“When I consider the short duration of my life, swallowed up in the eternity before and after, the little space which I fill, and even can see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces of which I am ignorant and which know me not, I am frightened….Who has put me here? By whose order and direction have this place and time been allotted to me?”
Here surely is the language of angst, anxiety, the mother tongue of the post-modern age. But it was said 400 years ago by a deeply believing Catholic—Blaise Pascal.
Historian James Hitchcock calls Pascal “the most important Catholic thinker” from the 16th to the 19th century. Pope Francis, in a tribute marking the fourth centenary of his birth in 1623, salutes him as “a tireless seeker of truth.” T.S. Eliot wrote of him in the 1930s, “I know of no religious writer more pertinent to our time.”
Yet Pascal left only two books—one a religious polemic, the other unfinished at the time of his death.
Why is he important today?
For one thing, he was a mathematical genius who invented probability theory and created a counting machine that was a precursor of the modern computer. He was also a man of deep spirituality who in 1654 had a mystical experience—the “night of fire”—that profoundly altered his life.
Although probably not himself a Jansenist—the rigorist Catholic movement centered on the Port Royal convent where his sister Jacqueline was a nun—he took up the cudgels in defense of Port Royal in the Provincial Letters, a satirical polemic that shredded the intellectual pretensions of Port Royal’s enemies.
But it is for his Pensees (Thoughts), published after his death in 1662 at age 39, that Pascal has a permanent place in world literature. He had intended the book as a massive work of apologetics showing the unique excellence of Christianity in general and Catholicism in particular. And although he did not live to write it, his notes and sketches—from multi-page drafts to single-sentence aphorisms, all of it written in crystalline French prose—add up to a volume whose argument and plan are clear enough.
The book addresses a fundamental question: What is the meaning of human life? Christian faith, Pascal concludes, “goes mainly to establish these two facts, the corruption of nature and redemption by Jesus Christ.” Faith does not come from reason alone, however, but from reason in conjunction with something much deeper, to which he gives the name “heart.”
For Pascal this is not a maxim of sentimentality but a conclusion reached by reflection on observable facts.
“We know truth not only by the reason but also by the heart [by which] we know first principles,” he writes. And again: “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know….It is the heart which experiences God.”
Nevertheless, for those who may need an easily grasped argument, Pascal provides his famous “wager” on behalf of belief in God’s existence: “Let us weigh the gain and loss in wagering that God is: If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing. Wager, then, that he is.”
T.S. Eliot concludes his tribute to Pascal: “I can think of no Christian writer, not Newman even, more to be commended to those who doubt, but who have the mind to conceive, and the sensibility to feel…the mystery of life and suffering.” Here is a man for our times as much as, and arguably even more than, his own.
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We read of Pascal: “Here is a man for our times as much as, and arguably even more than, his own.”
And yet, if lucky, Pascal would be awarded one of the 400 voting seats at the Synod on Synodality. And with not more than two minutes to speak synodally about “reading the signs of the times.”
I believe Pascal was always Jansenist. Died Jansenist. It needed to be investigated thoroughly. Lefebvre would have been a very good one to do that. Taking in Lefebvre wisely was the thing to do in prudence and there was a slip. Lefebvre may have overacted but it would be understandable not condemnable.
This would mean that Pascal’s deathbed confession being advertised as a good thing has to be redressed.
Pope Francis is not going to resolve this at all and what he is doing in other areas will only multiply convolutions. He talks about listening and discerning and can’t hear it or see it. He invites speaking up but then he says it is an attack -but if he skips that part someone else will name it an attack and he doesn’t correct that.
If what I say is right, there would be 4 Popes to the date of Lefebvre’s death, that missed the moment for the unearthing of Jansenism.
The error would run deeper still. Lefebvre accepted, at the time, to be head of the Holy Ghost Fathers WITH intention of reform. He already knew about the problem. Likely then it can be said that Pius XII was negligent here as well.
One would surmise that Pius XI and Benedict XV were taken up with the affairs of global war.
Pius X and Leo XIII were implicitly re-condemning Jansenism in the condemnations of Modernism and in the ousting and denunciation of the Americanist Heresy.
Since writing about the Jansenism issue with Lefebvre, last year in Bartel’s article at CWR, as well as in other places; the WIKIPEDIA article on Lefebvre was altered and reference to Jansenism got removed. The whole WIKIPEDIA article has been renovated to portray Lefebvre as recalcitrant.
Some years ago a similar WIKIPEDIA revision was done, concerning Pelagianism. After my saying some things about it online, the essay in WIKIPEDIA was reformulated and certain references that evinced the best sense of the Pelagian problem, were excised. Quotes from Jerome disappeared.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcel_Lefebvre
https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2022/01/10/why-i-left-the-society-of-st-pius-x-an-open-letter-to-fr-golaski/
What study if any was ever done to investigate the relation between Jansenism and the French Revolution? I suggest this is a work that needs to be undertaken. Were Jansenists members of the Committee of Public Safety? Were there any Jansenists who were targeted by Robespierre or in the Reign of Terror? Were there Jansenists involved in the Thermidorian Reaction?
What roles did they have in the Estates General 1789; in the French Consulate 1799; or in the Storming of the Bastille?
Are any of them linked to the murders of the Royal Family?
Were any Jansenists involved in the execution of faithful Catholics?
“I have my reason.” When the Freemason invokes this he is calling on his fellows -his “brothers”- not to question his stand and to support him in the name of their Masonic society and for the sake of it. A Masonic meeting does not have to be in one of the “temples”. All a lodger has to do is throw a sign and a meeting is called. It could be right in front of your face without you ever knowing something else was in progress.
It bears a very close resemblance to the “ministerial aristocracy” of “concession” and “special tenure” of the Tudors. When you are taken into the involvement you are obliged and committed to managing affairs about it for one another and the lodge. Secretly. And you express what you are doing upon the connections that count and through supporting planes including vocabulary and themes and choice of connection.
Freemasonry has some core basic codes that they organized and made “official” or constant – “ancient and accepted”- around the second half of the 17th Century to just during the first part of the 18th Century. All coinciding with the thrust to collate Pascal in those days after his death.
See WIKIPEDIA footnotes.
‘ From Ednyfed’s many sons would come a “ministerial aristocracy” in northern Wales. ‘
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tudors_of_Penmynydd#cite_note-Ednyfed-4
‘ Even before the conquest of 1282, therefore, Ednyfed’s immediate descendants formed a “ministerial aristocracy” of considerable wealth, and their widespread possessions, combined with the favourable terms on which they were held, made them the forerunners of that class of Welsh squires whose emergence is characteristic of the post-conquest period. ‘
https://biography.wales/article/s-EDNY-FYC-1246