Thursday, November 5, 2020

Pascal: "What It Is To Be A King..."

He's paradoxical. He's provocative. Sometimes, he's a bit extreme. But Blaise Pascal (1623-1662) makes you think... and I'm not talking about mathematics or science here. I'm talking about the collection of his "Thoughts" published after his death at the age of 38. 

The Pensées were more like notes or fragments of a book when he died, but they were published and read widely, and continue to be admired for their brilliant French prose, and their profound religiosity.

In fact, reading them is like having buckets of existential cold water dumped on your head. When the world grows fuzzy, when everything is distracted and out of focus, Pascal can be very good reading. He speaks about the human condition with great insight, even when he uses hyperbolic language that can "go too far," or paradoxical articulations about human interior dividedness that draw much from his passionate Jansenism. Yet even when he stretches things thus, he always has a point. You can't simply dismiss his challenge to face the evasiveness and duplicity of your own life, and the cheap distractedness of the dominant mentality and so many cultural trends. 

Pascal refuses to allow you to be comfortable with any self-sufficient worldliness, with the forgetfulness of the human need for God. With poetic eloquence, he draws a picture of the human condition according to the volcanic incoherence of human behavior, of "the grandeur and misery of man." Thus, he is existentially provoking. And he speaks to human problems today as much as those of his time.

"Man is obviously made to think. It is his whole dignity and his whole merit; and his whole duty is to think as he ought. Now, the order of thought is to begin with self, and with its Author and its end. But of what does the world think? Never of this, but of dancing, playing the lute, singing, making verses, running at the ring, etc., fighting, making oneself king, without thinking what it is to be a king, or to be a man" (Pensées 146).

Topical, indeed. We are all still taken up with the question of "who is to become king," without thinking much about what it really means to "be king," and putting it in perspective: the person who wears the crown will be neither our savior nor our ruin. We are made for God. He is in control. Our identity comes from Jesus, the King of kings, and not from our tribes or our chiefs. We follow Jesus. We trust in Him, come what may.

Pascal's text is also a finger pointing at me, certainly. I want to say that I can think of my self, God, and my end, while also giving attention - critically, of course - to the relative values of playing the "lute" (especially the "electric lute") and singing and writing verse and playing ball. I tell myself that I'm trying to recognize the human values that are all wound up with the ambivalence and excess of these activities in today's society. That's what I want to do, but I'm also lured sometimes by the distractions, the cleverness, the spectacle. Being a Christian "in the world" is a vocational duty, but I am far from doing it well. I need more prayer, more attention to the word of God, more asceticism, more remembrance of Christ, more openness to the grace of the sacraments, more awareness of belonging to God, more desire to do His will.

Pascal is a "reality check" on all pretenses to compromise, to settle for mediocre Christianity instead of striving for a greater conformity to Jesus Christ.

In another text, the great French prodigy of math and science, the genius of invention, the passionate religious penitent lays before us all the paradox and ultimate helplessness of human reason's effort to establish the measure and value of human existence. The rhetoric exhorts us to look beyond ourselves, to listen to Another...

"What a chimera, then, is man! What a novelty! What a monster, what a chaos, what a contradiction, what a prodigy! Judge of all things, imbecile worm of the earth; depositary of truth, a sink of uncertainty and error; the pride and refuse of the universe!

"Who will unravel this tangle? Nature confutes the sceptics, and reason confutes the rationalists. What, then, will you become, O men! who try to find out by your natural reason what is your true condition? You cannot avoid one of these positions, nor adhere to one of them.

"Know then, proud man, what a paradox you are to yourself. Humble yourself, weak reason; be silent, foolish nature; learn that man infinitely transcends man, and learn from your Master your true condition, of which you are ignorant. Hear God" (Pensées 434).