The life and teachings of Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)

A witness of truth:

“On earth is not the home of truth; it wanders unrecognized among men...”

“Here on earth every thing is partly true, partly false... Nothing is pure truth, and therefore nothing is true that we believe to be pure truth... We possess both truth and good only in part, and mixed with evil and false...”

“The two opposite reasons. One must begin with them, otherwise one does not understand...; and even at the end of every truth one must add that one remembers the opposite truth... that all principles are true, those of the skeptics, those of the stoics, those of the atheists, etc., but their conclusions are false, because the opposite principles are also true...

The title for these remarks is: “The Passion of Truth or the Logic of the Shaken Heart”.

The title is not chosen at random, it already contains everything that Pascal is concerned with; the passionate and painful search for truth, for knowledge and the discovery of a new way of thinking, a new method of knowledge, the logic of the exhausted “heart”, whereby “heart” with Pascal has nothing to do with feeling and sentimentality. When one speaks of the “eyes of the heart” as a method of cognition, there is a danger that, in contrast to the precise calculations of the mind, one will stray into uncontrollable generalities and the mirages of wishful thinking.

In Pascal we can see that the “spirit of subtlety” with its “logic of the shaken heart” is just as precise and objective an organ of knowledge as the intellect, that on the contrary, its cautiously groping approach makes possible a flexible exactness that is more appropriate to the fluid, changeable reality of life's events than the rigid, delimited blocks of thinking of the ordinary intellect.

Let us first consider the “passion of truth”.

This concerns the fundamental questions of philosophy. Plato called them “the true”, “the good” and “the beautiful”.  The philosopher Kant formulated them for modern times as follows:

- What can I know? (metaphysics)

- What should I do? (morality)

- What can I hope for? (religion)

Whereby the question

- What is man?

basically includes all other questions.

How does Pascal answer these questions? I will let Pascal himself have his say by presenting quotes from the “Pensées”, which represent the culmination of his philosophy, his life’s work.

Pascal's voice becomes humanly moving at the moment when he passes from horror at the great contradictions of human existence to amazement. His amazement is always mixed with horror. But amazement is not just a feeling, it is a vision.

“What is man? A nothing and yet everything, a beggar and a king. And what a strange mixture: spirit and body, angel and animal!

All utopias and perfect societies must be put a stop to. Man is neither angel nor animal, and whoever wants to make him an angel makes him an animal”.

For Pascal, all words have a deeper meaning than we generally give them today. Everywhere he goes to the root of language and brings the deepest meaning of the original words back to light.

Pascal's linguistic style is the style of paradox, that is, of surprise, of astonishment, the most suitable for expressing the impatience and delight of the discoverer; for what could be more important, more exciting than to find that profound unification of opposites in which the secret of life consists...?

Pascal's language is a fugue, one hears in his voice the searching tone, the longing, the far-fetched but now impossible unification of the conflicting voices, the chord far beyond dissonance.

A sentence like: “Wisset, dass der Mensch unendlich über den Menschen hinausgeht - Apprenez que l’homme passe infiniment l’homme” (Know that man infinitely surpasses man) - cannot be resolved.

The mind says: either he is human and then he remains human; or then he is not human but superhuman, and then the human must be abolished and overcome. Pascal leaves the contradiction: man is and is not, but from being to non-being goes the movement of infinite “going beyond oneself”, beyond the abyss of space and time and beyond all that is available and attainable. This expectation is the keynote of Pascal’s voice.

It is a bold and humble dialectic that is characteristic of Pascal's thinking: neither a tragic hanging over the abyss of opposites nor a triumphant three-step from thesis to antithesis to synthesis. The whole, the synthesis is never given; visible is always only the split, the paradox of existence; and yet there is always an actual, albeit precarious step towards the whole possible, a step that makes us painfully aware of our distance from the whole, but at the same time gives us the certainty that it is not pointless to strive towards the whole, to approach it in a movement that never stands still.

Pascal's basic attitude arises from the move towards the unattainable whole: “So we should not seek security and a firm hold”.

This readiness for uncertainty will, however, increasingly prove to be the safest starting point in the search for the true being of man.

In Pascal's handwritten corrections, one can directly experience how a word that appears superficially in a logical sequence is repeatedly swept away by a ground wave, how everything must yield to the movement from the depths. And if you have an ear to hear, you can hear the sound of a human voice through all the objectivity of the text, the voice of Pascal: his dark passion, his infinite urge for knowledge and realization, his painstakingly fought humility, his fearful homesickness shaken by inhuman pain. Pascal's voice is most clearly audible and most profoundly touches us where it is very simple and where language becomes a conversation. In the encounter with the other person, the word emerges, which becomes an act: a yes to the presence of the other, a reaching out from the I to the You, a looking at each other face to face. The eternal transcendence in the encounter with God is transformed into the immanence of the current relationship, the existential encounter.

