Pascal's Wager Read online

  For months, Jacqueline and Gilberte conspired to pray for their brother, like St. Monica praying for her son Augustine, in the hope that he would find spiritual peace. Jacqueline understood that she owed a great debt to Blaise for her conversion and her life at Port-Royal. Then, a few months later, on Monday, the 23rd of November, 1654, Blaise met God. He never told anyone about it, never mentioned it, never said a word, and only wrote a short memorial about the experience and pinned it to the inside of his clothing, near his heart. It was only after his death, nine years later, when Blaise’s nephew was going through his clothing, that they found it. A servant felt through the garment and found what he thought was extra padding stuffed into the doublet; on further examination he found a piece of crumpled parchment, with a faded piece of paper wrapped inside. And there they found, in Blaise’s own handwriting, the story of his “night of fire.”

  The year of grace 1654,

  Monday, 23 November, the feast of St. Clement, pope and martyr, and of

  others in the martyrology.

  The Vigil of St. Chrysogonus, martyr, and others.

  From about half past ten at night until about half past midnight,

  FIRE.

  GOD of Abraham, GOD of Isaac, GOD of Jacob

  not the God of the philosophers and of the learned.

  Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy. Peace.

  GOD of Jesus Christ.

  Deum meum et Deum vostrum. [My God and your God.]

  Your GOD will be my God.

  Forgetfulness of the world and of everything, except GOD.

  He can only be found by the ways taught in the Gospel.

  Grandeur of the human soul.

  Righteous Father, the world has not known you, but I have known you.

  Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.

  I have departed from him:

  Dereliquerunt me fontem aquae vivae. [They have forsaken me, the fount of

  living water.]

  My God, will you leave me?

  Let me not be separated from him forever.

  This is eternal life, that they know you, the one true God, and the one that

  you sent, Jesus Christ.

  Jesus Christ.

  Jesus Christ.

  I left him; I fled him, renounced, crucified.

  Let me never be separated from him.

  He is only kept securely by the ways taught in the Gospel:

  Renunciation, total and sweet.

  Complete submission to Jesus Christ and to my director.

  Eternally in joy for a day’s exercise on the earth.

  Non obliviscar sermones suos. [May I never forget his words.] Amen.60

  [1656]

  So Jolly a Penitent

  The weakness of little children’s limbs is innocent, not their souls.

  —ST. AUGUSTINE

  To Carthage I came, when all about me resounded a cauldron of dissolute loves.

  —ST. AUGUSTINE

  Give me chastity and continence, but not just now.

  —ST. AUGUSTINE

  God of Clothilda, if you grant me a victory I shall become a Christian.

  —CLOVIS (466–511)

  Suddenly, Monsieur Pascal was a changed man, and no one knew why. Everyone who knew him marveled at the change: one day he was drowning in confusion, and the next he was free of it. No one knew anything about his experience on that night in November, his night of fire, and would not know about it until after his death, so they could only speculate. Of course, there were stories to explain his conversion, so that even after he had died and the family found the memorial pinned to his doublet, they simply dusted off the old stories and shifted them to explain the cause of his mystical experience. By this time, the stories were well trod, and the fact that they were speculative didn’t mean that they were devoid of truth.

  One story tells how Pascal had nearly died in a carriage accident on a day when he was out with some friends; the driver lost control of the horses while they were crossing a bridge over the river Seine, and the carriage and passengers nearly ended up in the river. Supposedly, this accident put a certain rush on his desire for conversion, something he might have put off until another day had he not been faced with the possibility of sudden death. The other story is less dramatic, the one told by Marguerite Perier about her uncle after his death—that he attended Mass one Sunday and heard a particularly poignant sermon given by Père Singlin, one that forced him to begin thinking about his life, one that led him to a sudden change of heart, perhaps even led him to the “night of fire.” But this seems a bit too much like a pious set piece, as do many of the stories told about Pascal by the Perier family. And Pascal must have heard many powerful sermons before that date, so why did that one affect him so? The story feels like a literary type, for too many saints have had conversions of heart after listening to sermons full of hellfire. Supposedly, St. Anthony of Egypt heard such a sermon and, picking up the challenge, sold everything he had, left the city of Alexandria, and went to live in the desert. The same thing happened with St. Augustine by a chance reading of the Bible. There is a theory that the hand of God touches people through sermons and bits of Scripture blown open by sudden gusts of wind. And even though the theory is not unreasonable, it has been told enough times to be suspicious, or at least clichéd.

