Pascal

No passion holds people in its power so long, conceals from them so firmly—sometimes until the very end—the vanity of temporal worldly life, and distances people so greatly from understanding the meaning of human life and its true good, as the passion for human glory, in whatever form it may appear: petty vanity, ambition, or love of fame.

Every lust carries its punishment within itself, and the sufferings that accompany its satisfaction expose its worthlessness. Moreover, every lust weakens with the years, but love of fame burns ever more and more intensely with age. And most importantly, the pursuit of human glory is always connected with the thought of serving people, and it is easy for a person to deceive himself when seeking the approval of others that he lives not for himself but for the good of those whose approval he seeks. Therefore this is the most insidious and dangerous passion and the most difficult to uproot. Only people with great spiritual powers free themselves from this passion.

Great spiritual powers give such people the ability to quickly achieve great fame, and these same spiritual powers give them the ability to see its worthlessness.

Such a person was Pascal. Such too was a Russian close to us—Gogol (I think I understood Pascal through Gogol). Both of them, though with entirely different qualities and with completely different cast and scope of mind, lived through one and the same thing. Both very quickly attained the fame they passionately desired; and both, having attained it, immediately saw the vanity of what had seemed to them the highest, most precious blessing in the world, and both were horrified at the temptation in whose power they had been. They devoted all the powers of their souls to showing people the full horror of that delusion from which they had just emerged, and the stronger the disillusionment, the more urgent seemed to them the necessity of such a goal, such a purpose in life, that nothing could destroy.

This is the reason for the passionate attitude toward faith of both our Gogol and Pascal; this is also the reason for their contempt for everything they had done before. After all, it was all done for fame. And fame passed, and there was nothing in it but deception. Therefore, everything that was done to acquire it was also unnecessary and worthless. One thing alone matters, only one thing: that which was not there, that which was obscured by worldly desires for glory. Only one thing was important and necessary: that faith which gives meaning to this passing life and a firm direction to all its activity. And this consciousness of the necessity of faith and the impossibility of living without it so strikes such people that they cannot help wondering how they themselves could have lived, how people in general can live, without a faith that explains to them the meaning of their life and of the death that awaits them.

Such a person was Pascal, and in this lies his great, invaluable, and far undervalued service.

Pascal was born in Clermont in 1623. His father was a well-known mathematician. The boy, like all children imitating his father from earliest childhood, took up mathematics, and extraordinary abilities were revealed in him. The father, not wishing to develop the child prematurely, did not give him mathematical books; but the boy, listening to his father’s conversations with his mathematician acquaintances, began to reinvent geometry on his own. The father, seeing these works extraordinary for a child, was so struck by this that he was enraptured, wept with emotion, and from then on himself began teaching his son mathematics. The boy soon not only mastered everything his father had shown him but began making mathematical discoveries himself. His successes attracted the attention not only of those close to him but also of scholars, and Pascal very young acquired the reputation of a remarkable mathematician. The fame of an outstanding scholar, despite his young years, encouraged him in his studies; great abilities gave him the opportunity to increase his fame, and Pascal devoted all his time and strength to scientific studies and research. But his health had been weak from childhood, and his intensive studies weakened it still more, and in his youth he became seriously ill. After his illness, at his father’s request, he reduced his studies to two hours a day and spent his free time reading philosophical works.

He read Epictetus, Descartes, and Montaigne’s Essays. Montaigne’s book particularly struck him—it outraged him with its skepticism and indifference to religion. Pascal had always been religious and believed with childlike faith in the Catholic teaching in which he had been raised. Montaigne’s book, by arousing doubts in him, made him think about questions of faith, especially about how necessary faith is for a reasonable human life, and he became still more strict with himself in the fulfillment of religious duties and, besides philosophical works, began reading books of religious content. Among these books he came upon a book by the Dutch theologian Jansen, The Transformation of the Inner Man.

In this book there was a discussion that, besides the lust of the flesh, there is also a lust of the spirit, consisting in the satisfaction of human curiosity, at the basis of which lies the same thing as in every lust: egoism and self-love, and that such refined lust more than anything else distances a person from God. This book strongly struck Pascal. With the truthfulness characteristic of great souls, he felt the truth of this reasoning in relation to himself, and despite the fact that to give up his scientific studies and the fame connected with them was a great deprivation for him—or rather precisely because it was a great deprivation—he decided to abandon the studies in science that tempted him and directed all his powers to clarifying for himself and for others those questions of faith that occupied him more and more intensely.

Nothing is known about Pascal’s relations with women or what influence the temptations of woman’s love had on his life. His biographers, on the basis of his small work Discours sur les passions de l’amour, in which he says that the greatest happiness accessible to man—love—is a pure, spiritual feeling and should serve as the source of everything elevated and noble, conclude that Pascal in his youth was in love with a woman who stood above him in position and did not return his love. In any case, even if there was such a love, it had no consequences for Pascal’s life. The main interests of his young life consisted in the struggle between his striving for scientific studies and the fame they gave him, and the consciousness of the emptiness and worthlessness of these studies and the harmfulness of the temptation of love of fame, and the desire to devote all his powers solely to the service of God.