But let's listen to Pascal himself:

“What is a human being in the infinite?

... After all, what is man in the world?  A nothing in comparison with the infinite, an all in comparison with the nothing, a middle thing between nothing and everything, infinitely far from grasping the extremes; the purpose and principle of things are inexorably hidden from him in an impenetrable mystery...He is equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he has been snatched as well as the infinite that engulfs him...

...Lost in the nothingness of the endlessness that surrounds him, man has only one strength, namely his ability to think and believe: Man is only a reed, the weakest in nature, but he is a thinking reed...

He knows that he is dying and what superiority the universe has over him. The universe knows nothing of this. So, our whole dignity consists in thinking. That is the ground of our being, and not space and time, which we could not fill...Our concern is to think rightly: that is the foundation of all morality” (Frg. 200/347).

The peculiarity of man is that he rejects finiteness, that he wants to maintain the rule of “consciousness: i.e., it characterizes man that he defies the boundless - and, since God is in the boundless, he defies God.

(Man seeks the eternity of consciousness - the only eternity that preoccupied Pascal).

No one understood better than this man of the 17th century the questions that man would ask himself at the beginning of the 21st century. He was one of the first to deduce the reason for human behavior from the transience of human existence and predicted that the fear of death causes the flight into distractions and uniformity - today it would be called superficial entertainment and arbitrary narcissistic individualism.

Quote:

“Since man is incapable of mastering the world or finding happiness in it, there is only one way out for him: to distract himself and turn life into a game ( fun-event) in order not to think about death. All kinds of distraction had to serve this purpose: Power, honor, war, dance, hunting...All this is just illusion, all just games...You spend the whole day chasing after a rabbit that you didn’t want to buy. This hare would not save us from the thought of death...but hunting saves us from it…”(Frg. 136/139)

“We rush carelessly towards the abyss, having kept something in front of us to prevent us from seeing it”. (Frg. 166/183)

“…and to free us from thoughts of the approach of death... but distractions entertain us and make us fall imperceptibly prey to death”. (Frg. 414/171)

“This indifference in a matter that concerns them, their eternal life, their everything, moves me to anger rather than pity; it astonishes me and frightens me: to me it is something monstrous”.(Frg. 427/194)

Nevertheless, the distractions are a thousand times better than the hopelessness from which the answers of the philosophers arise, these “half-baked” ones who denounce the existence of man without offering anything in return.

He was also one of the first to recognize that man can commit the worst barbarities under the pretext that God has withdrawn from man - and equally heinous atrocities in the name of God. And finally, he was also - long before Marx, Freud, Heidegger or Sartre - one of the first to recognize the blurred boundaries between freedom and alienation - regardless of whether they are drawn by God, the social order, genetic determinism or sexuality.

The fundamental knowledge from which Pascal's world view unfolds flows with inner necessity from the basic situation of being suspended between the abysses of the universe and nothingness (The Ropewalker).  Here we must not allow ourselves to be seduced by the pathos of suffering, but rather observe with such mathematical precision how Pascal brings this shock, which we all too easily drift off into the unconscious, up into consciousness and makes it the starting point of all experience. This fright at the limits of the ego before the unbridgeable gulf that opens up between finiteness and infinity, this uncanniness of existence will prove to be the ultimate ground to which we can penetrate and in which all our thinking and feeling is rooted.

For Pascal, the view into the immeasurable spaces of the infinitely large, into the abyss above us, was only the preparation for the descent into the world of the infinitely small, into the abyss below us, which we will then recognize more and more as the abyss within us under Pascal's infinitely careful guidance.

Blaise Pascal:

One of the most fascinating figures in the history of philosophy and science and - one of the most independent thinkers, who posed the most difficult problems that people so readily close their eyes to.

Hidden behind the pseudonyms of seven different identities, each of which he endowed with its own personality, we encounter an endlessly dazzling and seductive personality whose short life echoes numerous destinies: Autodidact, intellectual, man of the world, scientist, tinkerer, businessman, mystic, writer, pamphleteer, desperado, cynic, humorist, sick man, outsider, hermit - a fragile rock, loner without wealth and without title, always masked, madly in love with his sister Jacqueline, who was undoubtedly as brilliant and repressed as he was.

