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Pascal’s God and the
Fragments of the World
Martin Nemoianu
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Pascal’s God and the Fragments of the World
Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com
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Martin Nemoianu
Pascal’s God and the
Fragments of the
World
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To the memory of my friend, Joseph d’Amécourt.
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Contents
1 Introduction 1
References 18
2 God 21
1Infini Rien: The God of the First Distinction 21
2Difficulties of Divine Disclosure 28
3God and Memory 35
References 42
3 Nature 45
1Incarnation and Nature 45
2Greatness and Wretchedness 51
3The End of Things and their Principle 54
4Incarnation and Supernature 58
References 62
4 Man 65
1The Heart 66
2Prayer 81
3Divertissement 88
4The Hateful Self 94
5Martyrdom 97
References104
ix
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x
Contents
5 Afterword—Divine
Grace and Human Freedom: Pascal,
Jansenism, and Sacred Tradition107
I109
II112
III115
IV126
V130
VI137
References139
Bibliography143
Index151
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Abbreviations
L
S
OC I and OC II
Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. Louis Lafuma (Paris: Seuil, 1962)
Blaise Pascal, Pensées, ed. Philippe Sellier (Paris: Bordas/
Classiques Garnier, 1991)
Blaise Pascal, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Michel Le Guern, 2 vols.
(Paris: Gallimard, 1998-2000)
xi
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CHAPTER 1
Introduction
This is the prose of the world, as it appears to the consciousness both of the
individual himself and of others:—a world of finitude and mutability, of
entanglement in the relative, of the pressure of necessity from which the
individual is in no position to withdraw. For every isolated living thing
remains caught in the contradiction of being itself in its own eyes this shut­in unit and yet of being nevertheless dependent on something else, and the
struggle to resolve this contradiction does not get beyond an attempt and
the continuation of this eternal war.—G.W.F Hegel1
Ultimate experience can only be achieved when ‘Above’ and ‘Below’ have
ceased to be irreconcilable opposites.—Wilhelm Furtwängler on
Anton Bruckner2
The disordered state of the Pensées at the time of Pascal’s death hangs
heavy over the efforts of any interpreter. What is the text about? What
does Pascal mean to show? What is his argument? Questions like these are
natural and straightforward in the history of philosophy. Asked about
Pascal, they become difficult and embarrassing. The problem, however, is
not altogether an accident of circumstance. Pascal himself is highly
sensitive to the question of the proper order of his text, a question which,
he insists, cannot be answered independently of the nature of its object:
1
2
Hegel (1975), p. 150.
As quoted in Allen (2018), p. 159.
1
M. Nemoianu, Pascal’s God and the Fragments of the World,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-55626-5_1
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2
M. NEMOIANU
I will write my thoughts here without order, and yet not perhaps in
unplanned confusion. This is the true order, and it will always indicate my
aim by its very disorder. I would be honoring my subject too much if I
treated it with order, since I want to show that it is incapable of it.3
On this point, Pascal is plain: the right form of a text must be drawn not
from art but from nature:
Eloquence. It requires something of the pleasant and of the real, but the
pleasant must itself be derived from the true … We must not judge nature
according to ourselves but according to it.4
The natural order of the text, then, must be disorder, where the object of
the text is the disorder of nature. As in the world, so in the work: a fragmentary text will be most suitable to the fragmentary state of things.5
3
S457/L532. References to the Pensées are given by two numbers. The first, marked with
an S, is taken from the Sellier edition, based on the second copy of Pascal’s manuscript: Pascal
(1991). The second number, marked with an L, refers to the Lafuma edition, which follows
the first copy: Pascal (1962). Page numbers to the longer fragments refer to Sellier’s French
in Pascal (1991). For the English, I have consulted two translations of the Sellier version—
that of Roger Ariew in Pascal (2005) and that of Pierre Zoberman et al. in Pascal (2022)—
one translation of Lafuma—A. J. Krailsheimer in Pascal (1995)—and one translation of the
older Brunschvicg ordering—Trotter in Pascal (1931). Quotations are drawn primarily from
Ariew and Zoberman et al., with a preference for the greater philosophical sensitivity of the
former, but, in all cases, with frequent modification and retranslation. Translations from
other texts by Pascal are my own, made from Michel Le Guern’s two volume edition of the
Oeuvres complètes, Pascal (1998–2000), indicated OC I and II.
4
S547/L667–668.
5
This point is well observed by McCarthy (1997), pp. 669–670. Jean Mesnard proposes
that the opening of S457/L532 abbreviates “Pyrrhonisme” and that the passage is therefore
to be read as a parodic presentation of skepticism. Mesnard (1992), pp. 363–370. Michel Le
Guern argues that the abbreviated opening refers rather to Descartes’ Principles. See OC II,
p. 1489, n. 4 to p. 748. The debate is treated by Hammond (1994), pp. 63–65. Le Guern’s
reading, though less widely accepted, is more plausible in my view. Its implication would be
that Pascal’s rejection of Cartesianism is written into the very style of the text. But even taking the initial abbreviation to mean “Skepticism” or “Pyrrhonism”—as Lafuma, Sellier,
Trotter, Krailsheimer, Ariew, and Zoberman et al. all do—it does not follow that Pascal is
merely parodying skepticism, one legitimate moment of his dialectic, the “Continual reversal
of pro and con” (S127/L93). See S164/L131 and the Entretien avec M. de Sacy sur Épictète
et Montaigne, in OC II, pp. 95–98. In any case, the fitness between the actual form of the
Pensées and its substantive philosophical content is independent of the particular (and unsettled) historical question of whether Pascal harbored designs for a fragmentary presentation
of his completed work. Some commentators do suggest that Pascal intended to employ a
fragmentary style: see, notably, Goldmann (1959), most directly at pp. 220 and 225–226.
