A ‘Pascal’ Mystery

Religion (1997) 27, 267–273

A ‘Pascal’ Mystery N R Surely some have wondered during discussions about forthcoming research projects with academic colleagues in the humanities whether one really needed yet another book on Dante or yet another study of the Oxford Movement. Surely the bookshelves are already heavily burdened with tome upon tome. In a most insightful introduction to an English-language edition of Pascal’s Pensées T. S. Eliot gave a welcome answer when he claimed that ‘Pascal is one of those writers who will be and who must be studied afresh by men in every generation’. In the place of Pascal put your favourite subject or personality and your new project is justified! In the same place, more importantly, Eliot also claimed that there are really only two ways of looking at the human condition, one the way of Pascal and the other the way of Voltaire. ‘. . .Pascal’s method is, on the whole, the method natural and right for the Christian; and the opposite method is that taken by Voltaire. . . Voltaire has presented, better than any one since, what is the unbelieving point of view; and in the end we must all choose for ourselves between one point of view and another’. Many students of the Enlightenment know that Voltaire was so pre-occupied with Pascal that he attached a twenty-fifth letter concerning Pascal to his Philosophical Letters on the English, at least a clear indication that he regarded Pascal as one of his most important opponents.1 Voltaire always chose his principal targets with great care, and if Pascal, Bossuet, and Leibniz can in many ways be taken as the three most important for him to have refuted, Eliot may well be right in finding Pascal alone still a viable opponent. Certainly few would claim the combative bishop of Meaux or the caricature of a German philosopher as survivors of Voltaire’s wit, but Pascal continues to attract the scholarly attention of many. The most recent example is an insightful and challenging little volume by the great student of Marxism and other modern ideologies, Leszek Kolakowski; his study, sub-titled A Brief Remark on Pascal’s Religion and on the Spirit of Jansenism, carries the intriguing principal title: God Owes us Nothing.2 If Voltaire’s pre-occupation with refuting Pascal makes him the most famous ‘anti-Pascal’, Pascal himself was probably prophetically the first and best ‘antiphilosophe’. If the Enlightenment be regarded as the application of the method of the Scientific Revolution to the wider world of humanity, then Voltaire correctly understood how fundamentally Pascal challenged the Enlightenment before it was anything more than a faint hope or dream. Pascal understood mankind theologically where the philosophes sought to understand it scientifically. Certainly neither Voltaire, Rousseau, nor the other first-rate thinkers of the 18th Century had a naive faith in Science; they were in fact tormented by having to admit a universe devoid of sanctions based on more than physical nature, the mature Voltaire most notably in Candide and Rousseau early on from his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences throughout all his writings. Neither shared the naive faith of Condorcet whose Historical Sketch of the Progress of the Human Mind did not shrink from expecting the abolition of war, poverty, and perhaps even death. Still any acknowledgment that Pascal might have been right would have aborted the entire ‘Enlightenment Project’, as many scholars now prefer to call the 18th-century intellectual movement. Pascal thus anticipated a Voltaire, even if he only had the example of a Montaigne actually before him. 0048–721X/97/030267 + 07 $25.00/0/rl960053