Pascal's thinking evolved in his confrontation with the rationalism of Descartes (1596-1650) and the humanist and skeptic Monteigne (1533-1592).

Quote from Descartes on the certainty of thought:

“Only that which is logically and rationally conceived can be true”.

“Therefore, reason is the only guarantor of truth”.

It may seem an irony of fate that Descartes, to whom the separation of mind and matter is attributed and who became the father of mechanical natural science and world interpretation, received his vocation in an enlightenment experience (vision and three-part dream) on November 10, 1619 near Ulm as a 23-year-old soldier and philosopher. He always described this event as the most important of his life and in gratitude made a vow to make a pilgrimage from Venice on foot to the Virgin of Loretto. He actually did this 5 years later.

So, certainty of reason in Descartes meets contrition of reason, self-renunciation of reason in Pascal.

Educated according to the Essays of the greatest French humanist and skeptic Montaigne (1533 - 1592), skepticism became the starting point of Pascal's philosophy.

(I am reminded of the medal whose inscription Montaigne had specially embossed for himself in Greek and which he always wore on his person: “Que sais-je?” (What do I know?) and on the reverse: “Je m’abstiens” (I abstain).

It should be noted that the skeptical attitude of the humanist “What do I know?” is not a reason for resignation, but rather liberates and leads to independence of judgment and inner security. One's own experience, one's own self, is the most suitable object of reflection. Through self-observation of his inner self, man finds his own nature. (Every human being carries within him the total form of human nature).

Like everything new in history, the rationalism of the one (Descartes) and the existentialism of the other (Montaigne) emerged with a purity that was never again achieved, despite all progress.

The basic trait that both have in common and that deeply unites us with them is the belief that man can do everything of his own accord and that he does not need to resort to any higher power.

Blaise Pascal saw through the short-sightedness of this belief in progress and its consequences. But he was also aware that no step in human history could be taken backwards. On the contrary, he combined the geometric clarity of Cartesian thinking with the flowing vitality of Montaigne and infinitely carefully explored the boundaries of humanity.

In this way, he found a path that points beyond these boundaries.

However, it was clear to him that the person who follows this path always remains within the boundaries; by striving towards a whole that encompasses him, he himself remains a part that cannot grasp the whole.

From this basic situation, Pascal developed a peculiarly agitated and highly tense way of thinking, which, from irreconcilable opposites, inexorably strives towards a unity that can never be achieved but can never be abandoned.

The “intelligent ignorance that knows itself” seems to Pascal to be the best description of what he was looking for. It demanded that we not be satisfied with reason.

Incidentally, while working on his difficult theories, he had realized that even in mathematics, discoveries have nothing logical, deductive or rational about them; they are inductive and insane: the essential lies in intuition, in the message coming from outside. Logical proofs are only the simplest part, which can be left to machines or to the least creative and therefore least interesting areas of the mind.

Again and again, Pascal ventures out to the furthest edge of reality with his thinking in order to experience there that the limits of man are not the limits of being and recognizes that it is not man who has being in his hands, but that being has him.

If man sought to understand himself first, he would see how incapable he is of going beyond his limits. How should a part be able to recognize the whole?

Here Pascal touches the indissoluble knot of our knowledge. All thinking seems to have to stop here. But here, where thinking has reached the bottom of its inconsistency (incapacity and disproportion), the real movement of Pascal's thinking begins. Here begins a new epoch of thought. The principle of totality will be the constant driving force of his thinking. He will always keep an eye on the whole, which he cannot achieve; he will always recognize every individual position he reaches as premature in view of the whole. A divine restlessness will always keep him in motion, but this motion will not exhaust itself; it will always bring everything individual into a higher context and thus always keep alive the inkling and longing for the whole, without ever allowing the false certainty of having arrived at the whole to arise.

Quote:

“Imagine a number of people in chains, all condemned to death, some of whom are killed every day before the eyes of the others, so that those who remain recognize their own situation by that of their fated companions and, looking at each other painfully and hopelessly, await their turn. This is the image of the human condition”. (Frg. 434/199)

As the very last resort of this philosophy of horror, in the face of the indissoluble knot of our knowledge, the LAUGHTER - the poetic, ironic, gentle laughter, the laughter that one so often suspected on Pascal's face despite the sorrow and pain. The laughter of the condemned to death in the face of the execution squad. The laughter of the Buddha.

The laughter that is so peculiar to man and which, in French, combines the religious and the comic in the same word: spiritual, which in French can take on the meaning of witty and funny as well as spiritual and mental.

(Laughing uproariously at the ridiculous brilliance of humanity).

Let us take a journey back in time to 17th century France.