For discussion, see Melzer (1986), pp. 132–135 and Hammond (1994), p. 63 n. 43.
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1
INTRODUCTION
3
And yet it is not enough to say, simply, that the Pensées is about a fallen
and fragmented nature. Pascal cleaves to a still stronger hermeneutical
principle, one not satisfied by his “orderless order”6 alone:
Every author has a meaning in which all contrary passages are reconciled
[s’accordent], or he has no meaning at all … We must, then, seek for a meaning that reconciles all oppositions.7
What is this meaning? The answer is already adverted to in the very disclosure of disorder. What is the condition of the possibility of our recognition
of disorder? Against what does fragmentation show itself as such?
What then does this craving and powerlessness cry out to us, but that there
was once a true happiness in man, of which there now remains only the
wholly empty mark and trace?8
Disorder is fragmentation of form. A fragmentary form implies a frustrated teleology, the falling short of a standard. A fragmentary text, by its
very character, adverts to a principle of its unification. It is meaningful, as
fragmentary, only in terms of this principle, which must be implicit in the
text and yet beyond the text. A fragmentary text which is the reflection of
fragmentary nature adverts to a principle which is implicit in nature and
yet lies beyond nature. Such a principle must be “universal … within us …
ourselves and not us.”9 The disorder and fragmentation of the Pensées,
therefore, is the reflection of the disorder and fragmentation of nature.
Both are haunted by a principle of order adequate to the integration and
unification of the whole, “a sole principle of everything … a sole end of
everything.”10 Without this sole principle and end, at once immanent and
transcendent, nature and text alike are a disordered nothing, a fragmentary heap.
It is the contention of this book that the central theme of Pascal’s
Pensées is the articulation of this sole principle and end in terms of a distinction between the principle and all else—all nature, all being—which,
without the principle, would be nothing at all. This first and most
This ideal formulation is due to McCarthy (1997), p. 669.
S289/L257.
8
S181/L148.
9
S471/L564.
10
S237/L205. See also S808/L988 and S230/L199, pp. 249 and 255.
6
7
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4
M. NEMOIANU
fundamental distinction Pascal names “Infini rien,” “Infinity nothing.”11
This is the “meaning that reconciles all oppositions,” in text and in
nature.12 The whole of the Pensées, and not only the Pensées, is devoted to
the question of how this distinction can be made to appear and, in its
appearance, what it implies, particularly for human nature and human
personhood.
With respect to his own approach to the disclosure of this distinction—
we cannot call it a method—Pascal has not left us altogether starless. For
him, “Man is obviously made to think. That is his whole dignity and his
whole merit, and his whole duty is to think properly. Now, the order of
thought is to begin with self and with its author and its end,” that is, from
the lowest to the highest, or from what appears to the principles of its
appearance.13 Put in terms of the Infini rien distinction, Pascal means to
begin with the second term, with what is, in itself, nothing, and in disclosing the per se nothingness of things, to direct readers toward the first
term, the principle of their being. The pattern of the text in both copies of
the Pensées, set out in the table at S1, seems to confirm a “bottom up”
approach, even if Pascal may, at times, have had doubts about its propriety.14
This order of thought recommends itself not least because the very
disorder and fragmentation of nature tends to obscure its own character,
to conceal yet deeper, behind that obscurity, the fact that there is a principle of things, and to encourage, thereby, each thing in nature to regard
itself as ordering center.15 Because of this complex of hiddenness, Pascal
holds, the proper order is to begin by drawing attention to what is nearest
at hand:
If there is a sole principle of everything, a sole end of everything … the true
religion must teach us to worship only him and to love only him. But as we
find ourselves powerless to worship what we do not know or to love any-
11
“Infini rien” occurs as the opening line of S680/L418. Ariew and Zoberman et al. render Pascal’s “rien” as “nothingness.” I have chosen, like Krailsheimer and Trotter, to translate it as “nothing” and to reserve the English “nothingness,” more strictly, for his “néant.”
12
S289/L257.
13
S513/L620.
14
S573/L694.
15
See, among many other places, S680/L421, S494/L597, and the whole series of fragments on divertissement, from S165/L132 to S171/L139.
