Pascal's Wager (14 page)

The people listened, the barricades came down, and the crowds melted away. Everyone breathed easily, and the city seemed to return to itself and become a place of charm and grace once again. But this didn’t last very long. The guards at the Palais-Royal needed resupply, and, unhappily, their two caissons of gunpowder arrived in the city at just that moment. The people watched as the military procession rolled through the streets of the city, and they became certain that the queen was preparing to strike. All of a sudden, the streets were filled with people calling, “To arms!” And things were just as bad as they had been the day before. The magistrates moved among the people to reassure them, but no one listened. Within half an hour, the city was alive with rebellion once again.

Two months later, the queen, the young king, and the cardinal, leaving much of the court to fend for themselves, sneaked out of the city and rallied troops for their attack on the city. Fortunately for them, the Peace of Westphalia had ended the Thirty Years’ War, and the French Army, under the command of the young prince de Condé, was now free to put down the rebellion. His troops surrounded the capital, and all the people’s fears seemed to come true. The queen would have her vengeance after all. But the prince was not eager to lead a general slaughter, and never led his troops inside the capital. Meanwhile, the nobles among the rebels quietly negotiated with the Spanish, the queen’s own family, to intercede on their behalf. But the people were too French for that, and wouldn’t be saved by the hated Spaniards, and so they were forced to submit. Negotiations started; messages zoomed back and forth across the barricades; the people submitted; the queen relented; and suddenly in 1649, with the Peace of Rueil, there was peace at last. The only problem left was the prince de Condé, who had his own army to play with and now felt that the queen owed him. She didn’t agree, and the Fronde of the Princes was on.

T
he Pascal family had fled Paris for the Auvergne in May 1649, and lived there for the next eighteen months at the home of Gilberte and Florin Perier. Undoubtedly, they gleaned whatever news they could of the events in Paris and waited for the fire to die down. Blaise continued with his scientific investigations, and had momentary episodes
of religious fervor, but these, too, died down. Gilberte recorded how he made retreats in the country, in spite of his constant infirmity, to help sort out his faith. At home, he took on many of the tasks once reserved for the servants, and refused their help on household chores. He made his own bed, carried his dishes in from the table, even cooked for himself from time to time. Whether that was a bad idea or not, Gilberte never said. He read the Bible voraciously, and said that the Bible was not a text for “the genius,” the rational mind, but for the heart. His life was inching toward a fork in the road. His problem was complex—how to reconcile his scientific pursuits with his spirituality, especially when his spiritual directors thought that science itself was a sin equal to lust. He felt, increasingly, that he had to make a choice. The fact that this very idea would have appeared excessive, even ridiculous, to the vast majority of Catholics, especially those trained by the Jesuits, never quite sank in.

Jacqueline, on the other hand, never wavered. She kept her promises to Mère Angélique and remained in her room as best she could, living a life of monastic silence. According to Gilberte, Jacqueline never left her quarters except to go to church or to visit the sick and the poor, all of which were part of the life of the sisterhood. She maintained her contact with Port-Royal through a stream of letters between herself and Mère Agnès Arnauld, the novice mistress and Mère Angélique’s sister and closest confidant. Finally, as the Fronde of the Parlement died down, Étienne decided that it was time for the Pascals to return to the capital. They arrived in November 1650 and took residence in a house on the rue de Touraine. The Fronde of the Princes was not quite over with, however, and so the family watched through their second-story windows as troops maneuvered on the streets below and soldiers fired muskets on one another and died.

While all this was going on, Blaise found himself in a war of his own. In the summer of 1651, an anonymous Jesuit attached to the college in Montferrand wrote a treatise attacking Blaise’s work on the vacuum. The Jesuits, awash in Thomistic Aristotelianism, naturally abhorred the vacuum, and fought the idea whenever they could. After all, Descartes was their boy and Pascal wasn’t. Thomas Aquinas was a saint, and
Pascal wasn’t that, either. In his treatise, the anonymous Jesuit wrote that “certain persons, lovers of novelty,” had falsely claimed credit for the discovery of the vacuum from experiments performed in Normandy and the Auvergne when in fact these same experiments had already been carried out in Italy and in Germany. Adding acid to the wound, the Jesuit dedicated his treatise to Étienne’s successor on the Cour des Aides, the tax court of the Auvergne.