Keep in mind, however, that we must be aware that we are not describing realities in relation to the distant past, but always remain trapped in our own reality and worldview today.

The crucial philosophical question posed at that time concerned salvation. (Grace). -

Apart from the freethinkers, no one seriously thought about anything other than what awaited them after death. The great concern was whether one would spend eternity in hell or in paradise.

It is the time of the 30-year war.

France is not only the largest country in Europe in terms of population (25 million inhabitants), we are also approaching the Great Century of the Sun King in scientific and cultural terms. (The time of Corneille, Moliere, La Fontaine, Racine etc... and of Descartes and Fermat...)

On June 19, 1623, Blaise Pascal was born in Clermont-Ferrand in Auvergne into an old, respected and wealthy family (provincial nobility) as the second child of the royal councillor for taxation, one of the highest administrative positions in the province, Etienne Pascal (1599-1651) (highly gifted mathematician, physicist and lawyer. The first child, a daughter Gilberte (normally gifted) born in 1620 will later write the best biography of Pascal.

On October 5, 1625, his younger sister Jacqueline Pascal was born, also highly gifted (literature, poetry, theater).  Pascal is devoted to her and says that throughout his life she is the only person with whom he can communicate on an equal level.

His mother died in 1626, when the children Gilberte was 6 years old, Blaise 3 years old and Jacqueline 1 year old (she had converted to Protestantism, a pious woman), but because of her early death she had no influence on the children.

Blaise is a weak, overly tender child, suffering from mental trauma. His miraculous healing by a witch. Reason/Miracle.

The father Etienne, an enthusiastic mathematician and scientist, is not religious.

He decides to bring up and teach the 3 children on his own. He teaches them according to the educational method advocated by Montaigne in the Essays. Questioning everything and checking everything himself, no memorization, no books. Not enough challenge in all subjects. Physics, Latin and Greek not before the 12th year. Mathematics only as a reward once the languages have been mastered fluently. All children will appreciate this education. Gilbert later had her 3 children taught by Blaise using the same method. The skeptic Montaigne, the Bible and the stoic Epictetus would remain Blaise Pascal's main sources of reading for most of his life.

In 1626, Etienne bought the office of deputy president of the tax office in Clermont, which he held for the rest of his life. As a brilliant mathematician and lawyer, he was ideally suited for the job.

In 1631, when Blaise was 8 years old, Etienne moved to Paris because he wanted to cultivate contacts with the leading mathematicians there and also hoped for more inspiration for the education of his children.

He realizes early on that 2 of his children are highly gifted.

1635 Foundation of the “Academie de Mathematique” by the Franciscan priest Marin Mersenne, an important and leading polymath (his works on music theory are still reference works today). He had a great talent for identifying the best thinkers. Pascal: “He had the unique art of posing beautiful questions”. He was considered the secretary of learned Europe.  A Jesuit like Descartes and his friend, he was a zealous propagandist of Descartes' ideas of a mechanical natural science. Great influence at court and among scholars throughout Europe.

Blaise Pascal was undoubtedly a genius: at the age of 12 (1635) he independently discovered the first 32 propositions of Euclidean geometry; (he drew circles and bars on the kitchen tiles with chalk. He does not know the names “circle” and “straight line”!) His father had forbidden him to study mathematics and closed all his books.

1635 France openly opposes the Emperor in the 30 Years' War. War. Protector of smaller imperial states in Alsace.

Difficult times for the Pascals:

1638 Etienne Pascal takes part in a protest meeting of the rentiers against a royal financial decree.  He is in danger of being arrested, flees to friends and goes into hiding in the Auvergne.

1639 Jacqueline plays the leading role (pockmarked - highly witty and of rare charm) in the comedy “Le Prince Deguise” (by Mme Scudery), which is performed at court, and obtains Richelieu's pardon for her father due to her great success. He visits her frequently and is impressed by her spirit and talent. In November, he sent Etienne Pascal to Rouen as commissioner for the Normandy tax system.

In the same year, at the age of 16, Blaise developed descriptive geometry, which is still used today in mechanics and engineering, making him one of the most important mathematicians of his time. Descartes cannot believe that it is a 16-year-old who solves the most difficult problems in mathematics.

1641 Gilberte marries her cousin, Florin Perier, with whom she will have 3 children. He carries out the famous air pressure experiments with Blaise.  Later, he manages and organizes Pascal's estate and takes care of publications and the emerging myth and fame of his famous relative throughout his life.

In 1642, at the age of 19, Blaise invented the first calculating machine, the “Pascaline”, the ancestor of the computer, to help his father with his computing work.

