Pascal's Wager Page 2

  FRANCE

  EUROPE AND THE NEW WORLD

  INTRODUCTION

  The Man Who Played Dice with God

  Each of us earns his death, his own death,

  which belongs to no one else

  and this game is life.

  —GEORGE SEFERIS (GIORGOS STYLIANOU SEFERIADES)

  The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.

  —G. K. CHESTERTON

  I am convinced that He [God] does not play dice.

  —ALBERT EINSTEIN

  The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious.

  It is the source of all true art and science.

  —ALBERT EINSTEIN, What I Believe

  This is the story of Blaise Pascal, the man who invented the modern world, or at least a good chunk of it. He lived thirty-nine years of the seventeenth century, and was perpetually sick. From childhood on he was in pain every day, but along the way he invented one of the first calculating machines, the very first public transportation system, probability theory, decision theory, and much of the mathematics of risk management, and proved the existence of the vacuum—all of which set the stage for quantum physics, the insurance industry, management science, racing forms, the computer, Powerball lotteries, Las Vegas, the vacuum pump, the concept of outer space, the jet engine, the internal combustion engine, the atomic bomb, mass media, and on and on. You cannot walk ten feet in the twenty-first century without running into something that Pascal’s thirty-nine years of the seventeenth century did not affect in one way or another.

  Pascal was also a religious mystic. His sister Jacqueline, who became a Jansenist nun at the Benedictine abbey of Port-Royal, played a major role in his spiritual life. She was also an early feminist, who argued vehemently for the right of self-determination for women. Later in his life—on Monday, the 23rd of November, 1654, the feast of St. Clement, pope and martyr—after enjoying a serious bout of worldliness, which Jacqueline chided him for, he sat alone in his room, buried in depression, and suddenly, from half past ten in the evening until half past twelve, he had a direct encounter with God that changed him. Fire! he said. Certitude. Certitude. Joy. Peace. He told no one about this, but he wrote it out as a short poem, a memorial of the event, and pinned it to the inside of his coat, next to his heart. No one would ever have known about it, except that his nephew found it after Pascal died.

  Like his family and most of his friends, Pascal was a Jansenist, a member of a steel-rod sect within Catholicism that was declared a heresy in his own lifetime and that demanded a life of penance—if not for your own sins, then for the sin of Adam, which you inherited when your parents had too much fun conceiving you. Jansenism, like the more hard-core Calvinism, followed Augustine in laying the sin of Adam onto the shoulders of every human born of a mother and a father, a sin that was passed on through the pleasure of sex, like an STD. And because of that sin, the human race has forever been wretched and vile, so that only the very few, those selected by God, can be saved. This was called God’s mercy.

  Amazingly, this variant of Christianity produced wave after wave of ferocious Christians, who in their zeal saw themselves as a holy remnant in an increasingly sinful church. Pascal suffered under this vision, received mystical insights under it, and wrote his greatest works, the Provincial Letters and the Pensées, in defense of it. However, in the middle of this dry, rigorous plain that he found himself crossing, he retained enough puckish sense of humor to invent a proof for the rationality of faith based on gambling.

  This is a book about his life and how that life led to such a proof. Many people have tried to understand this man, to psychoanalyze him and thereby put him on the shelf as a garden-variety neurotic. Others have tried to canonize him, to see in him the marks of sanctity that he yearned to find in himself. He was neither a neurotic nor a saint. A faithful Catholic, he spent his adult life deeply involved with a heretical group that caused no end of trouble and that in fact so weakened the church through constant nattering argument that it was nearly powerless in the face of the French Revolution. As a scientist, he argued ferociously against the Aristotelian orthodoxy of his day, and many historians would hold that his arguments laid the foundation for some of the most important concepts of empirical science. So, how do we reconcile the scientist and the mystic? I don’t think we can, and that is what makes Pascal so interesting.

  His great discovery concerning probability emerged from one of those silly moments in life that often produce big ideas. On a trip to Poitou, while hanging out with his friend the duc de Roannez and his entourage, he stood in a small crowd of courtiers watching two ne’er-do-well gentlemen, the self-proclaimed legend the chevalier de Méré and his sidekick, Monsieur Mitton, gamble their hearts, not to mention their fortunes, away. Up until that point, the two sparkling gentlemen thought little of the short, brittle-looking fellow who seemed more interested in theology than in the games of real men, and they often laughed behind his back. They knew that their host, the duke, was quite fond of the little man, who always seemed to have a runny nose or a headache, and they knew vaguely that he had a reputation as a mathematician and a scientist, but what use was he beyond that?

  Like two high school cool boys, they joked about him when he wasn’t around and gave him nicknames that would have shamed either of them to receive in turn. Had Pascal been anyone else, he might have challenged one of them to a duel. Those would have been the rules for true gentlemen, of course. But Pascal was far too sickly to follow them. Then, after a long streak of bad luck, the chevalier noticed Pascal standing nearby and, remembering that he was a mathematician, asked him a question: if I am playing dice with Monsieur Mitton, and we agree to so many throws but our game is interrupted, how then do we divide up the pot?

