Blaise Pascal: Insight into Faith (Post IV)

Continued from Insight into Faith (Post III).

Blaise Pascal believed that Christianity alone embodies and offers the holistic solution for the quest of the mind and heart for truth. Pascal’s solution is simple, we must listen to God. Pascal, a brilliant scientist, mathematician, philosopher, inventor, writer and so forth, had a spiritual experience in his thirty first year of life that he recorded and kept in the lining of his jacket.

Memorial

In the year of grace, 1654, On Monday, 23rd of November, Feast of St Clement, Pope and Martyr, and others in the Martyrology, Vigil of St Chrysogonus, Martyr, and others, From about half past ten in the evening until about half past twelve,

Fire!

God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, (Ex 3:6; Mt 22:32) not of the philosophers and scholars.

Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy.
Peace. God of Jesus Christ.
“Thy God and my God.” (Jn 20:17)
Forgetfulness of the world and of everything, except God.
He is to be found only in the ways taught in the Gospel.
Greatness of the Human Soul.
“Righteous Father, the world hath not known Thee, but I have known Thee.” (Jn 17:25)
Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.
I have separated myself from Him. “They have forsaken Me, the fountain of living waters.” (Jr 2:13) “My God, wilt Thou leave me?” (Mt 27:46)
Let me not be separated from Him eternally. “This is the eternal life, that they might know Thee, the only true God, and the one whom Thou hast sent, Jesus Christ.” (Jn 17:3) Jesus Christ.

Jesus Christ

I have separated myself from Him:
I have fled from Him,
denied Him,
crucified Him.
Let me never be separated from Him.
We keep hold of Him only by the ways taught in the Gospel.
Renunciation, total and sweet.
Total submission to Jesus Christ and to my director.
Eternally in joy for a day’s training on earth.
“I will not forget thy words.” (Ps 119:16) Amen.

Pascal discovered the paradox of man which true religion teaches. Man is both a source of greatness and wretchedness. Even in wretchedness man learns of his greatness. Pascal points out that man can realize that something is missing because he has fallen from a previous nature, the state of grace that one ought to be. Knowledge of privation points out knowledge of one’s true condition. Pascal wittingly indicates that while a person with no eyes is inconsolable “probably no man ever ventured to mourn at not having three eyes” (409). Man seeks what is intrinsic to his nature including knowledge of reality. Since reason cannot know all of reality, the limitation of man becomes more evident and humbles man to receive grace and knowledge as a gift.

Christian religion points out two truths that man must know to remain balance in his knowledge. “There is a God whom men can know, and…there is a corruption in their nature which renders them unworthy of Him” (555). Knowledge of only one of these truths leads to opposite extremes. Knowledge of God but not of sin leads to the pride of the philosophers while knowledge of sin and wretchedness but not of a redeeming God leads to the despair of the atheists. It is God in his gift of faith that makes both truths known to man. The need for redemption becomes both evident and reasonable. Through faith Jesus Christ can be recognized as “the end of all, and the center to which all tends” (555). The true God is different from limited view of God that philosophy offers because God not only brings the world into motion but also restores His creation that has turned against Him. As a God of love, He fills the hearts of man to make them aware of their condition that they might freely return back to Him. Without the mediator of Jesus Christ, man falls into either atheism or deism. To accept such possibilities is not reason, but grace through which all things become possible and miracles become evidence. To reject such possibilities is not reason, but an emotional problem that fails to dive into the infinite mystery that surrounds all things.

This worldview follows the assumption that the highest act of a human person is not knowledge and reason but faith and love. We are made to know precisely because we are made to love and be loved, not vice versa. While reason is very much a function of the human person it is not humanity’s end in itself but a means to understanding the choices available to the will. Faith is to the will what knowledge is to the intellect. They complement one another rather than replace each other. There is no competition intrinsic to the either faith or reason that would put one in conflict with the other. Rather human minds create the conflict. Even when affirming a judgment of the intellect, this willful act follows a trust in the correlation of an idea and its ability to represent reality regardless of whether this process is something that the judger is consciously aware of. This implicit trust is made explicit in Christianity and its belief of Jesus Christ as the Logos and Word of God. God stands beyond all creation and orders everything accordingly to His will and sees that it is good. Rather than destroying reason, Christianity inherently fosters the scientific and philosophical enterprise, precisely because it believes in the intelligibility of the world ordered by a divine Logos. Even if such world is ultimately shrouded in mystery, we can through the gifts of revelation and reason have positive knowledge about creation and the creator.

“Without the Creator the creature would disappear...But when God is forgotten the creature itself grows unintelligible." --Second Vatican Council

Blaise Pascal: Insight into Faith (Post III)

Continued from Insight into Faith (Post II).

Living in France where a favorite pass-time of the French was to gamble, Pascal plays with the idea of statistical gain and risks in his famous wager argument. Appealing to gamblers, Pascal shows how disbelief in God may risk more than any person would want to lose, the possibility for eternal happiness. This argument is not meant to justify belief in God but to show that belief in God is at least reasonable, and may be one of the most reasonable decisions a person will ever make. The point of this argument is to ready the heart for true faith. In other words, Pascal is taking up the banner of John the Baptist in hopes that a person may be prepared for humbling receiving grace. He does not believe that his argument in any way can provide that faith.