Thus, even in that period of his life when he had decided to give up scientific studies, he happened to read Torricelli’s research on the vacuum. Feeling that this question was being decided incorrectly and that a more precise determination was possible, Pascal could not restrain himself from the desire to verify these experiments. In verifying them, he made his famous discovery about the weight of air. This discovery attracted the attention of the entire learned world. Scholars wrote to him, visited him, and praised him. And the struggle with the temptation of human glory became still more difficult.

To combat this temptation, Pascal wore on his body a belt with nails turned toward the flesh, and every time it seemed to him that in reading or listening to praise of himself a feeling of ambition and pride was rising in him, he pressed the belt with his elbow against his side, the nails pricked his body, and he remembered all the course of thoughts and feelings that drew him away from the temptation of fame.

In 1651 an event occurred to Pascal that seemed unimportant but strongly struck him and had a great influence on his spiritual state. On the Pont de Neuilly he fell from his carriage and was a hair’s breadth from death. At this same time Pascal’s father died. This double reminder of death made Pascal delve even more deeply than before into questions of life and death.

A religious mood more and more took hold of Pascal’s life, so that in 1655 he completely withdrew from the world. He moved to the Jansenist community of Port-Royal and began to live there an almost monastic life, thinking over and preparing the great work in which he wanted to show, first, the necessity of religion for a reasonable human life, and second, the truth of the religion he himself professed. But even here the temptations of human glory did not leave Pascal.

The Jansenist community of Port-Royal where Pascal lived had aroused the hostility of the powerful Jesuit order, and the intrigues of the Jesuits brought about the closure of both the boys’ and girls’ schools that existed at Port-Royal, and the monastery of Port-Royal itself was threatened with being closed.

Living among the Jansenists and sharing their teaching, Pascal could not remain indifferent to the position of his co-religionists and, carried away by their dispute with the Jesuits, wrote in defense of the Jansenists a book that he called The Provincial Letters. In this work Pascal did not so much justify and defend the teaching of the Jansenists as condemn their enemies the Jesuits, exposing the immorality of their teaching. The book had great success, but this fame could no longer tempt Pascal.

His whole life was now unceasing service to God.

He established rules of life for himself and strictly followed them, not deviating from them either through laziness or through illness. Poverty he considered the foundation of virtue. “In poverty and destitution,” he said, “there is not only no evil, but in them is our good. Christ was poor and destitute and had not where to lay His head.” Giving away everything he could to the poor, Pascal lived so that he had only what was necessary; he did without servants as far as possible, admitting them only when illness prevented him from moving. His dwelling was the simplest, as were his food and clothing. He himself cleaned his rooms and brought himself his dinner. His illness kept increasing, and he never ceased to suffer. But he bore his sufferings not only with a patience that amazed those close to him, but even with joy and gratitude. “Do not pity me,” he said to those who sympathized with his condition, “illness is the natural state of the Christian, because in this condition the Christian is such as he should always be. It accustoms one to the deprivation of all blessings and sensual pleasures, accustoms one to restrain the passions that assail a person all his life, to be without ambition, without greed, to be always in expectation of death.”

The luxury with which loving relatives tried to surround him oppressed him. He asked his sister to transfer him to a hospital for incurable poor people so that he might spend the last days of his life with them, but his sister did not fulfill his wish, and he died at home.

In his last hours he was unconscious. Only just before the end he raised himself from the bed and with a clear and joyful expression said: “Do not abandon me, Lord.” These were his last words.

He died on August 19, 1662.

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For his good, man needs two faiths: one—to believe that there is an explanation of the meaning of life; and the other—to find this best explanation of life.

Pascal did the first thing as no one else. Fate, God, did not grant him to do the second.

As a person dying of thirst throws himself on whatever water is before him without examining its quality, so Pascal, not examining the quality of the Catholicism in which he had been raised, saw in it the truth and salvation of men. Enough that it is water, enough that it is faith.

It goes without saying that no one has the right to guess at what might have been, but one cannot imagine the brilliant Pascal, truthful before himself, believing in Catholicism. He did not have time to subject it to that power of thought which he directed to proving the necessity of faith, and therefore dogmatic Catholicism remained whole in his soul. He leaned on it without touching it. He leaned on what was and is true in it. He took from it the intense work of self-perfection, the struggle with temptations, aversion to wealth, and firm faith in a merciful God to whom, dying, he gave up his soul.

He died having done only one part of the work—not having finished, not even having begun, the other. But because this second part of the work was not done, the first is no less precious: the remarkable book of Thoughts, assembled from scattered scraps of paper on which the sick, dying Pascal wrote down his thoughts. What a remarkable fate this book has had.

