THE “THOUGHTS”
The “Letters Provinciales” are, however, in some respects, ephemeral literature as compared with the “Pensées” or “Thoughts.”〖Harvard Classics, vol. xlviii.〗 In the “Thoughts” we have the sum and substance of Pascal’s religious views as well as one of the masterpieces of French literary style. Pascal had long planned a work on religion in which he intended to set forth the defense of Christianity. This work never got beyond the stage of disconnected and fragmentary notes and “Thoughts,” from which it is difficult, if not impossible, to extract the definite plan of the whole work. But, none the less, what we have deserves the deepest consideration.
Pascal was by temperament a pessimist, and therefore he agreed the more easily with the gloomy Augustinian determinism of the Jansenists and their ideas of the sinfulness of man and of the necessity of grace. He was no less convinced of the impotence of man’s reason to deal with the problems of the unknowable and of the hereafter. Pascal had fed on the jesting skepticism of Montaigne and realized how logically unanswerable it was in spite of its inconclusiveness. This realization made him feel that there was only one egress from the impasse, it was to reject all the help and conclusions of reason for or against, and to throw himself blindly into the arms of God, an act symbolized by his acceptance of faith and the influence of grace upon him. It is for these reasons that Pascal is sometimes given such varying designations as “skeptic,” “mystic,” or “fideist”; that, moreover, his religious feeling is called by some the expression of diseased hallucinations, by others visions of a seer into the other world.
The underlying idea of the fragmentary “Thoughts” is the despair of man, his weakness and powerlessness. But there remains something in man’s own nature which protests against this despair. We have a certainty that all is not as bad as it seems. Let us accept the truths of the Christian religion and we then have the consolation that our suffering is not without cause, that we are expiating the original and primitive sin of mankind. This will at least make us understand our condition. Thus we shall, in a way, be proving Christianity and even God himself, beginning with man.
The fragmentary state of the “Thoughts” makes it impossible, however, for the reader to work out the stages of this argument. He will find it more profitable to take them as they stand, and he will then be fully satisfied by words of imagination and of true poetry. The language is permeated with lyrical inspiration: the poet is a thinker who sees the abysses of immensity, spatial and temporal, the infinitely vast and the infinitely small. He brings back from the contemplation of them a feeling of terror and yet of self-confidence. For though man be a prey to brutal outer nature, though he may be but a frail reed beaten before the blast, yet he feels that one thing lifts him above it all, the consciousness that he is a thinking reed. The work is full of the vagueness of love for the divine; consequently, in spite of Pascal’s mathematical brain, it is no geometrical proof for the persuasion of reason, but rather a way to take hold of the feeling. Pascal is the intuitionalist of French classicism as Descartes,〖See pamphlet on Philosophy in this series, Lecture III.〗 his philosophical rival, is its great rationalist.
The influence of Pascal upon French thought has been tremendous. In his own day he helped to free French prose and its content from the stilted rhetoric of certain self-conscious Latinists like Guez de Balzac. He helped some of the men of letters of his age to acquire a new gentleness of feeling without the sacrifice of stoical self-control. He familiarized writers who were taken up by considerations of a petty nationalism with visions of the boundless immensity which enwraps this little earth. He helped to make the French prose of his day more clear and a mirror of the soul. And all this he accomplished by a work of which we have only disconnected fragments, and by a life tragic in its brevity, in its physical suffering, extraordinary by its mental torture and intellectual vigor, the life of an all-embracing genius such as the world produces scarcely once in many centuries.