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1
INTRODUCTION
5
thing other than ourselves, the religion instructing us of these duties must
instruct us of this powerlessness as well.16
The principle and end of things, that is to say, is to be shown negatively
and indirectly, by making readers self-consciously aware of their own
metaphysical condition, thus placing them in a position to wonder what
makes it possible for them to think beyond it.17 Or, if they will not wonder, that very fact again may be adduced as evidence of their condition.18
Indeed, the heuristic worth of starting with the nothingness of things
apart from their principle and end is inscribed even in Pascal’s own act of
composition:
In writing my thought, it sometimes escapes me, but this prompts me to
remember my weakness, which I am constantly forgetting. This is as instructive to me as my forgotten thought, for I care only to know my nothingness.19
Seen in these lights, Pascal’s text cannot be called an apology in the
usual sense, if by that we mean the accumulation of mundane evidence
which, added together, yields an ultramundane conclusion. Pascal is not
concerned to offer mid-level justifications for a religion, for a god, for a
life lived according to these that could be reconciled with a hostile or alien
philosophical frame. His goal is not to make Christianity plausible and
pleasing, by arguing for this or that doctrine or claim, leaving settled the
language of a modernity that takes for granted its implausibility and
unpleasantness. He means, rather, to open up a horizon around modernity, to cast into relief its smallness, its shallowness, its cowardice, its dishonesty. His is not a defense of Christianity to modernity but from
modernity, revealing that the modern turn to the self as the Archimedean
point out of which nature may be constructed, according to a plan of the
self’s own methodic design,20 is founded on a delusion about what the self
is, a delusion that lives parasitically, concealing the ultimate principle of
S237/L205
On this point, see S155/L122, S151/L119, and especially S164/L131. See also the
bundle of fragments that runs from S221/L189 to S225/L192, with its emphasis on seeing
one’s own misère as a necessary condition of knowing and loving God.
18
S681/L427-S682/L428–429.
19
S540/L656. See also S459/L542.
20
See Meditations II (AT VII, 24), in Descartes (1984–1985) and also Kant (1965), p. 20
(B xiii).
16
17
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6
M. NEMOIANU
things on which the self depends.21 Rather than mount a defense of
Christianity from within this modern frame, then, Pascal means to speak
always at the level of the first and most fundamental distinction, Infini
rien, to lay bare the per se nothingness of the self and of all things in terms
of their absolute dependency on the principle of being that transcends
them, one and all, radically. By starting with the second term of this distinction, he aims to effect or, rather, to be the occasion of effecting a
transformation, volitional as much as intellectual, in his readers.22
Pascal’s transformative aim explains and justifies his starting point at the
lower and dependent half of the distinction with which he is ultimately
concerned, as well as his embrace of order through disorder, whether this
means, finally, the intentional employment of fragmentation or merely the
rejection of the geometric method.23 The aim of the present study, however, is not apologetic but philosophical: the consideration of the view
Pascal affirms. As our aim does not simply repeat Pascal’s own, neither
does our presentation of his themes. Again: Pascal seems to have wanted
to provide what we might almost call a phenomenological disclosure of
the Infini rien distinction, moving from low to high, drawing his readers
into self-conscious awareness of their place in a fallen and fragmentary
world and, so, opening for them an awareness of the possibility of reintegration, reunification, wholeness, and health, in terms of the principle of
that world’s being, a principle which is at once the condition of the possibility of fallenness and fragmentation and the remedy. Our own pattern
moves instead from high to low, from the first term of Infini rien, its distinction from nature and its appearance in the world, and then to the
implications of that distinction and appearance for the self specifically.
21
A sketch of the history of philosophy in these terms is developed in Prufer (2018). See,
in particular, p. 8.
22
S41/L7.
23
If the reading of S457/L532 proposed by Le Guern is to be believed, and that fragment
is a direct reference to Descartes’ Principles, then it is plausible to suppose that Pascal contrasts his own “disorder” as “true order” with the geometric style. See OC II, p. 1489, n. 4
and 5 to p. 748. Pascal’s understanding of that style would be past question, even if he had
not articulated “the entire method of geometric proof of the art of persuasion,” in De l’esprit
géométrique, OC II, p. 175. The style of the Pensées, of course, is quite different and seems
perhaps to aspire to that persuasive approach, of which Pascal says, in the former work, he
feels himself incapable: “it is necessary to attend to the person whom we wish to persuade,
whose mind and heart we must know, what principles he grants, what things he loves; and
then to observe what link the thing in question has with the stated principles or delightful
objects.” Ibid., p. 173.
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1
INTRODUCTION
7
This is a reversal of Pascal’s order—not, we may hope, as a betrayal of
his thought but, rather, in service of articulating its philosophical substance. Following Thomas Prufer, we may call this rearticulation
“recapitulation.”24 Recapitulations are “shifts, shifts that show themselves
as shifts by preserving what they shift from” or, again, through the image
of the palimpsest: “The new is inscribed over the old; the old is legible
beneath the new.”25 To recapitulate is, thus, to repeat with a difference. As
Robert Sokolowski explains it:
To recapitulate is to repeat, but also to select, to summarize, and to put into
hierarchic order, with the more important distinguished from the less. We
place the old material into new chapters or headings, capitula … When
something is said to be recapitulated, it is obvious that it is still there in the
recapitulation, but it is also obvious that it has been abridged, rearranged,
and inevitably slanted.