? 1997 Academic Press Limited

268 N. Ravitch Although Pascal’s theologically based position was not the result of extensive formal study of Christian theology, he did engage in theological discourse in all his nonscientific work. The Provincial Letters may be considered theology for the general public, with little of the subtle nuance characteristic of true theologians, while the Pensées, the Writings on Grace, and the notes which were put together under Pascal’s name as the Discussion with Monsieur de Sacy demonstrate a serious study of Christian theology. It is perhaps appropriate that a student of the intricacies of Marxist ‘theology’ has undertaken a discussion of the subtleties of Augustinianism on grace and predestination; Kolakowski is quite equal to the task. Kolakowski divides his study of Jansenism and Pascal into two parts, into two major theses. The first asks the question: ‘Why did the Catholic Church condemn the teaching of Saint Augustine?’—many will be surprised that the question is not ‘did the Catholic Church condemn the teaching of Saint Augustine?’ The second part is entitled ‘Pascal’s Sad Religion.’ Both theses are open to dispute. Students of religion in general and scholars of the doctrine of the Predestination of the Saints and the doctrine of Grace may legitimately doubt the complete abandonment of Augustinianism in the Roman Catholic Church. And the surface pessimism of Pascal’s religious orientation may conceal more than it reveals, analogous to the paradoxical subtitle which Voltaire chose for Candide, ‘Optimism’. No reading of Voltaire’s timeless philosophical tale could possibly find its message unequivocally optimistic. Nor can Pascal’s Christian pessimism be reduced to ‘sadness’. Kolakowski is an accomplished guide through the perils of theology and philosophy but his views need not be accepted uncritically. The alleged abandonment or condemnation of Augustinian theology in the Roman Catholic Church in the 17th century is part of a more basic problem: what was authentic Christian tradition? Here more than a single answer is possible. The great scholar of French religious thought, Henri Bremond, who was also violently biased against Jansenism, held that the non-Augustinian view of the human condition which the Renaissance and the Jesuits viewed as Christian or devout humanism placed the doctrine of Redemption rather than that of Original Sin at the centre of Christian faith. The fathers of the Greek Church before the time of Augustine had never emphasized Original Sin and the irresistibility of divine grace. Indeed Augustine, knowing little Greek, had read The Epistle to the Romans 5 : 12 in a faulty Latin version which had the Apostle Paul identify Adam as the man ‘in whom all men sinned’ where the Greek actually had said ‘in as much as all men sinned.’ To this very day Eastern Orthodox theology would identify Augustinianism as the chief theological difference between itself and Western Christianity, whether Catholic or Protestant. The point is not that Paul had perhaps been misunderstood by Augustine but rather that normative Catholicism for a thousand years at least had been Augustinian. The contribution of Thomas Aquinas in matters of grace was a little inconsistent since he suggested that humans can refuse to cooperate with divine grace, but any consistent view of Aquinas must consider him largely Augustinian. The 17th-century Dominicans understood their theology as Augustinian and therefore opposed the Jesuit emphasis on free will. Pascal’s first several Provincial Letters mordantly revealed the Dominicans as theologically at one with the Jansenists but nonetheless politically joined with the Jesuits to ruin them.3 A leading 20th-century integrist French Thomist Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, whom François Mauriac called ‘that sacred monster of Thomism’, fully defended the Augustinianism of Aquinas. In the 16th and 17th centuries there was no doubt that the most visible enemies of the Jesuit views on Grace were the Dominicans. The Dominicans tried but failed to get Molina’s Concordia, the theological work which

A ‘Pascal’ Mystery 269 would mark Jesuit theology until the present day, officially prohibited.4 Pre-Augustinian Christian theology had been influenced by the continuing importance of Greek philosophy, and the Pelagian movement which spurred Augustine to defend the theology of Predestination and Grace was heavily marked by the ethical ideals of paganism, especially of Stoicism. Peter Brown, a leading Augustine scholar, concludes that ‘the victory of Augustine’s ideas over those of Pelagius. . . (is) . . . one of the most important symptoms of that profound change that we call ‘‘the End of the Ancient World and the Beginning of the Middle Ages’’.5 Thus Augustinianism can at one and the same time be considered normative, traditional Latin Christianity and a true departure from the Christianity of the Hellenistic Church. Which theological position is truly primary and evangelical is impossible to determine since the first century of the Church was marked by a great variety of ethical, theological, and ecclesiastical belief among Christians which only later could be labelled orthodox or heretical. Walter Bauer’s very important Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity, originally published in German in the 1930’s, remains fully persuasive here. Kolakowski is surely right when he claims that as a result of the challenge of Jansenism the Catholic Church in effect condemned the Augustinian theology of Prestination and Grace, but he goes too far when he considers this a repudiation of tradition, for he ignores or insufficiently admits the multi-faceted nature of Christian tradition. The Church could never decisively decide between the sovereignty of God and the freedom of His human creation, an inherent mystery which even the most orthodox GarrigouLagrange was forced to concede as ‘beyond our power of perception’. The decrees of the Council of Trent had seemed to support a largely Augustinian view of the matter but the early intervention at Trent of the Jesuit Diego Laynez, an early companion of Ignatius Loyola, demonstrated that those with pastoral and missionary concerns could find Augustinian theology a hinderance. After seeking and failing to impose a silence concerning Predestination and Grace on Augustinians and Christian humanists alike, the Roman Catholic Church finally chose a position closer to that of the Jesuits, the so-called ‘semi-Pelagianism’ of Jansenist polemic. The Jansenists with the help of the considerable literary skills of Pascal might indeed seek to claim that Protestantism could only be defeated by reclaiming the authentic Augustinianism of Catholic tradition, that there was a significant difference between Augustinian and Calvinist interpretations of the theology of Predestination and Grace, and that the Jesuits were as much a danger to orthodoxy as the Protestants, but the Church in the late 17th and early 18th century nonetheless chose to repudiate much of its Augustinian heritage. Kolakowski deserves credit for making this fairly clear since normative Catholic apologists prefer to continue to find important differences between Calvinist and Jansenist misunderstandings of Augustine on the one hand and true Catholic Augustinianism on the other. Since the 17th century Augustine has been subjected to the teaching magisterium of the Church and is not considered the supreme authority to which the Church must herself defer. The Jansenists and Calvinists had indeed placed Augustine above the Church. Only perhaps a student of the twists and turns of the various kinds of Marxism could find as sure a footing here as Kolakowski has managed. But a student of Marxism may also have a particular blind spot: the desire to find socio-economic motivations for theological decisions and to identify social consequences of theological change. Kolakowski is quick to disavow the work of Lucien Goldmann who in The Hidden God (1955) tried to understand Jansenism as particularly the religion of the noblesse de robe as it felt threatened by French political and social changes. Kolakowski had once been somewhat sympathetic to Goldmann’s thesis—