1643 Louis XIII (since 1610) is succeeded by Louis XIV (*1715), still a minor - head of politics Cardinal Mazarin.

1645 Pascal does not receive the patent until 1649. Gilberte later wrote that he had finally ruined his health working on the “Pascaline” (the thinking machine) for 10 years. Blaise P. would later say that he had not lived a day without pain since the age of 18.

By chance, his father's hip dislocation, two lay doctors came to the Pascals’ house for a long time. They are close to the Jansenists, a religious Catholic renewal movement. The conversations about religion make an impression on the whole Pascal family. (The men are highly educated!)

This is Blaise Pascal’s first conversion (first turn to religion), but it is more of a theoretical interest; however, as with everything he does, he turns to the new field with a great thirst for research.

There was a wave of conversion in Normandy at the time.

1647: In Paris at the age of 24 due to illness, 2 unsuccessful conversations with Descartes.

The discovery of Port-Royal, by the Pascal family, the most important nunnery, influence of the Arnauld family on the convent (Aebtissen) Saint-Cyran spiritual leader, a remarkable personality, as a friend of Mazarin's best access to the court. He used the place to push through the theses he was preparing with Jansenius. The Jansenists were among the first pedagogues to regard children as children and not as miniature adults. They taught in French and abolished corporal punishment. Schools for the high nobility.

The monastery drew an attractive, sophisticated clientele. They wanted to show themselves here and in a certain way emphasize their opposition to Cardinal Richelieu, whose enemy was Saint-Cyran. His arrest gave the monastery a tragic dimension. (political and Jesuit distance) Being seen here became a sign of public distance from power, of rejection of fame as well as revolt, which grew into a strange epidemic: about 30 notable personalities (called the pious men, the hermits/high nobility) had houses built on the walls of Port-Royal de Paris. They lived and worked there without having joined the Order. The royal court became restless. What would become of the king if the best refused to serve? It was rumored that Racine had only joined Port-Royal and the Jansenists because he wanted to be part of the “spiritually rich” elite.

1647 Pascal invents the theory of probability, which has become the basis for all of today's social sciences and physics.

1648 End of the 30-year war.

The monastery of Port-Royal is divided into two parts. Some of the nuns and the pious noble men (the hermits) move to Port Royal des Champs.

Etienne Pascal moves back to Paris as a private citizen (after 8 years in Normandy). His office in Rouen was abolished by the outbreak of the Parliamentary Front - the high nobility staged a coup against the king's absolutism). Blaise was outraged by his father's fate and decided to write a book about human existence and injustice.

Jacqueline announces her decision to enter the Port-Royal convent. She believed that in Port-Royal she had found a way to reach the absolute, which she had always striven for, and which had eluded her on all other paths.

In 1648, at the age of 25, Blaise founded experimental physics, calculated the weight of air, designed the hydraulic press and broke with a millennia-old theory according to which nature is supposedly “abhorrence of emptiness”, nature abhors a vacuum.

The originality and novelty of his discovery of the void was disputed by some, even by Descartes.

1650 Descartes dies in Stockholm. (at the court of Christine of Sweden)

1651 Death of Etienne Pascal. Inheritance disputes between the children. Blaise fiercely resists Jacqueline's wish to enter the Port-Royal convent, although her father had promised her after much pleading that she would be allowed to do so after his death. J. suffers greatly but does not give in to her father’s promise.

1653 Blaise and Gilbert fiercely oppose Jacqueline's wish to donate her fortune to the Port-Royal convent.

Pope Innocent X condemns 5 sentences from the “Augustine” of Jansenius. Cornelius Jansenius and his doctrine of grace, a softened Calvinism. Original Christianity, against any authority of church and state, inner evidence. Where is the mediating role of the church? Heresy.

After J. has moved to the monastery, Pascal flees into secular life, he is popular and revered as a “homme honnete” (man of the world), cultivates friendships with the Duke of Roannez and his family. He travels to Poitou with his family and other courtiers. He writes the book: Bekehrung eines Suenders (On the Conversion of a Sinner).

1649-1654 Various mathematical writings and publications.

Conversations with Jacqueline. P. expresses his contempt for the world.

November 23, 1654: The zenith of his life,

The 2nd conversion of Pascal

The night of Pascal's conversion, recorded in the Memorial. Throughout his life, he does not speak about it to anyone, not even to Jacqueline. He writes down the experience of enlightenment as a document in his accurate handwriting and carries it sewn into the lining of his jacket on his body for the rest of his life. There are 2 parchment slips of paper and they are sewn into the new jacket each time he changes it. Only after his death does a servant find them. No one knew of their existence.