Sokolowski’s most illuminating metaphor is linguistic: “[Things that are
recapitulated] are re-syntaxed … and to re-syntax something is to rethink
it.”26 Recapitulation is not repetition, if this is understood as mechanical
recitation of particular formulations. Nor again is it explication, if this
means interpretation and analysis from the outside, in disinterested detachment. Recapitulation is retrieval of what is old, of bringing what is old to
new light by ordering it anew, under new headings, and thinking it afresh,
in a new head.27
Pascal himself seems to endorse a form of recapitulation, characterizing
his own relation to the Catholic tradition in similar terms:
Let no one claim that I have said nothing new: the arrangement of the material is new. When we play tennis [Quand on joue à la paume], it is the same
ball hit back and forth, but one of us places it better. I would as soon be told
24
Prufer (1993), integrating work previously published between 1963 and 1991. And see
Sokolowski (2012), pp. 9–10.
25
Prufer (1993), p. xii.
26
Sokolowski (2008), p. 78–79 n10, and Sokolowski (2012), pp. 9–10.
27
Recapitulation, so understood, bears some affinity with Ezra Pound’s modernist slogan
“Make It New,” where “It” refers to “Tradition.” The genealogy of Pound’s phrase is traced
by North (2013), pp. 162–171. The connection between Prufer’s “recapitulations” and
Pound’s “make it new” is perhaps not so far-fetched, since Prufer’s thought and style are
marked decisively by the influence of T. S. Eliot’s “Old stone to new building” modernism,
with its “easy commerce of the old and the new.” See Prufer (1993), pp. xi-xiii.
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M. NEMOIANU
I have used old words. As if the same thoughts did not form another body
of discourse when arranged differently, just as the same words form other
thoughts by their own different arrangement.28
There is, of course, an ironic distance here, but the deployment of it is not
for the sake of mere novelty, and still less for the sake of innovation. Pascal
is absolutely unequivocal that the highest truth, the condition of all other
truth, is the entry of God into human history—the simultaneous disclosure of both sides of the Infini rien distinction—transmitted in the tradition of the Church, the “higher principle” to which “submission and
conformity” are required.29 This is the tradition “Jesus Christ bequeathed
to the ancients, to be transmitted to the faithful,” so that “the history of
the Church must properly be called the history of truth.”30 Pascal’s distance is in service of drawing near, of throwing new light on old truth, so
that it may appear in new circumstances, beneath which it would otherwise be hidden:
But when we no longer listen to tradition; when … the true source of truth,
which is tradition, has been excluded … the truth is no longer free to manifest itself. Then, as men no longer speak of truth, truth itself must
speak to men.31
Pascal’s recapitulation is, finally, for the sake of disclosing a truth which is
timeless.
Though my approach here inverts Pascal’s own, my ultimate object is
to disclose his ultimate object. My aim is to recapitulate his recapitulation
and, so, to make manifest, in a new way, what he hoped to make manifest
in a new way. In shifting from an order that leads with the second term of
Infini rien to one that opens with the first, we move from beginning with
28
S575/L696. See also S645/L784: “Words differently arranged make for different
meanings, and meanings differently arranged make for different effects.” The original model
of reading Pascal in light of these passages is provided to us as the version of the Penées prepared by Léon Brunschvicg—not, to be sure, as a scholarly edition, where it must be judged
inadequate, but as a systematic interpretation and recapitulation of Pascal’s themes, where it
stands almost alone in its scope. Like Brunschvicg, my concern is less Pascal’s historical intentions and the details of composition as it is the themes of the text and the picture of things
they open up.
29
S317/L285.
30
S634/L769 and S641/L776.
31
S439/L865.
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INTRODUCTION
9
a question to beginning with an answer, or, again, we move from the order
of experience to the order of being. This shift reassigns the emphasis of the
Pascalian themes from goodness to truth. Of course, from whatever side
one takes it, the two come together ultimately, as Pascal himself does not
hesitate to point out.32 Nevertheless, to pose the per se nothingness of
nature, and man in nature, as a question is to think of it as a problem in
need of a solution, a privation that should be or could be remedied. And,
of course, Pascal characterizes his own project in just these terms.33 By
contrast, to begin with the first term of Infini rien is to step behind the
questions and problems of experience and to open not just with the condition of experience but, indeed, the condition of conditions. The emphasis
here is a shift to truth because it is set on what is ultimately and absolutely
real. Again, what is ultimately and absolutely real is also the good of each
individual, but this is so in a deeper sense than merely the fulfillment of the
natural needs of a natural kind (let alone pleasure), reaching to the transcendent ground of each and of all and, so, to the reason why each is
“anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever.”34
Interpretively, to step behind the questions and problems of experience
is to step behind the many “epistemology of religion” debates in which
Pascal is implicated and to enter, rather, into the metaphysical issues before
which those debates swirl. Putting it otherwise, we might say that the
recapitulated order takes up the Pascalian themes first from the side of
theoretical rather than practical reason. But this simple formulation still
fails to capture the radicality of Pascal’s essential drive, which does not
come to rest with either theoretical or practical reason but pushes always
toward the transcendent ground of both. This book does, therefore, concern itself with the metaphysical lineaments, explicit and implicit, of
Pascal’s thought, but always and only in light of what goes beyond
32
S471/L564 employs “universal being” and “universal good” interchangeably. S808/
L988 claims that God must be at once the ground of things and their ultimate consummation, and likewise the end of S230/L199. See also the identification of justice and wisdom in
the order of charity at S761/L933.
