Our human predicament

Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) was one of France’s greatest minds: inventor of the first calculating machine, and the first public transport (in Paris), he was a mathematician but most famous for his literary accomplishments; he was regarded by many as the greatest of French prose artists. He was an unconventional Catholic because he struggled against the Jesuits, calling their Society and the Inquisition “twin scourges of the truth” (Pensées §916/920). Also unusual for a Catholic layman in those days, he profoundly studied the Bible which was for him the source of absolute truth; so he was quite like an evangelical not only for his high regard for Scripture, but also because he underwent a profound experience of the risen Christ, which was a radical conversion, the essence of which he wrote immediately in his “Memorial” which has been described as the most sublime writing ever put on paper. 

Pascal thought long about the human condition: he compares mankind to a feeble plant, like a reed, then adds “but he is a thinking reed… All our dignity consists in thought” (§620/347). Well, he had lots of thoughts; he would be a blogger if he lived today, though some of his thoughts (pensées in French) are short like a tweet. They were considered so powerful and brilliant that they were published just as he jotted them down in his moments of inspiration and they are still in print today – 350 years later.

Here is an example of Pascal’s penetrating understanding of our human dilemma – which you will agree, as you read, sounds like it was written in our time.

“When I see the blind and wretched state of man, when I survey the whole universe in its dumbness and man left to himself with no light, as if lost in this corner of the universe, without knowing who put him there, what he has come to do, what will become of him when he dies, incapable of knowing anything, I am moved to terror, like a man transported in his sleep to some terrifying desert island, who wakes up quite lost and with no means of escape. Then I marvel that so wretched a state does not drive people to despair. I see other people around me, made like myself. I ask them if they are any better informed than I, and they say they are not. Then these lost and wretched creatures look around and find some attractive objects to which they become addicted and attached. For my part, I have never been able to form such attachments, and considering how very likely it is that there exists something besides what I can see, I have tried to find out whether God has left any traces of himself.” (§198/693)

If his emphasis on man’s “wretchedness” sounds too negative, know that Pascal also emphasises man’s wonderfulness: “What sort of freak then is man! … glory and refuse of the universe”! (§131/434)

Clive Every-Clayton