Quote: Year of Mercy 1654

“Monday, November 23,...

From about ten and a half in the evening until about half an hour after midnight (2 hours before the burning bush)

——————

             FIRE

God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob, not of philosophers and scholars Certainty, certainty, feeling: Joy, peace.

            God of Jesus Christ”

This document is of the highest intensity in this concentration and clarity.

The “fire” is the fire of enlightenment, the overpowering of grace is part of the topicality of every vision of conversion; and this experience is obviously of an inner certainty of feeling that surpasses the philosophical. This makes it clear that Pascal was also concerned with philosophical and inner certainty.

1655 - 1st retreat to Port-Royal des Champs. Center of Jansenism/ characterized by a desire for knowledge and a spirit of revolt/ against all external authority.

It was said that the Jansenists read; anyone who read was therefore a Jansenist, and that is why they were so dangerous.

Conversation with M. de Sacry, Philosophical Dialogues on Epictetus (Stoic, late Roman, rigorous doctrine of virtue for the perfection of man, completely dismissed by Pascal as not compatible with the Jansenist doctrine of grace) and Mont. The doctrine of grace) and Montaigne (humanist and skeptic). Pascal wants to gain clarity about his conversion through these conversations.

Pascal converts the Duke of Rouannez, his friend, friendship with Charlotte of Rouannez.

1656 In Port-Royal des Champs, Pascal is persuaded to write the Provincial Letters under the pseudonym Luis de Montalte. The 1st letter appears in the series and immediately causes a sensation throughout France. The last two letters, the 17th and 18th, appear in March and June 1657 and are abruptly discontinued...

Writing the Provincial Letters - Pascal often spent a full 20 days on a letter to bring it to perfection. It was the first example of an intellectual who stood up against censorship, totalitarianism and lies and fought for truth and against slander. The battle between Jansenists and Jesuits moved the whole of France and even Europe.

It is said that the Jesuits never forgave Pascal for these letters and his polemics.

The church lexicon still contains the entry: “I only say - after Augustine - that he was not a man of the Church!”

1657 on March 24: 3rd conversion of Pascal through “The Miracle of the Holy Thorn”, the healing of Pascal's niece Marguerite Perier through contact with the thorn reliquary of Port-Royal.

Convincing confirmation of his earlier experience of enlightenment on November 23, 1654. For Pascal, the certainty/proof of grace that God is present for him in his innermost being. This is the final turning point towards faith.

Pascal notarizes his testimony of the miraculous healing.

This marks the beginning of Pascal's withdrawal from the world.

On September 6, 1657, the Provincial Letters are placed on the Index of Prohibited Books and publicly burned.  The persecution of the Jansenists of Port-Royal begins.

Life in the underground...

In 1658, at the age of 35, during a sleepless night and suffering from raging toothache, Pascal solved one of the most difficult mathematical problems, developing the foundations of integral calculus in the process. A few years later, after reading one of Pascal's manuscripts (now lost), Leibniz (1646-1716) found a method with which he was able to solve the same problem (of a curve of inscribed surfaces and volumes) more quickly. However, the German philosopher and scholar always acknowledged Pascal as the father of integral calculus and was one of the first to recognize the universality and versatility of the genius.

1658 at the age of 35:  Pascal presents the plan of his Apology of the Christian Religion to his friends at Port-Royal. He felt called to do so as a result of his experience of enlightenment. The central idea, the necessity and the proof of the truth and superiority of Christianity. Just an apology of the Christian religion would have been nothing particularly original. From the beginning of the 17th century, the apology was a popular literary genre. It was a popular literary genre to counteract the influence of freethinkers. But Pascal didn't just want to prove the truth of Christianity, he wanted to tell the whole story of human existence since Genesis.

Pascal now lives like a saint. He wears a spiked belt, mortifies himself, can no longer eat, only liquid food. (However, he hides his struggle for sanctification from everyone)

1659 Persistent illness. His exhaustion no longer allows him to work regularly. He can no longer read or write.  Various religious writings are produced.

1661 at the age of 37. Port Royal is ordered to submit to the condemnation of Jansenism. (The clergy throughout France are required to sign the “Formulaire”, the 5 heretical propositions of Jansenius, in lieu of an oath). The monastery initially signs with the proviso that the sentences in question are not in Jansenius’ works. A little later, however, the royal council revoked this declaration, which was immediately condemned by Rome. The “petite ecoles” of Port-Royal were dissolved and the monastery was forbidden to accept novices. The monastery's backbone was thus broken.

