Out of the same depth of spiritual experience and trenchant moral analysis comes all that is true and valuable in his so-called ‘Apology.’ That the ‘Pensées’ were more or less designed to form such an Apology—to be woven into the plan of a treatise in defence of the Christian religion—seems beyond doubt. He had himself, according to the statement of his nephew, unfolded such a plan to his friends, in a lengthened conversation about the year 1657 or 1659. They were charmed with the loftiness of his design, and listened to his exposition of it for two or three hours with unabated interest. He was to commence with an analysis of human nature, and to advance from the contemplation of its mysteries, obscurities, and perplexities, to the consideration of the various methods, philosophical and religious, by which reason had endeavoured to meet the difficulties of thought and life. After explaining the inconclusiveness and absurdities of these methods—represented by the diverse philosophies and religions of the world—he was to call attention to the Jewish religion, and the superiority which it presents to all others, both in the extraordinary circumstances of its history, and in the revelation which it gives of one God, Creator and Governor of the world, and of the origin of man—his primitive innocence and fall. The idea of the fall, which was a central one in all
Pascal’s thoughts, was to be fully expounded, in its own character and as “the source not only of whatever is most inexplicable in man’s nature, but also of a multitude of things, external to him, of which he knows not the causes.” From the fall he was to pass to the hopes of deliverance revealed in the Old Testament, and especially the lofty conception which it gives of God as a God of love, a feature peculiar to it, and “which he deemed the essence of true religion.”
From such general considerations—of the nature of prolegomena or “preparation” for the reader’s mind—he proceeded to furnish a brief view of “the positive proofs of the truths he wanted to establish,—proofs derived from the authenticity of the books of Moses, especially the miracles they record, the figures and types they embody.” He then went on more at length to prove the truth of religion from prophecy, which he is represented as having studied deeply, and certain views of which, “of a nature wholly original,” he explained with great clearness. Finally, “after going through the books of the Old Testament,” he advanced to those of the New, “and deduced from them his crowning proofs of the truths of the Gospel.” He began with Christ, whose divine mission he already supposed to be established by the argument from prophecy, and added additional force of evidence from His resurrection, His miracles, His doctrines, and the tenor of His life; then from the character and mission of the apostles; and lastly, from the style and manner of the New Testament books, and especially of the Gospels, “the multitude of miracles, martyrs, and the saints,”—in a word, from all “by which the Christian religion is so triumphantly established.”
It is needless to say how imperfectly this design was ever accomplished; and no ingenuity of restoration can make of Pascal’s apologetic plan anything but a mass of imperfect fragments. Yet he has left us a definite series of Thoughts on the Jewish religion, on Miracles, Figures, and Prophecy, and also on Jesus Christ and the general character of the Christian religion. In these Thoughts, it must be admitted, there is but little to reward our study in comparison with those of a more introductory and philosophical nature. Pascal’s genius was in no degree historical, and but slightly critical—not to mention that the very idea of historical criticism had not emerged in his time, nor long afterwards. While realising so profoundly the perplexities of human experience, he has no conception of the difficulties that beset historical tradition; nor do his habits of scientific investigation, and the natural severity and logical rigour of his mind, seem to have suggested to him any misgivings as to the prevalence of miraculous agency in the world. The perfect faith with which he accepted the “miracle” of the Holy Thorn is a sufficient indication of his state of mind in this respect, and how ready he was to accept evidence the very idea of which merely excites a smile of wonder in the modern mind.
It cannot be said, therefore, to be any matter of regret that Pascal did not live to complete the historical portion of his projected work,—what he seems himself, from the report of his friends, to have considered the main structure of the defence he intended to rear on behalf of the religion so dear to him. He expended his real strength on the portico to the designed temple. His genius fitted
him to deal with this, and with this alone, in any adequate manner. His moral analysis, at once keen and veracious, enabled him not only to lay bare all the “disproportions” of humanity, but, moreover, to unfold the adaptation of Christianity as a spiritual system to meet and remedy these disproportions. This is the real “apologetic” work of the ‘Pensées,’ and the only one for which Pascal’s mind pre-eminently fitted him. He sees in the Gospel a Divine Power which is capable of ministering to man’s higher wants—a power of infinite compassion towards human weakness and misery, of infinite help for the one and remedy for the other. The Christian religion, according to him, alone “understands at once man’s greatness and degradation, and the reason of both the one and the other.” “It is equally important for man to know his capacity of being like God and his unworthiness of Him. To know of God without knowing his misery, or to know his misery without knowing the Redeemer, who alone can deliver him from it, is alike dangerous. The one knowledge constitutes the pride of the philosopher, the other the despair of the atheist. Man must therefore have the double experience, and so it has pleased God to reveal it. This the Christian religion does; in this it consists.” Again: “Christ is the centre in which alone we find at once God and our misery. In Him alone we have a God whom we must approach without pride, and before whom we may yet bow without despair.” In another and more lengthened passage he brings the two ideas of human corruption and divine redemption closely together, the one as supplementary of the other, and expressly
emphasises the perfection with which Christianity fits so to speak, into all the wards of the human enigma,—in comparison with every system of human philosophy.