  They were in luck. Pascal was precisely the man to answer that question. Not only was he an accomplished mathematician, but he had also spent years looking for ways to apply mathematics to everyday life. He had actually invented one of the first computing machines, the Pascaline, when he was little more than a boy, simply to help his father, a tax judge, more easily complete the tidal wave of calculations that he was drowning under. Suddenly, Pascal wasn’t quite the geek they had thought him to be. He promised them an answer, and soon was able to show just why the chevalier’s strategy at dice was losing him so much money. A capital fellow!

  What the gentlemen found after a time was a young man whose intelligence far outstripped their own, who was able to see further and think more clearly, who had a pungent wit, who could be cruel one minute and solicitous the next. They came to know a terribly unhappy young man who wanted to be a saint and yet loved life, who berated himself for his worldliness one minute and then laughed at some raucous joke the next. If they had been told that this Pascal fellow would soon have a mystical experience of God and withdraw from the world, they would not have been surprised, for he was halfway there anyway. If they had been told that he would soon after write one of the greatest and nastiest works of the modern age, the Provincial Letters, a book of satire that Voltaire kept by his bedside every night and used as a model, and that these letters would be directed against the all-powerful Jesuits, they would not have been surprised by that, either.

  [1625]

  The Witch

  Historians are the best gossips.

  —JOHN PADBURG, S.J.

  It seemed certain that the boy would die. Mysterious childhood ailments abounded, but this one was mysterious indeed. The boy Blaise was only two years old, the first and only son of Étienne and Antoinette Pascal, when suddenly he began to waste away, becoming emaciated, as one en chartre, or “starving.” He seemed dejected. He could
not stand the sight of liquids, nor could he take water in any form. In fact, he seemed afraid of water, obsessed by a sudden hydrophobia that set him shrieking with fear. What’s more, he couldn’t bear to see his parents together. His mother, by herself, was fine, as was his father, but the two of them together sent him into rages. Was he possessed? Was he bewitched? It was the seventeenth century, and most of the Pascals’ fellow townspeople would have thought such things possible. Rumors about the boy and his illness fluttered about Clermont like birds.

  The boy’s father, Étienne, was uncertain. He was too much the scientific intellectual to easily believe in witchcraft and was, by his own account, an honnête homme, a man of good breeding, one of the new bourgeois intellectuals who served his king and his God, and who made a little money on the side doing it. He was a worldly man, though pious; a rational man; a philosophical man who doubted all the superstitious frippery of the simple people. But still, the boy was wasting away, and if the father did not find a cure, and find it soon, his son would die.

  The town gossips suspected first this one, then that one, finally culling out an old woman who had once worked for the Pascals, possibly as a sevreuse, one who took in the children of the wealthy during their time of weaning, one who would put up with the children’s tantrums and their weeping, one who, because of her age, could no longer be a wet nurse and who was therefore the child’s first teacher about the hardness of the world.1 This particular old woman had once received the Pascals’ charity—a fact that, oddly enough, became the source of her grievance against Étienne, the tax judge. Because of her prior relationship, she had expected a favorable judgment by monsieur the judge, but was disappointed and grumbled about his hard-heartedness. And so the people put together the pieces. An old woman, a grievance, a mysterious illness—it had to be witchcraft. Étienne stopped her in the street one day and told her that if she was indeed responsible, he would take her to court and see her punished. He demanded that she cure his son at once and without further witchcraft.

  The old woman, cowed, apologized over and over, and said that certainly she would do what she could. Still, life for life, death for death: some other poor soul would have to sacrifice its life for the boy. After all, the spell had been a killing spell, which could be satisfied only by a death. Pascal ridiculed her and asked if she wanted one of his horses to kill, but the old woman pushed on. She said no; a cat would do as well. In time, the bargain was set. Étienne returned to his home, and the witch cast about for a cat to steal. She went out and found herself a cat. But as she was walking up the stairs of Étienne’s house, she met someone on the stairs, likely a servant, who opposed her, insulted her, and upbraided her. Startled and upset, she threw the cat out the window. Now, cats are legendary when it comes to surviving falls, and the window was not very high off the ground. But when the old woman found the cat outside the window, it was already dead.

  To complete the cure, the witch then gathered common herbs from the garden and, after mixing them with flour, placed them on the boy’s navel. Suddenly, little Blaise fell into a coma and looked as if he had fallen dead, just like the cat. Étienne called for the doctor, who arrived and examined the boy, and then told the distraught parents that their son had indeed died, that he was sorry, that there was nothing he could do. Meanwhile, the witch had gone off for a time, but after a while she returned. She knocked on the door, and the servants ushered her into the child’s bedroom. Overcome with grief and anger, Étienne the philosopher, the gentleman of good breeding, ran to the woman and knocked her to the ground with his fist. Standing over her, he shouted at her and cursed her. But the witch pleaded, assuring him that his son was not dead, that they should not put him in a shroud, and certainly not bury him—that this lethargy was part of the cure, and that if they only had a bit more patience, they would see that Blaise would awaken soon and begin to heal.