On October 4, Jacqueline dies as a result of the conflict. She and Blaise are against signing and revoking the “Formulaire”, which they believe in. Pascal remains a bitter opponent of the Jesuits and now also an opponent of the Jansenists, as he does not sign.  Quote: “I stand alone...”

In November, Port Royal signs the “Formulaire” without any restrictions.

Pascal lapses into a silence that many cannot understand. Nietsche: “I will never forgive Christianity for having hunted down and silenced such a brilliant thinker”.

January 1662. At the age of 38, despite his serious illness and his withdrawal from the world, Pascal obtains a patent for his transport company “Carosses Cinq Sols”, the first public limited company on the continent and a labor of love for the poor.

(the first omnibus company in Paris).

1662 In June, Pascal is transported to his sister Gilbert, writes his will there and dies on August 19, presumably of a cerebral hemorrhage.

1664 Start of the great Jansenist persecutions, which will last 4 years.

1670 The first edition of the Pensées appears, which are only discovered after his death, 100 slips of paper, the fragments ... The order and integration of the slips of paper, which are pinned together, is not definitive. Today it is assumed that this is precisely the intention.

The key to Pascal's essence can only be found if one sees in the unfinished nature of his work not only the force of fate, but the actual meaning of his life.

Pascal himself saw a deeper meaning in the apparent randomness and disconnectedness of his fragmentary work.

In these fragments, called Pensées, Blaise Pascal wages his final battle to convince the world of the truth of Christianity on the basis of his experience and to demonstrate his “esprit finesse”, that reason must sacrifice itself, for it is the heart that leads to faith, which belongs to a higher order than the spirit/reason.

1685 Edict of Nantes is revoked

Jansenists, Protestants and Jesuits fall from grace.

Port Royal des Champs - “dissident's nest” for the king, a few kilometers from Versailles.

Jansenism = spirit of resistance, oldest enemy of the Sun King.

1709 Port-Royal is completely destroyed and razed. As a symbol of Jansenism, all traces of its enemies were to be eradicated by order of the Sun King.

The Great Century died with the Sun King, but Jansenism also perished: one had killed the other. For 11/2 centuries, Jansenism had captured the attention of all educated French people. (?)

But Pascal survived as a small flickering flame in a France over which the light of enlightenment was beginning to shine. In the end, this murderous struggle between the two branches of Catholicism only served its secular enemies. The disputes over grace, the original sin and salvation, which had so captivated people in the 17th century, became obsolete. The Enlightenment drew out of Jansenism the spirit of revolt and the desire for knowledge. But in a sense, it was still the same conditions of freedom; and Pascal's dream of a renewed church moved everyone who dreamed of a political renewal of the country.

So much for the journey through time.

Finally, let's take another look at the Pensées: they became a cornerstone of French literature and were read more widely than Descartes' complete works.  

These fragments, 100 packs of loosely stapled notes, were discovered in Pascal's bedside table after his early death (at the age of 39) and their true meaning and conception were only recognized much later. They are the culmination of his philosophy. A large poem on the “human condition”, written under the pseudonym “Salomon de Stultie”.

The whole message of his masterly apologetics is already hidden in this short work. After an intellectual feat of reason (Solomon), the insight that the wisdom of God on earth appears as foolishness and can only be seen by a pure heart.

Thus, after the intellectual masterpiece of apologetics (reason/Salomon), as staged by Pascal, the final pious production is folly (de Stultie from “stultia” - folly).

“Don't be surprised if you meet simple people who believe without thinking. God gave them love for him”.

The language of the Pensées is the most beautiful French prose ever written before him.

They are immortal passages about the splendor and misery of human existence, about the relationships between science and faith, freedom and imagination, happiness and compassion, power and violence, in which he repeatedly combined chance and law, nature and habit, mind and heart, science and experience, and the earthly and the mystical. He was always guided by the desire to reveal, classify and explain the hidden causes of even the most insignificant human wickedness.

And he uttered one of the most beautiful riddles ever posed by the human condition: “Atheists. What reason do they have for claiming that one cannot be resurrected? What is more difficult: to be born or to be resurrected? That what has never existed now exists or that what has existed still exists? Habit makes the one seem easy, lack of habit makes the other seem impossible. A way of judging peculiar to the people”. (Question 882/222)

In other words, since one admits without understanding that it is possible to come to the world, there is no reason to deny oneself the belief that rebirth is possible!