  Either way, Blaise Pascal was a changed man, and he informed his sister Jacqueline that he was ready to place himself at the disposal of the Augustinian movement, to turn his back upon the world. One can only imagine how thrilled Jacqueline was at hearing this, though she may have been puzzled at first, for his change of heart was sudden indeed.

  Eventually, Blaise ended up under the direction of Père Singlin, though the good father, while exceptionally holy, was not a strong enough intellect to direct the younger Pascal, and perhaps was wise enough to know it. Therefore, he sent him on to the country monastery, for “M. Singlin believed when he saw this great genius that it would be well to send him to Port-Royal-des-Champs, where M. Arnauld would lead him in what pertained to the higher sciences, and where M. de Saci would teach him to despise them.”61

  But as Pascal had written in his memorial, unknown to everyone else, he had already decided to give “total submission to Jesus Christ and to my director,” and thus to walk the Jansenist path, for he had found the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and not the God of the intellectuals. On the other hand, his life hadn’t changed much outwardly, and this troubled Jacqueline, for she had no idea of his inner life and could judge only by what she saw. Though he had obviously found a measure of peace, he still lived in the same residence in the Faubourg Saint-Michel, and still kept the same staff of servants. The woman who ran his household was the sister of Étienne’s old housekeeper, Louise Default, the woman who had taken care of the children when Étienne had to leave town to avoid facing the wrath of Cardinal Richelieu, and who had since run the family home for many years. This sister had her husband, and also her two daughters, all of whom worked in Blaise’s service. Besides that, the younger Pascal had hired a cook to fix his meals and a footman to help him travel about town. His house, near the church and across the street from one of the great hôtels, had a garden, with flowers and fruit trees, where Pascal could sit on a summer’s eve and listen to the birds and the ringing of the bells.

  All of this concerned Jacqueline, for Blaise did not seem to have changed his habits in the slightest, though Gilberte noted that he had begun to rely less and less on his servants, and even made his own bed. He was a gentleman, however, and lived a gentleman’s life. Like his father, Blaise was an honnête homme, and was by all appearances still a man of the world. So how could such a one, “so jolly a penitent,”62 claim that he was ready to give up life in the world when the world was so much with him? He had not even broken his association with that clutch of notorious gamblers the chevalier de Méré and Monsieur Mitton, who hadn’t changed their ways one jot or tittle, nor showed any inkling to do so. She was more comforted by the presence
of the duke, however, for he, too, seemed to be interested in the spiritual life, and though he was not willing to change too much, nor run headlong toward Port-Royal, he was certainly ready to become a fellow traveler with the Jansenist movement.

  Had Jacqueline known the complete story of her brother’s mystical experience, she might have had very different feelings about his professed change of heart; she might have realized that this jolly penitent was basing his changes on something more profound than anyone in her circle had ever experienced. What Blaise had learned from his night of fire was that there is a kind of certitude that has little to do with proper methodology—“certitude, certitude, feeling, joy, peace”—the surety of direct experience. In a world where doubt had become intellectually fashionable, where theological ideas once bolstered by cosmology had been overturned, Blaise had learned that one could become certain of God’s existence and of God’s nature by direct encounter, bypassing reason altogether. While he maintained a desire to continue his work as a mathematician and philosopher, he cancelled his running correspondence with Fermat on probability, ceased tinkering with his arithmetic machine, and postponed the distribution of his treatise on the arithmetic triangle, though it was already printed. He began to question the power of reason itself; while never really doubting its capacity to reveal truth, he decided that that capacity was limited to lesser truths and could not supplant the truths of revelation. Piety was no longer an empty practice, and reason was no longer a royal road to truth.