270 N. Ravitch fortunately for him he had expressed himself in a little read Polish-language academic journal—but he now finds Goldmann’s work still imaginative but vitiated by its false Marxist assumptions. Yet he cannot free himself entirely from a perfectly understandable desire to tie the theological developments before him to the more general course of history. No more than the non-Marxist Robert R. Palmer in 1939 can he avoid the influence of Bernhard Groethuysen6 who held that Jansenist theology was a desperate reactionary attempt to stem the tide of modernity. The French bourgeoisie, Groethuysen had claimed, was increasingly alienated from Christian faith by the moral and theological teaching of the Jansenists . Palmer had found that the appropriate Jesuit attempt to keep the allegiance of the bourgeoisie came too little and too late. In all these attempts to connect theology with social change there are useful insights but little certainty. Groethuysen, Palmer, and Goldmann might even have cited the great neo-orthodox theologian of this century, Karl Barth, who early in his career wrote that the Catholic belief in natural theology and the analogy of being, a leading feature of Thomism, was a ‘bourgeois perversion of the gospel’.7 Nevertheless a certain French and Netherlandish bourgeoisie had initially been much attached to Augustinian theology and morality. I suppose that a vulgar Marxism would seek to identify precisely which economic strata of the bourgeoisie favoured austerity and which laxity in the living of a Christian life, but Kolakowski fortunately does not indulge in any of this speculation. Where Kolakowski clings to uncertain assumptions is when he considers Augustinian theology self-evidently reactionary and Pelagianism certainly more consistent with the needs of the upper and middle classes who wanted to feel they exercised control over their lives. For him, Augustinianism appealed principally to people who valued moral security over moral autonomy. But aristocratic values were ambivalently confronted by the middle classes. It might seem clear that rigorous Augustinianism would not appeal to most members of the aristocracy and the Court. But the middle classes, perhaps the poorer, rural nobility, and certainly the lower classes, were in the 17th Century still censorious about the mores of the aristocracy. Eventually the bourgeoisie would seek to separate itself from both the ‘People’ below it and from the aristocracy above. Kolakowski too carelessly lumps the upper classes together as if they had everything in common. This is more populist than Marxist but it is certainly simplistic. One can agree with Kolakowski that Pelagianism was an aristocratic theology in its belief that men can save themselves, since it recognized that few have the moral and intellectual resources to succeed in this difficult endeavour. The ancient world had of course been profoundly sceptical of the possibility of virtue for more than a very small, cultivated elite. On the other hand, an inscrutable God can at least be expected to dispense His parsimonious grace on a basis other than social status. His will might be mysterious but it was certainly not likely to be simply elitist. In Augustinian theology there was no firm reason to believe that an arbitrary God would be more likely to prefer the upper classes. When he considers the question of institutional power Kolakowski judiciously notes that both Augustinian and Pelagian theology could easily be adapted to the needs of a powerful Church establishment; neither was clearly more compatible than the other with ecclesiastical hierarchy or Ultramontanism. For his part Robert R. Palmer noted that in the last analysis the Jesuits had not really been able to counter the Enlightenment or to keep the allegiance of the elites for Christianity and the Church. It is easy to speculate that had the Jesuits not been dissolved in the 1760’s and 1770’s they might have accomplished more, but one can also imagine that perhaps a still Augustinian Catholicism might have kept society more orthodox and more pious. Augustinianism