Reason alone, as great as it may seem, has limits and lacks the ability to judge definitively whether God exists or not. This is not to say that belief in God is not reasonable nor that an argument cannot be philosophically derived, but God is not merely an idea of the intellect. Any judgment would insinuate a conclusion that goes beyond the evidence available to the mind. Such a fact, regarding the existence of God as an objective and evident judgment, lies beyond and prior to the mind. Ultimately reason may aide the person in finding God, but the heart must first seek Him. Thus, we can neither affirm nor deny the existence of God based on reason alone. However, Pascal insists that every person must wager whether “God is, or He is not” (233). Since reason cannot speak and must remain neutral, the wager becomes a question of happiness rather than knowledge. Accordingly, Pascal sets the stakes on the fact that God is. “If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing” (233). Considering the possibility of the existence of God completely as a gamble and ignorant to the case in reality, there exist an equal chance of whether or not God exist, heads or tails. Betting that God exist when he does in fact exist, a person would hypothetically gain eternal happiness. If God does not exist that person has lost nothing. Following the nature of the gamble, the only way a person gains anything is if God does in fact exist. If God does not exist then a person neither gains nor loses in any of the scenarios. Therefore a person can reasonable gamble that God exists if they are remotely interested in the possibility of gaining eternal happiness. Since a person must gamble, belief becomes the most reasonable bet. The person sacrifices a finite chance in which nothing is gained for an infinite chance in which everything is to be gained.

Pascal realizes that belief from such a wager hardly seems like faith at all. In fact, he indicates that belief from a gamble is not true faith; but the wager only purposes to open a person up to the possibility of receiving faith. When struggling with faith, Pascal recommends that such a person live as if they did believe and follow the paths of those who have had similar struggles with atheism in finding their way to faith. By living as a believer a person is more inclined to believe and opens himself up to the supernatural grace of faith. Eventually, such a life may reveal the nothingness this life has to offer in comparison to the infinite happiness to be found in God.

Belief that God exist is not equal to faith in God. Where the mind may think of God, the heart experiences Him. Pascal says, “Knowledge of God is very far from the love of Him” (280). Both reason and the heart represent reality and know truth; only each tells us something different. Pascal says that the heart knows first principles such as “space, time, motion, [and] number” (282), and reason would be absurd to demand reasons for these intuitions of the heart. A person can only wait patiently for grace of faith when realizing the insufficiency of reason.

Next week will be the final post on this series of Blaise Pascal and his insight into faith. I will discuss the paradoxical nature of man’s greatness and wretchedness, the purpose of religion, and the primacy of humility.

Blaise Pascal: Insight into Faith (Post II)

Continued from Insight into Faith (Post I).

Blaise Pascal identifies a paradox of reality within the nature of humanity. Man stands torn as a medium between the two opposites of infinity and nothingness. After assessing the hopelessness in the ability of man to discern either the infinite or nothingness, Pascal turns to religion and faith as the way to leave the pit of despair. Since man can neither see the beginning, the nothingness from which he came, nor the end, the infinite towards which he is headed, only faith in God can bring comfort. Pascal, critical of Descartes, makes sure not to reduce God to a rational backing of a worldview and shows that we also need faith in God. Besides, God ultimately disappears past man’s ability to conceive or imagine.

Blaise realizes that everything, once reflected upon seriously, leads to its own mystery. All of man’s reason and man himself becomes as nothing in relationship to the infinite reality that surrounds him. Yet when man tries to study himself he dives into an infinite number of smaller and vaster things heading towards nothingness. Although man wants to comprehend everything he is left with understanding nothing.

For Pascal, man, when left to his own accord, is in a very helpless condition. Man seeks happiness in science and many other pleasures only to discover that he cannot become happy with himself or his abilities. Man orients all his activities in hope to become happy in the future but he cannot find contentment in the present. There is an excessive amount of activity without an overall purpose. Many run around in a helpless condition because both senses and reason fail in attaining truth. The senses deceive reason with faulty appearances and vice versa until both become enemies with one another and both are cast into doubt. The mortal condition of man in the dark has no way out of itself through itself.

A different approach must be taken, that of faith. Man must go out of himself and trust in more than his reason. But man must have something beyond himself to allow him to do this. Pascal believes that God places religion into both the mind, by reason, and the heart, by grace, and He does not force it upon either. Since there is not enough evidence to neither confirm nor deny God in the world, the grace of faith becomes a very valuable gift. In the context of this faith, if man thinks as he ought he can find this faith reasonable. Faith in God orders the ideas of man and allows him to be content with himself through his relationship with God. Instead of slipping into the darkness of meaningless, faith allows man to live with the assurance of eternity. The latter becomes a more reasonable way to live while the former creates a state of despair.