  But Blaise’s newfound Jansenism had one stumbling block: he was ready for them, but were they ready for him? Père Singlin and Mère Angélique were still suspicious of worldly philosophers, for they both believed that the desire to puzzle out the world meant that one still belonged to the world. So how to break him from this addiction? The only answer was to send him on a retreat to Port-Royal des Champs, where he could take time with the solitaries, les messieurs des granges, “the gentlemen of the barns,” as the locals called them, to pray and to receive instruction. The solitaries of Port-Royal were a group of laymen who had left the world to live a life of penance without actually joining a religious order. Back in 1625, Mère Angélique Arnauld had brought her troupe of sisters into Paris from the country because the old monastery of Port-Royal des Champs had grown dilapidated through the centuries. Once in Paris, the community flourished both in size and in wealth.

  A number of important people soon joined the movement, most notably the son of Catherine Arnauld, the oldest sister of Mère Angélique, who had married a man by the name of Lemaître. Their marriage didn’t last very long, but it did produce one son by the name of Antoine, born in 1608. When the marriage broke up, Catherine returned with her son to the Arnauld family home, and the boy was raised in the home of that fiercely loyal clan, so loyal that they followed one another into Jansenism. He grew up to become one of the brightest young legal minds of his day—eloquent, intelligent, and charming in the extreme—and everyone at the royal court expected him to have a career among the planets. But then he met the abbé de Saint-Cyran and, with half the other members of his family, decided to retire from the world and live a life of penance. Because of his prominence, his conversion was anything but private, and the loss of a man of such talent stirred the rancor of Cardinal Richelieu, the king’s first minister. The cardinal knew that he couldn’t afford to lose too many men like that, especially to the radicals of Port-Royal. Then the Augustinus, the originating work of Jansenism by Cornelis Jansen, was published in 1640, and soon after, in 1643, Antoine Arnauld published his notorious tract on frequent Communion, De la fréquente communion. The cardinal’s irritation with Port-Royal became deadly. The famous Antoine Lemaître then joined the fray by writing a pamphlet condemning “laxity” and hinting that the laxists included some of the most important churchmen in the nation, and most especially the Jesuits. Richelieu was furious, and set his eye on them.

  At first, Lemaître lived in a small house within the compound of Port-Royal de Paris, but after Cardinal Richelieu had the abbé de Saint-Cyran arrested, Lemaître quietly left town and took up residence in the old monastery of Port-Royal des Champs. Here, other young men of similar status and spiritual concerns gathered with him, and here they worked on improving the old monastery, replanting the gardens and repairing the old buildings. Over the years, the solitaries managed through consistent hard work to breathe new life into the dying monastery. They drained the swamps and planted new fields, and with time the place began to become beautiful once again.

  Soon after the abbé de Saint-Cyran had been thrown into prison and Antoine Lemaître had retired to the country, two of Antoine’s brothers—each sporting one of the odd faux titles of aristocracy that the Arnauld family seemed to enjoy, one Simon Lemaître de Séricourt and his brother Isaac Lemaître de Saci, otherwise known as “de Saci”—joined him in the country. The younger brother, Isaac, had decided to study for the priesthood, and when he was ordained, he and Père Singlin split the duties of spiritual direction between them, with Père Singlin taking the Port-Royal community in Paris and Père de Saci taking the gentlemen of the barns in the country. Together with the solitaries, he translated many of the works of the church fathers into contemporary French and, along with Pierre Nicole, founded the petites écoles, a school for young boys, a school that eventually produced some of the more prominent minds in France, men like the poet and dramatist Jean Racine and the historian Louis-Sébastien Le Nain de Tillemont.