A ‘Pascal’ Mystery 271 certainly demands a great deal and it can quickly lose its appeal. In the form of Calvinism, whether in the Dutch Republic, in Geneva, in Scotland, or in New England it did not in fact last very long. Perhaps no form of Christianity was sufficiently well-equipped to beat off the partisans of Enlightenment. To express certainty that the Roman Catholic Church abandoned Augustinian theology because it understood that this theology would weaken its appeal to the elite is to assign her a prescience she does not claim for herself and which even the Holy Spirit might not vouchsafe. Kolakowski certainly makes no firm claims but he shares a generalized feeling about what is modern and what antiquated, which may not have much basis in reality, but only in ideology. He may simply assume that what actually happened was inevitable, surely not the first one to surrender to this tempting assumption. Kolakowski would benefit along with all of us from the more sophisticated and nuanced work of recent historians of Christianity, particularly the work of John Bossy.8 If Kolakowski’s discussion of Augustinianism, Pelagianism, and modernity is insightful if still not without some problems, his evaluation of Pascal’s religion as ‘sad’ also raises questions about his specific judgments. He ends his study with these startling words: ‘All (Pascal’s) . . . protestations about the happiness of those who ‘‘have found God’’ notwithstanding, it was a religion for unhappy people and it was designed to make them more unhappy’. Here I strongly dissent and am puzzled how someone who has confronted the tragedies of the 20th century more closely than most can adopt such an apparently insensitive stance. Kolakowski seems to echo Voltaire but I fear he may perhaps be even closer to Doctor Pangloss. Bernard Fontenelle may be considered the missing link between the Scientific Revolution of the 17th century and the Enlightenment of the 18th. He lived for one hundred years, and not just any one hundred years but from 1657 to 1757. As Perpetual Secretary of the French Acade´mie des Sciences he chose to perform the routine task of writing obituaries of deceased members in a creative new way. His official biographical notices were hardly subtle attempts to propagandize on behalf of the New Science. Many of the scientists whose lives he recorded were found to have been originally destined by their families for Church careers but they had turned instead to Science, despite the greater insecurity of such a non-traditional career. Science was clearly shown as the successor of Religion, scientists as having superseded clerics as the spiritual leaders of society. Had Fontenelle been required to write Pascal’s obituary, he would have had to show that a brilliant scientist and mathematician had rejected the New Science for the Old Religion, that Pascal had moved in the opposite direction from Progress, Reason, and Nature. Fontenelle would likely have spent some time on Pascal’s physical disabilities and psychological woes in order to explain his ‘conversion’ to the wrong cause, but the fact would have remained that Pascal understood all the accomplishments and possibilities of the New Science and chose to reject them as essentially meaningless for human beings. Pascal earlier than most and better than most had understood what by now is clear: in Kolakowski’s words, ‘this was perhaps the mightiest blow inflicted by Descartes to both the standard mentality and standard Christian philosophy: there is no way that leads logically from nature to its maker, no possibility of experiencing directly the divine finger in natural events’. Once Science proceeded by asking only how the universe worked and no longer what it all meant, nothing human beings really cared about any longer could be approached by Reason. The Natural Law was replaced by the laws of nature. Alexandre Koyre´ wrote some years ago that the New Science had a place for everything but no place for Man. Pascal fully understood this, which led him to turn back to religion, and not his physical infirmities or his melancholy disposition.

272 N. Ravitch Is this sad? The separation of God from Nature was indeed a blow to the scholastic attempt to unify faith and reason, God and Nature, but the unknowable, mysterious, and hidden God of the Augustinians had thus left the natural world to run on its own. Science was free to study what it wished and the Church had no right to compel a theological understanding of Nature. The Jesuits had believed that they had some proper supervisory role over the scientific endeavour and this had led among other things to the condemnation of Galileo. Neither did those who studied Nature have any right to dictate to those concerned with God and faith, for Christianity Pascal insisted was the only religion he knew of ‘against Nature’. Kolakowski admits that Pascal’s recognition of the separateness of Faith and Nature was fully modern and that he worked to protect the autonomy of each separate domain. How sad is this? Within the Enlightenment first-rate thinkers were not slow in understanding what Pascal had already perceived about the new scientific view of the universe. David Hume demolished deism in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion but left his manuscript unpublished. Voltaire made it clear in Candide, after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755, that man would have to create meaning on his own in a probably meaningless universe. Rousseau expressed his doubts about the moral value of the scientific endeavour in his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences and then went on to assert that Nature could be a sure guide if viewed in a more sentimental and less Cartesian way. Voltaire’s answer was essentially existential, Rousseau’s romantic, and Hume’s no answer at all. In various ways the modern Ersatz religions of nationalism and socialism grew from these disparate roots, as well as from the experience of the French Revolution, and they helped to transform the world in the l9th and 20th centuries. Kolakowski knows their achievements, the good and the catastrophic. Some might see these ‘religions’ as much sadder than the orthodox Christianity of Pascal. Kolakowski rightly notes that despite Pascal’s vigorous defense of the Jansenists his Pensées were the reflection of a fully orthodox Augustinianism little dependent on specifically Jansenistic polemics. Pascal’s ‘sad religion’ is then the religion of countless Christians over almost two thousand years. The view of the crucified Saviour is sad. So is the Mater Dolorosa and the martyrdom of the saints. But this religion claims to offer true hope in the will of the God who walked and talked with the patriarchs of Israel. An Augustinian does not need to try to find comfort in the mathematical formulas of Science or in the processes of Nature ‘red in tooth and claw’. He does not need to receive each additional discovery of Science with a desperate hope that it can be reconciled with his real concerns. A discovery of possible life forms on Mars, for example, does not throw him into doubt or despair. But he can rely on the conviction that God is good and just, that only God’s will defines goodness and justice, and that His will will be done. Of course one needs the faith of a Pascal to perceive this. Kolakowski evidently does not have it. It is sad that he finds this faith sad. For some Pascal has an appealing and convincing answer for Modern Man. The Roman Catholic Church does not normally admit that there is no correspondence between Nature and the God who created it. It still prefers a modified Thomistic position on this question. I recently heard a young priest, no more than three years from the seminary, assure us that no finding in science could possibly contradict Christian faith. Thus Aquinas continues to guide Catholic teaching. Nor is Augustinian theology as mediated though Pascal a comfort to all troubled Christians. Apparently Charles Maurras, the agnostic ‘church father’ of integrist French Catholics in the first half of the 20th century, ascribed his own devastating spiritual crisis partly to Pascal. For Maurras Pascal’s religious scepticism simply caused non-belief, Maurras preferred Aquinas and