Blaise was furious. There was no doubt about the identity of the “certain persons.” After all, the anonymous Jesuit had specified experiments in the very places where Blaise had so famously triumphed over the plenists. Moreover, because he remained anonymous, his attack was particularly cowardly. If you are going to attack someone’s character, you should at least do so to his face. Blaise wrote a public response, protesting the attack on his character and on the character of his brother-in-law, Florin Perier. He then outlined the history of these experiments, how he was in a tradition of researchers who doubted the Aristotelian physics, from Galileo to numerous others, and how each one had made his contribution, himself included. The experiments he had performed were his own, and their honesty could be attested to by both his brother-in-law and his father, Étienne—good men of high position.

What was at stake was an entire theory of knowledge. The scientific method was just then being formulated, and Pascal was a part of this. Theological and philosophical knowledge existed as part of a tradition, and so the opinions of great authorities in the past meant something. This was not true of science, for science was a new thing in the seventeenth century, and was still in its infancy. Pascal and others sought to distinguish scientific knowledge from both theological and philosophical knowledge. Cultural questions—who was the first king of France, where the geometers drew the first meridian—are questions of authority and can be solved by reference to books. This is a matter of scholarship. Questions that can be solved only by experiment and by reason—questions in mathematics and physics—cannot be solved by references to authority, and can be solved only by rigorous thought and observation. Père Noël and the other Aristotelians wanted to solve questions of physics as if they
were questions of theology. This was not the method taught to Pascal in Mersenne’s seminar; it was not the method taught to him by his father.

In the midst of this controversy, Étienne died. His health had been declining for some time, perhaps even as far back as Rouen and his fall on the ice. His long hours of tedious calculation couldn’t have helped matters, for he was frequently exhausted in Normandy, and the time he spent there aged him beyond his years. Still, at sixty-four he was an old man by seventeenth-century standards, and his death was not unexpected. He died on September 24, 1651, just as Gilberte was going into labor in Clermont. She gave birth three days later, to a healthy son, and then received a letter from Jacqueline informing her and Florin of her father’s death. A month later, she received a letter from Blaise completing Jacqueline’s letter. The letter he wrote was quite Catholic. He mentioned his own grief in passing, but the rest of the letter reads like “My Sunday Sermon.” For a Christian, all of life should be a dying, an act of sacrifice: “Let us not be afflicted like the heathen who have no hope. We did not lose my father at the moment of his death. We had lost him, so to speak, as soon as he entered the Church through baptism.”
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At this point, Pascal sets out his idea of the “Two Loves,” an idea that would resurface later, in the
Pensées
. God has created humanity with two loves—the love of God and the love of self. The love of God is infinite and all-consuming, while the love of self is finite and has the purpose of leading us back to God. But when sin entered the world through Adam, humanity lost the love of God. Only the instrumental love of the self remained, and “this self-love has spread and overflowed into the vacuum which the love of God has left.” In order to recover the love of God, each human soul must die to itself. It must give up the love of self in order to make room for the love of God. And so, dying should hold no fear for the Christian, who has already died in the soul; once that is accomplished, the death of the body is a dawdle.
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But in spite of all these brave Augustinian words, for Blaise this was a terrible time, perhaps the worst in his life. Underneath his theology he was in deep emotional pain, and the mention he makes of his grief re
veals just the tip of his sadness. His father had been the gravitational center of his life from the day his mother died. He had no wife, no children, few friends; his life had turned around his father’s plans for him, and he had become a great man, greater even than his father. But in all that time, partly because of Étienne’s domination and partly because of his persistent illness, he had never created a life for himself. He was a great mind in search of a heart, and now, what was there to love? He knew in his faith that God was the ultimate object of love, but just how does one attain that goal? The only way to do this, as the Jansenist spiritual directors at Port-Royale insisted, was to rid himself of all distraction, of every other love, so that, like the poor of the earth, his soul would have no other place to go but to God.