  In modern terms, Lemaître de Saci would have been described as “laidback”—quiet, plodding, with little obvious fire. His great talent was to be able to talk to anyone, and to adjust his style of direction to fit each new directee. By all accounts, he was a fine listener and a natural-born psychologist. To carpenters, he talked of carpentry. To painters, he talked of painting. To philosophers, he talked of philosophy, and thus led them through the world of their making into the world of God’s making. Much of what he and Blaise talked about in those sessions during Blaise’s retreat and afterward has been lost to us—all except what was said in one session, which had been witnessed by de Saci’s personal secretary, Nicholas Fontaine, who took copious notes during the session and wrote them down years later in a pamphlet entitled Entretien avec M. de Saci.

  By this time, Blaise was something of a celebrity among the European intellectuals. His adding machine, the Pascaline; his work on the vacuum; and, most recently, his letters with Fermat on probability had spread his name across the continent, and he came to Père de Saci as one of the great men of his time. De Saci, however, was not all that impressed, and though he recognized Blaise’s obvious talents, he was concerned about falling prey to the glamour of Pascal’s intellect. Like Mère Angélique and Père Singlin, he was too deeply entrenched in the thinking of St. Augustine to be impressed by worldly success. He began the conversation by asking Pascal what books he had been reading, and of course Pascal responded by expounding on two works of philosophy. He had been reading, he said, the works of Epictetus the Stoic and the short essays of Montaigne, and found them both instructive.

  What followed was an encounter between two basic worldviews. Pascal wanted to find a way to integrate his new faith into his previous scientific work. He had long believed that the man of science ought to pay attention to what he sees rather than slavishly follow some already determined philosophical system, as Descartes had done. Descartes, the philosopher, had tried to find a new way to build an Aristotelian worldview in a time of skepticism. Pascal had always argued that the discovery of the existence of the vacuum and other scientific achievements should be based upon proper methodology and upon the witness of one’s own eyes rather than through faithfulness to a philosophical tradition. Shouldn’t this same attitude be brought to bear on the spiritual life? This made perfect sense to Pascal, for his newfound spirituality came out of a direct experience of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and not out of some philosophical insight.

  Pascal then began to discuss the
works of Epictetus with de Saci, saying that Epictetus was a philosopher of duty, and that his wisdom, pagan though it was, often rang true with the teachings of Augustine. Epictetus taught that everything belongs to God and that all the things we enjoy are only on loan, Pascal told him, summing up the Stoic ideal. “Never say, says he, ‘I have lost that.’ Say instead, ‘I have given it back. My son is dead. I have given him back. My wife is dead. I have given her back.’”63

  But then he went on to criticize the same ideal by saying that Epictetus was wrong in assuming that people have the power to do good and that people are truly free to do their duty. Epictetus did not understand the fallen nature of humanity and therefore in his paganism could believe that an act of suicide could be a call from God under a condition of persecution.

  After this, Pascal discussed his favorite author, Michel de Montaigne, whom he preferred over Epictetus because he was a Christian and in various places ably defended the Christian faith. He had used the skepticism of the day to fight the libertins, and “since he wished to discover what morality reason ought to prescribe independent of the light of faith, he based his principle upon that supposition…. He places all things in a universal and so general doubt that this very doubt carries itself away.”64 And so the doubter doubts even his reason and his own quest for knowledge, and therefore leads himself into a perpetual circle, a strange loop of doubt.

  De Saci’s response was, following Augustine, that such philosophers could lead one astray, into the swamp of intellectual pride—a dangerous pleasure, a iucundidate pestifere, where the great mind thanks God for forgiveness while still enjoying the vanity of the world. But what is the use of such readings, if they are so very dangerous?

  Pascal responded that Epictetus had the remarkable ability to disturb the complacency of those addicted to material pleasure by showing them that they were slaves to their own flesh, which eventually must die. But while Epictetus can prick us from our sleep, he can lead to pride, the pride that says that we fallen humans have the power to save ourselves, when only God has such a power. Montaigne, on the other hand, is wonderful for attacking the pride of the narrow-minded, those fools who think they can find truth outside the faith through science. But Montaigne, for all that, leads to despair, the doldrums of the intellect, which, without faith, merely bobs up and down in the water, without a breeze to carry it forth.