoiled meat,” and that the only righteous thing a human can do is live a life of penance, you will eventually find nothing beautiful in humanity. Everything human that seems good is only an illusion and must be burned out. Everything human that seems righteous is a fancy and must be killed.

  In October 1651, a month after their father had died, Blaise and Jacqueline came to an accommodation. Jacqueline signed her inheritance over to Blaise; in return, Blaise promised her a regular yearly income from the estate. These negotiations were between the two of them, for Gilberte had already been given a sizable dowry o
n her wedding day. Everyone seemed to understand that if Jacqueline entered Port-Royal, she would have to leave her inheritance behind. Nevertheless, Jacqueline was bent on entering the convent and would not change her mind. When Gilberte came to visit at the end of November, Jacqueline pulled her aside and told her quietly that she intended to become a postulant at Port-Royal by the first of the year. She was concerned about how Blaise would react, and so she had told him that she was going for a retreat, when in fact she had no intention of returning. The new year came, and on January 3, 1652, Gilberte, and not Jacqueline, broke the news to their brother. According to Gilberte, “He retired very sadly to his rooms without seeing Jacqueline, who was waiting in the little parlor where she was accustomed to say her prayers.”41

  The next morning, Jacqueline stood in the corridor of the Pascal home, waiting for the carriage to be brought around to take her to the convent. Gilberte saw her and turned away, unable to say good-bye for fear of weeping.

  [1652]

  The Feud

  You must be able to judge that I am strong enough to go ahead

  despite you but not strong enough perhaps to withstand the

  anguish that your opposition would cause me.

  —JACQUELINE PASCAL TO BLAISE

  ON THE OCCASION OF HER VOWS

  God sets the solitary in families.

  —PS. 68.6

  Families, I hate you! Shut-in homes, closed doors,

  jealous possessions of happiness.

  —ANDRÉ GIDE, Les nourritures terrestres

  By this time, Port-Royal had begun to smell like a cult. At the time, Parisian Catholics would have used another term—heretics—but the social implications were often the same: an increasingly isolated group surrounding a charismatic personality, espousing an exaggerated spirituality. Were they true heretics, or merely extremists? Many of the leaders of the Catholic revival had already rejected them, including some who had once been friendly. And there were factions in France, most notably the Jesuits, who were preparing charges against them.

  Their move to Paris had been as lucrative for the community as Mère Angélique had hoped; rich patrons flocked to them, though they had lost the support of the crown. Richelieu had despised them. Although Louis XIII had admired them for a time, the queen had little use for them in the end, and Mazarin had even less. When Louis XIV entered manhood and sat on the throne in earnest, he set about to destroy them. Dark clouds slowly gathered over the convent. Some modern commentators say that Port-Royal was persecuted because they were powerful women, but this is unlikely, since there were many powerful women in France, and some of them were the ones doing the persecuting. Moreover, Port-Royal was merely the core of a wider movement, one that included both men and women, one that advocated both a fearsomely penitential life before a terrifying God and the breakdown of the old ecclesiastical hierarchies in favor of a new egalitarianism. While Mère Angélique ruled her own universe with steel, she increasingly ignored the authority of those over her and promoted equality among the sisters without regard to their station in life on the outside. And so, Port-Royal carried a whiff of republicanism about it, the same kind of republicanism promoted by the Calvinists all over Europe and the New World, the kind that got King Charles of England beheaded.

  France was becoming polarized between the Port-Royalistas and everyone else. This may have been the real reason why the crown opposed them: because they were fast becoming a new center of power. But the reason the church opposed them was more theological. Largely because of the Jesuit influence, the tide was turning against Augustinianism, an undertow that would eventually lead to the condemnation of Augustine’s teachings on free will and predestination. A rigor that might have made sense twenty years earlier suddenly felt excessive, and the Jansenists had taken Augustinian pessimism one step beyond what French sensibilities would accept. They had gone too far, and had shocked even the most pious souls by their outsize rigor.

  One of the marks of a modern cult is that they quickly try to separate people from their money. The argument is that the cause is so important that it transcends all other considerations, and if you truly believed, you would give all you had. This is the same logic that has been followed by religious orders from the beginning of Christendom, and so it has always been difficult to discern a cult from a legitimate religious movement.