33
S230/L199 most obviously, but see especially S491/L595 and S46/L12, which cast the
order of human understanding and of the text in relation to the true good. Hibbs (2017),
reads Pascal’s account of human life as having “the structure of a quest” (p. 104). Manent
(2022) provides an excellent illustration of reading Pascal from the side of the question and,
thus, in terms of the good—here, specifically, the good that will answer to the cultural and
spiritual fragmentation of Europe.
34
John Wippel attributes this striking formula to Siger of Brabant. See Wippel
(2007), p. 731.
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10
M. NEMOIANU
metaphysics, if by that we understand the study of being in and of the
natural whole. The Pascalian metaphysical picture emerges only in light of
a concern that is deeper than this: “the end of things and their principle,”
so whole and self-sufficient as to be radically transcendent, so radically
transcendent as to be able to enter even into immanent nature as a singular
particular, so singular and absolute in its fundamentality that, without it,
all else is nothing at all.35
My recapitulation begins, accordingly, with the Pascalian God. I return
to a familiar text—S680/L418, the fragment containing the wager—to
read it in an unfamiliar way, by asking about the God it presupposes. The
answer to this question yields three different levels of the text, addressed
to three different readers, with a deeper understanding of God at each. On
this reading, the third level of the text offers, to those capable of it, the
fullest glimpse of God in the Infini rien distinction: between the principle
of being and being, between God and the created world which, without
God, is nothing.
The primacy and fundamentality of this distinction complicates its disclosure. The absolute character of the distinction’s first term precludes any
possibility of getting behind or above it to secure demonstrative purchase.
The independence of the first term precludes any straightforward inference from the second. Indeed, the radical transcendentality of the first
term seems to preclude the possibility of attaining to it from the second in
any way at all. The essential and irreducible nature of the difference
between God and all else means that there is nothing more fundamental
or necessary in terms of which God could be shown, and, in particular,
nothing in created being adequate to reach the difference. Natural theology, of itself, is not sufficient, and its deliverances remain ambiguous
between first principles in nature and first principles of nature. The only
disclosure fully adequate to the depth of the Infini rien distinction must
come from the side of the first term: the initiative of the divine in making
itself manifest to created being.
The primary disclosure of God to man, the disclosure that establishes
for man the distinction between God and the world, in its priority and
depth, is the incarnation of Christ. In one sense, of course, God must
always be present in the created cosmos, from the high level of what is
universal and necessary, to the low level of contingent particularity, for,
again, these are, strictly and exactly, nothing without God. The
35
S230/L199, p. 249.
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1 INTRODUCTION
11
incarnation goes further. God’s entry into the created cosmos as, at once,
wholly God and wholly this particular man, subject to history, to birth, to
death, discloses God more fully in the depth of his distinction from the
world. Incarnation—and not mere theophany—is possible only if God is
radically transcendent in such a way as not to compete for being with created things. Only then could he enter in among them without change or
loss.36 The incarnation discloses the Infini rien distinction singularly: in a
way that nothing else could and through what is singular and particular.
The historical appearance of God as this man, the singular point of contact
between divine transcendence and created immanence, becomes the center of a sacred tradition that points backward and forward through history
and by which God is disclosed. This disclosure is established not by an
argument but by a person, not by inference or abstraction from reality but
by a real, existent one.37
That the incarnate Christ is wholly God and wholly man, therefore,
discloses a deeper sense of divinity than what is available to natural reason
alone. In so doing, the incarnation discloses a deeper sense of nature than
what is available to natural reason alone. The incarnate Christ is the unifying center, the mediator of the principle and end of all things in the created whole. Without God, the created whole would be nothing. Without
the incarnate Christ, created nature, incoherently struggling to separate
itself from God, weakens and yields to fragmentation and disorder. What
remains is a nature riven between high and low, the necessary and universal estranged from the contingent and particular. Philosophy, struggling
to reconstitute cosmic order out of tragic heterogeneity, either subsumes
the low into the high or else reduces the high to the low, when it does not
simply counsel resignation. The division of nature appears no less in man,
who is both wretched and great, at once finite, contingent, and mortal,
and also capable, in his rational dimension, of knowing himself as such
and, so, of thinking beyond his wretchedness, in terms of what is general
and necessary. These contrarieties form a paradox. Human grandeur
emerges from misère and yet is unable to escape from it or remedy it, with
the result that all the efforts of philosophy to account for man either exalt
him in his rationality by obscuring the lowliness of his condition or turn
instead to skeptical denigration of his nature, traducing his rational
36
These latter points—which I owe to Prufer (1993), Sokolowski (1982), and Sokolowski
(2006)—are discussed in much greater detail below.