But his attachments, it seemed, had their own way of disappearing. His intellectual achievements had produced nothing but controversy—bile from the Jesuits, bile from Descartes, bile from the intellectual gatekeepers of the university. He had followed his father’s path, but now his father was dead, and both of his sisters were setting out to find their own lives, leaving him alone. What had started in Rouen with Gilberte’s departure for Clermont to marry Florin Perier continued on in the death of his father and his sister Jacqueline’s insistence on entering Port-Royal. One by one, the members of the family he depended on were leaving him. He was alone in the world.

As soon as Étienne had been laid to rest and an appropriate mourning time had passed, Jacqueline announced her intention to enter Port-Royal. After all, she had stayed home out of duty, because her father had asked her to, because he could not bear to part with her, and because to disobey him would have been an act of impiety. But now he was dead and her duty fulfilled. Blaise needed her, too, but he was not her father and did not have the same authority over her, even if he was the only male left in the family. Jacqueline was convinced that gender alone should not give one person authority over another, and that she should follow the calling of her heart over the needs of her brother. He had servants to help him, and money enough to live comfortably. Did he need his sister any longer? Suddenly, there was war in the Pascal household.

Blaise pleaded with Jacqueline not to leave, but she was adamant. He commanded her to stay, but that didn’t work, either. At the heart of this growing difference, beside Blaise’s fear of abandonment, was a disagreement over Port-Royal itself. Like Francis de Sales and Vincent de Paul, Blaise was shocked by the severity of some of Mère Angélique’s directions. While in Paris, Jacqueline had taken an Oratorian priest as her confessor. Since this was the order founded by Pierre de Bérulle, a longtime mentor for the abbé de Saint-Cyran, he was a good choice. The priest had a noteworthy reputation, and no one said anything bad about his advice. He praised Jacqueline’s poetic ability, especially after she translated a Latin hymn from the breviary,
Jesu, nostra redemptio
, into French. He told her that her translation was beautiful and that she should seek to incorporate her gifts into her spiritual life. Jacqueline was happy at first, but then suffered a bout of scruples. She fired off a letter to Mère Angélique, who wrote back: “This talent for poetry is not something for which God will ask you for an accounting. You must bury it.”
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Blaise was aghast at this. The demands of Port-Royal were stricter than even the advice of an Oratorian, one of the strictest orders in the French church. Mère Angélique’s advice sounded too much like what Jansen had said about the study of science—that it was another form of lust. Once you begin with the assumption, as Augustine did, that humanity is a bit of “spoiled meat,” and that the only righteous thing a human can do is live a life of penance, you will eventually find nothing beautiful in humanity. Everything human that seems good is only an illusion and must be burned out. Everything human that seems righteous is a fancy and must be killed.

In October 1651, a month after their father had died, Blaise and Jacqueline came to an accommodation. Jacqueline signed her inheritance over to Blaise; in return, Blaise promised her a regular yearly income from the estate. These negotiations were between the two of them, for Gilberte had already been given a sizable dowry on her wedding day. Everyone seemed to understand that if Jacqueline entered Port-Royal, she would have to leave her inheritance behind. Nevertheless, Jacqueline was bent on entering the convent and would not change her mind. When Gilberte
came to visit at the end of November, Jacqueline pulled her aside and told her quietly that she intended to become a postulant at Port-Royal by the first of the year. She was concerned about how Blaise would react, and so she had told him that she was going for a retreat, when in fact she had no intention of returning. The new year came, and on January 3, 1652, Gilberte, and not Jacqueline, broke the news to their brother. According to Gilberte, “He retired very sadly to his rooms without seeing Jacqueline, who was waiting in the little parlor where she was accustomed to say her prayers.”
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The next morning, Jacqueline stood in the corridor of the Pascal home, waiting for the carriage to be brought around to take her to the convent. Gilberte saw her and turned away, unable to say good-bye for fear of weeping.