“Without divine knowledge,” he says, “what have men been able to do save to exalt themselves in the consciousness of their original greatness, or abase themselves in the view of their present weakness? Unable to see the whole truth, they have never attained to perfect virtue. One class considering nature as incorrupt, another as irreparable, they have been alternately the victims of pride or sensuality—the two sources of all vice. . . . If, in one case, they recognised man’s excellence, they ignored his corruption; and so, in escaping indulgence, they lost themselves in pride. In the other case, in acknowledging his weakness they ignored his dignity, and, while escaping vanity, plunged into despair. Hence the diverse sects of Stoics and Epicureans, of Dogmatists and Academicians, etc. The Christian religion alone can reconcile these discrepancies and cure both evils, not by expelling the one by the other, according to the wisdom of this world, but by expelling both the one and the other by the simplicity of the Gospel. For it teaches the just that while it elevates them even to be partakers of the divine nature, they still carry with them in this lofty state the source of all their corruption, making them during life subjects of error, misery, death, and sin. At the same time, it proclaims to the most impious that they are capable of becoming partakers of a Redeemer’s grace. By thus warning those whom it justifies, and consoling those whom it condemns, it tempers with just measure fear and hope, through the twofold capacity in all of grace and sin; so that it abases infinitely more than reason, yet without producing despair, and exalts infinitely more than natural pride, yet without puffing up,—plainly showing that it alone is exempt from all error and wrong, and possesses the power at once of instructing and correcting men. Who, then, can withhold his belief in this revelation, or refuse to adore its celestial light? For is it not more clear than day that we feel in ourselves the ineffaceable traces of divine excellence? And it is equally clear that we experience every hour the effects of our fall and ruin. What, then, comes to us from all this chaos and wild confusion, in a voice of irresistible conviction, but the irrefragable truth of both those sides of humanity?” [199]
This passage conveys very clearly at once the gist of Pascal’s philosophy and the chief merit of his line of Christian apology. The two cannot be separated. They run constantly into one another. He was a Christian apologist in so far as he was a Christian philosopher; and those who reject his line of Christian defence, will also reject his whole mode of thought. To him the only solution of human perplexity in thought and life is Christ. He is the “object and centre of all things, in whom alone all contradictions are reconciled.” This is the conclusion of his intelligence, and not of his despair. Whatever may be the traces of scepticism in his intellectual nature, it is doing him great injustice to represent his acceptance of Christianity as a mere refuge from uncertainty. He is a totally different man from Huet, with whom Cousin has ventured to compare him in this respect. He never dallies on the surface; mere traditionalism has but a slight hold of him. He is a Christian not because he has been taught Christianity, or because the Church as a divine institution claims his allegiance. All these influences may have affected him, and given a turn to his mind; but they do not touch the essence of his thoughts. Anything he does say of the external claims of Christianity has but little weight. It is out of the depths of his own spiritual experience that his
faith is born. It is a voice within him, a conflicting cry of weakness and aspiration going up everywhere from humanity, that find their answer in Christ. There is the enigma of man on the one side, to him otherwise hopeless, and Christ on the other, holding the keys of the enigma in His hand. The solution appeared to him perfect, according to his study and analysis of the problem—the twofoldness that he found in man, of divine dignity on the one hand, and frivolous, sensual degradation on the other. Both facts, he says, are equally clear and certain. Man’s fall from a state of divine innocence alone explains them; and the Gospel alone recognises the one side as well as the other of human nature, and provides a Power capable of restoring its true balance and rectifying all its disorder. He felt in himself the might of this power healing all the wounds of his own heart, and binding up the shreds of his Christian efforts “to do justly, and love mercy, and walk humbly with God.” Whether we agree with all his analyses, or recognise all the adaptations which he describes, it is impossible not to feel that they were living to him, and that he saw in Christianity not merely a refuge for the disappointed heart, but a true philosophy of life—the only “sure and sound philosophy,” as Justin Martyr had found long before him.