37
Along similar lines, see Spaemann (2017), p. 21.
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12
M. NEMOIANU
capacity and its cosmic ambitions. The “meaning that reconciles all oppositions,” that unifies high and low, universal and particular, without reduction or subsumption, must be both in nature and beyond it, both
“ourselves and not us,” able to enter into the world at both its levels, to
ground the reality and integrity of each alone and both together.38 This is
the mediation of the incarnate Christ.
The entry of the transcendent divine into human history as a particular
man, of course, carries profound implications for the human being specifically. These implications must not be considered primarily in epistemological, psychological, or moral terms. They are, in the first place, a
question of being: Christ’s mediation discloses a deeper sense of man than
what is available to natural reason alone. It shows not only that what is
ultimately true is higher than the horizon of the natural whole. It shows
also that, in uniting himself to man, God opens the possibility of man’s
transcendence of the natural whole and points to a human destiny beyond
the necessities of nature and, above all, beyond death, the chief consequence of those necessities for each particular. Man is shown to be not
merely an instance of a nature but something more: a person who has a
nature.39
It is here, above all, that man bears the image of the incarnate Christ,
one person with two natures, human and divine. The heart is the name
given by Pascal to this human personhood, this dimension of the human
being set at once in and beyond nature. On one side, the heart is related
to human nature, both rational and corporeal, and is able to see that
nature, to know it, and to integrate it. On the other side, it transcends this
nature in its receptivity to what lies beyond all nature as the principle of
the whole. Taking these two sides together, the heart is the transcendent
aspect of the human being capable of grasping the whole as a whole, in
terms of its transcendent principle and end.
In its transcendence of nature, analogous to the divine transcendence
of the created whole, the heart is the location of a deeper and more radical
freedom than that found in the ordinary, quotidian actions of the will,
which follow the determinations of reason. In having and not simply being
his nature, man may be well or badly, rightly or wrongly, properly or
improperly related to his nature and to nature as such. Man is rightly
related to nature by being rightly related to God, to Christ, to the truth
38
39
S289/L257 and S471/L564.
This formulation follows Spaemann (2017), especially at pp. 31–33.
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1 INTRODUCTION
13
which is the principle and the end of all created things. The incarnation
thus poses for man an ultimate question of being along with the power to
answer it. Man is given the freedom to determine his ultimate orientation
to the truth: whether he will accept or reject his created nature and his
place in the created natural order.40 In slightly different terms, we may say
that man is faced, ultimately, with the question of whether he will turn in
receptivity to divine truth and be ordered in cooperation with it or, instead,
treat the self as center and its preferences as what is ultimately real.
Prayer is the characteristic activity of the heart ordered toward God.
God creates through speech. His word creates and discloses what is. In
prayer, I speak the word that God has spoken to me.41 I am disclosed to
myself by participation in God’s disclosure to me; I become myself by
participation in God’s creation of me. In prayer, the human heart turns
and is turned toward God. It participates in the sustenance and growth of
its own being, and the governance of being in nature more generally,
through imitation of the divine act, intellectual and volitional, which is
generative of all being.
Divertissement is the characteristic activity of the heart ordered toward
the self as Archimedean point, the self-creating, ordering principle of all
things. Incapable, by its nature, of sustaining the pleasing fiction of its
own self-sufficiency and overwhelmed by the boredom which is the index
of this incapacity, the self tacks this way and that, swinging from one diversionary activity to another. The teleological structure of these activities
discloses the partial, perishing, and insufficient nature of the self, reaching
always beyond itself, even as the means serve to obscure this disclosure.
The self which would make itself center of all things is forced to turn its
attention away from itself and toward some something else in order to
conceal the per se nothingness of its own nature. This concealment always
presupposes the concealment of God, against whom human nature and
the human condition stand out in stark relief. God is hidden behind the
hiding of the self to itself. Divertissement, thus, stands as the metaphysical
inversion of prayer. Where God’s disclosure to man, spoken back to God,
is man’s own self-disclosure, ordering quotidian activity in its light, divertissement is, rather, quotidian activity concealing the self to itself and concealing God beneath that self-concealment.
40
41
Cf. Spaemann (2017), pp. 32–33.
Wonderfully articulated by Prufer (1993), p. 29.
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14
M. NEMOIANU
The self turned from God, mired in boredom, palliated by diversions is,
in a word, hateful. The hateful self is in a condition of ontological ingratitude. Chosen gratuitously to be, out of the nothingness which is otherwise its lot, the self obscures or elides this gratuity by means of its very
participation in it. In Pascalian terms, this is nothing other than amour-­
propre, in its fullest metaphysical sense: resentful and jealous of its universal human rights. The ingratitude of self-love is hateful because it hates
createdness: it hates the truth which makes it, and all things, to be. The
hateful self refuses to make the Infini rien distinction or, having made it,
has chosen—and, in so choosing, has set itself in tension with—the distinction’s second term. Such a self is to be overcome. Such overcoming is
martyrdom.
