Barry's Blog

Before we considered the beginnings of some entries dedicated to the seventeenth century philosopher and thinker Blaise Pascal. His Pensees, or "meditations," explore the human condition, with all of our desires for happiness, truth, and joy, and the reasons for our disappointments as well. And as Socrates uttered many centuries ago, whose thought echoes down the corridors of time, "The unexamined life is not worth living." And nothing has really changed much over the centuries, has it?  Not to speak of the fact that few humans seem to ever seriously reflect on life. Again, as Bertrand Russell uttered, "Most people would rather die than think -- in fact, they do."

But Pascal took his great mathematical and scientific mind to explore the dilemma of the human condition, irrespective of religious persuasion, or lack thereof. And in his quest to explore the inner recesses of the human heart, despite his great mental faculties, he looked at his Christian faith as more than an academic enterprise. While his "first conversion" occurred at the ripe old age of twenty-three, a conversion perhaps more of the mind and seeing things differently, from a new perspective with his newfound faith, it was to be followed by a "second conversion" some eight years later on the night of November 23, 1654. On this evening he had an intense, two-hour mystical experience that he recorded in "The Memorial," beginning with these famous lines:

FIRE

"God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob," not of philosophers

and scholars.

Certainty, certainty, heartfelt, joy, peace.

On this "night of fire" that Pascal experienced late in his life, Os Guinness, in his Foreword to the Trinity Forum booklet on Pascal, writes that: "This 'night of fire' became so decisive for Pascal's remaining eight years of life...it was so precious and pivotal to him that he sewed the parchment record of it into the lining of his doublet--and into every new doublet that he bought for the rest of his life. Laboring on his extraordinary writings through the years of chronic sickness, depression, and mounting pain, Pascal died at the age of thirty-nine."

Whatever sentiments we may have about Pascal's "night of fire," there is little dispute that it changed him for life. But he would continue to use the same rigors of his great mind to explore some of the dilemmas of the human condition, among them, one of his favorites was what he called "Vanity." By vanity, as Peter Kreeft in his commentary of the Forum booklet explains, Pascal meant "something between mere self-regard or self-flattery (as in a 'vanity mirror') and the total meaninglessness and purposelessness of life that Ecclesiastes means by "vanity of vanities, all is vanity." He means pettiness, thinness, shallowness, hollowness, insubstantiality..." Reading Kreeft's comments makes me wonder, wouldn't Pascal have been the perfect author for our own day? Does his work not expose the emptiness and futility of what is commonly referred to as "current, relevant, and in vogue"?

Listen to Pensee #47:

"We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is. The fact is that the present usually hurts. We thrust it out of sight because it distresses us, and if we find it enjoyable, we are sorry to see it slip away. We try to give it the support of the future, and think how we are going to arrange things over which we have no control for a time we can never be sure of reaching...Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it it inevitable that we should never be so."

Kreeft's comments are insightful: "Pascal does not mean that we should live for the present but that we should live in the present; not irresponsibility and whim-gratification, but the wise counsels of the Sermon on the Mount: 'Do not be anxious about tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day's own trouble be sufficient for the day.' " (Matthew 6:34)

Hmmmm. I think that dog will hunt...