Nor should we try to rationally explain all the mysteries of religion, such as the Trinity, the Incarnation, the Eucharist or the Fall. One can only be convinced of the existence of God through love. Early on, Pascal speaks of the 3 orders:  The order of the physical world, the spiritual world, whereby by spirit he refers to “ratio” and then, as the highest order, the order of love/wisdom. (see dedication letter to Queen Christina of Sweden)

“God is hidden, man is visible. One must show God and hide man.

If man is not created for God, why is he only happy in God? If man is created for God, why is he in such contradiction to God?”  (Frg. 399/438)

“It is improbable that God is.

And it is equally improbable that HE is not”.

Pascal and the concept of “coer” - heart. (*also spirit)

He searched, hesitated, tried out various words such as “instinct”, but it was not enough for him, because what he had in mind was far more than instinct, because it also included love. So he tried the theological virtues of “mercy”, love of God, love of neighbor, faith, feeling, sense, nature, natural principles and the idea of truth. . No one word covered everything he wanted to express.

At the same time, he wrote about the importance of the precision of definitions and about the simplicity of concepts and became furious because he was unable to find a suitable term.

But suddenly he had an epiphany.

“Heart” should be the word.

“Scripture is the science of the heart, not of the mind. It is only understandable to those who have a sincere heart. We recognize the truth not only with reason, but also with the heart”. (Frg. 110/282) 

“The heart has its order, the spirit/mind has its own, which consists of principles and proofs. The heart has a different one. One does not prove that one must be loved by setting forth the causes of love in order; that would be ridiculous”. (Frg. 298/283) 

“The heart and not reason perceives God. That is to believe. God is perceptible to the heart and not to the mind. The heart has a reason which the mind does not know; this is known from a thousand different things”. (Frg. 424/278)

Knowledge presupposes love. One will recognize the truth - really recognize it, in the deepest sense, with the passion of appropriation - to the extent that one is loving.

For Pascal, the heart is the name for the center of action of man's relationship to reality, for a dynamic relationship, an encounter. It is the name for man's connection to the other, and not just an intellectual, a spiritually conceived relationship, but for the real attraction, for a relationship that is as real as that of the earth to the sun or that of the moon to the earth. And since it is obvious that we as human beings are bound in such a relationship, which we can generally describe as a bond of love, the bond of the heart opens up an order that is different from that of reason and the spirit and is only connected to it by analogy. The heart has its order, and the spirit its own. Since the heart is the center of action of reality, it is bound into the natural givenness of the world.

This wonderful, incomparable discovery of the heart, which was given to Pascal, is more grandiose than all scientific, technical inventions, which until then had mostly only worked to the detriment of man. At this high point, the astute mathematical mind unreservedly acknowledged the heart, which he subordinated to reason, and through which he also gained the inner certainty that made him so jubilant in his Memorial. There are few fragments by Pascal that have met with such enthusiastic approval in modern times as “that the heart has its order, its reasons, which the mind does not even suspect”.

Pascal's heart has been associated with his incomparable concept of “esprit de finesse”, with which he foreshadowed a logic superior to logic in the usual sense (Aristotle's either-or), according to which opposites are mutually exclusive. It refers to the initial stages of thought, an aphoristic, erratic, non-deductive progression of the cognitive process. It is clear that the average European, who is accustomed to continuous thinking, has difficulty adjusting to the discontinuous, moving, erratic thinking of a Pascal or Heidegger. He need not therefore deny his mathematical conscience. He only has to learn the supple exactitude of differential thinking.

The qualitative leap that takes the place of the continuous transition in the Cartesian world view can be of very different kinds: Reversal, conversion, a break-in from the higher into the lower plane of existence, inspiration, sudden inspiration, a change of life, a new beginning of history, mutation. The leap expresses itself in the fact that it always represents a turning in the direction of something qualitatively new.

Pascal has been praised as the discoverer of intuitive thinking, which is based on the logic of the heart and is capable of encompassing the most diverse aspects of truth simultaneously, thus achieving knowledge in a previously unknown way.

As a brilliant mathematician and through the experimental application of the spirit of geometry to the field of physics, Pascal paved a good part of the way that led to the technical mastery of the world. Precisely because he recognized the power and value of the geometric spirit like few others of his time, he was also able to identify its limits and show another way of knowing that does not exclude the geometric one, but rather includes it by going beyond it.

He calls this other way of knowing the “spirit of subtlety”. He explains this strange concept by contrasting it with the “spirit of geometry”.

Let us recall the secret that the fox revealed to Antoine de Saint-Exupery's Little Prince:

“On ne voit bien qu¹avec le coeur, l¹essentiel est invisible pour les yeux”.

(One only sees well with the heart; the essential is invisible to the eyes).