The preservation of the self as center of all things requires the concealment of what is ultimate—death and God—against which the self appears
as what it truly is. The overcoming of the hateful self requires a return to
what is ultimate: on one side, the turning of the heart in receptivity to the
God who is beyond nature, and, on the other, receptivity to nature, and
especially one’s own rational and bodily nature, as created, as given by
God. Submission to God and submission to the natural order as created
are inseparable. Just as the hateful self conceals God beneath concealment
of created nature, the turn toward God must also be a turn toward created
nature. The overcoming of the hateful self requires the acceptance of
nature’s necessities, even as one sees that these necessities are themselves
created and contingent, subject to another, deeper necessity which is absolute. For mortal man, the natural necessity that frames all others is death,
and the acceptance of death for the sake of God is the highest expression
of assent to nature as created and given. This is martyrdom.
The culmination of the Pascalian vision of things, then, is not the separation of the self from nature. It is, rather, the full and joyful embrace of
created nature, in imitation of the transcendent God who enters unreservedly into nature, even to the point of death. Whereas the hateful self that
would make itself the center of all things loses even itself in its own nothingness, the self that accepts its own nothingness for the sake of God
receives things—itself and the whole—as they really are, on the basis of
union with the transcendent God who makes all things to be. This is the
heart of the martyr, who has made the Infini rien distinction fully.
My recapitulation, thus, begins and ends with the Infini rien distinction. It orders and interprets Pascal’s text and his themes according to this
distinction, which for him discloses what is ultimate and absolute. It takes
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1 INTRODUCTION
15
his central concern to be a fundamental question of metaphysics—“What
is a god?”42—and his answer to that question to be, “Truth as such.”43 The
effect of this reorientation of focus on the metaphysical question of what
is ultimate and absolute, of reading Pascal in terms of God as truth rather
than in terms of human problems of knowledge or the good, allows us to
see more clearly the stakes of Pascal’s project. These stakes, of course, may
be found announced in the wager fragment, particularly when that fragment is read more carefully and closely than it usually is. But Pascal’s view
is by no means exhausted by S680/L418. The distinction between the
divine absolute and the per se nothingness of all else forms the context,
implicit and explicit, of all of Pascal’s later thinking, particularly in the
Pensées: the fragments on grandeur et misère, on the corruption of nature,
on prayer, on boredom and divertissement, on the self.
The alternative to the Pascalian vision of the ultimate and absolute is
not, as the superficial reading of the wager has it, an ordinary life of ordinary pleasures. The negative counterpart of “that universal being,” before
whom only “self-annihilation” in martyrdom suffices,44 may appear in any
number of proximate guises, but it does not terminate in a middling life
spent watching Notre Dame football on television.45 No: for Pascal, outside of the transcendent and incarnate God of the Infini rien distinction,
all options reduce, finally, to the wisdom of Silenus:
Wretched, ephemeral race, children of chance and tribulation, why do you
force me to tell you the very thing which it would be most profitable for you
not to hear? The very best thing is utterly beyond your reach not to have
been born, not to be, to be nothing. However, the second best thing for you
is: to die soon.46
In Pascalian language, the follower of Silenus, conscious or unconscious,
has seen that the self, for all its paradoxical self-awareness, is nothing,
belongs properly to nothing, and so ought to be nothing. The upshot of
such a view, the triumph of the second term of Pascal’s distinction, is not
suicide but a headlong plunge into divertissement. The Silenian, like the
42
Indeed, if Allan Bloom is to be believed, this is “the most difficult and dangerous question of all philosophy.” See Bloom (2001), p. 117.
43
S164/L131, p. 211.
44
S410/L378.
45
As it was suggested to me once by a hostile interlocutor.
46
Nietzsche (1999), p. 23. Nietzsche here glosses Aristotle in Eudemus VI.
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16
M. NEMOIANU
Pascalian, may recognize the triviality of most diversion and the ultimate
futility of all.47 But—here again, like Pascal48—he sees that some diversions
do afford a certain escape, precarious and temporary, casting up a veil of
“resplendent, dream-born figures” before the truth, that is, the nothingness of the self. Lost in the wondrous pattern thus created, the heart’s
insistent reminders of human nothingness are, for a time, stilled:
Here, in the highest symbolism of art, we see before us that Apolline world
of beauty and the ground on which it rests, that terrible wisdom of Silenus,
and we grasp, intuitively, the reciprocal necessity of these two things. At the
same time, however, we encounter Apollo as the deification of the principium individuationis in which alone the eternally attained goal of the
primordial unity, its release and redemption through semblance, comes
­
about; with sublime gestures he shows us that the whole world of agony is
needed in order to compel the individual to generate the releasing and
redemptive vision and then, lost in contemplation of that vision, to sit calmly
in his rocking boat in the midst of the sea.49
For the Silenian, there is no higher horizon than the final nothingness,
but, within this horizon, the awful tension of the human admixture of
being and nothingness offers up glittering moments in which the primordial truth withdraws before splendid shadows, the nothingness of the self
is forgotten, the heart is silenced, and the wheel of Ixion comes to rest.50
The wisdom of Silenus is, therefore, an inversion of Pascalian martyrdom. Both alike seek an overcoming of the self, but each according to its
view of ultimacy: infinity or nothingness. For Pascal, the hateful self is
overcome by submitting and being submitted to the God who is both
within and beyond it. This overcoming passes through death but does not
end there. Precisely because the martyr is unified to the principle of his
own innermost being, nearer to him than he is to himself, his overcoming
is a restoration of the self and a reintegration into the whole of what is. For
the Silenian self, there is no stable end and principle, no true transcendent
self-overcoming. There is only the quieting of the truth—better not to be,
better still never to have been—in passing instances of dreamlike
self-forgetfulness.