  For women religious, it has been a common practice to present the house with a “dowry,” the same dowry that they would have given to a prospective husband, since on the day of their vows, they would become “brides of Christ.” Not to do so would place an undue burden on the house, since religious are not allowed to work a trade to make money. Jacqueline Pascal had entered Port-Royal with pious abandon, and she wanted to enter her new life on an equal footing with all the other sisters. Therefore, she expected to make the same kind of donation that the others had made. It seemed only logical to her that she should give her share of the family fortune to Port-Royal. But suddenly, surprisingly, she bashed into a wall of opposition, not only from Blaise but from Gilberte as well.

  Blaise’s resistance came from the fact that his health problems had placed him in a precarious position. His doctors and their cures cost money, and with Jacqueline gone, he would have to find some other way to find care. If he handed over a third of Étienne’s legacy to Port-Royal, he could be in serious financial trouble. Jacqueline would take a vow of poverty, but Blaise would live it. Of course, he was still angry with Jacqueline for running out on him. In his letter to Gilberte after his father’s death, he hinted at his great need. Gilberte had left him for her own life in Clermont; Jacqueline had left him for a life in the convent. Both of them had strong support systems, while Blaise, with all his illnesses, had none. Gilberte seemed to be oblivious to this need, while Jacqueline seemed to resent it. The very fact that Blaise needed her still was a sore point for her. His resistance to handing over her dowry only aggravated that resentment. In all of this, Mère Angélique advised her never to trust people in the world, and as her brother, Blaise, was a man of the world, he was someone who had to be rejected:

  Haven’t you learned long ago that you can never trust the affection of creatures, and that the world loves only those who are the world’s? Aren’t you happy that God teaches this to you so clearly by the behavior of those from whom you would have least expected it? This should answer any doubts that you might have had, before you leave the world forever. Now you can do so with a bolder heart, because your action is the more necessary. Your resolution must be unwavering, because you can now say, in a manner of speaking, that you no longer have anyone to leave behind.”42

  But Blaise’s objections were not the only ones on the table. Florin and Gilberte Perier objected to the fact that these donations might actually deprive them of their legitimate inheritance, because the family fortune was almost exclusively in credits, and it was one thing to hold someone’s debt and another to collect it.

  None of this was particularly troubling for the convent, for they had the capital to wait on these debts, whereas the Pascals did not. Port-Royal was far from financially strapped. By the time Jacqueline entered the house, they were rich and powerful in a way that few houses of religious women could ever be. They had become a national force, a force that had earned the notice, and the malice, of the powerful. In a sense, Angélique had traded a soft life for power, all too easily done and almost completely done without her awareness. But such a choice was part of her character, she who even as a child insisted that if she was going to be handed over to a convent, she wanted to be an abbess. The love of power is its own form of lust, but if gathered under the auspices of legitimate authority, it can seem like an act of profound spirituality. This was a choice that had plagued many imperfect reformers in the past, male and female alike.

  It should not have been too surprising, however, that Blaise would object to his sister’s request. Jacqueline had been fighting with Blaise over her vocation for nearly a year, even before the deat
h of their father. Port-Royal had removed her from the circle of the family, and because of its theology of extreme renunciation, it had encouraged her to abandon the world utterly, and if that included the family who loved her, so be it. What was behind this was the Doctrine of Two Loves—that each of us has two loves, the love of God and the love of our own lives, and these two loves are at war. To love God properly, we must abandon everything else, especially all other loves. Even before her father died, Jacqueline had written such ideas in a reflection on the Cross in which she said: “This teaches me to die not only to myself, but also to all the interests of flesh and blood and human affection. That is, I must forget everything about my [family and] friends that doesn’t concern their salvation.”43

  Thus, to enter Port-Royal, Jacqueline had to put her old life aside, and that included her brother and sister. From that day on, her only concern for them would be for their salvation. For a pious Jansenist, that meant that she should always work for their own total renunciation of the world. The fact that Blaise had resisted handing over a third of the family fortune to Port-Royal was merely a sign that he was immersed in sin. Blaise, all alone in the world, loved her, was attached to her, needed her—and she would have none of that. In a letter to him demanding that he surrender her inheritance and attend her betrothal to Christ, she laid the entire weight of her father’s demand that she not enter the convent on Blaise’s shoulders: “It is no longer reasonable to continue my deference to others’ feelings over my own. It’s their turn to do some violence to their own feelings in return for the violence I did to my own inclinations during four years. It is from you [Blaise] in particular that I expect this token of friendship.”44