A prophetic book appears—the crowd stands bewildered, struck by the power of prophetic words, troubled, wanting to understand and clarify, to know what to do. And now comes one of those people who, as Pascal said, think they know, and therefore muddle the world; these people come and say: “There is nothing to understand and clarify here; it is all very simple. This Pascal (the same was true of Gogol), as you see, believed in the Trinity, in communion; it is clear that he was sick, abnormal, and therefore in his weakness and illness understood everything backwards. The best proof of this is that he rejected, renounced even what good he himself had done and what we like (because we understand it), and ascribed great importance to completely useless ‘mystical’ reflections about human destiny and the future life. Therefore one must take from him not what he himself considered important but what we can understand and what we like.”

And the crowd is glad: before they did not understand, they needed an effort to rise to that height to which Pascal wanted to raise them, but here everything is completely simple. Pascal discovered the law by which pumps are made. Pumps are very useful, and that is very good; but all that he says about God, immortality—all this is nonsense, because he believed in the Trinity, the Bible. We do not need to make an effort to rise to him; on the contrary, from the height of our normality we can patronizingly and condescendingly acknowledge his merits despite his abnormality.

Pascal shows people that people without religion are either animals or madmen, rubs their noses in their ugliness and madness, shows them that no science can replace religion. But Pascal believed in God, the Trinity, the Bible, and therefore for them the matter is settled: what he told them about the madness of their life and the vanity of science is also untrue. That same science, that same bustle of life, that same madness that he so irrefutably exposed—this same bustle, this same science, this same madness they consider real life, truth, and Pascal’s reasonings they consider the product of his morbid abnormality. They cannot but acknowledge the power of thought and word of this man, and they number him among the classics, but the content of his book is unnecessary to them. It seems to them that they stand immeasurably higher than that highest spiritual state of religious consciousness to which man can attain and on which Pascal stands, and therefore the significance of this remarkable book is hopelessly hidden from them.

Yes, nothing is so harmful, so ruinous for the true progress of humanity, as these cleverly arranged arguments—decorated with all sorts of modern ornaments—of people qui croyent savoir (who think they know) and who, in Pascal’s opinion, bouleversent le monde (muddle the world).

But the light shines even in darkness, and there are people who, not sharing Pascal’s faith in Catholicism but understanding that he, despite his great mind, could believe in Catholicism (preferring to believe in it rather than believe in nothing), understand also the full significance of his remarkable book, which irrefutably proves to people the necessity of faith, the impossibility of human life without faith—that is, without a definite, firm relation of man to the world and to its Source.

And having understood this, people cannot but find also those answers of faith, corresponding to the degree of their moral and intellectual development, to the questions posed by Pascal.

In this lies his great service.

—Leo Tolstoy

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Translator’s Notes:

• Blaise Pascal (1623–1662) was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, and religious philosopher. His scientific contributions include work on the hydraulics of fluids (Pascal’s principle), probability theory, and the invention of the mechanical calculator. His unfinished religious work, published posthumously as Pensées (Thoughts), remains one of the great classics of Christian apologetics.
• Nikolai Gogol (1809–1852), the Russian writer famous for Dead Souls and The Inspector General, experienced a similar spiritual crisis late in life, renouncing his earlier literary work and attempting to write a religious continuation of Dead Souls. He burned the manuscript of the second volume shortly before his death.
• Cornelius Jansen (1585–1638) was a Dutch theologian whose posthumous work Augustinus sparked the Jansenist movement within Catholicism, which emphasized predestination and divine grace in ways that conflicted with Jesuit teaching.
• Port-Royal was a Cistercian abbey near Paris that became the center of Jansenist activity. The “Little Schools” of Port-Royal were famous for their educational methods.
• The Provincial Letters (Lettres provinciales, 1656–1657) was Pascal’s masterful satirical defense of Jansenism against Jesuit casuistry. The work was condemned by both the Jesuits and Pope Alexander VII but was hugely influential on French prose style.
• Evangelista Torricelli (1608–1647) was the Italian physicist who invented the mercury barometer. Pascal’s experiments extended Torricelli’s work and demonstrated that atmospheric pressure decreases with altitude.
• The Discours sur les passions de l’amour is a short essay on love sometimes attributed to Pascal, though its authorship is disputed.
• The belt with nails (cilice) that Pascal wore is a form of mortification of the flesh practiced by some Christians as a means of subduing the body’s desires and focusing on spiritual matters.
• Tolstoy’s characterization of Pascal as someone who grasped the necessity of faith but accepted an imperfect form of it (Catholicism) reflects Tolstoy’s own religious position—he believed in the necessity of faith but rejected all institutional Christianity as corrupted.
• The phrase “the light shines even in darkness” echoes John 1:5: “And the light shineth in darkness; and the darkness comprehended it not.”