S165/L132.
S168/L136, S33/L414.
49
Nietzsche (1999), pp. 23 and 26.
50
See Schopenhauer (1969), p. 196.
47
48
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1 INTRODUCTION
17
Pascal rules out any third option. The wisdom of Silenus is the destiny
of every supposed alternative to the Infini rien distinction. Either one
makes the distinction between the principle of being and all else which,
without the principle, would be nothing at all, or else one must invert the
distinction, affirming the ultimacy of the nothingness which is the distinction’s second term and treating everything, including the first term, as a
projection out of it.51 To be sure, only seldom will this second option be
taken in full self-consciousness. More often, it will proceed through various projects of diversionary consolation, more or less refined and more or
less effective at resisting the pull of the void, at most fleetingly recognized
for what they are.52 Thus all half-measures, whether self-satisfied
Cartesianism or Stoicism, Humeanism or Epicureanism, or anything else,
must finally break themselves on the disorder and fragmentation of nature,
struggling to overcome its tragic heterogeneity through soothing tales
that subsume or reduce its disparate elements, high and low, universal and
particular, in man and in nature writ large. Only the God who transcends
the world so entirely that he is able to enter it freely, as a lowly, contingent
particular, suffices to integrate the natural whole as a true cosmos, drawing
it out of nothingness by reconciling its oppositions, securing its reality at
both the level of universality and that of particularity, without the subsumption of the low into the high or the reduction of the high to the low.
Once more, save for the God of the first distinction, nature and man, and
the text itself, are nothing but an indifferent heap of bad fragments.
With the options so stated, Pascal’s argument finally takes on the shape
of a reductio: the foot of the cross or the barrel of a gun.53 Pascal himself
finds it noteworthy that even those in a position to see this reductio prefer
51
As Pascal would have it, seeking to make the distinction is, in some sense, already to have
made it: “You would not be seeking me, if you had not found me” (S751/L919).
52
One might think here of Conrad’s Kurtz, who has looked beyond the divertissements of
moral progress and human improvement and is shattered by the vision of metaphysical horror upon which they rest. Conrad’s narrator, Marlow, in recounting Kurtz’s tale to his fiancée, is unable to utter this truth and, instead, offers her a consoling lie about Kurtz’s final
devotion. Marlow’s story is itself a diversion for sailors, waiting beneath the “brooding
gloom” for the turn of the tide, hemmed in “by a black bank of clouds,” on a waterway that
“seemed to lead into the heart of an immense darkness.” He concludes sitting “apart, indistinct and silent, in the pose of a meditating Buddha. Nobody moved for a time.” Conrad
(1910), pp. 65, 147, and 157–158.
53
See Huysmans, quoting Barbey d’Aurevilly: “il ne reste plus … qu’à choisir entre la bouche
d’un pistolet ou les pieds de la croix.” Huysmans (1922), p. xxiv.
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18
M. NEMOIANU
to distract themselves, a fact he adduces as further evidence of the reductio
itself, the absurdity of cleaving to one’s own nothingness:
For it is indubitable that that the duration of this life is but an instant, that
the state of death is eternal, whatever its nature may be, and that thus all our
actions and thoughts must take such different paths, according to the state
of this eternity, that it is impossible to set out with sense and judgment
except by adjusting course in light of that point, which must be our final
object … On this, then, let us judge those who live without considering the
ultimate end of life, who let themselves be guided by their inclinations and
their pleasures, without reflection and without concern, as if they could
annihilate eternity by turning their minds away from it, thinking only of
how to become happy in the present moment.54
It is not natural that there exist men indifferent to the loss of their very
being … They behave quite differently with regard to all else: they fear even
the most trivial things, foresee them, feel them. And this same man who
spends so many days and nights in rage and despair at the loss of some office,
or because of some imaginary insult to his honor, is the very one who knows,
without anxiety and without emotion, that he will lose everything upon
death. It is monstrous to see in the same heart and at the same time such
sensitivity to the slightest things and such strange insensitivity to the
greatest.55
This work does not argue for the success of Pascal’s reductio. It seeks only
to trace it to its foundations in the distinction between infinity and nothing, to consider the implications of that distinction for the nature of nature
and the nature of man, and, perhaps, to express thereby something of
Pascal’s own sensitivity to both the slightest things and the greatest.
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Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness and The Secret Sharer (New York: Signet, 1910)
54
55
S682/L428.
S681/L427.
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1 INTRODUCTION
19
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20
M. NEMOIANU
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