  The spell required that they wait until midnight, when suddenly, she said, the boy would awaken and return to himself. That afternoon and into the night, the Pascals—Étienne and Antoinette—with their few servants and possibly even their daughter Gilberte, the woman who would eventually write down the story as part of a biography of her brother, Blaise, stayed by his bedside and prayed, taking cold comfort in what the witch had told them—that the boy was not dead but only asleep. Midnight passed, and nothing happened. One o’clock, and still nothing. Two o’clock. Three, four, five, six. The family despaired, but then around six thirty in the morning the boy stirred, and finally his eyes fluttered awake. The first thing he saw was his father and mother next to the bed, standing together, and he began to cry, as he had done in the past. So they knew that he was not yet cured. Moreover, he still feared water. But after a week, Étienne returned home one evening to find Blaise sitting in his mother’s lap, pouring water from one glass to another. He tried to approach his son, but Blaise began to cry. This situation continued for another few days, when Étienne found them once again, mother and child, and approached, but this time Blaise did not object, and began to put on weight from that point on, until he looked as if he had never been sick.

  When pressed, the witch admitted that she had placed the spell on the boy after Étienne had refused her application, and when pressed further, she admitted that her suit had not been just and that she had hoped her previous association with monsieur the judge would get her what she wanted anyway. The ways of the Evil One are indeed slippery, the people told themselves, and were satisfied. What happened to the old woman after that has not been written down.

  But what was this terrible illness? What had nearly killed the boy? The symptoms when taken together make little sense and have to be treated separately. The fear of water and the alarm at seeing his parents together might be psychological in nature, an Oedipus complex in the making. The wasting, together with the deformation in the child’s bones and skull, are easier to diagnose as a form of marasmus, a childhood disease that arises from a deficiency of protein in the diet and often occurs today in developing countries soon after a child is weaned. If the local diet is deficient in protein, if it relies mainly on cereal grains, with a lack of trustworthy cow’s milk, marasmus is common enough. This was the case in seventeenth-century France, especially in the Auvergne region before pasteurization, where cow’s milk was routinely turned into cheese, thus concentrating the fat and resulting in a loss of much of its protein content. All of Europe was in the latter days of the Little Ice Age, which stretched from the fourteenth century to the eighteenth century. During this time the Gulf Stream stopped shipping warm water from the Caribbean to the coasts of England and France, and the climate of Europe chilled enough to induce regular crop shortfalls and even sporadic famines. The European diet in the seventeenth century was meager at best—bread and wine mostly, and cheese, with a few vegetables. There was wheat gruel for the children, but only a rare piece of meat, even in the better families. A child with a delicate condition might well have been unable to absorb what few proteins were to be found in his food.2

  It is likely that Blaise’s condition began soon after his mother ceased to breast-feed him. Perhaps she wanted another child, and since many women used breast-feeding as a means of birth control, Antoinette Pascal may have decided that Blaise was ready to make that fearful transition from a diet of breast milk, which had everything he needed to survive, to the local diet, which often left adults hungry. Weaning was sometimes a life-threatening experience for a child, the second great shock in life after birth itself. Gastrointestinal infections followed marasmus like jackals following a lion, and children often died of dysentery, wasting away. The food did not satisfy, and the only thing a child of two knew was that he used to be fed and now was hungry, and that the presence or absence of his mother made the difference. Perhaps this explains some of Blaise’s anxiety at seeing his parents together—perhaps he recognized in his toddler’s brain that a sea change had occurred in his world, a change that pushed him beyond anything he had known into a strange new situ
ation.

  Life for Blaise Pascal began with uncertainty. His sister Gilberte reported how when the doctors cut open his body after his death, the autopsy showed that the anterior fontanel, the “soft spot” that opens in early childhood and then closes as the skull develops, had opened once again in Blaise’s case, and that it had not closed but had filled in with softer cartilage. The doctors who performed the autopsy said that this was because of Pascal’s native genius—because his brain, which was too large for his skull, had forced the fontanel to open and would not let it close. The fact that Pascal suffered debilitating headaches through most of his life and that his health had been precarious from childhood on, they assumed, supported their explanation, and was the price one paid for a prodigious intellect. However, these were also signs of childhood starvation and were symptomatic of rickets, a disease caused by a deficiency of vitamin D and of calcium. Perhaps genius begins with deprivation.

  [1626–1631]

  A Dangerous world

  Arise, ye prisoners of starvation,

  Arise, ye wretched of the earth,

  For justice thunders condemnation—

  A better world’s in birth.

  —“THE INTERNATIONALE” (1871)

  The boy Blaise lived, but he was sickly most of his life. He suffered debilitating headaches, spells of exhaustion, leg paralysis, stomachache, toothache, and beneath it all a grinding melancholy. The fact that a child of such a prominent family as the Pascals should suffer from malnutrition says something about the realities of the time. His family, though not wealthy, was more than respectable, having roots in the minor nobility. Étienne had been born out of two strands of the Pascal family, for both his mother and his father were Pascals. Blaise’s grandfather had been a commoner, for that branch of the family was never quite able to hold high office long enough to be able to pass nobility on to their children. Blaise’s grandmother’s branch, however, did have a few teetering instances of gentry, and so Étienne, and therefore Blaise, could claim some aristocrats in his bloodline.