Blaise Pascal uses reason to show the reasonability of faith in God. Reason cannot produce faith in God but only open a person to the possibility. Through exploring the nature of both faith and reason, Pascal continues to affirm the limitations of reason and need for faith in a world shrouded with mystery. Pascal realizes the inability of reason to bring man into knowledge of God, and that all proofs for God from the works of nature only help those who already see God in all things. In hopes to open the mind to listen to the reasons of the heart, Pascal offers a wager, a gamble, by which he shows that faith may be the most reasonable way to live one’s life. Pascal also identifies two truths in religion and shows how both are intrinsic to understanding reality. Reason and heart need to work in harmony to receive the grace of true knowledge about one’s own condition and the need of God. Ultimately Pascal shows the Christian Religion as the culmination in which the knowledge of reason and heart find their calling.

In my next post I will take up the Pascal’s famous wager. My hope is to show its complexity within the context that Pascal intended it. I have heard many simplified versions that do not do justice the actual argument. Taken in its context this argument is very beautiful and compelling in its own right. Pascal does not merely try to appeal to reason but to the entire person including one’s desires and hopes as well as reason. This argument was never meant to replace faith but to merely open a person up to its possibility. Pascal sees faith as a divine grace that follows a person’s humility. Often reason blind to its own presuppositions and unjustified metaphysical beliefs against the possibility of God gets in the way of this openness, which is the very reason that Pascal’s argument is so beneficial.

Blaise Pascal: Insight into Faith (Post I)

This is the beginning of a series of posts on Blaise Pascal. I believe he is often a neglected and misunderstood Christian thinker, and I have experienced people misquote and critique him without actually understanding the perplexity of his thought. In the mid 1600's, Blaise Pascal made significant contributions to the fields of mathematics and science. After a conversion experience he reflected on his faith and eventually started writing his Apology for the Christian Religion, a work never finished. After he died, the notes for this work were collected and named the Pensees or "thoughts". Sadly many people use Pascal’s insights and especially his famous wager out of context. Here I hope to explore and reflect on some of his central ideas, particularly those regarding faith and reason. Quote numbers from Pascal in this series of posts refer to the numbers in which his collection of thoughts was labeled.

Reactionary to the pure rationalism of Descartes, Blaise shows the interplay and reasonability of faith. Pascal claims that reason is utterly insufficient for an absolute argument that proves the existence of God. Some may venture to argue that reason currently can or may be able to one day demonstrate that some higher power or God does exist, but in the end, even with this belief, reason still fails in itself to discern the nature of God as Trinity; this type of insight relies on the gift of revelation and faith. Knowing that a God exists isn’t the same as knowing who that God is and is even further removed from a relationship with such a God. While I agree that philosophy gives much insight into God and there are very convincing arguments that may be made for God's existence, most arguments for God only offer a reasonable hypothesis in which a person is left with a fundamental choice of belief. In other words, the existence of God is not so evident to faculty of reason that one would be forced to believe in God without it being an act of faith rooted in the will.

If God were only an abstract universal like laws governing numbers and mathematics, faith would be quite unnecessary, but because God is an eternal subject we are called to have a relationship with him that translates concretely into our lives in an act of faith. The God of Christianity is not merely an impersonal prime mover that stands at the beginning of a causal sequence that has, through time and space, resulted in our own existence, but God is the One who actively sustains all reality and presently keeps us existing while moving us towards our ultimate end--telos. Such a God that loves us and cares for our own sake wants more than our knowledge of Him but our love which is mediated through a personal relationship, trust, and obedience. Faith is fundamental in belief of God and this faith requires at least as much as an act of the will as an act of the intellect.

To be human, “man’s response to God by faith must be free, and…therefore nobody is to be forced to embrace the faith against his will. The act of faith is of its very nature a free act.” “God calls men to serve him in spirit and in truth. Consequently they are bound to him in conscience, but not coerced…This fact received its fullest manifestation in Christ Jesus."

–CCC 160

Furthermore, faith is important in everyday life. It underlies the humility necessary to receive truth. Our minds most earnest attempts cannot discern the full nature of God, but this knowledge must be received as a gift through divine revelation. Our philosophical understanding may support what has been divinely revealed, but it cannot replace it. For these reasons alone it is important that Christianity emphasizes the need for faith and relationship with God. Neither a blind faith apart from reason nor reason divorced from faith is healthy, but faith must be balanced with reason.

If God is the creator and author of all things, than we can reasonably assume the both that books of nature (truth discovered through reason) and revelation (truth revealed through the Church) have the same author, namely God. Therefore, while faith points to that which is prior and beyond reason; neither of these books can contradict each other. As Aquinas pointed out to his contemporaries and the university: truth cannot contradict truth.

As I will explore in my next posts, the beauty of Pascal's thought is that it eloquently points out the limits of man in order to open man up to a relationship to Him who is without limits. The person truly open to all possibilities must then openly consider the possibility that God really exists and is really trying to enter into a relationship if only that person would believe.

Post II.