A ‘Pascal’ Mystery 273 the Jesuits as guides in his quest for a conservative social order. Thus Pascal and Augustinianism were made by him to appear left-wing. Kolakowski might wonder a bit about this. No one can say for certain whether the separation of Faith and Reason is good or bad for religion, as no one can say for certain whether the Jansenists or the Jesuits had a better plan for defeating unbelief. The question is still open. And so is Pascal.

Notes 1 For other reasons for Voltaire’s inclusion of Pascal in this work see Nicholas Cronk, (ed), Voltaire. Letters Concerning the English Nation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 122–3. 2 Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995, 238 pages. 3 A recent Jesuit scholar admits that matters of expediency may have been included in the Jesuits’ cultivation of the Dominican Order. See John W. O’Malley, The First Jesuits, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993. 4 R. Garrigou-Lagrange, Predestination, St. Louis: B. Herder, 1953, part II, section 1. Bernard E. Doering, Jacques Maritain and the French Catholic Intellectuals Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983, p. 95. James Broderick, SJ, Robert Bellarmine, Saint and Scholar, Westminster, MD: The Newman Press, 1961, pp. 189–216. 5 Augustine of Hippo (New York: Dorset Press, 1967, p. 367. 6 Robert R. Palmer, Catholics and Unbelievers in Eighteenth Century France, Princeton: Princeton University Press, l939. Bernhard Groethuysen, Die Entstehung der bu¨rgerlichen Welt und Lebensanschauung in Frankreich, 1927; published in English as The Bourgeois. Catholicism vs. Capitalism in Eighteenth-Century France, London: Barrie and Rockliff, 1968. 7 Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth, London: SCM Press, 1976, p. 285. 8 John Bossey, Christianity in the West 1400–1700, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985; see also Norman Ravitch, The Catholic Church and the French Nation, 1589–1989, London and New York: Routledge, 1990, pp. 44–51 . 9 Michael Sutton, Nationalism, Positivism and Catholicism. The Politics of Charles Maurras and French Catholics 1890–1914, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, pp. 232–42.

Bibliography 1 Chrétiens sans Eglise. la conscience religieuse et le lien confessionel au xviie sie`cle (1969) Paris, Gallimard. 2 God Owes us Nothing. A Brief Remark on Pascal’s Religion and on the spirit of Jansenism. (1995) Chicago, University of Chicago Press. 3 Main Currents of Marxism, Its Rise, Growth, and Dissolution (1978). Oxford, Clarendon Press. 4 Modernity on Endless Trial (1990). Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

NORMAN RAVITCH earned his Ph.D. at Princeton University and is currently Professor of History at the University of California at Riverside, specializing in French Catholic History, particularly of the 17th and 18th century. He is a past editor of the Proceedings of the Western Society for French History (1990–1995), and author of Sword and Mitre. Government and Episcopate in France and England in the Age Aristocracy, The Hague and Paris: Mouton, (1966) and The Catholic Church and the French Nation 1589–1989 London and New York, Routledge, (1990). History Department, University of California, Riverside, CA, U.S.A.